The Tommyknockers Read online

  Gardener remembered, when Bobbi's return had briefly wakened him last night (Bobbi's return and that flare of green light), hearing distant and meaningless heat-wave thunder.

  Now he remembered that sometimes Pete needed a little comfort too.

  Especially when it thundered. Pete was deathly afraid of that sound. The sound of thunder.

  Dear Christ, has she got Peter out in that shed? And if she does, in God's name WHY?

  There had been smears of some funny green goo on Bobbi's dress.

  And hairs.

  Very familiar short brown and white hairs. Peter was in the shed, and had been all this time. Bobbi had lied about Peter being dead. God alone knew how many other things she had lied about ... but why this?

  Why?

  Gardener didn't know.

  He changed direction, went to the cupboard to the right and beneath the sink, bent, pulled out a fresh bottle of Scotch, and broke the seal. He held the bottle up and said, "To man's best friend." He drank from the neck, gargled viciously, and swallowed.

  First swallow.

  Peter. What the fuck did you do to Peter, Bobbi?

  He meant to get drunk.

  Very drunk.

  Fast.

  BOOK III

  The Tommyknockers

  Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

  --THE WHO, "Won't Get Fooled Again"

  Over on the mountain:

  thunder, magic foam,

  let the people know my wisdom,

  fill the land with smoke.

  Run through the jungle ...

  Don't look back to see.

  --CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL, "Run Through the Jungle"

  I slept and I dreamed the dream. This time there was no disguise anywhere. I was the malicious male-female dwarf figure, the principle of joy-in-destruction; and Saul was my counterpart, male-female, my brother and my sister, and we were dancing in some open place, under enormous white buildings, which were filled with hideous, menacing, black machinery which held destruction. But in the dream, he and I, or she and I, were friendly, we were not hostile, we were together in spiteful malice. There was a terrible yearning nostalgia in the dream, the longing for death. We came together and kissed, in love. It was terrible, and even in the dream I knew it. Because I recognised in the dream those other dreams we all have, when the essence of love, of tenderness, is concentrated into a kiss or a caress, but now it was the caress of two half-human creatures, celebrating destruction.

  --DORIS LESSING, The Golden Notebook

  1.

  SISSY

  1

  "I hope you enjoyed the flight," the stewardess by the hatch told the fortyish woman who left Delta's flight 230 with a trickle of other passengers who had stuck it out all the way to Bangor, 230's terminating point.

  Bobbi Anderson's sister Anne, who was forty but who thought fifty as well as looking it (Bobbi would say--during those infrequent times she was in her cups--that sister Anne had thought like a woman of fifty since she was thirteen or so), halted and fixed the stew with a gaze that might have stopped a clock.

  "Well, I'll tell you, babe," she said. "I'm hot. My pits stink because the plane was late leaving La Garbage and even later leaving Logan. The air was bumpy and I hate to fly. The trainee they sent back to Livestock Class spilled someone's screwdriver all over me and I've got orange juice drying to a fine crack-glaze all over my arm. My panties are sticking in the crack of my ass and this little town looks like a pimple on the cock of New England. Other questions?"

  "No," the stew managed. Her eyes had gone glassy, and she felt as if she had suddenly gone about three quick rounds with Boom-Boom Mancini on a day when Mancini was pissed at the world. This was an effect Anne Anderson often had on people.

  "Good for you, dear." Anne marched past the attendant and up the jetway, swinging a large, screamingly purple totebag in one hand. The attendant never even had time to wish her a pleasant stay in the Bangor area. She decided it would have been a wasted effort anyway. The lady looked as if she had never had a pleasant stay anywhere. She walked straight, but she looked like a woman who did it in spite of pain somewhere--like the little mermaid, who went on walking even though every step was like knives in her feet.

  Only, the flight attendant thought, if that babe has got a True Love stashed anywhere, I hope to God he knows about the mating habits of the trapdoor spider.

