From a Buick 8(29)

'Yes,' Shirley said. She'd lit another Parliament and was smoking it in quick, nervous little puffs. 'Your father dragooned me into one of his experiments once ? got me to run the video camera. He put a long scratch down the driver's-side door, right under the chrome swoop, and we just let the camera run, came back together every fifteen minutes. It wasn't anything dramatic, like something in a movie, but it was pretty damned amazing. The scratch got shallower and started to darken around the edges, like it was working to match the paintjob. And finally it was just gone. All sign of it.'

'And the tires,' Phil Candleton said, taking a turn. 'You shoved a screwdriver into one of em, the air'd start to whoosh out just like you'd expect. Only then the whoosh'd thin to a whistle and a few seconds later that would stop, too. Then out comes the screwdriver.' Phil pursed his lips and made a thpp sound. 'Like spitting out a watermelon seed.'

'Is it alive?' Ned asked me. His voice was so low I could hardly hear it. 'I mean, if it can heal itself ? '

'Tony always said it wasn't,' I said. 'He was vehement on the subject. 'Just a gadget,' he used to say. 'Just some kind of goddam thingamajig we don't understand. 'Your dad thought just the opposite, and by the end he was just as vehement as Tony had ever been. If Curtis had lived ? '

'What? If he'd lived, what?'

'I don't know,' I said. All at once I felt dull and sad. There was a lot more to tell, but suddenly I didn't want to tell it. I didn't feel up to it and my heart was heavy with the prospect of it, the way your heart can grow heavy at the prospect of toil which is necessary but hard and stupid ? stumps to pull before sundown, hay to bundle into the barn before afternoon rain. 'I don't know what would have happened if he'd lived, and that's the God's honest truth.'

Huddie came to my rescue. 'Your dad was bullshit about the car, Ned. I mean bug-eyed bullshit. He was out there every spare minute, walking around it, taking pictures of it. . . touching it. That was what he mostly did. Just touching and touching, like to make sure it was real.'

'Sarge d'same way,' Arky put in.

Not exactly, I thought but didn't say. It had been different for Curt. In the end the Buick had been his in a way it had never been Tony's. And Tony had known it.

'But what about Trooper Rafferty, Sandy? Do you think the Buick-?'

'Ate im,' Huddie said. He spoke with dead flat certainty. 'That's what I thought then and it's what I think now. It's what your dad thought, too.'

'Did he?' Ned asked me.

'Well, yes. Ate him or took him away to someplace else.' Again the image of stupid work came to me ? rows of beds to be made, stacks of dishes to be washed, acres of hay to be scythed and carried.

'But you're telling me,' Ned said, 'that no scientist has ever been allowed to study that thing since Trooper Rafferty and my father found it? Ever? No physicists, no chemists? No one's ever run a spectrographic analysis?'

'Bibi was back at least once, I think,' Phil said, sounding just the tiniest bit defensive. 'By himself, though, without those kids he used to travel around with. He and Tony and your father wheeled some big machine in there . . . maybe it was a spectrograph, but I don't know what it showed. Do you, Sandy?'

I shook my head. There was no one left to answer that question. Or a lot of others. Bibi Roth died of cancer in 1998. Curtis Wilcox, who often walked around the Buick with a spiral notebook in his hands, writing things down (and sometimes sketching), was also dead. Tony Schoondist, alias the old Sarge, was still alive but now in his late seventies, lost in that confused twilit purgatory reserved for people with Alzheimer's disease. I remembered going to see him, along with Arky Arkanian, at the nursing home where he now lives. Just before Christmas, this was. Arky and I brought him a gold St Christopher's medal, which a bunch of us older fellows had chipped in to buy. It had seemed to me that the old Sarge was having one of his good days. He opened the package without much trouble and seemed delighted by the medallion. Even undid the clasp himself, although Arky had to help him do it up again after he'd slipped it on. When that was finally accomplished, Tony had looked at me closely with his brows knit together, his bleary eyes projecting a parody of his old piercing glare. It was a moment when he really seemed himself. Then his eyes filled with tears, and the illusion was gone. 'Who are you boys?' he'd asked. 'I can almost remember.' Then, as matter-of-factly as someone reporting the weather: 'I'm in hell, you know. This is hell.'

'Ned, listen,' I said. 'What that meeting in The Country Way really boiled down to was just one thing. The cops in California have it written on the sides of some of their cruisers, maybe because their memory is a little bit faulty and they have to write it down. We don't. Do you know what I'm talking about?'

'To serve and protect,' Ned said.

'You got it. Tony thought that thing had come into our hands almost as a result of God's will. He didn't say it that flat-out, but we understood. And your father felt the same way.'

I was telling Ned Wilcox what I thought he needed to hear. What I didn't tell him about was the light in Tony's eyes, and in the eyes of his father. Tony could sermonize about our commitment to serve and protect; he could tell us about how the men of Troop D were the ones best equipped to take care of such a dangerous res; he could even allow as how later on we might turn the thing over to a carefully chosen team of scientists, perhaps one led by Bibi Roth. He could spin all those tales, and did. None of it meant jack shit. Tony and Curt wanted the Buick because they just couldn't bear to let it go. That was the cake, and all the rest of it was just icing. The Roadmaster was strange and exotic, unique, and it was theirs. They couldn't bear to surrender it.