The Tommyknockers (35 page)

Alice Kimball, who taught at the Haven Grammar School, was a lesbian. Jesus told 'Becka this on Friday, not long after the lady herself, looking large and solid and respectable in a green pantsuit, had stopped by, collecting for the American Cancer Society.

Darla Gaines, the pretty seventeen-year-old girl who brought the Sunday paper, had half an ounce of “bitchin reefer” between the mattress and box spring of her bed. Jesus told 'Becka this right after Darla had come on Saturday to collect for the last five weeks (three dollars plus a fifty-cent tip 'Becka now wished she had withheld), and that she and her boyfriend smoked the reefer in Darla's bed before having intercourse, only they called having intercourse “doing the horizontal bop.” They smoked reefer and “did the horizontal bop” almost every weekday afternoon from two-thirty until three or so. Darla's parents both worked at Splendid Shoe in Derry and they didn't get home until well past four.

Hank Buck, another of Joe's poker cronies, worked at
a large supermarket in Bangor and hated his boss so much that a year ago he had put half a box of Ex-Lax in the man's chocolate shake when the boss had sent Hank out to get his lunch at McDonald's one day. The boss had had something rather more spectacular than a bowel movement; at three-fifteen that day he had done something in his pants that was the equivalent of a shit A-bomb. The A-bomb—or S-bomb, if you preferred—had gone off as he was slicing lunchmeat in the deli of Paul's Down-East SuperMart. Hank managed to keep a straight face until quitting time, but by the time he got into his car to go home, he was laughing so hard he almost shit his
own
pants. Twice he had to pull off the road, he got laughing so hard.

“Laughed,
” Jesus told 'Becka. “What do you think of
that?”

'Becka thought it was a low-down mean trick. And such things were only the beginning, it seemed. Jesus knew something unpleasant or upsetting about everyone 'Becka came in contact with, it seemed.

She couldn't live with such an awful outpouring.

She couldn't live
without
it, either.

One thing was certain: she had to do something
about
it.

“You
are,
” Jesus said. He spoke from behind her, from the picture on top of the Sony. Of
course
He did. The idea that His voice was coming
from inside her own head
—that she was somehow . . . well . . . somehow
reading people's thoughts
 . . . that was only a dreadful passing illusion. It
must
be. That alternative was horrifying.

Satan.
Witchcraft.

“In fact,” Jesus said, confirming His existence with that dry, no-nonsense voice so like her father's, “you're almost done with this part. Just solder that red wire to that point to the left of the long doohickey . . . no, not there . . .
there.
Good girl! Not too much solder, mind! It's like Brylcreem, 'Becka. A little dab'll do ya.”

Strange, hearing Jesus Christ talk about Brylcreem.

Joe woke up at a quarter to two, tossed Ozzie off his lap, strolled to the back of his lawn, brushing cat hairs off his T-shirt, and had a comfortable whiz into the poison ivy
back there. Then he headed into the house. Yankees and Red Sox. Great. He opened the fridge, glancing briefly at the snippets of wire on the counter and wondering just what in the hell that dimbulb 'Becka had been up to. But mostly he dismissed it. He was thinking of Nancy Voss. He was wondering what it would feel like to squirt off between Nancy's tits. He thought maybe Monday he'd find out. He squabbled with her; Christ, sometimes they squabbled like a couple of dogs in August. Seemed like it wasn't just them; everyone seemed short-fused lately. But when it came to fucking . . . son of a bitch! He hadn't been so randy since he was eighteen, and she was the same way. Seemed like neither of them could get enough. He'd even squirted in the night a couple of times. It was like he was sixteen again. He grabbed a quart of Bud and headed toward the living room. Boston was almost certainly going to win today. He had the odds figured at 8–5. Lately he seemed to have an amazing head for odds. There was a guy down in Augusta who'd take bets, and Joe had made almost five hundred bucks in the last three weeks . . . not that 'Becka knew. He'd ratholed it. It was funny; he'd know exactly who was going to win and why, and then he'd get down to Augusta and forget the
why
and only remember the
who.
But that was the important thing, wasn't it? Last time the guy in Augusta had grumbled, paying off at three to one on a twenty-dollar bet. Mets against the Pirates, Gooden on the mound, looked like a cinch for the Mets, but Joe had taken the Pirates and they'd won, 5–2. Joe didn't know how much longer the guy in Augusta would take his bets, but if he stopped, so what? There was always Portland. There were two or three books there. It seemed like lately he got a headache whenever he left Haven—needed glasses, maybe—but when you were rolling hot, a headache was a small price to pay. Enough money and the two of them could go away. Leave 'Becka with Jesus. That was who 'Becka wanted to be married to anyway.

