'How do you know it's not? How do you know?'
And the New Sarge, who will later think, It should have been me whose hat wound up lying blood-bolted on the side of the road, can say nothing. It seems almost profane to disagree with him, and besides, who knows? He could be right. Kids do blow off their fingers with blastingcaps or kill their little brothers with guns they find in their parents' bureau drawers or burn down the house with some old sparklight they found out in the garage. Because they don't know what they're playing with.
'Suppose,' says the man twirling his Stetson between his hands, 'that the 8 is a kind of valve. Like the one in a scuba diver's regulator. Sometimes it breathes in and sometimes it breathes out, giving or receiving according to the will of the user. But what it does it always limited by the valve.'
'Yes, but - '
'Or think of it. another way. Suppose it breathes like a man lying on the bottom of a swamp and using a hollow reed to sip air with so he won't be seen.'
'All right, but - '
'Either way, everything comes in or goes out in small breaths, they must be small breaths, because the channel through which they pass is small. Maybe the thing using the valve or the reed has put itself into a kind of suspended state, like sleep or hypnosis, so it can survive on so little breath. And then suppose some misguided fool comes along and throws enough dynamite into the swamp to drain it and make the reed unnecessary. Or, if you're thinking in terms of a valve, blows it clean off. Would you want to risk that? Risk giving it all the goddam air it needs?'
'No,' the New Sarge says in a small voice.
Curtis says: 'Once Buck Flanders and Andy Colucci made up their minds to do that very thing.'
'The hell you say!'
'The hell I don't,' Curtis returns evenly. 'Andy said if a couple of State Troopers couldn't get away with a little vehicular arson, they ought to turn in their badges. They even had a plan.
They were going to blame it on the paint and the thinner out there in the hutch. Spontaneous combustion, poof, all gone. And besides, Buck said, who'd send for the Fire Marshal in the first place? It's just an old shed with some old beater of a Buick inside it, for Christ's sake.'
The New Sarge can say nothing. He's too amazed.
'I think it may have been talking to them,' Curt says.
'Talking.' He's trying to get the sense of this. 'Talking to them.'
'Yes.' Curt puts his hat - what they always call the big hat - back on his head and hooks the strap under his chin the way you wear it in warm weather and adjusts the brim purely by feel.
Then, to his old friend he says: 'Can you say it's never talked to you, Sandy?'
The New Sarge opens his mouth to say of course it hasn't, but the other man's eyes are on him, and they are grave. In the end the SC says nothing.
'You can't. Because it does. To you, to me, to all of us. It talked loudest to Huddie on the day that monster came through, but we hear it even when it whispers. Don't we? And it talks all the time. Even in its sleep. So it's important not to listen.'
Curt stands up.
'Just to watch. That's our job and I know it now. If it has to breathe through that valve long enough, or that reed, or that whatever-it-is, sooner or later it'll choke. Stifle. Give out. And maybe it won't really mind. Maybe it'll more or less die in its sleep. If no one riles it up, that is. Which mostly means doing no more than staying out of snatching distance. But it also means leaving it alone.'
He starts away, his life running out from under his feet like sand and neither of them knowing, then stops and takes one more look at his old friend. They weren't quite rookies together but they grew into the job together and now it fits both of them as well as it ever will. Once, when drunk, the Old Sarge called law enforcement a case of good men doing bad chores.
'Sandy.'
Sandy gives him a whatnow look.
'My boy is playing Legion ball this year, did I tell you?'
'Only about twenty times.'
'The coach has a little boy, must be about three. And one day last week when I went overtown to pick Ned up, I saw him down on one knee, playing toss with that little hoy in left field. And I fell in love with my kid all over again, Sandy. As strong as when I first held him in my arms, wrapped in a blanket. Isn't that funny?'
Sandy doesn't think it's funny. He thinks it's maybe all the truth the world needs about men.
'The coach had given them their uniforms and Ned had his on and he was down on one knee, tossing underhand to the little boy, and I swear he was the whitest, purest thing any summer sky ever looked down on.' And then he says
NOW:
Sandy
In the shed there was a sallow flash, so pale it was almost lilac. It was followed by darkness . .
. then another flash . . . then more darkness . . . darkness this time unbroken.
'Is it done?' Huddie asked, then answered his own question: 'Yeah, I think it is.'
Ned ignored this. 'What?' he asked me. 'What did he say then?'
'What any man says when things are all right at home,' I told him. 'He said he was a lucky man.'