  2

  The Avis clerk told Anne she had no cars to rent; that if Anne hadn't made a reservation in advance, she was out of luck, so sorry. It was summer in Maine, and rental cars were at a premium.

  This was a mistake on the part of the clerk. A bad one.

  Anne smiled grimly, mentally spat on her hands, and went to work. Situations like this were meat and drink to sister Anne, who had nursed her father until he had died a miserable death on the first of August, eight days ago. She had refused to have him removed to an I.C. facility, preferring instead to wash him, medicate his bedsores, change his incontinence pants, and give him his pills in the middle of the night, by herself. Of course she had driven him to the final stroke, worrying at him constantly about selling the house on Leighton Street (he didn't want to; she was determined that he would; the final monster stroke, which occurred after three smaller ones at two-year intervals, came three days after the house was put up for sale), but she would no more admit that she knew this than she would admit the fact that although she had attended St. Bart's in Utica ever since earliest childhood and was one of the leading laywomen in that fine church, she believed the concept of God was a crock of shit. By the time Anne was eighteen she had bent her mother to her will, and now she had destroyed her father and watched dirt shoveled over his coffin. No slip of an Avis clerk could stand against Sissy. It took her about ten minutes to break the clerk down, but she brushed aside the offer of the compact car which Avis held in reserve for the occasional--very occasional--celebrity passing through Bangor and pressed on, scenting the young clerk's increasing fear of her as clearly as a hungry carnivore scents blood. Twenty minutes after the offer of the compact, Anne drove serenely away from Bangor International behind the wheel of a Cutlass Supreme reserved for a businessman scheduled to deplane at 6:15 P.M. By that time the clerk would be off-duty-and besides, she had been so unnerved by Anne's steady flailing that she wouldn't have cared if the Cutlass had been earmarked for the President of the United States. She went tremblingly into the inner office, shut the door, locked it, put a chair under the knob, and smoked a joint one of the mechanics had laid on her. Then she burst into tears.

  Anne Anderson had a similar effect on many people.

  3

  By the time the clerk had been eaten, it was going on three o'clock. Anne could have driven straight to Haven--the map she'd picked up at the Avis counter put the mileage at less than fifty--but she wanted to be absolutely fresh for her confrontation with Roberta.

  There was a cop at the X-shaped intersection of Hammond and Union streets--a streetlight was out, which she thought typical of this little running sore of a town--and she stopped halfway across to ask him for directions to the best hotel or motel in town. The cop intended to remonstrate with her for holding up traffic in order to ask for directions, and then, at the look in her eyes--the warm look of a fire in the brain which has been well-banked and might flare at any time--decided it might be less trouble to give her the directions and get rid of her. This lady looked like a dog the cop had known when he was a kid, a dog who had thought it fine fun to tear the seats from the pants of kids passing on the way to school. That kind of hassle on a day when both the temperature and his ulcer were too hot, he didn't need. He directed her to Cityscape Hotel out on Route 7 and was glad to see the ass end of her, going away.

  4

  Cityscape Hotel was full.

  That was no trouble for sister Anne.

  She got herself a double, then bullied the harried manager into giving her another because the air conditioner in the first rattled and be
cause the color on the TV was so bad, she said, that all the actors looked like they had just eaten shit and would soon die.

  She unpacked, masturbated to a grim-and-cheerless climax with a vibrator nearly the size of one of the mutant carrots in Bobbi's garden (the only climaxes she had were of the grim-and-cheerless type; she'd never been with a man in bed and never intended to), showered, napped, then went to dinner. She scanned the menu with a darkening frown, then bared her teeth in a spitless grin at the waiter who came to take her order.

  "Bring me a bunch of vegetables. Raw, leafy vegetables."

  "Madame wants a sal--"

  "Madame wants a bunch of raw, leafy vegetables. I don't give a shit what you call them. Just wash them first to get the bugpiss off. And bring me a sombrero right now."

