From a Buick 8(30)

'Ned,' I asked, 'would you know if your dad left any notebooks? Spirals, they would have been, like the kind kids take to school.'

Ned's mouth pinched at that. He dropped his head and spoke to a spot somewhere bet-ween his knees. 'Yeah, all kinds of them, actually. My mom said they were probably diaries. Anyway, in his will, he asked that Mom burn all his private papers, and she did.'

'I guess that makes sense,' Huddie said. 'It jibes with what I know about Curt and the old Sarge, at least.'

Ned looked up at him.

Huddie elaborated. 'Those two guys distrusted scientists. You know what Tony called them? Death's cropdusters. He said their big mission in life was to spread poison everywhere, telling people to go ahead and eat all they wanted, that it was knowledge and it wouldn't hurt them ? that it would set them free.' He paused. 'There was another issue, too.'

'What issue?' Ned asked.

'Discretion,' Huddie said. 'Cops can keep secrets, but Curt and Tony didn't believe scientists could. "Look how fast those idiots cropdusted the atomic bomb all around the world," I heard Tony say once. "We fried the Rosenbergs for it, but anyone with half a brain knows the Russians would have had the bomb in two years, anyway. Why? Because scientists like to chat. That thing we've got out in Shed B may not be the equivalent of the A-bomb, but then again it might. One thing's for sure, it isn't anybody's A-bomb as long as it's sitting out back under a piece of canvas."'

I thought Huddie was helping the kid understand, but I knew it was just part of the truth, not the whole truth. I've wondered from time to time if Tony and Ned's father ever really needed to talk about it ? I mean on some late weekday evening when things at the barracks were at their slowest, guys cooping upstairs, other guys watching a movie on the VCR and eating microwave popcorn, just the two of them downstairs from all that, in Tony's office with the door shut. I'm not talking about maybe or kinda or sorta. I mean whether or not they ever spoke the flat-out truth: There's not anything like this anywhere, and we're keeping it. I don't think so. Because really, all they would have needed to do was to look into each other's eyes. To see that same eagerness ? the desire to touch it and pry into it. Hell, just to walk around it. It was a secret thing, a mystery, a marvel. But I didn't know if the boy could accept that. I knew he wasn't just missing his father; he was angry at him for dying. In that mood, he might have seen what they did as stealing, and that wasn't truth, either. At least not the whole truth.

'By then we knew about the lightquakes,' I said. 'Tony called them "dispersal events". He thought the Buick was getting rid of something, discharging it like static electricity. Issues of discretion and caretaking aside, by the end of the seventies people in Pennsylvania ? and not just us but everyone ? had one very big reason not to trust the scientists and the techies.'

'Three-Mile,' Ned said.

'Yes. Plus, there's more to that car than self-healing scratches and dust-repellent. Quite a bit more.'

I stopped. It seemed too hard too much.

'Go on, tell him,' Arky said. He sounded almost angry, a pissed-off bandleader in the gloaming. 'You told him all dis dat don't mean shit, now you tell im da rest.' He looked at Huddie, then Shirley. 'Even 1988. Yeah, even dat part.' He paused, sighed, looked at Shed B. 'Too late to stop now, Sarge.'

I got up and started across the parking lot. Behind me, I heard Phil say: 'No, hunh-unh. Let him go, kid, he'll be back.'

That's one thing about sitting in the big chair; people can say that and almost always be right. Barring strokes, heart attacks, and drunk drivers, I guess. Barring acts of what we mortals hope is God. People who sit in the big chair ? who have worked to get there and work to stay there ? never just say oh f**k it and go fishing. No. Us big-chair folks continue making the beds, washing the dishes, and baling the hay, doing it the best we can. Ah, man, what would we do without you? people say. The answer is that most of them would go on doing whatever the hell they want, same as always. Going to hell in the same old handbasket.

I stood at the roll-up door of Shed B, looking through one of the windows at the thermometer. It was down to fifty-two. Still not bad ? not terrible, anyway ? but cold enough for me to think the Buick was going to give another shake or two before settling down for the night. No sense spreading the tarp back over it yet, then; we'd likely just have to do it again later on.

It's winding down: that was the received wisdom concerning the Roadmaster, the gospel according to Schoondist and Wilcox. Slowing like an unwound clock, wobbling like an exhausted top, beeping like a smoke detector that can no longer tell what's hot. Pick your favorite metaphor from the bargain bin. And maybe it was true. Then again, maybe it wasn't. We knew nothing about it, not really. Telling ourselves we did was just a strategy we used so we could continue living next door to it without too many bad dreams.

I walked back to the bench, lighting another cigarette, and sat down between Shirley and Ned. I said, 'Do you want to hear about the first time we saw what we saw tonight?'

'Yes, sir. I sure do.'

The eagerness I saw on his face made it a little easier to go on.

THEN

Sandy was there when it started, the only one who was. In later years he would say ? half-joking ? that it was his one claim to fame. The others arrived on the scene soon enough, but to begin with it was only Sander Freemont Dearborn, standing by the gas-pump with his mouth hung open and his eyes squinched shut, sure that in another few seconds the whole bunch of them, not to mention the Amish and few non-Amish farmers in the area, would be so much radioactive dust in the wind.