The Regulators (26 page)

On Poplar Street, the sun was starting to go down. It was too early for it to be going down, but it was, just the same. It glared above the horizon in the west like a baleful red eye, turning the puddles in the street and the driveways and on the stoops to fire. It turned
the broken glass which littered the block into embers. It turned the eyes of the
faux
-buzzard into red pits as it lifted off from the body of Mary Jackson on its improbable wings and flew across the street to the Carver lawn. Here it alit, looking from David Carver's body to that of Susi Geller's friend. It seemed unsure upon which to start. So much to eat, so little time. At last it chose Ellen and Ralphie's father, approaching the dead man in a series of clumsy hops. One of its yellow claw-feet sported five talons, the other only two.

Across the street, in the Wyler house—in the smell of dirt, old hamburger, and tomato soup—the TV blared on. It was the first saloon scene of
The Regulators.

“You're a right purty lady,” Rory Calhoun was saying. That knowing leer in his voice, the one that said
Babydoll, I'm going to eat you like ice cream before this shitty little oat-opera is over, and both of us know it.
“Why don't you sit down n have a drink? Bring me some luck?”

“I don't drink with trash,” Karen Steele responded coldly, and all of Rory Calhoun's men—the ones not currently hiding outside of town, that was—guffawed.

“Well ain't you a little spitfire?” Rory Calhoun said, relaxed, and his men guffawed some more.

“Want some Doritos, Pete?” Tak said. Now it spoke in the voice of Lucas McCain, who rode the cable-TV range in
The Rifleman.

Peter Jackson, seated in the La-Z-Boy in front of the TV, didn't reply. He was grinning broadly. Moving
shadows played across his face, occasionally making the grin look like a silent scream, but it was a grin, all right.

“He should have some, all right, Paw,” Tak said, now in the almost-adolescent voice of Johnny Crawford, who had played Lucas's son. “They're the good ones. Cool Ranch. Come on, Mr. Jackson, over the teeth and over the gums, look out guts, 'cause here they come.”

The boy held chips out in one grimy hand and waved them up and down in front of Peter Jackson's face. Peter took no notice. He stared at the TV, through the TV, with eyes that bulged out of his head like those of some exotic deep-dwelling fish that has undergone explosive decompression. And he grinned.

“Don't appear he's hongry, Paw.”

“I think he is, son. Hongry as hell. You're hongry, ain't you, Pete? Just need a little help, that's all.
So take the damn chips!
”

There was a kind of humming in the room. A line of static appeared briefly on the TV, where Rory Calhoun was now trying to kiss Karen Steele. She slapped his face and knocked off his hat. That wiped away his leering, teasing grin. Folks—even womenfolks—didn't knock off Jeb Murdock's hat with impunity.

Peter slowly raised the chips. He bypassed his relentlessly grinning mouth and began poking them against his nose instead, crumbling them, catching some of the smaller pieces in his nostrils. His unnaturally bulging eyes never left the TV.

“Little
too high, Mr. Jackson.” Now it was the earnest voice of Hoss Cartwright. Hoss had been one of Seth's favorites before Tak came to stay inside him, and so now he was one of Tak's favorites, too. They rolled that way, like a wheel. “Let's try again, what do you say?”

The hand went down slowly and jerkily, like a freight elevator. This time the chips went into Peter's mouth, and he began to chew mechanically. Tak smiled at him with Seth's mouth. It hoped—in its strange way it did have emotions, although none of them were precisely human—that Peter was enjoying the Doritos, because they were going to be his last meal. It had sucked a great deal of life-force out of Peter, first replenishing the gaudy amounts of energy it had expended this afternoon, then taking in more. Getting ready for the next step.

Getting ready for the night.

Peter chewed and chewed, Dorito fragments spilling out of his grin and tumbling down the front of his tee-shirt, the one with happy old Mr. Smiley-Smile on the front. His eyeballs, bulging so far out of their sockets that they seemed to be lying on his cheeks, quivered with the motion of his jaw. The left one had split like a squeezed grape when Tak invaded his mind and stole most of it—the useful part—but he could still see a little out of the right one. Enough so he'd be able to do the next part mostly on his own. Once, that was, his motor was running again.

