‘Okay.’
‘Just tell me one thing: when’ll we have enough to draw some conclusions? Not about everything, mind you, but maybe a few of the bigger things. Like where the bat and the fish came from, for instance. If I had to settle for just one answer, it’d probably be that one.’
‘Probably never.’
Curt raised his hands to the smoke-stained tin ceiling, then dropped them back to the table with a clump. ‘Gahh! I knew you’d say that! I could strangle you, Dearborn!’
They looked at each other across the table, across the tops of beers neither one of them wanted, and Curt started to laugh. Sandy smiled. And then he was laughing, too.
NOW:
Sandy
Ned stopped me there. He wanted to go inside and call his mother, he said. Tell her he was okay, just eating dinner at the barracks with Sandy and Shirley and a couple of the other guys. Tell her lies, in other words. As his father had before him.
‘Don’t you guys move,’ he said from the doorway. ‘Don’t you move a red inch.’
When he was gone, Huddie looked at me. His broad face was thoughtful. ‘You think telling him all this stuff is a good idea, Sarge?’
‘He gonna want to see all dose ole tapes, nex’ t’ing,’ Arky said dolefully. ‘Hell’s own rnovieshow.’
‘I don’t know if it’s a good idea or a bad one,’ I said, rather peevishly. ‘I only know that it’s a little late to back out now.’ Then I got up and went inside myself.
Ned was just hanging up the phone. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked. His brows had drawn together, and I thought of standing nose to nose with his father outside The Tap, the scurgy little bar that had become Eddie J.’s home away from home. That night Curt’s brows had drawn together in that exact same way. Like father, like son.
‘Just to the toilet,’ I said. ‘Take it easy, Ned, you’ll get what you want. What there is to get, anyway. But you have to stop waiting for the punchline.’
I went into the can and shut the door before he had a chance to reply. And the next fifteen seconds or so were pure relief. Like beer, iced tea is something you can’t buy, only rent.
When I got back outside, the smokers’ bench was empty. They had stepped across to Shed B
and were looking in, each with his own window in the roll-up door facing the rear of the barracks, each in that sidewalk superintendent posture I knew so well. Only now it’s changed around in my mind. It’s exactly backwards. Whenever I pass men lined up at a board fence or at sawhorses blocking off an excavation hole, the first things I think of are Shed B and the Buick 8.
‘You guys see anything in there you like better than yourselves?’ I called across to them.
It seemed they didn’t. Arky came back first, closely followed by Huddie and Shirley. Phil and Eddie lingered a bit longer, and Curt’s boy returned last to the barracks side of the parking lot. Like father like son in this, too. Curtis had also always lingered longest at the
window. If, that was, he had time to linger. He wouldn’t make time, though, because the Buick never took precedence. If it had, he and I almost certainly would have come to blows that night at The Tap instead of finding a way to laugh and back off. We found a way because us getting into a scrape would have been bad for the Troop, and he kept the Troop ahead of everything — the Buick, his wife, his family when the family came. I once asked him what he was proudest of in his life. This was around 1986, and I imagined he’d say his son. His response was The uniform. I understood that and responded to it, but I’d be wrong not to add that the answer horrified me a little, as well. But it saved him, you know. His pride in the job he did and the uniform he wore held him steady when the Buick might otherwise have unbalanced him, driven him into an obsessional madness. Didn’t the job also get him killed?
Yes, I suppose. But there were years in between, a lot of good years. And now there was this kid, who was troubling because he didn’t have the job to balance him. All he had was a lot of questions, and the naive belief that, just because he felt he needed the answers, those answers would come. Bosh to that, his father might have said.
‘Temp in there’s gone down another tick,’ Huddie said as we all sat down again. ‘Probably nothing, but she might have another surprise or two left in her. We’d best watch out.’
‘What happened after you and my dad almost got into that fight?’ Ned asked. ‘And don’t start telling me about calls and codes, either. I know about calls and codes. I’m learning dispatch, remember.’
What was the kid learning, though? After spending a month of officially sanctioned time in the cubicle with the radio and the computers and the modems, what did he really know? The calls and codes, yes, he was a quick study and he sounded as professional as hell when he answered the red phone with State Police Statler, Troop D, this is PCO Wilcox, how can I help?, but did he know that each call and each code is a link in a chain? That there are chains everywhere, each link in each one stronger than the last? How could you expect a kid, even a smart one, to know that? These are the chains we forge in life, to misquote Jacob Marley. We make them, we wear them, and sometimes we share them. George Morgan didn’t really shoot himself in his garage; he just got tangled in one of those chains and hung himself. Not, however, until after he’d helped us dig Mister Dillon’s grave on one of those brutally hot summer days after the tanker-truck blew over in Poteenville.
There was no call or code for Eddie Jacubois spending more and more of his time in The Tap; there was none for Andy Colucci cheating on his wife and getting caught at it and begging her for a second chance and not getting it; no code for Matt Babicki leaving; no call for Shirley Pasternak coming. There are just things you can’t explain unless you admit a knowledge of those chains, some made of love and some of pure happenstance. Like Orville Garrett down on one knee at the foot of Mister Dillon’s fresh grave, crying, putting D’s collar on the earth and saying Sorry, partner, sorry.
And was all that important to my story? I thought it was. The kid, obviously, thought
differently. I kept trying to give him a context and he kept repudiating it, just as the Buick’s tires repudiated any invasion — yes, right down to the smallest sliver of a pebble that would simply not stay caught between the treads. You could put that sliver of pebble in, but five or ten or fifteen seconds later it would fall back out again. Tony had tried this experiment; I had tried it; this boy’s father had tried it time and time and time again, often with videotape rolling. And now here sat the boy himself, dressed in civvies, no gray uniform to balance his interest in the Buick, here he sat repudiating even in the face of his father’s undoubtedly dangerous eight-cylinder miracle, wanting to hear the story out of context and out of history, chainless and immaculate. He wanted what suited him. In his anger, he thought he had a right to that. I thought he was wrong, and I was sort of pissed at him myself, but I tell you with all the truth in my heart that I loved him, too. He was so much like his father then, you see. Right down to the let’s-play-Bingo-with-the-paycheck look in his eyes.
‘I can’t tell you this next part,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t there.’
I turned to Huddie, Shirley, Eddie J. None of them looked comfortable. Eddie wouldn’t meet my gaze at all.
‘What do you say, guys?’ I asked them. ‘PCO Wilcox doesn’t want any calls or codes, he just wants the story.’ I gave Ned a satiric look he either didn’t understand or chose not to understand.
‘Sandy, what — ‘ Ned began, but I held up my palm like a traffic cop. I had opened the door to this. Probably opened it the first time I’d gotten to the barracks and seen him out mowing the lawn and hadn’t sent him home. He wanted the story. Fine. Let him have it and be done.
‘This boy is waiting. Which of you will help him out? And I want to have all of it. Eddie.’