The Regulators (10 page)

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
Bonanza.
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.

I might have let it go at that if he hadn't sounded so funny and vague, so really unlike himself. You know your own kin, don't you? Or you think you do. And Bill was always outgoing and bubbly or indrawn and pouty. There wasn't much middle ground. Except during that phone call, it seemed to be
all
middle ground. So I kept after him about it, which I wouldn't have done ordinarily. I said that
AN AMAZING BREAKTHROUGH
sounded like one specific event. So he said that well, yes, something
had
happened not too far from Ely, which is one of the few good-sized towns north of Las Vegas. Just after they went by a road sign pointing the way to a burg called Desperation (charming names they have out there, I must say, makes you just wild to visit), Seth “kinda freaked out.” That's how Bill put it. They were on Route 50, the non-turnpike route, and there was this huge ridge of earth on their left, south of the highway.

Bill thought it was sort of interesting, but no more. Seth, though—when he turned in that direction and saw it, he went nuts. Started waving his arms and gabbling in that private language of his. To me it always sounds like talk on a tape that someone is playing backward.

Bill and June and the two older kids went along with him the way they do—
did
—when he gets excited and
starts verbalizing, which is rare but far from unheard-of. You know, kind of like Yeah, Seth, you bet, Seth, it sure
is
wild, Seth—and all the time they're doing it, that embankment is slipping farther and farther behind them. Until finally Seth—get this—speaks up, not in gibberish but in English. He
really talks,
says “Stop, Daddy, go back, Seth want to see mountain, Seth want to see Hoss and Little Joe.” Hoss and Little Joe, in case you don't remember, are two of the main characters on
Bonanza.

Bill said it was more real words than Seth had put together in his whole life, and some time spent around Seth has convinced me of how unusual it would be for him to say so much in clear language at one time.
But . . .
AMAZING BREAKTHROUGH?
I don't want to be mean or anything, but it was hardly the Gettysburg Address, was it? I couldn't make it jibe then, and I can't now. On his postcard, Bill sounds so pumped he's just about blowing his stack; on the phone he sounded like a pod-person in
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Plus one other thing. On the card he says “more later,” as if he can't wait to spill the whole thing, but once I had him on the phone, I just about have to drag it out of him. Weird!

Bill said what happened made him think of an old joke about a couple who think their son is mute. Then one day, when the kid's six or so, he speaks up at the dinner table. “Please, mother, may I have another ear of corn?” he says. The parents fall all over him and ask why he's never spoken up before. “I never had anything to say,” he tells them. Bill told me the joke (I'd heard it before, I think back around the time they burned Joan of Arc at the stake) and then gave out with the phony cocktail-party laugh again, ha-ha-ha. Like that closed the
subject for good and all. Only I wasn't ready for it to be closed.

“So did you ask him, Bill?” I asked.

“Ask him what?” he says.

“Why he never spoke before.”

“But he
does
talk.”

“Not like
this,
though. He doesn't talk like
this,
which is why you sent me the excited postcard, right?” I was getting mad at him by then. I don't know why, but I was. “So did you ask him why he hadn't ever strung fifteen or twenty words of clear English together before?”