The Tommyknockers (76 page)

“Yeah. Give it to me.”

The directory-assistance operator did. Anne called. The phone rang . . . rang . . . rang. The tone of the ring was exactly the same as the tone she got when she dialed the house where her spineless sister had been hiding out for the last thirteen years or so. A person could almost believe they were ringing into the same receiver.

She actually toyed with the idea for a moment before brushing it aside. But giving such a paranoid thought even a moment's house-room was unlike her, and it made her angrier. The rings sounded alike because the same little dipshit backwoods phone company sold and serviced all the phone equipment in town, that was all.

“Did you get her?” Paula asked timidly, coming to the door.

“No.
She
doesn't answer, the town
constable
doesn't answer, I think the whole fucking town went to Bermuda. Jesus!” She blew a lock of hair off her sweaty forehead.

“Perhaps if you called one of her friends—”

“What friends? The loony she's shacked up with?”

“Sissy! You don't know—”

“I know who answered the phone the one time I did get through,” she returned grimly. “After living in this family, it's easier for me to tell when a man's drunk by his voice.”

Her mother said nothing; she had been reduced to wet-eyed, trembling silence, one hand hovering at the collar of her black dress, and that was just how Anne liked her.

“No, he's there, and they both know I'm trying to get through and why, and they're going to be sorry they fucked with me.”

“Sissy, I do so wish you wouldn't use that lang—”

“Shut up!”
Anne screamed at her, and of course her mother did.

Anne picked up the telephone again. This time when she dialed directory assistance, she asked for the number of the Haven mayor. They didn't have one of those either. There was something called a town manager, whatever the fuck that was.

Muffled little clicks, like rats' claws on glass, as the operator looked things up on her computer screen. Her mother had fled. From the other room came the theatrically overblown sobs and wails of Irish grief. Like a V-2 rocket, Anne thought, an Irish wake was powered by liquid fuel, and in both cases the liquid was the same. Anne closed her eyes. Her head thumped. She ground her teeth together—it produced a bitter, metallic taste. She closed her eyes and imagined how good, how wonderful it would be to perform a little surgery on Bobbi's face with her fingernails.

“Are you still there, honey,” she asked without opening her eyes, “or did you suddenly run off to the W.C.?”

“Yes, I have a l—”

“Give it to me.”

The operator was gone. A robot recited a number in odd, herky-jerky cadences. Anne dialed it. She fully expected no answer, but the phone was picked up promptly. “Selectmen's. Newt Berringer here.”

“Well, it's good to know
someone's
there. My name's Anne Anderson. I'm calling from Utica, New York. I tried to call your constable, but apparently he's gone fishing.”

Berringer's voice was even. “He's a she, Miss Anderson. She died unexpectedly last month. The office hasn't been filled. Probably won't be until next town meeting.”

This stopped Anne for only an instant. She focused instead on something which interested her more.

“Miss
Anderson? How did you know I was a Miss, Berringer?”

There was no pause. Berringer said, “Ain't you Bobbi's sister? If you are, and if you were married, you wouldn't be Anderson, would you?”

“You know Bobbi then, do you?”

“Everyone in Haven knows Bobbi, Miss Anderson. She's our resident celebrity. We're real proud of her.”

It went through the meat of Anne's brain like a sliver of glass.
Our resident celebrity Oh dear bleeding Christ
.

“Good job, Sherlock. I've been trying to reach her on whatever passes for phones up there in Moosepaw County to tell her her father died yesterday and he's going to be buried tomorrow.”

She had expected some conventional sentiment from this faceless official—after all, he knew Bobbi—but there
was none. “Been some trouble with the phones out her way,” was all Berringer said.

Anne was again put momentarily off-pace
(very
momentarily; Anne was never put off-pace for very long). The conversation was not going as she had expected. The man's responses were a little strange, too reserved even for a Yankee. She tried to picture him and couldn't. There was something very odd in his voice.

“Could you have her call me? Her mother is crying her eyes out in the other room, she's near collapse, and if Roberta doesn't get here in time for the funeral, I think she
will
collapse.”

