The Regulators by Stephen King

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 thesubject for good and all. Only I wasn’t ready for it to be closed.
    â€œSo did you ask him, Bill?” I asked.
    â€œAsk him what?” he says.
    â€œWhy he never spoke before.”
    â€œBut he does talk.”
    â€œNot 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?”
    â€œWell, no,” he says. “I didn’t.”
    â€œAnd did you go back? Did you take him to Desperation so he could look for the Ponderosa Ranch or whatever?”
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œWhat do you mean, you couldn’t ?” I ask him.
    â€œCouldn’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