The Regulators - Stephen King [4]
He tastes; closes his eyes; tastes again. His eyes, already quite red, open. He smiles. 'Yes, ladies and gentlemen!' he tells his simmering backyard. 'We have a winner!'
Faintly, over all the other sounds of summer — kids, mowers, muscle-cars, sprinklers, singing bugs in the baked grass of his back yard — Gary can hear the writer's guitar, a sweet and easy sound. He picks out the tune almost at once and dances around the circle of shade thrown by the umbrella with his glass in his hand, singing along: 'So kiss me and smile for me . . . Tell me that you'll wait for me . . . Hold me like you'll never let me go . . .'
A good tune, one he remembers from before the Reed twins two houses down were even thought of, let alone born. For just a moment he is struck by the reality of time's passage, how stark it is, and unappealable. It passes the ear with a sound like iron. He takes another big sip of his martini and wonders what to do now that the barbecue is ready for liftoff. Along with the other sounds he can hear the shower upstairs, and he thinks of Marielle naked in there — the bitch of the western world, but she's kept her body in good shape. He thinks of her soaping her breasts, maybe caressing her nipples with the tips of her fingers in a circular motion, making them hard. Of course she's doing nothing of the damned kind, but it's the sort of image that just won't go away unless you do something to pop it. He decides to be a twentieth-century version of St George; he will fuck the dragon instead of slaying it. He puts his martini glass down on the picnic table and starts for the house.
Oh gosh, it's summertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertime, and on Poplar Street the living is easy.
Gary Ripton checks his rearview mirror for traffic, sees none, and swerves easterly across the street to the Carver house. He hasn't bothered with Mr Marinville because, at the start of the summer, Mr Marinville gave him five dollars not to deliver the Shopper. 'Please, Gary,' he said, his eyes solemn and earnest. 'I can't read about another supermarket opening or drugstore jamboree. It'll kill me if I do.' Gary doesn't understand Mr Marinville in the slightest, but he is a nice enough man, and five bucks is five bucks.
Mrs Carver opens the front door of 248 Poplar and waves as Gary easy-tosses her the Shopper. She grabs for it, misses completely, and laughs. Gary laughs with her. She doesn't have Brad Josephson's hands, or reflexes, but she's pretty and a hell of a good sport. Her husband is beside the house, wearing his bathing suit and flipflops, washing the car. He catches a glimpse of Gary out of the corner of his eye, turns, points a finger. Gary points one right back, and they pretend to shoot each other. This is Mr Carver's crippled but game effort to be cool, and Gary respects that. David Carver works for the post office, and Gary figures he must be on vacation this week. The boy makes a vow to himself: if he has to settle for a regular nine-to-five job when he grows up (he knows that, like diabetes and kidney failure, this does happen to some people), he will never spend his vacation at home, washing his car in the driveway.
I'm not going to have a car, anyway, he thinks. Going to have a motorcycle. No Japanese bike, either. Big damn old Harley-Davidson like the one Mr Marinville keeps in his garage. American steel.
He checks the rearview again and catches sight of something bright red up on Bear Street beyond the Josephson place — a van, it looks like, parked just beyond the southwestern corner of the intersection — and then swoops his Schwinn back across the street again, this time to 247, the Wyler place.
Of the occupied houses on the street (242, the old Hobart place, is vacant), the Wyler place is the only one which even approaches seedy — it's a small ranch-style home that could use a fresh coat of paint, and a fresh coat of seal on the driveway. There's a sprinkler twirling on the lawn, but the grass is still showing the effects of the hot, dry weather in a way the other lawns on the street (including the lawn of the