Because only the earliest risers had begun to stir, the bellman took the time to inform him there was a pay phone at the Mobil station.
“Intersection of U.S. 1 and Route 26. Now get the hell out before I call the cops.”
If he had needed to know any more about himself than he already did, it was in the husky bellman’s disgusted eyes.
Gardener trudged slowly down the hill toward the gas station. His socks flapped and flailed against the tar. His heart knocked like a wheezy Model T engine that’s experienced too much hard traveling and too little maintenance. He could feel the headache moving to the left, where it would eventually center in a brilliant pinpoint ... if he’d had plans to live that long, anyway. And suddenly he was seventeen again.
He was seventeen, and his obsession wasn’t nukes but nooky. The girl’s name was Annmarie and he thought he was going to make it with her pretty soon, maybe, if he didn’t lose his nerve. If he kept his cool. Maybe even tonight. But part of keeping his cool was doing okay today. Today, right here, here being Straight Arrow, an intermediate ski trail at Victory Mountain in Vermont. He was looking down at his skis, mentally reviewing the steps necessary to come to your basic snowplow stop, reviewing as he would study for a test, wanting to pass, knowing he was still pretty new at this and Annmarie wasn’t, and he somehow didn’t think she would be so apt to come across if he ended up looking like Frosty the Snowman his first day off the beginners’ slopes; he didn’t mind looking a little inexperienced as long as he didn’t look downright stupid, so there he had been, looking stupidly down at his feet instead of where he was going, which was directly at a gnarled old pine with the warning red stripe painted on its bark, and the only sounds were the wind in his ears and the snow sliding dryly under his skis, and they were the same soothing hush-a-bye sound: Shhhhhh ...
It was the rhyme that broke into the memory, making him stop near the Mobil station. The rhyme came back and it stayed, beating in time with his throbbing head. Late last night and the night before, Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.
Gard hawked, tasted the coppery, unpleasant flavor of his own blood, and spat a reddish glob of phlegm into the trash-littered dirt of the soft shoulder. He remembered asking his mother who or what Tommyknockers were. He couldn’t remember what, if anything, she had replied, but he’d always thought they must be highwaymen, robbers who stole by moonlight, killed in shadow, and buried in the darkest part of the night. And hadn’t he spent one tortured, endless half-hour in the darkness of his bedroom before sleep finally decided to be merciful and claim him, thinking they might be cannibals as well as robbers? That instead of burying their victims in the dark of the night, they might have cooked them and . . . well . . .
Gardener wrapped his thin arms (there didn’t seem to be any restaurants up in the cyclone) around his chest and shuddered.
He crossed to the Mobil station, which was hung with bunting but not yet open. The signs out front read SUPERUN-LEADED .99 and GOD BLESS AMERICA and WE LUV WINNE-BAGOS! The pay phone was on the side of the building. Gardener was grateful to find it was one of the new ones; you could dial long distance without depositing any money. That at least spared him the indignity of spending part of his last morning on earth panhandling.
He punched zero, then had to stop. His hand was shaking wildly, it was all over the place. He cocked the phone between head and shoulder this time, leaving both hands free. Grasped his right wrist with his left hand to hold the hand steady . . . as steady as possible, anyway. Now, looking like a shooter on a target range, he used his forefinger to punch the buttons with slow and horrible deliberation. The robot voice told him to punch in either his telephone credit-card number (a task Gard thought he would have been utterly incapable of performing, even if he’d had such a card) or zero for an operator. Gardener hit zero.
“Hi, happy holiday, this is Eileen,” a voice chirruped. “May I have your billing, please?”
“Hi, Eileen, happy holiday to you too,” Gard said. “I’d like to bill the call collect to anyone from Jim Gardener.”
“Thank you, Jim.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, and then, suddenly: “No, change that. Tell her it’s Gard calling.”
As Bobbi’s telephone began to ring up there in Haven, Gardener turned and looked toward the rising sun. It was even redder than before, rising toward the scud of thickening mackerel scales like a great round blister in the sky. The sun and the clouds together brought another childhood rhyme to mind: Red sky atnight, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailor, take warning. Gard didn’t know about red sky at morning or at night, but he knew those delicate scales of cloud were a reliable harbinger of rain.
