From a Buick 8(55)

'The other guy was me,' Sandy said. 'You scared the living crap out of us, Phil. You seemed all right at first, then you started to yell and twist and buck. I sort of expected to see you bleeding somewhere, or turning blue in the face. But all you had was . . . well.' And he made a little gesture at me to go on.

'I had the leaves. What was left of them, anyway. When I freaked out, I must have made fists, okay? Clenched down on them. And once I was back outside, I realized my hands were all wet. People were yelling Are you all right and What happened in there, Phil? Me up on my knees, with most of my shirt around my neck and a damn floorburn on my gut from being dragged, and I'm thinking My hands are bleeding. That's why they're wet. Then I see this white goo. Looked like the kind of paste the teacher gives you in the first grade. It was all that was left of the leaves.'

I stopped, thought about it.

'And now I'm gonna tell you the truth, okay? It didn't look like paste at all. It was like I had two fistfuls of warm bull-jizz. And the smell was awful. I don't know why. You could say A little peppermint and cabbage, what's the big deal? and you'd be right, but at the same time you'd be wrong. Because really that smell was like nothing on earth. Not that I ever smelled before, anyway.

'I wiped my hands on my pants and went back to the barracks. Went downstairs. Brian Cole is just coming out of the crapper down there. He thought he heard some yelling, wants to know what's going on. I pay him absolutely no mind. Almost knock him over getting into the can, matter of fact. I start washing my hands. I'm still washing away when all at once I think of how I looked with that cummy-white leaf-gunk dripping out of my fists and how it was so warm and soft and somehow sleek and how it made strings when I opened up my fingers. And that was it. Thinking of how it made strings between my palms and the tips of my fingers. I upchucked. It wasn't like having your guts send your supper back by Western Union, either. It was like my actual stomach making a personal appearance, coming right up my throat and tipping everything I'd swallowed down lately right back out my mouth. The way my ma used to throw her dirty wash-water over the back porch railing. I don't mean to go on about it, but you need to know. It's another way of trying to understand. It wasn't like puking, it was like dying. Only other time I had anything like that was my first road fatality. I get there and the first thing I see is a loaf of Wonder Bread on the yellow line of the old Statler Pike and the next thing I see is the top half of a kid. A little boy with blond hair. Next thing I see is there's a fly on the kid's tongue. Washing its legs. That set me off. I thought I was going to puke myself to death.'

'It happened to me, too,' Huddie said. 'Nothing to be ashamed of.'

'Not ashamed,' I said. 'Trying to make him see, is all. Okay?' I took in a deep breath, smelling the sweet air, and then it hit me that the kid's father was also a road kill. I gave the kid a smile. 'Oh well, thank God for small favors ? the commode was right next to the basin, and I didn't get hardly any on my shoes or the floor.'

'And in the end,' Sandy said, 'the leaves came to nothing. And I mean that literally. They melted like the witch in The Wizard of Oz. You could see traces of them in Shed B for awhile, but after a week there was nothing but some little stains on the concrete. Yellowish, very pale.'

'Yeah, and for the next couple of months I turned into one of those compulsive hand-washers,' I said. 'There were days when I couldn't bring myself to touch food. If my wife packed me sandwiches, I picked em up with a napkin and ate them that way, dropping the last piece out of the napkin and into my mouth so I never had to touch any of it with my fingers. If I was by myself in my cruiser, I was apt to eat with my gloves on. And I kept thinking I'd get sick just the same. What I kept imagining was that gum disease where all your teeth fall out. But I got over it.' I looked at Ned and waited until he met my eyes. 'I got over it, son.'

He met my eyes, but there was nothing in them. It was funny. Like they were painted on, or something.

Okay?

NOW:

Sandy

Ned was looking at Phil. The boy's face was calm enough, but I sensed rejection in his gaze, and I think Phil sensed it, too. He sighed, folded his arms across his chest, and looked down as if to say he was done talking, his testimony was finished.

Ned turned to me. 'What happened that night? When you dissected the bat?'

He kept calling it a bat and it hadn't been a bat. That was just a word I'd used, what Curtis would have called a nail to hang my hat on. And all at once I was mad at him. More than mad ? pissed like a bear. And I was also angry at myself for feeling that way, for daring to feel that way. You see, mostly what I was angry at was the kid raising his head. Raising his eyes to mine. Asking his questions. Making his foolish assumptions, one of which happened to be that when I said bat I meant bat, and not some unspeakable indescribable thing that crept out of a crack in the floor of the universe and then died. But mostly it was him raising his head and his eyes. I know that doesn't exactly make me out to be the prince of the world, but I'm not going to lie about it.

Up until then, what I'd mostly felt was sorry for him. Everything I'd done since he started showing up at the barracks had been based on that comfortable pity. Because all that time when he'd been washing windows and raking leaves and snowblowing his way through the drifts in the back parking lot, all that time he'd kept his head down. Meekly down. You didn't have to contend with his eyes. You didn't have to ask yourself any questions, because pity is comfortable. Isn't it? Pity puts you right up on top. Now he had lifted his head, he was using my own words back at me, and there was nothing meek in his eyes. He thought he had a right, and that made me mad. He thought I had a responsibility ? that what was being said out here wasn't a gift being given but a debt being repaid ? and that made me madder. That he was right made me maddest of all. I felt like shoving the heel of my hand up into the shelf of his chin and knocking him spang off the bench. He thought he had a right and I wanted to make him sorry.