The Tommyknockers (17 page)

How
could
it be worse than Nora?

Something.
For the time being his head hurt too badly to even try reconstructing the last unknown period of time.

Gardener looked down at the water, the waves bulging smoothly up toward where he sat, forearms on his knees, head sagging. When the troughs passed he could see barnacles and slick green seaweed. No . . . not really seaweed. Green slime. Like boogers.

Shot your wife . . . good fucking deal, uh?

Gardener closed his eyes against the sickening pulses of pain, then opened them again.

Jump in
, a voice cajoled him softly.
I mean, what the fuck, you don't really need any more of this shit, do you? Game called in the bottom of the first. Not official. Rainout. To be rescheduled when the Great Wheel of Karma turns into the next life . . . or the one after that, if I have to spend the next making up for this one by being a dung beetle or something. Hang up your jock, Gard. Jump in. In your current state, both of your legs will cramp and it'll be over quick. Gotta beat a bedsheet in a jail cell, anyway. Go on, jump.

He got up and stood swaying on the rocks, looking at the water. Just one big step, that's all it would take. He could do it in his sleep. Shit, almost had.

Not yet. Want to talk to Bobbi first.

The part of his mind which still wanted a little to live grasped at this idea. Bobbi. Bobbi was the only part of his old life that still seemed somehow whole and good. Bobbi was living down there in Haven, writing her westerns, still sane, still his friend if no longer his lover. His last friend.

Want to talk to Bobbi first, okay?

Why? So you can make a last stab at fucking her up too? God knows you've tried hard enough. She's got a police record because of you, and undoubtedly her own FBI folder as well. Leave Bobbi out of this. Jump and stop fucking around.

He swayed forward, very close to doing it. The part of him that still wanted to live seemed to have no arguments left, no delaying tactics. It could have said that he had stayed sober—more or less—for the last three years, there had been no blackouts since he and Bobbi had been arrested at Seabrook in 1985. But that was a hollow argument. Except for Bobbi he was now completely alone. His mind was in turmoil almost all of the time, returning again and again—even sober—to the subject of the nukes. He recognized that his original concern and anger had rotted into obsession . . . but recognition and rehabilitation were not the same things at all. His poetry had deteriorated. His
mind
had deteriorated. Worst of all, when he wasn't drinking he wished he was.
It's just that the hurting's all the time now. I'm like a bomb walking around and looking for a place to go off. Time to defuse.

Okay, then. Okay. He closed his eyes and got ready.

As he did, an odd certainty came to him, an intuition so strong that it was nearly precognitive. He felt that Bobbi needed to talk to
him,
rather than the other way around. That it was no mind trick. She really was in some kind of trouble.
Bad
trouble.

He opened his eyes and looked around, like a man coming out of a deep daze. He would find a phone and call her. He wouldn't say “Hey Bobbi I had another blackout” and he wouldn't say “I don't know where I am Bobbi but this time there's no nose-picking deputy to stop me.” He would say “Hey, Bobbi, how you doin?” and when she told him she was doin okay, never better, shooting it out with the James gang in Northfield, or lighting out for the territories with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and by the way, Gard, how's your own bad self, Gard would tell her he was fine, writing some good stuff for a change, thinking of going over Vermont way for a bit, see some friends. Then he would go back out to the end of the breakwater and jump off. Nothing fancy; he would just bellyflop into the dead zone. That seemed to fit; after all, it was the way he had mostly gotten through the live one. The ocean had been here for a billion years or so. It would wait another five minutes while he did that.

But no laying it off on her, you hear me? Promise, Gard. No breaking down and blubbering. You're supposed to be her friend, not the male equivalent of her slimebucket sister. None of that shit.

He had broken promises in his life, God knew—a few thousand of them to himself. But this one he would keep.

He climbed clumsily up to the top of the breakwater. It was rough and rocky, a really fine place to break an ankle. He looked around apathetically for his scuffed brown totebag, the one he always took with him when he went off to read, or just to ramble, thinking it might be lodged in one of the holes between the rocks. It wasn't. It was an old campaigner, scuffed and battered, going back to the last troubled years of his marriage, something he had managed to hold onto while all the valuable things got lost. Well, now the tote was finally gone too. Clothes, toothbrush, bar of soap in a plastic dish, a bunch of jerky meat-sticks (it amused Bobbi to cure jerky in her shed, sometimes), a twenty-dollar bill under
the tote's bottom . . . and all his unpublished poems, of course.

The poems were the least of his worries. The ones he had written over the last couple of years, and to which he had given the wonderfully witty and upbeat title “The Radiation Cycle,” had been submitted to five different publishers and rejected by all five. One anonymous editor had scribbled: “Poetry and politics rarely mix; poetry and propaganda, never.” This little homily was perfectly true, he knew it . . . and still hadn't been able to stop.

Well, the tide had administered the Ultimate Blue Pencil to them.
Go and do thou likewise,
he thought, and lurched slowly along the breakwater toward the beach, thinking that his walk out to where he had awakened must have been better than a death-defying circus act. He walked with the summer sun rising up red and bloated from the Atlantic behind him, his shadow trailing out in front of him, and on the beach a kid in jeans and a T-shirt set off a string of firecrackers.

A marvel: his totebag wasn't lost after all. It was lying upside-down on the beach just above the high-tide line, unzipped, looking to Gardener like a big leather mouth biting at the sand. He picked it up and looked inside. Everything was gone. Even his frayed undies. He pulled up the tote's imitation leather bottom. The twenty was gone too. Fond hope, too quickly banish'd.

Gardener dropped the tote. His notebooks, all three of them, lay a little further along the beach. One was resting on its covers in a tent shape, one lay soggily just below the high-tide line, swelled up to the size of a telephone book, and the wind was leafing through the third idly.
Don't bother,
Gardener thought.
Lees of an ass.

The kid with the firecrackers came toward him . . . but not too close.
Wants to be able to take off in a hurry if I turn out to be as weird as I undoubtedly look
, Gardener thought. Smart kid.

“That your stuff?” the kid asked. His T-shirt showed a guy blowing his groceries.
SCHOOL-LUNCH VICTIM,
the shirt said.

“Yeah,” Gardener said. He bent down and picked up the soggy notebook, looked at it for a moment, and then tossed it down again.

The kid handed him the other two. What could he say?
Don't bother, kid? The poems suck, kid? Poetry and politics rarely mix, kid, poetry and propaganda
never?

“Thanks,” he said.

“Sure.” The kid held the bag so Gardener could drop the two dry notebooks back inside. “Surprised you got anything left at all. This place is full of ripoff artists in the summer. The park, I guess.”

The kid gestured with his thumb and Gardener saw the roller coaster silhouetted against the sky. Gard's first thought was that he had somehow managed to roister all the way north to Old Orchard Beach before collapsing. A second look changed his mind. No pier.

“Where am I?” Gardener asked, and his mind harked back with an eerie totality to the jail cell and the nose-picking deputy. For a moment he was sure the kid would say,
Where do you think you are?

“Arcadia Beach.” The kid looked half-amused, half-contemptuous. “You must have really hung one on last night, mister.”

“Last night, and the night before,” Gardener chanted, his voice a little rusty, a little eerie. “Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.”

The boy blinked at Gardener in surprise . . . and then delighted him by unexpectedly adding a couplet Gardener had never heard: “Wanna go out, dunno if I can, cause I'm so afraid of the Tommyknocker man.”

Gardener grinned . . . but the grin turned into a wince of fresh pain. “Where'd you hear that, kid?”

“My mom. When I was a baby.”

“I heard about the Tommyknockers from my mother too,” Gardener said, “but never that part.”

The kid shrugged as if the topic had lost whatever marginal interest it might have had for him. “She used to make all kinds of stuff up.” He appraised Gardener. “Don't you ache?”

“Kid,” Gardener said, leaning forward solemnly, “in the immortal words of Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, I feel like homemade shit.”

“You look like you been drunk a long time.”

“Yeah? How would you know?”

“My mom. With her it was always funny stuff like the Tommyknockers or too hung-over to talk.”

“She give it up?”

“Yeah. Car crash,” the kid said.

Gardener was suddenly racked with shivers. The boy appeared not to notice; he studied the sky, tracing the path of a gull. It coursed a morning sky of blue delicately shelled with mackerel scales, turning black for a moment as it flew in front of the sun's rising red eye. It landed on the breakwater, where it began to pick at something which gulls presumably found tasty.

Gardener looked from the gull to the kid. All of this was taking on decidedly omenish tones. The kid knew about the fabled Tommyknockers. How many kids in the world knew about them, and what were the odds that Gardener would happen to stumble on one who both (a) knew about them and (b) had lost his mother because of drink?

The kid reached in his pocket and brought out a small tangle of firecrackers.
Sweet bird of youth,
Gard thought, and smiled.

“Want to light a couple? Celebrate the Fourth? Might cheer you up.”

“The Fourth? The Fourth of
July?
Is that what this is?”

The kid gave him a dry smile. “It ain't Arbor Day.”

The twenty-sixth of June had been . . . he counted backwards. Good Christ. He had eight days which were painted black. Well . . . not quite. That actually would have been better. Patches of light, not at all welcome, were beginning to illuminate parts of that blackness. The idea that he had hurt someone—
again
—arose now in his mind as a certainty. Did he want to know who that

(arglebargle)

was, or what he had done to him or her? Probably not. Best to call Bobbi and finish himself before he remembered.

“Mister, how'd you get that scar on your forehead?”

“Ran into a tree while I was skiing.”

“Bet it hurt.”

“Yeah, even worse than this, but not by much. Do you know where there's a pay phone?”

The kid pointed to an eccentric green-roofed manse which stood perhaps a mile down the beach. It topped a crumbling granite headland and looked like the cover of
a paperback gothic. It had to be a resort. After a moment's fumbling, Gard came up with the name.

“That's the Alhambra, isn't it?”

“The one and only.”

“Thanks,” he said, and started off.

“Mister?”

He turned.

“Don't you want that last book?” The kid pointed to the wet notebook lying on the high-tide line. “You could dry it out.”

Gardener shook his head. “Kid,” he said, “I can't even dry
me
out.”

“You sure you don't want to light off some firecrackers?”

Gardener shook his head, smiling. “Be careful with 'em, okay? People hurt themselves with things that go bang.”

“Okay.” He smiled, a little shyly. “My mother did for a long time before the, you know—”

“I know. What's your name?”

“Jack. What's yours?”

“Gard.”

“Happy Fourth of July, Gard.”

“Happy Fourth, Jack. And watch out for the Tommyknockers.”

“Knocking at my door,” the kid agreed solemnly, and looked at Gardener with eyes which seemed queerly knowing.

For a moment Gardener seemed to feel a second premonition (
whoever would have guessed a hangover was so conducive to the psychic emanations of the universe?
a bitterly sarcastic voice inside asked). He didn't know what of, exactly, but it filled him with urgency about Bobbi again. He tipped the kid a wave and set off up the beach. He walked at a fast, steady pace, although the sand drew at his feet, clinging, pulling. Soon his heart was racing and his head was thudding so hard his eyeballs seemed to pulse.

The Alhambra did not seem to be drawing appreciably closer.

Slow down or you'll have a heart attack. Or a stroke. Or both.

He did slow down . . . and then doing so struck him as palpably absurd. Here he was, planning to drown himself in fifteen minutes or so, but minding his heart in the
meantime. It was like the old joke about the condemned man turning down the cigarette offered by the captain of the firing squad. “I'm trying to quit,” the guy says.

Gardener picked up his pace again, and now the bolts of pain began to beat out steady pulses of jingle-jangle verse:

Late last night and the night before,

Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers,

Knocking at the door.