The Regulators

“Bugger-doody!” the little scamp in the wagon cried, and made a rather mature jacking-off gesture at Peter with one hand.

“That’ll be enough of that, big guy,” David said indulgently, without turning around. His buttocks worked back and forth in the too-small bathing suit. To Peter they looked like biscuits on pistons.

“What happened?” Tom asked in his gruff voice as the wagon passed by.

Peter tuned out Carver’s reply (David, mindful of his wife’s concern, kept moving as he filled in the Doc) and looked up toward the corner for any sign of his wife’s Lumina. He saw no moving vehicles at all, only a parked van just this side of the Abelsons” house on Bear Street. It was painted a yellow so bright it all but screamed. He supposed that part of its brightness derived from the way the light was fading as the clouds advanced, but still, looking at it made his eyes ache. Must be kids, he thought. No one else would want something that color. It hardly looked like a real vehicle at all, more like something out of a Star Trek movie, or-

An idea suddenly hit him. Not a very good one.

“Dave?”

Carver looked back, his sunburned belly hanging over the front of his bathing suit, scales of soap from his car-washing operation drying on it.

What was he driving, the guy who shot Gary?”

“A red van.”

“That’s right,” Ralphie chipped in. “Red like Tracker Arrow.”

Peter hardly heard this. He was stuck on the word van, feeling his own stomach tighten up like something attached to a crank.

“The reddest red van you ever saw,” Kirsten added. “I saw it, too. I was looking out the window and I saw it go by. David, will you come on?

“Sure,” he said, and began pulling the wagon again. When David turned away, Peter (his momentary disquiet passing) suddenly stuck his tongue out at Ralphie, who just happened to be looking at him. Ralphie looked comically surprised.

Old Doc strolled down to Peter, hands still in his pockets. Thunder rolled. They looked up and saw dark shelves of clouds overspreading Poplar Street’s portion of the sky. Lightning stabbed forks at downtown Columbus.

“Going to rain a bitch,” the veterinarian said. His hair was thin, white, baby-fine. “I hope they’ll get the boy’s body decently covered before it comes.” He paused, took one hand out of his pocket, and passed it slowly over his brow, as if to soothe away the beginnings of a headache. “Terrible thing. He was a fine lad. Played ball.”

“I know.” Peter thought of the way Gary had laughed when he, Peter, had told him that next year it would be his turn to howl at shortstop, and felt a sudden pain in his stomach, the organ (not the heart, as the poets had always claimed) most attuned to humankind’s tender emotions. Suddenly it was all perfectly real to him. Gary Ripton wasn’t going to be the Wentworth Hawks” starting shortstop next summer; Gary Ripton wasn’t going to swing in through the back door tonight, asking what was for supper. Gary Ripton had flown off to Never-Never Land, leaving his shadow behind. He was one of the Lost Boys now.

Thunder bammed again, the sound so close and splintery this time that Peter jumped. “Look,” he said to Tom. “I’ve got a big sheet of plastic in my garage. The size of a car-cover, almost. If I got it, would you come down the street and help me cover him with it?”

“Officer Entragian might not like that,” the old man said.

“Screw Officer Entragian, he’s no more a cop than I am,” Peter said. “They fired his ass last year for graft.”

“The other police, though, when they come-”

“I don’t care about them, either,” Peter said. He wasn’t crying, exactly, but his voice had thickened and was no longer quite steady. “He was a nice kid, a really lovely kid, and some drugrunner shot him off his bike like an Indian off his pony in a John Ford movie. It’s going to rain and he’ll get soaked. I’d like to tell his mother I did what I could. So do you want to help me or not?”

“Well, since you put it like that,” Tom said. He clapped Peter on the shoulder. “Come on, Teach, let’s do it.”

“Good man.”

Kim Geller slept through the whole thing. She was still sleeping on the coverlet of her bed when Susi and Debbie Ross-the redhead with whom Gary Ripton had been so taken-came rushing into her bedroom and shook her awake. She sat up, muzzy and feeling almost hungover (sleeping on dog-hot days like this one was almost always a mistake, but sometimes you just couldn’t help it), trying to follow what the girls were saying and losing the thread of it almost at once. They seemed to be telling her that someone had been shot, shot on Poplar Street, and that was of course fantastic.

Still, when they got her over to the window, it seemed unde niable that something had happened. The Reed twins and Cammie, their mother, were standing at the end of their driveway. The Lush and the Bitch, known as the Sodersons in politer circles, were standing right in the middle of the street up by the end of the block… although now Marielle was tugging Gary in the direction of their house, and he seemed to be going. Beyond them, standing together on the sidewalk, were the Josephsons. And, across the way, she saw Peter Jackson and old man Billingsley coming out of the Jackson garage, carrying a great big piece of blue plastic between them. The wind was starting to rise, and the sheet of plastic was rippling.

Everyone on the street, just about. Everyone that was home, anyhow. It was no good trying to get a look at what they were gawking at from here, either. The side of the house cut off any view down the block to the corner.

Kimberly Geller turned back to the girls, trying hard to clear the cobwebs out of her mind. The girls were dancing from foot to foot as if they had to go to the bathroom; Debbie, she saw, was snapping her hands open and closed. They were both pale and excited, a combination Kim didn’t care for very much. But the idea that someone had been killed… they had to be wrong about that… didn’t they?

“Now tell me what happened,” she said. “No faking.”

