From a Buick 8(9)

'What's to know? And did my mom know, too?'

'Nobody knows these days except for us,' I said.

'Troop D, you mean.'

'Yes. And that's how it's going to stay.' There was a cigarette in my hand that I barely remembered lighting. I dropped it to the macadam and crushed it out.  'It's  our business.'

I took a deep breath.

'But if you really want to know, I'll tell you. You're one of us now . . . close enough for government work, anyway.' His father used to say that, too ? all the time, and things like that have a way of sticking. 'You can even go in there and look.'

'When?'

'When the temperature goes up.'

'I don't get you. What's the temperature in there got to do with anything?'

'I get off at three today,' I said, and pointed at the bench. 'Meet me there, if the rain holds off. If it doesn't, we'll go upstairs or down to the Country Way Diner, if you're hungry. I expect your father would want you to know.'

Was that true? I actually had no idea. Yet my impulse to tell him seemed strong enough to qualify as an intuition, maybe even a direct order from beyond. I'm not a religious man, but I sort of believe in such things. And I thought about the oldtimers saying kill or cure, saying give that curious cat a dose of satisfaction.

Does knowing really satisfy? Rarely, in my experience. But I didn't want Ned leaving for Pitt in September the way he was in July, with his usual sunny nature flickering on and off like a lightbulb that isn't screwed all the way in. I thought he had a right to some answers. Sometimes there are none, I know that, but I felt like trying. Felt I had to try, in spite of the risks.

Earthquake country, Curtis Wilcox said in my ear. That's earthquake country in there, so be careful.

'Goose walk over your grave again, Sandy?' the boy asked me.

'I guess it wasn't a goose, after all,' I said. 'But it was something.'

The rain held off. When I went out to join Ned on the bench which faces Shed B across the parking lot, Arky Arkanian was there, smoking a cigarette and talking Pirate baseball with the kid. Arky made as if to leave when I showed up, but I told him to stay put. 'I'm going to tell Ned about the Buick we keep over there,' I told Arky, nodding toward the ramshackle shed across the way. 'If he decides to call for the men in the white coats because the Troop D Sergeant Commanding has lost his shit, you can back me up. After all, you were here.'

Arky's smile faded. His iron-gray hair fluffed around his head in the limp, hot breeze that had sprung up. 'You sure dat a good idear, Sarge?'

'Curiosity killed the cat,' I said, 'but ? '

' ? satisfaction brought him back,' Shirley finished from behind me. 'A great big dose of it, is what Trooper Curtis Wilcox used to say. Can I join you? Or is this the Boys' Club today?'

'No sex discrimination on the smokers' bench,' I said. 'Join us, please.'

Like me, Shirley had just finished her shift and Steff Colucci had taken her place at dispatch.

She sat next to Ned, gave him a smile, and brought a pack of Parliaments out of her purse. It was two-double-oh-two, we all knew better, had for years, and we went right on killing ourselves. Amazing. Or maybe, considering we live in a world where drunks can crush State Troopers against the sides of eighteen-wheelers and where make-believe Buicks show up from time to time at real gas stations, not so amazing. Anyway, it was nothing to me right then.

Right then I had a story to tell.

THEN

In 1979, the Jenny station at the intersection of SR 32 and the Humboldt Road was still open, but it was staggering badly; OPEC took all the little 'uns out in the end. The mechanic and owner was Herbert 'Hugh' Bossey, and on that particular day he was over in Lassburg, getting his teeth looked after ? a bear for his Snickers bars and RC Colas was Hugh Bossey. NO MECH ON DUTY BECAUSE OF TOOTH-AKE, said the sign taped in the window of the garage bay. The pump-jockey was a high school dropout named Bradley Roach, barely out of his teens. This fellow, twenty-two years and untold thousands of beers later, would come along and kill the father of a boy who was not then born, crushing him against the side of a Freuhof box, turning him like a spindle, unrolling him like a noisemaker, spinning him almost skinless into the weeds and leaving his bloody clothes inside-out on the highway like a magic trick. But all that is in the yet-to-be. We are in the past now, in the magical land of Then.

At around ten o'clock on a morning in July, Brad Roach was sitting in the office of the Jenny station with his feet up, reading Inside View. On the front was a picture of a flying saucer hovering ominously over the White House.

The bell in the garage dinged as the tires of a vehicle rolled over the airhose on the tarmac. Brad looked up to see a car ? the very one which would spend so many years in the darkness of Shed B ? pull up to the second of the station's two pumps. That was the one labeled HI TEST. It was a beautiful midnight-blue Buick, old (it had the big chrome grille and the portholes running up the sides) but in mint condition. The paint sparkled, the windshield sparkled, the chrome bar sweeping along the side of the body sparkled, and even before the driver opened the door and got out, Bradley Roach knew there was something wrong with it. He just couldn't put his finger on what it was.

He dropped his newspaper on the desk (he never would have been allowed to take it out of the desk drawer in the first place, if the boss hadn't been overtown paying for his sweet tooth) and got up just as the Roadmaster's driver opened his door on the far side of the pumps and got out.