'Sarge d'same way,' Arky put in.
Not exactly, I thought but didn't say. It had been different for Curt. In the end the Buick had been his in a way it had never been Tony's. And Tony had known it.
'But what about Trooper Rafferty, Sandy? Do you think the Buick-?'
'Ate im,' Huddie said. He spoke with dead flat certainty. 'That's what I thought then and it's what I think now. It's what your dad thought, too.'
'Did he?' Ned asked me.
'Well, yes. Ate him or took him away to someplace else.' Again the image of stupid work came to me - rows of beds to be made, stacks of dishes to be washed, acres of hay to be scythed and carried.
'But you're telling me,' Ned said, 'that no scientist has ever been allowed to study that thing since Trooper Rafferty and my father found it? Ever? No physicists, no chemists? No one's ever run a spectrographic analysis?'
'Bibi was back at least once, I think,' Phil said, sounding just the tiniest bit defensive.
'By himself, though, without those kids he used to travel around with. He and Tony and your father wheeled some big machine in there . . . maybe it was a spectrograph, but I don't know what it showed. Do you, Sandy?'
I shook my head. There was no one left to answer that question. Or a lot of others. Bibi Roth died of cancer in 1998. Curtis Wilcox, who often walked around the Buick with a spiral notebook in his hands, writing things down (and sometimes sketching), was also dead. Tony Schoondist, alias the old Sarge, was still alive but now in his late seventies, lost in that confused twilit purgatory reserved for people with Alzheimer's disease. I remembered going to see him, along with Arky Arkanian, at the nursing home where he now lives. Just before Christmas, this was. Arky and I brought him a gold St Christopher's medal, which a bunch of us older fellows had chipped in to buy. It had seemed to me that the old Sarge was having one of his good days. He opened the package without much trouble and seemed delighted by the medallion. Even undid the clasp himself, although Arky had to help him do it up again after he'd slipped it on. When that was finally accomplished, Tony had looked at me closely with his brows knit together, his bleary eyes projecting a parody of his old piercing glare. It was a moment when he really seemed himself. Then his eyes filled with tears, and the illusion was gone. 'Who are you boys?' he'd asked. 'I can almost remember.' Then, as matter-of-factly as someone reporting the weather: 'I'm in hell, you know. This is hell.'
'Ned, listen,' I said. 'What that meeting in The Country Way really boiled down to was just one thing. The cops in California have it written on the sides of some of their cruisers, maybe because their memory is a little bit faulty and they have to write it down. We don't. Do you know what I'm talking about?'
'To serve and protect,' Ned said.
'You got it. Tony thought that thing had come into our hands almost as a result of God's will.
He didn't say it that flat-out, but we understood. And your father felt the same way.'
I was telling Ned Wilcox what I thought he needed to hear. What I didn't tell him about was the light in Tony's eyes, and in the eyes of his father. Tony could sermonize about our commitment to serve and protect; he could tell us about how the men of Troop D were the ones best equipped to take care of such a dangerous res; he could even allow as how later on we might turn the thing over to a carefully chosen team of scientists, perhaps one led by Bibi Roth. He could spin all those tales, and did. None of it meant jack shit. Tony and Curt wanted the Buick because they just couldn't bear to let it go. That was the cake, and all the rest of it was just icing. The Roadmaster was strange and exotic, unique, and it was theirs. They couldn't bear to surrender it.
'Ned,' I asked, 'would you know if your dad left any notebooks? Spirals, they would have been, like the kind kids take to school.'
Ned's mouth pinched at that. He dropped his head and spoke to a spot somewhere bet-ween his knees. 'Yeah, all kinds of them, actually. My mom said they were probably diaries. Anyway, in his will, he asked that Mom burn all his private papers, and she did.'
'I guess that makes sense,' Huddie said. 'It jibes with what I know about Curt and the old Sarge, at least.'
Ned looked up at him.
Huddie elaborated. 'Those two guys distrusted scientists. You know what Tony called them?
Death's cropdusters. He said their big mission in life was to spread poison everywhere, telling people to go ahead and eat all they wanted, that it was knowledge and it wouldn't hurt them - that it would set them free.' He paused. 'There was another issue, too.'
'What issue?' Ned asked.
'Discretion,' Huddie said. 'Cops can keep secrets, but Curt and Tony didn't believe scientists could. 'Look how fast those idiots cropdusted the atomic bomb all around the world,' I heard Tony say once. 'We fried the Rosenbergs for it, but anyone with half a brain knows the Russians would have had the bomb in two years, anyway. Why? Because scientists like to chat. That thing we've got out in Shed B may not be the equivalent of the A-bomb, but then again it might. One thing's for sure, it isn't anybody's A-bomb as long as it's sitting out back under a piece of canvas.''
I thought Huddie was helping the kid understand, but I knew it was just part of the truth, not the whole truth. I've wondered from time to time if Tony and Ned's father ever really needed to talk about it - I mean on some late weekday evening when things at the barracks were at their slowest, guys cooping upstairs, other guys watching a movie on the VCR and eating microwave popcorn, just the two of them downstairs from all that, in Tony's office with the door shut. I'm not talking about maybe or kinda or sorta. I mean whether or not they ever spoke the flat- out truth: There's not anything like this anywhere, and we're keeping it. I don't think so. Because really, all they would have needed to do was to look into each other's eyes. To see that same eagerness - the desire to touch it and pry into it. Hell, just to walk around it. It was a secret thing, a mystery, a marvel. But I didn't know if the boy could accept that. I knew he wasn't just missing his father; he was angry at him for dying. In that mood, he might have seen what they did as stealing, and that wasn't truth, either. At least not the whole truth.
'By then we knew about the lightquakes,' I said. 'Tony called them 'dispersal events'. He thought the Buick was getting rid of something, discharging it like static electricity. Issues of discretion and caretaking aside, by the end of the seventies people in Pennsylvania - and not just us but everyone - had one very big reason not to trust the scientists and the techies.'