“Well, I can't
make
her call you, Miss Anderson, can I?” Berringer returned with infuriating, drawly slowness. “She's a grown woman. But I'll surely pass the message along.”

“Maybe I'd better give you the number,” Anne said through clenched teeth. “I mean, we're still here at the same old stand, but she calls so seldom these days, she might have forgotten it. It's—”

“No need,” Berringer interrupted. “If she don't remember, or have it written down, there's always d'rect'ry assistance, ain't there? I guess that's how you must have gotten this'un.”

Anne hated the telephone because it allowed only a fraction of the full, relentless force of her personality to come through. She thought she had never hated it so much as she did at this moment. “Listen!” she cried. “I don't think you understand—”

“Think I do,” Berringer said. This was the second interruption, and the conversation was not three minutes old. “I'll go out 'fore I have m'dinner and pass it on. Thanks for calling, Miss Anderson.”

“Listen—”

Before she could finish, he did the thing she hated the
most.

Anne hung up, thinking she could cheerfully stand by and watch as the jag-off to whom she'd just been speaking was eaten alive by wild dogs.

She had been grinding her teeth together madly.

Bobbi didn't return her call that afternoon. Nor that early evening, as the V-2 of the wake entered the boozosphere. Nor that late evening as it went into orbit. Nor in the two hours past midnight as the last of the wakers stumbled blearily out to their cars, with which they would menace other drivers on their way home.

Anne lay sleepless and ramrod straight in her bed most of the night, wired up on speed like a suitcase bomb, alternately grinding her teeth and digging her nails into her palms, planning revenge.

You'll come back, Bobbi, oh yes you will. And when you do—

When she still hadn't called the next day, Anne put the funeral off in spite of her mother's weak wailings that it wasn't fitting. Finally Anne whirled on her and snarled, “I'll say what's fitting and what isn't. What's fitting is that that little whore should be here and she hasn't even bothered to call. Now leave me alone!”

Her mother slunk away.

That night she tried first Bobbi's number, then the selectmen's office. At the first number the sirening sound continued. At the second, she got a recorded message. She waited patiently until the beep and then said, “It's Bobbi's sis again, Mr. Berringer, cordially hoping that you'll be afflicted with syphilis that won't be diagnosed until your nose falls off and your balls turn black.”

She called directory assistance back and asked for three Haven numbers—the number of Newt Berringer, a Smith
(“Any
Smith, dear, in Haven they're all related”), and a Brown (the number she received in response to this last request was, by virtue of alphabetical order, Bryant's). She got the same siren howl at each number.

“Shit!”
Anne yelled, and threw the phone at the wall.

Upstairs in bed, her mother cringed and hoped Bobbi would not come home . . . at least not until Anne was in a better mood.

She had put the funeral and interment off yet another day.

The relatives began to rumble, but Anne was more than equal to
them,
thank you. The funeral director took one look at her and decided the old mick could rot in his pine box before he got involved. Anne, who spent the whole day on the phone, would have congratulated him on making a wise decision. Her fury was rapidly passing all previous bounds. Now
all
the phones into Haven seemed out of service.

She could not delay the funeral another day longer and she knew it. Bobbi had won this battle; all right, so be it. But not the war. Oh no. If she thought that, the bitch had several more things coming—and all of them would be painful.

Anne bought her plane tickets angrily but confidently—one from upstate New York to Bangor . . . and two returns.

She would have flown to Bangor the following day—that was when the ticket was for—but her idiotic mother fell down the back stairs and broke her hip. Sean O'Casey had once said that when you lived with the Irish you marched in a fool's parade, and oh how right he had been. Her mother's screams brought Anne in from the back yard, where she had been lying on a chaise longue soaking up some sun and going over her strategy for keeping Bobbi in Utica once she had gotten her here. Her mother was sprawled at the bottom of the narrow staircase, bent at a hideous angle, and Anne's first thought was that for a row of pins she would gladly have left the stupid old bitch there until the anesthetic effects of the claret began to wear off. The new widow smelled like a winery.

