The Tommyknockers (3 page)

On the top shelf were her own books, eleven of them. Ten were westerns, beginning with
Hangtown,
published in 1975, and ending with
The Long Ride Back,
published in '86.
Massacre Canyon,
the new one, would be published in September, as all of her westerns had been since the beginning. It occurred to her now that she had been here, in Haven, when she had received her first copy of
Hangtown,
although she'd begun the novel in the room of a scuzzy Cleaves Mills apartment, on a thirties-vintage Underwood dying of old age. Still, she'd finished here, and it was here that she'd held the first actual copy of the book in her hands.

Here, in Haven. Her entire career as a publishing writer was here . . . except for the first book.

She took that down now and looked at it curiously, realizing it had been perhaps five years since she had last held this slim volume in her hands. It was not only depressing to realize how fast time got by; it was depressing to think of how often she thought about that lately.

This volume was a total contrast to the others, with
their jackets showing mesas and buttes, riders and cows and dusty trail-drive towns. This jacket was a nineteenth-century woodcut of a clipper ship quartering toward land. Its uncompromising blacks and whites were startling, almost shocking.
Boxing the Compass
was the title printed above the woodcut. And below it:
Poems by Roberta Anderson.

She opened the book, paging past the title, musing for a moment over the copyright date, 1974, then pausing at the dedication page. It was as stark as the woodcut.
This book is for James Gardener.
The man she had been trying to call. The second of the only three men she had ever had sex with, and the only one who had ever been able to bring her to orgasm. Not that she attached any special importance to
that.
Or not much, anyway. Or so she thought. Or
thought
she thought. Or something. And it didn't matter anyway; those days were also old days.

She sighed and put the book back on the shelf without looking at the poems. Only one of them was much good. That one had been written in March of 1972, a month after her grandfather died of cancer. The rest of them were crap—the casual reader might have been fooled, because she
was
a talented writer . . . but the heart of her talent had been somewhere else. When she had published
Hangtown,
the circle of writers she had known had all denied her. All except Jim, who had published
Boxing the Compass
in the first place.

She had dropped Sherry Fenderson a long chatty letter not long after coming to Haven, and had received a curt postcard in return:
Please don't write me anymore. I don't know you.
Signed with a single slashed S. as curt as the message. She had been sitting on the porch, crying over that card, when Jim showed up.
Why are you crying over what that silly woman thinks?
he had asked her.
Do you really want to trust the judgment of a woman who goes around yelling “Power to the people” and smelling of Chanel Number Five?

She just happens to be a very good poet,
she had sniffled.

Jim gestured impatiently.
That doesn't make her any older,
he had said,
or any more able to recant the cant she's been taught and then taught herself. Get your mind right, Bobbi. If you want to go on doing what you like, get your fucking mind right and stop that fucking crying. That fucking crying makes me sick. That fucking crying
makes me want to
puke.
You're not weak. I know weak when I'm with it. Why do you want to be something you're not? Your sister? Is that why? She's not here, and she's not you, and you don't have to let her in if you don't want to. Don't whine to me about your sister anymore. Grow up. Stop bitching.

She'd looked at him, she remembered now, amazed.

There's a big difference between being good at what you
DO
and being smart about what you
KNOW,
he said.
Give Sherry some time to grow up. Give yourself some time to grow up. And stop being your own jury. It's boring, I don't want to listen to you snivel. Sniveling is for jerks. Quit being a jerk.

She had felt herself hating him, loving him, wanting all of him and none of him. Did he say he knew weak when he was with it? Boy, he ought to. He was bent. She knew it even then.

Now,
he had said,
you want to lay an ex-publisher or do you want to cry all over that stupid postcard?

She had laid him. She didn't know now and hadn't known then if she
wanted
to lay him, but she had. And screamed when she came.

That had been near the end.

She remembered that too—how it had been near the end. He had gotten married not long after, but it would have been near the end anyway. He was weak, and he was bent.

Doesn't matter anyway,
she thought, and gave herself the old, good advice:
Let it go.

Advice easier given than followed. It was a long time before Anderson got over into sleep that night. Old ghosts had stirred when she moved her book of undergraduate poems . . . or perhaps it was that high, mild wind, hooting the eaves and whistling the trees.

She had almost made it when Peter woke her up. Peter was howling in his sleep.

Anderson got up in a hurry, scared—Peter had made a lot of noises in his sleep before this (not to mention some unbelievably noxious dogfarts), but he had never howled. It was like waking to the sound of a child screaming in the grip of a nightmare.

She went into the living room naked except for her socks and knelt by Peter, who was still on the rug by the stove.

“Pete,” she muttered. “Hey, Pete, cool it.”

She stroked the dog. Peter was shivering and jerked away when Anderson touched him, baring the eroded remains of his teeth. Then his eyes opened—the bad one and the good one—and he seemed to come back to himself. He whined weakly and thumped his tail against the floor.

“You all right?” Anderson asked.

Peter licked her hand.

“Then lie down again. Stop whining. It's boring. Stop fucking off.”

Peter lay down and closed his eyes. Anderson knelt, looking at him, troubled.

He's dreaming of that thing.

Her rational mind rejected that, but the night insisted on its own imperative—it was true, and she knew it.

She went to bed at last, and sleep came sometime after two in the morning. She had a peculiar dream. In it she was groping in the dark . . . not trying to find something but to get away from something. She was in the woods. Branches whipped into her face and poked her arms. Sometimes she stumbled over roots and fallen trees. And then, ahead of her, a terrible green light shone out in a single pencillike ray. In her dream she thought of Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the mad narrator's lantern, muffled up except for one tiny hole, which he used to direct a beam of light onto the evil eye he fancied his elderly benefactor possessed.

