The Tommyknockers (4 page)

Anderson thanked her and hung up. She looked at the phone thoughtfully, calling up Muriel fully in her mind—another Irish colleen (but Muriel had the expected red hair) just now reaching the far edge of her prime, round-faced, green-eyed, full-breasted. Had she slept with Jim? Probably. Anderson felt a spark of jealousy—but not much of a spark. Muriel was okay. Just speaking to Muriel made her feel better—someone who knew who she was, who could think of her as a real person, not just as a customer on the other side of the counter in an Augusta hardware store or as someone to say how-do to over the mailbox. She was solitary by nature, but not monastic . . . and sometimes simple human contact had a
way of fulfilling her when she didn't even know she needed to be fulfilled.

And she supposed she knew now why she had wanted to get in contact with Jim—talking with Muriel had done that, at least. The thing in the woods had stayed on her mind, and the idea that it was some sort of clandestine coffin had grown to a certainty. It wasn't
writing
she was restless to do; it was
digging.
She just hadn't wanted to do it on her own.

“Looks like I'll have to, though, Pete,” she said, sitting down in her rocker by the east window—her reading chair. Peter glanced at her briefly, as if to say,
Whatever you want, babe.
Anderson sat forward, suddenly looking at Pete—really
looking
at him. Peter looked back cheerfully enough, tail thumping on the floor. For a moment it seemed there was something different about Peter . . . something so obvious she should be seeing it.

If so, she wasn't.

She settled back, opening her book—a master's thesis from the University of Nebraska, the most exciting thing about it the title:
Range War and Civil War.
She remembered thinking a couple of nights ago as her sister Anne would think:
You're getting as funny in the head as Uncle Frank, Bobbi.
Well . . . maybe.

Shortly she was deep into the thesis, making an occasional note on the legal pad she kept near. Outside, the rain continued to fall.

The following day dawned clear and bright and flawless: a postcard summer day with just enough breeze to make the bugs keep their distance. Anderson pottered around the house until almost ten o'clock, conscious of the growing pressure her mind was putting on her to get out there and dig it up, already. She could feel herself consciously pushing back against that urge (Orson Welles again—
We will dig up no body before its
 . . . oh, shut up, Orson). Her days of simply following the urge of the moment, a lifestyle that had once been catechized by the bald motto “If it feels good, do it,” were over. It had never worked well for her, that philosophy—in fact, almost every bad
thing that had happened to her had its roots in some impulsive action. She attached no moral stigma to people who did live their lives according to impulse; maybe her intuitions just hadn't been that good.

She ate a big breakfast, added a scrambled egg to Peter's Gravy Train (Peter ate with more appetite than usual, and Anderson put it down to the end of the rainy spell), and then did the washing-up.

If her dribbles would just stop, everything would be fine. Forget it; we will stop no period before its time. Right, Orson? You're fucking-A.

Bobbi went outside, clapped an old straw cowboy hat on her head, and spent the next hour in the garden. Things out there were looking better than they had any right to, given the rain. The peas were coming on and the corn was rearing up good, as Uncle Frank would have said.

She quit at eleven. Fuck it. She went around the house to the shed, got the spade and shovel, paused, and added a crowbar. She started out of the shed, went back, and took a screwdriver and an adjustable wrench from the toolbox.

Peter started out with her as he always did, but this time Anderson said, “No, Peter,” and pointed back at the house. Peter stopped, looking wounded. He whined and took a tentative step toward Anderson.

“
No
, Peter.”

Peter gave in and headed back, head down, tail drooping dispiritedly. Anderson was sorry to see him go that way, but Peter's previous reaction to the plate in the ground had been bad. She stood a moment longer on the path which would lead her to the woods road, spade in one hand, shovel and crowbar in the other, watching as Peter mounted the back steps, nosed open the back door, and went into the house.

She thought:
Something was different about him
 . . . is
different about him. What is it?
She didn't know. But for a moment, almost subliminally, her dream flickered back to her—that arrow of poisonous green light . . . and her teeth all falling painlessly out of her gums.

