Steff had gone away to mind her microphone and computer screen, but the others were still here. Ned took no notice of any of them. His puffy, red-lidded eyes never left me. 'Did he say anything else?'
'Said you hit two homers against the Rocksburg Railroad the week before, and that you gave him a wave after the second one, while you were coming around third. He liked that, laughed telling me about it. He said you saw the ball better on your worst day than he ever had on his best. He also said you needed to start charging ground balls if you were serious about playing third base.'
The boy looked down and began to struggle. We looked away, all of us, to let him do it in reasonable privacy. At last he said: 'He told me not to be a quitter, but that's what he did with that car. That fucking 8. He quit on it.'
I said, 'He made a choice. There's a difference.'
He sat considering this, then nodded. 'All right.'
Arky said: 'Dis time I'm really going home.' But before he went he did something I'll never forget: leaned over and put a kiss on Ned's swollen cheek. I was shocked by the tenderness of it.
'G'night, lad.'
'Goodnight, Arky.'
We watched him drive away in his rattletrap pickup and then Huddie said, 'I'll drive Ned home in his Chevy. Who wants to follow along and bring me back here to get my car?'
'I will,' Eddie said. 'Only I'm waiting outside when you take him in. If Michelle Wilcox goes nuclear, I want to be outside the fallout zone.'
'It'll be okay,' Ned told him. 'I'll say I saw the can on the shelf and picked it up to see what it was and maced my stupid self.'
I liked it. It had the virtue of simplicity. It was exactly the sort of story the boy's father would have told.
Ned sighed. 'Tomorrow bright and early I'll be sitting in the optometrist's chair over in Statler Village, that's the downside.'
'Won't hurt you,' Shirley said. She also kissed him, planting hers on the corner of his mouth.
'Goodnight, boys. This time everyone goes and no one comes back.'
'Amen to that,' Huddie said, and we watched her walk away. She was forty-five or so, but there was still plenty to look at when she put her backfield in motion. Even by moonlight. (Especially by moonlight.)
Off she went, driving past us, a quick flick of right-back-atcha and then nothing but the taillights.
Darkness from Shed B. No taillights there. No fireworks, either. It was over for the night and someday it would be over for good. But not yet. I could still feel the sleepy beat of it far down in my mind, a tidal whisper that could be words if you wanted them to be.
What I'd seen.
What I'd seen when I had the boy hugged in my arms, him blinded by the spray.
'You want to ride along, Sandy?' Huddie asked.
'Nah, guess not. I'll sit here awhile longer, then get on home. If there are problems with Michelle, you have her call me. Here or at the house, makes no difference.'
'There won't be any problem with Mom,' Ned said.
'What about you?' I asked. 'Are there going to be any more problems with you?'
He hesitated, then said: 'I don't know.'
In some ways I thought it was the best answer he could have given. You had to give him points for honesty.
They walked away, Huddie and Ned heading toward the Bel Aire. Eddie split apart from them, going toward his own car and pausing long enough at mine to take the Kojak light off the roof and toss it inside.
Ned stopped at the rear bumper of his car and turned back to me. 'Sandy.'
'What is it?'
'Didn't he have any idea at all about where it came from? What it was? Who the man in the black coat was? Didn't any of you?'
'No. We blue-skied it from time to time, but no one ever had an idea that felt like the real deal, or even close. Jackie O'Hara probably nailed it when he said the Buick was like a jigsaw piece that won't fit into the puzzle anywhere. You worry it and worry it, you turn it this way and that, try it everywhere, and one day you turn it over and see the back is red and the backs of all the pieces in your puzzle are green. Do you follow that?'
'No,' he said.
'Well, think about it,' I said, 'because you're going to have to live with it.'
'How am I supposed to do that?' There was no anger in his voice. The anger had been burned away. Now all he wanted was instructions. Good.
'You don't know where you came from or where you're going, do you?' I asked him. 'But you live with it just the same. Don't rail against it too much. Don't spend more than an hour a day shaking your fists at the sky and cursing God.'
'But - '
'There are Buicks everywhere,' I said.
Steff came out after they were gone and offered me a cup of coffee. I told her thanks, but I'd pass. I asked her if she had a cigarette. She gave me a prim look - almost shocked -and reminded me she didn't smoke. As though
