This lesson was not in the learning but in the letting go
From a Buick 8 by Stephen King (2002, Scribner) has always struck me as one of the many King novels that went invisible after publication.
The early novels put out by Doubleday, bestsellers before King because a name-brand, seem permanent today as marble. Likewise novels and shorter tales with solid film adaptations (Salem's Lot, The Shining, "Shawshank," It, "Apt Pupil," "The Body," Pet Sematary).
I have always wondered why novels as ambitious as Cujo, Insomnia, and From a Buick 8 have not gained more traction.
* * *
From a Buick 8 is the kind of novel I am politically predisposed to hate: a cop-love novel subtle as a Bochco or Wambaugh warts-and-all paean to the ruling class's killers in blue.
Yet I have read From a Buick 8 twice since publication.
From a Buick 8 is also a hymn to bourgeois right: to fatherhood; to the hunger of sons for a father's (or surrogate father's) approval; to grace-under-pressure as the epitome of bourgeois male seriousness. ["Professional courtesy," as Cole Thornton tells Nelse McLeod at the end of Hawks' El Dorado (1966).]
* * *
There is nothing to actively hate in From a Buick 8. It is about serious professional men, the armed might of the state, confronting a menacing mystery; they form themselves into a closed knot of fellowship to protect their secret and guard it to ensure it does not endanger the wider world.
The Buick abandoned at a Western Pennsylvania gas station in 1979 is not a Buick, or anything else belonging to the universe as humans understand it. It is an unnameable device, perhaps abandoned by its builders out of malice, perhaps out of carelessness, perhaps because they simply forgot it.
Every once in a while the Buick throws up some object or entity from somewhere else, and sometimes vice versa.
There is no human attempt at rational communication à la The Day the Earth Stood Still. King alots no space to liberal pieties. The only member of the fellowship (among troop D of the Pennsylvania State Police) with ambitions toward scientific study of the Buick and its emissions is Curtis Wilcox, who eventually seems to acknowledge that there is no way to plumb its depths.
Curtis is eventually killed by a drunk driver. His son Ned turns to the men of Troop D who worked with his dad. They tell the story of the Buick to him piecemeal, and Ned comes to see the place the Buick had in his father's mental world, as both secret and obsessive subject.
* * *
At the end of From a Buick 8, the mood is both sublime and haunting. No easy answers, but a tone of peroration aimed at accepting the unnameable, the imp of the perverse, as a true explanation for the ways of unbearable reality, as when a son loses his father.
....'Your father was the scientist,' I said. 'An amateur one, yeah, but a good one. The things that came out of the Buick and his curiosity about the Buick itself, those were the things that made him a scientist. His dissection of the bat-thing, for instance. Crazy as that was, there was something noble about it, too, like the Wright Brothers going up in their little glue-and-paste airplane. Bibi Roth, on the other hand . . . Bibi was a microscope mechanic. He sometimes called himself that, and with absolute pride. He was a person who had carefully and consciously narrowed his vision to a single strip of knowledge, casting a blaze of light over a small area. Mechanics hate mysteries. Scientists — especially amateur scientists — embrace them. Your father was two people at the same time. As a cop, he was a mystery-hater. As a Roadmaster Scholar . . . well, let's just say that when your father was that person, he was very different.'
'Which version did you like better?'
I thought it over. 'That's like a kid asking his parents who they love best, him or his sister. Not a fair question. But the amateur Curt used to scare me. Used to scare Tony a little, too.'
The kid sat pondering this.
'A few more things appeared,' I said. 'In 1991, there was a bird with four wings.'
'Four—!'
'That's right. It flew a little bit, hit one of the walls, and dropped dead. In the fall of 1993, the trunk popped open after one of those lightquakes and it •was half-filled with dirt. Curt wanted to leave it there and see what would happen and Tony agreed at first, but then it began to stink. I didn't know dirt could decompose, but I guess it can if it's dirt from the right place. And so . . . this is crazy, but we buried the dirt. Can you believe it?'
He nodded. 'And did my dad keep an eye on the place where it was buried? Sure he did. Just to see what would grow.'
'I think he was hoping for a few of those weird lilies.'
'Any luck?'
