The Regulators

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?”

“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 inner front door stood open behind a screen with a scrolly, ornamental B in the middle of it. That dark rectangular hole-an opening which might lead to a cave of safety-looked a thousand miles away.

Collie ran for Peter first, with no thought of bravery so much as crossing his mind; it was just where he went first. Another deafening report, and he was tightening his back and buttocks against a potentially lethal hit even while his mind was informing him that one, at least, was thunder. The next one wasn’t. It was another whiplash KA-POW, and he felt something slap a groove in the air past his right ear.

First time shot at, he thought. Nine years as a cop before they stuck it to me and broke it off-four beat, four plainclothes, one IA-and never shot at until now.

Another report. One of Billingsley’s living-room windows blew in, billowing the white curtains like ghost-arms. Guns going off behind him like artillery now, just bam-bam-bam-bam, and he felt another hot load go hustling by, this one to the left of his head, and a black hole appeared in the siding below the broken window. To Collie the hole looked like a big startled eye. The next one hummed by his hip. He couldn’t believe he wasn’t dead, just couldn’t believe it. He could smell burning cedar shingles and had time to think about October afternoons spent in the backyard with his dad, burning leaves in smouldery aromatic piles.

He had been running for hours, he felt like a goddam ceramic duck in a goddam shooting gallery, and he hadn’t even reached Peter Jackson yet, what the fuck was going on here?

It’s been five seconds since the shooting started, the colder side of his mind informed him. Maybe only three.

The hippie guy was still yanking Peter’s wrist, and now the girl, Cynthia, muckled on above the hippie guy’s grip. But Peter was actively resisting them, Collie saw. Peter wanted to stay with his wife, who had chosen a divinely bad time to arrive back home.

Still picking up speed (and he could boogie pretty good when he really wanted to), Collie bent and hooked a hand under the kneeling man’s left armpit on the way by. Just call me the mail train, he thought. Peter thrashed backward, trying to stop the three of them from pulling him away from his wife. Collie’s hand began to slip. Oh fuck, he thought. Fuck us all. Sideways.

There was another shriek from behind him, at the Carvers”. In the corner of his eye he saw the pink van, now past them and speeding up, accelerating down the hill toward Hyacinth Street.

“Mary!” Peter screamed. “She’s hurt!”

“I got her, Pete, don’t worry, I got her!” Old Doc screamed cheerfully, and although he had no one-was, in fact, running past Mary’s sprawled body without so much as a glance down at it-Peter nodded, looking relieved. It was the tone, Collie thought. That crazily cheerful tone of voice.