“Someone killed Gary Ripton, we told you!” Susi cried impatiently, as if her mother were the dumbest thing in the world… which, at this particular moment, Kim felt herself to be. “Come on, Mom! We can watch the police come!”

“I want to see him again before someone covers him up!” Debbie yelled suddenly. She turned and raced off down the stairs. Susi paused for a moment, looking dubious-looking almost sick, in fact-then turned and followed her friend.

“Come on, Mom!” she called back over her shoulder, and then was thundering down the stairs, this spring’s Rose Queen at the high school prom and every bit as graceful as a water buffalo, making the windows rattle and the overhead light-fixture tingle.

Kim walked slowly across to the bed and slipped her bare feet into her sandals, feeling slow and late and confused.

“And you ran all the way down there?” Belinda Josephson asked for the third time. This seemed to be the part of the story she couldn’t quite get straight. “Fat as you are?”

“Shit, woman, I’m not fat,” Brad said. “Large is what I am.”

“Honey, that’s what they’ll put on your death certificate, if you do many more of those hundred-yard dashes,” Belinda said. “'The victim died of terminal largeness.'” The words were nagging, the tone was not. She rubbed the back of his neck as she spoke, feeling the chilled sweat there.

He pointed down the street. “Look. Pete Jackson and Old Doc.”

“What are they doing?”

“Going to cover up the boy, I think,” he said, and started in that direction.

She yanked him back at once. “No you don’t, my friend. No sir, no way. You’ve had your trip downstreet for the day.”

He gave her what Belinda thought of as his Don’t Diss Me Woman look-a pretty good one for a Boston-raised black man whose chief knowledge of ghetto life came from TV-but made no argument. Perhaps he would have if Johnny Marinville hadn’t come down his walk just then. More thunder boomed. A steady breeze was blowing now. It felt cold to Belinda-showery-cold. There were purplish thunderheads rolling in overhead, ugly but not scary. What was scary-a little, anyway-was the yellow sky off to the southwest. She hoped to God they weren’t going to see a tornado funnel between now and dark; that would add the final touch to a day that had gone about as wrong as any day in recent memory.

She supposed that the rain would drive people indoors once it started, but for now just about everybody on the street was out, gawking down the hill at Entragian’s house. As she watched, Kim Geller came out of 243, looked around, then walked one house up to join Cammie Reed on the Reeds” front porch. The Reed twins (the stuff of which harmless housewife-fantasies were made, in Belinda Josephson’s humble opinion), along with Susi Geller and a dishy redhead Belinda didn’t know, were standing on the lawn. Davey Reed was kneeling and appeared to be wiping his feet with his shirt, God knew why-

Of course you know why, she told herself. There’s a body down there, all right, there really is, and Dave Reed vomited at the sight of it. Vomited and got some on himself, poor kid.

She saw people in front of every house or from every house except the old Hoba rt place, which was empty, the ex-cop’s house, and 247, the third house down on their side of the street. The Wyler place. There was a bad-luck family if there had ever been one. Neither Audrey nor the poor orphan child she was raising (not that a boy like Seth could ever exactly be raised, Belinda supposed; that was just the hell of it) were outside. Gone for the day? Maybe, but she was sure she’d seen Audrey as late as noon, lackadaisically setting up her lawn sprinkler. Belinda mulled this over and decided she had the time about right.

She remembered thinking that Audrey was letting herself go-both the shell top and the blue shorts she’d been wearing had looked dingy, and why the woman had ever dyed her perfectly nice brunette hair that horrible shade of purplish-red, Belinda would never know. If it was supposed to make her look young, it was a miserable failure. It needed washing, too-had a greasy, clumped-up look. As a teenager, Belinda had occasionally wished she were white-the white girls always seemed to be having more fun, and to be more relaxed-but now that she was pushing on toward fifty and menopause, she was very glad to be black. White women seemed to need so much more putting together as they went on. Maybe their glue was just not naturally strong.

“I tried to call the cops,” Johnny Marinville was saying. He stepped out into the street as if he meant to cross over to the Josephsons, then stopped. “My phone…” He trailed off, seemingly unsure of how to continue. Belinda found this extremely odd. She’d have thought this was one fellow who would keep on rattling even on his own deathbed; God would have to reach down and carry him through the golden door just to shut him up.

“Your phone what?” Brad asked.

Johnny paused yet a moment longer, seeming to sort through a variety of responses, then settled on a brief one. “It’s dead. You want to try yours?”

“I can,” Brad said, “but I imagine Entragian’s already called them from the store. He pretty much took over.”

“Did he?” Marinville said thoughtfully, and looked down the hill. “Did he indeed?” If he saw the two men with the rippling tarp between them and understood what they were up to, he didn’t say. He seemed lost in his own musings.

Movement caught Belinda’s eye. She looked up Bear Street and saw an olive green Lumina approaching the intersection. Mary Jackson’s car. It passed the yellow van parked near the corner, then slowed.

Made it back before the rain, good for you, Belinda thought. Although they were far from bosom buddies, she liked Mary Jackson as much as anyone on the street. She was funny and she had a strutty, no-bullshit way about her… although just lately she seemed preoccupied a lot of the time. It hadn’t gone to her looks like it had with Audrey Wyler, though. In fact Mary had just lately seemed to be blooming, like a dry flowerbed after a shower.

The pay-phone was by the newspaper rack, which was empty except for one lonely left-over copy of USA Today’s weekend edition and a couple of