The Regulators Page 7

  “Why—” Gary begins, then stops when Johnny looks up fiercely.

  “Say anything and I’ll punch your lights out,” he says. “I mean it.”

  Gary looks vague—almost doltish—for a moment, and then his face fills first with a goaty sort of understanding, followed by fake solemnity. He makes a zipping motion across his lips, though, and that’s good. In the long run Gary will almost certainly talk, but Johnny Marinville has never been less concerned with the long run in his whole life.

  He turns toward the Carver house and sees David Reed carrying the little Carver girl—she is shrieking and kicking her legs in vast scissoring motions—toward the house. Pie Carver on her knees, wailing as Johnny heard the village women wail in Vietnam all those years ago (only it doesn’t seem that long ago, with the last scent of gunsmoke still on the air); she has her arms around the dead man’s neck and David’s head is wagging in a horrible way. Even more horrible is the little boy, Ralphie, standing beside her. Under ordinary circumstances he is a ceaseless, tireless noisebox, a pint-sized pisspot of the purest ray sublime, but now he is a wax dummy, staring down at his dead father with a face which appears to be melting in the rain. No one is taking him away because it’s his sister making the noise for a change, but someone should be.

  “Jim,” Johnny says to the other Reed twin, walking to the back of Mary’s car so he can be heard without having to shout. The boy looks up from the dead man and the wailing woman. His face is dazed.

  “Take Ralphie inside, Jim. He shouldn’t be here.”

  Jim nods, picks the boy up, and trots up the walk with him. Johnny expects shrieks of protest—even at six, Ralphie Carver knows it is his destiny to run the world someday—but the boy only hangs in the big teenager’s arms like a doll, his eyes huge and unblinking. Johnny believes the influence of childhood trauma on the lives of adults has been wildly overrated by a generation that listened to too many Moody Blues records in its formative years, but something like this must be different; it will be a long time, Johnny thinks, before the chief behavioral factor in Ralph Carver’s life ceases to be the sight of his father lying dead on the lawn and his mother kneeling beside him in the rain, hands locked beneath his neck, screaming his daddy’s name over and over, as if she could wake him up.

  He thinks of trying to separate Kirsten from the corpse—it’ll have to be done sooner or later—but Collie Entragian arrives at the Billingsley house before he can make his move, with the counter-girl from the E-Z Stop right behind him. The girl has pulled ahead of the longhair, who is puffing badly. The guy isn’t as young as his rock-and-roll hair made him look from a distance. Johnny is perhaps most struck by the Josephsons. They are standing at the foot of the Carver driveway, holding hands, looking somehow like a Spike Lee version of Hansel and Gretel in the pouring rain. Marielle Soderson passes behind Johnny and joins her husband on the Billingsley lawn. Johnny decides that if Brad and Belinda Josephson can be Hansel and Gretel in Spike’s new G-rated joint, Marielle can play the witch.

  It’s like the last chapter of an Agatha Christie, he thinks, when Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot explains everything, even how the murderer got out of the locked sleeping-car berth after doing the deed. We’re all here except for Frank Geller and Charlie Reed, who are still at work. It’s a regular block-party.

  Except, he realizes, that’s not quite true. Audrey Wyler isn’t here, and neither is her nephew. The edge of something glimmers in his mind at that. He has a flash memory—the sound of a kid with a cold, he had thought—but before he can do more than start to reach for it, wanting to see if it’s connected to anything (it feels connected, God knows why), Collie Entragian comes over to Mary’s car and grabs his shoulder, hard enough to hurt, with one dripping hand. He’s looking past Johnny, at the Carver place.

  “What—two?—how—Christ!”

  “Mr. Entragian . . . Collie . . .” He tries to sound reasonable, tries not to grimace. “You’re breaking my shoulder.”

  “Oh. Sorry, man. But—” His eyes go back and forth from the shotgunned woman to the shotgunned man, David Carver with tendrils of blood washing down his white, blubbery sides in tendrils. Entragian can’t seem to pick one to settle on, and consequently looks like a guy watching a tennis match.

  “Your shirt,” Johnny says, thinking what a stupendous nonstarter of a conversational gambit this is. “You forgot to put it on.”

