From a Buick 8

Ned turned back to me. 'Sandy, that day at the picnic, did any of you talk about . . .' He trailed off without finishing.

'Talk about what?' I asked him.

He shook his head, looked down at the remains of his sandwich, and popped the last bite into his mouth. 'Never mind. Isn't important. Did my dad really dissect the bat-thing you guys found?'

'Yep. After the second lightshow but before the Labor Day picnic. He - '

'Tell the kid about the leaves,' Phil said. 'You forgot that part.'

And I had. Hell, I hadn't even thought about the leaves in six or eight years. 'You tell him,'

I said. 'You're the one who had your hands on them.'

Phil nodded, sat silent for a few moments, and then began to speak staccato, as if giving a report to a superior officer.

NOW:

Phil

The second lightshow happened midafternoon. Okay? Curt goes into the shed with the rope on when it's over and brings out the gerbil whatchacallit. We see one of the critters is gone. There's some more talk. Some more picture-taking. Sergeant Schoondist says okay, okay, everyone as you were, who's on duty out in the hutch. Brian Cole says 'Me, Sarge.'

'The rest of us go back in the barracks. Okay? And I hear Curtis say to the Sarge, "I'm gonna dissect that thing before it disappears like everything else. Will you help me?" And the Sarge says he will - that night, if Curt wants. Curt says "Why not right now?" and the Sarge says,

"Because you got a patrol to finish. Shift-and-a-half. John Q. is depending on you, boy, and lawbreakers tremble at the sound of your engyne." That's the way he talked, sometimes, like a piney-woods preacher. And he never said engine, always engyne.

'Curt, he don't argue. Knows better. Goes off. Around five o'clock Brian Cole comes in and gets me. Asks will I cover the shed for him while he goes to the can. I say sure. I go out there.

Take a look inside. Situation normal, fi'-by. Thermometer's gone up a degree. I go into the hutch.

Decide die hutch is too hot, okay? There's an L.L. Bean catalogue on the chair. I go to grab that.

Just as I put my fingers on it, I hear this creak-thump sound. Only one sound like it, when you unlatch the trunk of your car and it springs up hard. I go rushing out of the hutch. Over to the shed windows. Buick's trunk's open. All this what I thought at first was paper, charred bits of paper, is whooshing up out of the trunk. Spinning around like they were caught in a cyclone. But the dust on the floor wasn't moving. Not at all. The only moving air was coming out of the trunk.

And then I saw all the pieces of paper looked pretty much the same and I decided they were leaves.

Turned out that was what they were.'

I took my notebook out of my breast pocket. Clicked out the tip of my ballpoint and drew this:

[graphic of a curled crescent-shaped leaf]

'It looks sort of like a smile,' the kid said.

'Like a goddam grin,' I said. 'Only there wasn't just one of them. Was hundreds. Hundreds of black grins swirling and spinning around. Some landed on the Buick's roof. Some dropped back into the trunk. Most of em went on the floor. I ran to get Tony. He came out with the video camera. He was all red in the face and muttering, 'What now, what next, what the hell, what now?' Like that.

It was sort of funny, but only later on, okay? Wasn't funny at the time, believe me.

'We looked in the window. Saw the leaves scattered all across the cement floor. There were almost as many as you might have on your lawn after a big October windstorm blows through. Only by then they were curling up at the corners. Made em look a little less like grins and a little more like leaves. Thank God. And they weren't staying black. They were turning whitish-gray right in front of our eyes. And thinning. Sandy was there by then. Didn't make it in time for the lightshow, but turned up in time for the leafshow.'

Sandy said, 'Tony called me at home and asked if I could come in that evening around seven. He said that he and Curt were going to do something I might want to be in on. Anyway, I didn't wait for seven. I came in right away. I was curious.'

'It killed the cat,' Ned said, and sounded so much like his pa that I almost shivered. Then he was looking at me. 'Tell the rest.'