“Peter? I say, Peter, can you hear me, old boy?” Tak now spoke in the clipped British tones of Andrew Case, Peter's
department head. Like all of Tak's imitations, it was quite good. Not as good as its Western movie and TV show imitations (at which it had had much more practice), but still not bad.

And the voice of authority did wonders, it had found, even for the terminally brain-damaged. A vague flicker of life came into Peter's face. He turned and saw Andrew Case in a spiffy houndstooth jacket instead of Seth Garin in a pair of MotoKops Underoos decorated with reddish-orange blobs of Chef Boyardee sauce.

“I'll want you to go across the street now, old boy. Into the woods, eh? But you needn't toddle all the way to Grandmother's house. Just to the path. Do you know the path in the woods?”

Peter shook his head. His protruding eyeballs trembled above the stretched clown rictus of his lips.

“No matter, you'll find it. Hard to miss, old top. When you get to the fork, you can sit down with your . . . friend.”

“My friend,” Peter said. Not quite a question.

“Yes, that's right.”

Peter had never actually met the man he would be joining at the fork in the path and never actually would, not really, but there was no sense in telling Peter these things. He didn't have mind enough left to understand them, for one thing. He was shortly going to be dead, for another. As dead as Herb Wyler. As dead as the man with the shopping cart, the one Peter would shortly be meeting in the woods.

“My friend,”
Peter said a second time. A little surer now.

“Yep.” The British department head was gone; Tak returned to John Payne doing his Gary Cooper thing. “Best be crawling, pard.”

“Down the path to the fork.”

“Reckon so.”

Peter rose to his feet like an old clockwork toy with rust in its gears. His eyeballs jiggled in the silver dreamlight from the TV.

“Best be crawling. And when I get to the fork, I can sit down with my friend.”

“Yessir, that's the deal.” Now it was the half-leering, half-laughing voice of Rory Calhoun. “He's quite the boy, your friend. You
could
say he got this whole thing started. Lit the fuse, anyway. You git on, now, pard. Happy trails to you, until we meet again.”

Peter walked through the arch, not glancing with his one dying eye at Audrey, who was slumped over sideways in one of the living-room chairs with her eyes half-open. She appeared to be in a daze or perhaps even a state of coma. She was breathing slowly and regularly. Her legs, long and pretty (the first things about her to attract Herb back in the days when she had still been Audrey Garin), were stretched out before her, and Peter almost stumbled over them in his sleepwalk to the front door. When he opened the door and the red light of the declining day fell on his grin, it looked more like a scream than ever.

Halfway down the walk with that red light falling like strained blood through the rising pillar of smoke
from the Hobart place, the Rory Calhoun voice filled his head, ripping at it like a razor blade:
Close the door behind you, partner, was you born in a barn?

Peter made a drunken about-face, came back and did as he was told. The door was smooth and intact, the only one on the block not riddled with bullet-holes. He did another about-face (almost falling off the stoop in the process) and then set sail through the red light toward his own house, where he would walk up the driveway, past the breezeway, and into the backyard. From there he would climb over the low wire fence and enter the greenbelt. Find the path. Find the fork. Find his friend. Sit down with his friend.

He stepped over the sprawled body of his wife, then paused as a wild cry rose in the hot, smoky air:
Wh-Wh-Whooo
 . . . As far gone as he was, that cry brought a scatter of gooseflesh to his arms. What was a coyote doing in Ohio? In a suburb of Colum—

Best be crawling, pard. Git along, little dogie.

Pain, even more excruciating than before. He moaned through the frozen curve of his grin. Fresh blood oozed from his ruptured eye and trickled down his cheek.

He started forward again, and when the cry returned, this time joined by a second, a third, and finally a fourth—he didn't react. He thought only of the path, the fork, the friend. Tak made one final check of the man's mind (it did not take long, as there was not much mind left in Peter to check) and then withdrew.

