The Tommyknockers (55 page)

They had been called Big Injun Woods because it was there that Chief Atlantic had died. It was the whites who called him Chief Atlantic—his proper Micmac name had been Wahwayvokah, which means “by tall waters.” “Chief Atlantic” was a contemptuous translation of this. The tribe had originally covered much of what was now Penobscot County, with large groups centered in Oldtown, Skowhegan, and the Great Woods, which began in Ludlow—it was in Ludlow that they buried their dead when they were decimated by influenza in the 1880s and drifted south with Wahwayvokah, who had presided over their further decline. Wahwayvokah died in 1885, and on his deathbed he declared that the woods to which he had brought his dying people were cursed. That was known and reported by the two white men who had been present when he died—one an anthropologist from Boston College, the other from the Smithsonian Institution—who had come to the area in search of Indian artifacts from the tribes of the Northeast, which were degenerating rapidly and would soon be gone. What was less sure was whether Chief Atlantic was laying the curse himself or only making note of an existing condition.

Either way, his only monument was the name Big Injun Woods—even the site of his grave was no longer known. The name for that large piece of forest was, so far as Ev knew, still the one most commonly used in Haven and the other towns which were a part of it, but he could understand how the cartographers responsible for the Maine atlas might not have wanted to put a word like “Injun” in their book of maps. People had gotten touchy about such casual slurs.

Old tales sometimes have a grain of truth, his dad had said. . . .

Ev, who also crossed himself when black cats crossed his path (and, truth to tell, when one looked likely to, just to be safe), thought that his dad was right, and that grain was usually there. And, cursed or not, Big Injun Woods had never been very lucky.

Not lucky for Wahwayvokah, not lucky for the Clarendons. It had never been very lucky for the hunters who tried their hand in there, either, he recalled. Over the
years there had been two . . . no, three . . . wait a minute . . .

Ev's eyes widened and he made a silent whistle as he thumbed through a mental card-file labeled
HUNTING ACCIDENTS, HAVEN.
He could just offhand think of a dozen accidents, most of them shootings, which had taken place in Big Injun Woods, a dozen hunters who had been lugged out bleeding and cursing, bleeding and unconscious, or just plain dead. Some had shot themselves, using loaded guns for crutches to help them climb over fallen trees, or dropping them, or some damn thing. One was a reputed suicide. But Ev now remembered that on two occasions murder had been done during November in Big Injun Woods—it had been done in hot blood both times, once in an argument over a card game at someone's camp, once because of a squabble between two friends over whose bullet had taken down a buck of record-breaking size.

And hunters got lost there. Christ! Did they ever! Every year it seemed there was at least one search party sent out to find some poor scared slob from Massachusetts or New Jersey or New York, and some years there were two or three. Not all of them were found.

Most were city people who had no business in the woods to start with, but that wasn't always the case. Veteran hunters said compasses worked poorly or not at all in Big Injun Woods. Ev's dad said he guessed there must be a helluva chunk of magnetic rock buried somewhere out there, and it foozled a compass needle to hell and gone. The difference between city folks and those who were veterans of the woods was that the city folks learned how to read a compass and then put all their trust in it. So when it packed up and said east was north and west was east or just spun around and around like a milk bottle in a kissing game, they were like men stuck in the shithouse with diarrhea and no corncobs. Wiser men just cursed their compasses, put them away, and tried another of the half-dozen ways there were of finding a direction. Lacking all else, you looked for a stream to lead you out. Sooner or later, if you held a straight course, you'd either hit a road or a set of CMP power pylons.

But Ev had known a few fellows who had lived and hunted all their lives in Maine and who
still
had to be
pulled by a search party or who finally made it out on their own only by dumb luck. Delbert McCready, whom Ev had known since childhood, had been one of these. Del had gone into Big Injun Woods with his twelve-gauge on Tuesday, November 10th, 1947. When forty-eight hours had passed and he still hadn't shown up, Mrs. McCready called Alf Tremain, who in those days had been the constable. A search party of twenty went into the woods where the Nista Road petered out at the Diamond Gravel Pit and by the end of the week it had swelled to two hundred.

