From a Buick 8(112)

'No,' the New Sarge says in a small voice.

Curtis says: 'Once Buck Flanders and Andy Colucci made up their minds to do that very thing.'

'The hell you say!'

'The hell I don't,' Curtis returns evenly. 'Andy said if a couple of State Troopers couldn't get away with a little vehicular arson, they ought to turn in their badges. They even had a plan. They were going to blame it on the paint and the thinner out there in the hutch. Spontaneous combustion, poof, all gone. And besides, Buck said, who'd send for the Fire Marshal in the first place? It's just an old shed with some old beater of a Buick inside it, for Christ's sake.'

The New Sarge can say nothing. He's too amazed.

'I think it may have been talking to them,' Curt says.

'Talking.' He's trying to get the sense of this. 'Talking to them.'

'Yes.' Curt puts his hat ? what they always call the big hat ? back on his head and hooks the strap under his chin the way you wear it in warm weather and adjusts the brim purely by feel. Then, to his old friend he says: 'Can you say it's never talked to you, Sandy?'

The New Sarge opens his mouth to say of course it hasn't, but the other man's eyes are on him, and they are grave. In the end the SC says nothing.

'You can't. Because it does. To you, to me, to all of us. It talked loudest to Huddie on the day that monster came through, but we hear it even when it whispers. Don't we? And it talks all the time. Even in its sleep. So it's important not to listen.'

Curt stands up.

'Just to watch. That's our job and I know it now. If it has to breathe through that valve long enough, or that reed, or that whatever-it-is, sooner or later it'll choke. Stifle. Give out. And maybe it won't really mind. Maybe it'll more or less die in its sleep. If no one riles it up, that is. Which mostly means doing no more than staying out of snatching distance. But it also means leaving it alone.'

He starts away, his life running out from under his feet like sand and neither of them knowing, then stops and takes one more look at his old friend. They weren't quite rookies together but they grew into the job together and now it fits both of them as well as it ever will. Once, when drunk, the Old Sarge called law enforcement a case of good men doing bad chores.

'Sandy.'

Sandy gives him a whatnow look.

'My boy is playing Legion ball this year, did I tell you?'

'Only about twenty times.'

'The coach has a little boy, must be about three. And one day last week when I went overtown to pick Ned up, I saw him down on one knee, playing toss with that little hoy in left field. And I fell in love with my kid all over again, Sandy. As strong as when I first held him in my arms, wrapped in a blanket. Isn't that funny?'

Sandy doesn't think it's funny. He thinks it's maybe all the truth the world needs about men.

'The coach had given them their uniforms and Ned had his on and he was down on one knee, tossing underhand to the little boy, and I swear he was the whitest, purest thing any summer sky ever looked down on.' And then he says

NOW:

Sandy

In the shed there was a sallow flash, so pale it was almost lilac. It was followed by darkness . . . then another flash . . . then more darkness . . . darkness this time unbroken.

'Is it done?' Huddie asked, then answered his own question: 'Yeah, I think it is.'

Ned ignored this. 'What?' he asked me. 'What did he say then?'

'What any man says when things are all right at home,' I told him. 'He said he was a lucky man.'

Steff had gone away to mind her microphone and computer screen, but the others were still here. Ned took no notice of any of them. His puffy, red-lidded eyes never left me. 'Did he say anything else?'

'Said you hit two homers against the Rocksburg Railroad the week before, and that you gave him a wave after the second one, while you were coming around third. He liked that, laughed telling me about it. He said you saw the ball better on your worst day than he ever had on his best. He also said you needed to start charging ground balls if you were serious about playing third base.'

The boy looked down and began to struggle. We looked away, all of us, to let him do it in reasonable privacy. At last he said: 'He told me not to be a quitter, but that's what he did with that car. That f**king 8. He quit on it.'

I said, 'He made a choice. There's a difference.'

He sat considering this, then nodded. 'All right.'

Arky said: 'Dis time I'm really going home.' But before he went he did something I'll never forget: leaned over and put a kiss on Ned's swollen cheek. I was shocked by the tenderness of it. 'G'night, lad.'

'Goodnight, Arky.'

We watched him drive away in his rattletrap pickup and then Huddie said, 'I'll drive Ned home in his Chevy. Who wants to follow along and bring me back here to get my car?'

'I will,' Eddie said. 'Only I'm waiting outside when you take him in. If Michelle Wilcox goes nuclear, I want to be outside the fallout zone.'

'It'll be okay,' Ned told him. 'I'll say I saw the can on the shelf and picked it up to see what it was and maced my stupid self.'

I liked it. It had the virtue of simplicity. It was exactly the sort of story the boy's father would have told.