The Regulators (9 page)

The shotgun goes off twice more, and at first Johnny can't see what this is about, because the blue van is in the way—he thinks he can hear shattering glass over the roar of the storm, but that's all. Then the van is retreating into the teeming, driving rain and he sees David Carver lying dead in his driveway in a litter of
glass from the blown-in picture window. There's a huge red puddle in the center of Carver's stomach, it is surrounded by gobbets of torn white flesh that looks like suet, and Johnny reckons that Carver's days as a postal worker—not to mention his days as a suburban car-washer—are over.

The blue van rolls rapidly up to the corner. By the time it gets there and turns right on Bear Street, it looks to Johnny like the mirage it should by all rights have been.

“Christ, lookit him!”
Brad screams, and runs into the street.

“Bradley, no!”
His wife grabs for him, but she's too late. Down the street, angling toward them, are the Reed twins.

Johnny walks out into the street on numb, unsteady legs. He raises a hand, sees that the fingertips are already white and pruney (he sees it all, yes indeed, and how could a guy in a
Close Encounters
alien mask possibly look
familiar
), and swops his soaked hair out of his eyes. Lightning jags across the sky like a bright crack in a dark mirror; thunder chases it. His feet are squelching in his sneakers, and he can smell damp gunsmoke. It'll be gone in another ten or fifteen seconds, he knows, driven to earth and then washed away by the pounding rain, but for the time being it's still there, as if to keep him from even
trying
to believe it was all just a hallucination . . . what his ex-wife Terry called “a brain-cramp.”

And yes, he can see Mary Jackson's pussy, that highly sought-after part of the female anatomy that
was known, in those dim old junior high school days, as “the bearded clam.” He doesn't want to be thinking this—doesn't want to be seeing what he's seeing, for that matter—but he's not in charge. All the barriers in his mind have fallen, the way they used to when he was writing (it was one of the reasons he had quit writing novels, not the only one, but a biggie), time's passage slowing as perception grows, widening until it's like being in a Sergio Leone movie where people die the way people swim in underwater ballets.

Little bitty baby Smitty,
he thought, again hearing the voice from the telephone.
I seen you bite your mommy's titty.
Why should that voice remind him of the man in the bizarre costume and even more bizarre almond-eyed alien mask?

“What in the name of Jesus H. Sodapop Christ happened?” a voice asks from beside him. The others have converged on David Carver, but Gary Soderson has come over here, onto Old Doc's lawn. With his pale face and scrawny body, he looks like a man suffering from mid-stage cholera. “Holy shit, Johnny! I see Paris, I see France, but I don't see her—”

“Shut up, you drunken asshole,” Johnny says. He looks to his left and sees the Reed twins and their mother, Kim Geller and her daughter, plus a redhead he doesn't know at all. They are gathered around David Carver's body like ballplayers clustered around an injured teammate. Gary's shrew of a wife is also there, but she's spied Gary and is now drifting in the direction of
chez
Billingsley. Then she stops, fascinated, as the Carvers' door smashes open and Kirstie comes flying
out into the pelting rain like the governess in an old gothic novel, shrieking her husband's name as the lightning flashes and the thunder rolls.

Slowly, like a stupid child who has been called upon to recite, Gary says:
“What
did you call me?” He isn't looking at Johnny, though, or even at the crowd on the Carvers' lawn; he is looking at what the dead woman's hiked-up skirt has revealed, storing it up for later reference (and, perhaps, conversation). Johnny suddenly feels an almost irresistible urge to punch the man in the nose.

“Never mind, just keep your mouth shut. I mean it.” He looks to his right, down the street, and sees Collie Entragian running this way. He appears to be wearing pink plastic shower-sandals. Behind him is a longhaired guy Johnny has never seen before, and the new girl from the market—Cynthia, her name is.

And behind them, quickly outdistancing old Tom Billingsley and closing in on Cynthia, wild-eyed, comes the street's resident expert on James Dickey and the New Southerns.

“Daddy!”
A piercing, desolate little-girl shriek: Ellen Carver.

“Get those kids out of here!” Brad Josephson, hard and commanding, God bless him, but Johnny doesn't even look in that direction. Peter Jackson is coming, and there is something here he probably has even less business seeing than he and Gary Soderson, even though Peter has surely seen it before and they haven't. An English teacher's riddle if ever there was one, he thinks. Another crazy old punchline rockets
through his head:
Hey mister, your sign fell down!
He can't even remember the fucking joke it came from. He takes one more look around to make sure no one but Gary is paying attention to Mary, and no one is. This is surely a miracle that won't last long. He bends down, turns Mary's hip—how heavy she is now that she's dead, how Christing
heavy
—and her legs fall together. Water runs down the side of one white thigh like rain on a tombstone. He yanks the hem of her skirt, deliberately turned so his action is blocked to the people coming up the hill. Already he can hear Peter bellowing “Mary?
Mary?
” He will have seen her car, of course, the Lumina with its nose against the stake fence.

“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 with 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.