The Regulators - Stephen King [96]
'I want my Dweem Fwoatah,' he muttered in the sulky voice I hate most of all. 'I want my Dweem Fwoatah, you find it.'
I made him French toast, usually his favorite, but he wouldn't eat. Just walked off (sorry, stalked off) to the den. Pretty soon I heard the VCR, then one of his MotoKops tapes started. He's got four or five, each with a dozen episodes on it. I have really gotten to hate those stupid cartoon voices, especially Cassie's. Sometimes I wish No Face would kill her and dump her decapitated body in a ditch somewhere. God help me, I wish I was joking but I'm not.
When they were cackling away in there (he always turns up the volume, which is sometimes good) I asked Herb how he was going to explain his black eye when he got to work. He put his voice up to the falsetto range batted his eyes and said, 'I'll just tell the boys I ran into a door, honey.' Trying to make a joke of it. It didn't work.
The worst part of today hasn't been Seth throwing things like he did when Herb suggested we could buy a replacement Dream Floater. He didn't do that today. I almost wish he would. He simply goes from room to room, stalking, glaring, lower lip poached out, still looking for the missing P. W. Sometimes he goes into the den to watch TV, but not even Bonanza held him long today. I tried to get him to talk but he wouldn't the thing is . . . oh, I wish I could write better, express it so someone reading this (not that anyone ever will, I imagine) could understand. It's like he — the SLB — generates a kind of poison electricity when he's pissed. He seems to spin it right out of his body, like a spider spinning electric silk or thunderheads putting out lightning. It builds up and up until you feel like just running from room to room, screaming and beating your head against things. It's real, not just a feeling but a physical thing. It makes you sweat ( it's stinky sweat, like when you have a high fever), your muscles tremble, your mouth gets dry. I'll write something in here I've never told Herb. Sometimes, when it gets like that, I go in the bathroom, lock the door masturbate like mad. It's the only thing that seems to take a little of the pressure off. The orgasms are so hard they're frightening. Like bombs going off!
I've felt all this before when the Stalky Little Boy inside Seth is pissed about something, but it's never gone on so long or revved up so high. By mid-afternoon it was like the whole house was full of natural gas, just waiting for a match to set it off. I was in the kitchen, walking aimlessly around, my head aching so badly that I could feel my eyeballs throbbing, I kept wanting to grin. I don't know why, there's nothing funny about any of it, but the more my head ached and the more my eyes throbbed and the more I felt the atmosphere of the house pressing in on me, the more I wanted to grin. Christ!
I went to the sink looked out the window into the back yard. Seth was sitting in the sandbox, playing with his other Power Wagons. Only if anyone but me had seen how he was playing, I'm sure he would have been in some sort of special installation by nightfall, some place where the government studies exceptional children.
The P.W.'s have pop-out wings, but they don't really fly, of course. Except sometimes Seth's do. He was sitting in the sand with his hands in his lap, and around and around his head they went, Tracker Arrow and Rooty-Toot and the Meatwagon and the rest, dipping and diving under each other, swooping and doing rolls, coming in for touch-and-go's on a landing-strip Seth has made for them in the sandbox, sometimes doing formation flights down the yard to his swing, going under the seat like stunt pilots in a movie, then banking around and coming back. Kids' toys, all bright colors, flying missions in the back yard. I know I must sound like a raving madwoman, but I swear in the name of God that it's true.