The Regulators

Shoppers. Last week’s. It gave Collie Entragian a queer, thoughtful feeling to realize that the boy who would have restocked the rack with a supply of the current issue was lying dead on his lawn. And meanwhile, this lousy convenience-store pay-telephone-

He slammed it into its cradle and walked back to the counter, using the towel to wipe the last of the shaving cream from his face. The cutiepie with the tu-tone hair and the aging hippie-type from the Ryder truck were both watching him, and he was acutely aware that he was minus his shirt. He felt more like a cashiered cop than ever.

“Damn pay-phone doesn’t work,” he told the girl. He saw she was wearing a little name-badge pinned to her smock. “Don’t you have an out-of-order sign, Cynthia?”

“Yeah, but it was working fine at one o’clock,” she said. “The bakery guy used it to call his girlfriend.” She rolled her eyes, then said something which Collie found almost surreal, under the circumstances: “Did you lose your quarter?”

He had, but it didn’t much matter, under the circumstances. He looked through the E-Z Stop’s door and saw Peter Jackson and the retired vet from up the street, approaching his lawn with a large piece of blue plastic. It was obvious that they meant to cover the body. Collie started toward the door, meaning to tell them to stand the hell clear, that was an evidence scene they were getting ready to screw around with, and then the thunder rolled again-the loudest blast so far, loud enough to make Cynthia cry out in surprise.

Fuck, he thought. Let them go ahead. It’s going to rain, anyhow.

Yes, maybe that would be best. The rain would very likely come before the cops got here (Collie didn’t even hear any sirens yet), and that would play hell with any hypothetical forensics. So, better to cover it… but he still had a dismaying feeling of events racing out of his control. And even that, he realized, was an illusion: nothing about the situation had ever been in his control to start with. He was, basically, just another citizen of Poplar Street. Not that that didn’t have its merits; if he fucked up the procedure, they couldn’t very well put it in his jacket, could they?

He opened the door, stepped out, and cupped his hands around his mouth so as to be heard above the rising wind. “Peter! Mr Jackson!”

Jackson looked over, face set, expecting to be told to quit what he was doing.

“Don’t touch the body!” he called. “Do not touch the body! Just kind of shake that thing down over him like it was a bedspread! Have you got that?”

“Yes!” Peter called. The vet was also nodding.

“There are some cement blocks in my garage, stacked up by the back wall!” Collie yelled. “The door’s unlocked! Get them and use them to weight down the tarp so it won’t blow away!” They were both nodding now, and Collie felt a little better.

We can stretch it to cover his bike, as well!” the old man called. “Should we?”

“Yes!” he called back, then had another idea. “There’s a piece of plastic in the garage, too-in the corner. You can use it to cover the dog, if you don’t mind carrying some more blocks.”

Jackson flashed him a thumb-and-forefinger circle, then the two of them started for the garage, leaving the tarp behind. Collie hoped they would get it spread and anchored before the wind strengthened enough to blow it away. He went back inside to ask Cynthia if there was a store phone-there had to be, of course-and saw she had already put it on the counter for him.

“Thanks.”

He picked it up, heard the dial-tone, tapped four numbers, then had to stop and shake his head and laugh at himself.

“What’s wrong?” the hippie-type asked.

“Nothing.” If he told the guy he’d just dialled the first four numbers of his old squadroom-like a retired horse clip-clopping back to the old firebarn-he wouldn’t understand. He tapped the cutoff button and dialled 911 instead.

The phone rang once in his ear… and it did ring, as if he had called a residence. Collie frowned. What you got when you dialled 911-unless they had changed it since the days when listening to the recordings had been part of his job-was a high toneless bleep sound.

Well, they did change it, that’s all, he thought. Made it a little more user-friendly.

It started to ring again and then was picked up. Only instead of getting the 911 robot, telling him what button to press for what emergency, he got soft, wet, snuffly breathing. What the hell-?

“Hello?”

“Trick or treat,” a voice responded. A young voice and somehow eerie. Eerie enough to send a scamper of gooseflesh up his back. “Smell my feet, give me something good to eat. If you don’t, I don’t care, you can smell my underwear.” This was followed by a high, adenoidal giggle.

“Who is this?”

“Don’t call here no more, partner,” the voice said. “Tak!”

The click in his ear was deafening, so deafening the girl heard it, too, and screamed. Not the phone, he thought. Thunder. She’s screaming at thunder. But the guy with the long hair was breaking for the door like his hair was on fire and his ass was catching, the phone was dead in his hand, as dead as the pay-telephone had been even after he dropped his quarter, and when the sound came again, he recognized it for what it was: not thunder but more gunfire.

Collie ran for the door, too.

Mary Jackson had left the accounting firm where she worked part-time not at two but at eleven. She hadn’t gone to the Crossroads Mall, though. She had gone to the Columbus Hotel. There she had met a man named Gene Martin, and for the next three hours she had done everything for him a woman could possibly do for a man except cut his toenails. She supposed she would have done that, too, if she had been asked. And now here she was, almost home and looking (at least as far as she could tell from the rearview mirror) pretty much put together… but she was going to have to get into the shower fast, before Peter got too good a look at her, maybe. And, she reminded herself, she would need to take a pair of panties out of her top drawer to throw into the hamper along with her skirt and blouse. The pair she had been wearing-what was left of them-were currently residing under the bed in room 203. Gene Martin, a wolf in accountant’s clothing if ever there had been one, had ripped them right off her. Ooo you beast, quoth the maiden fair.