Then it was gone and she set off toward the place where it was, that odd thing in the ground, listening to the crickets make their steady
ree-ree-ree
sound in this
small back field which would soon be ready for its first cutting.

At three that afternoon it was Peter who raised her from the semidaze in which she had been working, making her aware she was two damn-nears: damn-near starving and damn-near exhausted.

Peter was howling.

The sound raised gooseflesh on Anderson's back and arms. She dropped the shovel she had been using and backed away from the thing in the earth—the thing that was no plate, no box, not anything she could understand. All she knew for sure was that she had fallen into a strange, thoughtless state she didn't like at all. This time she had done more than lose track of time; she felt as if she had lost track of
herself.
It was as if someone else had stepped into her head the way a man would step into a bulldozer or a payloader, simply firing her up and starting to yank the right levers.

Peter howled, nose pointing toward the sky—long, chilling, mournful sounds.

“Stop it, Peter!”
Anderson yelled, and thankfully, Peter did. Any more of that and she might simply have turned and run.

Instead, she fought for control and got it. She backed up another step and cried out when something flapped loosely against her back. At her cry, Peter uttered one more short, yipping sound and fell silent again.

Anderson grabbed for whatever had touched her, thinking it might be . . . well, she didn't know what she thought it might be, but even before her hand closed on it, she remembered what it was. She had a hazy memory of stopping just long enough to hang her blouse on a bush; here it was.

She took it and put it on, getting the buttons wrong on the first try so that one tail hung down below the other. She rebuttoned it, looking at the dig she had begun—and now that archaeological word seemed to fit what she was doing exactly. Her memories of the four and a half hours she'd spent digging were like her memory of hanging her
blouse on the bush—hazy and broken. They were not memories; they were fragments.

But now, looking at what she had done, she felt awe as well as fear . . . and a mounting sense of excitement.

Whatever it was, it was huge. Not just big, but
huge.

The spade, shovel, and crowbar lay at intervals along a fifteen-foot trench in the forest floor. She had made neat piles of black earth and chunks of rock at regular intervals. Sticking up from this trench, which was about four feet deep at the point where Anderson had originally stumbled over three inches of protruding gray metal, was the leading edge of some titanic object.
Gray metal . . . some object . . .

You'd ordinarily have a right to expect something better, more specific, from a writer, she thought, arming sweat from her forehead, but she was no longer sure the metal was steel. She thought now it might be a more exotic alloy, beryllium, magnesium, perhaps—and composition aside, she had absolutely no idea what it
was.

She began to unbutton her jeans so she could tuck in her blouse, then paused.

The crotch of the faded Levi's was soaked with blood.

Jesus. Jesus Christ. This isn't a period. This is Niagara Falls.

She was momentarily frightened, really frightened, then told herself to quit being a ninny. She had gone into some sort of daze and done digging a crew of four husky men could have been proud of . . . her, a woman who went one-twenty-five, maybe one-thirty, tops. Of
course
she was flowing heavily. She was fine—in fact, should be grateful she wasn't cramping as well as gushing.

My, how poetic we are today, Bobbi,
she thought, and uttered a harsh little laugh.

All she really needed was to clean herself up: a shower and a change would do fine. The jeans had been ready for either the trash or the ragbag anyway. Now there was one less worry in a troubled, confusing world, right? Right. No big deal.

She buttoned her pants again, not tucking the blouse in—no sense ruining that as well, although God knew it wasn't exactly a Dior original. The feel of the sticky wetness down there when she moved made her grimace. God, she wanted to get cleaned up. In a hurry.

But instead of starting up the slope to the path, she
walked back toward the thing in the earth, again driven to it. Peter howled, and the gooseflesh reappeared again. “
Peter, will you for Christ's sake shut
UP!”
She hardly ever shouted at Pete—really
shouted
at him—but the goddam mutt was starting to make her feel like a behavioral-psychology subject. Gooseflesh when the dog howled instead of saliva at the sound of the bell, but the same principle.

