The Tommyknockers Read online

  Okay, then. Okay. He closed his eyes and got ready.

  As he did, an odd certainty came to him, an intuition so strong that it was nearly precognitive. He felt that Bobbi needed to talk to him, rather than the other way around. That it was no mind trick. She really was in some kind of trouble. Bad trouble.

  He opened his eyes and looked around, like a man coming out of a deep daze. He would find a phone and call her. He wouldn't say "Hey Bobbi I had another blackout" and he wouldn't say "I don't know where I am Bobbi but this time there's no nose-picking deputy to stop me." He would say "Hey, Bobbi, how you doin?" and when she told him she was doin okay, never better, shooting it out with the James gang in Northfield, or lighting out for the territories with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and by the way, Gard, how's your own bad self, Gard would tell her he was fine, writing some good stuff for a change, thinking of going over Vermont way for a bit, see some friends. Then he would go back out to the end of the breakwater and jump off. Nothing fancy; he would just bellyflop into the dead zone. That seemed to fit; after all, it was the way he had mostly gotten through the live one. The ocean had been here for a billion years or so. It would wait another five minutes while he did that.

  But no laying it off on her, you hear me? Promise, Gard. No breaking down and blubbering. You're supposed to be her friend, not the male equivalent of her slimebucket sister. None of that shit.

  He had broken promises in his life, God knew--a few thousand of them to himself. But this one he would keep.

  He climbed clumsily up to the top of the breakwater. It was rough and rocky, a really fine place to break an ankle. He looked around apathetically for his scuffed brown totebag, the one he always took with him when he went off to read, or just to ramble, thinking it might be lodged in one of the holes between the rocks. It wasn't. It was an old campaigner, scuffed and battered, going back to the last troubled years of his marriage, something he had managed to hold onto while all the valuable things got lost. Well, now the tote was finally gone too. Clothes, toothbrush, bar of soap in a plastic dish, a bunch of jerky meat-sticks (it amused Bobbi to cure jerky in her shed, sometimes), a twenty-dollar bill under the tote's bottom . . . and all his unpublished poems, of course.

  The poems were the least of his worries. The ones he had written over the last couple of years, and to which he had given the wonderfully witty and upbeat title "The Radiation Cycle," had been submitted to five different publishers and rejected by all five. One anonymous editor had scribbled: "Poetry and politics rarely mix; poetry and propaganda, never." This little homily was perfectly true, he knew it ... and still hadn't been able to stop.

  Well, the tide had administered the Ultimate Blue Pencil to them. Go and do thou likewise, he thought, and lurched slowly along the breakwater toward the beach, thinking that his walk out to where he had awakened must have been better than a death-defying circus act. He walked with the summer sun rising up red and bloated from the Atlantic behind him, his shadow trailing out in front of him, and on the beach a kid in jeans and a T-shirt set off a string of firecrackers.

  2

  A marvel: his totebag wasn't lost after all. It was lying upside-down on the beach just above the high-tide line, unzipped, looking to Gardener like a big leather mouth biting at the sand. He picked it up and looked inside. Everything was gone. Even his frayed undies. He pulled up the tote's imitation leather bottom. The twenty was gone too. Fond hope, too quickly banish'd.

  Gardener dropped the tote. His notebooks, all three of them, lay a little further along the beach. One was resting on its covers in a tent shape, one lay soggily just below the high-tide line, swelled up to the size of a telephone book, and the wind was leafing through the third idly. Don't bother, Gardener thought. Lees of an ass.

  The kid with the firecrackers came toward him . . . but not too close. Wants to be able to take off in a hurry if I turn out to be as weird as I undoubtedly look, Gardener thought. Smart kid.

  "That your stuff?" the kid asked. His T-shirt showed a guy blowing his groceries. SCHOOL-LUNCH VICTIM, the shirt said.

  "Yeah," Gardener said. He bent down and picked up the soggy notebook, looked at it for a moment, and then tossed it down again.

  The kid handed him the other two. What could he say? Don't bother, kid? The poems suck, kid? Poetry and politics rarely mix, kid, poetry and propaganda never?

  "Thanks," he said.

  "Sure." The kid held the bag so Gardener could drop the two dry notebooks back inside. "Surprised you got anything left at all. This place is full of ripoff artists in the summer. The park, I guess."

  The kid gestured with his thumb and Gardener saw the roller coaster silhouetted against the sky. Gard's first thought was that he had somehow managed to roister all the way north to Old Orchard Beach before collapsing. A second look changed his mind. No pier.

  "Where am I?" Gardener asked, and his mind harked back with an eerie totality to the jail cell and the nose-picking deputy. For a moment he was sure the kid would say, Where do you think you are?

  "Arcadia Beach." The kid looked half-amused, half-contemptuous. "You must have really hung one on last night, mister."

  "Last night, and the night before," Gardener chanted, his voice a little rusty, a little eerie. "Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door."

  The boy blinked at Gardener in surprise . . . and then delighted him by unexpectedly adding a couplet Gardener had never heard: "Wanna go out, dunno if I can, cause I'm so afraid of the Tommyknocker man."

  Gardener grinned ... but the grin turned into a wince of fresh pain. "Where'd you hear that, kid?"

  "My mom. When I was a baby."

  "I heard about the Tommyknockers from my mother too," Gardener said, "but never that part."

  The kid shrugged as if the topic had lost whatever marginal interest it might have had for him. "She used to make all kinds of stuff up." He appraised Gardener.