'I guess that depends on what you think of as luck. Nothing sprouted, I'll tell you that much. The dirt from the trunk went into the ground not far from where we buried Mister D and the tools. As for the monster, what didn't turn to goo we burned in the incinerator. The ground where the dirt went is still bare. A few things try to straggle up every spring, but so far they always die. Eventually, I suppose that'll change.'
I put the last cigarette in my mouth and lit it.
'A year and a half or so after the dirt-delivery, we got another red-stick lizard. Dead. That's been the last. It's still earthquake country in there, but the earth never shakes as hard these days. It wouldn't do to be careless around the Buick any more than it would to be careless around an old rifle just because it's rusty and the barrel's plugged with dirt, but with reasonable precautions it's probably safe enough. And someday — your dad believed it, Tony believed it, and I do too — that old car really will fall apart. All at once, just like the wonderful one-hoss shay in the poem.'
He looked at me vaguely, arid I realized he had no idea what poem I was talking about. We live in degenerate times. Then he said, 'I can feel it.'
Something in his tone startled me badly, and I gave him a hard stare. He still looked younger than his eighteen years, I thought. Just a boy, no more than that, sitting with his sneakered feet crossed and his face painted with starlight. 'Can you?' I asked.
'Yes. Can't you?'
All the Troopers who'd passed through D over the years had felt the pull of it, I guessed. Felt it the way people who live on the coast come to feel the motions of the sea, the tides a clock their hearts beat to. On most days and nights we noticed it no more than you consciously notice your nose, a shape sitting at the bottom of all you see. Sometimes, though, the pull was stronger, and then it made you ache, somehow.
'All right,' I said, 'let's say I do. Huddie sure did — what do you think would have happened to him that day if Shirley hadn't screamed when she did? What do you think would have happened to him if he'd crawled into the trunk like he said he had a mind to do?'
'You really never heard that story before tonight, Sandy?'
I shook my head.
'You didn't look all that surprised, even so.'
'Nothing about that Buick surprises me anymore.'
'Do you think he really meant to do it? To crawl in and shut the lid behind him?'
'Yes. Only I don't think he had anything to do with it. It's that pull — that attraction it has. It was stronger then, but it's still there.'
He made no reply to that. Just sat looking across at Shed B.
'You didn't answer my question, Ned. What do you think would have happened to him if he'd crawled in there?'
'I don't know.'
A reasonable enough answer, I suppose — a kid's answer, certainly, they say it a dozen times a day- but I hated it just the same. He'd quit off the football team, but it seemed he hadn't forgotten all he'd learned there about bobbing and weaving. I drew in smoke that tasted like hot hay, then blew it back out. 'You don't.'
'No.'
'After Ennis and Jimmy and — probably — Brian Lippy, you don't.'
'Not everything goes on to somewhere else, Sandy. Take the other gerbil, for instance. Rosalie or Roslyn or whatever her name was.'
I sighed. 'Have it your way. I'm going down to The Country Way to bite a cheeseburger. You're welcome to join me, but only if we can let this go and talk about something else.'
He thought it over, then shook his head. 'Think I'll head home. Do some thinking.'
'Okay, but don't be sharing any of your thinking with your mother.'
He looked almost comically shocked. 'God, no!'
I laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. The shadows had gone out of his face and suddenly it was possible to like him again. As for his questions and his childish insistence that the story must have an ending and the ending must hold some kind of answer, time might take care of it. Maybe I'd been expecting too many of my own answers. The imitation lives we see on TV and in the movies whisper the idea that human existence consists of revelations and abrupt changes of heart; by the time we've reached full adulthood, I think this is an idea we have on some level come to accept. Such things may happen from time to time, but I think that for the most part it's a lie. Life's changes come slowly. They come the way my youngest nephew breathes in his deepest sleep; sometimes I feel the urge to put a hand on his chest just to assure myself he's still alive. Seen in that light, the whole idea of curious cats attaining satisfaction seemed slightly absurd. The world rarely finishes its conversations. If twenty-three years of living with the Buick 8 had taught me nothing else, it should have taught me that. At this moment Curt's boy looked as if he might have taken a step toward getting better. Maybe even two. And if I couldn't let that be enough for one night, I had my own problems.
