The Regulators

a high wind. The Lumina’s tires scream, and there is a loud dry bang as the right front blows out. The car veers left, the flat tire flapping, the hubcap running off the rim and streaking down the street like the Reed kids” Frisbee.

Johnny sees everything, hears everything, feels everything; input floods him and his mind insists on lining up each crazy increment, as if something coherent were happening here, something which could actually be narrated.

The stormy sky is coming apart, starting to release its cold reservoir. He sees spots darkening all over the sidewalk, feels drops hitting the back of his neck in an increasing tempo as Brad Josephson shouts “What the Christ!” behind him.

The van is still on the Lumina’s ass, bulldozing it, digging into its flimsy New Age back deck; there is a hideous metallic squall and then a thunk! as the trunk latch lets go and the lid flies up, disclosing a spare tire, some old newspapers, and an orange styrofoam cooler. The Lumina’s front end bounces up over the curb. The car crosses the sidewalk and comes to rest with its bumper against the fence between Billingsley’s house and the next one down the hill, Mary’s own.

Lightning-it’s close, very close-paints the street a momentary lurid violet, thunder follows like a mortar barrage, the wind begins to pick up, hissing in the trees, and the rain starts coming in sheets. Visibility is closing down fast, but there’s enough for him to see the yellow van picking up speed, racing away into the rain, and to see the Lumina’s driver’s side door open. A leg sticks out and then Mary Jackson emerges, looking as if she has absolutely no idea of where she is.

Brad is gripping his arm now with a very large and very wet hand, he’s asking if Johnny saw that, if he saw it, that yellow van deliberately rammed her, but Johnny barely hears him. Johnny can now see another van, this one with scooped sides and metal-flake blue paint. It comes looming out of the storm like the snout of a prehistoric beast, the rain running in rivers down a steep polarized windshield on which no wipers move. And suddenly he knows what is going to happen.

“Mary!” he screams at the dazed woman staggering away from her car on high heels, but another brazen cannonade of thunder drowns out his cry. She doesn’t even look his way. Rain is running down her face like extravagant tears in a South American soap opera.

“MARY, GET DOWN!” screaming so loud this time he thinks his vocal cords may rupture. “GET UNDER THE CAR!”

Then the windshield of the blue van goes down. Slides down. Yes. That steep windshield slides into the front of the van like the front of a glass elevator, and behind it is darkness, and in the darkness there are ghosts. Ghosts. Yes. Two of them. Surely them must be ghosts; they are beings as brightly gray as a fog-shrouded landscape just before the sun burns its way through. The one behind the wheel is wearing a Confederate States of America uniform-Johnny is almost sure of this-but it is not human. Beneath its pinned-back cavalry hat is a bulging forehead, weird almond-shaped eyes, and a mouth that pulses out from its face like a fleshy horn. Its companion, although also a bright and illusory gray, at least looks human. He wears a buckskin trapper’s shirt with a bandolier belt across it. His face is stubbled with what might be a week’s growth of beard; the bristles look very black against the unnatural silver of his skin. He is standing, this fellow, and in his hands is a heavy double-barrelled shotgun. Trapper John raises it as Johnny watches, leaning out into a teeming, streaming world full of colors he does not in the slightest share, and he is grinning, lips drawing back to reveal a mouthful of tangled teeth which have clearly never known a dentist’s ministrations. This dreamlike creature looks like something from a horror movie about inbred cretins living far back in some swamp.

No he doesn’t, Johnny thinks. He looks like something from a movie, all right, but not that one.

“MARY!” he screams, and beside him, Brad joins in: “YO, MARY, LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU!”

But she never sees. The guy in the buckskin shirt opens up, firing three times, pumping his weapon rapidly after each shot and then reshouldering it. The first round goes wild, as far as Johnny can see. The second erases the Lumina’s radio aerial. The third blows off the left side of Mary Jackson’s head. She staggers away from her car and toward Old Doc’s house nevertheless, blood pouring down her neck and soaking the left side of her blouse, her hair briefly burning in the rain (he sees this, he sees everything), and then for a moment she turns in Johnny’s direction and looks at him with her one remaining eye and the lightning flashes, filling that eye with fire; in the last second or two of her life she is empty of everything but electricity, it seems. Then she stumbles out of one of her high heels and falls backward, swandives into the sound of thunder, the brief low flames in her hair going out, her head still smoking like the tip of an indifferently butted cigarette. She sprawls near the ceramic German Shepherd on Billingsley’s lawn, the one with his name and the number of his house on it, and as her legs relax apart Johnny sees something which is terrible and sad and inexplicable, all at the same time: a dark shadow that can only be one thing. Grotesquely, the punchline of an old joke goes on for a moment in his head like a neon sign: I don’t know about the other two, but the guy in the middle looks like Willie Nelson. He laughs out loud in the rain. Peter Jackson’s accountant wife has just been killed by a ghost, shot from a van piloted by another ghost (this one the ghost of an alien in a Sesech uniform), and the lady has died drawerless. None of this is funny, but he laughs just the same. Maybe to keep himself from screaming. He’s afraid that if he starts doing that, he won’t be able to stop.

Now the shining creature behind the wheel of the blue van turns toward him and for just a moment Johnny sees it looking at him, marking him with its huge almond eyes, and he has a sense of having seen this thing before, insanity, of course, but the feeling is nevertheless very strong. It is only for a moment and then the van is past.

But he saw me, all right, Johnny thinks. That thing in the mask (it must have been a mask) saw me, and it marked me, the way you might turn down the corner of a book-page for later reference.

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 look 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, on to 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 Johnny 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