Cold as ice, she was. But that Nancy? One hot ticket! And smart! Why, just today she'd taken him out back at the P.O. to show him something. “Look! Look what I thought of! I think I ought to patent it, Joe! I really do!”

“What idear?” Joe asked. The truth was, he felt a little mad with her. The truth
was,
he was more interested in her
tits
than her
idears,
and mad or not, he was already
getting a blue-steeler. It really
was
like being a kid again. But what she showed him was enough to make him forget all about his blue-steeler. For at least four minutes, anyway.

Nancy Voss had taken a kid's Lionel train transformer and hooked it somehow to a bunch of D-cell batteries. This gadget was wired to seven flour sifters with their screens knocked out. The sifters were lying on their sides. When Nancy turned on the transformer, a number of filament-thin wires hooked to something that looked like a blender began to scoop first-class mail from a pile on the floor into the sifters, seemingly at random.

“What's it doing?” Joe asked.

“Sorting the first-class,” she said. She pointed at one sifter after another. “That one's Haven Village . . . that's RFD 1, Derry Road, you know . . . that one's Ridge Road . . . that one's Nista Road . . . that one's . . .”

He didn't believe it at first. He thought it was a joke, and he wondered how she'd like a slap upside the head.
Why'd you do that?
she'd whine.
Some men can take a joke,
he'd answer like Sylvester Stallone in that movie
Cobra, but I ain't one of em.
Except then he saw it was really working. It was quite a gadget, all right, but the sound of the wires scraping across the floor was a little creepy. Harsh and whispery, like big old spiders' legs. It was working, all right; damned if he knew how, but it
was.
He saw one of the wires snag a letter for Roscoe Thibault and push it into the correct sifter—RFD 2, which was the Hammer Cut Road—even though it had been misaddressed to Haven Village.

He wanted to ask her how it worked, but he didn't want to look like a goddam dummy, so he asked her where she got the wires instead.

“Out of these telephones I bought at Radio Shack,” she said. “The one at the Bangor Mall. They were on sale! There's some other stuff from the phones in it too. I had to change everything around, but it was easy. It just, you know . . . come to me. You know?”

“Yeah,” Joe said slowly, thinking about the bookie's face when Joe had come in to collect his sixty bucks after the Pirates beat Gooden and the Mets. “Not bad. For a woman.”

For a moment her brow darkened and he thought:
You want to say something? You
want to fight? Come on. That's okay. That's just about as okay as the other.

Then her brow cleared and she smiled. “Now we can do
it
even longer.” Her fingers slid down the hard ridge in his pants. “You do want to do it don't you, Joe?”

And Joe did. They slipped to the floor and he forgot all about being mad at her, and how all of a sudden he seemed to be able to figure the odds on everything from baseball games to horse races to golf matches in the wink of an eye. He slid into her and she moaned and Joe even forgot the tenebrous whispering sound those wires made as they sifted the first-class mail into the row of flour sifters.

When Joe entered the living room, 'Becka was sitting in her rocker, pretending to read the latest issue of
The Upper Room.
Just ten minutes before Joe came in, she had finished wiring the gadget Jesus had shown her how to make into the back of the Sony TV. She followed His instructions to the letter, because He said you had to be careful when you were fooling around inside the back of a television.

“You could fry yourself,” Jesus advised. “More juice back there than there is in a Birds Eye warehouse, even when it's turned off.”

The TV was off now and Joe said ill-temperedly, “I thought you'd have this all wa'amed up for me.”

“I guess you know how to turn on the damned TV,” 'Becka said, speaking to her husband for the last time.

