‘1986,’ she murmured.
“86 it was,’ I said, and patted her knee. ‘There was a bad fire in Lassburg around that same time, kids playing with matches in the basement of an apartment house. Just goofing. No supervision. When someone says to me that the Amish are crazy to live like they do, I think about that fire in Lassburg. Nine people killed, including all but one of the kids in the basement. The one who got out probably wishes he hadn’t. He’d be sixteen now, right around the age boys are generally getting good and interested in girls, and this kid probably looks like the lead actor in a burn-ward production of Beauty and the Beast. It didn’t make the national news — I have a theory that multiple-fatality apartment housefires only make the news if they happen at Christmas — but it was bad enough for these parts, thank you very
much, and Jackie O’Hara got some terrible burns on his hands, helping out. Oh, and we had a Trooper — James Dockery, his name was — ‘
‘Docker- ty,’ Phil Candleton said. “T. But you’re forgiven, Sarge, he wasn’t here more than a month or two, then he transferred over to Lycoming.’
I nodded. ‘Anyhow, this Dockerty won a third prize in the Betty Crocker Bakeoff for a recipe called Golden Sausage Puffs. He got ribbed like a motherfucker, but he took it well.’
‘Very well,’ Eddie J. agreed. ‘He shoulda stayed. He woulda fit in here.’
‘We won the tug-of-war that year at the Fourth of July picnic, and — ‘
I saw the look on the kid’s face and smiled at him.
‘You think I’m teasing you, Ned, but I’m not. Honest. What I’m doing is trying to make you understand. The Buick was not the only thing happening around here, okay? Not. In fact, there were times when we forgot it entirely. Most of us, anyway. For long stretches of time it was easy to forget. For long stretches of time all it did was sit out back and be quiet. Cops came and went while it did. Dockerty stayed just long enough to get nicknamed Chef Prudhomme. Young Paul Loving, the one who sprained his knee last Labor Day, got transferred out and then got transferred back in three years later. This job isn’t the revolving door that some jobs are, but the door turns, all right. There’s probably been seventy Troopers through here since the summer of 1979 — ‘
‘Oh, that’s way low,’ Huddie said. ‘Make it a hundred, counting the transfers and the Troops who are on duty here currently. Plus a few bad eggs.’
‘Yeah, a few bad eggs, but most of us did our jobs. And Ned, listen — your father and Tony Schoondist learned a lesson the night your father opened up that bat-thing. I did, too.
Sometimes there’s nothing to learn, or no way to learn it, or no reason to even try. I saw a movie once where this fellow explained why he lit a candle in church even though he “wasn’t a very good Catholic anymore. ‘You don’t fuck around with the infinite,’ he said. Maybe that was the lesson we learned.
‘Every now and then there was another lightquake in Shed B. Sometimes just a little temblor, sometimes a great-gosh-a’mighty. But people have a really amazing capacity to get used to stuff, even stuff they don’t understand. A comet shows up in the sky and half the world goes around bawling about the Last Days arid the Four Horsemen, but let the comet stay there six months and no one even notices. It’s a big ho-hum. Same thing happened at the end of the twentieth century, remember? Everyone ran around screaming that the sky was falling and all the computers were going to freeze up; a week goes by and it’s business as usual. What I’m doing is trying to keep things in perspective for you. To — ‘
‘Tell me about the fish,’ he said, and I felt that anger again. He wasn’t going to hear all I had to say, no matter how much I wanted him to or how hard I tried. He’d hear the parts he wanted to hear and call it good. Think of it as the Teenage Disease. And the light in his eyes was like the light in his father’s when Curt bent over the bat-thing with his scalpel in his
gloved hand. (Cutting now. I sometimes still hear Curtis Wilcox saying that in my dreams.) Not exactly like it, though. Because the boy wasn’t just curious. He was angry, as well. Pissed like a bear.
My own anger rose out of his refusal to take everything I wanted to give, for having the gall to pick and choose. But where did his come from? What was its center? That his mother had been lied to, not just once but over and over as the years passed?
That he himself had been lied to, if only by omission? Was he mad at his father for holding on to a secret? Mad at us? Us? Surely he didn’t believe the Buick had killed his father, why would he? Bradley Roach was safely on the hook for that, Roach had unspooled him up the side of a pulled-over sixteen-wheeler, leaving a bloodsmear ten feet long and as tall as a State Trooper, about six-feet-two in the case of Curtis Wilcox, pulling his clothes not just off but inside out as well in the scream of brakes and all the while the radio playing WPND, which billed itself Western Pennsylvania’s Country-Fried Radio, what else would it be but country with a half-drunk low rider like Bradley? Daddy sang bass and Momma sang tenor as the coins were ripped out of Curt Wilcox’s pants and his penis was torn off like a weed and his balls were reduced to strawberry jelly and his comb and wallet landed on the yellow line; Bradley Roach responsible for all that, or maybe you wanted to save some blame for Dicky’s Convenience in Statler that sold him the beer, or maybe for the beer company itself with its goodtime ads about cute talking frogs and funny ballpark beer-men instead of dead people lying by the highway with their guts hanging out, or maybe you want to blame it on Bradley’s DNA, little twists of cellular rope that had been whispering Drink more, drink more ever since Bradley’s first sip (because some people are just wired up that way, which is to say like suitcase bombs ready to explode, which is absolutely zero comfort to the dead and wounded).
Or maybe God was to blame, God’s always a popular whipping boy because He doesn’t talk back and never writes a column for the Op-Ed page. Not the Buick, though. Right? He couldn’t find the Buick in Curt’s death no matter how he traced it out. The Buick had been sitting miles away in Shed B, fat and luxy and blameless on whitewall tires that wouldn’t take dirt or even the slightest pebble in the treads but repudiated them each and every one, right down to (as far as we could tell) the finest grain of sand. It was just sitting there and minding its business when Trooper Wilcox bled out on the side of Pennsylvania State Road 32. And if it was sitting in the faintest baleful reek of cabbage, what of that? Did this boy think—
‘Ned, it didn’t reach out for him, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t do that.’ I had to laugh at myself a little, sounding so sure. Sounding as if I knew that for a fact. Or anything else for a fact, when it came to the Roadmaster. ‘It has pull, maybe even a kind of voice, when it’s in one of its . . . I don’t know . . .’
‘Active phases,’ Shirley suggested.
‘Yes. When it’s in one of its active phases. You can hear the hum, and sometimes you can hear it in your head, as well . . . kind of calling . . . but could it reach all the way out to
Highway 32 by the old Jenny station? No way.’
Shirley was looking at me as if I’d gone slightly loopy, and I felt slightly loopy. What, exactly, was I doing? Trying to talk myself out of being angry at this unlucky, father-lost boy?
‘Sandy? I just want to hear about the fish.’
I looked at Huddie, then Phil and Eddie. All three offered variations of the same rueful shrug. Kids! it said. What are you gonna do?
Finish it. That was what I was going to do. Set aside my anger and finish it. I had spilled the beans (I hadn’t known how many beans there were in the bag when I started, I’ll grant you that much), and now I was going to clean them up.
‘All right, Ned. I’ll tell you what you want to hear. But will you at least bear in mind that this place stayed a barracks? Will you try to remember that, whether you believe it or not, whether you like it or not, the Buick eventually became just another part of our day, like writing reports or testifying in court or cleaning puke off the floormats of a cruiser or Steve Devoe’s Polish jokes? Because it’s important.’