  “I was shaving,” Collie replies, and runs his hands through his short, dripping hair. The gesture expresses—as probably nothing else could—a mind that has progressed beyond confusion to a state of almost total distraction. Johnny finds it strangely endearing. “Mr. Marinville, do you have the slightest clue what’s happening here?”

  Johnny shakes his head. He only hopes that, whatever it was, it’s now over.

  Then Peter arrives, sees his wife lying in front of Billingsley’s ceramic German shepherd, and howls. The sound brings out fresh goosebumps on Johnny’s wet arms. Peter falls on his knees beside his wife just as Pie Carver fell on her knees beside her husband, and oh gosh, does John Edward Marinville have a case of Dem Ole Kozmic Vietnam Blues again or what? All we need, he thinks, is Hendrix on the soundtrack, playing “Purple Haze.”

  Peter grabs her and Johnny sees Gary watching with a kind of frozen fascination, waiting for Peter to roll her body into his arms. Johnny can read Soderson’s thoughts as if they were printed on tickertape and running across his brow: What’s he going to make of it? When he rolls her over and her legs flop apart and he sees what he sees, what’s he going to make of it? Or maybe it’s no big deal, maybe she always goes around that way.

  “MARY!” Peter cries. He doesn’t turn her (thank God for small favors) but lifts her upper body, getting her into a sitting position. He screams again—no word this time, no vocal shape at all, just a streamer of amazed grief—as he sees the state of her head, half the face gone, half the hair burned off.

  “Peter—” Old Doc begins, and then the sky is split by a long lance of electricity flowing down the rain. Johnny spins around, dazzled but still (oh yes of course you bet) seeing perfectly well. Thunder rips the street before the lightning can even begin to fade, so loud that it feels like hands clapped to the sides of his head. Johnny sees the lightning strike the abandoned Hobart place, which stands between the cop’s house and the Jacksons’ place. It demolishes the decorative chimney William Hobart added last year before his problems started and he decided to put the house up for sale. The lightning also ignites the shake roof. Before the thunder has finished pummelling them, before Johnny even has a chance to identify the flash-fried smell in his nostrils as ozone, the deserted house is wearing a crown of flames. It burns furiously in the driving rain, like an optical illusion.

  “Ho-lee shit,” Jim Reed says. He’s standing in the Carver doorway with Ralphie still in his arms. Ralphie, Johnny sees, has reverted to thumb-sucking. And Ralphie is the only one (besides Johnny himself, that is) who isn’t still looking at the burning house. He is looking up the hill, and now Johnny sees his eyes widen. He takes his thumb out of his mouth, and before he begins to shriek in terror Johnny hears two clear words . . . and again, they seem hauntingly, maddeningly familiar. Like words heard in a dream.

  “Dream Floater,” the boy says.

  And then, as if the words were some sort of magical incantation, his waxy, unnatural limpness departs. He begins to scream in fear, and to twist in young Jim Reed’s arms. Jim is caught by surprise and drops the boy, who lands on his ass. That must hurt like a bastard, Johnny thinks, heading in that direction without even thinking about it, but the kid shows no sign of pain; only fear. His bulging eyes are still staring up the street as he begins paddling frantically with his feet, sliding back into the house on his bottom.

  Johnny, now standing on the edge of the Carver driveway, turns to look, and sees two more vans swinging around the corner from Bear Street. The one in the lead is candy-pink and so streamlined it looks to Johnny like a giant Good & Plenty wi
th polarized windows. On the roof is a radar dish in the shape of a Valentine heart. Under other circumstances it might look cute, but now it only looks bizarre. Curved aerodynamic shapes protrude on either side of the Good & Plenty van. They look like lateral fins or maybe even stubby wings.

  Behind this vehicle, which may or may not be called Dream Floater, comes a long black vehicle with a bulging, dark-tinted windshield and a toadstool-shaped housing, also black, on the roof. This ebony nightmare is chased with zigzag bolts of chrome that look like barely disguised Nazi SS insignia.

  The vehicles begin to pick up speed, their engines purring with a humming, cyclic bent.

  A large porthole irises open in the left side of the pink vehicle. And on top of the black van, which looks like a hearse trying to transform itself into a locomotive, the side of the toadstool slides back, revealing two figures with shotguns. One is a bearded human being. He, like the alien driving the blue van, appears to be wearing the tags and tatters of a Civil War uniform. The thing beside him is wearing another sort of uniform altogether: black, high-collared, dressed with silver buttons. As with the black-and-chrome van, there’s something Nazi-ish about the uniform, but this isn’t what catches Johnny’s eyes and freezes his vocal cords so he is at first unable to cry a warning.

