The Tommyknockers (11 page)

The goddam fucking nukes.

Forget it.

He tried. For a start, he tried thinking about tonight's reading at Northeastern—a fun-filled frolic that was being
sponsored by a group that called itself the Friends of Poetry, a name which filled Gardener with fear and trembling. Groups with such names tended to be made up exclusively of women who called themselves ladies (most of them of a decidedly blue-haired persuasion). The ladies of the club tended to be a good deal more familiar with the works of Rod McKuen than those of John Berryman, Hart Crane, Ron Cummings, or that good old drunken blackout brawler and wife shooter James Eric Gardener.

Get out of here, Gard. Never mind the New England Poetry Caravan. Never mind Northeastern or the Friends of Poetry or the McCardle bitch. Get out of here right now before something bad happens. Something really bad. Because if you stay, something really bad will. There's blood on the moon.

But he was damned if he'd go running back to Maine with his tail between his legs. Not him.

Besides, there was the bitch.

Patricia McCardle was her name, and if she wasn't one strutting world-class bitch, Gard had never met one.

She had a contract, and it specified no play, no pay.

“Jesus,” Gardener said, and put a hand over his eyes, trying to shut away the growing headache, knowing there was only one kind of medicine that would do that, and also knowing it was exactly the sort of medicine that could bring that really bad thing on.

And
also
knowing that knowing would do no good at all. So after a while the booze started to flow and the cyclone started to blow.

Jim Gardener, now in free fall.

Patricia McCardle was the New England Poetry Caravan's principal contributor and head ramrod. Her legs were long but skinny, her nose aristocratic but too bladelike to be considered attractive. Gard had once tried to imagine kissing her and had been horrified by the image which had risen, unbidden, in his mind: her nose not just sliding up his cheek but slicing it open like a razor blade. She had a high forehead, nonexistent breasts, and eyes as
gray as a glacier on a cloudy day. She traced her ancestry back to the
Mayflower.

Gardener had worked for her before and there had been trouble before. He had become part of the 1988 New England Poetry Caravan in rather grisly fashion . . . but the reason for his abrupt inclusion was no more unheard-of in the world of poetry than it was in those of jazz and rock and roll. Patricia McCardle had been left with a last-minute hole in her announced program because one of the six poets who had signed on for this summer's happy cruise had hung himself in his closet with his belt.

“Just like Phil Ochs,” Ron Cummings had said to Gardener as they sat near the back of the bus on the first day of the tour. He said it with a nervous bad-boy-at-the-back-of-the-classroom giggle. “But then, Bill Claughtsworth always was a derivative son of a bitch.”

Patricia McCardle had gotten twelve reading dates and fairly good advances on a deal which, when stripped of all the high-flown rhetoric, boiled down to six poets for the price of one. Following Claughtsworth's suicide, she found herself with three days to find a publishing poet in a season when most publishing poets were booked solid (“Or on permanent vacation like Silly Billy Claughtsworth,” Cummings said, laughing rather uneasily).

Few if any of the booked groups would balk at paying the stipulated fee just because the Caravan happened to be short one poet—to do such a thing would be in rawther shitty taste, particularly when one considered the
reason
the Caravan was a poet short. All the same, it put Caravan, Inc., in a position of contractual default, at least technically, and Patricia McCardle was not a woman to brook loopholes.

After trying four poets, each more minor-league than the last, and with only thirty-six hours before the first reading, she had finally called Jim Gardener.

“Are you still drinking, Jimmy?” she asked bluntly. Jimmy—he hated that. Most people called him Jim. Jim was all right. No one called him Gard except himself . . . and Bobbi Anderson.

“Drinking a little,” he said. “Not bingeing at all.”

“I'm dubious,” she said coldly.

“You always have been, Patty,” he replied, knowing she hated that even more than he did Jimmy—her Puritan blood screamed against it. “Were you asking because you
happen to be short a quart, or did you have a more pressing reason?”

Of course he knew, and of course she knew he knew, and of course she knew he was grinning, and of course she was infuriated, and of course all of this tickled him just about to death, and of course she knew he knew
that
too, and that was just the way he liked it.

They sparred a few more minutes, and then came to what was not a marriage of convenience but one of necessity. Gardener wanted to buy a good used wood furnace for the coming winter; he was tired of living like a slut, bundled up at night in front of the kitchen stove while the wind rattled the plastic stapled over the windows; Patricia McCardle wanted to buy a poet. There would be no handshake agreement, though, not with Patricia McCardle. She had driven down from Derry that afternoon with a contract (in triplicate) and a notary public. Gard was a little surprised she hadn't brought a second notary, just in case the first one happened to suffer a coronary or something.

Feelings and hunches aside, there was really no way he could leave the tour and get the wood furnace, because if he left the tour he would never see the second half of his fee. She'd haul him into court and spend a thousand dollars trying to get him to cough up the three hundred Caravan, Inc., had paid up front. She might be able to do it, too. He had done almost all the dates, but the contract he had signed was crystal clear on the subject: if he took off
for any reason unacceptable to the Tour Co-Ordinator, any and all fees unpaid shall be declared null and void, and any and all fees prepaid shall be refundable to Caravan, Inc., within thirty (30) days.

And she
would
go after him. She might think she was doing it on principle, but it would really be because he had called her Patty in her hour of need.

Nor would that be the end of it. If he left, she would work with unflagging energy to get him blackballed. He would certainly never read again for another poetry tour with which she was associated, and that was a lot of poetry tours. Then there was the delicate matter of grants. Her husband had left her a lot of money (although he didn't think you could say, as Ron Cummings did, that she practically had money falling out of her asshole, because Gard didn't believe Patricia McCardle
had
anything so vulgar as an asshole, or even a rectum—when in need of relief, she probably performed an Act of Immaculate Excretion). Patricia McCardle had taken a great deal of this money and set up a number of grants-in-aid. This made her simultaneously a serious patron of the arts and an extremely smart businesswoman in regard to the nasty business of income taxes: the grants were write-offs. Some of them funded poets for specific time periods. Some funded cash poetry awards and prizes, and some underwrote magazines of modern poetry and fiction. The grants were administered by committees. Behind each of them moved the hand of Patricia McCardle, making sure that they meshed as neatly as the pieces of a Chinese puzzle . . . or the strands of a spider's web.

She could do a lot more to him than get back her lousy six hundred bucks. She could muzzle him. And it was just possible—unlikely, but possible—that he might write a few more good poems before the madmen who had stuffed a shotgun up the asshole of the world decided to pull the trigger.

So get through it,
he thought. He had ordered a bottle of Johnnie Walker from room service (God bless
THE TAB,
forever and ever, amen), and now he poured his second drink with a hand that had become remarkably steady.
Get through it, that's all.

But as the day wore on, he kept thinking about grabbing a Greyhound bus at the Stuart Street terminal and getting off five hours later in front of the dusty little drugstore in Unity. Thumbing a ride up to Troy from there. Calling Bobbi Anderson on the phone and saying:
I almost went up in the cyclone, Bobbi, but I found the storm cellar just in time. Lucky break, uh?

Shit on that. You make your own luck. If you be strong, Gard, you be lucky. Get through it, that's all. That's what's to do.

He scrummed through his totebag, looking for the best clothes he had left, since his reading clothes appeared to be beyond salvage. He tossed a pair of faded jeans, a plain white shirt, a tattered pair of skivvies, and a pair of socks onto the bedspread (
thanks, ma'am, but there's no need to make up the room, I slept in the tub).
He got dressed, ate some Certs, ate some booze, ate some more Certs, and then went through the bag again, this time looking for the aspirin. He found it and ate some of
those. He looked at the bottle. Looked away. The pulse of the headache was getting worse. He sat down by the window with his notebooks, trying to decide what he should read that night.