They were just about to give Del—whose daughter was, of course, Hazel McCready—up for lost when he stumbled out of the woods along the course of Preston Stream, pale and dazed and twenty pounds lighter than he had been when he went in.

Ev visited him in the hospital. “How'd it happen, Del? Night was clear. Stars were out. You can read the stars, can't you?”

“Ayuh.” Del looked deeply ashamed. “Always could, anyway.”

“And the moss. 'Twas you who told me about how to read north by the moss on the trees when we was kids.”

“Ayuh,” Del repeated. Just that. Ev gave him time, then pressed.

“Well, what happened?”

For a long time Del still said nothing. Then, in a voice which was almost inaudible, he said: “I got turned around.”

Ev let the silence spin out, as difficult as that was.

“Everything was all right for a while,” Del resumed at last. “I hunted most of the morning but didn't see no fresh sign. I sat down and ate m'dinner and had a bottle of my ma's beer. Made me sleepy and I napped. I had some funny dreams . . . can't remember em, but I know they was funny. And, look! This happened while I was sleepin.”

Del McCready raised his upper lip and showed Ev a hole there.

“Lost a tooth?”

“Ayuh . . . it was layin in the crotch of m'pants when I woke up. Fell out when I was sleepin, I guess, but I ain't hardly ever had any trouble with my teeth, at least not since that one wisdom tooth got impacted and damn near killed me. By then it coming on dark—”

“Dark!”

“I know how it sounds, don't you worry,” Del said crossly—but it was the crossness of someone who is deeply ashamed. “I just slept all the afternoon away, and when I got up, Ev—”

His eyes rolled up to meet Ev's for one miserable second and then shifted away, as if he could not bear to look his old friend in the eye for longer than that one second.

“It was like somethin stole m'brains. The tooth fairy, mayhap.”

Del laughed, but there hadn't been much humor in the sound. “I wandered around for a while, thinking I was following the polestar, and when I still hadn't come out on the Hammer Cut Road by nine o'clock or so, I kinda rubbed my eyes and saw it wasn't Polaris at all, but one of the planets—Mars or Sat'n, I guess. I laid down to sleep, and until I came out along Preston Stream a week later, I don't remember nothing but little bits and pieces.”

“Well . . .” Ev halted. It sounded entirely unlike Del, whose head was as level as a carpenter's plane. “Well, was you panicked, Del?”

Del's eyes rolled up to meet Ev's, and they were still ashamed, but there was also a leaven of real humor in them now. “A man can't stay in a panic for a whole week, I don't b'lieve,” he said dryly. “It's
awful
tirin.”

“So you just . . .”

“I just,” Del agreed, “but just
what,
I don't know. I know that when I woke up from that nap my feet and my ass was both asleep and all numb, and I know that in one of those dreams it seemed like I heard somethin hummin—the way you can hear power lines hum on a still day, you know—and that's all. I forgot all m'woodcraft and wandered around in the woods like somebody who'd never even
seen
the woods before. When I hit Preston Stream I knew enough to follow it out, and I woke up in here, and I guess I'm a laughingstock in town, but I'm grateful to be alive. It's God's mercy that I am.”

“You ain't a laughingstock, Del,” Ev said, and of course that was a lie, because that was exactly what Del was. He worked at overcoming it for nearly five years, and when he saw for sure that the barbershop wits were never going to let him live it down, he moved up to East Eddington and opened a combination garage and
small engine-repair shop. Ev still got up to see him once in a while, but Del didn't come down to Haven much anymore. Ev guessed he knew why.

Sitting in his rented room, Ev closed the compass up as tight as it would go and drew the tiniest circle yet, the smallest the compass would make. There was only one house inside this marble-sized circle, and he thought:
That house is the closest one there is to the center of Haven. Funny I never thought about it before.

It was the old Garrick place, sitting there on Derry Road with Big Injun Woods widening out behind it.

Should have drawn this last circle in red, if no other.

Frank's niece, Bobbi Anderson, lived on the Garrick place now—not that she farmed, of course; she wrote books. Ev hadn't passed many words with Bobbi, but she had a good reputation in town. She paid her bills on time, folks said, and didn't gossip. Also, she wrote good old western stories that you could really sink your teeth into, not all full of make-believe monsters and a bunch of dirty words, like the ones that fellow who lived up Bangor wrote. Goddam good westerns, people said.

