'I remember sitting on a bench under an elm tree with a bunch of guys, all of us moderately toasted, listening to Brian Cole tell about these flying saucer sightings around the powerlines in New Hampshire — only a few years before, that was — and how some woman claimed to have been abducted and had all these probes stuck up inside her, entrance ramps and exit ramps both.'
'Is that what my father believed? That aliens abducted his partner?'
'No,' Shirley said. 'Something happened here in 1988 that was so . . . so outrageous and beyond belief . . . so fucking awful. . .'
'What?' Ned asked. 'For God's sake, what?
Shirley ignored the question. I don't think she even heard it. 'A few days afterward, I asked your father flat-out what he believed. He said it didn't matter.'
Ned looked as if he hadn't heard her correctly. 'It didn't matter?'
'That's what he said. He believed that, whatever the Buick was, it didn't matter in the great scheme of things. In that big picture you were talking about. I asked him if he thought someone was using it, maybe to watch us . . . if it was some sort of television . . . and he said, "I think it's forgotten." I still remember the flat, certain way he said it, as if he was talking about ... I don't know . . . something as important as a king's treasure buried under the desert since before the time of Christ or something as unimportant as a postcard with the wrong address sitting in a Dead Letter file somewhere. "Having a wonderful time, wish you were here" and who cares, because all that was long, long ago. It comforted me and at the same time it chilled me to think anything so strange and awful could just be forgotten . . . misplaced . . . overlooked. I said that, and your dad, he laughed. Then he flapped his arm at the western horizon and he said, "Shirley, tell me something. How many nuclear weapons do you think this great nation of ours has got stored out there in various places between the Pennsylvania-Ohio line and the Pacific Ocean? And how many of them do you think will be left behind and forgotten over the next two or three centuries?"'
We were all silent for a moment, thinking about this.
'I was considering quitting the job,' Shirley said at last. 'I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about poor old Mister Dillon, and in my mind quitting was almost a done deal. It was Curt who talked me into staying, and he did it without even knowing he was doing it. "I think it's forgotten," he said, and that was good enough for me. I stayed, and I've never been sorry, either. This is a good place, and most of the guys who work here are good Troops. That goes for the ones who are gone, too. Like Tony.'
'I love you, Shirley, marry me,' Huddie said. He put an arm around her and puckered his lips. Not a pretty sight, all in all.
She elbowed him. 'You're married already, foolish.'
Eddie J. spoke up then. 'If your dad believed anything, it was that yonder machine came from some other dimension.'
'Another dimension? You're kidding.' He looked at Eddie closely. 'No. You're not kidding.'
'And he didn't think it was planned at all,' Eddie went on. 'Not, you know, like you'd plan to send a ship across the ocean or a satellite into space. In some ways, I'm not even sure he thought it was real.'
'You lost me,' the kid said.
'Me, too,' Shirley agreed.
'He said . . .' Eddie shifted on the bench. He looked out again at the grassy place where Shed A had once stood. 'This was at the O'Day farm, if you want to know the truth. That day. You hafta realize we were out there almost seven goddam hours, parked in the corn and waiting for those two dirtbags to come back. Cold. Couldn't run the engine, couldn't run the heater. We talked about everything — hunting, fishing, bowling, our wives, our plans. Curt said he was going to get out of the PSP in another five years — '
'He said that?' Ned was round-eyed.
Eddie gave him an indulgent look. 'From time to time we all say that, kid. Just like all the junkies say they're going to quit the spike. I told him how I'd like to open my own security business in The Burg, also how I'd like to get me a brand-new Winnebago. He told me about how he wanted to take some science courses at Horlicks and how he was getting resistance from your mom. She said it was their job to put the kids through school, not him. He caught a lot of flak from her but never blamed her. Because she didn't know why he wanted to take those courses, what had got him interested, and he couldn't tell her. That's how we got around to the Buick. And what he said — I remember this clear as the sky on a summer morning — was that we saw it as a Buick because we had to see it as something....'
