From a Buick 8(104)

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 done. 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 understood 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 f**kin 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.