In that angry, dismayed moment Anne knew that all of her plans would have to be changed, and she thought that their mother might actually have done it on
purpose—gotten drunk to nerve herself up and then not just fallen but
jumped
downstairs. Why? To keep her from Bobbi, of course.

But you won't,
she had thought, going to the phone.
You won't; if I want a thing to be, if I
mean
a thing to be, that thing
will
be; I am going to Haven and I am going to cut a wide swath there. I'm going to bring Bobbi back, and they're going to remember me for a long time. Especially the hayseed dork who hung up on me.

She picked up the phone and punched the Medix number—it had been pasted to the phone ever since her father's first stroke—with quick, angry stabs of her forefinger. She was grinding her teeth.

Thus it was the ninth of August before she could finally get away. In the caesura, there was no call from Bobbi, and Anne didn't try to get her again, or the hick town manager, or Bobbi's drunk fuck in Troy. He had apparently moved in so he could poke her full-time. Okay. Let them both fall into a lull. That would be very fine.

Now she was here, in Bangor's Cityscape Hotel, sleeping badly . . . and grinding her teeth.

She had always ground her teeth. Sometimes it was so loud it awoke her mother in the night . . . on a few occasions even her father, who slept like a brick. Her mother mentioned it to the family doctor when Anne was three. That fellow, a venerable upstate New York G.P. whom Doc Warwick would have felt right at home with, looked surprised. He considered a moment, then said: “I think you must be imagining that, Mrs. Anderson.”

“If I am, it must be catching,” Paula had said. “My husband's heard it too.”

They looked toward Anne, who was building a shaky tower of blocks, one on top of the other. She worked with grim, unsmiling concentration. As she added a sixth block, the tower fell down . . . and as she started to rebuild it, they both heard the grim, skeletal sound of Anne grinding her baby teeth together.

“She also does that in her
sleep?
” the doctor asked.

Paula Anderson nodded.

“Well, it'll probably go away,” the doctor said. “It's harmless.” But of course it didn't go away and it wasn't harmless; it was bruxism, a malady which, along with heart attacks, strokes, and ulcers, often afflicts driven, self-assertive people. The first of Anne's baby teeth to fall out was noticeably eroded. Her parents commented on it . . . then forgot it. By then Anne's personality had begun to assert itself in more gaudy and startling ways. By six and a half she was already ruling the Anderson family in some strange way you could never quite put your finger on. And they had all gotten used to the thin, slightly gruesome whisper of Anne's teeth grinding together in the night.

The family dentist had noticed the problem wasn't going away but getting worse by the time Anne was nine, but it wasn't treated until she was fifteen, when it began to cause her actual pain. By then she had worn her teeth down to the live nerves. The dentist fitted her with a rubber mouth-splint taken from a mold of her teeth, then an acrylic one. She wore these appliances, which are called “night-guards,” to bed every night. At eighteen she was fitted with all-metal crowns on most of her top and bottom teeth. The Andersons couldn't afford it, but Anne insisted. They had allowed the problem to slide, and she was not going to allow her skinflint father to turn around when she was twenty-one and say, “You're a grownup now, Anne; it's
your
problem. If you want crowns,
you
pay the bill.”

She had wanted gold, but that really was beyond their means.

For several years thereafter, Anne's infrequent smiles had a glittery, mechanized look that was extremely startling. People often actually recoiled from that grin. She took a grim enjoyment from these reactions, and when she had seen the villain Jaws in one of the later James Bond movies, she had laughed until she thought her sides would split—this unaccustomed burst of amusement had left her feeling dizzy and ill. But she had understood exactly why, when that huge man first bared his stainless-steel teeth in a sharklike grin, people had recoiled from her, and she almost wished she hadn't finally had porcelain fused over the metal. Yet, she thought, it was perhaps better not to show oneself so clearly—it could be as unwise to wear your personality on
your sleeve as it was to wear your heart there. Maybe you didn't have to
look
as though you could chew your way through a door made of oak planks to get what you wanted as long as you knew you
could
.