The Tommyknockers Read online

  In this dreadful long afternoon light all his poems looked as if they had been written in Punic. Instead of doing anything positive about his headache, the aspirin seemed to actually be intensifying it: slam, bam, thank you, ma'am. His head whacked with each heartbeat. It was the same old headache, the one that felt like an auger made of dull steel being slowly driven into his head at a point slightly above and to the left of his left eye. He touched the tips of his fingers to the faint scar there and ran his fingers lightly along it. The steel plate buried under the skin there was the result of a skiing accident in his teens. He remembered the doctor saying, You may suffer headaches from time to time, son. When they come, just thank God you can feel anything. You're lucky to be alive.

  But at times like this he wondered.

  At times like this he wondered a lot.

  He put the notebooks aside with a shaking hand and closed his eyes.

  I can't get through it.

  You can.

  I can't. There's blood on the moon, I feel it, I can almost see it.

  Don't give me any of your Irish willywags! Just get tough, you weak fucking sister! Tough!

  "I'll try," he muttered, not opening his eyes, and fifteen minutes later, when his nose began to bleed slightly, he didn't notice. He had fallen asleep in the chair.

  5

  He always got stage fright before reading, even if the group was a small one (and groups which turned out to hear readings of modern poetry tended to be just that). On the night of June 27th, however, Jim Gardener's stage fright was intensified by his headache. When he woke from his nap in the hotel room chair the shakes and the fluttery stomach were gone, but the headache had gotten even worse: it had graduated to a Genuine Class-A Thumper & World-Beater, maybe the worst of all time.

  When his turn to read finally came, he seemed to hear himself from a great distance. He felt a little like a man listening to a recording of himself on a shortwave broadcast coming in from Spain or Portugal. Then a wave of light-headedness coursed through him and for a few moments he could only pretend to be looking for a poem, some special poem, perhaps, that had been temporarily misplaced. He shuffled papers with dim and nerveless fingers, thinking: I'm going to faint, I think. Right up here in front of everyone. Fall against this lectern and pitch both it and me into the front row. Maybe I can land on that blue-blooded cunt and kill her. That would almost make my whole life seem worthwhile.

  Get through it, that implacable inner voice responded. Sometimes that voice sounded like his father's; more often it sounded like the voice of Bobbi Anderson. Get through it, that's all. That's what's to do.

  The audience that night was larger than usual, maybe a hundred people squeezed behind the desks of a Northeastern lecture hall. Their eyes seemed too big. What big eyes you have, Gramma! It was as if they would eat him up with their eyes. Suck out his soul, his ka, his whatever you wanted to call it. A snatch of old T. Rex occurred to him: Girl, I'm just a vampire for your love ... and I'm gonna SUCK YA!

  Of course there was no more T. Rex. Marc Bolan had wrapped his sports car around a tree and was lucky not to be alive. Bang-a-Gong, Marc, you sure got it on. Or got it off. Or whatever. A group called Power Station is going to cover your tune in 1986 and it's going to be really bad, it ... it ...

  He raised an unsteady hand to his forehead, and a quiet murmur ran through the audience.

  Better get going, Gard. Natives are getting restless.

  Yeah, that was Bobbi's voice, all right.

  The fluorescents, embedded in pebbled rectangles overhead, seemed to be pulsing in cycles which perfectly matched the cycles of pain driving into his head. He could see Patricia McCardle. She was wearing a little black dress that surely hadn't cost a penny more than three hundred dollars--distress-sale stuff from one of those tacky little shops on Newbury Street. Her face was as narrow and pallid and unforgiving as that of any of her Puritan forebears, those wonderful, funloving guys who had been more than happy to stick you in some stinking gaol for three or four weeks if you had the bad luck to be spied going out on the Sabbath Day without a snotrag in your pocket. Patricia's dark eyes lay upon him like dusty stones and Gard thought: She sees what's happening and she couldn't be more pleased. Look at her. She's waiting for me to fall down. And when I do, you know what she'll be thinking, don't you?

  Of course he did.

