Yes. There was one.
Shirley was on duty when the call came in: a crackup out on SR 32, near the Humboldt Road intersection. Where the old Jenny station used to be, in other words. Shirley's face was pale as ashes when she came and stood in the open door of my office.
'What is it?' I asked. 'What the hell's wrong with you?'
'Sandy . . . the man who called it in said the vehicle was an old Chevrolet, red and white. He says the driver's dead.' She swallowed. 'In pieces. That's what he said.'
That part I didn't care about, although I would later, when I had to look at it. At him. 'The Chevrolet - have you got the model?'
'I didn't ask. Sandy, I couldn't.' Her eyes were full of tears. 'I didn't dare. But how many old red and white Chevrolets do you think there are in Statler County?'
I went out to the scene with Phil Candleton, praying the crashed Chevy would turn out to be a Malibu or a Biscayne, anything but a Bel Aire, vanity plate MY 57. But that's what it was.
'Fuck,' Phil said in a low and dismayed voice.
He'd piled it into the side of the cement bridge which spans Redfern Stream less than five minutes' walk from where the Buick 8 first appeared and where Curtis was killed. The Bel Aire had seatbelts, but he hadn't been wearing one. Nor were there any skidmarks.
'Christ almighty,' Phil said. 'This ain't right.'
Not right and not an accident. Although in the obituary, where shirts are kept neatly tucked in arid skirts are kept discreetly below the knee, it would only say he died unexpectedly, which was true. Lord yes.
Lookie-loos had started showing up by then, slowing to stare at what lay facedown on the bridge's narrow walkway. I think one asshole actually took a picture. I wanted to run after him and stuff his shitty little disposable camera down his throat.
'Get some detour signs up,' I told Phil. 'You and Carl. Send the traffic around by County Road. I'll cover him up. Jesus, what a mess! Jesus! Who's gonna tell his mother?'
Phil wouldn't look at me. We both knew who was going to tell his mother. Later that day I bit the bullet and did the worst job that comes with the big chair. Afterward I went down to The Country Way with Shirley, Huddie, Phil, and George Stankowski. I don't know about them, but I myself didn't pass go or collect two hundred dollars; old Sandy went directly to shitfaced.
I only have two clear memories of that night. The first is of trying to explain to Shirley how weird The Country Way's jukeboxes were, how all the songs were the very ones you never thought of anymore until you saw their names again here. She didn't get it.
My other memory is of going into the bathroom to throw up. After, while I was splashing cold water on my face, I looked at myself in one of the wavery steel mirrors. And I knew for sure that the getting-to-be-old face I saw looking back at me was no mistake. The mistake was believing that the twenty-five-year-old guy who seemed to live in my brain was real.
I remembered Huddie shouting Sandy, grab my hand! and then the two of us, Ned and I, had spilled out on to the pavement, safe with the rest of them. Thinking of that, I began to cry.
Died unexpectedly, that shit is all right for the County American, but cops know the truth. We clean up the messes and we always know the truth.
Everyone not on duty went to the funeral, of course. He'd been one of us. When it was over, George Stankowski gave his mother and his two sisters a ride home and I drove back to the barracks with Shirley. I asked her if she was going to the reception - what you call a wake, I guess, if you're Irish - and she shook her head. 'I hate those things.'
So we had a final cigarette out on the smokers' bench, idly watching the young Trooper who was looking in at the Buick. He stood in that same legs-apart, goddam-the-Democrats, didya-hear-the-one-about-the-traveling- salesman pose that we all assumed when we looked into Shed B. The century had changed, but everything else was more or less the same.
'It's so unfair,' Shirley said. 'A young man like that - '
'What are you talking about?' I asked her. 'Eddie J. was in his late forties, for God's sake .
. . maybe even fifty. I think his sisters are both in their sixties. His mother's almost eighty!'
'You know what I mean. He was too young to do that.'
'So was George Morgan,' I said.
'Was it . . . ?' She nodded toward Shed B.
'I don't think so. Just his life. He made an honest effort to get sober, busted his ass. This was right after he bought Curt's old Bel Aire from Ned. Eddie always liked that car, you know, and Ned couldn't have it at Pitt anyway, not as a freshman. It would've just been sitting there in his driveway - '
' - and Ned needed the money.'
'Going off to college from a single-parent home? Every penny. So when Eddie asked him, he said okay, sure. Eddie paid thirty-five hundred dollars - '
'Thirty-two,' Shirley said with the assurance of one who really knows.
'Thirty-two, thirty-five, whatever. The point is, I think Eddie saw getting it as a new leaf he was supposed to turn over. He quit going to The Tap; I think he started going to AA meetings instead. That was the good part. For Eddie, the good part lasted about two years.'
Across the parking lot, the Trooper who'd been looking into Shed B turned, spotted us, and began walking in our direction. I felt the skin on my arms prickle. In the gray uniform the boy -
only he wasn't a boy any longer, not really - looked strikingly like his dead father. Nothing strange about that, I