Too goddam many rhymes for a man’s last morning on earth, he thought irritably, and then: I’m going to wake you up, Bobbi. Going to wake you up, but I promise you I’ll never do it again.
But there was no Bobbi to wake up. The phone rang, that was all. Rang . . . and rang . . . and rang.
“Your party doesn’t answer,” the operator told him, just in case he was deaf or had maybe forgotten what he was doing for a few seconds and had been holding the phone against his asshole instead of his ear. “Would you like to try again later?”
Yeah, maybe. But it’d have to be by Ouija board, Eileen.
“Okay,” he said. “You have a good one.”
“Thank you, Gard!”
He pulled the phone away from his ear as if it had bitten him and stared at it. For a moment she had sounded so much like Bobbi ... so goddam much ...
He put the phone back and got as far as, “Why did you—” before realizing that cheerful Eileen had clicked off.
Eileen. Eileen, not Bobbi. But—
She had called him Gard. Bobbi was the only one who—
No, change that, he’d said. Tell her it’s Gard calling.
There. Perfectly reasonable explanation.
Then why didn’t it seem that way?
He hung up slowly. He stood at the side of the Mobil station in wet socks and shrunken pants and untucked shirt, his shadow long and long. A phalanx of motorcycles went by on Route 1, headed for Maine.
Bobbi’s in trouble.
Will you please just let that go? It’s boolsheet, as Bobbi herself would say. Somebody tell you the only holiday you could go home for was Christmas? She went back to Utica for the Glorious Fourth, that’s all.
Yeah, sure. Bobbi was as likely to go back to Utica for the Fourth as Gard was to apply as an intern at the new Bay State nuclear plant. Sister Anne would probably celebrate the holiday by ramming a few M-80s up Bobbi’s cooze and lighting them.
Well, maybe she got invited to be parade marshal—or sheriff marshal, ha-ha—inone of those cow towns she’s always writing about. Deadwood, Abilene, Dodge City, someplace like that. You did what you could. Now finish what you started.
His mind made no effort to argue; he could have dealt with that. Instead it only reiterated its original thesis: Bobbi’s in trouble.
Just an excuse, you chickenshit bastard.
He didn’t think so. Intuition was solidifying into certainty. And whether it was boolsheet or not, that voice continued to insist that Bobbi was in a jam. Until he knew one way or the other for sure, he supposed he could table his personal business. As he had told himself not long ago, the ocean wasn’t going anywhere.
“Maybe the Tommyknockers got her,” he said out loud, and then laughed—a scared, husky little laugh. He was going crazy, all right.
7.
GARDENER ARRIVES
1
Shushhhhh . . .
He’s staring down at his skis, plain brown wood strips racing over the snow. He started looking down just to make sure he was keeping the skis nice and parallel, not trying to look like a snowbunny with no business here after all. Now he’s almost hypnotized by the liquid speed of his skis, by the crystal flicker of snow passing in a steady white strip, six inches wide, between the skis. He doesn’t realize his state of semih
ypnosis until Annmarie screams: “Gard, watch out! Watch out!”
It’s like being roused from a light doze. That’s when he realizes he’s been in a semitrance, that he has been looking down at that shiny, flowing strip far too long.
Annmarie screams: “Stem christie! Gard! Stem christie!” She screams again, and this time is she telling him to fall down, just fall down? Christ, you could break a leg that way!
In these last few seconds before the crunching impact, he still can’t comprehend how things got serious so fast.
He has somehow managed to drift far off to the left side of the trail. Pines and spruces, their blue-gray branches heavy with snow, are blurring past less than three yards from him. A rock poking out of the snow blips by; his left ski has missed it by inches. He realizes with cold horror that he has lost all control, has forgotten everything Annmarie has taught him, maneuvers that seemed so easy on the kiddie slopes.