'Not much to tell,' I said. 'The leaves were thinning. I might be wrong, but I think we could actually see it happening.'

'You're not wrong,' Sandy said.

'I was excited. Not thinking. Ran around to the side door of the shed. And Tony, man, Tony was on me like white on rice. He grabs me around the neck in a choke-hold. "Hey," I says. "Leggo me, leggo me, police brutality!" And he tells me to save it for my gig at the Comedy Shop over in Statesboro. "This is no joke, Phil," he says. "I have good reason to believe I've lost one officer to that goddamned thing. I'm not losing another."

'I told him I'd wear the rope. I was hot to trot. Can't remember exactly why, but I was. He said he wasn't going back to get the goddam rope. I said I'd go back and get the goddam rope. He said, "You can forget the goddam rope, permission denied." So I says, "Just hold my feet, Sarge. I want to get a few of those leaves. There's some not five feet from the door. Not even close to the car. What do you say?"

'"I say you must have lost your friggin mind, everything in there is close to the car," he says, but since that wasn't exactly no, I went ahead and opened the door. You could smell it right away. Something like peppermint, only not nice. Some smell underneath it, making the one on top even worse. That cabbagey smell. Made your stomach turn over, but I was almost too excited to notice. I was younger then, okay? I got down on my stomach. Wormed my way in. Sarge has got me by the calves, and when I'm just a little way inside the shed he says, "That's far enough, Phil. If you can grab some, grab away. If you can't, get out."

'There were all kinds that had turned white, and I got about a dozen of those. They were smooth and soft, but in a bad way. Made me think of how tomatoes get when they've gone rotten under the skin. A little farther away there was a couple that were still black. I stretched out and got hold of em, only the very second I touched em, they turned white like the others. There was this very faint stinging sensation in my fingertips. Got a stronger whiff of peppermint and I heard a sound. Think I did, anyway. A kind of sigh, like the sound a soda can makes when you break the seal on the poptop.

'I started wiggling out, and at first I was doing all right, but then I ... something about the feel of those things in my hands ... all sleek and smooth like they were . . .'

For a few seconds I couldn't go on. It was like I was feeling it all over again. But the kid was looking at me and I knew he wouldn't let it go, not for love or money, so I pushed ahead. Now just wanting to get it over with.

'I panicked. Okay? Started to push backward with my elbows and kick with my feet. Summer. Me in short sleeves. One of my elbows kind of winged out and touched one of the black leaves and it hissed like . . . like I don't know what. Just hissed, you know? And sent up a puff of that peppermint-cabbage stink. Turned white. Like me touching it had given it frostbite and killed it.

Thought of that later. Right then I didn't think about anything except getting the righteous fuck out of there. Scuse me, Shirley.'

'Not at all,' Shirley said, and patted my arm. Good girl. Always was. Better in dispatch than Babicki - by a country mile - and a whole lot easier on the eyes. I put my hand over hers and gave a little squeeze. Then I went on and it was easier than I thought it would be. Funny how things come back when you talk about them. How they get clearer and clearer as you go along.

'I looked up at that old Buick. And even though it was in the middle of the shed, had to be twelve feet away from me easy, all at once it seemed a lot closer than that. Big as Mount Everest.

Shiny as the side of a diamond. I got the idea that the headlights were eyes and the eyes were looking at me. And I could hear it whispering. Don't look so surprised, kid. We've all heard it whispering. No idea -what it's saying - if it's really saying anything - but sure, I could hear it. Only inside my head, going from the inside out. Like telepathy. Might have been imagination, but I don't think so. All of a sudden it was like I was six again. Scared of the thing under my bed. It meant to take me away, I was sure of it. Take me to wherever it had taken Ennis. So I panicked. I yelled, "Pull me, pull me, hurry up!" and they sure did. The Sarge and some other guy -

'

'The other guy was me,' Sandy said. 'You scared the living crap out of us, Phil. You seemed all right at first, then you started to yell and twist and buck. I sort of expected to see you bleeding somewhere, or turning blue in the face. But all you had was . . . well.' And he made a little gesture at me to go on.

