The Roadmaster stood entirely revealed, the tarp it had somehow shrugged off lying crumpled in a tan drift on the driver's side. To me, it looked more like an objet d'art than ever - that big old automotive dinosaur with its curvy lines and hardtop styling, its big wheels and sneermouth grille. Welcome, ladies and gentleman! Welcome to this evening's viewing of From a Buick 8! Just keep a respectful distance, because this is the art that bites!
It sat there moveless and dead . . . moveless and dead . . . and then the cabin lit up a brilliant flashbulb purple. The oversized steering wheel and the rearview mirror stood out with absolute dark clarity, like objects on the horizon during an artillery barrage. Ned gasped and put up a hand to shield his face.
It flashed again and again, each silent detonation printing its leaping shadow across the cement floor and up the board wall, where a few tools still hung from the pegs. Now the humming was very clear. I directed my gaze toward the circular thermometer hanging from the beam which ran above the Buick's hood, and when the light bloomed again, I was able to read the temperature easily: fifty-four degrees Fahrenheit. Not great, but not terrible, either. It was mostly when the temperature in Shed B dropped below fifty that you had to worry; fifty-four wasn't a bad number at all. Still, it was best to play safe. We had drawn a few conclusions about the Buick over the years - established a few rules - but we knew better than to trust any of them very far.
Another of those bright soundless flashes went off inside the Buick, and then there was nothing for almost a full minute. Ned never budged. I'm not sure he even breathed.
'Is it over?' he asked at last.
'Wait,' I said.
We gave it another two minutes and when there was still nothing I opened my mouth to say we might as well go back and sit down, the Buick had exhausted its supply of fireworks for tonight.
Before I could speak, there was a final monstrous flash. A wavering tendril of light, like a spark from some gigantic cyclotron, shot outward and upward from the Buick's rear passenger window. It rose on a jagged diagonal to the back corner of the shed, where there was a high shelf loaded with old boxes, most filled with hardware oddments. These lit up a pallid, somehow eldritch yellow, as if the boxes were filled with lighted candles instead of orphan nuts, bolts, screws, and springs.
The hum grew louder, rattling my teeth and actually seeming to vibrate along the bridge of my nose. Then it quit. So did the light. To our dazzled eyes, the interior of the shed now looked pitch-black instead of just gloomy. The Buick was only a hulk with rounded corners and furtive gleams which marked the chrome facings around its headlights.
Shirley let out her breath in a long sigh and stepped back from the window where she had been watching. She was trembling. Arky slipped an arm around her shoulders and gave her a comforting hug.
Phil, who had taken the window to my right, said: 'No matter how many times I see it, boss, I never get used to it.'
'What is it?' Ned asked. His awe seemed to have wound ten or twelve years off his face and turned him into a child younger than his sisters. 'Why does it happen?'
'We don't know,'I said.
'Who else knows about it?'
'Every Trooper who's worked out of Troop D over the last twenty-plus years. Some of the motor-pool guys know. The County Road Commissioner, I think - '
'Jamieson?' Huddie said. 'Yeah, he knows.'
' - and the Statler Township Chief of Police, Sid Brownell. Beyond that, not many.'
We were walking back to the bench now, most of us lighting up. Ned looked like he could use a cigarette himself. Or something. A big knock of whiskey, maybe. Inside the barracks, things would be going back to normal. Steff Colucci would already be noting an improvement in her radio reception, and soon the DSS dish on the roof would be receiving again - all the scores, all the wars, and six Home Shopping stations. If that wouldn't make you forget about the hole in the ozone layer, by God, nothing would.
'How could folks not know?' Ned asked. 'Something as big as this, how could it not get out?'
'It's not so big,' Phil said. 'I mean, it's a Buick, son. A Cadillac, now . . . that would be big.'
'Some families can't keep secrets and some families can,' I said. 'Ours can. Tony Schoondist called that meeting in the The Country Way, two nights after the Buick came in and Ennis disappeared, mostly to make sure we would. Tony briefed us on any number of things that night.
Ennis's sister, of course - how we were going to take care of her and how we were supposed to respond to her until she cooled down - '
'If she ever did, I wasn't aware of it,' Huddie said.
' - and how we were to handle any reporters if she went to the press.'
There had been a dozen Troopers there that night, and with the help of Huddie and Phil, I managed to name most of them. Ned wouldn't have met all of them face to face, but he'd probably heard the names at his dinner table, if his dad talked shop from time to time. Most Troopers do.
Not the ugly stuff, of course, not to their families - the spitting and cursing and the bloody messes on the highway - but there's funny stuff, too, like the time we got called out because this Amish kid was roller-skating through downtown Statler, holding on to the tail of a galloping horse and laughing like a loon. Or the time we had to talk to the guy out on the Culverton Road who'd done a snow-sculpture of a naked man and woman in a sexually explicit position. But it's art! he kept yelling. We tried to explain that it wasn't art to the neighbors; they were scandalized. If not for a warm spell and a storm of rain, we probably would have wound up in court on that one.
I told Ned about how we'd dragged the tables into a big hollow square without having to be asked, and how Brian Cole and 'Dicky-Duck' Eliot escorted the waitresses out and closed the doors behind them. We served ourselves from the steam tables which had been set up at the front of the room. Later there was beer, the off-duty Troopers pulling their own suds and running their own tabs, and a fug of blue cigarette smoke rising to the ceiling. Peter Quinland, who owned the restaurant in those days, loved The Chairman of the Board, and a steady stream of Frank Sinatra songs rained down on us from the overhead speakers as we ate and drank and smoked and talked:
