The Tommyknockers (9 page)

So far as she could tell, the Dallas police had done such a good job protecting John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald that they had been put in charge of the summer race riots two years later, and then the war in Viet Nam. Other assignments followed: handling the oil embargo ten years after the Kennedy assassination, the negotiations to secure the release of the American hostages at the embassy in Tehran, and, when it became clear that the ragheads were not going to listen to the voice of reason and authority, Jimmy Carter had sent the Dallas police in to rescue those pore fellers—after all, authorities who had handled that Kent State business with such coolheaded aplomb could surely be counted upon to perform the sort of job those
Mission: Impossible
guys did every week. Well, the old Dallas police had had a spot of tough luck on that one, but by and large, they had the situation under control. All you had to do was look at how damned
orderly
the world situation had become in the years since a man in a strappy T-shirt with Vitalis on his thinning hair and fried-chicken grease under his fingernails had blown out a President's brains as he sat in the back seat of a Lincoln rolling down the street of a Texas cow town.

I'll tell Jim Gardener. When he gets back. Gard'll know what to do, how to handle it. He'll have some ideas, anyway.

Anne's voice:
You're going to ask a certified loony for advice. Great.

He's not a loony. Just a little bit weird.

Yeah, arrested at the last Seabrook demonstration with a loaded .45 in his backpack. That's weird, all right.

Anne, shut up.

She weeded. All that morning in the hot sun she weeded, the back of her T-shirt wet with sweat, last year's scarecrow wearing the hat she usually put on to keep the sun off.

After lunch she lay down to take a nap and couldn't sleep. Everything kept going through her mind, and that stranger's voice never shut up.
Dig on it, Bobbi, it's okay, dig on it
—

Until at last she
did
get up, grabbed the crowbar, spade, and shovel, and set out for the woods. At the far end of her field she paused, forehead grooved in thought, and came back for her pickax. Peter was on the porch. He looked up briefly but made no move to come with Anderson.

Anderson was not really surprised.

So about twenty minutes later she stood above it, looking down the forested slope to the trench she had begun in the ground, freeing what she now believed was a very tiny section of an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Its gray hull was as solid as a wrench or a screwdriver, denying dreams and vapors and supposings; it was
there.
The dirt she had thrown to either side, moist and black and forest-secret, was now a dark brown—still damp from last night's rain.

Going down the slope, her foot crunched on something that sounded like newspaper. It wasn't newspaper; it was a dead sparrow. Twenty feet further down was a dead crow, feet pointed comically skyward like a dead bird in a cartoon. Anderson paused, looked around, and saw the bodies of three other birds—another crow, a bluejay, and a scarlet tanager. No marks. Just dead. And no flies around any of them.

She reached the trench and dropped her tools on the bank. The trench was muddy. She stepped in nevertheless, her workshoes squashing in the mud. She bent down and could see smooth gray metal going into the earth, a puddle standing on one side.

What are you?

She put her hand on it. That vibration sank into her skin and seemed for a moment to go all through her. Then it stopped.

Anderson turned and put her hand on her shovel, feeling its smooth wood, slightly warmed by the sun. She was vaguely aware that she could hear no forest noises,
none at all . . . no birds singing, no animals crashing through the undergrowth and away from the smell of a human being. She was more sharply aware of the smells: peaty earth, pine needles, bark and sap.

A voice inside her—very deep inside, not coming from the right of her brain but perhaps from the very root of her mind—screamed in terror.

Something's happening, Bobbi,
something is happening right
NOW.
Get out of here dead chuck dead birds Bobbi please please
PLEASE—

Her hand tightened on the shovel's handle and she saw it again as she had sketched it—the gray leading edge of something titanic in the earth.

Her period had started again, but that was all right; she had put a pad in the crotch of her panties even before she went out to weed the garden. A Maxi. And there were half a dozen more in her pack, weren't there? Or was it more like a dozen?

She didn't know, and it didn't matter. Not even discovering some part of her had known she would end up here in spite of whatever foolish conceptions of free will the rest of her mind might possess disturbed her. A shining sort of peace had filled her. Dead animals . . . periods that stopped and started again . . . arriving prepared even after you had assured yourself the decision had not yet been taken . . . these were small things, smaller than small, a whole lot of boolsheet. She would just dig for a while, dig on this sucker, see if there was anything but smooth metal skin to see. Because everything—

“Everything's fine,” Bobbi Anderson said in the unnatural stillness, and then she began to dig.

While Bobbi Anderson was tracing a titanic shape with a compass and thinking the unthinkable with a brain more numbed with exhaustion than she knew, Jim Gardener was doing the only work he could these days. This time he was doing it in Boston. The poetry reading on June 25th was at B.U.
That
went all right. The twenty-sixth was an off-day. It was also the day that Gardener stumbled—only “stumble” didn't really describe what happened, unfortunately. It was no minor matter like snagging your foot under a root while you were walking in the woods. It was a
fall
that he took, one long fucking
fall
, like taking a no-expenses-paid bone-smasher of a tumble down a long flight of stairs.
Stairs?
Shit, he had almost fallen off the face of the earth.

The fall started in his hotel room; it ended on the breakwater at Arcadia Beach, New Hampshire, eight days later.

Bobbi wanted to dig; Gard woke up on the morning of the twenty-sixth wanting to drink.

He knew there was no such thing as a “partially arrested alcoholic.” You were either drinking or you weren't. He wasn't drinking now, and that was good, but there had always been long periods when he didn't even
think
about booze. Months, sometimes. He would drop into a meeting once in a while (if two weeks went by in which Gard didn't attend an AA meeting, he felt uneasy—the way he
felt if he spilled the salt and didn't toss some over his shoulder) and stand up and say, “Hi, my name's Jim and I'm an alcoholic.” But when the urge was absent, it didn't feel like the truth. During these periods, he wasn't actually dry; he could and did drink—
drink,
that was, as opposed to boozing. A couple of cocktails around five, if he was at a faculty function or a faculty dinner party. Just that and no more. Or he could call Bobbi Anderson and ask if she'd like to come over to go out for a couple of cold ones and it was fine. No sweat.

Then there would come a morning like this when he would wake up wanting all the booze in the world. This seemed to be an
actual
thirst, a physical thing—it made him think of those cartoons Virgil Partch used to do in the
Saturday Evening Post,
the ones where some funky old prospector is always crawling across the desert, his tongue hanging out, looking for a waterhole.

All he could do when the urge came on him was fight it off—stand it off, try to earn a draw. Sometimes it was actually better to be in a place like Boston when this happened, because you could go to a meeting every night—every four hours, if that was what it took. After three or four days, it would go away.

Usually.

He would, he thought, just wait it out. Sit in his room and watch movies on cable TV and charge them to room service. He had spent the eight years since his divorce and severance from college teaching as a Full-Time Poet . . . which meant he had come to live in an odd little subsociety where barter was usually more important than money.

He had traded poems for food: on one occasion a birthday sonnet for a farmer's wife in exchange for three shopping bags of new potatoes. “Goddam thing better rhyme, too,” the farmer had said, fixing a stony eye upon Gardener.
“Real
poimes rhyme.”

Gardener, who could take a hint (especially when his stomach was concerned), composed a sonnet so filled with exuberant masculine rhymes that he burst into gales of laughter after scanning the second draft. He called Bobbi, read it to her, and they both howled. It was even better out loud. Out loud it sounded like a love letter from Dr. Seuss. But he hadn't needed Bobbi to point out
to him that it was still an honest piece of work, jangly but not condescending.

On another occasion, a small press in West Minot agreed to publish a book of his poems (this had been in early 1983 and was, in fact, the last book of poems Gardener had published), and offered half a cord of wood as an advance. Gardener took it.

“You should have held out for three-quarters of a cord,” Bobbi told him that night as they sat in front of her stove, feet up on the fender, smoking cigarettes as a wind shrieked fresh snow across the fields and into the trees. “Those're good poems. There's a lot of them, too.”

