The Tommyknockers Read online

  There was a large buffet for which most of the poets made a beeline, reliably following Gardener's First Rule for Touring Poets: If it's gratis, grab it. As he watched, Ann Delaney, who wrote spare, haunting poems about rural working-class New England, stretched her jaws wide and ripped into the huge sandwich she was holding. Mayonnaise the color and texture of bull semen squirted between her fingers, and Ann licked it off her hand nonchalantly. She tipped Gardener a wink. To her left, last year's winner of Boston University's Hawthorne Prize (for his long poem Harbor Dreams 1650--1980) was cramming green olives into his mouth with blurry speed. This fellow, Jon Evard Symington by name, paused long enough to drop a handful of wrapped mini-wheels of Bonbel cheese into each pocket of his corduroy sport-coat (patched elbows, naturally), and then went back to the olives.

  Ron Cummings strolled over to where Gardener was standing. As usual, he wasn't eating. He had a Waterford glass that looked full of straight whiskey in one hand. He nodded toward the buffet. "Great stuff. If you're a connoisseur of Kirschner's bologna and iceberg lettuce, you in like Flynn, bo."

  "That Arglebargle really knows how to live," Gardener said.

  Cummings, in the act of drinking, snorted so hard his eyes bulged. "You're on the hit-line tonight, Jim. Arglebargle. Jesus." He looked at the glass in Gardener's hand. It was a vodka and tonic--weak, but his second, just the same.

  "Tonic water?" Cummings asked slyly.

  "Well ... mostly."

  Cummings laughed again and walked away.

  By the time someone pulled Bach and put on B. B. King, Gard was working on his fourth drink--on this one he'd asked the bartender, who had been at the reading, to go a little heavier on the vodka. He had begun to repeat two remarks that seemed wittier as he got drunker: first, that if you were a connoisseur of Kirschner's bologna and iceberg lettuce you were in like Flynn here, bo, and second, that all assistant professors were like T. S. Eliot's Practical Cats in at least one way: they all had secret names. Gardener confided that he had intuited that of their host: Arglebargle. He went back for a fifth drink, and told the bartender just to wave the tonic bottle in that old drink's face--that would be fine. The bartender waggled the bottle of Schweppes solemnly in front of Gardener's glass of vodka. Gardener laughed until tears stood in his eyes and his stomach hurt. He really was feeling fine tonight ... and who, sir or madam, deserved it more? He had read better than he had in years, maybe in his whole life.

  "You know," he told the bartender, a needy postgrad hired especially for the occasion, "all assistant professors are like T. S. Eliot's Practical Cats in one way."

  "Is that so, Mr. Gardener?"

  "Jim. Just Jim." But he could see from the look in the kid's eyes that he was never going to be just Jim to this guy. Tonight he had seen Gardener blaze, and men who blazed could never be anything so mundane as just Jim.

  "It is," he told the kid. "Each of them has a secret name. I have intuited that of our host. It's Arglebargle. Like the sound you make when you use the old Listerine." He paused, considering. "Of which the gentleman under discussion could use a good dose, now that I think of it." Gardener laughed quite loudly. It was a fine addition to the basic thrust. Like adding a tasteful hood ornament to a fine car, he thought, and laughed again. This time a few people glanced around before going back to their conversations.

  Too loud, he thought. Turn down your volume control, Gard, old buddy. He grinned widely, thinking he was having one of those magic nights--even his damn thoughts were funny tonight.

  The bartender was also smiling, but his smile had a slightly concerned edge to it. "You ought to be careful what you say about Professor Arberg," he said, "or who you say it to. He's ... a bit of a bear."

  "Oh is he!" Gardener popped his eyes round and waggled his eyebrows energetically up and down like Groucho Marx. "Well, he's got the build for it. Beefy sonofawhore, ain't he?" But he was careful to keep the old volume control down when he said it.

  "Yeah," the bartender said. He looked around and then leaned over the makeshift bar toward Gardener. "There's a story that he happened to be passing by the grad assistants' lounge last year and heard one of them joking about how he'd always wanted to be associated with a school where Moby Dick wasn't just another dry classic but an actual member of the faculty. That guy was one of the most promising English students Northeastern has ever had, I heard, but he was gone before the semester was over. So was everyone who laughed. The ones who didn't laugh stayed."

