The Tommyknockers (10 page)

And that's what I'm going to do now
, he thought, rubbing his throat and thinking about the taste of good aged whiskey.
EXACTLY
what I'm going to do. Just sit here and watch them
all
over again, even
Rainbow Brite.
And for lunch I'm going to order three bacon cheeseburgers and eat one cold at three o'clock. Maybe skip
Rainbow Brite
and take a nap. Stay in tonight. Go to bed early. And stand it off.

Bobbi Anderson tripped over a three-inch tongue of metal protruding from the earth.

Jim Gardener tripped over Ron Cummings.

Different objects, same result.

For want of a nail.

Ron popped in around the same time that, some two hundred and ten miles away, Anderson and Peter were finally getting home from their less-than-normal trip to the vet's. Cummings suggested they go down to the hotel bar and have a drink or ten.

“Or,” Ron continued brightly, “we could just skip the foreplay and get shitfaced.”

If he had put it more delicately, Gard might have been okay. Instead, he found himself in the bar with Ron Cummings, raising a jolly Jack Daniel's to his lips and
telling himself the old one about how he could choke it off when he really wanted to.

Ron Cummings was a good, serious poet who just happened to have money practically falling out of his asshole . . . or so he often told people. “I am my own de' Medici,” he would say; “I have money practically falling out of my asshole.” His family had been in textiles for roughly nine hundred years and owned most of southern New Hampshire. They thought Ron was crazy, but because he was the second son, and because the first one was
not
crazy (i.e., uninterested in textiles), they let Ron do what he wanted to do, which was write poems, read poems, and drink almost constantly. He was a narrow young man with a TB face. Gardener had never seen him eat anything but beer-nuts and Goldfish crackers. To his dubious credit, he had no idea of Gardener's own problem with booze . . . or the fact that he had once come very close to killing his wife while drunk.

“Okay,” Gardener said. “I'm up for it. Let's get 'faced.”

After a few in the hotel bar, Ron suggested that a couple of smart fellers like them could find a place with entertainment a tad more exciting than the piped-in Muzak drifting down from the overhead speakers. “I think my heart can take it,” Ron said. “I mean, I'm not sure, but—”

“—God hates a coward,” Gardener finished.

Ron cackled, clapped him on the back, and called for
THE TAB.
He signed it with a flourish and then added a generous tip from his money clip. “Let's boogie, m'man.” And off they went.

The late-afternoon sun lanced Gardener's eyes like glass spears and it suddenly occurred to him that this might be a bad idea.

“Listen, Ron,” he said, “I think maybe I'll just—”

Cummings clapped him on the shoulder, formerly pale cheeks flushed, formerly watery blue eyes blazing (to Gard, Cummings now looked rather like Toad of Toad Hall after the acquisition of his motor-car), and cajoled: “Don't crap out on me now, Jim! Boston lies before us, so various and new, glistening like the fresh ejaculate of a young boy's first wetdream—”

Gardener burst into helpless gales of laughter.

“That's more like the Gardener we've all come to know and love,” Ron said, cackling himself.

“God hates a coward,” Gard said. “Hail us a cab, Ronnie.”

He saw it then: the funnel in the sky. Big and black and getting closer. Soon it was going to touch down and carry him away.

Not to Oz, though.

A cab pulled over to the curb. They got in. The driver asked them where they wanted to go.

“Oz,” Gardener muttered.

Ron cackled. “What he means is someplace where they drink fast and dance faster. Think you can manage that?”

“Oh, I think so,” the driver said, and pulled out.

Gardener draped an arm around Ron's shoulders and cried:
“Let the wild rumpus start!”

“I'll drink to that,” Ron said.

Gardener awoke the next morning fully dressed in a tubful of cold water. His best set of clothes—which he'd had the misfortune to be wearing when he and Ron Cummings set sail the day before—were bonding themselves slowly to his skin. He looked at his fingers and saw they were very white and very pruny. Fishfingers. He'd been here for a while, apparently. The water might even have been hot when he climbed in. He didn't remember.

