The Tommyknockers (24 page)

Now, something new had been added—something which was just simple enough to be terrifying:

You don't believe that, do you?

I don't know.

Come on, Gard—flying tractors? Give me a break!

She's got a miniature sun in her water heater.

Bullshit. I think it might have been a light bulb, a bright one, like a two-hundred-watt—

It was
not
a light bulb!

Okay, all right, calm down. It just sounds like an ad for a really
E.T.
ripoff, that's all. “You'll believe a tractor can fly.”

Shut up.

Or “John Deere, phone home.” How's that?

He stood in Anderson's kitchen again, looking longingly at the cabinet where the booze was. He shifted his eyes away—it was not easy because they felt as if they had gained weight—and walked back into the living room. He saw that Bobbi had changed positions and that her respiration was moving along a bit more rapidly. First signs of waking up. Gardener glanced at his watch again and saw it was nearly ten o'clock. He went over to the bookcase by Bobbi's desk, wanting to find something to read until she came around, something that would take his mind off this whole business for a little while.

What he saw on Bobbi's desk, beside the battered old typewriter, was in some ways the worst shock of all. Shocking enough, anyway, so that he barely noticed another change: a roll of perforated computer paper hung on the wall above and behind the desk and typewriter like a giant roll of paper towels.

THE BUFFALO SOLDIERS

a novel by Roberta Anderson

Gardener put the top sheet aside, facedown, and saw his own name—or rather, the nickname only he and Bobbi used.

For Gard, who's always there when I need him.

Another shudder worked through him. He put the second sheet aside facedown on the first.

In those days, just before Kansas began to bleed, the buffalo were still plentiful on the plains—plentiful enough, anyway, for poor men, white and Indian alike, to be buried in buffalo skins rather than in coffins.

“Once you get a taste of buffaler meat, you'll never want what come off'n a cow again,” the old-timers said, and they must have believed what they said, because these hunters of the plains, these buffalo soldiers, seemed to exist in a world of hairy, humpbacked ghosts—all about them they carried the memory of the buffalo, the smell of the buffalo—the smell, yes, because many of them smeared buff-tallow on their necks and faces and hands to keep the prairie sun from burning them black. They wore buffalo teeth in necklaces and sometimes in their ears; their chaps were of buffalo hide; and more than one of these nomads carried a buffalo penis as a good-luck charm or guarantee of continued potency.

Ghosts themselves, following herds that crossed the short-wire grass like the great clouds which cover the prairie with their shadows; the clouds remain but the great herds are gone . . . and so are the buffalo soldiers, madmen from wastes that had as yet never known a fence, men who came striding out of nowhere and went striding back into that same place, men with buffalo-hide moccasins on their feet and bones clicking about their necks; ghosts out of time, out of a place that existed just before the whole country began to bleed.

Late in the afternoon, of August 24th, 1848, Robert Howell, who would die at Gettysburg not quite fifteen years later, made camp near a small stream far out along the Nebraska panhandle, in that eerie section known as the Sand Hill Country. The stream was small but the water smelled sweet enough . . .

Gardener was forty pages into the story and utterly absorbed when he heard Bobbi Anderson call sleepily:

“Gard? Gard, are you still around?”

“I'm here, Bobbi,” he said, and stood up, dreading what would come next and already half-believing he had
gone insane. That had to be it, of course. There could not be a tiny sun in the bottom of Bobbi's hot-water tank, nor a new gear on her Tomcat which suggested levitation . . . but it would have been easier for him to believe either of those things than to believe that Bobbi had written a four-hundred-page novel called
The Buffalo Soldiers
in the three weeks or so since Gard had last seen her—a novel that was, just incidentally, the best thing she had ever written. Impossible, yeah. Easier—hell,
saner
—to believe he had gone crazy and simply leave it at that.

If only he could.

Bobbi was getting off the couch slowly, wincing like an old woman.

“Bobbi—” Gardener began.

“Christ, I ache all over,” Anderson said. “And I've got to change my—never mind. How long did I sleep?” Gardener glanced at his watch. “Fourteen hours, I guess. A little more. Bobbi, your new book—”

“Yeah. Hold that until I get back.” She walked slowly across the floor toward the bathroom, unbuttoning the shirt she'd slept in. As she hobbled toward the bathroom, Gardener got a good look—a better one than he wanted, actually—of just how much weight Bobbi had lost. This went beyond scrawniness to the point of emaciation.

She stopped, as if aware Gardener was looking at her, and without looking around she said: “I can explain everything, you know.”

“Can you?” Gardener asked.

Anderson was in the bathroom a long time—much longer than it should have taken her to use the toilet and change her pad—Gardener was pretty sure that was what she'd gone to do. Her face just had that I-got-the-curse look.
He listened for the shower but it wasn't running, and he began to feel uneasy. Bobbi had seemed perfectly lucid when she woke up, but did that necessarily mean she
was?
Gardener began to have uncomfortable visions of Bobbi wriggling out the bathroom window and then running off into the woods in nothing but blue jeans, cackling wildly.