  "Jesus Christ," Gardener said. He had heard stories like it before--one or two that were even worse--but still felt disgusted. He followed the bartender's glance and saw Arglebargle at the buffet, standing next to Patricia McCardle. Arglebargle had a stein of beer in one hand and was gesturing with it. His other hand was plowing potato chips through a bowl of clam dip and then conveying them to his mouth, which went right on talking as it slobbered them chips in. Gardener could not remember ever having seen anything so quintessentially disgusting. Yet the McCardle bitch's rapt attention suggested that she might at any moment drop to her knees and give the man a blowjob out of sheer adoration. Gardener thought, and the fat fuck would go right on eating while she did it, dropping potato-chip crumbs and globs of clam dip in her hair.

  "Jesus wept," he said, and slugged back half of his vodka-sans-tonic. It hardly burned at all ... what burned was the evening's first real hostility--the first outrider of that mute and inexplicable rage that had plagued him almost since the time he began drinking. "Freshen this up, would you?"

  The bartender dumped in more vodka and said shyly: "I thought your reading tonight was wonderful, Mr. Gardener."

  Gardener was absurdly touched. "Leighton Street" had been dedicated to Bobbi Anderson, and this boy behind the bar--barely old enough to drink legally himself--reminded Gardener of Bobbi as she had been when she first came to the university.

  "Thank you."

  "You want to be a little careful of that vodka," the bartender said. "It has a way of blindsiding you."

  "I'm in control," Gardener said, and gave the bartender a reassuring wink. "Visibility ten miles to unlimited."

  He pushed off from the bar, glancing toward the beefy sonofawhore and McCardle again. She caught him looking at her and gazed back, cool and unsmiling, her blue eyes chips of ice. Bite my bag, you frigid bitch, he thought, and raised his drink to her in a boorish barrelhouse salute, at the same time favoring her with an insultingly wide grin.

  "Just tonic, right? Pure tonic."

  He looked around. Ron Cummings had appeared at his side as suddenly as Satan. And his grin was properly satanic.

  "Bugger off," Gardener said, and more people turned around to look.

  "Jim, old buddy--"

  "I know, I know, turn down the volume control." He smiled, but he could feel that pulse in his head getting harder, more insistent. It wasn't like the headaches the doctor had predicted following his accident; it didn't come from the front of his head but rather from someplace deep in the back. And it didn't hurt.

  It was, in fact, rather pleasant.

  "You got it." Cummings nodded almost imperceptibly toward McCardle. "She's got a heavy down on you, Jim. She'd love to dump you off the tour. Don't give her a reason."

  "Fuck her."

  "You fuck her," Cummings said. "Cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, and brain damage are all statistically proven results of heavy drinking, so I could reasonably expect any of them in my future, and if one of them were to come down on my head, I'd have no one to blame but myself. Diabetes, glaucoma, and premature senility all run in my family. But hypothermia of the penis? That I can do without. Excuse me."

  Gardener stood still for a moment, puzzled, watching him go. Then he got it and brayed laughter. This time the tears did not just stand in his eyes; this time they actually rolled down his cheeks. For the third time that evening people were looking at him--a big man in rather shabby clothes with a glass full of what looked suspiciously like straight vodka, standing by himself and laughi
ng at the top of his voice.

  Put a lid on it, he thought. Turn down the volume, he thought. Hypothermia of the penis, he thought, and sprayed more laughter.

  Little by little he managed to regain control. He headed for the stereo in the other room--that was where the most interesting people at a party were usually found. He grabbed a couple of canapes from a tray and swallowed them. He had a strong feeling that Arglebargle and McCarglebargle were looking at him still, and that McCarglebargle was giving Arglebargle a complete rundown on him in neat phrases, that cool, maddening little smile never leaving her face. You didn't know? It's quite true--he shot her. Right through the face. She told him she wouldn't press charges if he would give her an uncontested divorce. Who knows if it was the right decision or not? He hasn't shot any more women ... at least, not yet. But however well he might have read tonight--after that rather eccentric lapse, I mean--he is unstable, and as you can see, he's not able to control his drinking ...

