The Tommyknockers (19 page)

“Beaver'd eat anything,” the girl in the cutoffs said.

The kid in the van's shotgun seat looked back. He was a plump boy with a wide, pleasant face. “
Un
true,” he said, “I'd
never
eat my mother.”

At that they were all laughing wildly, Gardener included. When he was able, he said: “The crackers are fine. Really.” And they were. He ate slowly at first, tentatively, monitoring his works closely for signs of rebellion. There were none and he began to eat faster and faster, until he was gobbling the crackers in big handfuls, his stomach snarling and yapping.

When had he last eaten? He didn't know. It was lost in the blackout. He did know from previous experience that he never ate much when he was busy trying to drink up the world—and a lot of what he tried to eat either ended up in his lap or ran down his shirt. That made him think of the big greasy pizza he had eaten—
tried
to eat—Thanksgiving evening, 1980. The night he had shot Nora through the cheeks.

—or you could have severed one or both optic nerves!
Nora's lawyer suddenly shouted furiously at him inside his head.
Partial or total blindness! Paralysis! Death! All that bullet had to do was chip one tooth to go flying off in any direction, any damned direction at all! Just one! And don't sit there and try any bullshit like how you didn't
mean to kill her, either. You shoot a person in the head, what else are you trying to do?

The depression came rolling back—big, black, and a mile high.
Should have killed yourself, Gard. Shouldn't have waited.

Bobbi's in trouble.

Well, maybe so. But getting help from a guy like you is like hiring a pyromaniac to fix the oil-burner.

Shut up.

You're wasted, Gard. Fried. What that kid back there on the beach would undoubtedly call a burnout.

“Mister, you sure you're all right?” the girl asked. Her hair was red, cut punkily short. Her legs went approximately up to her chin.

“Yeah,” he said. “Did I look not all right?”

“For a minute there you looked terrible,” she answered gravely. That made him grin—not what she'd said but the solemnity with which she'd said it—and she grinned back, relieved.

He looked out the window and saw they were headed north on the Maine Turnpike—only up to mile thirty-six, so he couldn't have slept too long. The feathery mackerel scales of two hours ago were beginning to merge into a toneless gray that promised rain by afternoon—before he got to Haven, it would probably be dark and he would be soaked.

After hanging up the telephone at the Mobil station, he had stripped off his socks and tossed them into the wastecan on one of the gasoline islands. Then he walked over to Route 1 northbound in his bare feet and stood on the shoulder, old totebag in one hand, the thumb of his other out and cocked north.

Twenty minutes later this van had come along—a fairly new Dodge Caravel with Delaware plates. A pair of electric guitars, their necks crossed like swords, were painted on the side, along with the name of the group inside:
THE EDDIE PARKER BAND.
It pulled over and Gardener had run to it, panting, totebag banging his leg, headache pulsing white-hot pain into the left side of his head. In spite of the pain, he had been amused by the slogan carefully lettered across the van's doors:
IF EDDIE'S ROCKIN', DON'T COME KNOCKIN'.

Now, sitting on the floor in back and reminding himself not to turn around quickly and thump the snare drum
again, Gardener saw the Old Orchard exit coming up. At the same time, the first drops of rain hit the windshield.

“Listen,” Eddie said, pulling over, “I hate to leave you off like this. It's starting to rain and you don't even have any fuckin shoes.”

“I'll be all right.”

“You don't look so all right,” the girl in the cutoffs said softly.

Eddie whipped off his hat
(DON'T BLAME ME; I VOTED FOR HOWARD THE DUCK
written over the visor) and said: “Cough up, you guys.” Wallets appeared; change jingled in jeans pockets.

“No! Hey, thanks, but no!” Gardener felt hot blood rush into his cheeks and burn there. Not embarrassment but outright shame. Somewhere inside him he felt a strong painful thud—it didn't rattle his teeth or bones. It was, he thought, his soul taking some final fall. It
sounded
melodramatic as hell. As for how it felt . . . well, it just felt real. That was the horrible part about it. Just . . . real.
Okay,
he thought.
That's what it feels like. All your life you've heard people talk about hitting bottom, this is what it feels like. Here it is. James Eric Gardener, who was going to be the Ezra Pound of his generation, taking spare change from a Delaware bar band.