Bobbi Anderson felt her teeth fall out.

They went painlessly, all of them. The bottom ones tumbled, some outward, some back into her mouth, where they lay on her tongue or under it in hard little lumps. The top ones simply dropped down the front of her blouse. She felt one catch in her bra, which clasped in front, poking her skin.

The light. The green light. The light—

—was wrong.

It wasn't just that it was gray and pearly, that light; it was expected that such a wind as had blown up the night before
would bring a change in the weather. But Anderson knew there was something more than that wrong even before she looked at the clock on the nightstand. She picked it up in both hands and drew it close to her face, although her vision was a perfect 20/20. It was quarter past three in the afternoon. She had gone to sleep late, given. But no matter how late she slept, either habit or the need to urinate always woke her up by nine o'clock, ten at the latest. But she had slept a full twelve hours . . . and she was ravenous.

She shuffled out into the living room, still wearing only her socks, and saw that Peter was lying limply on his side, head back, yellow stubs of teeth showing, legs splayed out.

Dead
, she thought with a cold and absolute certainty.
Peter's dead. Died in the night.

She went to her dog, already anticipating the feel of cold flesh and lifeless fur. Then Peter uttered a muzzy, lip-flapping sound—a blurry dog-snore. Anderson felt huge relief course through her. She spoke the dog's name aloud and Peter started up, almost guiltily, as if he was also aware of oversleeping. Anderson supposed he was—dogs seemed to have an acutely developed sense of time.

“We slept late, fella,” she said.

Peter got up and stretched first one hind leg and then the other. He looked around, almost comically perplexed, and then went to the door. Anderson opened it. Peter stood there for a moment, not liking the rain. Then he went out to do his business.

Anderson stood in the living room a moment longer, still marveling over her certainty that Peter had been dead. Just what in hell was wrong with her lately? Everything was doom and gloom. Then she headed for the kitchen to fix a meal . . . whatever you called breakfast at three in the afternoon.

On the way she diverted into the bathroom to do her own business. Then she paused in front of her reflection in the toothpaste-spotted mirror. A woman pushing forty. Graying hair, otherwise not too bad—she didn't drink much, didn't smoke much, spent most of her time outside when she wasn't writing. Irish black hair—no romance-novel blaze of red for her—rather too long. Gray-blue eyes. Abruptly she bared her teeth, expecting for just a moment to see only smooth pink gums.

But her teeth were there—all of them. Thank the fluoridated water in Utica, New York, for that. She touched them, let her fingers prove their bony reality to her brain.

But something wasn't right.

Wetness.

There was wetness on her upper thighs.

Oh no, oh shit, this is almost a week early, I just put clean sheets on the bed yesterday
—

But after she had showered, put a pad in a fresh pair of cotton panties, and pulled the whole works snug, she checked the sheets and saw them unmarked. Her period was early, but it had at least had the consideration to wait until she was almost awake. And there was no cause for alarm; she was fairly regular, but she had been both early and late from time to time; maybe diet, maybe subconscious stress, maybe some internal clock slipping a cog or two. She had no urge to grow old fast, but she often thought that having the whole inconvenient business of menstruation behind her would be a relief.

The last of her nightmare slipped away, and Bobbi Anderson went in to fix herself a very late breakfast.

It rained steadily for the next three days. Anderson wandered restlessly around the house, made a trip with Peter into Augusta in the pickup for supplies she didn't really need, drank beer, and listened to old Beach Boys tunes while she made repairs around the house. Trouble was, there weren't really that many repairs that needed to be done. By the third day she was circling the typewriter, thinking maybe she would start the new book. She knew what it was supposed to be about: a young schoolmarm and a buffalo-hunter caught up in a range war in Kansas during the early 1850s—a period when everyone in the midsection of the country seemed to be tuning up for the Civil War, whether they knew it or not. It would be a good book, she thought, but she didn't think it was quite “ready” yet, whatever that meant (a sardonic mimic awoke in her mind, doing an Orson Welles voice:
We will write no oater before its time).
Still, her restlessness dug at her, and the signs were all there: an impatience with books, with the music, with herself. A tendency to drift off . . . and then she would be looking at the typewriter, wanting to wake it into some dream.

Peter also seemed restless, scratching at the door to go out and then scratching at it to come back in five minutes later, wandering around the place, lying down, then getting up again.

Low barometer,
Anderson thought. That's all it is.
Makes us both restless, cranky.

And her damned period. Usually she flowed heavy and then just stopped. Like turning off a faucet. This time she just went on leaking.
Bad washer, ha-ha,
she thought with no humor at all. She found herself sitting in front of the typewriter just after dark on the second rainy day, a blank sheet rolled into the carriage. She started to type and what came out was a bunch of X's and O's, like a kid's tic-tac-toe game, and then something that looked like a mathematical equation . . . which was stupid, since the last math she'd taken was Algebra II in high school. These days, x was for crossing out the wrong word, and that was all. She pulled the blank sheet out and tossed it away.

After lunch on the third rainy day, she called the English Department at the university. Jim no longer taught there, not for eight years, but he still had friends on the faculty and kept in touch. Muriel in the office usually knew where he was.

And did this time. Jim Gardener, she told Anderson, was doing a reading in Fall River that night, June 24th, followed by two in Boston over the next three nights, followed by readings and lectures in Providence and New Haven—all part of something called the New England Poetry Caravan. Must be Patricia McCardle, Anderson thought, smiling a little.

“So he'd be back . . . when? Fourth of July?”

“Gee, I don't know when he'll be back, Bobbi,” Muriel said. “You know Jim. His last reading's June 30th. That's all I can say for sure.”