Ned stopped at the rear bumper of his car and turned back to me. ‘Sandy.’
‘What is it?’
‘Didn’t he have any idea at all about where it came from? What it was? Who the man in the black coat was? Didn’t any of you?’
‘No. We blue-skied it from time to time, but no one ever had an idea that felt like the real deal, or even close. Jackie O’Hara probably nailed it when he said the Buick was like a jigsaw piece that won’t fit into the puzzle anywhere. You worry it and worry it, you turn it this way and that, try it everywhere, and one day you turn it over and see the back is red and the backs of all the pieces in your puzzle are green. Do you follow that?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘Well, think about it,’ I said, ‘because you’re going to have to live with it.’
‘How am I supposed to do that?’ There was no anger in his voice. The anger had been burned away. Now all he wanted was instructions. Good.
‘You don’t know where you came from or where you’re going, do you?’ I asked him. ‘But you live with it just the same. Don’t rail against it too much. Don’t spend more than an hour a day shaking your fists at the sky and cursing God.’
‘But — ‘
‘There are Buicks everywhere,’ I said.
Steff came out after they were gone and offered me a cup of coffee. I told her thanks, but I’d pass. I asked her if she had a cigarette. She gave me a prim look — almost shocked -and reminded me she didn’t smoke. As though that was her toll-booth, one with the sign reading ALL BUICK ROADMASTERS MUST DETOUR BEYOND THIS POINT. Man, if we lived in that world.
If only.
‘Are you going home?’ she asked.
‘Shortly.’
She went inside. I sat by myself on the smokers’ bench. There were cigarettes in my car, at least half a pack in the glovebox, but getting up seemed like too much work, at least for the moment. When I did get up, I reckoned it would be best just to stay in motion. I could have a smoke on the way home, and a TV dinner when I got in — The Country Way would be closed by now, and I doubted if Cynthia Garris would be very happy to see my face in the place again soon, anyway. I’d given her a pretty good scare earlier, her fright nothing to mine when the penny finally dropped and I realized what Ned was almost certainly planning to do.
And my fear then was only a shadow of the terror I’d felt as I looked into that rising purple glare with the boy hanging blind in my arms and that steady beat-beat-beat in my ears, a sound like approaching footfalls. I had been looking both down, as if into a well, and on an uptilted plane . . . as if my vision had been split by some prismatic device. It had been like looking through a periscope lined with lightning. What I saw was very vivid — I’ll never forget it — arid fabulously strange. Yellow grass, brownish at the tips, covered a rocky slope that rose before me and then broke off at the edge of a drop. Green-backed beetles bustled in the grass, and off to one side there grew a clump of those waxy lilies. I hadn’t been able to see the bottom of the drop, but I could see the sky. It was terrible engorged purple, packed with clouds and ripe with lightnings. A prehistoric sky. In it, circling in ragged flocks, were flying things. Birds, maybe. Or bats like the one Curt had tried to dissect. They were too far away for me to be sure. And all this happened very quickly, remember. I think there was an ocean at the foot of that drop but don’t know why I think it — perhaps only because of the fish that came bursting out of the Buick’s trunk that time. Or the smell of salt. Around the Roadmaster there was always that vague, teary smell of salt.
Lying in the yellow grass close to where the bottom of my window (if that’s what it was) ended was a silvery ornament on a fine chain: Brian Lippy’s swastika. Years of being out in the weather had tarnished it. A little farther off was a cowboy boot, the fancy-stitched kind with the stacked heel. Much of the leather had been overgrown with a blackgray moss that looked like spiderwebs. The boot had been torn down one side, creating a ragged mouth through which I could see a yellow gleam of bone. No flesh; twenty years in the caustic air of that place would have decayed it, though I doubt the absence of flesh was due to mere decay alone. What I think is that Eddie J.’s old school pal was eaten. Probably while still alive. And screaming, if he could catch enough breath to do so.
And two things more, near the top of my momentary window. The first was a hat, also furry with patches of that blackgray moss; it had grown all around the brim and also in the crease of the crown. It wasn’t exactly what we wear now, that hat, the uniform has changed some since the nineteen-seventies, but it was a PSP Stetson, all right. The big hat. It hadn’t blown away because someone or something had driven a splintery wooden stake down through it to hold it in place. As if Ennis Rafferty’s killer had been afraid of the alien intruder even after the intruder’s death, and had staked the most striking item of his clothing to make sure he wouldn’t rise and walk the night like a hungry vampire.
Near the hat, rusty and almost hidden by scrub grass, was his sidearm. Not the Beretta auto we carry now but the Ruger. The kind George Morgan had used. Had Ennis also used his to commit suicide? Or had he seen something coming, and died firing his weapon at it? Had it even been fired at all?
There was no way to tell, and before I could look more closely, Arky had screamed at Steff to help him and I’d been yanked backward with Ned hanging in my arms like a big doll. I saw no more, but one question at least was answered. They’d gone there, all right, Ennis Rafferty and Brian Lippy both.
Wherever there was.
I got up from the bench and walked over to the shed a final time. And there it was, midnight blue and not quite right, casting a shadow just as if it were sane. Oil’s fine, the man in the black coat had told Bradley Roach, and then he was gone, leaving behind this weird steel callingcard.
At some point, during the last listless lightstorm, the trunk had shut itself again. About a dozen dead bugs lay scattered on the floor. We’d clean them up tomorrow. No sense saving them, or photographing them, or any of that; we no longer bothered. A couple of guys would burn them in the incinerator out back. I would delegate this job. Delegating jobs is also part of what sitting in the big chair is about, and you get to like it. Hand this one the shit and that one the sweets. Can they complain? No. Can they put it on their TS list and hand it to the chaplain? Yes. For all the good it does.
‘We’ll outwait you,’ I said to the thing in the shed. ‘We can do that.’
It only sat there on its whitewalls, and far down in my head the pulse whispered: Maybe.
. . . and maybe not.
LATER
Obituaries are modest, aren’t they? Yeah. Shirt always tucked in, skirt kept below the knee.
Died unexpectedly. Could be anything from a heart attack while sitting on the jakes to being stabbed by a burglar in the bedroom. Cops mostly know the truth, though. You don’t always want to know, especially when it’s one of your own, but you do. Because most of the time we’re the guys who show up first, with our reds lit and the walkie-talkies on our belts crackling out what sounds like so much gibble-gabble to the John Q’s. For most folks who die unexpectedly, we’re the first faces their staring open eyes can’t see.
When Tony Schoondist told us he was going to retire I remember thinking, Good, that’s good, he’s getting a little long in the tooth. Not to mention a little slow on the uptake. Now, in the year 2006, I’m getting ready to pull the pin myself and probably some of my younger guys are thinking the same thing: long in the tooth and slow on the draw. But mostly you know I feel the same as I ever did, full of piss and vinegar, ready to work a double shift just about any day of the week. Most days when I note the gray hair which now predominates the black or how much more forehead there is below the place where the hair starts, I think it’s a mistake, a clerical error which will eventually be rectified when brought to the attention of the proper authorities. It is impossible, I think, that a man who still feels so profoundly twenty-five can look so happast fifty. Then there’ll be a stretch of bad days and I’ll know it’s no error, just time marching on, that shuffling, rueful tread. But was there ever a moment as bad as seeing Ned behind the wheel of the Buick Roadmaster 8?