The Regulators (25 page)

“Is that a buzzard?” Cynthia asked. “Or maybe a vulture?”

“Buzzard?
Vulture?
” Old Doc looked startled. “Good gosh, no. I've never seen a bird like that in my life.”

“In Ohio, you mean,” Collie said, knowing that wasn't what Billingsley meant, but wanting to hear it for himself.

“I mean
anywhere.
”

The hippie looked from the bird to Billingsley and then back to the bird again. “What is it, then? A new species?”

“New species my fanny! Excuse my French, young lady, but that's a fucking mutant!” Billingsley stared, rapt, as the bird opened its wings, flapping them in order to help it move a little farther up Mary's leg. “Look how big its body is, and how short its wings are in relation to it—damned thing makes an ostrich look like a miracle of aerodynamics! I don't think the wings are even the same
length
!”

“No,” Collie said. “I don't think they are, either.”

“How
can it fly?” Doc demanded. “How can it possibly
fly
?”

“I don't know, but it does.” Cynthia pointed down toward the thick billows which had now blotted out all vestiges of the world below Hyacinth Street. “It flew out of the smoke. I saw it.”

“I'm sure you did, I didn't think someone pulled up in a . . . a Birdmobile and dropped it off, but how it can
possibly
fly is beyond all—” He broke off, peering at the thing. “Although I can understand how you might have thought it was a buzzard before the inevitable second thoughts set in.” Collie thought Old Doc was mostly talking to himself by this point, but he listened intently just the same. “It does look a little like a buzzard. As a child might draw it, anyway.”

“Huh?” Cynthia said.

“As a child might draw it,” Billingsley repeated. “Perhaps one who got it all mixed up in his mind with a bald eagle.”

The sight of Ralphie Carver hurt Johnny's heart. Put aside by Jim Reed, whose solicitude had been superseded by his excitement at the impending mission, Ralphie stood between the stove and the refrigerator with his thumb in his mouth and a big wet spot spreading on the front of his shorts. All his bratty bluster had departed. His eyes were huge and still and
shiny. He looked to Johnny like drug addicts he had known.

Johnny stopped inside the kitchen door and put Ellie down. She didn't want to go, but at last he managed to pry her hands gently off his neck. Her eyes were also shocked, but held none of the merciful glaze Johnny could see in her brother's. He looked past her and saw Kim and Susi Geller sitting on the floor with their arms around each other. Probably suits Mom just fine, Johnny thought, remembering how the woman had seemed to struggle with young David Reed for possession of the girl. He had won then, but now David had bigger fish to fry; he was bound for Anderson Avenue and parts unknown. That didn't change the fact that there were two little kids here who had become orphans since lunch, however.

“Kim?” he asked. “Could you maybe help a little with—”

“No,” she said. No more, no less. And calm. No defiance in her gaze, no hysteria in her tone . . . but no fellow feeling, either. She had an arm around her daughter, her daughter had an arm around her, cozy as can be, just a coupla white girls sittin around and waitin for the clouds to roll by. Understandable, maybe, but Johnny was furious with her, nevertheless; she was suddenly everyone he had ever known who looked bored when the conversation came around to AIDS, or homeless children, or the defoliation of the rain forests; she was everyone who had ever stepped over a homeless man or woman sleeping on the sidewalk without so much as a single glance down. As he
had on occasion done himself. Johnny could picture himself grabbing her by the arms, hauling her to her feet, whirling her around, and planting a swift kick square in the middle of her narrow midwestern ass. Maybe that would wake her up. Even if it didn't, it would certainly make him feel a little better.

“No,” he repeated, feeling his temples throb with stupid rage.

“No,” she agreed, and gave him a wan little at-last-you-understand smile. Then she turned her head toward Susi and began to stroke the girl's hair.

“Come on, dear heart,” Belinda said to Ellen, leaning down and opening her arms. “Come over here and spend some time with Bee.” The girl came, silent, her face twisting in an awful cramp of grief that made the silence somehow even worse, and Belinda enfolded her.

