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.