“I know,” Gardener said, “but I was cold. Half a cord'll get me through until spring.” He dropped her a wink. “Besides, the guy's from Connecticut. I don't think he knew most of it was ash.”

She dropped her feet to the floor and stared at him. “You kidding?”

“Nope.”

She began to giggle and he kissed her soundly and later took her to bed and they slept together like spoons. He remembered waking up once, listening to the wind, thinking of all the dark and rushing cold outside and all the warmth of this bed, filled with their peaceful heat under two quilts, and wishing it could be like this forever—only nothing ever was. He had been raised to believe God was love, but you had to wonder how loving a God could be when He made men and women smart enough to land on the moon but stupid enough to have to learn there was no such thing as forever over and over again.

The next day Bobbi had again offered money and Gardener again refused. He wasn't exactly rolling in dough, but he made out. And he couldn't help the little spark of anger he felt in spite of her matter-of-fact tone. “Don't you know who's supposed to get the money after a night in bed?” he asked.

She stuck out her chin. “You calling me a whore?”

He smiled. “You need a pimp? There's money in it, I hear.”

“You want breakfast, Gard, or do you want to piss me off?”

“How about both?”

“No,” she said, and he saw she was really mad—Christ,
he was getting worse and worse at seeing things like that, and it used to be so
easy.
He hugged her.
I was only kidding, couldn't she see that?
he thought.
She always
used
to be able to tell when I was kidding.
But of course she hadn't known he was kidding because he hadn't been. If he believed different, the only one getting kidded was himself. He had been trying to hurt her because she'd embarrassed him. And it wasn't her offer that had been stupid; it was his embarrassment. He had more or less chosen the life he was living, hadn't he?

And he didn't want to hurt Bobbi, didn't want to drive Bobbi away. The bed part was fine, but the bed part wasn't the really important part. The really important part was that Bobbi Anderson was a friend, and something scary seemed to be happening just lately. How fast he seemed to be running out of friends. That was pretty scary, all right.

Running out of friends? Or running them out? Which is it, Gard?

At first hugging her was like hugging an ironing board and he was afraid she would try to pull away and he would make the mistake of trying to hold on, but she finally softened.

“I want breakfast,” he said. “And to say I'm sorry.”

“It's all right,” she said, and turned away before he could see her face—but her voice held that dry briskness that meant she was either crying or near it. “I keep forgetting it's bad manners to offer money to Yankees.”

Well, he didn't know if it was bad manners or not, but he would not take money from Bobbi. Never had, never would.

The New England Poetry Caravan, however, was a different matter.

Grab that chicken, son,
Ron Cummings, who needed money about as much as the pope needed a new hat, would have said.
The bitch is too slow to run and too fat to pass up.

The New England Poetry Caravan paid cash. Coin of the realm for poetry—two hundred up front and two hundred at the end of the tour. The word made flesh, you might say. But hard cash, it was understood, was only part of the deal.

The rest was
THE TAB.

While you were on tour, you took advantage of every
opportunity. You got your meals from room service, your hair cut in the hotel barbershop if there was one, brought your extra pair of shoes (if you had one) and put
them
out one night instead of your regulars so you could get the extras shined up.

There were the in-room movies, movies you never got a chance to see in a theater, because theaters persisted in wanting money for much the same thing poets, even the very good ones, were for some reason supposed to provide for free or next to it—three bags of spuds = one (1) sonnet, for instance. There was a room charge for the movies, of course, but what of that? You didn't even have to put them on
THE TAB;
some computer did it automatically, and all Gardener had to say on the subject was God bless and keep
THE TAB,
and bring those fuckers
on!
He watched
everything,
from
Emmanuelle in New York
(finding the part where the girl flogs the guy's doggy under a table at Windows on the World particularly artistic and uplifting; it certainly uplifted part of him, anyway) to
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
to
Rainbow Brite and the Star-Stealer.