From a Buick 8(97)

Then Eddie started talking again and I sat back to listen. It's funny how close the past is, sometimes. Sometimes it seems as if you could almost reach out and touch it. Only . . .

Only who really wants to?

THEN:

Eddie

In the end there was no more melodrama, just a Trooper in a gray uniform and the shadow of his big hat shielding his eyes bending and reaching out like you might reach out your hand to a crying child to comfort him. He touched the muzzle of his Ruger to the dog's smoking ear and pulled the trigger. There was a loud Pow! and D fell dead on his side. The smoke was still coming out of his fur in little ribbons. It was as if he'd swallowed a hotspring.

George bolstered his weapon and stood back. Then he put his hands over his face and cried something out. I don't know what it was. It was too muffled to tell. Huddie and I walked to where he was. Shirley did, too. We put our arms around him, all of us. We were standing in the middle of the parking lot with Unit 6 behind us and Shed B to our right and our nice barracks dog who never made any trouble for anybody lying dead in front of us. We could smell him cooking, and without a word we all moved farther to our right, upwind, shuffling rather than walking because we weren't quite ready to lose hold of one another. We didn't talk. We waited to see if he'd actually catch on fire like we thought he might, but it seemed that the fire didn't want him or maybe couldn't use him now that he was dead. He swelled some, and there was a gruesome little sound from inside him, almost like the one you get when you pop a paper lunchsack. It might have been one of his lungs. Anyway, once that happened, the smoke started to thin.

'That thing from the Buick poisoned him, didn't it?' Huddie asked. 'It poisoned him when he bit into it.'

'Poisoned him my ass,' I said. 'That pink-hair motherf*cker firebombed him.' Then I remembered that Shirley was there, and she never had appreciated that kind of talk. 'Sorry,' I said.

She seemed not to have heard me. She was still looking fixedly down at Mister D. 'What do we do now?' she asked. 'Does anyone have any ideas?'

'I don't,' I said. 'This situation is totally out of control.'

'Maybe not,' George said. 'Did you cover up the thing in there, Hud?'

'Yeah.'

'All right, that's a start. And how does it look out in Poteenville, Shirl?'

'The kids are out of danger. They've got a dead bus driver, but considering how bad things looked at first, I'd say . . .' She stopped, lips pressed together so tight they were almost gone, her throat working. Then she said, 'Excuse me, fellas.'

She walked stiff-legged around the corner of the barracks with the back of her hand pressed against her mouth. She held on until she was out of sight ? nothing showing but her shadow ? and then there came three big wet whooping sounds. The three of us stood over the smoking corpse of the dog without saying anything, and after a few minutes she came back, dead white and wiping her mouth with a Kleenex. And picked up right where she'd left off. It was as if she'd paused just long enough to clear her throat or swat a fly. 'I'd say that was a pretty low score. The question is, what's the score here?'

'Get either Curt or the Sarge on the radio,' George said. 'Curt will do but Tony's better because he's more level-headed when it comes to the Buick. You guys buy that?'

Huddie and I nodded. So did Shirley. 'Tell him you have a Code D and we want him here as soon as he can get here. He should know it's not an emergency, but he should also know it's damn close to an emergency. Also, tell him we may have a Kubrick.' This was another piece of slang peculiar (so far as I know) to our barracks. A Kubrick is a 2001, and 2001 is PSP code for 'escaped prisoner'. I had heard it talked about, but never actually called.

'Kubrick, copy,' Shirley said. She seemed steadier now that she had orders. 'Do you ? '

There was a loud bang. Shirley gave a small scream and all three of us turned toward the shed, reaching for our weapons as we did. Then Huddle laughed. The breeze had blown the shed door closed.

'Go on, Shirley,' George said. 'Get the Sarge. Let's make this happen.'

'And Brian Lippy?' I asked. 'No APB?'

Huddie sighed. Took off his hat. Rubbed the nape of his neck. Looked up at the sky. Put his hat back on. 'I don't know,' he said. 'But if one does go out, it won't be any of us who puts it out. That's the Sarge's call. It's why they pay him the big bucks.'

'Good point,' George said. Now that he saw that the responsibility was going to travel on, he looked a little more relaxed.

Shirley turned to go into the barracks, then looked back over her shoulder. 'Cover him up, would you?' she said. 'Poor old Mister D. Put something over him. Looking at him that way hurts my heart.'

'Good idea,' I said, and started toward the shed.

'Eddie?' Huddie said.

'Yeah?'

'There's a piece of tarp big enough to do the job in the hutch. Use that. Don't go into the shed.'

'Why not?'

'Because something's still going on with that Buick. Hard to tell exactly what, but if you go in there, you might not come back out.'

'All right,' I said. 'You don't have to twist my arm.'

I got the piece of tarp out of the hutch ? just a flimsy blue thing, but it would do. On the way back to cover D's body, I stopped at the roll-up door and took a look into the shed, cupping one hand to the side of my face to cut the glare. I wanted a look at the thermometer; I also wanted to make sure my old school chum Brian wasn't skulkassing around in there. He wasn't, and the temperature appeared to have gone up a degree or two. Only one thing in the landscape had changed. The trunk was shut.