From a Buick 8(111)

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 sooner 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?'

'This 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.

'Suppose,' says the man twirling his Stetson between his hands, 'that the 8 is a kind of valve. Like the one in a scuba diver's regulator. Sometimes it breathes in and sometimes it breathes out, giving or receiving according to the will of the user. But what it does is always limited by the valve.'

'Yes, but ? '

'Or think of it. another way. Suppose it breathes like a man lying on the bottom of a swamp and using a hollow reed to sip air with so he won't be seen.'

'All right, but ? '

'Either way, everything comes in or goes out in small breaths, they must be small breaths, because the channel through which they pass is small. Maybe the thing using the valve or the reed has put itself into a kind of suspended state, like sleep or hypnosis, so it can survive on so little breath. And then suppose some misguided fool comes along and throws enough dy***ite into the swamp to drain it and make the reed unnecessary. Or, if you're thinking in terms of a valve, blows it clean off. Would you want to risk that? Risk giving it all the goddam air it needs?'