The Regulators

Chapter Four

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 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 pouring rain. Marielle Soderson passes behind Johnny and joins her husband on the Billingsley lawn. Johnny decides that if Brad and Belinda Josephson can be Hansel and Gretel in Spike’s new G-rated joint, Marielle can play the witch.

It’s like the last chapter of an Agatha Christie, he thinks, when Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot explains everything, even how the murderer got out of the locked sleeping-car berth after doing the deed. We’re all here except for Frank Geller and Charlie Reed, who are still at work. It’s a regular block-party.

Except, he realizes, that’s not quite true. Audrey Wyler isn’t here, and neither is her nephew. The edge of something glimmers in his mind at that. He has a flash memory-the sound of a kid with a cold, he had thought-but before he can do more than start to reach for it, wanting to see if it’s connected to anything (it feels connected, God knows why), Collie Entragian comes over to Mary’s car and grabs his shoulder, hard enough to hurt, with one dripping hand. He’s looking past Johnny, at the Carver place.

“What-two?-how-Christ!”

“Mr Entragian… Collie…” He tries to sound reasonable, tries not to grimace. “You’re breaking my shoulder.”

“Oh. Sorry, man. But-” His eyes go back and forth from the shotgunned woman to the shotgunned man, David Carver with tendrils of blood washing down his white, blubbery sides in tendrils. Entragian can’t seem to pick one to settle on, and consequently looks like a guy watching a tennis match.

Your shirt,” Johnny says, thinking what a stupendous non-starter of a conversational gambit this is. “You forgot to put it on.”

“I was shaving,” Collie replies, and runs his hands through his short, dripping hair. The gesture expresses-as probably nothing else could-a mind that has progressed beyond confusion to a state of almost total distraction. Johnny finds it strangely endearing. “Mr Marinville, do you have the slightest clue what’s happening here?”

Johnny shakes his head. He only hopes that, whatever it was, it’s now over.

Then Peter arrives, sees his wife lying in front of Billingsley’s ceramic German Shepherd, and howls. The sound brings out fresh goosebumps on Johnny’s wet arms. Peter falls on his knees beside his wife just as Pie Carver fell on her knees beside her husband, and oh gosh, does John Edward Marinville have a case of Dem Ole Kozmic Vietnam Blues again or what? All we need, he thinks, is Hendrix on the soundtrack, playing “Purple Haze”.

Peter grabs her and Johnny sees Gary watching with a kind of frozen fascination, waiting for Peter to roll her body into his arms. Johnny can read Soderson’s thoughts as if they were printed on tickertape and running across his brow: What’s he going to make of it? When he rolls her over and her legs flop apart and he sees what he sees, what’s he going to make of it?

Or maybe it’s no big deal, maybe she always goes around that way.

“MARY!” Peter cries. He doesn’t turn her (thank God for small favors) but lifts her upper body, getting her into a sitting position. He screams again-no word this time, no vocal shape at all, just a streamer of amazed grief-as he sees the state of her head, half the face gone, half the hair burned off.

“Peter-” Old Doc begins, and the n the sky is split by a long lance of electricity flowing down the rain. Johnny spins around, dazzled but still (oh yes of course you bet) seeing perfectly well. Thunder rips the street before the lightning can even begin to fade, so loud that it feels like hands clapped to the sides of his head. Johnny sees the lightning strike the abandoned Hobart place which stands between the cop’s house and the Jacksons” place. It demolishes the decorative chimney William Hobart added last year before his problems started and he decided to put the house up for sale. The lightning also ignites the shake roof. Before the thunder has finished pummelling them, before Johnny even has a chance to identify the flash-fried smell in his nostrils as ozone, the deserted house is wearing a crown of flames. It burns furiously in the driving rain, like an optical illusion.

“Ho-lee shit,” Jim Reed says. He’s standing in the Carver doorway with Ralphie still in his arms. Ralphie, Johnny sees, has reverted to thumb-sucking. And Ralphie is the only one (besides Johnny himself, that is) who isn’t still looking at the burning house. He is looking up the hill, and now Johnny sees his eyes widen. He takes his thumb out of his mouth, and before he begins to shriek in terror Johnny hears two clear words… and again, they seem hauntingly, maddeningly familiar. Like words heard in a dream.

“Dream Floater,” the boy says.