The question was, what was she doing? And what was she going to do? She had loved Peter for the nine years of their marriage, even more after the miscarriage than before, if that was possible, and she still loved him. That didn’t change the fact that she already wanted to be with Gene again, doing things she had never even considered doing with Peter. Guilt was freezing half of her mind, lust was frying the other half, and in between, in a kind of shrinking twilight zone, was the reasonable, good-humored, rational woman she had always considered herself to be. She was having an adulterous affair, and the guy she was having it with was just as damned married as she was; she was on her way home to a good man who suspected nothing (She was sure he didn’t, prayed he didn’t, of course he didn’t, how could he?) with no underwear on under her skirt, she was still sore from their adventures, she didn’t quite know how all this had started or how she could want to continue anything so stupid and sordid, goddam Gene Martin didn’t have a brain in his head, except of course it wasn’t his head she was interested in, she could have cared less about his head, and what was she going to do? She didn’t know. She only knew one thing for sure, and that was how drug addicts felt, and she would never put them down again in her life. Just say no? Mother, please.

She drove with these chaotic thoughts swimming in her mind, the suburban streets passing like landmarks in a dream, hoping only that Peter wouldn’t be home when she got there, that he would have maybe gone over to Milly’s on the Square for ice cream (or maybe to Santa Fe to visit his mother for a few weeks, that would be great, that would maybe give her a chance to work through this awful fever). She didn’t notice the way the afternoon was darkening or the fact that many of the cars that passed her on the 290 were using their headlights; she didn’t hear the thunder or see the lightning. Neither did she see the yellow van parked near the corner of Bear Street and Poplar when she passed it.

What jerked her out of her reverie was seeing Brad and Belinda Josephson out in front of their house. Johnny Marinville was with them. Farther down the block she saw more people: David Carver, wearing a bathing suit that looked almost obscenely tight, standing on his walk, hands planted on his meaty hips… the Reed twins… Cammie, their mother… Susi Geller and a friend on their lawn with Kim Geller standing behind them…

A wild thought came to her: they knew. All of them knew. They were waiting for her, they were going to help Peter hang her from a sour apple tree or perhaps stone her the way the townspeople had stoned the woman in that Shirley Jackson story she’d read back in high school.

Don’t be stupid, the part of her that still belonged to her said. That part was dismayingly small these days, but it was still there. It’s not all about you, Mare; no matter what shit you’ve been rolling in, the world still doesn’t revolve just around you, so why don’t you just lighten up a little? You probably wouldn’t be half so paranoid if you weren’t riding around with no-

Oh shit. Was that Peter down at the end of the block? She couldn’t tell for sure, but she thought so. Peter and Old Doc from next door. They seemed to be covering something on the lawn of the house across from the little store.

Thunder bammed this time hard enough to make her jump and gasp. The first drops of rain spattered on to the glass of the windshield, sounding like flecks of metal. She realized she had been sitting here at the corner with the engine idling for… well, she didn’t know just how long, but for quite a while. The Josephsons and Johnny Marinville must have thought she’d lost her wits. Except the world really didn’t revolve just around her; they weren’t paying her any attention at all, she saw as she turned the corner. Belinda had given her that one little glance, and now she and the rest of them were looking back down the street again, at whatever her husband and old Billingsley were doing. At whatever they were covering.

Trying to see for herself, groping for the windshield wiper knob as more raindrops-big ones-began to spatter the glass, she didn’t have any idea that the yellow space-age van had followed her on to Poplar Street until it rear-ended her.

From Playthings, The International Merchandising Magazine of the Toy Industry, January 1994 (Vol. 94, No. 2), p. 96. Excerpted from Licensing ’94: An Overview, by John P. Muller:

Chapter Four

POPLAR STREET/4:09 P.M./JULY 15 1996

He sees everything.

That has been both his blessing and his curse in all his years-the world still falls on his eye as it falls upon the eye of a child, evenly, unchosen, as impartial as the weight of light.

He sees Mary’s Lumina at the corner and knows she is trying to puzzle out what she’s seeing-too many people standing in stiff, watching attitudes which don’t jibe with a lazy late-afternoon in July. When she starts to roll again, he sees the yellow van which is now behind her also starting to roll, hears another vicious crack of thunder, and feels the first cold splashes of rain on his hot forearms. As she starts down the street, he sees the yellow van suddenly speed up and knows what’s going to happen, but he still can’t believe it.

Watch out, old boy, he thinks. You get too busy watching her and you’re apt to get run down like a squirrel in the road.

He steps back, up on the sidewalk in front of the Josephsons” house, head still turned to the left, eyes wide. He sees Mary behind the wheel of her Lumina, but she isn’t looking at him-she’s looking down the street. Probably recognized her husband, the distance wasn’t too far to do that, probably wondering what he’s doing, and she isn’t seeing Johnny Marinville, isn’t seeing the weird yellow van with the polarized glass windows looming behind her, either.

“Mary, look out!” he yells. Brad and Belinda, now mounting their front steps, wheel around. At the same moment, the van’s high, blunt front end crashes into the rear of the Lumina, splintering the taillights, snapping the bumper and crimping the trunk. He sees Mary’s head snap back and then forward, like the head of a flower on a long stalk pushed back and forth by