  Above the high collar, there seems to be only darkness. He has no face, Johnny thinks in the second before the creatures in the pink van and the dead black one open fire. He has no face, that thing has no face at all.

  It occurs to Johnny Marinville, who sees everything, that he may have died; that this may be hell.

  Letter from Audrey Wyler (Wentworth, Ohio) to Janice Conroy (Plainview, New York), dated August 18, 1994:

  Dear Janice,

  Thanks so much for your call. The note of condolence, too, of course, but you’ll never know how good it was to have your voice in my ear last night—like a drink of cool water on a hot day. Or maybe I mean like a sane voice when you’re stuck in the booby hatch!

  Did any of what I said on the phone make sense to you? I can’t remember for sure. I’m off the tranks—“Fuck that shit,” as we used to say back in college—but that’s only been for the last couple of days, and even with Herb pitching in and helping like mad, a lot of the world has been so much scrambled eggs. Things started being that way when Bill’s friend, Joe Calabrese, called and said my brother and his wife and the two older kids had been killed, shotgunned in a drive-by. The man, who I’ve never met in my life, was crying, hard to understand, and much too shaken to be diplomatic. He kept saying he was so ashamed, and I ended up trying to comfort him, and all the time I’m thinking, “There’s got to be a mistake here, Bill can’t be dead, my brother was supposed to be around for as long as I needed him.” I still wake up in the night thinking, “Not Bill, it’s just a goof-up, it can’t be Bill.” The only thing in my whole life I can remember that felt this crazy was when I was a kid and everybody came down with the flu at the same time.

  Herb and I flew out to San Jose to collect Seth, then flew back to Toledo on the same plane as the bodies. They store them in the cargo hold, did you know that? Me neither. Nor wanted to.

  The funeral was one of the most horrible experiences of my life—probably the most horrible. Those four coffins—my brother, my sister-in-law, my niece, and my nephew—lined up in a row, first in the church and then at the cemetery, where they sat over the holes on those awful chrome rails. Wanna hear something totally nuts? During the whole graveside service I kept thinking of my honeymoon in Jamaica. They have speed-bumps in the road that they call sleeping policemen. And for some reason that’s how I started thinking of the coffins, as sleeping policemen. Well, I told you I’ve been crazy, didn’t I? Ohio’s Valium Queen of 1994, that’s me.

  The service at the church was packed—Bill and June had a lot of friends—and everyone was bawling. Except for poor little Seth, of course, who can’t. Or doesn’t. Or who knows? He just sat there between me and Herb with two of his toys on his lap—a pink van he calls “Dweem Fwoatah” and the action figure that goes with it, a sexy little redhead named Cassandra Styles. The toys are from a show called MotoKops 2200, and the names of the damned MotoKops vans (excuse me, the MotoKops Power Wagons, lah-di-dah) are among the few things Seth says which are actually understandable (“Doughnuts buy ’em for me” is another one; also “Seth go potty,” which means you’re supposed to go in there with him—he’s trained but very weird about his bathroom habits).

  I hope he didn’t understand the service meant the rest of his family is dead, gone from him forever. Herb is sure he doesn’t know (“The kid doesn’t even know where he is,” Herb says), but I wonder. That’s the hell of autism, isn’t it? You always wonder, you never really know, they’re broadcasting but God hooked them up with a scrambler-phone and nothing’s coming through at the receiving end but gibberish.

  Tell you one thing—I’ve gained a new respect for Herb Wyler in the last couple of weeks. He arranged EVERYTHING, from the planes to the obituaries in both the Columbus Dispatch and Toledo Blade. And to take Seth in as he has, without a word of complaint—not just an orphan but an autistic orphan—well, I mean, is it amazing or is it just me? I vote for amazing. And he seems to really care for the poor kid. Sometimes, when he looks at the boy, a preoccupied expression comes into his face that could even be love. The beginnings of it, anyway.