And now he’s going . . . what? Twenty miles an hour? Thirty? Forty? Cold air cuts against his face and he sees the line of trees at the edge of the Straight Arrow trail getting ever closer. His own straight arrow has become a mild diagonal. Mild, but enough to be deadly, just the same. He sees his path will soon take him off the trail completely and then he will stop, you bet, then he will stop very quickly.
She shrieks again and he thinks: Stem christie? Did she really say that? I can’t even snowplow for beans and she wants me to do a stem christie?
He tries to turn right but his skis remain stubbornly on course. Now he can see the tree he’ll hit, a big, hoary old pine. A red stripe has been painted around its gnarly trunk—a wholly unnecessary danger signal.
He tries again to turn but he’s forgotten how to do it.
The tree swells, seeming to rush toward him while he himself remains still; he can see jagged knobs, splintery groping butts of branches on which he may impale himself, he can see nicks in the old bark, he can see drips where the red paint has run.
Annmarie shrieks again and he’s aware he himself is screaming.
Shusshhhhhh ...
2
“Mister? Mister, are you all right?”
Gardener sat up suddenly, startled, expecting to pay for the movement with a whacking thud of pain through his head. There was none. He experienced a moment of nauseous vertigo that might have come from hunger, but his head was clear. The headache had passed in its sudden way while he slept—perhaps even while he was dreaming of his accident.
“I’m okay,” he said, looking around. His head thudded now—but against a drum. A girl in cutoff denim jeans laughed. “You’re supposed to use sticks on those, man, not your head. You were mumbling in your sleep.”
He saw he was in a van—and now everything fell into place. “Was I?”
“Yeah. Not good mumbles.”
“It wasn’t a good dream,” Gardener said.
“Have a hit off this,” the girl said, and handed him a joint. The roachclip it was in, he saw, was a golden oldie: Richard Nixon in a blue suit, fingers thrust up in the characteristic double-V gesture that probably not even the oldest of the five other people in this van remembered. “Guaranteed to cure all bad dreams,” the girl added solemnly.
That’s what they told me about the booze, Lady Day. But sometimes they lie. Take it from me. Sometimes they lie.
He took a small hit off the joint for politeness’ sake and felt his head begin to swim almost at once. He handed it back to the girl, who was sitting against the van’s sliding door, and said: “I’d rather have something to eat.”
“Got a box of crackers,” the driver said, and handed it back. “We ate everything else. Beaver even ate the fucking prunes. Sorry.”
“Beaver’d eat anything,” the girl in the cutoffs said.
The kid in the van’s shotgun seat looked back. He was a plump boy with a wide, pleasant face. “Untrue,” he said. “Untrue. I’d never eat my mother.”
At that they were all laughing wildly, Gardener included. When he was able, he said: “The crackers are fine. Really.” And they were. He ate slowly at first, tentatively, monitoring his works closely for signs of rebellion. There were none and he began to eat faster and faster, until he was gobbling the crackers in big handfuls, his stomach snarling and yapping.
When had he last eaten? He didn’t know. It was lost in the blackout. He did know from previous experience that he never ate much when he was busy trying to drink up the world—and a lot of what he tried to eat either ended up in his lap or ran down his shirt. That made him think of the big greasy pizza he had eaten—tried to eat—Thanksgiving evening, 1980. The night he had shot Nora through the cheeks. —or you could have severed one or both optic nerves! Nora’s lawyer suddenly shouted furiously at him inside his head. Partial or total blindness! Paralysis! Death! All that bullet had to do was chip one tooth to go flying off in any direction, any damned direction at all! Just one! And don’t sit there and try any bullshit like how you didn’t mean to kill her, either. You shoot a person in the head, what else are you trying to do?
The depression came rolling back—big, black, and a mile high. Should have killed yourself, Gard. Shouldn’t have waited.
Bobbi’s in trouble.
Well, maybe so. But getting help from a guy like you is like hiring a pyromaniac to fix the oil-burner.
Shut up.
You’re wasted, Gard. Fried. What that kid back there on the beach would undoubtedly call a burnout.