'I had the leaves. What was left of them, anyway. When I freaked out, I must have made fists, okay? Clenched down on them. And once I was back outside, I realized my hands were all wet. People were yelling Are you all right and What happened in there, Phil? Me up on my knees, with most of my shirt around my neck and a damn floorburn on my gut from being dragged, and I'm thinking My hands are bleeding. That's why they're wet. Then I see this white goo. Looked like the kind of paste the teacher gives you in the first grade. It was all that was left of the leaves.'

I stopped, thought about it.

'And now I'm gonna tell you the truth, okay? It didn't look like paste at all. It was like I had two fistfuls of warm bull-jizz. And the smell was awful. I don't know why. You could say A little peppermint and cabbage, what's the big deal? and you'd be right, but at the same time you'd be wrong. Because really that smell was like nothing on earth. Not that I ever smelled before, anyway.

'I wiped my hands on my pants and went back to the barracks. Went downstairs. Brian Cole is just coming out of the crapper down there. He thought he heard some yelling, wants to know what's going on. I pay him absolutely no mind. Almost knock him over getting into the can, matter of fact. I start washing my hands. I'm still washing away when all at once I think of how I looked with that cummy-white leaf-gunk dripping out of my fists and how it was so warm and soft and somehow sleek and how it made strings when I opened up my fingers. And that was it. Thinking of how it made strings between my palms and the tips of my fingers. I upchucked. It wasn't like having your guts send your supper back by Western Union, either. It was like my actual stomach making a personal appearance, coming right up my throat and tipping everything I'd swallowed down lately right back out my mouth. The way my ma used to throw her dirty wash-water over the back porch railing. I don't mean to go on about it, but you need to know. It's another way of trying to understand. It wasn't like puking, it was like dying. Only other time I had anything like that was my first road fatality. I get there and the first thing I see is a loaf of Wonder Bread on the yellow line of the old Statler Pike and the next thing I see is the top half of a kid. A little boy with blond hair. Next thing I see is there's a fly on the kid's tongue. Washing its legs. That set me off. I thought I was going to puke myself to death.'

'It happened to me, too,' Huddie said. 'Nothing to be ashamed of.'

'Not ashamed,' I said. 'Trying to make him see, is all. Okay?' I took in a deep breath, smelling the sweet air, and then it hit me that the kid's father was also a road kill. I gave the kid a smile. 'Oh well, thank God for small favors - the commode was right next to the basin, and I didn't get hardly any on my shoes or the floor.'

'And in the end,' Sandy said, 'the leaves came to nothing. And I mean that literally. They melted like the witch in The Wizard of Oz. You could see traces of them in Shed B for awhile, but after a week there was nothing but some little stains on the concrete. Yellowish, very pale.'

'Yeah, and for the next couple of months I turned into one of those compulsive hand-washers,'

I said. 'There were days when I couldn't bring myself to touch food. If my wife packed me sandwiches, I picked em up with a napkin and ate them that way, dropping the last piece out of the napkin and into my mouth so I never had to touch any of it with my fingers. If I was by myself in my cruiser, I was apt to eat with my gloves on. And I kept thinking I'd get sick just the same.

What I kept imagining was that gum disease where all your teeth fall out. But I got over it.' I looked at Ned and waited until he met my eyes. 'I got over it, son.'

He met my eyes, but there was nothing in them. It was funny. Like they were painted on, or something.

Okay?

NOW:

Sandy

Ned was looking at Phil. The boy's face was calm enough, but I sensed rejection in his gaze, arid I think Phil sensed it, too. He sighed, folded his arms across his chest, and looked down as if to say he was done talking, his testimony was finished.

Ned turned to me. 'What happened that night? When you dissected the bat?'

