The Collective (47 page)

"No," 'Becka whimpered. "No, I ain't heard any voices in my head."

She stood by her clothesline in the hot backyard, looking blankly off toward the woods on the other side of the Nista Road, blue-gray-hazy in the heat. She wrung her hands in front of her and begun to weep.

"I ain't no heard no voices in my head."

Crazy, her dead father's implacable voice replied.
Crazy with the heat. You come on over here, 'Becka Bouchard, I'm gonna beat you three shades of blister-blue for that crazy talk.

"I ain't heard no voices in my head," 'Becka moaned. "That picture really did talk, I swear, I can't do ventriloquism!"

Better believe the picture. If it was the hole, it was a brain tumor, sure. If it was the picture, it was a miracle. Miracles came from God. Miracles came from Outside. A miracle could drive you crazy - and the dear God knew she felt like she was going crazy now - but it didn't mean you were crazy, or that your brains were scrambled. As for believing that you could hear other people's thoughts ... that was just crazy.

'Becka looked down at her legs and saw blood gushing from her left knee. She shrieked again and ran back into the house to call the doctor, MEDIX, somebody. She was in the living room again, pawing at the dial with the phone to her ear, when Jesus said:

"That's raspberry filling from your coffeecake, 'Becka. Why don't you just relax, before you have a heart attack?"

She looked at the TV, the telephone receiver falling to the table with a clunk. Jesus was still sitting on the rock outcropping. It looked as though He had crossed His legs. It was really surprising how much He looked like her own father . only He didn't seem forbidding, ready to be hitting angry at a moment's notice. He was looking at her with a kind of exasperated patience.

"Try it and see if I'm not right," Jesus said.

She touched her knee gently, wincing, expecting pain. There was none. She saw the seeds in the red stuff and relaxed. She licked the raspberry filling off her fingers.

"Also," Jesus said, "you have got to get these ideas about hearing voices and going crazy out of your head. It's just Me. And I can talk to anyone I want to, any way I want to."

"Because you're the Savior," 'Becka whispered.

"That's right," Jesus said, and looked down. Below Him, a couple of animated salad bowls were dancing in appreciation of the hidden Valley Ranch Dressing which they were about to receive. "And I'd like you to please turn that crap off, if you don't mind. We don't need that thing running. Also, it makes My feet tingle."

'Becka approached the TV and turned it off.

"My Lord," she whispered.

Now it was Sunday, July 10th. Joe was lying fast asleep out in the backyard hammock with Ozzie lying limply across him ample stomach like a black and white fur stole. She stood in the living room, holding the curtain back with her left hand and looking out at Joe. Sleeping in the hammock, dreaming of The Hussy, no doubt -dreaming of throwing her down in a great big pile of catalogs from Carroll Reed and fourth-class junk mail and then - how would Joe and his piggy poker-buddies out it? - "putting the boots to her."

She was holding the curtain with her left hand because she had a handful of square nine-volt batteries in her right. She had bought them yesterday down at the town hardware store. Now she let the curtain drop and took the batteries into the kitchen, where she was assembling a little something on the counter. Jesus had told her how to make it. She told Jesus she couldn't build things. Jesus told her not to be a cussed fool. If she could follow a recipe, she could build this little gadget. She was delighted to find that Jesus was absolutely right. It was not only easy, it was fun. A lot more fun than cooking, certainly; she had never really had the knack for that. Her cakes almost always fell and her breads almost never rose. She had begun this little thing yesterday, working with the toaster, the motor from her old Hamilton-Beach blender, and a funny board full of electronic things which had come from the back of an old radio in the shed. She thought she would be done long before Joe woke up and came in to watch the Red Sox on TV at two o'clock.

Actually, it was funny how many ideas she'd had in the last few days. Some Jesus had told her about; others just seemed to come to her at odd moments.

Her sewing machine, for instance - she'd always wanted one of those attachments that made the zigzag stitches, but Joe had told her she would have to wait until he could afford to buy her a new machine (and that would probably be along about the twelfth of Never, if she knew Joe). Just four days ago she had seen how, if she just moved the button stitcher and added a second needle where it had been at an angle of forty-five degrees to the first needle, she could make all the zigzags she wanted. All it took was a screwdriver - even a dummy like her could use one of those - and it worked just as well as you could want. She saw that the camshaft would probably warp out of true before long because of the weight differential, but there were ways to fix that, too, when it happened.