He put his right hand to the left side of his forehead, where the scar was. His head had started to throb a little. He let another minute or two slip by, and then he got up and walked toward the bathroom, making an effort to step quietly that was not quite unconscious. Visions of Bobbi escaping through the bathroom window to avoid explanations had been replaced by one of Bobbi serenely cutting her throat with one of Gard's own razor blades to avoid explanations permanently.

He decided he would just listen. If he heard normal-sounding movements, he would go on out to the kitchen and put on coffee, maybe scramble a few eggs. If he didn't hear anything—

His worries were needless. The bathroom door hadn't latched when she closed it, and other improvements aside, the unlatched doors in the place apparently still had their old way of swinging open. She'd probably have to shim up the whole north side of the house to do that.
Maybe that was
next
week's project,
he thought.

The door had swung open enough for him to see Bobbi standing at the mirror where Gardener had stood himself not long ago. She had her toothbrush in one hand and a tube of toothpaste in the other . . . but she hadn't uncapped the tube yet. She was looking into the mirror with an intensity that was almost hypnotic. Her lips were pulled back, her teeth bared.

She caught movement in the mirror and turned around, making no particular effort to cover her wasted breasts.

“Gard, do my teeth look all right to you?”

Gardener looked at them. They looked to him about as they always had, although he couldn't remember ever having seen quite this much of them—he was reminded of that terrible photo of Karen Carpenter again.

“Sure.” He kept trying not to look at her stacked ribs, the painful jut of her pelvic bones above the waist of her jeans, which were drooping in spite of a belt cinched so
tight it looked like a hobo's length of clothesline. “I guess so.” He smiled cautiously. “Look, ma, no cavities.”

Anderson tried to return Gardener's smile with her lips still pulled back to the gums; the result of this experiment was mildly grotesque. She put a forefinger on a molar and pressed.

“Oes it iggle en I ooo at?”

“What?”

“Does it wiggle when I do that?”

“No. Not that I can see, anyway. Why?”

“It's just this dream I keep having. It—” She looked down at herself. “Get out of here, Gard, I'm in dishabilly.”

Don't worry, Bobbi. I wasn't going to jump your bones. Mostly because that'd be too close to what I'd really be doing.

“Sorry,” he said. “Door was open. I thought you'd gone out.”

He closed the door, latching it firmly.

Through it she said clearly: “I know what you're wondering.”

He said nothing—only stood there. But he had a feeling she knew—
knew
—he was still there. As if she could see through the door.

“You're wondering if I'm losing my mind.”

“No,” he said then. “No, Bobbi. But—”

“I'm as sane as you are,” Anderson said through the door. “I'm so stiff I can hardly walk and I've got an Ace bandage wrapped around my right knee for some reason I can't quite remember and I'm hungry as a bear and I know I've lost too much weight . . . but I
am
sane, Gard. I think you may have times before the day's over when you wonder if
you
are. The answer is, we both are.”

“Bobbi, what's happening here?” Gardener asked. It came out in a helpless sort of cry.

“I want to unwrap the goddam Ace bandage and see what's under it,” Anderson said through the door. “Feels like I jobbed my knee pretty good. Out in the woods, probably. Then I want to take a hot shower and put on some clean clothes. While I do that, you could make us some breakfast. And I'll tell you everything.”

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, Bobbi.”

“I'm glad to have you here, Gard,” she said. “I had a
bad feeling once or twice. Like maybe you weren't doing so good.”

Gardener felt his vision double, treble, then float away in prisms. He wiped an arm across his face. “No pain, no strain,” he said. “I'll make some breakfast.”

“Thanks, Gard.”

He walked away, but he had to walk slow, because no matter how often he wiped his eyes, his vision kept trying to break up on him.

He stopped just inside the kitchen and went back to the closed bathroom door as a new thought occurred to him. Water was running in there now.

“Where's Peter?”

“What?”
she called over the drumming shower.

“I said, where's Peter?”
he called, raising his voice.

“Dead,” Bobbi called back over the drumming water. “I cried, Gard. But he was . . . you know . . .”

“Old,” Gardener muttered, then remembered and raised his voice again. “It was old age, then?”

“Yes,” Anderson called back over the drumming water.

Gardener stood there for just a moment before going back to the kitchen, wondering why he believed Bobbi was lying about Peter and how he had died.

Gard scrambled eggs and fried bacon on Bobbi's grill. He noticed that a microwave oven had been installed over the conventional one since he'd last been here, and there was now track lighting over the main work areas and the kitchen table, where Bobbi was in the habit of eating most of her meals—usually with a book in her free hand.

He made coffee, strong and black, and was just bringing everything to the table when Bobbi came in, wearing a fresh pair of cords and a T-shirt with a picture of a blackfly on it and the legend
MAINE STATE BIRD.
Her wet hair was wrapped in a towel.