  This is even more remarkable, it seems to me, when you realize how little a child like Seth can give back. Mostly he just sits plonked down out there in the sandbox Herb put in as soon as we got back from Toledo, like a big boy-shaped raisin, wearing only his MotoKops 2200 Underoos (he has the lunchbox, too), mouthing his nonsense words, playing with his vans and the action figures that go with them, especially the sexy redhead in the blue shorts. These toys trouble me a bit, because—if you’re not entirely sure I’ve lost it, this should convince you—I’m not sure where they came from, Jan! Seth sure didn’t have any such expensive rig the last time I visited Bill and June in Toledo (I checked in Toys R Us, and the MotoKops stuff is VERY pricey), I can tell you that. They aren’t the sort of toys Bill and Junie would have approved of, anyhow—their toy-buying ideas ran more to Barney than Star Wars, much to their kids’ disgust. Poor little Seth can’t tell me, that’s for sure, and it probably doesn’t matter, anyway. I only know the names of the vans and the figures that go with them because I watch the cartoon-show with him on Saturday mornings. The chief bad guy, No Face, is très creepy.

  He’s so strange, Jan (Seth, I mean, not No Face, har-har). I don’t know if Herb feels that as much as I do, but I know he feels some of it. Sometimes when I look up and catch Seth looking at me (he has eyes of such dark brown that sometimes they actually look black), I get the weirdest chill—like someone’s using my spine for a xylophone. And some odd things have happened since Seth came to live with us. Don’t laugh, but there’ve even been a couple of incidents like the poltergeist phenomena they sometimes dramatize on what Herb calls “the psycho reality shows.” Glasses flying off shelves, a couple of windows that broke seemingly for no reason, and weird wiggly shapes that sometimes appear in Seth’s sandbox at night. They’re like strange, surreal sand-paintings. I’ll send you some Polaroids next time I write, if I think of it. I wouldn’t tell anybody this stuff besides you, Jan, believe me. Thank God I know and trust your wonder . . . your curiosity . . . your DISCRETION!

  Mostly Seth is no trouble. The most annoying thing about having him around is the way he breathes! He takes in air in these big, sloppy gusts, always through his mouth, which is always hung open and halfway down to his chest. It makes him look like the village idiot, which he really is not, regardless of the problems he does have. Mr. Marinville from across the street was over the other day with a banana cake he baked (he’s quite a sweetie for a guy who once wrote a book about a man having a love-affair with his own daughter . . . and called the book Delight, of all things), and he spent some time with Seth, who was taking a sandbox-break to watch Bona
nza. Remember that one? TNT shows the reruns every weekday afternoon (they call ’em the Afternoon Ponderosa Party, ain’t that cute), and Seth just loves ’em. Wessurn, Wessurn, he says, when they come on. Mr. Marinville, who likes to be called Johnny, watched with us for quite awhile, the three of us eating banana cake and drinking chocolate milk like old pals, and when I apologized for Seth’s wet breathing (mostly because it drives me nuts, of course), Marinville just laughed and said that Seth couldn’t help his adenoids. I’m not even sure what adenoids are, but I suppose we’ll have to have Seth’s looked at. Thank God for the Blue twins—Cross and Shield.

  One thing keeps nagging me, and that’s why I’ve enclosed a Xerox of the postcard my brother sent me from Carson City shortly before he died. He says on it that they’ve had a breakthrough—an amazing breakthrough is what he says, actually—with Seth. Capital letters, lots of exclamation points. See for yourself. I was curious, natch, so I asked him about it the next time we talked on the phone. That must have been on July 27th or 28th, and it was the last time I spoke to him. His reaction was very peculiar, very unlike Bill. A long silence, then this weird artificial laugh, “ha-ha-ha!” the way it gets written out but the way real laughter hardly ever sounds, except at boring cocktail parties. I never heard my brother laugh like that in his life. “Well, Aud,” he sez, “I might have overreacted a little on that one.”

  He didn’t want to say any more on the subject, but when I pressed him he said that Seth seemed brighter, more with them, once they got far enough into Colorado to see the Rockies. “You know how he’s always loved Western movies and TV shows,” he said, and although I didn’t then, I sure do now. Nuts for cowboys and posses and cuttin’ ’em off at the pass is young Seth Garin. Bill said Seth probably knew he wasn’t in the real Old West because of all the cars and campers, but “the scenery still turned him on.” That’s how Bill put it.