The Tommyknockers (12 page)

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.

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 no 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.

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.