The Reed twins watched this, but really didn't see. They were standing by the back door, looking bright-eyed and excited. Cammie approached them, stood in front of them, appraised them with an expression Johnny at first mistook for dourness. A moment more and he realized what it really was: terror so large it could only be partially concealed.

“All right,” she said at last. Her voice was dry and businesslike. “Which one carries it?”

The boys looked at each other, and Johnny had a sense of communication between them—brief but complex, perhaps the sort of thing in which only twins could engage. Or perhaps, he thought, it's just that
your brains have boiled, John. That was not actually so farfetched. They certainly
felt
boiled.

Jim held out his hand. For just a moment his mother's upper lip trembled. Then it firmed and she passed him David Carver's pistol. Dave took the shells and opened the box while his brother rolled the .45's cylinder and held the gun up to the light, checking to make sure the chambers were empty just as Johnny had done. We're careful because we understand the potential a gun has to maim and kill, Johnny thought, but it's more than that. On some level we know they're evil. Devilish. Even their biggest fans and partisans sense it.

Dave was holding out a palmful of shells to his brother. Jim took them one at a time, loading the gun.

“You act like your father was with you every minute,” Cammie said as he did it. “If you think of doing something he wouldn't let you do if he was here,
don't
. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Mom.” Jim snapped the pistol's cylinder closed and then held it at the end of his arm with his finger outside the trigger-guard and the muzzle pointing at the floor. He looked both embarrassed by his mother's orders—she sounded like the C.O. in an old Leon Uris novel, laying down the law for a couple of green privates—and wildly excited at the prospect of what lay ahead.

She turned her attention to the other twin. “David?”

“Yes, Mom?”

“If you see people—strangers—in the woods, come right back. That's the most important thing. Don't ask
questions, don't respond to anything they might say, don't even approach them.”

Jim began, “Mom, if they don't have guns—”

“Don't ask
questions,
don't
approach
them,” she repeated. She didn't speak much louder, but there was something in her voice they both flinched back from a little. Something that finished the discussion.

“Suppose they see cops, Mrs. Reed?” Brad asked. “The police may have decided the greenbelt is their best approach to the street.”

“Safest to stay away,” Johnny said. “Any cops we run into are apt to be . . . well, nervous. Nervous cops have been known to hurt innocent people. They never mean to, but it's better to be safe. Avoid accidents.”

“Are you coming with us, Mr. Marinville?” Jim asked.

“Yes.”

Neither twin said anything, but Johnny liked the relief he saw in their eyes.

Cammie gave Johnny a forbidding look—
Are you done? May I get back to business?
it said—and then resumed her instructions. “Go to Anderson Avenue. If everything looks all right there . . .” She faltered a moment, as if realizing how unlikely that was, and then pushed on.”. . . ask to use someone's phone and call the police. But if Anderson Avenue's like it is here, or if things seem even the slightest bit . . . well . . .”

“Hinky,” Johnny said. In Vietnam they'd had as many words for the feeling she was talking about as Indians had for variations in the weather, and it was funny how they all came back, turning on like
neon signs in a dark room. Hinky. Weirded-out. Bent. Snafu'd. Dinky-dau. Yeah, doc, it's all coming back to me now. Pretty soon I'll be whipping a bandanna into a rope and tying it around my forehead to keep back the sweat, maybe leading the congregation in the Fish Cheer.

Cammie was still looking at her boys. Johnny hoped she'd hurry up. They were still looking back at her with respect (and a little fear), but most of what she had to say from this point on would go in one ear and out the other just the same.

“If you don't like what you see on Anderson Avenue, use that pipe you know about. Get over to Columbus Broad. Call the police. Tell them what's happened here. And don't you even
think
of coming back to Poplar Street!”

“But Mom—” Jim began.

She reached up and seized his lips, pinching them shut. Not painfully, but firmly. Johnny could easily imagine her doing the same thing when the twins were ten years younger, only bending down to do it.

“You save ‘but Mom' for another time,” she said. “This time you just
mind
Mom. Get to a safe place, call the police, then stay put until this craziness is over. Got it?”

