From a Buick 8(76)

On three more occasions, things appeared in the Buick's trunk. Once it was half a dozen large green beetles which looked like no beetles anyone in Troop D had ever seen. Curt and Tony spent an afternoon at Horlicks University, looking through stacks of entomology texts, and there was nothing like those green bugs in the books, either. In fact, the very shade of green was like nothing anyone in Troop D had ever seen before, although none could have explained exactly how it was different. Carl Brundage dubbed it Headache Green. Because, he said, the bugs were the color of the migraines he sometimes got. They were dead when they showed up, the whole half-dozen. Tapping their carapaces with the barrel of a screwdriver produced the sort of noise you would have gotten by tapping a piece of metal on a block of wood.

'Do you want to try a dissection?' Tony asked Curt.

'Do you want to try one?' Curt replied.

'Not particularly, no.'

Curt looked at the bugs in the trunk ? most of them on their backs with their feet up ? and sighed. 'Neither do I. What would be the point?'

So, instead of being pinned to a piece of corkboard and dissected while the video camera ran, the bugs were bagged, tagged with the date (the line on the tag for NAME/RANK OF OIC was left blank, of course), and stored away downstairs in that battered green file-cabinet. Allowing the alien bugs to make their journey from the Buick's trunk to the green file-cabinet unexamined was another step down Curt's road to acceptance. Yet the old look of fascination still came into his eyes sometimes. Tony or Sandy would see him standing at the roll-up doors, peering in, and that light would be there, more often than not. Sandy came to think of it as his Kurtis the Krazy Kat look, although he never told anyone that, not even the old Sarge. The rest of them lost interest in the Buick's misbegotten stillbirths, but Trooper Wilcox never did.

In Curtis, familiarity never bred contempt.

On a cold February day in 1984, five months or so after the appearance of the bugs, Brian Cole stuck his head into the SC's office. Tony Schoondist was in Scranton, trying to explain why he hadn't spent his entire budget appropriation for 1983 (there was nothing like one or two scrimpy SCs to make everyone else look bad), and Sandy Dearborn was holding down the big chair. By then it was fitting his ass quite nicely.

'Think you better take a little amble out to the back shed, boss,' Brian said. 'Code D.'

'What kind of Code D we talking about, Bri?'

'Trunk's up.'

'Are you sure it didn't just pop open? There haven't been any fireworks since just before Christmas. Usually ? '

'Usually there's fireworks, I know. But the temperature's been too low in there for the last week. Besides, I can see something.'

That got Sandy on his feet. He could feel the old dread stealing its fat fingers around his heart and starting to squeeze. Another mess to clean up, maybe. Probably. Please God don't let it be another fish, he thought. Nothing that has to be hosed out of there by men wearing masks.

'Do you think it might be alive?' Sandy asked. He thought he sounded calm enough, but he did not feel particularly calm. 'The thing you saw, does it look ? '

'It looks like some sort of uprooted plant,' Brian said. 'Part of it's hanging down over the back bumper. Tell you what, boss, it looks a little bit like an Easter lily.'

'Have Matt call Curtis in off the road. His shift's almost over, anyway.'

Curt rogered the Code D, told Matt he was out on Sawmill Road, and said he'd be back at base in fifteen minutes. That gave Sandy time to get the coil of yellow rope out of the

hutch and to have a good long look into Shed B with the pair of cheap but fairly powerful binoculars that were also kept in the hutch. He agreed with Brian. The thing hanging out of the trunk, a draggled and membranous white shading to dark green, looked as much like an Easter lily as anything else. The kind you see about five days after the holiday, drooping and going on dead.

Curt showed up, parked sloppily in front of the gas pump, and came on the trot to where Sandy, Brian, Huddie, Arky Arkanian, and a few others were standing at the shed windows in those sidewalk superintendent poses. Sandy held the binoculars out and Curt took them. He stood for nearly a full minute, at first making tiny adjustments to the focus-knob, then just looking.

'Well?' Sandy asked when he was finally finished.

'I'm going in,' Curt replied, a response that didn't surprise Sandy in the slightest; why else had he bothered to get the rope? 'And if it doesn't rear up and try to bite me, I'll photograph it, video it, and bag it. Just give me five minutes to get ready.'

It didn't take him even that. He came out of the barracks wearing surgical gloves ? what were already coming to be known in the PSP as 'AIDS mittens' ?  a barber's smock, rubber galoshes, and a bathing cap over his hair. Hung around his neck was a Puff-Pak, a little plastic breathing mask with its own air supply that was good for about five minutes. In one of his gloved hands he had a Polaroid camera. There was a green plastic garbage bag tucked into his belt.

Huddie had unlimbered the videocam and now he trained it on Curt, who looked tres fantastique as he strode manfully across the parking lot in his blue bathing cap and red galoshes (and even more so when Sandy had knotted the yellow rope around his middle).

'You're beautiful!' Huddie cried, peering through the video camera. 'Wave to your adoring fans!'