by Stephen King
"Paul Loving is 10-98 for home in his cruiser, his son's having an asthma attack."
"You might forget to put that on the report."
Steffie gave me a reproachful look, as if she hardly needed me to tell her that. "What's going on out in Shed B?"
"Nothing," I said. "Well, nothing much. Normalizing. I'm out of here. If anything comes up, just . . ." I stopped, sort of horrified.
"Sandy?" she asked. "Is something wrong?"
If anything comes up, just call Tony Schoondist, I'd been about to say, as if twenty years hadn't slipped under the bridge and the old Sarge wasn't dribbling mindlessly in front of Nick at Nite in a Statler nursing home. "Nothing wrong," I said. "If anything comes up, call Frank Soderberg. It's his turn in the barrel."
"Very good, sir. Have a nice night."
"Thanks, Steff, right back atcha."
As I stepped out, the Bel Aire rolled slowly toward the driveway with one of the groups Ned likes--Wilco, or maybe The Jayhawks--blaring from the custom speakers. I lifted a hand and he returned the wave. With a smile. A sweet one. Once more I found it hard to believe I'd been so angry with him.
I stepped over to the shed and assumed the position, that feet-apart, sidewalk-superintendent stance that makes everyone feel like a Republican somehow, ready to heap contempt on welfare slackers at home and flag-burning foreigners abroad. I looked in. There it sat, silent under the overhead lights, casting a shadow just as though it were sane, fat and luxy on its whitewall tires. A steering wheel that was far too big. A hide that rejected dirt and healed scratches--that happened more slowly now, but it did still happen. Oil's fine was what the man said before he went around the corner, those were his last words on the matter, and here it still was, like an objet d'art somehow left behind in a closed-down gallery. My arms broke out in gooseflesh and I could feel my balls tightening. My mouth had that dry-lint taste it gets when I know I'm in deep shit. Ha'past trouble and goin on a jackpot, Ennis Rafferty used to say. It wasn't humming and it wasn't glowing, the temperature was up above sixty again, but I could feel it pulling at me, whispering for me to come in and look. It could show me things, it whispered, especially now that we were alone. Looking at it like this made one thing clear: I'd been angry at Ned because I'd been scared for him. Of course. Looking at it like this, feeling its tidal pull way down in the middle of my head--beating in my guts and my groin, as well--made everything easier to understand. The Buick bred monsters. Yes. But sometimes you still wanted to go to it, the way you sometimes wanted to look over the edge when you were on a high place or peer into the muzzle of your gun and see the hole at the end of the barrel turn into an eye. One that was watching you, just you and only you. There was no sense trying to reason your way through such moments, or trying to understand that neurotic attraction; best to just step back from the drop, put the gun back in its holster, drive away from the barracks. Away from Shed B. Until you got beyond the range of that subtle whispering voice. Sometimes running away is a perfectly acceptable response.
I stood there a moment longer, though, feeling that distant beat-beat-beat in my head and around my heart, looking in at the midnight-blue Buick Roadmaster. Then I stepped back, drew a deep breath of night air, and looked up at the moon until I felt entirely myself again. When I did, I went to my own car and got in and drove away.
The Country Way wasn't crowded. It never is these days, not even on Friday and Saturday nights. The restaurants out by Wal-Mart and the new Statler Mall are killing the downtown eateries just as surely as the new cineplex out on 32 killed off the old Gem Theater downtown.
As always, people glanced at me when I walked in. Only it's the uniform they're really looking at, of course. A couple of guys--one a deputy sheriff, the other a county attorney -said hello and shook my hand. The attorney asked if I wouldn't join him and his wife and I said no thanks, I might be meeting someone. The idea of being with people, of having to do any more talking that night (even small-talking), made me feel sick in my stomach.
I sat in one of the little booths at the back of the main room, and Cynthia Garris came over to take my order. She was a pretty blonde thing with big, beautiful eyes. I'd noticed her making someone a sundae when I came in, and was touched to see that between delivering the ice cream and bringing me a menu, she'd undone the top button on her uniform so that the little silver heart she wore at the base of her throat showed. I didn't know if that was for me or just another response to the uniform. I hoped it was for me.
"Hey, Sandy, where you been lately? Olive Garden? Outback? Macaroni Grille? One of those?" She sniffed with mock disdain.
