They had worked together well over the last years. But if this went any farther, all that would change. It depended on what he said next.
'It smelled like a basket of minks.' That was what he said. It was a remark that came from nowhere at all, at least nowhere he could pinpoint. 'Even from the outside.'
'How would you know what a basket of minks smelled like?' Curt starting to smile. Just a little.
'Call it poetic license.' Sandy also starting to smile, but also only a little. They had turned in the right direction, but they weren't out of the woods.
Then Curtis asked: 'Did it smell worse than that whore's shoes? The one from Rocksburg?'
Sandy started laughing. Curt joined him. And they were off the hinge, just like that.
'Come on in,' Curt said. 'I'll buy you another beer.'
Sandy didn't want another beer, but he said okay. Because now it wasn't about beer; it was about damage control. About putting the crap behind them.
Back inside, sitting in a corner booth, Curt said: 'I've had my hands in that trunk, Sandy.
I've knocked on the bottom of it.'
'Me too.'
'And I've been under it on a crawler. It's not a magician's trick, like a box with a false bottom.'
'Even if it was, that was no white rabbit that came out of there yesterday.'
Curtis said, 'For things to disappear, they only have to be in the vicinity. But when things show up, they always come out of the trunk. Do you agree?'
Sandy thought it over. None of them had actually seen the bat-thing emerge from the Buick's trunk, but the trunk had been open, all right. As for the leaves, yes - Phil Candleton had seen them swirling out.
'Do you agree?' Impatient now, his voice saying Sandy had to agree, it was so goddarn obvious.
'It seems likely, but I don't think we have enough evidence to be a hundred per cent sure yet,' Sandy replied at last. He knew saying that made him hopelessly stodgy in Curtis's eyes, but it was what he believed. ''One swallow doesn't make a summer.' Ever heard that one?'
Curt stuck out his lower lip and blew an exasperated breath up his face. ''Plain as the nose on your face', ever heard that one?'
'Curt - '
Curt raised his hands as if to say no, no, they didn't have to go back out into the parking lot and pick up where they had left off. 'I see your point. Okay? I don't agree, but I see it.'
'Okay.'
'Just tell me one thing: when'll we have enough to draw some conclusions? Not about everything, mind you, but maybe a few of the bigger things. Like where the bat and the fish came from, for instance. If I had to settle for just one answer, it'd probably be that one.'
'Probably never.'
Curt raised his hands to the smoke-stained tin ceiling, then dropped them back to the table with a clump. 'Gahh! I knew you'd say that! I could strangle you, Dearborn!'
They looked at each other across the table, across the tops of beers neither one of them wanted, and Curt started to laugh. Sandy smiled. And then he was laughing, too.
NOW:
Sandy
Ned stopped me there. He wanted to go inside and call his mother, he said. Tell her he was okay, just eating dinner at the barracks with Sandy and Shirley and a couple of the other guys. Tell her lies, in other words. As his father had before him.
'Don't you guys move,' he said from the doorway. 'Don't you move a red inch.'
When he was gone, Huddie looked at me. His broad face was thoughtful. 'You think telling him all this stuff is a good idea, Sarge?'
'He gonna want to see all dose ole tapes, nex' t'ing,' Arky said dolefully. 'Hell's own rnovieshow.'
'I don't know if it's a good idea or a bad one,' I said, rather peevishly. 'I only know that it's a little late to back out now.' Then I got up and went inside myself.
Ned was just hanging up the phone. 'Where are you going?' he asked. His brows had drawn together, and I thought of standing nose to nose with his father outside The Tap, the scurgy little bar that had become Eddie J.'s home away from home. That night Curt's brows had drawn together in that exact same way. Like father, like son.
'Just to the toilet,' I said. 'Take it easy, Ned, you'll get what you want. What there is to get, anyway. But you have to stop waiting for the punchline.'
I went into the can and shut the door before he had a chance to reply. And the next fifteen seconds or so were pure relief. Like beer, iced tea is something you can't buy, only rent. When I got back outside, the smokers' bench was empty. They had stepped across to Shed B and were looking in, each with his own window in the roll-up door facing the rear of the barracks, each in that sidewalk superintendent posture I knew so well. Only now it's changed around in my mind. It's exactly backwards. Whenever I pass men lined up at a board fence or at sawhorses blocking off an excavation hole, the first things I think of are Shed B and the Buick 8.
'You guys see anything in there you like better than yourselves?' I called across to them.
It seemed they didn't. Arky came back first, closely followed by Huddie and Shirley. Phil and Eddie lingered a bit
