From a Buick 8(8)

'Look at it!' Ned said when we got there. He ran the words all together, like an enthusiastic little kid. 'What a neat old car, huh? Even better than my Dad's Bel Aire! It's a Buick, I can tell that much by the portholes and the grille. Must be from the mid-fifties, wouldn't you say?'

Actually it was a '54, according to Tony Schoondist, Curtis Wilcox, and Ennis Rafferty. Sort of a '54. When you got right down to it, it wasn't a 1954 at all. Or a Buick. Or even a car. It was something else, as we used to say in the days of my misspent youth.

Meanwhile, Ned was going on, almost babbling.

'But it's in cherry condition, you can see that from here. It was so weird, Sandy! I looked in and at first all I saw was this hump. Because the tarp was on it. I started to wash the windows . . .' Only what he actually said was warsh the windas, because that's how we say it in this part of the world, where the Giant Eagle supermarket becomes Jaunt Iggle. '. . . and there was this sound, or two sounds, really, a wisssshh and then a thump. The tarp slid off the car while I was washing the windows! Like it wanted me to see it, or something! Now is that weird or is that weird?'

'That's pretty weird, all right,' I said. I leaned my forehead against the glass (as I had done many times before) and cupped my hands to the sides of my face, eliminating what reflection there was on this dirty day. Yes, it looked like an old Buick, all right, old but almost cherry, just as the kid had said. That distinctive fifties Buick grille, which looked to me like the mouth of a chrome crocodile. Whitewall tires. Fenderskirts in the back ? yow, baby, we used to say, too cool for school. Looking into the gloom of Shed B, you probably would have called it black. It was actually midnight blue.

Buick did make a 1954 Roadmaster in midnight blue ? Schoondist checked ? but never one of that particular type. The paint had a kind of textured flaky look, like a kid's duded-up streetrod.

That's earthquake country in there, Curtis Wilcox said.

I jumped back. Dead a year or not, he spoke directly into my left ear. Or something did.

'What's wrong?' Ned asked. 'You look like you saw a ghost.'

Heard one, I almost said. What I did say was 'Nothing.'

'You sure? You jumped.'

'Goose walked over my grave, I guess. I'm okay.'

'So what's the story on the car? Who owns it?'

What a question that was. 'I don't know,' I said.

'Well, what's it doing just sitting there in the dark? Man, if I had a nice-looking street-custom like that ? and vintage! ? I'd never keep it sitting in a dirty old shed.' Then an idea hit him. 'Is it, like, some criminal's car? Evidence in a case?'

'Call it a repo, if you want. Theft of services.' It's what we'd called it. Not much, but as Curtis himself had once said, you only need one nail to hang your hat on.

'What services?'

'Eleven dollars' worth of gas.' I couldn't quite bring myself to tell him who had pumped it.

'Eleven dollars? That's all?'

'Well,' I said, 'you only need one nail to hang your hat on.'

He looked at me, puzzled. I looked back at him, saying nothing.

'Can we go in?' he asked finally. 'Take a closer look?'

I put my forehead back against the glass and read the thermometer hanging from the beam, as round and bland as the face of the moon. Tony Schoondist had bought it at the Tru-Value in Statler, paying for it out of his own pocket instead of Troop D petty cash. And Ned's father had hung it from the beam. Like a hat on a nail.

Although the temperature out where we were standing had to be at least eighty-five, and everyone knows heat builds up even higher in poorly ventilated sheds and barns, the thermometer's big red needle stood spang between the fives of 55.

'Not just now,' I said.

'Why not?' And then, as if he realized that sounded impolite, perhaps even impudent: 'What's wrong with it?'

'Right now it's not safe.'

He studied me for several seconds. The interest and lively curiosity drained out of his face as he did, and he once more became the boy 1 had seen so often since he started coming by the barracks, the one I'd seen most clearly on the day he'd been accepted at Pitt. The boy sitting on the smokers' bench with tears rolling down his cheeks, wanting to know what every kid in history wants to know when someone they love is suddenly yanked off the stage: why does it happen, why did it happen to me, is there a reason or is it all just some crazy roulette wheel? If it means something, what do I do about it? And if it means nothing, how do I bear it?

'Is this about my father?' he asked. 'Was that my dad's car?'

His intuition was scary. No, it hadn't been his father's car . . . how could it be, when it wasn't really a car at all? Yes, it had been his father's car. And mine . . . Huddie Royer's . . . Tony Schoondist's . . . Ennis Rafferty's. Ennis's most of all, maybe. Ennis's in a way the rest of us could never equal. Never wanted to equal. Ned had asked who the car belonged to, and I supposed the real answer was Troop D, Pennsylvania State Police. It belonged to all the Troopers, past and present, who had ever known what we were keeping out in Shed B. But for most of the years it had spent in our custody, the Buick had been the special property of Tony and Ned's dad. They were its curators, its Roadmaster Scholars.

'Not exactly your dad's,' I said, knowing I'd hesitated too long. 'But he knew about it.'