The Regulators

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 di

“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?”

“Well, no,” he says. “I didn’t.”

“And did you go back? Did you take him to Desperation so he could look for the Ponderosa Ranch or whatever?”

“We really couldn’t do that, Aud,” he says after another of those long silences. It was like waiting for a chess computer to catch up with a tough move. I don’t like to be talking this way about my brother, who I loved and will miss for the rest of my life, but I want you to understand how really strange that last conversation was. The truth? It was hardly like talking to my brother at all. I wish I could explain why that was, but I can’t.

“What do you mean, you couldn’t?” I ask him.

“Couldn’t means couldn’t,” he says. I think he was a little pissed at me but I didn’t mind; he sounded a little more like himself, anyway. “I wanted to be sure of getting to Carson City before dark, which we wouldn’t have done if I’d turned around and backtracked to that little town he was so excited about. Everyone kept telling me how treacherous 50 can be after sundown, and I didn’t want to put my family into a dangerous situation.” Like he’d been crossing the Gobi Desert instead of central Nevada.

And that’s all there is. We talked a little more and then he said, Take it easy, babe,” the way he always did, and that’s the last I’ll ever hear from him… in this world, at least. Just take it easy, babe, and then he disappeared down the barrel of some travelling asshole’s gun. All of them did, except for Seth. The police haven’t even been able to identify the caliber of the guns they used yet, did I tell you that? Life is so unfinished compared to books and movies! Like a fucking salad.

Still, that last conversation nags me. More than anything I keep coming back to that stupid cocktail-party laugh. Bill-my Bill-never laughed like that in his life.

I wasn’t the only one that noticed he was a little off the beam, either. His friend Joe, the one they were out there visiting, said the whole family seemed off, except for Seth. I had a conversation with him at the undertaker’s, while Herb was signing the transferral forms. Joe said he kept wondering if they had a virus, or the “flu. “Except for the little one,” he said. “He had lots of zip, always out there in the sandbox with his toys.”

Okay, I’ve written enough-way, way too much, probably. But think all of this over, would you? Put those good inventive brains of yours to work, because THIS IS REALLY BUGGIN” ME! Talking to Herb is no good; he calls it displaced grief. I thought about talking to J. Marinville from across the street-he seems both kind and perceptive-but I don’t know him well enough. So it has to be you. You see that, don’t you?

Love you, J-girl. Miss you. And sometimes, especially lately, I wish that we were young again, with all the dirty cards life can deal you still buried well down in the deck. Remember how it was in college, when we thought we’d live forever and only our stupid periods ever caught us by surprise?

I’ve got to stop or I’ll be crying again.

XXX (and tons more),

Chapter Five

Standing bare-chested at the bathroom mirror that afternoon before the world dropped into hell like a bucket on a broken string, Collie Entragian had made three large resolutions. The first was to quit going around unshaven on weekdays. The second was to quit drinking, at least until he got his life back on an even keel-he was doing far too much boozing, enough to make him uneasy, and it had to stop. The third was to stop procrastinating about looking for a job. There were three good security firms in the Columbus area, people he knew worked for two of them, and it was time to get cracking. He hadn’t died, after all; it was time to quit yowling and get on with his life.

Now, as the Hobart house burned like merry hell down the street and the two bizarre vans approached, all he cared about was holding on to that life. Mostly it was the black vehicle creeping along behind the pink one that galvanized him, that engaged every instinct to immediately relocate, possibly to Outer Mongolia. He didn’t catch more than a rain-blurred glimpse of the figures in the black van’s turret, but the van itself was enough. It looked like a hearse in a science-fiction movie, he thought.

“Inside!” he heard himself screaming-some part of him apparently still wanted to be in charge. “Everybody inside now!”

At that point he lost track of the people clustered around the late postman and his keening, shrieking wife-Mrs Geller, Susi, Susi’s friend, the Josephsons, Mrs Reed. Marinville, the writer, was a little closer, but Collie lost track of him, too. His focus shrank to the ones in front of Old Doc’s bungalow: Peter Jackson, the Sodersons, the store-clerk, the longhair from the Ryder truck, and Old Doc himself, who had retired from veterinary practice the year before with absolutely no clue that something like this was waiting for him.

“Go!” Collie screamed into Gary’s wet, gaping, half-drunk face. In that moment he wanted to kill the man, just haul off and kill him, set him on fire or something. “Go in the fucking HOUSE!” Behind him he could hear Marinville screaming the same thing, although it was presumably the Carvers” house he had in mind.

“What-” Marielle began, stepping to her husband’s side, then she looked past Gary and her eyes widened. Her splay-fingered hands rose to the sides of her face, her mouth dropped open and for one mad moment Collie expected her to drop to her knees and start singing “Mammy” like Al Jolson. She screamed instead. And as if that had been all their attackers had been waiting for, the gunfire began-harsh, compact explosions that no one could have mistaken for thunder.

The hippie guy grabbed Peter Jackson by Peter’s right wrist and tried to haul him away from his dead wife. Peter didn’t want to let go of her. He was still howling, and seemed completely unaware of what was happening around him. There was a KA-POW, as deafening as dynamite, followed by the sound of shattering glass. A KA-BAM, even louder, followed by a shriek of either fear or pain. Collie’s dough was on fear… this time, at least. A third report, and Billingsley’s ceramic German Shepherd disappeared from the forelegs up. Old Doc’s i