  "Yes, madame," the waiter said, licking his lips. People were looking at them. A few smiled ... but those who got a look at Anne Anderson's eyes soon stopped. The waiter started away and she called him back, her voice loud and even and undeniable.

  "A sombrero," she said, "has Kahlua and cream in it. Cream. If you bring me a sombrero with milk in it, chum, you're going to be shampooing with the motherfucker."

  The waiter's Adam's apple went up and down like a monkey on a stick. He tried to summon the sort of aristocratic, pitying smile which is a good waiter's chief weapon against vulgar customers. To do him full credit, he got a pretty good start on that smile--then Anne's lips curved up in a grin that froze it dead. There was no good nature in that grin. There was something like murder in it.

  "I mean it, chum," sister Anne said softly. The waiter believed her.

  5

  She was back in her room at seven-thirty. She undressed, put on a robe, and sat looking out the fourth-story window. In spite of its name, Cityscape Hotel was actually far out on Bangor's outskirts. The view Anne looked out on was, except for the lights in the small parking lot, one of almost unalloyed darkness. That was exactly the sort of view she liked.

  There were amphetamine capsules in her purse. Anne took one of them out, opened it, poured the white powder onto the mirror of her compact, made a line with one sensibly short nail, and snorted half of it. Her heart immediately began to jackrabbit in her narrow chest. A flush of color bloomed in her pallid face. She left the rest for the morning. She had begun to use yellowjackets this way shortly after her father's first stroke. Now she found she could not sleep without a snort of this stuff, which was the diametric opposite of a sedative. When she had been a little girl--a very little girl--her mother had once cried at Anne in utter exasperation, "You're so contrary cheese'd physic ya!"

  Anne supposed it had been true then, and that it was true now ... not that her mother would ever dare say it now, of course.

  Anne glanced at the phone and then away. Just looking at it made her think of Bobbi, of the way she had refused to come to Father's funeral--not in words but in a cowardly way that was typical of her, by simply refusing to respond to Anne's increasingly urgent efforts to communicate with her. She had called twice during the twenty-four hours following the old bastard's stroke, when it became obvious he was going to snuff it. The phone had not been answered either time.

  She called again after her father died--this time at 1:04 on the morning of August 2nd. Some drunk had answered the telephone.

  "I'd like Roberta Anderson, please," Anne said. She stood stiffly at the pay phone in the lobby of Utica Soldiers' Hospital. Her mother sat in a nearby plastic chair, surrounded by endless brothers and endless sisters with their endless Irish-potato faces, weeping and weeping and weeping. "Right now."

  "Bobbi?" the drunk voice at the other end said. "You want the old boss or the New and Improved Boss?"

  "Spare me the bullshit, Gardener. Her father has--"

  "Can't talk to Bobbi now," the drunk--it was Gardener, all right, she recognized the voice now--broke in. Anne closed her eyes. There was only one piece of phone-related bad manners she hated worse than being broken in upon. "She's out in the shed with the Dallas Police. They're all getting even Newer and more Improved."

  "You tell her her sister Anne--"

  Click!

  Dry rage turned the sides of her throat to heated flannel. She held the telephone handset away from her and looked at it the way a woman might look at a snake that has bitten her. Her fingernails were white-going-on-purple.

  The piece of phone manners she hated most was being hung up on.

  6

  She had dialed back at once, but this time, after a long pause, the telephone began to make a weird sirening noise in her ear. She hung up and went over to her weeping mother and her harp relatives.

  "Did you get her, Sissy?" her mother asked Anne.

  "Yes."

  "What did she say?" Her eyes begged Anne for good news. "Did she say she'd come home for his funeral?"

  "I couldn't get a commitment one way or another," Anne said, and suddenly all of her fury at Roberta--Roberta, who had had the temerity to try to escape--suddenly burst out of her heart, but not in shrillness. Anne would never be still or shrill. That sharklike grin surfaced on her face. The murmuring relatives grew silent and looked at Anne uneasily. Two of the old ladies gripped their rosaries. "She did say that she was glad the old bastard was dead. Then she laughed. Then she hung up."