Then there was the Electrolux. Jesus had told her about that one. Getting her ready for Joe, maybe. It had been Jesus who told her how to use Joe's little butane welding torch, and that made it easier. She had gone over to Derry and bought three of those electronic Simon games at KayBee Toys. Once she was back home she broke them open and pulled out the memory boards. Following Jesus' instructions, she connected the boards and wired Eveready dry cells to the memory circuits she had created. Jesus told her how to program the Electrolux and power it (she had in fact, already figured this out for herself, but she was much too polite to tell Him so). Now it vacuumed the kitchen, living room, and downstairs bathroom all by itself. It had a tendency to get caught under the piano bench or in the bathroom (where it just kept on butting its stupid self against the toilet until she came running to turn it around), and it scared the granola out of Ozzie, but it was still an improvement over dragging a thirty-pound vac around like a dead dog. She had much more time to catch up on the afternoon stories - and now these included true stories Jesus told her. Her new, improved Electrolux used juice awfully fast, though, and sometimes it got tangled in its own electrical cord. She thought she might just scratch the dry cells and hook up a motorcycle battery to it one day soon. There would be time

- after this problem of Joe and The Hussy had been solved.

Or .just last night. She had lain awake in bed long after Joe was snoring beside her, thinking about numbers. It occurred to 'Becka (who had never gotton beyond Business Math in high school) that if you gave numbers letter values, you could un-freeze them -you could turn them into something that was like Jell-O. When they

- the numbers - were letters, you could pour them into any old mold you liked. Then you could turn the letters back into numbers, and that was like putting the Jell-O into the fridge so it would set, and keep the shape of the mold when you turned it out onto a plate later on.

That way you could always figure things out, 'Becka had thought, delighted. She was unaware that her fingers had gone to the spot above her left eye and were rubbing, rubbing, rubbing. For instance, just look! You could make things fall into a line every time by saying ax + bx + c = 0, and that proves it. It always works. It's like Captain Marvel saying Shazam! Well, there is the zero factor; you can't let "a" be zero or that spoils it. But otherwise -

She had lain awake a while longer, considering this, and then had fallen asleep, unaware that she had just reinvented the quadratic equation, and polynomials, and the concept of factoring.

Ideas. Quite a few of them just lately.

'Becka picked up Joe's little blowtorch and lit it deftly with a kitchen match. She would have laughed last month if you'd told her she would ever be working with something like this. But it was easy. Jesus had told her exactly how to solder the wires to the electronics board from the old radio. It was just like fixing up the vacuum cleaner, only this idea was even better.

Jesus had told her a lot of other things in the last three days or so. They had murdered her sleep (and what little sleep she had gotton was nightmare-driven), they had made her afraid to show her face in the village itself
(I'll always know when you've done something wrong, 'Becka,
her father had told her,
because your face just can't keep a secret),
they had made her lose her appetite. Joe, totally bound up in his work, the Red Sox, and his Hussy, noticed none of these tings . although he had noticed the other night as the watched television that 'Becka was gnawing her fingernails, something she had never done before - it was, in fact, one of the many things she nagged him about. But she was doing it now, all right; they were bitten right down to the quick. Joe Paulson considered this for all of twelve seconds before looking back at the Sony TV and losing himself in dreams of Nancy Voss's billowy white breasts.