And then, as if the words were some sort of magical incantation, his waxy, unnatural limpness departs. He begins to scream in fear, and to twist in young Jim Reed’s arms. Jim is caught by surprise and drops the boy, who lands on his ass. That must hurt like a bastard, Johnny thinks, heading in that direction without even thinking about it, but the kid shows no sign of pain; only fear. His bulging eyes are still staring up the street as he begins paddling frantically with his feet, sliding back into the house on his bottom.

Johnny, now standing on the edge of the Carver driveway, turns to look, and sees two more vans swinging around the corner from Bear Street. The one in the lead is candy pink and so streamlined it looks to Johnny like a giant Good amp; Plenty with polarized windows. On the roof is a radar dish in the shape of a Valentine heart. Under other circumstances it might look cute, but now it only looks bizarre. Curved aerodynamic shapes protrude on either side of the Good amp; Plenty van. They look like lateral fins or maybe even stubby wings.

Behind this vehicle, which may or may not be called Dream Floater, comes a long black vehicle with a bulging, dark-tinted windshield and a toadstool-shaped housing, also black, on the roof. This ebony nightmare is chased with zigzag bolts of chrome that look like barely disguised Nazi SS insignia.

The vehicles begin to pick up speed, their engines purring with a humming, cyclic bent.

A large porthole irises open in the left side of the pink vehicle. And on top of the black van, which looks like a hearse trying to transform itself into a locomotive, the side of the toadstool slides back, revealing two figures with shotguns. One is a bearded human being. He, like the alien driving the blue van, appears to be wearing the tags and tatters of a Civil War uniform. The thing beside him is wearing another sort of uniform altogether: black, high-collared, dressed with silver buttons. As with the black-and-chrome van, there’s something Nazi-ish about the uniform, but this isn’t what catches Johnny’s eyes and freezes his vocal cords so he is at first unable to cry a warning.

Above the high collar, there seems to be only darkness. He has no face, Johnny thinks in the second before the creatures in the pink van and the dead black one open fire. He has no face, that thing has no face at all.

It occurs to Johnny Marinville, who sees everything, that he may have died; that this may be hell.

Letter from Audrey Wyler (Wentworth, Ohio) to Janice Conroy (Plainview, New York), dated August 18, 1994:

Dear Janice, Thanks so much for your call. The note of condolence, too, of course, but you’ll never know how good it was to have your voice in my ear last night-like a drink of cool water on a hot day. Or maybe I mean like a sane voice when you’re stuck in the booby hatch!

Did any of what I said on the phone make sense to you? I can’t remember for sure. I’m off the tranks-“Fuck that shit,” as we used to say back in college-but that’s only been for the last couple of days, and even with Herb pitching in and helping like mad, a lot of the world has been so much scrambled eggs. Things started being that way when Bill’s friend, Joe Calabrese, called and said my brother and his wife and the two older kids had been killed, shotgunned in a drive-by. The man, who I’ve never met in my life, was crying, hard to understand, and much too shaken to be diplomatic. He kept saying he was so ashamed, and I ended up trying to comfort him, and all the time I’m thinking, There’s got to be a mistake here, Bill can’t be dead, my brother was supposed to be around for as long as I needed him.” I still wake up in the night thinking, “Not Bill, it’s just a goof-up, it can’t be Bill.” The only thing in my whole life I can remember that felt this crazy was when I was a kid and everybody came down with the flu at the same time.

Herb and I flew out to San Jose to collect Seth, then flew back to Toledo on the same plane as the bodies. They store them in the cargo hold, did you know that? Me neither. Nor wanted to.

The funeral was one of the most horrible experiences of my life-probably the most horrible. Those four coffins-my brother, my sister-in-law, my niece and my nephew-lined up in a row, first in the church and then at the cemetery, where they sat over the holes on those awful chrome rails. Wanna hear something totally nuts? During the whole graveside service I kept thinking of my honeymoon in Jamaica. They have speed-bumps in the road that they call sleeping policemen. And for some reason that’s how I started thinking of the coffins, as sleeping policemen. Well, I told you I’ve been crazy, didn’t I? Ohio’s Valium Queen of 1994, that’s me.

The service at the church was packed-Bill and June had a lot of friends-and everyone was bawling. Except for poor little Seth, of course, who can’t. Or doesn’t. Or who knows? He just sat there between me and Herb with two of his toys on his lap-a pink van he calls “Dweem Fwoatah” and the action figure that goes with it, a sexy little redhead named Cassandra Styles. The toys are from a show called MotoKops 2200, and the names of the damned MotoKops vans (excuse me, the MotoKops Power Wagons, lah-di-dah) are among the few things Seth says which are actually understandable (“Doughnuts buy “em for me” is another one; also “Seth go potty”, which means you’re supposed to go in there with him-he’s trained but very weird about his bathroom habits).