  There was a moment of stunned silence. Then Paula Anderson clapped her hands to her ears and began to shriek.

  7

  Anne had had no doubt--at least at first--that Bobbi would be at the funeral. Anne meant for her to be there, and so she would be. Anne always got what she wanted; that made the world nice for her, and that was the way things should be. When Roberta did come, she would be confronted with the lie Anne had told--probably not by their mother, who would be too pathetically glad to see her to mention it (or probably even to remember it), but surely by one of the harp uncles. Bobbi would deny it, so the harp uncle would probably let it go--unless the harp uncle happened to be very drunk, which was always a good possibility with Mama's brothers--but they would all remember Anne's statement, not Bobbi's denial.

  That was good. Fine, in fact. But not enough. It was time--overtime--that Roberta came home. Not just for the funeral; for good.

  She would see to it. Leave it to Sissy.

  8

  Sleep did not come easily to Anne that night in the Cityscape. Part of it was being in a strange bed; part of it was the dim gabble of TVs from other rooms and the sense of being surrounded by other people, just another bee trying to sleep in just another chamber of this hive where the chambers were square instead of hexagonal; part of it was knowing that tomorrow would be an extremely busy day; most of it, however, was her continuing dull fury at being balked. It was the thing which she hated above all others--it reduced such annoyances to minor piffles. Bobbi had balked her. So far she had balked her utterly and completely, necessitating this stupid trip during what the weather forecasters were calling the worst heatwave to hit New England since 1974.

  An hour after her lie about Bobbi to her mother and the harp aunts and uncles, she had tried to phone again, this time from the undertaker's (her mother had long since tottered home, where Anne supposed she would be sitting up with her cunt of a sister Betty, the two of them drinking that shitty claret they liked, wailing over the dead man while they got slopped). She got nothing but that sirening sound again. She called the operator and reported trouble on the line.

  "I want you to check it, locate the trouble, and see that it's corrected," Anne said. "There's been a death in the family, and I need to reach my sister as soon as possible."

  "Yes, ma'am. If you'll give me the number you're calling from--"

  "I'm calling from the undertaker's," Anne said. "I'm going to pick out a coffin for my father and then go to bed. I'll call in the morning. Just make sure my call goes through then, honey."

  She hung up and turned to the undertaker.

  "Pine box," she said. "Cheapest one you've got."

  "But, Ms. Anderson, I'm sure y
ou'll want to think about--"

  "I don't want to think about anything," Anne barked. She could feel the warning pulses which signaled the onset of one of her frequent migraine headaches. "Just sell me the cheapest pine box you've got so I can get the fuck out of here. It smells dead."

  "But ..." The undertaker was flabbergasted. "But won't you want to see ..."

  "I'll see it when he's wearing it," Anne said, drawing her checkbook out of her purse. "How much?"

  9

  The next morning Bobbi's telephone was working, but there was no answer. There continued to be no answer all day. Anne grew steadily more angry. Around four P.M., with the wake in the next room going full-blast, she had called Maine directory assistance and told the operator she wanted the number of the Haven Police Department.

  "Well ... there's no police department, exactly, but I have a listing for the Haven constable. Will that--"

  "Yeah. Give it to me."

  The directory-assistance operator did. Anne called. The phone rang ... rang ... rang. The tone of the ring was exactly the same as the tone she got when she dialed the house where her spineless sister had been hiding out for the last thirteen years or so. A person could almost believe they were ringing into the same receiver.

  She actually toyed with the idea for a moment before brushing it aside. But giving such a paranoid thought even a moment's house-room was unlike her, and it made her angrier. The rings sounded alike because the same little dipshit backwoods phone company sold and serviced all the phone equipment in town, that was all.