Here were just a few of the afternoon stories Jesus had told her which had caused 'Becka to sleep poorly and to begin biting her fingernails at the advanced age of forty-five:

In 1973, Moss Harlingen, one of Joe's poker buddies, had murdered his father. They had been hunting deer up in Greenville and it had supposedly been one of those tragic accidents, but the shooting of Abel Harlingen had been no accident. Moss simply lay up behind a fallen tree with his rifle and waited until his father splashed towards him across a small stream about fifty yards down the hill from where Moss was. Moss shot his father carefully and deliberately through the head. Moss thought he had killed his father for money. His (Moss's) business, Big Ditch Construction, had two notes falling due with two different banks, and neither bank would extend because of the other. Moss went to Abel, but Abel refused to help, although he could afford to. So Moss shot his father and inherited a lot of money as soon as the county coroner handed down his verdict of death by misadventure. The note was paid and Moss Harlingen really believed (except perhaps in his deepest dreams) that he had committed the murder for gain. The real motive had been something else. Far in the past, when Moss was ten and his little brother Emery but seven, Abel's wife went south to Rhode Island for one whole winter. Moss's and Emery's uncle had died suddenly, and his wife needed help getting on her feet. While their mother was gone, there were several incidents of buggery in the Harlingens' Troy home. The buggery stopped when the boy's mother came back, and the incidents were never repeated. Moss had forgotten all about them. He never remembered lying awake in the dark anymore, lying awake in mortal terror and watching the doorway for the shadow of his father. He had absolutely no recollection of lying with his mouth pressed against his forearm, hot salty tears of shame and rage squeezing out of his eyes and coursing down his face to his mouth as Abel

Harlingen slathered lard onto his cock and then slid it up his son's back door with a grunt and a sigh. It had all made so little impression on Moss that he could not remember biting his arm until it bled to keep from crying out, and he certainly could not remember Emery's breathless little cries from the next bed -"Please, no, daddy, please not me tonight, please, daddy, please no." Children, of course, forget very easily. But some subconscious memory must have lingered, because when Moss Harlingen actually pulled the trigger, as he had dreamed of doing every night for the last thirty-two years of his life, as the echoes first rolled away and then rolled back, finally disappearing into the great forested silence of the up-Maine wilderness, Moss whispered: "Not you, Em, not tonight." That Jesus had told her this not two hours after Moss had stopped in to return a fishing rod which belonged to Joe never crossed 'Becka's mind.

1 Alice Kimball, who taught at the Haven Grammar School, was a lesbian. Jesus told 'Becka this Friday, not long after the lady herself, looking large and solid and respectable in a green pant suit, had stopped by, collecting for the American Cancer Society.

2 Darla Gaines, the pretty seventeen-year-old girl who brought the Sunday paper, had half an ounce of "bitchin' reefer" between the mattress and box spring of her bed. Jesus told 'Becka not fifteen minutes after Darla had come by on Saturday to collect for the last five weeks (three dollars plus a fifty-cent tip 'Becka now wished she had withheld). That she and her boyfriend smoked the reefer in Darla's bed after doing what they called "the horizontal bop." They did the horizontal bop and smoked reefer almost every weekday from two until three o'clock or so. Darla's parents both worked at Splended Shoe in Derry and they didn't get home until well past four.

3 Hank Buck, another of Joe's poker buddies, worked at a large supermarket in Bangor and hated his boss so much that a year ago he had put half a box of Ex-Lax in the man's chocolate

shake when he, the boss, sent Hank out to McDonald's to get his lunch one day. The boss had shit his pants promptly at quarter past three in the afternoon, as he was slicing luncheon meat in the deli of Paul's Down-East Grocery Mart. Hank managed to hold on until punching-out time, and then he sat in his car, laughing until he almost shit his pants. "He laughed," Jesus told 'Becka. "He laughed. Can you believe that?" And these things were only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. It seemed that Jesus knew something unpleasant or upsetting about everyone - everyone 'Becka herself came in contact with, anyway. She couldn't live with such an awful outpouring.

But she didn't know if she could live without it anymore, either. One thing was certain - she had to do something. Something. "You are doing something," Jesus said. He spoke from behind her, from the picture on top of the TV - of course He did - and the idea that the voice was coming from inside her own head, and that it was a cold mutation of her own thoughts ... that was nothing but a dreadful passing illusion. "In fact, you're almost done with this part, 'Becka. Just solder that red wire to that point beside the long doohickey . not that one, the one next to it . that's right. Not too much solder! It's like Brylcreem, 'Becka. A little dab'll do ya." Strange, hearing Jesus Christ talk about Brylcreem.