  Better watch it, Gard, he thought, and for the second time that night a thought came in a voice that was very much like Bobbi's. Your paranoia's showing. They're not talking about you, for Chrissake.

  At the doorway he turned and looked back.

  They were looking directly at him.

  He felt nasty, dismayed shock race through him ... and then he forced another big, insulting grin and tipped his glass toward both of them.

  Get out of here, Gard. This could be bad. You're drunk. I'm in control, don't worry. She wants me to leave, that's why she keeps looking at me, that's why she's telling that fat fuck all about me--that I shot my wife, that I was busted at Seabrook with a loaded gun in my packsack--she wants to get rid of me because she doesn't think drunken wifeshooting commiesymp nuclear protesters should get the biggest motherfucking hand of the night. But I can be cool. No problem, baby. I'm just going to hang out, taper off on the firewater, grab some coffee, and go home early. No problem.

  And although he didn't drink any coffee, didn't go home early, and didn't taper off on the firewater, he was okay for the next hour or so. He turned down the volume control every time he heard it start going up, and made himself quit every time he heard himself doing what his wife had called holding forth. "When you get drunk, Jim," she had said, "not the least of your problems is a tendency to stop conversing and start holding forth."

  He stayed mostly in Arberg's living room, where the crowd was younger and not so cautiously pompous. Their conversation was lively, cheerful, and intelligent. The thought of the nukes rose in Gardener's mind--at hours such as this it always did, like a rotting body floating to the surface in response to cannonfire. At hours such as these--and at this stage of drunkenness--the certainty that he must alert these young men and women to the problem always floated up, trailing its heat of anger and irrationality like rotted waterweed. As always. The last six years of his life had been bad, and the last three had been a nightmare time in which he had become inexplicable to himself and scary to almost all the people who really knew him. When he drank, this rage, this terror, and most of all, this inability to explain whatever had happened to Jimmy Gardener, to explain even to himself--found outlet in the subject of the nukes.

  But tonight he had hardly raised the subject when Ron Cummings staggered into the parlor, his narrow, gaunt face glowing with feverish color. Drunk or not, Cummings was still perfectly able to see how the wind was blowing. He adroitly turned the conversation back toward poetry. Gardener was weakly grateful but also angry. It was irrational, but it was there: he had been denied his fix.

  So, partly thanks to the tight checkrein he had imposed on himself and partly due to Ron Cummings' timely intervention, Gardener avoided trouble until Arberg's party was almost over. Another half-hour and Gardener might have avoided trouble completely ... at least, for that night.

  But when Ron Cummings began to hold forth on the beat poets with his customary cutting wit, Gardener wandered back into the dining room to get another drink and perhaps something to nosh on from the buffet. What followed might have been arranged by a devil with a particularly malignant sense of humor.

  "Once we've got Iroquois on line, you'll have the equivalent of three dozen full scholarships to give away," a voice on Gardener's left was saying. Gardener looked around so suddenly that he almost spilled his drink. Surely he must be imagining this conversation--it was too coincidental to be real.

  Half a dozen people were grouped at one end of the buffet--three men and three women. One of the couples was that World-Famous Vaudeville Team of Arglebargle and McCarglebargle. The man speaking looked like a car salesman with better taste in clothes than most of the breed. His wife stood next to him. She was pretty in a strained way, her fading blue eyes magnified by thick spectacles. Gardener saw one thing at once. He might be an alky, and obsessive on this one subject, but he had always been a sharp observer and still was. The woman with the thick spectacles was aware that her husband was doing exactly that which Nora had accused Gard himself of doing at parties once he got drunk: holding forth. She wanted to get her husband out, but as yet couldn't see how to do it.

  Gardener took a second look and guessed they had been married eight months. Maybe a year, but eight months was a better guess.