Especially for a girl.

People in Haven felt good about Bobbi Anderson, but of course she'd just been in town for thirteen years and people would have to wait and see. Garrick, most agreed, had been as crazy as a shithouse rat. He always brought in a good garden, but that didn't change his mental state. He was always trying to tell someone about his dreams. They were usually about the Second Coming. After a while it got so that even Arlene Cullum, who sold Amway with the zeal of a Christian martyr, would make herself scarce when she saw Frank Garrick's truck (plastered with bumper-stickers which said things like
IF THE RAPTURE'S TODAY SOMEBODY GRAB MY STEERING WHEEL
) driving down the village's Main Street.

In the late sixties, the old man had gotten a bee in his bonnet about flying saucers. Something about Elijah seeing a wheel within a wheel, and being taken up to heaven by angels driving chariots of fire powered by
electromagnetism. He had been crazy, and he had died of a heart attack in 1975.

But before he died,
Ev thought with rising coldness,
he lost all his teeth. I noticed it, and I remember Justin Hurd just down the road commenting on it, and . . . and now Justin's the closest, except for Bobbi herself, that is, and Justin also wasn't what you'd call a model of sanity and reason. Few times I saw him before I left, he even
reminded
me of old Frank.

It was odd, he thought at first, that he had never put together the run of peculiar things that had happened within those two inner circles before, that no one had. Further reflection made him decide it really wasn't so strange, after all. A life—particularly a long one—was composed of millions of events; they made a crowded tapestry with many patterns woven into it. Such a pattern as this—the deaths, the murders, the lost hunters, crazy Frank Garrick, maybe even that queer fire at the Paulsons'—only showed up if you were looking for it. Once seen, you wondered how you could have missed it. But if you weren't—

And now a new thought dawned: Bobbi Anderson was perhaps
not
all right. He remembered that since the beginning of July, perhaps even
before,
there had been sounds of heavy machinery coming from Big Injun Woods. Ev had heard the sounds and dismissed them—Maine was heavily forested, and the sounds were all too familiar. New England Paper doing a spot of logging on its land, most likely.

Except, now that he thought about it—now that he had seen the pattern—Ev realized that the sounds weren't deep enough in the woods to be on NEP's land—those sounds were coming from the Garrick place. And he also realized that the earlier sounds—the cycling, waspy whine of a chainsaw, the crackle-crunch of falling trees, the coughing roar of a gas-powered chipper—had given way to sounds he didn't associate with woods work at all. The later sounds had been . . . what? Earth-moving machinery, perhaps.

Once you saw the pattern, things fell into place like the last dozen pieces going effortlessly into a big jigsaw puzzle.

Ev sat looking down at the map and the circles. A
numbing horror seemed to be filling his veins, freezing him from the inside out.

Once you saw the pattern, you couldn't
help
seeing it.

Ev slammed the atlas shut and went to bed.

Where he was unable to sleep.

What are they doing down there tonight? Building things? Making people disappear? What?

Every time he drifted near sleep, an image came: everyone in Haven Village standing in Main Street with drugged, dreamy expressions on their faces, all of them looking southwest, toward those sounds, like Muslims facing Mecca to pray.

Heavy machinery . . . earth-moving machinery.

As the pieces went into the puzzle, you began to see what it was, even if there was no picture on the box to help you. Lying in this narrow bed not far from where Hilly lay in his coma, Ev Hillman thought he saw the picture pretty well. Not all of it, mind you, but a lot. He saw it and knew perfectly well no one would believe him. Not without proof. And he dared not go back, dared not put himself in their reach. They would not let him go a second time.

Something. Something out in Big Injun Woods. Something in the ground, something on the land Frank Garrick had willed to his niece, who wrote those western books. Something that knocked compasses and human minds galley-west if you got too close. For all Ev knew, there might be such strange deposits all over the earth. If it did nothing else, it might explain why people in some places seemed so goddam pissed off all the time. Something bad. Haunted. Maybe even accursed.