Except he didn’t know what had happened then; the rest was all a blur to him. He didn’t come right out and say that, but he didn’t need to. I didn’t even have to see it in his bloodshot bewildered eyes. I had seen him, sitting behind the Roadmaster’s steering wheel with the gas can in his lap, looking pale and stoned and lost.
‘It took hold of you,’ I said. ‘It’s always had some kind of pull, it’s just never had anyone to use it on the way it could on you. When it called you, though, the rest of us heard, too. In our
own ways. In any case, it’s not your fault, Ned. If there’s fault, it’s mine.’
He straightened up from the sink, groped, took hold of my forearms. His face was dripping and his hair was plastered to his forehead. In truth he looked rather funny. Like a slapstick baptism.
Steff, who’d been watching the shed from the back door of the barracks, came over to us.
‘It’s dying down again. Already.’
I nodded. ‘It missed its chance. Maybe its last chance.’
‘To do mischief,’ Ned said. ‘That’s what it wanted. I heard it in my head. Or, I don’t know, maybe I just made that part up.’
‘If you did,’ I said, ‘then I did, too. But there might have been more to tonight than just mischief.’
Before I could say any more, Huddie came out of the bathroom with a first-aid kit. He set it down on the counter, opened it, and took out ajar of salve. ‘Put this all around your eyes, Ned.
If some gets in them, don’t worry. You won’t hardly notice.’
We stood there, watching him put the salve around his eyes in circles that gleamed under the kitchen fluorescents. When he was done, Shirley asked him if it was any better. He nodded.
‘Then come outside again,’ I said. ‘There’s one other thing I need to tell you. I would have earlier, but the truth is I never thought of it except in passing until I actually saw you sitting in that goddam car. The shock must have kicked it loose.’
Shirley looked at me with her brow furrowed. She’d never been a mother but it was a mother’s sternness I saw on her face right then. ‘Not tonight,’ she said. ‘Can’t you see this boy has had enough? One of you needs to take him home and make up some sort of story for his mother — she always believed Curtis’s, I expect she’ll believe one of yours if you can manage to stay together on the details — and then get him into bed.’
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think this can wait,’ I said.
She looked hard into my face and must have seen that I at least thought I was telling the truth, and so we all went back out to the smokers’ bench, and as we watched the dying fireworks from the shed — the second show of the night, although there wasn’t much to this one, at least not now — I told Ned one more story of the old days. I saw this one as you might see a scene from a play, two characters on a mostly bare stage, two characters beneath a single bright stagelight, two men sitting
THEN:
Curtis
Two men sitting on the smokers’ bench by the light of a summer sun and one will soon be dead — when it comes to our human lives there’s a noose at the end of every chain and Curtis Wilcox has nearly . reached his. Lunch will be his last meal and neither of them knows it.
This condemned man watches the other man light a cigarette and wishes he could have one himself but he’s quit the habit. The cost of them is bad, Michelle was always ragging on him about that, but mostly it’s wanting to see his children grow up. He wants to see their graduations, he wants to see the color of their children’s hair. He has retirement plans as well, he and Michelle have talked them over a lot, the Winnebago that will take them out west where they may finally settle, but he will be retiring sootier than that, and alone. As for smoking, he never had to give up the pleasure at all but a man can’t know that. Meanwhile the summer sun is pleasant. Later on the day will be hot, a hot day to die on, but now it’s pleasant, and the thing across the way is quiet. It is quiet now for longer and longer stretches. The lightquakes, when they come, are milder. It is winding down, that’s what the condemned State Trooper thinks. But Curtis can still sometimes feel its heartbeat and its quiet call and knows it will bear watching. This is his job; he has repudiated any chance of promotion in order to do it. It was his partner the Buick 8 got but in a way, he realizes, it got all of Curtis Wilcox it ever had to. He never locked himself in its trunk, as Huddie Royer once almost did in 1988, and it never ate him alive as it probably ate Brian Lippy, but it got him just the same. It’s always close to his thoughts. He hears its whisper the way a fisherman sleeping in his house hears the whisper of the sea even in his sleep. And a whisper is a voice, and a thing with a voice can—
He turns to Sandy Dearborn and asks ‘Does it think? Does it watch, think, wait for its chances?’
Dearborn — the old hands still call him the New Sarge behind his back — doesn’t need to ask what his friend is talking about. When it comes to the thing in Shed B they are of one mind, all of them, and sometimes Curtis thinks it calls even to those who have transferred out of D or quit the PSP altogether for some other, safer job; he thinks sometimes that it has marked them all like the Amish in their black clothes and black buggies are marked, or the
way the priest dirties your forehead on Ash Wednesday, or like roadgang convicts linked together and digging a ditch of endless length.
‘I’m almost sure not,’ the New Sarge says.
‘Still, it saved its biggest horror show for a time when this place was almost completely deserted,’ says the man who quit cigarettes so he could watch his children grow up and bear him grandchildren. ‘As if it knew. As if it could think. And watch. And wait.’
The New Sarge laughs — a sound of amusement which contains just the thinnest rind of contempt. ‘You’re gaga on the subject, Curt, Next you’ll be telling me it sent out a ray or something to make that Norco tanker crash into the schoolbus that day.’
Trooper Wilcox has set his coffee aside on the bench so he can take off his big hat — his Stetson. He begins turning it over and over in his hands, an old habit of his. Kitty-corner from where they sit, Dicky-Duck Eliot pulls up to the gas pump and begins filling D-12, something they will not be able to do much longer. He spots them on the bench and waves.
They give him a little of the old right-back-atcha, but the man with the hat— the gray Trooper’s Stetson that will finish its tour of duty in the weeds with the soda cans and fast-food wrappers — keeps his gaze mostly on the New Sarge. His eyes are asking if they can rule that out, if they can rule anything out.
The Sarge, irritated by this, says: ‘Why don’t we just finish it off, then? Finish it off and have done? Tow it into the back field, pour gasoline into her until it runs out the windows, then just light ‘er up?’
Curtis looks at him with an evenness that can’t quite hide his shock. ‘That might be the most dangerous thing we could do with it,’ he says. ‘It might even be what it wants us to do.
What it was sent to provoke. How many kids have lost fingers because they found something in the weeds they didn’t know was a blastingcap and pounded it with a rock?’
‘Tins isn’t the same.’
‘How do you know it’s not? How do you know?’
And the New Sarge, who will later think, It should have been me whose hat wound up lying blood-bolted on the side of the road, can say nothing. It seems almost profane to disagree with him, and besides, who knows? He could be right. Kids do blow off their fingers with blastingcaps or kill their little brothers with guns they find in their parents’ bureau drawers or burn down the house with some old sparklight they found out in the garage. Because they don’t know what they’re playing with.