I hope he didn’t understand the service meant the rest of his family is dead, gone from him forever. Herb is sure he doesn’t know (“The kid doesn’t even know where he is,” Herb says), but I wonder. That’s the hell of autism, isn’t it? You always wonder, you never really know, they’re broadcasting but God hooked them up with a scrambler-phone and nothing’s coming through at the receiving end but gibberish.

Tell you one thing-I’ve gained a new respect for Herb Wyler in the last couple of weeks. He arranged EVERYTHING, from the planes to the obituaries in both the Columbus Dispatch and Toledo Blade. And to take Seth in as he has, without a word of complaint-not just an orphan but an autistic orphan-well, I mean, is it amazing or is it just me? I vote for amazing. And he seems to really care for the poor kid. Sometimes, when he looks at the boy, a preoccupied expression comes into his face that could even be love. The beginnings of it, anyway.

This is even more remarkable, it seems to me, when you realize how little a child like Seth can give back. Mostly he just sits plonked down out there in the sandbox Herb put in as soon as we got back from Toledo, like a big boy-shaped raisin, wearing only his MotoKops 2200

Underoos (he has the lunchbox, too), mouthing his nonsense words, playing with his vans and the action figures that go with them, especially the sexy redhead in the blue shorts. These toys trouble me a bit, because-if you’re not entirely sure I’ve lost it, this should convince you-I’m not sure where they came from, Jan! Seth sure didn’t have any such expensive rig the last time I visited Bill and June in Toledo (I checked in Toys R Us, and the MotoKops stuff is VERY pricey), I can tell you that. They aren’t the sort of toys Bill and Junie would have approved of, anyhow-their toy-buying ideas ran more to Barney than Star Wars, much to their kids” disgust. Poor little Seth can’t tell me, that’s for sure, and it probably doesn’t matter, anyway. I only know the names of the vans and the figures that go with them because I watch the cartoon-show with him on Saturday mornings. The chief bad guy, No Face, is tres creepy.

He’s 50 strange, Jan (Seth, I mean, not No Face, har-har). I don’t know if Herb feels that as much as I do, but I know he feels some of it. Sometimes when I look up and catch Seth looking at me (he has eyes of such dark brown that sometimes they actually look black), I get the weirdest chill-like someone’s using my spine for a xylophone. And some odd things have happened since Seth came to live with us. Don’t laugh, but there’ve even been a couple of incidents like the poltergeist phenomena they sometimes dramatize on what Herb calls “the psycho-reality shows”. Glasses flying off shelves, a couple of windows that broke seemingly for no reason, and weird wiggly shapes that sometimes appear in Seth’s sandbox at night. They’re like strange, surreal sand-paintings. I’ll send you some Polaroids next time I write, if I think of it. I wouldn’t tell anybody this stuff besides you, Jan, believe me. Thank God I know and trust your wonder… your curiosity… and your DISCRETION!

Mostly Seth is no trouble. The most annoying thing about having him around is the way he breathes! He takes in air in these big, sloppy gusts, always through his mouth, which is always hung open and halfway down to his chest. It makes him look like the village idiot, which he really is not, regardless of the problems he does have. Mr Marinville from across the street was over the other day with a banana cake he baked (he’s quite a sweetie for a guy who once wrote a book about a man having a love-affair with his own daughter… and called the book Delight, of all things), and he spent some time with Seth, who was taking a sandbox-break to watch Bonanza. Remember that one? TNT shows the reruns every weekday afternoon (they call “em the Afternoon Ponderosa Party, ain’t that cute), and Seth just loves em. “Wessurn, Wessurn,” he says, when they come on. Mr Marinville, who likes to be called Johnny, watched with us for quite a while, the three of us eating banana cake and drinking chocolate milk like old pals, and when I apologized for Seth’s wet breathing (mostly because it drives me nuts, of course), Marinville just laughed and said that Seth couldn’t help his adenoids. I’m not even sure what adenoids are, but I suppose we’ll have to have Seth’s looked at. Thank God for the Blue twins-Cross and Shield.

One thing keeps nagging me, and that’s why I’ve enclosed a Xerox of the postcard my brother sent me from Carson City shortly before he died. He says on it that they’ve had a breakthrough-an amazing breakthrough is what he says, actually-with Seth. Capital letters, lots of exclamation points. See for yourself. I was curious, natch, so I asked him about it the next 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),