"Nope, just been eatin in. What you got on special?"
"Chicken and gravy, stuffed shells with meat sauce--both of em a little heavy on a night like this, in my humble opinion--and fried haddock. All you can cat's a dollar more. You know the deal."
"Think I'll just have a cheeseburger and an Iron City to wash it down with."
She jotted on her pad, then gave me a real stare. "Are you all right? You look tired."
"I am tired. Otherwise fine. Seen anyone from Troop D tonight?"
"George Stankowski was in earlier. Otherwise, you're it, darlin. Copwise, I mean. Well, those guys out there, but . . ." She shrugged as if to say those guys weren't real cops. As it happened, I agreed with her.
"Well, if the robbers come in, I'll stop em single-handed."
"If they tip fifteen per cent, Hero, let em rob," she said. "I'll get your beer." Off she went, pert little tail switching under white nylon.
Pete Quinland, the grease-pit's original owner, was long gone, but the mini-jukeboxes he'd installed were still on the walls of the booths. The selections were in a kind of display-book, and there were little chrome levers on top to turn the pages. These antique gadgets no longer worked, but it was hard to resist twiddling the levers, turning the pages, and reading the songs on the little pink labels. About half of them were by Pete's beloved Chairman of the Board, hepcat fingersnappers like "Witchcraft" and "Luck Be a Lady Tonight". FRANK SINATRA, said the little pink labels, and beneath, in smaller letters: THE NELSON RIDDLE ORCH. The others were those old rock and roll songs you never think about any more once they leave the charts; the ones they never seem to play on the oldies stations, although you'd think there'd be room; after all, how many times can you listen to "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" before beginning to scream? I flipped through the jukebox pages, looking at tunes a dropped quarter would no longer call forth; time marches on, baby. If you're quiet you can hear its shuffling, rueful tread.
If anyone asks about that Buick 8, just tell em it's an impound. That's what the Old Sarge had said on the night we met out here in the back room. By then the waitresses had been sent away and we were pulling our own beers, running our own tab, and keeping our accounts straight down to the very last penny. Honor system, and why not? We were honorable men, doing our duty as we saw it. Still are. We're the Pennsylvania State Police, do you see? The real road warriors. As Eddie used to say--when he was younger as well as thinner--it's riot just a job, it's a fuckin adventure.
I turned a page. Here was "Heart of Glass", by BLONDIE.
On this subject you can't get far enough off the record. More words of wisdom from Tony Schoondist, spoken while the blue clouds of cigarette smoke rose to the ceiling. Back then everybody smoked, except maybe for Curt, and look what happened to him. Sinatra sang "One for My Baby" from the overhead speakers, and from the steam tables had come the sweet smell of barbecued pork. The Old Sarge had been a believer in that off-the-record stuff, at least as regarded the Buick, until his mind had taken French leave, first just infantry squads of brain-cells stealing away in the night, then platoons, then whole regiments in broad daylight. What's not on the record can't hurt you, he'd told me once -this was around the time when it became clear it would be me who'd step into Tony's shoes and sit in Tony's office, ooh Grampa, what a big chair you have. Only I'd gone on the record tonight, hadn't I? Yeah, whole hog. Opened my mouth and spilled the whol
e tale. With a little help from my friends, as the song says. We'd spilled it to a boy who was still lost in the funhouse of grief Who was agog with quite natural curiosity in spite of that grief. A lost boy? Perhaps. On TV, such tales as Ned's end happily, but I can tell you that life in Statler, Pennsylvania, bears Christing little resemblance to The Hallmark Hall of Fame. I'd told myself I knew the risks, but now I found myself wondering if that was really true. Because we never go forward believing we will fail, do we? No. We do it because we believe we're going to save the goddam day and six times out often we step on the business end of a rake hidden in the high grass and up comes the handle and whammo, right between the eyes.
Tell me what happened when you dissected the bat. Tell me about the fish.
Here was "Pledging My Love", by JOHNNY ACE.
Brushing aside every effort I made--that any of us made--to suggest this lesson was not in the learning but in the letting go. Just bulling onward. Sort of a surprise he hadn't read us the Miranda, because hadn't it been an interrogation as much as it had been stories of the old days when his old man had still been alive? Young and alive?