  That's what you get for calling me Patty, you drunken son of a bitch. That was what she would be thinking. That's what you get for calling me Patty, that's what you get for doing everything but making me get down on my knees and beg. So go on, Gardener. Maybe I'll even let you keep the up-front money. Three hundred dollars seems a cheap-enough price to pay for the exquisite pleasure of watching you crack up in front of all these people. Go on. Go on and get it over with.

  Some members of the audience were becoming visibly uneasy now--the delay between poems had stretched out far beyond what might be considered normal. The murmur had become a muted buzz. Gardener heard Ron Cummings clear his throat uneasily behind him.

  Get tough! Bobbi's voice yelled again, but the voice was fading now. Fading. Getting ready to high-side it. He looked at their faces and saw only pasty-pale blank circles, ciphers, big white holes in the universe.

  The buzz was growing. He stood at the podium, swaying noticeably now, wetting his lips, looking at his audience with a kind of numb dismay. And then, suddenly, instead of hearing Bobbi, Gardener actually saw her. This image had all the force of vision.

  Bobbi was up there in Haven, up there right now. He saw her sitting in her rocking chair, wearing a pair of shorts and a halter top over what boobs she had, which wasn't much. There was a pair of battered old mocs on her feet and Peter was curled before them, deeply asleep. She had a book but wasn't reading it. It lay open facedown in her lap (this fragment of vision was so perfect Gardener could even read the book's title--it was Watchers, by Dean Koontz) while Bobbi looked out the window into the dark, thinking her own thoughts--thoughts which would follow one after the other as sanely and rationally as you could want a train of thought to run. No derailments;. no late freights; no head-ons. Bobbi knew how to run a railroad.

  He even knew what she was thinking about, he discovered. Something in the woods. Something ... it was something she had found in the woods. Yes. Bobbi was in Haven, trying to decide what that thing might be and why she felt so tired. She was not thinking about James Eric Gardener, the noted poet, protester, and Thanksgiving wifeshooter, who was currently standing in a lecture hall at Northeastern University under these lights with five other poets and some fat shit named Arberg or Arglebargle or something like that, and getting ready to faint. Here in this lecture hall stood the Master of Disaster. God bless Bobbi, who had somehow managed to keep her shit together while all about her people were losing theirs, Bobbi was up there in Haven, thinking the way people were supposed to think--

  No she's not. She's not doing that at all.

  Then, for the first time, the thought came through with no soundproofing around it; it came through as loud and urgent as a firebell in the night: Bobbi's in trouble! Bobbi's in REAL TROUBLE!

  This surety struck him with the force of a roundhouse slap, and suddenly the light-headedness was gone. He fell back into himself with such a thud he almost seemed to feel his teeth rattle. A sickening bolt of pain ripped through his head, but even that was welcome--if he felt pain, then he was back here, here, not drifting around someplace in the ozone.

  And for one puzzling moment he saw a new picture, very brief, very clear, and very ominous: it was Bobbi in the cellar of the farmhouse she'd inherited from her uncle. She was hunkered down in front of some piece of machinery, working on it ... or was she? It seemed so dark, and Bobbi wasn't much of a hand with mechanical stuff. But she sure was doing something, because ghostly blue fire leapt and flickered between her fingers as she fiddled with tangled wires inside ... inside ... but it was too dark to see what that dark, cylindrical shape was. It was familiar, something he had
seen before, but--

  Then he could hear as well as see, although what he heard was even less comforting than that eldritch blue fire. It was Peter. Peter was howling. Bobbi took no notice, and that was utterly unlike her. She only went on fiddling with the wires, jiggering them so they would do something down there in the root-smelling dark of the cellar ...

  The vision broke apart on rising voices.

  The faces which went with those voices were no longer white holes in the universe but the faces of real people: some were amused (but not many), a few more embarrassed, but most just seemed alarmed or worried. Most looked, in other words, the way he would have looked had his position been reversed with one of them. Had he been afraid of them? Had he? If so, why?