He opened the tub drain. Saw a bottle of bourbon standing on the toilet seat. It was half-full, its surface bleary with some sort of grease. He picked it up. The grease smelled vaguely of fried chicken. Gardener was more interested in the aroma coming from
inside
the bottle. Don't do this, he thought, but the neck of the bottle was rapping against his teeth before the thought was even half-finished. He had a drink. Blacked out again.

When he came to, he was standing naked in his bedroom with the phone to his ear and the vague idea that he had just finished dialing a number. Whose? He had no idea until Cummings answered. Cummings sounded even worse than Gardener felt. Gardener would have sworn this was impossible.

“How bad was it?” Gardener heard himself ask. It was always this way when he was in the grip of the cyclone; even when he was conscious, everything seemed to have the gray grainy texture of a tabloid photograph, and he never seemed to exactly be
inside
of himself. A lot of the time he seemed to be floating above his own head, like a kid's silvery Puffer balloon. “How much trouble did we get into?”

“Trouble?” Cummings repeated, and then fell silent. At least Gardener
thought
he was thinking.
Hoped
he was thinking. Or maybe dreaded the idea. He waited, his hands very cold. “No trouble,” Cummings said at last, and Gard relaxed a little. “Except for my head, that is. I got my head in
plenty
of trouble. J
ee-zus!”

“You sure?
Nothing?
Nothing at
all?”

He was thinking of Nora.

Shot your wife, uh?
a voice spoke up suddenly in his mind—the voice of the deputy with the comic book.
Good fucking deal.

“We-ell . . .” Cummings said reflectively, and then stopped.

Gardener's hand clenched tight on the phone again.

“Well
what?”
Suddenly the lights in the room were too bright. Like the sun when they had stepped out of the hotel late yesterday afternoon.

You did something. You had another fucking blackout and did another stupid thing. Or crazy thing. Or horrible thing. When are you going to learn to leave it alone? Or
can
you learn?

An exchange from an old movie clanged stupidly into his mind.

Evil
El Comandante:
Tomorrow before daybreak,
señor,
you will be dead! You have seen the sun for the last time!

Brave
Americano:
Yeah, but you'll be bald for the rest of your life.

“What was it?” he asked Ron. “What did I do?”

“You got into an argument with some guys at a place called the Stone Country Bar and Grille,” Cummings said. He laughed a little. “Ow! Christ, when it hurts to laugh, you
know
you abused yourself. You remember the Stone Country Bar and Grille and them thar good ole boys, James, my dear?”

He said he didn't. Really straining, he could remember a place called Smith Brothers. The sun had just been
going down in a kettle of blood, and this being late June, that meant it had been . . . what? eight-thirty? quarter of nine? about five hours after he and Ron had gotten started, give or take. He could remember the sign outside bore the likeness of the famous coughdrop siblings. He could remember arguing furiously about Wallace Stevens with Cummings, shouting to be heard over the juke, which had been thundering out something by John Fogerty. That was where the last jagged edges of memory came to a halt.

“It was the place with the
WAYLON JENNINGS FOR PRESIDENT
bumper-sticker over the bar,” Cummings said. “That refresh the old noggin?”

“No,” Gardener said miserably.

“Well, you got into an argument with a couple of the good ole boys. Words were passed. These words grew first warm and then hot. A punch was thrown.”

“By me?” Gardener's voice was now only dull.

“By you,” Cummings agreed cheerfully. “At which point we flew through the air with the greatest of ease, landing on the sidewalk. I thought we got off pretty cheap, to tell you the truth. You had them frothing, Jim.”

“Was it about Seabrook or Chernobyl?”

“Shit, you
do
remember!”

“If I remembered, I wouldn't be asking you which one it was.”

“As a matter of fact, it was both.” Cummings hesitated. “Are you all right, Gard? You sound real low.”

Yeah? Well, actually, Ron, I'm way
up.
Up in the cyclone. Going around and around and up and down, and where it ends nobody knows.

“I'm okay.”

“That's good. One hopes you know who you have to thank for it.”