He kept calling it a bat and it hadn't been a bat. That was just a word I'd used, what Curtis would have called a nail to hang my hat on. And all at once I was mad at him. More than mad -

pissed like a bear. And I was also angry at myself for feeling that way, for daring to feel that way. You see, mostly what I was angry at was the kid raising his head. Raising his eyes to mine.

Asking his questions. Making his foolish assumptions, one of which happened to be that when I said bat I meant bat, and not some unspeakable indescribable thing that crept out of a crack in the floor of the universe and then died. But mostly it was him raising his head and his eyes. I know that doesn't exactly make me out to be the prince of the world, but I'm not going to lie about it.

Up until then, what I'd mostly felt was sorry for him. Everything I'd done since he started showing up at the barracks had been based on that comfortable pity. Because all that time when he'd been washing windows and raking leaves and snowblowing his way through the drifts in the back parking lot, all that time he'd kept his head down. Meekly down. You didn't have to contend with his eyes. You didn't have to ask yourself any questions, because pity is comfortable. Isn't it?

Pity puts you right up on top. Now he had lifted his head, he was using my own words back at me, and there was nothing meek in his eyes. He thought he had a right, and that made me mad. He thought I had a responsibility - that what was being said out here wasn't a gift being given but a debt being repaid - and that made me madder. That he was right made me maddest of all. I felt like shoving the heel of my hand up into the shelf of his chin and knocking him spang off the bench. He thought he had a right and I wanted to make him sorry.

Our feelings toward the young never much change in this regard, I suppose. I don't have kids of my own. I've never been married - like Shirley, I guess I married Troop D. But I've got plenty of experience when it comes to the young, both inside and outside the barracks. I've had them in my face plenty of times. It seems to me that when we can no longer pity them, when they reject our pity (not with indignation but with impatience), we pity ourselves instead. We want to know where they went, our comfy little ones, our baby buntings. Didn't we give them piano lessons and show them how to throw the curveball? Didn't we read them Where the Wild Things Are and help them search for Waldo? How dare they raise their eyes to ours and ask their rash and stupid questions?

How dare they want more than we want to give?

'Sandy? What happened when you guys dissected the - '

'Not what you want to hear,' I said, and when his eyes widened a little at the coldness he heard in my voice, I was not exactly displeased. 'Not what your father wanted to see. Or Tony, either. Not some answer. There never was an answer. Everything to do with the Buick was a shimmer-mirage, like the ones you see on I-87 when it's hot and bright. Except that's not quite true, either. If it had been, I think we could have dismissed the Buick eventually. The way you dismiss a murder when six months go by and you all just kind of realize you're not going to catch whoever did it, that the guy is going to slide. With the Buick and the things that came out of the Buick, there was always something you could catch hold of. Something you could touch or hear. Or something you could

THEN

'Oi,' Sandy Dearborn said. 'That smell,'

He put his hand up to his face but couldn't actually touch his skin because of the plastic breathing cup he was wearing over his mouth and nose - the kind dentists put on before going prospecting. Sandy didn't know how it was on germs, but the mask did nothing to stop the smell. It was that cabbagey aroma, and it choked the air of the storage closet as soon as Curt opened the stomach of the bat-thing.

'We'll get used to it,' Curt said, his own breathing cup bobbing up and down on his face. His and Sandy's were blue; the Sergeant's was a rather cute shade of candy-pink. Curtis Wilcox was a smart guy, right about a lot of things, but he was wrong about the smell. They didn't get used to it. No one ever did.

Sandy couldn't fault Trooper Wilcox's preparation, however; it seemed perfect. Curt had swung home at the end of his shift and picked up his dissection kit. To this he had added a good microscope (borrowed from a friend at the university), several packets of surgical gloves, and a pair of extremely bright Tensor lamps. He told his wife he intended to examine a fox someone had shot behind the barracks.

'You be careful,' she said. 'They can have rabies.'