They nodded. Cammie nodded back and let go of Jim's lips. Jim was smiling an embarrassed smile—ohboy, that's my ma—and blushing to the tips of his ears. He knew better than to remonstrate, however.

“And be careful,” she finished. Something came in her eyes—an urge to kiss them, Johnny thought, or
maybe just an urge to call the whole thing off while she still could. Then it was gone.

“Ready, Mr. Marinville?” Dave asked. He was looking enviously at the gun dangling at the end of his brother's arm. Johnny suspected they would not be too far down the path through the greenbelt before he asked to carry it awhile.

“Just a second,” he said, and knelt down in front of Ralphie. Ralphie backed away until his little butt was flush against the wall, then looked at Johnny over his thumb. Down here at Ralphie's level, the smell of urine and fear was so strong it was jungly.

From his pocket Johnny took the figure he'd found in the upstairs hall—the alien with the big eyes, the horn of a mouth, and the stiff strip of yellow hair running up the center of his otherwise bald head. He held it in front of Ralphie's eyes. “Ralphie, what's this?”

For a moment he didn't think the boy was going to answer. Then, slowly, he reached out with the hand that wasn't anchored in his mouth and took it. For the first time since the shooting had begun, a spark of life showed in his face. “That's Major Pike,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Yes. He's a Canopalean.” He pronounced this word carefully, proudly. “That means he's a nailien. But a good
nailien
. Not like No Face.” A pause. “Sometimes he drives Bounty's Power Wagon. Major Pike wasn't with them, was he?” Tears overspilled Ralphie's eyes, and Johnny suddenly remembered the story every kid used to know about the Black Sox baseball scandal in 1919. A weeping little boy had
supposedly approached Shoeless Joe Jackson, begging the ballplayer to tell him that the fix hadn't been in—to say it wasn't so. And although Johnny
had
seen this freak—or someone wearing a mask to make him look like this freak—he immediately shook his head and gave Ralphie a comforting pat on the shoulder.

“Is Major Pike from a movie or a TV show?” Johnny asked, but he knew the answer already. It was coming together now, maybe should have come together a lot earlier. In the last few years he had taught a lot of classes in schools where grownups had to lean over seriously in order to drink from the water fountains, did a lot of readings in library rooms where the chairs were mostly three feet high. He listened to the run of their talk, but he didn't watch their shows or go to their movies. He knew instinctively that that sort of research would hinder his work rather than help it. So he didn't know everything, and still had plenty of questions, but he thought he was beginning to believe that this craziness
could
be understood.

“Ralphie?”

“From a TV show,” Ralphie said around his thumb. He was still holding Major Pike up in front of his eyes, much as Johnny had done. “He's a MotoKop.”

“And Dream Floater. What's that, Ralphie?”

“Mr. Marinville,” Dave began, “we really ought to—”

“Give him a second, son,” Brad said.

Johnny never took his eyes off Ralphie. “Dream Floater?”

“Cassie's Power Wagon,” Ralphie said. “Cassie Styles. I think she's Colonel Henry's girlfriend. My
friend Jason says she isn't because MotoKops don't have girlfriends, but I think she is. Why are the Power Wagons on Poplar Street, Mr. Marinville?”

“I don't know, Ralphie.” Except he almost did.

“Why are they so
big
? And if they're good guys, why did they shoot my daddy and mommy?”

Ralphie dropped the Major Pike figure on the floor and kicked it all the way across the room. Then he put his hands over his face and began to sob. Cammie Reed started forward, but before she could get there, Ellen had wriggled free of Belinda. She went to Ralphie and put her arms around him. “Never mind,” she said. “Never mind, Ralphie, I'll take care of you.”

“Won't
that
be a treat,” Ralphie said through his sobs, and Johnny clapped a hand over his mouth almost hard enough to make his lips bleed. It was the only way he could keep from bursting into mad, yodeling laughter.

If they're good guys, why did they shoot my daddy and mommy?

“Come on, boys,” he said, standing up and turning to the Reed twins. “Let's go exploring.”