I still felt sick in my stomach. I could drink the beer Cynthia was bringing, the bubbles might even help, but eat a cheeseburger? I didn't think so. It had been years since the night Curtis dissected the bat-thing, but I was thinking about it now. How he'd said Inquiring minds want to know and then poked his scalpel into its eye. The eye had made a popping sound and then collapsed, dribbling out of its socket like a black tear. Tony and I had screamed, and how was I supposed to eat a cheeseburger now, remembering that? Stop it, this is pointless, I'd said, but he hadn't stopped. The father had been as insistent as the son. Let's look in the lower gut and then we're done, he had said, only he had never been clone. He had poked, he had prodded, he had investigated, and the Buick had killed him for his pains.
I wondered if the boy knew it. I wondered if he under stood the Buick Roadmaster 8 had killed his father as surely as Huddie, George, Eddie, Shirley, and Mister Dillon had killed the shrieking monstrosity that had come out of the car's trunk in 1988.
Here was "Billy Don't Be a Hero" by BO DONALDSON AND THE HEYWOODS. Gone from the charts and our hearts.
Tell me about the bat, tell me about the fish, tell me about the E. T. with the pink cords for hair, the thing that could think, the thing that showed up with something like a radio. Tell me about my father, too, because I have to come to terms with him. Of course I do, I see his life in my face and his ghost in my eyes every time I stand at the mirror to shave. Tell me everything . . . but don't tell me there's no answer. Don't you dare. I reject that. I repudiate it.
"Oil's fine," I murmured, and turned the steel levers on top of the booth's mini-juke a little faster. There was sweat on my forehead. My stomach felt worse than ever. I wished I could believe it was the flu, or maybe food poisoning, but it wasn't either one and I knew it. "Oil's just fuckin ducky."
Here was "Indiana Wants Me" and "Green-Eyed Lady" and "Love Is Blue". Songs that had somehow slipped between the cracks. "Surfer Joe", by The Surfaris.
Tell me everything, tell me the answers, tell me the one answer.
The kid had been clear about the things he wanted, you had to give him that. He'd asked for it with the pure untinctured selfishness of the lost and the grief-stricken.
Except once.
He'd started to ask for one piece of the past . . . and then changed his mind. What piece had that been? I reached for it, fumbled at it, felt it shrink slyly from my touch. When that happens, it's no good to chase. You have to back off and let the recollection come back to you of its own free will.
I thumbed the pages of the useless jukebox back and forth. Little pink stickers like tongues.
"Polk Salad Annie", by TONY JOE WHITE and Tell me about The Year of the Fish.
"When", by THE KALIN TWINS and Tell me about the meeting you had, tell me everything, tell me everything but the one thing that might pop up a red flag in your suspicious cop's mind--
"Here's your beer--" Cynthia Garris began, and then there was a light gasp.
I looked up from twiddling the metal levers (the pages flipping back and forth under the glass had half-hypnotized me by then). She was looking at me with fascinated horror. "Sandy--you got a fever, hon? Because you're just running with sweat."
And that was when it came to me. Telling him about the Labor Day picnic of 1979. The more we talked, the more we drank, Phil Candleton had said. My head ached for two days after.
"Sandy?" Cynthia standing there with a bottle of IC and a glass. Cynthia with the top button of her uniform undone so she could show me her heart. So to speak. She was there but she wasn't. She was years from where I was at that moment.
All that talk and not one single conclusion, I'd said, and the talk had moved on--to the O'Day farm, among other things--and then all at once the boy had asked . . . had begun to ask . . .
Sandy, that day at the picnic, did any of you talk about . . .
And then he had trailed off.
"Did any of you talk about destroying it," I said. "That's the question he didn't finish." I looked into Cynthia Garris's frightened, concerned face. "He started to ask and then he stopped."
Had I thought storytime was over and Curt's boy was heading home? That he'd let go that easily? A mile or so down the road, headlights had passed me going the other way. Going back toward the barracks at a good but not quite illegal clip. Had Curt Wilcox's Bel Aire been behind those lights, and Curt Wilcox's son behind the wheel? Had he gone back just as soon as he could be sure we were gone?
I thought yes.
I took the bottle of Iron City from Cynthia's tray, watching my arm stretch out and my hand grasp the neck the way you watch yourself do things in dreams. I felt the cold ring of the bottle's neck slip between my teeth and thought of George Morgan in his garage, sitting on the floor and smelling cut grass under the mower. That good green smell. I drank the beer, all of it. Then I stood up and put a ten on Cynthia's tray.
