The Tommyknockers (77 page)

Bruxism aside, Anne also had had a lot of cavities both as a child and as an adult, in spite of Utica's fluoridated water and her own strictly observed regimen of oral hygiene (she often flossed her teeth until her gums bled). This was also due in large part to her personality rather than her physiology. Drive and the urge to dominate afflict both the softest parts of the human body—stomach and vitals—and the hardest, the teeth. Anne had a chronic case of dry-mouth. Her tongue was nearly white. Her teeth were dry little islands. Without a steady flow of saliva to wash away crumbs of food, cavities began quickly. By this night when she lay sleeping uneasily in Bangor, Anne had better than twelve ounces of silver-amalgam fillings in her mouth—on infrequent occasions she had set off airport metal detectors.

In the last two years she had begun to lose teeth in spite of her fanatic efforts to save them: two on the top right, three on the bottom left. In both cases she had opted for the most expensive dental bridgework available—she had to travel to New York City to have the work done. The dental surgeon removed the rotting husks, flayed her gums to the dull white of the jawbone, and implanted tiny titanium screws. The gums were sewn back together and healed nicely—some people reject metal implants in the bone, but Anne Anderson had no trouble at all accepting them—leaving two little titanium posts sticking out of the flesh. The bridgework was placed over the metal anchors after the flesh around them had healed.

She didn't have as much metal in her head as Gard did (Gard's plate
always
set off airport metal detectors), but she had a lot.

So she slept without knowing that she was a member of an extremely exclusive club: those people who could enter Haven as it was now with a bare chance of surviving.

She left for Haven in her rental car at eight the following morning. She made one wrong turn, but still arrived at the Troy-Haven town line by nine-thirty.

She had awakened feeling as nervous and randy-dandy as a thoroughbred dancing her way into the starting gate. But somewhere, in the last fifteen or twenty miles before she reached the Haven town line—the land around her nearly empty, dreamingly ripe in the breathless summer heat-hush—that fine feeling of anticipation and wire-thin nervy readiness had bled away. Her head began to ache. At first it was just a minor throb, but it quickly escalated into the familiar pounding of one of her near-migraines.

She drove past the town line into Haven.

By the time she got to Haven Village, she was hanging on to herself by force of will and not much more. The headache came and went in sickish waves. Once she thought she had heard a burst of hideously distorted music coming out of her mouth, but that must have been imagination, something brought on by the headache. She was faintly aware of people on the streets in the little village, but not of the way they all turned to look at her . . . her, then each other.

She could hear machinery throbbing in the woods somewhere—the sound was distant and dreamlike.

The Cutlass began to weave back and forth on the deserted road. Images doubled, trebled, came reluctantly back together, then began doubling and trebling again.

Blood trickled from the corners of her mouth unnoticed.

She held hard to one thought:
It's on this road, Route 9, and her name will be on the mailbox. It's on this road, Route 9, and her name will be on the mailbox. It's on this road—

The road was mercifully deserted. Haven slept in the morning sun. Ninety percent of out-of-town traffic had been rerouted now, and this was a good thing for Anne, whose car pitched and yawed wildly, left-hand wheels now spuming dust from one shoulder, right-hand wheels spuming dust from the other a few moments later. She knocked down a turn sign without being aware of it.

Young Ashley Ruvall saw her coming and pulled his
bike a prudent distance off the road and stood astride it in Justin Hurd's north pasture until she was gone.

(a lady there's a lady and I can't hear her except her pain)

A hundred voices answered him, soothing him.

(we know Ashley it's all right 
. . .
shhh . . . shhh)

Ashley grinned, exposing his pink, baby-smooth gums.

Her stomach revolted.

Somehow she was able to pull over and shut off the engine before her breakfast bolted up and out a moment after she managed to claw the driver's door open. For a moment she just hung there with her forearms propped on the open window of the half-open door, bent awkwardly outward, consciousness no more than a single spark which she maintained by her determination that it should not go out. At last she was able to straighten up and pull the door closed.

She thought in a dim and confused way that it must have been breakfast—headaches she was used to, but she almost never threw up. Breakfast in the restaurant of that fleabag that was supposed to be Bangor's best hotel. The bastards had poisoned her.

I may be dying . . . oh God yes, it really feels as if I might be dying. But if I'm not, I am going to sue them from here to the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court. If I live, I'll make them wish their mothers never met their fathers.

Perhaps it was the bracing quality of this thought which made Anne feel strong enough to get the car moving again. She crept along at thirty-five, looking for a mailbox with
ANDERSON
written on it. A terrible idea came to her. Suppose Bobbi had painted out her name on the mailbox? It wasn't so crazy when you really thought about it. She might well suspect Sissy would turn up, and the spineless little twat had always been afraid of her. She was in no shape to stop at every farm along the way, inquiring after Bobbi (not that she'd get much help from Bobbi's hayseed neighbors if the donkey she'd spoken to on the phone was any indication), and—

But there it was:
R. ANDERSON.
And behind it, a place
she had seen only in photographs. Uncle Frank's place. The old Garrick farm. There was a blue truck parked in the driveway. The
place
was right, yes, but the
light
was wrong. She realized this clearly for the first time as she approached the driveway. Instead of feeling the triumph she had expected at this moment—the triumph of a predator that has finally succeeded in running its prey to earth—she felt confusion, uncertainty, and, although she did not even really realize it for what it was because it was so unfamiliar, the first faint trickle of fear.

The
light.

The
light
was wrong.

This realization brought others in quick succession. Her stiff neck. The circles of sweat darkening her dress under her arms. And—

Her hand flew to her crotch. There was a faint dampness there, drying now, and she isolated a dim ammoniac smell in the car. It had been there for some time, but her conscious mind had just now tumbled to it.