  "Don't you ache?"

  "Kid," Gardener said, leaning forward solemnly, "in the immortal words of Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, I feel like homemade shit."

  "You look like you been drunk a long time."

  "Yeah? How would you know?"

  "My mom. With her it was always funny stuff like the Tommyknockers or too hung-over to talk."

  "She give it up?"

  "Yeah. Car crash," the kid said.

  Gardener was suddenly racked with shivers. The boy appeared not to notice; he studied the sky, tracing the path of a gull. It coursed a morning sky of blue delicately shelled with mackerel scales, turning black for a moment as it flew in front of the sun's rising red eye. It landed on the breakwater, where it began to pick at something which gulls presumably found tasty.

  Gardener looked from the gull to the kid. All of this was taking on decidedly omenish tones. The kid knew about the fabled Tommyknockers. How many kids in the world knew about them, and what were the odds that Gardener would happen to stumble on one who both (a) knew about them and (b) had lost his mother because of drink?

  The kid reached in his pocket and brought out a small tangle of firecrackers. Sweet bird of youth, Gard thought, and smiled.

  "Want to light a couple? Celebrate the Fourth? Might cheer you up."

  "The Fourth? The Fourth of July? Is that what this is?"

  The kid gave him a dry smile. "It ain't Arbor Day."

  The twenty-sixth of June had been . . . he counted backwards. Good Christ. He had eight days which were painted black. Well ... not quite. That actually would have been better. Patches of light, not at all welcome, were beginning to illuminate parts of that blackness. The idea that he had hurt someone--again--arose now in his mind as a certainty. Did he want to know who that (arglebargle) was, or what he had done to him or her? Probably not. Best to call Bobbi and finish himself before he remembered.

  "Mister, how'd you get that scar on your forehead?"

  "Ran into a tree while I was skiing."

  "Bet it hurt."

  "Yeah, even worse than thi
s, but not by much. Do you know where there's a pay phone?"

  The kid pointed to an eccentric green-roofed manse which stood perhaps a mile down the beach. It topped a crumbling granite headland and looked like the cover of a paperback gothic. It had to be a resort. After a moment's fumbling, Gard came up with the name.

  "That's the Alhambra, isn't it?"

  "The one and only."

  "Thanks," he said, and started off.

  "Mister?"

  He turned.

  "Don't you want that last book?" The kid pointed to the wet notebook lying on the high-tide line. "You could dry it out."

  Gardener shook his head. "Kid," he said, "I can't even dry me out."

  "You sure you don't want to light off some firecrackers?"

  Gardener shook his head, smiling. "Be careful with 'em, okay? People hurt themselves with things that go bang."

  "Okay." He smiled, a little shyly. "My mother did for a long time before the, you know--"

  "I know. What's your name?"

  "Jack. What's yours?"

  "Gard."

  "Happy Fourth of July, Gard."

  "Happy Fourth, Jack. And watch out for the Tommyknockers."

  "Knocking at my door," the kid agreed solemnly, and looked at Gardener with eyes which seemed queerly knowing.

  For a moment Gardener seemed to feel a second premonition (whoever would have guessed a hangover was so conducive to the psychic emanations of the universe? a bitterly sarcastic voice inside asked). He didn't know what of, exactly, but it filled him with urgency about Bobbi again. He tipped the kid a wave and set off up the beach. He walked at a fast, steady pace, although the sand drew at his feet, clinging, pulling. Soon his heart was racing and his head was thudding so hard his eyeballs seemed to pulse.

  The Alhambra did not seem to be drawing appreciably closer.

  Slow down or you'll have a heart attack. Or a stroke. Or both.

  He did slow down ... and then doing so struck him as palpably absurd. Here he was, planning to drown himself in fifteen minutes or so, but minding his heart in the meantime. It was like the old joke about the condemned man turning down the cigarette offered by the captain of the firing squad. "I'm trying to quit," the guy says.

  Gardener picked up his pace again, and now the bolts of pain began to beat out steady pulses of jingle-jangle verse: Late last night and the night before,

  Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers,

  Knocking at the door.

  I was crazy and Bobbi was sane

  But that was before the Tommyknockers came.

  He stopped. What is this Tommyknocker shit?

  Instead of an answer, that deep voice, as terrifying and yet as sure as the voice of a loon crying out on an empty lake came back: Bobbi's in trouble!

  He began to walk again, getting up to his former brisk pace . . . and then moving even faster. Wanna go out, he thought. Dunno if I can, cause I'm so afraid of the Tommyknocker man.

  He was climbing the weather-whitened stairs which led up the side of the granite headland from the beach to the hotel when he wiped his hand across his nose and saw that it was bleeding again.

  3

  Gardener lasted exactly eleven seconds in the lobby of the Alhambra--long enough for the desk clerk to see he had no shoes on. The clerk nodded to a husky bellman when Gardener began to protest, and the two of them gave him the bum's rush.

  They would have booted me even if I had been wearing shoes, Gard reflected. Shit, I would have booted me.

  He had gotten a good look at himself in the glass of the lobby door. Too good. He had managed to mop most of the blood off his face with his sleeve, but there were still traces. His eyes were bloodshot and starey. His week's growth of beard made him look like a porcupine about six weeks after a shearing. In the genteel summer world of the Alhambra, where men were men and women wore tennis skirts, he looked like a male bag-lady.

  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.