Joe raised his eyebrows.
Damned
anything was damned odd, coming from 'Becka. He thought about calling her on it, and decided to let it ride. Could be there was one fat old mare who'd find herself keeping house by herself before much of a longer went by.

“Guess I do,” Joe said, speaking to his
wife
for the last time.

He pushed the button that turned the Sony on, and better than two thousand volts of current slammed into him, AC which had been boosted, switched over to lethal DC, and then boosted again. His eyes popped wide open,
bulged, and then burst like grapes in a microwave. He had started to set the quart of beer on top of the TV next to Jesus. When the electricity hit, his hand clenched tightly enough to break the bottle. Spears of brown glass drove into his fingers and palm. Beer foamed and ran. It hit the top of the TV (its plastic casing already blistering) and turned to steam that smelled like yeast.

“EEEEEOOOOOOARRRRHMMMMMMM!”
Joe Paulson screamed. His face began to turn black: Blue smoke poured out of his hair and his ears. His finger was nailed to the Sony's On button.

A picture popped on the TV. It was Dwight Gooden throwing the wild pitch that let in two runs and chased him, making Joe Paulson forty dollars richer. It flipped and showed him and Nancy Voss screwing on the post-office floor in a litter of catalogues and
Congressional Newsletters
and ads from insurance companies saying you could get all the coverage you needed even if you were over sixty-five, no salesman would call at your door, no physical examination would be required, your loved ones would be protected at a cost of pennies a day.

“No!”
'Becka screamed, and the picture flipped again. Now she saw Moss Harlingen behind a fallen pine, notching his father in the sight of his .30-.30 and murmuring
Not you, Em, not tonight.
It flipped and she saw a man and a woman digging in the woods, the woman behind the controls of something that looked a little bit like a payloader and a little bit like something out of a Rube Goldberg cartoon, the man looping a chain around a stump. Beyond them, a vast dish-shaped object jutted out of the earth. It was silvery, but dull; the sun struck it in places but did not twinkle.

Joe Paulson's clothes burst into flame.

The living room was filled with the smell of cooking beer. The 3-D picture of Jesus jittered around and then exploded.

'Becka shrieked, understanding that, like it or not, it had been her all along, her, her, her,
and she was murdering her husband.

She ran to him, seized his looping, spasming hand . . . and was herself galvanized.

Jesus oh Jesus save him, save me, save us both,
she thought as the current slammed into her, driving her up on her toes like the world's heftiest ballerina
en pointe.

And a mad, cackling voice, the voice of her father, rose in her brain:
Fooled you, 'Becka, didn't I? Fooled you good! Teach you to lie! Teach you for good and all!

The rear of the television, which she had screwed back on after she had finished adding her alterations, blew back against the wall with a mighty blue flash of light. 'Becka tumbled to the carpet, pulling Joe with her. Joe was already dead.

By the time the smoldering wallpaper behind the TV had ignited the chintz curtains, 'Becka Paulson was dead too.

The day Hillman Brown did the most spectacular trick of his career as an amateur magician—the
only
spectacular trick of his career as an amateur magician, actually—was Sunday, July 17th, exactly one week before the Haven town hall blew up. That Hillman Brown had never managed a really spectacular trick before was not so surprising. He was only ten, after all.

His given name had been his mother's maiden name. There had been Hillmans in Haven going back to the time when it had been Montgomery, and although Marie Hillman had no regrets about becoming Marie Brown—after all, she loved the guy!—she had wanted to preserve the name, and Bryant had agreed. The new baby wasn't home a week before everyone was calling him Hilly.

Hilly grew up nervous. Marie's father, Ev, said he had cat whiskers for nerves and would spend his whole life on the jump. It wasn't news Bryant and Marie Brown wanted to hear, but after their first year with Hilly, it wasn't really news at all; just a fact of life. Some babies attempt to comfort themselves by rocking in their cribs or cradles; some by sucking a thumb. Hilly rocked in his crib almost constantly (crying angrily at the same time, more often than not), and sucked
both
thumbs—sucked them so hard that he had painful blisters on them by the time he was eight months old.