'You're in tomorrow, right?' I asked.
'Bright and early, Sarge. We'll do it all again.'
'Then maybe you ought to postpone your thinking and do a little sleeping instead.'
'I guess I can give it a try.' He touched my hand briefly. 'Thanks, Sandy'.
'No problem.'
'If I was a pisshead about any of it — '
'You weren't,' I said. He had been a pisshead about some of it, but I didn't think he'd been able to help it. And at his age I likely would have been pissier by far. I watched him walk toward the restored Bel Aire his father had left behind, a car of roughly the same vintage as the one in our shed but a good deal less lively. Halfway across the parking lot he paused, looking at Shed B, and I paused with the smoldering stub of my cigarette poised before my lips, watching to see what he'd do.
He moved on instead of going over. Good. I took a final puff on my delightful tube of death, thought about crushing it on the hottop, and found a place for it in the butt-can instead, where roughly two hundred previous butts had been buried standing up. The others could crush out their smokes on the pavement if they wanted to — Arky would sweep them up without complaint — but it was better if I didn't do that. I was the Sarge, after all, the guy who sat in the big chair....
* * *
At the end King lets some of his surviving troopers have their cake and eat it, too.
'Are you going home?' she asked.
'Shortly.'
She went inside. I sat by myself on the smokers' bench. There were cigarettes in my car, at least half a pack in the glovebox, but getting up seemed like too much work, at least for the moment. When I did get up, I reckoned it would be best just to stay in motion. I could have a smoke on the way home, and a TV dinner when I got in — The Country Way would be closed by now, and I doubted if Cynthia Garris would be very happy to see my face in the place again soon, anyway. I'd given her a pretty good scare earlier, her fright nothing to mine when the penny finally dropped and I realized what Ned was almost certainly planning to do. And my fear then was only a shadow of the terror I'd felt as I looked into that rising purple glare with the boy hanging blind in my arms and that steady beat-beat-beat in my ears, a sound like approaching footfalls. I had been looking both down, as if into a well, and on an uptilted plane . . . as if my vision had been split by some prismatic device. It had been like looking through a periscope lined with lightning. What I saw was very vivid — I'll never forget it — arid fabulously strange. Yellow grass, brownish at the tips, covered a rocky slope that rose before me and then broke off at the edge of a drop. Green-backed beetles bustled in the grass, and off to one side there grew a clump of those waxy lilies. I hadn't been able to see the bottom of the drop, but I could see the sky. It was terrible engorged purple, packed with clouds and ripe with lightnings. A prehistoric sky. In it, circling in ragged flocks, were flying things. Birds, maybe. Or bats like the one Curt had tried to dissect. They were too far away for me to be sure. And all this happened very quickly, remember. I think there was an ocean at the foot of that drop but don't know why I think it — perhaps only because of the fish that came bursting out of the Buick's trunk that time. Or the smell of salt. Around the Roadmaster there was always that vague, teary smell of salt.
Lying in the yellow grass close to where the bottom of my window (if that's what it was) ended was a silvery ornament on a fine chain: Brian Lippy's swastika. Years of being out in the weather had tarnished it. A little farther off was a cowboy boot, the fancy-stitched kind with the stacked heel. Much of the leather had been overgrown with a blackgray moss that looked like spiderwebs. The boot had been torn down one side, creating a ragged mouth through which I could see a yellow gleam of bone. No flesh; twenty years in the caustic air of that place would have decayed it, though I doubt the absence of flesh was due to mere decay alone. What I think is that Eddie J.'s old school pal was eaten. Probably while still alive. And screaming, if he could catch enough breath to do so.
And two things more, near the top of my momentary window. The first was a hat, also furry with patches of that blackgray moss; it had grown all around the brim and also in the crease of the crown. It wasn't exactly what we wear now, that hat, the uniform has changed some since the nineteen-seventies, but it was a PSP Stetson, all right. The big hat. It hadn't blown away because someone or something had driven a splintery wooden stake down through it to hold it in place. As if Ennis Rafferty's killer had been afraid of the alien intruder even after the intruder's death, and had staked the most striking item of his clothing to make sure he wouldn't rise and walk the night like a hungry vampire....
* * *
Jay
5 July 2020
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