“Really . . . no—”

Eddie Parker went on passing the hat just the same. There was a bunch of change and a few one-dollar bills in it. Beaver got the hat last. He tossed in a couple of quarters.

“Look,” Gardener said, “I appreciate it, but—”

“C'mon, Beaver,” Eddie said. “Cough up, you fuckin Scrooge.”

“Really, I have friends in Portland, I'll just call a few up . . . and I think I might have left my checkbook with this one guy I know in Falmouth,” Gardener added wildly.

“Bea
-ver's a
Scrooge,”
the girl in the cutoffs began to chant gleefully. “
Bea
-ver's a
Scrooge
,
Bea
-ver's a
Scrooge!”
The others picked it up until Beaver, laughing and rolling his eyes, added another quarter and a New York lottery ticket.

“There, I'm tapped,” he said, “unless you want to wait around for the prunes to work.” The guys in the band and the girl in the cutoffs were laughing wildly again. Looking resignedly at Gardener, as if to say,
You see the
morons I have to deal with? You dig it?,
Beaver handed the hat to Gardener, who had to take it; if he hadn't, the change would have rolled all over the van floor.

“Really,” he said, trying to give the hat back to Beaver. “I'm perfectly okay—”

“You
ain't,”
Eddie Parker said. “So cut the bullshit, what do you say?”

“I guess I say thanks. It's all I can think of right now.”

“Well, it ain't so much you'll have to declare it on your income taxes,” Eddie said. “But it'll buy you some burgers and a pair of those rubber sandals.”

The girl slid open the door in the Caravel's sidewall. “Get better, understand?” she said. Then, before he could reply, she hugged him and gave him a kiss, her mouth moist, friendly, half-open, and redolent of pot. “Take care, big guy.”

“I'll try.” On the verge of getting out he suddenly hugged her again, fiercely. “Thank you. Thank you all.”

He stood at the end of the ramp, the rain falling a little harder now, watching as the van's sidewall door rumbled shut on its track. The girl waved. Gardener waved back and then the van was rolling down the breakdown lane, gathering speed, finally sliding over into the travel lane. Gardener watched them go, one hand still raised in a wave in case they might be looking back. Tears were running freely down his cheeks now, to mix with the rain.

He never did get a chance to buy a pair of rubber sandals, but he got to Haven before dark and he didn't have to walk the last ten or so miles to Bobbi's house, as he'd thought he might; you'd think people would be more apt to pick up a guy hitching in the rain, but that was just when they were most likely to pass you by. Who needed a human puddle in the passenger seat?

But he got a ride outside of Augusta with a farmer who complained constantly and bitterly about the government all the way up to the China town line, where he let Gard out. Gard walked a couple of miles, thumbing the few cars that passed, wondering if his feet were turning to ice or if it was just his imagination, when a pulp truck pulled to a rackety halt beside him.

Gardener climbed into the cab as fast as he could. It smelled of old woodchips and sour loggers' sweat . . . but it was warm.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Don't mention it,” the driver said. “Name's Freeman Moss.” He stuck out a hand. Gardener, who had no idea that he would meet this man in the not-too-distant future under far less cheery circumstances, took it and shook it.

“Jim Gardener. Thanks again.”

“Shoot a pickle,” Freeman Moss scoffed. He got the truck moving. It shuddered along the edge of the road, picking up speed, Gard thought, not just grudgingly but with actual pain.
Everything
shook. The universal moaned beneath them like a hag in a chimney corner. The world's oldest toothbrush, its eroded bristles dark with the grease it had been employed to coax out of some clotted gear-or cog-tooth, chittered along the dashboard, passing an old air freshener of a naked woman with very large breasts on its way. Moss punched the clutch, managed to find second after an endless time spent grinding gears, and wrestled the pulp truck back onto the road. “Y'look half-drownded. Got half a thermos of coffee from the Drunken Donuts in Augusta left over from my dinner . . . you want it?”

Gardener drank it gratefully. It was strong, hot, and heavily laced with sugar. He also accepted a cigarette from the driver, dragging deeply and with pleasure, although it hurt his throat, which was getting steadily sorer.