  Only Patricia McCardle didn't fit. She was looking at him with a quiet, sure satisfaction that brought him all the way back.

  Gardener suddenly spoke to the audience, surprised at how natural and pleasant his voice sounded. "I'm sorry. Please excuse me. I've got a batch of new poems here, and I went woolgathering among them, I'm afraid." Pause. Smile. Now he could see some of the worried ones settling back, looking relieved. There was a little laughter, but it was sympathetic. He could, however, see a flush of anger rising in Patricia McCardle's cheeks, and it did his headache a world of good.

  "Actually," he went on, "even that's not the truth. Fact is, I was trying to decide whether or not to read some of this new stuff to you. After some furious sparring between those two thundering heavyweights Pride of Authorship and Prudence, Prudence has won a split decision. Pride of Authorship vows to appeal the decision--"

  More laughter, heartier. Now old Patty's cheeks looked like his kitchen stove through its little isinglass windows on a cold winter night. Her hands were locked together, the knuckles white. Her teeth weren't quite bared, but almost, friends and neighbors, almost.

  "In the meantime, I'm going to finish with a dangerous act: I'm going to read a fairly long poem from my first book, Grimoire."

  He winked in Patricia McCardle's direction, then took them all into his humorous confidence. "But God hates a coward, right?"

  Ron snorted laughter behind him and then they were all laughing, and for a moment he actually did see a glint of her pearly-whites behind those stretched, furious lips, and oh boy howdy, that was just about as good as you'd want, wasn't it?

  Watch out for her, Gard. You think you've got your boot on her neck now, and maybe you even do, for the moment, but watch out for her. She won't forget.

  Or forgive.

  But that was for later. Now he opened the battered copy of his first book of poems. He didn't need to look for "Leighton Street"; the book fell open to it of its own accord. His eyes found the subscript. For Bobbi, who first smelled sage in New York.

  "Leighton Street" had been written the year he met her, the year Leighton Street was all she could talk about. It was, of course, the street in Utica where she had grown up, the street she'd needed to escape before she could even start being what she wanted to be--a simple writer of simple stories. She could do that; she could do that with flash and ease. Gard had known that almost at once. Later that year he had sensed that she might be able to do more: to surmount the careless, profligate ease with which she wrote, and do, if not great work, brave work. But first she had to get away from Leighton Street. Not the real one, but the Leighton Street which she carried with her in her mind, a demon geography populated by haunted tenements, her sick, loved father, her weak, loved mother, and her defiant crone of a sister, who rode over them all like a demon of endless power.

  Once, that year, she had fallen asleep in class--Freshman Comp, that had been. He had been gentle with her, because he already loved her a little and he had seen the huge circles under her eyes.

  "I've had problems sleeping at night," she said, when he held her after class for a moment. She had still been half-asleep, or she never would have gone on from there; that was how powerful Anne's hold--which was the hold of Leighton Street--had been over her. But she was like a person who has been drugged, and exists with one leg thrown over each side of the sleep's dark and stony wall. "I almost fall asleep and then I hear her."

  "Who?" he asked gently.

  "Sissy ... my sister Anne, that is. She grinds her teeth and it sounds like b-b-b--"

  Bones, she wanted to say, but then she woke into a fit of hysterical weeping that had frightened him very badly.

  Anne.

  More than anything else, Anne was Leighton Street.

  Anne had been

  (knocking at the door)

  the gag of Bobbi's needs and ambitions.

  Okay, Gard thought. For you, Bobbi. Only for you. And began to read "Leighton Street" as smoothly as if he had spent the afternoon rehearsing it in his room.

  "These streets begin where the cobbles

  surface through tar like the heads

  of children buried badly in their textures,"

  Gardener read.

  "What myth is this?

  we ask, but

  the children who play stickball and

  Johnny Jump-My-Pony round here just laugh.

  No myth they tell us no myth,

  just they say hey motherfucker aint

  nothing but Leighton Street here,

  aint nothing but all small houses

  aint only but back porches where our mothers

  wash there and they're and their.