  The man speaking had to be some sort of wheel with Bay State Electric. Had to be Bay State, because Bay State owned the boondoggle that was the Iroquois plant. This guy was making it sound like the greatest thing since sliced bread, and because he looked as though he really believed it, Gardener decided he must be a wheel of a rather small sort, maybe even a spare tire. He doubted if the big guys were so crazy about Iroquois. Even putting aside the insanity of nuclear power for a moment, there was the fact that Iroquois was five years late coming "on-line" and the fate of three interconnected New England bank chains depended on what would happen when--and if--it did. They were all standing chest-deep in radioactive quicksand and trading paper. It was like some crazy game of musical chairs.

  Of course, the courts had finally given the company permission to begin loading hot rods the month before, and Gardener supposed that had the motherfuckers breathing a little easier.

  Arberg was listening with solemn respect. He wasn't a trustee of the college, but anyone above the post of instructor would know enough to butter up an emissary from Bay State Electric, even a spare tire. Big private utilities like Bay State could do a lot for a school if they wanted to.

  Was Reddy Kilowatt here a Friend of Poetry? About as much, Gard suspected, as he himself was a Friend of the Neutron Bomb. His wife, however--she of the thick glasses and the strained, pretty face--she looked like a Friend of Poetry.

  Knowing it was a terrible mistake, Gardener drifted over. He was wearing a pleasant late-in-the-party-gotta-go-soon smile, but the pulse in his head was faster, centering on the left. The old helpless anger was rising in a red wave. Don't you know what you're talking about? was almost all that his heart could cry.There were logical arguments against nuclear power plants that he could muster, but at times like this he could only find the inarticulate cry of his heart.

  Don't you know what you're talking about? Don't you know what the stakes are? Don't any of you remember what happened in Russia two years ago? They haven't; they can't. They'll be burying the cancer victims far into the next century. Jesus-jumped-up-fiddling-Christ! Stick one of those used core-rods up your ass for half an hour or so and tell everyone how safe nuclear power is when your turds start to glow in the dark! Jesus! JESUS! You jerks are standing here listening to this man talk as if he was sane!

  He stood there, drink in hand, smiling pleasantly, listening to the spare tire spout his deadly nonsense.

  The third man in the group was fifty or so and looked like a college dean. He wanted to know about the possibility of further organized protests in the fall. He called the spare tire Ted.

  Ted the Power Man said he doubted there was much to worry about. Seabrook had had its vogue, and the Arrowhead installation in Maine--but since the federal judges
had started to deal out some stiff sentences for what they saw as merely hell-raising, the protests had slowed down fast. "These groups go through targets almost as fast as they go through rock groups," he said. Arberg, McCardle, and the others laughed--all except the wife of Ted the Power Man. Her smile only frayed a little more.

  Gardener's pleasant smile remained. It felt flash-frozen onto his face.

  Ted the Power Man grew more expansive. He said it was time to show the Arabs once and for all that America and Americans didn't need them. He said that even the most modern coal-fired generators were too dirty to be acceptable by the EPA. He said that solar power was great ... "as long as the sun shines." There was another burst of laughter.

  Gardener's head thudded and whipped, whipped and thudded. His ears, tuned to an almost preternatural pitch, heard a faint crackling sound, like ice shifting, and he relaxed his hand a bare moment before it tightened enough to shatter the glass.

  He blinked and Arberg had the head of a pig. This hallucination was utterly complete and utterly perfect, right down to the bristles on the fat man's snout. The buffet was in ruins, but Arberg was scavenging, finishing up the last few Triscuits, spearing a final slice of salami and chunk of cheese on the same plastic toothpick, chasing them with the last potato-chip crumbs. It all went into his snuffling snout, and he went on nodding all the while as Ted the Power Man explained that nuclear was the only alternative, really. "Thank God the American people are finally getting that Chernobyl business into some kind of perspective," he said. "Thirty-two people dead. It's horrible, of course, but there was an airplane crash just a month ago that killed a hundred and ninety-some. You don't hear people yelling for the government to shut down the airlines, though, do you? Thirty-two dead is horrible, but it's far from the Armageddon these nukefreaks made it sound like." He lowered his voice a little. "They're as nuts as the LaRouche people you see in airports, but in a way, they're worse. They sound more rational. But if we gave them what they wanted, they'd turn around a month or so later and start whining about not being able to use their blow-dryers, or found out their Cuisinarts weren't going to work when they wanted to mix up a bunch of macrobiotic food."