Hank Buck

Hank Buck, called Henry Buck by his full name, is a Haven resident whose grudge against Albert “Pits” Barfield leads him to use the town’s new powers in a startlingly literal act of revenge. His improvised “Send” device makes Barfield disappear into another world, an episode remembered as the final eruption of irrational violence in Haven before Hank himself dies in the burning woods.

Identity and Place in Haven

Hank is part of the Thursday-night poker circle that once included Joe Paulson and Pits Barfield. By July 31, the games have stopped: telepathy has made bluffing impossible, while the town’s wider transformation has unsettled its residents. The distinction between private suspicion and shared knowledge has collapsed. Hank’s grievance, however, is not a new product of the transformation. It has accumulated over years of poker games in which he believed Pits was cheating.

The narrator presents Hank’s deed against a tense communal background. During the search for David Brown, Haven residents had exchanged angry words and blows, but Ruth McCausland’s moral authority had helped keep the search from becoming a general brawl. After the “becoming” began, Ruth, Bobbi, and a small group of seven visitors to Bobbi’s shed helped the town through its first difficult stage. Hank’s attack comes at the close of this volatile period: his revenge is called the last act of outright irrational craziness to occur in Haven.

The Grudge Against Pits Barfield

Hank’s resentment centers on the belief that Pits had been bottom-dealing for years. The suspicion had circulated among the poker players; Hank remembered Moss Harlingen demonstrating his certainty about Pits’s technique during a pool game at Kyle Archinbourg’s place. As the town changed, the old games ended, but the revelation of telepathy did not erase Hank’s anger. It gave the suspicion a different setting in which to harden.

Hank eventually learns that Pits had not only dealt from the bottom of the deck but had sometimes marked cards. Pits had acquired those skills during monotonous duty at a Berlin repple-depple after World War II. Hank spends two weeks dwelling on the discovery, with headaches and imagined scenes of Pits practicing his methods and anticipating his return to civilian life. His solution is shaped by Pits’s past: Hank decides to send him to a repple-depple somewhere impossibly far away, in what he thinks of as the Phantom Zone. The elaborate revenge begins as a private fantasy, but Hank acts on it in the early hours of the morning, building the device before confronting Pits a week later.

The “Send” Device and Pits’s Disappearance

Hank finds Pits outside Cooder’s market, sitting in a chair and looking at a magazine. He approaches carrying a large radio, with a pistol tucked into the front of his trousers. The townspeople sense the word recurring in Hank’s thoughts, and those nearby step away. Hank accuses Pits of cheating and threatens him, then produces a small pair of Borg earphones, connects them to the radio, and orders Pits to put them on.

The radio is more than a receiver: it can play cassette tapes as well as pick up AM and FM broadcasts. Hank has taped over the cassette player’s Play button and written “Send” on the tape. With his service pistol still aimed at Pits, he presses the button. Pits begins to scream, then fades from view, his physical presence and visibility diminishing together. A section of reality opens behind him onto a purple-black landscape; the air and loose litter rush toward the opening, and some of the debris appears to pass through Pits. The scene transforms Hank’s resentment into an act with consequences beyond the town’s ordinary physical world: he has sent Pits away, but the device also tears a breach in Haven’s reality and draws nearby goods through it.

The townspeople do not treat the disappearance as an occasion for a simple arrest. Hank pays Randy Kroger by personal check for the broken display window and merchandise pulled through the opening; Kroger verifies the check and accepts it. The town’s small jail is plainly inadequate, and sending Hank to the county jail would not fit the strange circumstances. Having examined his mind and motives, the residents see that his anger and confusion are subsiding. They take away the converted radio, tell him not to make another, and turn their attention to the voice he says he heard from the other world. Frank Spruce identifies it as David Brown’s voice, and no one disputes him: David is on Altair-4.

Death in the Burning Woods

Hank’s next appearance comes during Gard’s escape from the farm through the burning woods. He has ridden a motorcycle to the farm, abandoned it in the same field where Nancy Voss had met her end, and run after Gard. Hank carries his own Zap Gun. Gard turns and fires the Sonic Space Blaster; the beam strikes Hank in the upper left side of the chest, killing him. Gard immediately faces forward again and steers the Tomcat away from a burning spruce, narrowly avoiding a collision as he continues along the trail.

The juxtaposition is stark: Hank had once used an improvised device to send another man out of Haven, and now he appears with a weapon amid the fire and destruction surrounding the farm. His death ends his part in the story during the escape, with no further explanation of what brought him to the farm beyond his arrival on the motorcycle and his pursuit of Gard.

Narrative Role and Significance

Hank’s episode links Haven’s altered mental life to the material devices its residents construct. The “Send” radio begins as a modified household appliance, made legible by its taped-over button and handwritten label; in use, it becomes an instrument that changes who and what can occupy the town’s reality. The object’s crude, recognizable form sharpens the contrast with the extraordinary consequence it produces.

The episode also marks a shift in the town’s crisis. Hank’s revenge is described as the last major act of irrational craziness, while the people of Haven move on to the question of David Brown’s voice and the broader dangers beyond the town. Later, Hank’s pursuit of Gard ends in the burning woods, where the conflict has become a direct struggle to escape. His arc thus moves from a grievance rooted in ordinary card games to the extraordinary violence of the transformed town, and finally to a fatal encounter within the spreading fire.