‘Sure. Tell me about the fish.’
I leaned back against the wall and raised my eyes to the moon. I wanted to give him his life back if I could. Or stars in a paper cup. All that poetry. All he wanted to hear about was the goddamned fish.
So fuck it, I told him.
THEN
No paper trail: that was Tony Schoondist’s decree, and it was followed. People still knew how matters pertaining to the Buick were to be handled, though, what the proper channels were. It wasn’t tough. No paperwork, since paper seemed always to find its way to Scranton. One either reported to Curt, the Sarge, or to Sandy Dearborn. They were the Buick guys. Sandy supposed he’d become part of that triumvirate simply by virtue of having been present at the infamous autopsy. Certainly it wasn’t because he had any especial curiosity about the thing.
Tony’s no-paper edict notwithstanding, Sandy was quite sure that Curt kept his own records — notes and speculations — about the Buick. If so, he was discreet about it.
Meanwhile, the temperature drops and the energy discharges — the lightquakes — seemed to be slowing down. The life was draining out of the thing.
Or so they all hoped.
Sandy kept no notes and could never have provided a reliable sequence of events. The videotapes made over the years would have helped do that (if it ever needed doing), but there would still be gaps and questions. Not every lightquake was taped, and so what if they had been? They were all pretty much the same. There were probably a dozen between 1979 and 1983. Most were small. A couple were as big as the first one, and one was even bigger. That big one — the all-time champ — came in 1983. Those who were there sometimes still called
’83 The Year of the Fish, as if they were Chinese.
Curtis made a number of experiments between ’79 and ’83, leaving various plants and animals in and around the Buick when the temperature dropped, but all the results were essentially reruns of what happened with Jimmy and Roslyn. Which is to say sometimes things disappeared, and sometimes they didn’t. There was no way of predicting in advance; it all seemed as random as a coin-toss.
During one temperature drop, Curt left a guinea pig by the Roadmaster’s left front tire. Put it in a plastic bucket. Twenty-four hours after the purple fireworks were over and the temperature in the shed had gone back to normal, the guinea pig was still in his bucket, hopping and reasonably happy. Before another lightshow, Curt put a cage with two frogs in it directly under the Buick. There were still two frogs in the cage after the lightshow ended. A
day later, however, there was only one frog in the cage.
A day after that, the cage was empty.
Then there was the Famous Trunk Experiment of 1982. That one was Tony’s idea. He and Curt put six cockroaches in a clear plastic box, then put the box in the Buick’s trunk. This was directly after one of the fireworks shows had ended, and it was still cold enough in the Buick so that they could see vapor coming out of their mouths when they bent into the trunk. Three days went by, with one of them checking the trunk every day (always with a rope tied around the waist of the one doing the checking, and everyone wondering what good a damn rope would do against something that had been able to snatch Jimmy out of his gerbil-condo without opening either of the hatches . . . or the frogs out of their latched cage, for that matter). The roaches were fine the first day, and the second, and the third. Curt and Tony went out on the fourth day to retrieve them, another failed experiment, back to the old drawing board. Only the roaches were gone, or so it seemed when they first opened the trunk.
‘No, wait!’ Curt yelled. ‘There they are! I see em! Running around like mad bastards!’
‘How many?’ Tony called back. He was standing outside the door on the side of the shed, holding the end of the rope. ‘Are they all there? How’d they get out of the damn box, Guru’s?’
Curtis counted only four instead of six, but that didn’t mean much. Cockroaches don’t need a bewitched automobile to help them disappear; they are quite good at that on their own, as anybody who’s ever chased one with a slipper knows. As for how they’d gotten out of the plastic box, that much was obvious. It was still latched shut, but now there was a small round hole in one side of it. The hole was three-quarters of an inch across. To Curt and the Sarge, it looked like a large-caliber bullet-hole. There were no cracks radiating out from around it, which might also indicate that something had punched through at an extremely high velocity.
Or perhaps burned through. No answers. Only mirages. Same as it ever was. And then the fish came, in June of 1983.
It had been at least two and a halt years since Troop D had kept a day-in-and-out watch on the Buick, because by late 1979 or early 1980 they had decided that, with reasonable precautions, there wasn’t much to worry about. A loaded gun is dangerous, no argument, but you don’t have to post an around-the-clock guard on one to make sure it won’t shoot by itself.
If you put it up on a high shelf and keep the kiddies away, that’s usually enough to do the trick.
Tony bought a vehicle tarp so anyone who came out back and happened to look in the shed wouldn’t see the car and ask questions (in. ’81 a fellow from the motor-pool, a Buick-fancier, had offered to buy it). The video camera stayed out in the hutch, mounted on its tripod and with a plastic bag pulled over it to keep it free of moisture, and the chair was still there (plus a good high stack of magazines beneath it), but Arky began to use the place more and more as a gardening shed. Bags of peat and fertilizer, pallets of sod, and flower-planters first began
to crowd the Buick-watching stuff and then to crowd it out. The only time the hutch reverted to its original purpose was just before, during, and after one of the lightquakes.
June in The Year of the Fish was one of the most beautiful early summer months in Sandy’s memory — the grass lush, the birds all in tune, the air filled with a kind of delicate heat, like a teenage couple’s first real kiss. Tony Schoondist was on vacation, visiting his daughter on the west coast (she was the one whose baby had caused all that trouble). The Sarge and his wife were trying to mend a few fences before they got broken down entirely.
Probably not a bad plan. Sandy Dearborn and Huddie Royer were in charge while he was gone, but Curtis Wilcox — no longer a rookie — was boss of the Buick, no doubt about that.
And one day in that marvelous June, Buck Flanders came to see him in that capacity.
‘Temp’s down in Shed B,’ he said.
Curtis raised his eyebrows. ‘Not exactly the first time, is it?’
‘No,’ Buck admitted, ‘but I’ve never seen it go down so fast. Ten degrees since this morning.’
That got Curt out to the shed in a hurry, with the old excited light in his eyes. When he put his face to one of the windows in the roll-up front door, the first thing he noticed was the tarp Tony had bought. It was crumpled along the driver’s side of the Buick like a scuffed-up rug.
It wasn’t the first time for that, either; it was as if the Buick sometimes trembled (or shrugged) and slid the nylon cover off like a lady shrugging off an evening wrap by lifting her shoulders. The needle on the round thermometer stood at 61.
‘It’s seventy-four out here,’ Buck said. He was standing at Curt’s elbow. ‘I checked the thermometer over by the bird-feeder before coming in to see you.’
‘So it’s actually gone down thirteen degrees, not ten.’
‘Well, it was sixty-four in there when I came to get you. That’s how fast it’s going down.
Like a . . . a cold front setting in, or something. Want me to get Huddie?’
‘Let’s not bother him. Make up a watch-roster. Get Matt Babicki to help you. Mark it . . .
um, “Car Wash Detail”, Let’s get two guys watching the Buick the rest of the day, and tonight as well. Unless Huddie says no or the temp bounces back up.’
‘Okay,’ Buck said. ‘Do you want to be on the first stand?’
Curt did, and quite badly — he sensed something was going to happen — but lie shook his head. ‘Can’t. I have court, then there’s that truck-trap over in Cambria.’ Tony would have screamed and clutched his head if he had heard Curt call the weigh-in on Highway 9 a truck-trap, but essentially that was what it was. Because someone was moving heroin and cocaine from New Jersey over that way, and the thinking was that it was moving in some of the independent truckers’ loads. ‘Truth is, I’m busier’n a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.