  Where days grow hot

  and on Leighton Street they listen to the radio

  while pterodactyls flow between the TV aerials

  on the roof and they say hey motherfucker they say

  Hey motherfucker!

  No myth they tell us no myth,

  just they say hey motherfucker aint

  nothing but Leighton Street round here

  This they say is how you be silent in your silence

  of days. Motherfucker.

  When we turned our back on these upstate roads,

  warehouses with faces of blank brick,

  when you say 'O, but I have reached the end

  of all I know and still hear her grinding,

  grinding in the night ...' "

  Because it had been so long since he had read the poem, even to himself, he did not just "perform" it (something, he had discovered, that was almost impossible not to do at the end of a tour such as this); he rediscovered it. Most of those who came to the reading at Northeastern that night--even those who witnessed the evening's sordid, creepy conclusion, agreed that Gardener's reading of "Leighton Street" had been the best of the night. A good many of them maintained it was the best they had ever heard.

  Since it was the last reading Jim Gardener would ever give in his life, it was maybe not such a bad way to go out.

  6

  It took him nearly twenty minutes to read all of it, and when he finished he looked up uncertainly into a deep and perfect well of silence. He had time to think he had never read the damned thing at all, that it had just been a vivid hallucination in the moment or two before the faint.

  Then someone stood up and began to clap steadily and hard. It was a young man with tears on his cheeks. The girl beside him also stood and began to clap and she was also crying. Then they were all standing and applauding, yeah, they were giving him a fucking standing O, and in their faces he saw what every poet or would-be poet hopes to see when he or she finished reading: the faces of people suddenly awakened from a dream brighter than any reality. They looked as dazed as Bobbi had on that day, not quite sure where they were.

  But they weren't all standing and applauding, he saw; Patricia McCardle sat stiff and straight in her third-row seat, her hands clasped tightly together in her lap over her small evening bag. Her lips had closed. No sign of the old pearly-whites now; her mouth had become a small bloodless cut. Gard felt a weary amusement. As far as you're concerned, Patty, the real Puritan ethic is no one who's a black sheep should dare rise above his designated level of mediocrity, correct? But there's n
o mediocrity clause in your contract, is there?

  "Thank you," he muttered into the mike, sweeping his books and papers together into an untidy pile with his shaking hands--and then almost dropping them all over the floor as he stepped away from the podium. He dropped into his seat next to Ron Cummings with a deep sigh.

  "My God," Ron whispered, still applauding. "My God!"

  "Stop clapping, you ass," Gardener whispered back.

  "Damned if I will. I don't care when you wrote it, it was fucking brilliant," Cummings said. "And I'll buy you a drink on it later on."

  "I'm not drinking anything stronger than club soda tonight," Gardener said, and knew it was a lie. His headache was already creeping back. Aspirin wouldn't cure that, Percodan wouldn't, a 'lude wouldn't. Nothing would fix his head but a great big clout of booze. Fast, fast relief.

  The applause was finally beginning to die away. Patricia McCardle looked acidly grateful.

  7

  The name of the fat shit who had introduced each of the poets was Arberg (although Gardener kept wanting to call him Arglebargle), and he was the assistant professor of English who headed the sponsoring group. He was the sort of man his father had called a "beefy sonofawhore."

  The beefy sonofawhore threw a party for the Caravan, the Friends of Poetry, and most of the English Department faculty at his house after the reading. It began around eleven o'clock. It was stiffish at first--men and women standing in uncomfortable little groups with glasses and paper plates in their hands, talking your usual brand of cautious academic talk. This sort of bullshit had struck Gard as a stupid waste of time when he was teaching. It still did, but there was also something nostalgic and pleasing--in a melancholy way--about it now.

  His Party Monster streak told him that, stiff or not, this was a Party with Possibilities. By midnight the Bach etudes would almost certainly be replaced by the Pretenders, and talk of classes, politics, and literature would be replaced by more interesting fare--the Red Sox, who on the faculty was drinking too much, and that all-time favorite, who was fucking whom.