In this dreadful long afternoon light all his poems looked as if they had been written in Punic. Instead of doing anything positive about his headache, the aspirin seemed to actually be intensifying it:
slam, bam, thank you, ma'am.
His head whacked with each heartbeat. It was the same old headache, the one that felt like an auger made of dull steel being slowly driven into his head at a point slightly above and to the left of his left eye. He touched the tips of his fingers to the faint scar there and ran his fingers lightly along it. The steel plate buried under the skin there was the result of a skiing accident in his teens. He remembered the doctor saying,
You may suffer headaches from time to time, son. When they come, just thank God you can feel anything. You're lucky to be alive.

But at times like this he wondered.

At times like this he wondered a lot.

He put the notebooks aside with a shaking hand and closed his eyes.

I can't get through it.

You can.

I can't. There's blood on the moon, I feel it, I can almost
see
it.

Don't give me any of your Irish willywags! Just get tough, you weak fucking sister! Tough!

“I'll try,” he muttered, not opening his eyes, and fifteen minutes later, when his nose began to bleed slightly, he didn't notice. He had fallen asleep in the chair.

He always got stage fright before reading, even if the group was a small one (and groups which turned out to hear readings of modern poetry tended to be just that). On the night of June 27th, however, Jim Gardener's stage fright was intensified by his headache. When he woke from his nap in the hotel room chair the shakes and the fluttery stomach were gone, but the headache had
gotten even worse: it had graduated to a Genuine Class-A Thumper & World-Beater, maybe the worst of all time.

When his turn to read finally came, he seemed to hear himself from a great distance. He felt a little like a man listening to a recording of himself on a shortwave broadcast coming in from Spain or Portugal. Then a wave of light-headedness coursed through him and for a few moments he could only pretend to be looking for a poem, some special poem, perhaps, that had been temporarily misplaced. He shuffled papers with dim and nerveless fingers, thinking:
I'm going to faint, I think. Right up here in front of everyone. Fall against this lectern and pitch both it and me into the front row. Maybe I can land on that blue-blooded cunt and kill her. That would almost make my whole life seem worthwhile.

Get through it,
that implacable inner voice responded. Sometimes that voice sounded like his father's; more often it sounded like the voice of Bobbi Anderson.
Get through it, that's all. That's what's to do.

The audience that night was larger than usual, maybe a hundred people squeezed behind the desks of a Northeastern lecture hall. Their eyes seemed too big.
What big eyes you have, Gramma!
It was as if they would eat him up with their eyes. Suck out his soul, his
ka,
his whatever you wanted to call it. A snatch of old T. Rex occurred to him:
Girl, I'm just a vampire for your love . . . and I'm gonna
SUCK YA!

Of course there was no more T. Rex. Marc Bolan had wrapped his sports car around a tree and was lucky not to be alive.
Bang-a-Gong, Marc,
you
sure got it on. Or got it off. Or whatever. A group called Power Station is going to cover your tune in 1986 and it's going to be really bad, it . . . it . . .

He raised an unsteady hand to his forehead, and a quiet murmur ran through the audience.

Better get going, Gard. Natives are getting restless.

Yeah, that was Bobbi's voice, all right.

The fluorescents, embedded in pebbled rectangles overhead, seemed to be pulsing in cycles which perfectly matched the cycles of pain driving into his head. He could see Patricia McCardle. She was wearing a little black dress that surely hadn't cost a penny more than three hundred dollars—distress-sale stuff from one of those tacky little shops on Newbury Street. Her face
was as narrow and pallid and unforgiving as that of any of her Puritan forebears, those wonderful, fun-loving guys who had been more than happy to stick you in some stinking gaol for three or four weeks if you had the bad luck to be spied going out on the Sabbath Day without a snotrag in your pocket. Patricia's dark eyes lay upon him like dusty stones and Gard thought:
She sees what's happening and she couldn't be more pleased. Look at her. She's waiting for me to fall down. And when I do, you know what she'll be thinking, don't you?