The gas tank didn’t blow, but Trooper Stamson was decapitated by his own shotgun rack.
Since 1974 we keep our shotguns clipped under the dash, and since 1973 Sam Stamson’s name has been on the memorial. ‘On the rock,’ we say. Ennis Rafferty is on the books as a disappearance, so he’s not on the rock. The official story on Trooper George Morgan is that he died while cleaning his gun (the same Ruger that ended Mister Dillon’s misery), and since he didn’t die on the job, his name isn’t on the rock, either. You don’t get on the rock for dying as a result of the job; it was Tony Schoondist who pointed that out to me one day when he
saw me looking at the names. ‘Probably just as well,’ he said. ‘We’d have a dozen of those things out here.’
Currently, the last name on the stone is Curtis K. Wilcox. July 2001. Line of duty. It wasn’t nice to have your father’s name carved in granite when what you wanted — needed — was the father, but it was something. Ennis’s name should have been carved there, too, so his bitch of a sister could come and look at it if she wanted to, but it wasn’t. And what did she have? A reputation as a nasty old lady, that’s what, the kind of person who if she saw you on fire in the street wouldn’t piss on you to put you out. She’d been a thorn in our side for years and liking her was impossible but feeling sorry for her was not. She’d ended up with even less than this boy, who at least knew for sure that his father was over, that he was never going to come back in someday with a shamefaced grin and some wild story to explain his empty pockets and how come he had that Tiajuana tan and why it hurt like hell each time he had to make a little water.
I had no good feeling about the night’s work. I’d hoped the truth might make things better (it’ll set you free, someone said, probably a fool), but I had an idea it had made things worse instead. Satisfaction might have brought the curious cat back, but I could make out zero satisfaction on Ned Wilcox’s face. All I saw there was a kind of stubborn, tired curiosity. I’d seen the same look on Curtis’s face from time to time, most often when he was standing at one of Shed B’s roll-up doors in that sidewalk superintendent’s stance, — legs apart, forehead to the glass, eyes squinted a little, mouth thoughtful. But what’s passed down in the blood is the strongest chain of all, isn’t it? What’s mailed along, one generation to the next, good news here, bad news there, complete disaster over yonder.
I said, ‘As far as anyone knows, Brian Lippy just took off for greener pastures. It might even be the truth; none of us can say different for certain. And it’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody some good; him disappearing that way might have saved his girlfriend’s life.’
‘I doubt it,’ Huddie rumbled. ‘I bet her next one was just Brian Lippy with different-colored hair. They pick up guys who beat them until they go through the change. It’s like they define themselves through the bruises on their faces and arms.’
‘She never filed a missing-persons on him, tell you that,’ Shirley said. ‘Not one that came across my desk, anyway, and I see the town and county reports as well as our own. No one in his family did, either. I don’t know what happened to her, but he was an authentic case of good riddance to bad rubbish.’
‘ You don’t believe he just slipped out through that broken window and ran away, do you?’
Ned asked Huddie. ‘I mean, you were there.’
‘No,’ Huddie said, ‘as a matter of fact I don’t. But what I think doesn’t matter. The point’s the same as the one Sarge has been trying to drum into your thick head all night long: we don’t know.’
It was as if the kid didn’t hear him. He turned back to me. ‘What about my dad, Sandy?
When it came to Brian Lippy, what did he believe?’
‘He and Tony believed that Brian wound up in the same place as Ennis Rafferty and Jimmy the Gerbil. As for the corpse of the thing they killed that day — ‘
‘Son of a bitch rotted quick,’ Shirley said in a brisk that-ends-it voice. ‘There are pictures and you can look at them all you want, but for the most part they’re photos of something that could be anything, including a complete hoax. They don’t show you how it looked when it was trying to get away from Mister D — how fast it moved or how loud it shrieked. They don’t show you anything, really. Nor can we tell you so you’ll understand. That’s all over your face. Do you know why the past is the past, darling?’
Ned shook his head.
‘Because it doesn’t work.’ She looked into her pack of cigarettes, and whatever she saw there must have satisfied her because she nodded, put them into her purse, and stood up.
‘I’m going home. I have two cats that should have been fed three hours ago.’
That was Shirley, all right — Shirley the All-American Girlie, Curt used to call her when he felt like getting under her skin a bit. No husband (there’d been one once, when she was barely out of high school), no kids, two cats, roughly 10,000 Beanie Babies. Like me, she was married to Troop D. A walking cliche, in other words, and if you didn’t like it, you could stick it.
‘Shirl?’
She turned to the plaintive sound in Ned’s voice. ‘What, hon?’
‘Did you like my father?’
She put her hands on his shoulders, bent down, and planted a kiss on Ned’s forehead.
‘Loved him, kid. And I love you. We’ve told you all we can, and it wasn’t easy. I hope it helps.’ She paused. ‘I hope it’s enough.’
‘I hope so, too,’ he said.
Shirley tightened her grip on his shoulders for a moment, giving him a squeeze. Then she let go and stood up. ‘Hudson Royer — would you see a lady to her car?’
‘My pleasure,’ he said, and took her arm. ‘See you tomorrow, Sandy? You still on days?’
‘Bright and early,’ I said. ‘We’ll do it all again.’
‘You better go home and get some sleep, then.’
‘I will.’
He and Shirley left. Ned and I sat on the bench and watched them go. We raised our hands as they drove past in their cars — Huddie’s big old New Yorker, Shirley in her little Subaru with the bumper sticker reading MY KARMA RAN OVER MY DOGMA. When their taillights had disappeared around the corner of the barracks, I took out my cigarettes and had my own peek into the pack. One left. I’d smoke it and then quit. I’d been telling myself this charming fable for at least ten years.
‘There’s really no more you can tell me?’ Ned asked in a small, disillusioned voice.
‘No. It’d never make a play, would it? There’s no third act. Tony and your dad ran a few more experiments over the next five years, and finally brought Bibi Roth in on it. That would’ve been your father persuading Tony and me getting caught in the middle, as usual.
And I have to tell you the truth: after Brian Lippy disappeared and Mister Dillon died, I was against doing anything with the Buick beyond keeping an eye on it and offering up the occasional prayer that it would either fall apart or disappear back to where it came from. Oh, and killing anything that came out of the trunk still lively enough to stand up and maybe run around the shed looking for a way out.’
‘Did that ever happen?’
‘You mean another pink-headed E.T.? No.’
‘And Bibi? What did he say?’
‘He listened to Tony and your dad, he took another look, and then he walked away. He said he was too old to deal with anything so far outside his understanding of the world and its works. He told them he intended to erase the Buick from his memory and urged Tony and Curt to do the same.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake! This guy was a scientist? Jesus, he should have been fascinated!’
‘ Your father was the scientist,’ I said. ‘An amateur one, yeah, but a good one. The things that came out of the Buick and his curiosity about the Buick itself, those were the things that made him a scientist. His dissection of the bat-thing, for instance. Crazy as that was, there was something noble about it, too, like the Wright Brothers going up in their little glue-and-paste airplane. Bibi Roth, on the other hand . . . Bibi was a microscope mechanic. He sometimes called himself that, and with absolute pride. He was a person who had carefully and consciously narrowed his vision to a single strip of knowledge, casting a blaze of light over a small area. Mechanics hate mysteries. Scientists — especially amateur scientists —