From a Buick 8(92)

'I know,' I said. 'It's getting ready to suck back in, you can feel it. We ought to get you your own eight hundred number, Eddie. You could make your fortune reading palms over the phone.'

'Yeah, go ahead, laugh. You think Ennis Rafferty's laughing, wherever he is? I'm telling you what I know, whether you like it or not. It's breathing. It's what it's been doing all along. This time when it sucks back, it's going to be hard. Tell you what. Let me and George help you with the tarp. We'll cover the thing up together and then we'll all go out together.'

That seemed like a bad idea to me, although I didn't know exactly why. 'Eddie, I can handle this. Swear to God. Also, I want to take a few pictures of Mr E.T. before he rots away to nothing but stone-crab soup.'

'Quit it,' George said. He was looking a little green.

'Sorry. I'll be out in two shakes of a lamb's tail. Go on, now, you guys, take care of your subject.'

Eddie was staring at the Buick, standing there on its big smooth whitewall tires, its trunk open so its ass end looked like the front end of a crocodile. 'I hate that thing,' he said. 'For two cents ? '

George was heading for the door by then, and Eddie followed without finishing what he'd do for two cents. It wasn't that hard to figure out, anyway.

The smell of the decaying creature was getting worse by the minute, and I remembered the Puff-Pak Curtis had worn when he'd come in here to investigate the plant that looked like a lily. I thought it was still in the hutch. There was a Polaroid camera, too, or had been the last time I looked.

Very faint, from the parking lot, I heard George calling to Shirley, asking her if she was all right. She called back and said she was. A second or two later, Eddie yelled 'FUCK!' at the top of his voice. Another country heard from. He sounded pissed like a bear. I figured his prisoner, probably high on drugs and with a broken nose to boot, had upchucked in the back of Unit 6. Well, so what? There are worse things than having a prisoner blow chunks in your ride. Once, while I was assisting at the scene of a three-car collision over in Patchin, I stashed the drunk driver who'd caused it all in the back of my unit for safekeeping while I set out some road flares. When I returned, I discovered that my subject had taken off his shirt and taken a shit in it. He then used one of the sleeves as a squeeze-tube ? you have to imagine a baker decorating a cake to get what I'm trying to describe here ? and wrote his name on both side windows in the back. He was trying to do the rear window, too, only he ran out of his special brown icing. When I asked him why he'd want to do such a nasty goddam thing, he looked at me with that cockeyed hauteur only a longtime drunk can manage and said, 'It's a nasty goddam world, Trooper.'

Anyway, I didn't think Eddie yelling was important, and I went out back to the hutch where we kept our supplies without bothering to check on him. I was more than half-convinced the Puff-Pak would be gone, but it was still on the shelf, wedged between the box of blank videotapes and a pile of Field & Stream magazines. Some tidy soul had even tucked it into a plastic evidence-bag to keep the dust off. Taking it down, I remembered how crazy Curt had looked on the day I first saw him wearing this gadget, Curt also wearing a plastic barber's smock and a blue bathing cap and red galoshes. You're beautiful, wave to your adoring fans, I'd told him.

I put the mask to my mouth and nose, almost sure that what came out of it would be unbreathable, but it was air, all right ? stale as week-old bread but not actually moldy, if you know what I mean. Better than the stench in the shed, certainly. I grabbed the battered old Polaroid One-Shot from the nail where it was hanging by the strap. I backed out of the hutch, and ? this could be nothing but hindsight, I'll be the first to admit it ? I think I saw movement. Just a flash of movement. Not from the vicinity of the shed, though, because I was looking right at that and this was more a corner-of-the-eye phenomenon. Something in our back field. In the high grass. I probably thought it was Mister Dillon, maybe rolling around and trying to get that thing's smell off. Well, it wasn't. Mister Dillon wasn't up to any rolling around by then. By then poor old D was busy dying.

I went back into the shed, breathing through the mask. And although I hadn't felt what Eddie was talking about before, this time it came through loud and clear. It was like being outside the shed for a few moments had freshened me for it, or attuned me to it. The Buick wasn't flashing purple lightning or glowing or humming, it was only sitting there, but there was a sense of liveliness to it that was unmistakable. You could feel it hovering just over your skin, like the lightest touch of a breeze huffing at the hairs on your forearms. And I thought . . . this is crazy, but I thought, What if the Buick's nothing but another version of what I'm wearing on my face right now? What if it's nothing but a Puff-Pak? What if the thing wearing it has exhaled and now its chest is lying flat but in a second or two ?

Even with the Puff-Pak, the smell of the dead creature was enough to make my eyes water. Brian Cole and Jackie O'Hara, two of the handier build-em-and-fix-em fellows on the roster back then, had installed an overhead fan the year before, and I flipped the switch as I passed it.

I took three pictures, and then the One-Shot was out of film ? I'd never even checked the load. Stupid. I tucked the photos into my back pocket, put the camera down on the floor, then went to get the tarp. As I bent and grabbed it, I realized that I'd taken the camera but walked out of the hutch right past the looped length of bright yellow rope. I should have taken it and cinched the loop in the end of it around my waist. Tied the other end to the big old hook Curtis had mounted to the left of Shed B's side door for just that purpose. But I didn't do that. The rope was too goddam bright to miss, but I missed it anyway. Funny, huh? And there I was where I had no business to be on my own, but I was on my own. I wasn't wearing a security line, either. Had walked right past it, maybe because something wanted me to walk right past it. There was a dead E.T. on the floor and the air was full of a lively, chilly, gathering feeling. I think it crossed my mind that if I disappeared, my wife and Ennis Rafferty's sister could join up forces. I think I might have laughed out loud at that. I can't remember for sure, but I do remember being struck humorous by something. The global absurdity of the situation, maybe.