Now there was only it and the woman. It supposed it knew why it had let her live, like the bird that is
reputed to live in the very jaws of the crocodile, the bird safe from the croc's teeth because it cleans among them, but Tak would not save her much longer. In many ways the boy had been an inspired host—perhaps the
only
host in which it could have lived and grown so much—but there was this one ironic drawback: what Tak could conceive and desire, the boy's body could not carry out. It could dress the woman and dye her hair, it could strip her naked, it could make her pinch her own nipples and do all sorts of other puerile things if it desired. It did not desire. What it desired was to couple with her, and that it could not do. Under certain circumstances it felt that it might have been able to manage some sort of joining in spite of its host's immaturity . . . but Seth himself was still inside, and on the occasions it had really tried, Seth had prevented it. Tak could have challenged the boy and almost certainly prevailed, but it was perhaps wiser not to do so. It had not emerged from its black place under the Nevada dust, after all the millennia of imprisonment, to have sex with a woman who was much younger than Tak itself and much older than its host body.

And what
had
it come for?

Well . . . to have fun. And . . .

To watch television,
a voice far back in its mind whispered.
To watch television, to eat SpaghettiOs, and to make. To build.

“You want to try me, Sheriff?” Rory Calhoun asked, and Tak's eyes drifted back to the TV. Some of the others might be moving into the woods. It could have
made sure of this one way or another if it had really desired, but it did not. Let them go into the woods if they wanted. They would not like what they found. And where could they go? Back, that was all. Back to the houses. In a very real sense, there was nowhere else. Meantime, it would save its energy. Just relax and watch the movie. Soon enough it would be time to bring on the night.

“Why don't we just stand down, think things over?” John Payne asked, and Seth and Tak came together again, as the Westerns—this one in particular—had always brought them together. Tak bent forward, eyes never leaving the screen, and picked up a bowl filled with a congealed mixture of Franco-American spaghetti and hamburger. It began to eat, eyes glued to the TV screen, oblivious of the chunks of meat that tumbled down its naked chest from time to time, coming to rest in its lap. Soon the final shootout would begin yet again—
KA-POW
and
KA-BAM
all the way home—and Tak let itself float into the story and the silvery black-and-white images, drinking in the atmosphere of violence, as ripe and electric as an impending thunderstorm.

As it watched, entranced, Seth Garin separated himself from Tak and moved away from it with the stealth of Jack creeping past the sleeping giant. He glanced at the TV and wasn't surprised to find that, whatever Tak might believe, he no longer liked
The Regulators
very much. Then he turned away, found one of the secret passages he had made for himself during Tak's reign, and disappeared quietly into it.
Deeper into his own mind he went, the passage taking him ever downward. He walked at first, then began to jog. He didn't understand much more of this world than he did the one outside, but now it was the only world he had.

From
The Regulators,
screenplay by Craig Goodis and Quentin Woolrich:

EXT.  MAIN STREET DAY

SHERIFF STREETER
watches
DEPUTY LAINE
yank
CANDY
to his feet. Behind them, in the adobe which houses Lushan's Chinese Laundry, a number of Chinese workers watch from the doorway, where they are huddled.

CANDY

What're you chinkies lookin' at?!

They don't recoil this time.

CHINESE LAUNDRYMAN

You! Clothes needee washee now, sure, sure!

The other
CHINESE
laugh. Even
STREETER
smiles a little.
CANDY
looks dazed. Can't believe
STREETER
has beaten him in a fair fight, can't believe these “Chink-Chink-China Boys” are laughing at him, can't believe any of this is happening.

STREETER

Best get on inside, boys.

The
LAUNDRYMEN
go back inside, but look out the windows.

STREETER
(
to
LAINE
)

Make sure he gets his hat, Josh. Wouldn't want him to have to go to jail without his hat.

Grinning,
LAINE
picks up
CANDY'S
pinned-back Johnny Reb cavalry hat, which fell off candy‘s head when
STREETER
knocked him over the hitching-rail. Now, grinning more broadly than ever,
DEPUTY LAINE
slams it down on the defeated thug's head. There is a puff of dust.