“You, maybe?”

“None other. Man, I landed on that sidewalk like a kid hitting the ground the first time he comes off the end of a slide. I can't quite see my ass in the mirror, but that's probably a good thing. I bet it looks like a Day-Glo Grateful Dead poster from sixty-nine. But you wanted to go back in and talk about how all the kids around Chernobyl were gonna be dead of leukemia in five years. You wanted to talk about how some guys almost blew up
Arkansas looking for faulty wiring with a candle in a nuclear-power plant. You said they caught the place on fire. Me, I'd bet my watch—and it's a Rolex—that they were Snopeses from Em-Eye-Double-Ess-Eye-Pee-Pee-Eye. Only way I could get you into a cab was by telling you we'd come back later and bust heads. I sweet-talked you up to your room and started the tub for you. You said you were all right. You said you were going to take a bath and then call some guy named Bobby.”

“The guy's a girl,” Gardener said absently. He was rubbing at his right temple with his free hand.

“Good-looking?”

“Pretty. No knockout.” An errant thought, nonsensical but perfectly concrete—
Bobbi's in trouble
—kicked across his mind the way an errant billiard ball will roll across the clean green felt of a pool table. Then it was gone.

He walked slowly over to a chair and sat down, now massaging both temples. The nukes. Of course it had been the nukes. What else? If it wasn't Chernobyl it was Seabrook, and if it wasn't Seabrook it was Three-Mile Island and if it wasn't Three-Mile Island it was Maine Yankee in Wiscasset or what could have happened at the Hanford Plant in Washington State if someone hadn't happened to notice, just in the nick of time, that their used core-rods, stored in an unlined ditch outside, were getting ready to blow sky-high.

How many nicks of time could there be?

Spent fuel rods that were stacking up in big hot piles. They thought the Curse of King Tut was bad? Brother! Wait until some twenty-fifth-century archaeologist dug up a load of
this
shit! You tried to tell people the whole thing was a
lie,
nothing but a baldfaced naked
lie,
that nuclear-generated power was eventually going to kill millions and render huge tracts of land sterile and unlivable. What you got back was a blank stare. You talked to people who had lived through one administration after another in which their elected officials told one lie after another, then lied about the
lies,
and when
those
lies were found out the liars said: Oh jeez, I forgot,
sorry—and since they
forgot,
the people who elected them behaved like Christians and
forgave.
You couldn't believe there were so fucking
many
of them willing to do that until you remembered what P. T. Barnum said about the extraordinarily high birth rate of suckers. They looked you square in the face when you tried to tell them the truth and informed you that you were full of shit, the American government didn't tell lies, not telling lies was what made America great,
Oh dear Father, here's the facts, I did it with my little ax, I can't keep silent for it was I, and come what may, I cannot tell a lie.
When you tried to talk to them, they looked at you as if you were babbling in a foreign language. It had been eight years since he had almost killed his wife, and three since he and Bobbi had been arrested at Seabrook, Bobbi on the general charge of illegal demonstration, Gard on a much more specific one—possession of a concealed and unlicensed handgun. The others paid a fine and got out. Gardener did two months. His lawyer told him he was lucky. Gardener asked his lawyer if he knew he was sitting on a time bomb and jerking his meat. His lawyer asked him if he had considered psychiatric help. Gardener asked his lawyer if he had ever considered getting stuffed.

But he had had sense enough not to attend any more demonstrations. That much, anyway. He kept away from them. They were poisoning him. When he got drunk, however, his mind—whatever the booze had left of it—returned obsessively to the subject of the reactors, the core-rods, the containments, the inability to slow down a runaway once it really got going—

To the nukes, in other words.

When he got drunk, his heart got hot. The nukes. The goddam nukes. It was symbolic, yeah, okay, you didn't have to be Freud to figure that what he was
really
protesting was the reactor in his own heart. When it came to matters of restraint, James Gardener had a bad containment system. There was some technician inside who should have long since been fired. He sat and played with all the wrong switches. That guy wouldn't be really happy until Jim Gardener went China Syndrome.