Curt promised her he'd glove up, and it was a promise he meant to keep. Meant for all three of them to keep. Because the bat-thing might have something a lot worse than rabies, something which remained virulent long after its original host was dead. If Tony Schoondist and Sandy Dearborn had needed a reminder of this (they probably didn't), they got it when Curt first closed the door at the foot of the stairs and then bolted it.

'I'm in charge as long as that door's locked,' he said. His voice was flat and absolutely sure of itself. It was mostly Tony he was speaking to, because Tony was twice his age, and if anyone was his partner in this, it was the SC. Sandy was just along for the ride, and knew it. 'Is that understood and agreed? Because if it isn't, we can stop right n - '

'It's understood,' Tony said. 'In here you're the general. Sandy and I are just a couple of buck privates. I have no problem with that. Just for Chrissake let's get it over with.'

Curt opened his kit, which was almost the size of an Army footlocker. The interior was packed with stainless steel instruments wrapped in chamois. On top of them were the dental masks, each in its own sealed plastic bag.

'You really think these are necessary?' Sandy asked.

Curt shrugged. 'Better safe than sorry. Not that those things are worth much. We should probably be wearing respirators.'

'I sort of wish we had Bibi Roth here,' Tony said.

Curt made no verbal reply to that, but the flash of his eyes suggested that was the last thing in the world he wanted. The Buick belonged to the Troop. And anything that came out of it belonged to the Troop.

Curt opened the door of the storage closet and went in, pulling the chain that turned on the little room's green-shaded hanging lamp. Tony followed. There was a table not much bigger than a grade-schooler's desk under the light. Small as the closet was, there was barely room for two, let alone three. That was fine with Sandy; he never stepped over the threshold at all that night.

Shelves heaped with old files crowded in on three sides. Curt put his microscope on the little desk and plugged its light-source into the closet's one outlet. Sandy, meanwhile, was setting up Huddie Royer's videocam on its sticks. In the video of that peculiar postmortem, one can sometimes see a hand reach into the picture, holding out whatever instrument Curt has called for. It's Sandy Dearborn's hand. And one can hear the sound of vomiting at the end of the tape, loud and clear.

That is also Sandy Dearborn.

'Let's see the leaves first,' Curt said, snapping on a pair of the surgical gloves.

Tony had a bunch of them in a small evidence bag. He handed it over. Curt opened it and took out the remains of the leaves with a small pair of tongs. There was no way to get just one; by now they were all semi-transparent and stuck together like clumps of Saran Wrap. They were seeping little trickles of fluid, and the men could smell their aroma - that uneasy mix of cabbage and peppermint - immediately. It was not nice, but it was a long way from unbearable. Unbearable was at that point still ten minutes in the future.

Sandy used the zoom in order to get a good image of Curt separating a fragment of the mass from the whole, using the pincers deftly. He'd treated himself to a lot of practice over the last few weeks, and here was the payoff.

He transferred the fragment directly to the stage of the microscope, not attempting to make a slide. Phil Candleton's leaves were just the Coming Attractions reel. Curtis wanted to get to the feature presentation as soon as possible.

He bent over the twin eyepieces for a good long time nevertheless, then beckoned Tony for a look.

'What're the black things that look like threads?' Tony asked after several seconds of study.

His voice was slightly muffled by his pink mask.

'I don't know,' Curt said. 'Sandy, give me that gadget that looks like a Viewmaster. It has a couple of cords wrapped around it and PROPERTY H.U. BIOLOGY DEPARTMENT Dymotaped on the side.'

Sandy passed it to him over the top of the videocam, which was pretty much blocking the doorway. Curt plugged one of the cords into the wall and the other into the base of the microscope. He checked something, nodded, and pushed a button on the side of the Viewmaster thing three times, presumably taking pictures of the leaf fragments on the microscope's stage.

'Those black things aren't moving,' Tony said. He was still peering into the microscope.

'No.'