From a Buick 8(51)

'Sandy, I really ought to get toddling. I've got a lot of chores I've been putting off, and-'

'We've been telling this boy about his father,' I said. 'And what I think you ought to do, Eddie, is sit there quiet, maybe have a sandwich and a glass of iced tea, and wait until you have something to say.'

He settled back on the end of the bench and looked at us. I know what he saw in the eyes of Curt's boy: puzzlement and curiosity. We'd become quite a little Council of Elders, though, surrounding the young fellow, singing him our warrior-songs of the past. And what about when the songs were done? If Ned had been a young Indian brave, he might have been sent out on some sort of dream quest ? kill the right animal, have the right vision while the blood of the animal's heart was still smeared around his mouth, come back a man. If there could be some sort of test at the end of this, I reflected, some way in which Ned could demonstrate new maturity and understanding, things might have been a lot simpler. But that's not the way things work nowadays. At least not by and large. These days it's a lot more about how you feel than what you do. And I think that's wrong.

And what did Eddie see in our eyes? Resentment? A touch of contempt? Perhaps even the wish that it had been him who had flagged down the truck with the flapper rather than Curtis Wilcox, that it had been him who had gotten turned inside-out by Bradley Roach? Always-almost-overweight Eddie Jacubois, who drank too much and would probably be making a little trip to Scranton for a two-week stay in the Member Assistance Program if he didn't get a handle on his drinking soon? The guy who was always slow filing his reports and who almost never got the punchline of a joke unless it was explained to him? I hope he didn't see any of those things, because there was another side to him ? a better side ? but I can't say for sure he didn't see at least some of them. Maybe even all of them.

' ? about the big picture?'

I turned to Ned, glad to be diverted from the uncomfortable run of my own thoughts. 'Come again?'

'I asked if you ever talked about what the Buick really was, where it came from, what it meant. If you ever discussed, you know, the big picture.'

'Well . . . there was the meeting at The Country Way,' I said. I didn't quite see where he was going. 'I told you about that ? '

'Yeah, but that one sounded, you know, more administrative than anything else ? '

'You do okay in college,' Arky said, and patted him on the knee. 'Any kid can say a word like dat, jus' roll it out, he bound t'do okay in college.'

Ned grinned. 'Administrative. Organizational. Bureaucratized. Compartmentalized.'

'Quit showing off, kiddo,' Huddie said. 'You're giving me a headache.'

'Anyway, the thing at The Country Way's not the kind of meeting I'm talking about. You guys must've ... I mean, as time went on you must have . . .'

I knew what he was trying so say, and I knew something else at the same time: the boy would never quite understand the way it had really been. How mundane it had been, at least on most days. On most days we had just gone on. The way people go on after seeing a beautiful sunset, or tasting a wonderful champagne, or getting bad news from home. We had the miracle of the world out behind our workplace, but that didn't change the amount of paperwork we had to do or the way we brushed our teeth or how we made love to our spouses. It didn't lift us to new realms of existence or planes of perception. Our asses still itched, and we still scratched them when they did.

'I imagine Tony and your Father talked it over a lot,' I said, 'but at work, at least for the rest of us, the Buick gradually slipped into the background like any other inactive case. It ? '

'Inactive!' He nearly shouted it, and sounded so much like his father it was frightening. It was another chain, I thought, this link between father and son. The chain had been mangled, but it wasn't broken.

'For long periods of time, it was,' I said. 'Meantime, there were fender-benders and hit-and-runs and burglaries and dope and the occasional homicide.'

The look of disappointment on Ned's face made me feel bad, as if I'd let him down. Ridiculous, I suppose, but true. Then something occurred to me. 'I can remember one bull-session about it. It was at ? '

' ? the picnic,' Phil Candleton finished. 'Labor Day picnic. That's what you're thinking about, right?'

I nodded. 1979. The old Academy soccer field, down by Redfern Stream. We all liked the Labor Day picnic a lot better than the one on the Fourth of July, partially because it was a lot closer to home and the men who had families could bring them, but mostly because it was just us ? just Troop D. The Labor Day picnic really was a picnic.

Phil put his head back against the boards of the barracks and laughed. 'Man, I'd almost forgotten about it. We talked about that damn yonder Buick, kid, and just about nothing else. More we talked, the more we drank. My head ached for two days after.'

Huddie said: 'That picnic's always a good time. You were there last summer, weren't you, Ned?'

'Summer before last,' Ned said. 'Before Dad died.' He was smiling. 'That tire swing that goes out over the water? Paul Loving fell out of it and sprained his knee.'

We all laughed at that, Eddie as loud as the rest of us.

'A lot of talk and not one single conclusion,' I said. 'But what conclusions could we draw? Only one, really: when the temperature goes down inside that shed, things happen. Except even that turned out not to be a hard and fast rule. Sometimes ? especially as the years went by ? the temperature would go down a little, then rebound. Sometimes that humming noise would start . . . and then it would stop again, just cut out as if someone had pulled the plug on a piece of electrical equipment. Ennis disappeared with no lightshow and Jimmy the gerbil disappeared after a humungous lightshow and Roslyn didn't disappear at all.'