I pissed myself, I pissed myself and I've been in this fucking car almost long enough for it to dry—

(and the light, Anne)

The
light
was wrong. It was sunset light.

Oh no—it's nine-thirty in the—

But it
was
sunset light. There was no denying it. She had felt better after vomiting, yes . . . and she suddenly understood why. The knowledge had been there all along, really, just waiting to be noticed, like the patches of sweat under the arms of her dress, or that faint smell of drying urine. She had felt better because the period between closing the door and actually starting the car again hadn't been seconds or minutes, but
hours
—she had spent all that brutally hot summer day in the oven of the car. She had lain in a deathlike stupor, and if she had been using the Cutlass's air-conditioning with all the windows rolled up when she stopped the car, she would have cooked like a Thanksgiving turkey. But her sinuses were nearly as bad as her teeth, and the canned air manufactured by automobile air conditioners irritated them. This physical problem, she realized suddenly, staring at the old farm with wide, bloodshot eyes, had probably saved her life. She had been running with all four windows open. Otherwise—

This led to another thought. She had spent the day in a
deathlike stupor, parked by the side of the road,
and no one had stopped to check on her.
That no one had come along a main road like Route 9 in all those hours since nine-thirty was something she just couldn't accept. Not even out in the sticks. And when they did see you in trouble in Sticksville, they didn't just put the pedal to the metal and keep on going, like New Yorkers stepping over a wino.

What kind of town is this, anyway?

That unaccustomed trickle again, like hot acid in her stomach.

This time she recognized the feeling as fear, seized it, wrung its neck . . . and killed it. Its brother might show up later on, and if so, she would kill it too, and all the sibs that might follow.

She drove into the yard.

Anne had met Jim Gardener only twice before, but she never forgot a face. Even so, she barely recognized the Great Poet, although she believed she could have
smelled
him at forty yards if she had been downwind on even a moderately breezy day. He was sitting on the porch in a strappy T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans, an open bottle of Scotch in one hand. He had a three-or four-day beard-stubble, much of it gray. His eyes were bloodshot. Although Anne didn't know this—and wouldn't have cared—Gardener had been in this state, more or less, for the last two days. All his noble resolves had gone by the boards since finding the dog hairs on Bobbi's jacket.

He watched the car pull into the dooryard (missing the mailbox by bare inches) with a drunk's bleary lack of surprise. He watched the woman get out, stagger, and hold on to the open door for a minute.

Oh wow,
Gardener thought.
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Superbitch. Faster than a speeding hate-letter, able to leap cringing family members at a single bound.

Anne shoved the car door closed. She stood there for a moment, throwing a long shadow, and Gardener felt an eerie sense of familiarity. She looked like Ron Cummings
when Ron had a skinful and was trying to decide if he could walk across the room.

Anne made her way across the dooryard, trailing a steadying hand along the side of Bobbi's truck. When she had passed the truck, she reached at once for the porch railing. She looked up, and in the slanting light of seven o'clock, Gardener thought the woman looked both aged and ageless. She also looked evil, he thought—jaundiced and yellowish-black with a heavy freight of evil that was simultaneously wearing her out and eating her up.

He raised the Scotch, drank, gagged on the rank burn. Then he tipped the neck of it at her. “Hello, Sissy. Welcome to Haven. Having said that much, I now urge you to leave as fast as you can.”

She got up the first two steps okay, then stumbled and went to one knee. Gardener held out a hand. She ignored it.

“Where's Bobbi?”

“You don't look so good,” Gard said. “Haven has that effect on people these days.”

“I'm fine,” she said, at last gaining the porch. She stood over him, panting. “Where is she?”

Gardener inclined his head toward the house. The steady hiss of water came from one of the open windows. “Shower. We've been working in the woods all day and it was esh . . . extremely hot. Bobbi believes in showering to remove dirt.” Gardener raised the bottle again. “I believe in simply disinfecting. Shorter and pleasanter.”

“You smell like a dead pig,” Anne remarked, and started past him toward the house.

“While my own nose is undoubtedly not as keen as your own, dear heart, you have a delicate but noticeable odor of your own,” Gard said. “What do the French call that particular perfume?
Eau de Piss?”

She turned on him, startled into a snarl. People—people in Utica, at least—didn't speak to her that way.
Never.
But of course, they knew her. The Great Poet had undoubtedly judged her on the basis of his jizz receptacle: Haven's resident celebrity. And he was drunk.

“Well,” Gardener said, amused but also a trifle uneasy under her smoking gaze, “it was you who brought up the subject of aroma.”

“So I did,” she said slowly.

“Maybe we ought to start again,” he said with drunken courtesy.

“Start
what
again? You're the Great Poet. You're the drunk who shot his wife. I have nothing to say to you. I came for Bobbi.”

Good shot, the thing about the wife. She saw his face freeze, saw his hand tighten on the neck of the bottle. He stood there as if he had at least temporarily forgotten where he was. She offered him a sweet smile. That smartass crack about
Eau de Piss
had gotten through, but sick or not, she thought she was still ahead on points.

Inside, the shower shut off. And—perhaps it was only a hunch—Gardener had a clear sense of Bobbi listening.

“You always did like to operate without anesthetic. I guess I never got anything but exploratory surgery before this, huh?”

“Maybe.”

“Why now? After all these years, why did you have to pick
now
?”

“None of your business.”

“Bobbi's
my business.”

They faced each other. She drilled him with her gaze. She waited for his eyes to drop. They didn't. It suddenly occurred to her that if she started into the house without saying more, he might attempt to restrain her. It wouldn't do him any good, but it might be simpler to answer his question. What difference did it make?

“I've come to take her home.”

Silence again.

There are no crickets.