"Sandy?"
"I can't stay and eat," I said. "I forgot something back at the barracks."
I kept a battery-powered Kojak light in the glove compartment of my personal and put it on the roof as soon as I was out of town, running my car up to eighty and trusting to the red flasher to get anyone ahead of me out of my way. There weren't many. Western Pennsylvania folks roll up the sidewalks early on most weeknights. It was only four miles back to the barracks, but the run seemed to take an hour. I kept thinking about how my heart sank each time Ennis's sister--The Dragon--walked into the barracks under the haystack heap of her outrageous henna hair. I kept thinking, Get out of here, you're too close. And I didn't even like her. How much worse would it be to have to face Michelle Wilcox, especially if she had the twins, the Little J's, with her?
I drove up the driveway too fast, just as Eddie and George had done ten years before, wanting to be rid of their unpleasant prisoner so they could go over to Poteenville, where it must have seemed half the world was going up in smoke. The names of old songs--"I Met Him on a Sunday", "Ballroom Blitz", "Sugar Sugar"--jigged senselessly up and down in my head. Foolish, but better than asking myself what I'd do if the Bel Aire was back but empty; what I'd do if Ned Wilcox was gone off the face of the earth.
The Bel Aire was back, as I'd known it would be. He'd parked it where Arky's truck had been earlier. And it was empty. I could see that in the first splash of my headlights. The song titles dropped out of my head. What replaced them was a cold readiness, the kind that comes by itself, empty-handed and without plans, ready to improvise.
The Buick had taken hold of Curt's boy. Even while we'd been sitting with him, conducting our own peculiar kind of wake for his dad and trying to be his friend, it had reached out and taken hold of him. If there was still a chance to take him back, I'd do well not to bitch it up by thinking too much.
Steff, probably worried at the sight of a single Kojak instead of a rack of roof-lights, poked her head ou
t the back door. "Who's that? Who's there?"
"It's me, Steff." I got out of the car, leaving it parked where it was with the red bubble flashing on the roof over the driver's seat. If anyone came hauling in behind me, it would at least keep them from rear-ending my car. "Go back inside."
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
"That's what he said." She pointed at the Bel Aire, then stalked back inside.
I ran for the roll-up door of Shed B in the stutter-pulse of the light--so many stressful moments of my life have been lit by flashers. A John Q. stopped or overtaken by flashers is always frightened. They have no idea what those same lights sometimes do to us. And what we have seen by their glow.
We always left a light on in the shed, but it was brighter than a single night-light in there now, and the side door was standing open. I thought about diverting to it, then kept on as I was. I wanted a look at the playing-field before anything else.
What I'd been most afraid of seeing was nothing but the Buick. Looking in, I discovered something scarier. The boy was sitting behind the Roadmaster's oversized steering wheel with his chest smashed in. There was nothing where his shirt had been except a bright bloody ruin. My legs started to unbuckle at the knees, and then I realized it wasn't blood I was looking at, after all. Maybe not blood. The shape was too regular. There was a straight red line running just below the round neck of his blue T-shirt . . . and corners . . . neat right-angled corners . . .
No, not blood.
The gas can Arky kept for the mower.
Ned shifted behind the wheel and one of his hands came into view. It moved slowly, dreamily. There was a Beretta in it. Had he been driving around with his father's sidearm in the trunk of the Bel Aire? Perhaps even in the glove compartment?
I decided it didn't matter. He was sitting in that deathtrap with gas and a gun. Kill or cure, I'd thought. It had never crossed my mind to think he might try doing both at the same time.
He didn't see me. He should've--my white, scared face filling one of those dark windows should have been perfectly visible to him from where he sat--and he should've seen the red pulse from the light I'd stuck on the roof of my car. He saw neither. He was as hypnotized as Huddie Royer had been when Huddie decided to crawl into the Roadmaster's trunk and pull the lid shut behind him. I could feel it even from outside. That tidal pulse. That liveliness. There were even words in it. I suppose I might have made them up to suit myself, but it almost doesn't matter because it was the pulse that called them forth, the throb all of us had felt around the Buick from the very start. It was a throb some of us--this boy's father, for one--had felt more strongly than others.