Standing close to her find, she forgot about Peter and only stared wonderingly at it. After some moments she reached out and gripped it. Again she felt that curious sense of vibration—it sank into her hand and then disappeared. This time she thought of touching a hull beneath which very heavy machinery is hard at work. The metal itself was so smooth that it had an almost greasy texture—you expected some of it to come off on your hands.

She made a fist and rapped her knuckles on it. It made a dull sound, like a fist rapping on a thick chunk of mahogany. She stood a moment longer, then took the screwdriver from her back pocket, held it indecisively for a moment, and then, feeling oddly guilty—feeling like a vandal—she drew the blade down the exposed metal. It wouldn't scratch.

Her eyes suggested two further things, but either or both could have been an optical illusion. The first was that the metal seemed to grow slightly thicker as it went from its edge to the point where it disappeared into the earth. The second was that the edge was slightly curved. These two things—if true—suggested an idea that was at once exciting, ludicrous, frightening, impossible . . . and possessed of a certain mad logic.

She ran her palm over the smooth metal, then stepped away. What the hell was she doing, petting this goddam thing while the blood was running down her legs? And her period was the least of her concerns if what she was starting to think just might turn out to be the truth.

You better call somebody, Bobbi. Right now.

I'll call Jim. When he gets back.

Sure. Call a poet. Great idea. Then you can call the Reverend Moon. Maybe Edward Gorey and Gahan Wilson to draw pictures. Then you can hire a few rock bands and have fucking Woodstock 1988 out here. Get serious, Bobbi. Call the state police.

No. I want to talk to Jim first. Want him to see it. Want to talk to him about it. Meantime, I'll dig around it some more.

It could be dangerous.

Yes. Not only could be, probably was—hadn't she felt that? Hadn't Peter felt it? There was something else, too. Coming down the slope from the path this morning, she had found a dead woodchuck—had almost stepped on it. Although the smell when she bent over the animal told her it had been dead two days at least, there had been no buzz of flies to warn her. There were no flies at all around ole Chuck, and Anderson could not remember ever having seen such a thing. There was no obvious sign of what had killed it, either, but believing that thing in the ground had had anything to do with it was boolsheet of the purest ray serene. Ole Chuck had probably gotten some farmer's poison bait and stumbled out here to die.

Go home. Change your pants. You're bloody and you stink.

She backed away from the thing, then turned and climbed the slope back to the path, where Peter jumped clumsily on her and began to lick her hand with an eagerness that was a little pathetic. Even a year ago he would have been trying to nose at her crotch, attracted by the smell there, but not now. Now all he could do was shiver.

“Your own damn fault,” Anderson said. “I
told
you to stay home.” All the same, she was glad Peter had come. If he hadn't, Anderson might have worked right through until nightfall . . . and the idea of coming to in the dark, with that thing bulking close by . . . that idea didn't fetch her.

She looked back from the path. The height gave her a more complete view of the thing. It jutted from the ground at a slight angle, she saw. Her impression that the leading edge had a slight curve recurred.

A plate, that's what I thought when I first dug around it with my fingers. A steel plate, not a dinner-plate, I thought, but maybe even then, with so little of it sticking out of the ground, it was really a dinner-plate I was thinking of. Or a saucer.

A flying fucking saucer.

Back at the house, she showered and changed, using one of the Maxi-Pads even though the heavy menstrual flow already appeared to be lessening. Then she fixed herself a huge supper of canned baked beans and knockwurst. But she found herself too tired to do much more than pick at it. She put the remains—more than half—down for Peter and went over to her rocker by the window. The thesis she had been reading was still on the floor beside the chair, her place marked with a torn-off matchbook cover. Her notepad was beside it. She picked it up, turned to a fresh page, and began to sketch the thing in the woods as she had seen it when she took that last look back.