“Mister, you sure you’re all right?” the girl asked. Her hair was red, cut punkily short. Her legs went approximately up to her chin.
“Yeah,” he said. “Did I look not all right?”
“For a minute there you looked terrible,” she answered gravely. That made him grin—not what she’d said but the solemnity with which she’d said it—and she grinned back, relieved.
He looked out the window and saw they were headed north on the Maine Turnpike—only up to mile thirty-six, so he couldn’t have slept too long. The feathery mackerel scales of two hours ago were beginning to merge into a toneless gray that promised rain by afternoon—before he got to Haven, it would probably be dark and he would be soaked.
After hanging up the telephone at the Mobil station, he had stripped off his socks and tossed them into the wastecan on one of the gasoline islands. Then he walked over to Route 1 northbound in his bare feet and stood on the shoulder, old totebag in one hand, the thumb of his other out and cocked north.
Twenty minutes later this van had come along—a fairly new Dodge Caravel with Delaware plates. A pair of electric guitars, their necks crossed like swords, were painted on the side, along with the name of the group inside: THE EDDIE PARKER BAND. It pulled over and Gardener had run to it, panting, totebag banging his leg, headache pulsing white-hot pain into the left side of his head. In spite of the pain, he had been amused by the slogan carefully lettered across the van’s doors: IF EDDIE’S ROCKIN‘, DON’T COME KNOCKIN’.
Now, sitting on the floor in back and reminding himself not to turn around quickly and thump the snare drum again, Gardener saw the Old Orchard exit coming up. At the same time, the first drops of rain hit the windshield.
“Listen,” Eddie said, pulling over, “I hate to leave you off like this. It’s starting to rain and you don’t even have any fuckin shoes.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“You don’t look so all right,” the girl in the cutoffs said softly.
Eddie whipped off his hat (DON’T BLAME ME; I VOTED FOR HOWARD THE DUCK written over the visor) and said: “Cough up, you guys.” Wallets appeared; change jingled in jeans pockets.
“No! Hey, thanks, but no!” Gardener felt hot blood rush into his cheeks and burn there. Not embarrassment but outright shame. Somewhere inside him he felt a strong painful thud—it didn’t rattle his teeth or bones. It was, he thought, his soul taking some final fall. It sounded melodramatic as hell. As for how it felt ... well, it just felt real. That was the horrible part about it. Just ... real. Okay, he th
ought. That’s what it feels like. All your life you’ve heard people talk about hitting bottom, this is what it feels like. Here it is. James Eric Gardener, who was going to be the Ezra Pound of his generation, taking spare change from a Delaware bar band.
“Really . . . no—”
Eddie Parker went on passing the hat just the same. There was a bunch of change and a few one-dollar bills in it. Beaver got the hat last. He tossed in a couple of quarters.
“Look,” Gardener said, “I appreciate it, but—”
“C’mon, Beaver,” Eddie said. “Cough up, you fuckin Scrooge.”
“Really, I have friends in Portland, I’ll just call a few up ... and I think I might have left my checkbook with this one guy I know in Falmouth,” Gardener added wildly.
“Bea-ver’s a Scrooge,” the girl in the cutoffs began to chant gleefully. “Bea-ver’s a Scrooge, Bea-ver’s a Scrooge!” The others picked it up until Beaver, laughing and rolling his eyes, added another quarter and a New York lottery ticket.
“There, I’m tapped,” he said, “unless you want to wait around for the prunes to work.” The guys in the band and the girl in the cutoffs were laughing wildly again. Looking resignedly at Gardener, as if to say, You see the morons I have to deal with? You dig it?, Beaver handed the hat to Gardener, who had to take it; if he hadn’t, the change would have rolled all over the van floor.
“Really,” he said, trying to give the hat back to Beaver. “I’m perfectly okay—”
“You ain’t,” Eddie Parker said. “So cut the bullshit, what do you say?”
“I guess I say thanks. It’s all I can think of right now.”
“Well, it ain’t so much you’ll have to declare it on your income taxes,” Eddie said. “But it’ll buy you some burgers and a pair of those rubber sandals.”
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