Moss dropped him off just over the Haven town line at quarter to seven. The rain had slacked off, and the sky was lightening up in the west. “Do believe God's gonna let through some sunset,” Freeman Moss said. “I wish like hell I had a pair of shoes I could give you, mister-—I usually carry an old pair behind the seat, but it was so rainy today I never brought nothin but m'gumrubbers.”

“Thanks, but I'll be fine. My friend is less than a mile up the road.” Actually Bobbi's place was still three miles away, but if he told Moss that, nothing would do but that he drive Gardener up there. Gardener was tired, increasingly feverish, still damp even after forty-five minutes of the heater's dry, blasting air . . . but he couldn't stand any more kindness today. In his present state of mind it could well drive him crazy.

“Okay. Good luck.”

“Thank you.”

He got down and waved as the truck turned off on a side road and rumbled away toward home.

Even after Moss and his museum piece of a truck had disappeared, Gardener stood where he was for a moment longer, his wet totebag in one hand, his bare feet, white as Easter lilies, planted in the dirt of the soft shoulder, looking at the marker some two hundred feet back the way he had come.
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,
Frost had said. But he'd do well to remember he wasn't home. Maybe the worst mistake a man could make was to get to the idea that his friend's home was his own, especially when the friend was a woman whose bed you had once shared.

Not home, not at all—but he
was
in Haven.

He started to walk up the road toward Bobbi's house.

About fifteen minutes later, when the clouds in the west finally broke open to let through the westering sun, something strange happened: a burst of music, clear and brief, went through his head.

He stopped, looking at the sunlight as it spilled across rolling miles of wet woods and hayfields in the west, the rays beaming down like the dramatic sunrays in a DeMille Bible epic. Route 9 began to rise here, and the western view was long and gorgeous and solemn, the evening's light somehow English and pastoral in its clear beauty. The rain had given the landscape a sleek, washed look, deepening colors, seeming to fulfill the texture of things. Gardener was suddenly very glad he had not committed suicide—not in any corny Art Linkletter way, but because he had been allowed this moment of beauty and perceptual glow. Standing here, now almost at the end of his energy, feverish and sick, he felt a child's simple wonder.

All was still and silent in the final sunshine of evening. He could see no sign of industry or technology. Humanity, yes; a big red barn attached to a white farmhouse, sheds, a trailer or two, but that was all.

The light. It was the light that struck him so strongly.

Its sweet clarity, so old and deep—those rays of sun slanting almost horizontally through the unraveling clouds as this long, confusing, exhausting day neared its end. That ancient light seemed to deny time itself, and Gardener almost expected to hear a huntsman winding his horn, announcing “All Assemble.” He would hear dogs, and horses' hooves, and—

—and that was when the music, jarring and modern, blasted through his head, scattering all thought. His hands flew to his temples in a startled gesture. The burst lasted at least five seconds, perhaps as long as ten, and what he heard was perfectly identifiable; it was Dr. Hook singing “Baby Makes Her Blue Jeans Talk.”

The lyric was tinny but clear enough—as if he were listening to a small transistor radio, the kind that people used to take to the beach with them before that punk-rock group Walkman and the Ghetto-Blasters had taken over the world. But it wasn't pouring into his ears, that lyric; it was coming from the front of his head . . . from the place where the doctors had filled a hole in his skull with a piece of metal.

The queen of all the nightbirds,

A player in the dark,

She don't say nothing

But baby makes her blue jeans talk.

The volume was so loud it was almost unbearable. It had happened once before, this music in his head, after he'd stuck his finger into a light socket—and was he drunk at the time? My dear, does a dog piss on a fireplug?

He had discovered such musical visitations were neither hallucinatory nor all that rare—people had gotten radio transmissions on the lawn flamingos in their yards; on teeth fillings; on the steel rims of their spectacles. For a week and a half in 1957 a family in Charlotte, North Carolina, had received signals from a classical-music station in Florida. They first heard them coming from the bathroom water-glass. Soon other glasses in the house began to pick up the sound. Before it ended, the whole house was filled with the eerie sound of glassware broadcasting Bach and Beethoven, the music broken only by an occasional time-check. Finally, with a dozen violins
holding one long, high note, almost all the glasses in the house shattered spontaneously and the phenomenon ceased.