The Tommyknockers (25 page)

Anderson surveyed the table. “No toast?” she asked.

“Make your own frigging toast,” Gardener said amiably. “I didn't hitchhike two hundred miles to buttle your breakfast.”

Anderson stared. “You did
what?
Yesterday? In the rain?”

“Yeah.”

“What in God's name happened? Muriel said you were doing a reading tour and your last one was June 30th.”

“You called Muriel?” He was absurdly touched. “When?”

Anderson flapped a hand as if that didn't matter—probably it didn't. “What happened?” she asked again.

Gardener thought about telling her
—wanted
to tell her, he realized, dismayed. Was that what Bobbi was for, then? Was Bobbi Anderson really no more than the wall he wailed to? He hesitated, wanting to tell her . . . and didn't. There would be time for that later.

Maybe.

“Later,” he said. “I want to know what happened here.”

“Breakfast first,” Anderson said, “and that's an order.”

Gard gave Bobbi most of the eggs and bacon, and Bobbi didn't waste time—she went to them like a woman who hasn't eaten well for a long time. Watching her eat, Gardener remembered a biography of Thomas Edison he had read when he was quite young—no more than ten or eleven. Edison had gone on wild work-jags in which idea had followed idea, invention had followed invention. During these spurts, he had ignored wife, children, baths, even food. If his wife hadn't brought him his meals on a tray, the man might literally have starved to death between the light bulb and the phonograph. There had been a picture of him, hands plunged into hair that was wildly awry—as if it had been actually trying to get at the brain beneath hair and skull, the brain which would not let him rest—and Gardener remembered thinking that the man looked quite insane.

And, he thought, touching the left side of his forehead,
Edison had been subject to migraines. Migraines and deep depressions.

He saw no sign of depression in Bobbi, however. She gobbled eggs, ate seven or eight slices of bacon wrapped in a slice of toast slathered with oleo, and swallowed two large glasses of orange juice. When she had finished, she uttered a resounding belch.

“Gross, Bobbi.”

“In Portugal, a good belch is considered a compliment to the cook.”

“What do they do after a good lay? Fart?”

Anderson threw her head back and roared with laughter. The towel fell off her hair, and all at once Gard wanted to take her to bed, bag of bones or not.

Smiling a little, Gardener said: “Okay, it was good. Thanks. Some Sunday I'll make you some swell eggs Benedict. Now give.”

Anderson reached behind him and brought down a half-full package of Camels. She lit one and pushed the pack toward Gardener.

“No thanks. It's the only bad habit I ever succeeded in mostly giving up.”

But before Bobbi was done, Gardener had smoked four of them.

“You looked around,” Anderson said. “I remember telling you to do that—just barely—and I know you did. You look like I felt after I found the thing in the woods.”

“What thing?”

“If I told you now you'd think I was crazy. Later on I'll show you, but right now I think we'd better just talk. Tell me what you saw around the place. What changes.”

So Gardener ticked them off: the cellar improvements, the litter of projects, the weird little sun in the water heater. The strange job of customizing on the Tomcat's engine. He hesitated for a moment, thinking of the addition to the shifting diagram, and let that go. He supposed Bobbi knew he had seen it, anyway.

“And somewhere in the middle of all that,” he said, “you found time to write another book. A long one. I
read the first forty pages or so while I was waiting for you to wake up, and I think it's good as well as long. The best novel you've ever written, probably . . . and you've written some good ones.”

Anderson was nodding, pleased. “Thank you. I think it is too.” She pointed to the last slice of bacon on the platter. “You want that?”

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

She took it and made it gone.

“How long did it take you to write it?”

“I'm not completely sure,” Anderson said. “Maybe three days. No more than a week, anyway. Did most of it in my sleep.”

Gard smiled.

“I'm not joking, you know,” Anderson smiled. Gardener stopped smiling.

“My time sense is pretty fucked up,” she admitted. “I do know I wasn't working on it the twenty-seventh. That's the last day when time—sequential time—seemed completely clear to me. You got here last night, July 4th, and it was done. So . . . a week, max. But I really don't think it was more than three days.”

Gardener gaped. Anderson looked back calmly, wiping her fingers on a napkin. “Bobbi, that's impossible,” Gardener said finally.

“If you think so, you missed my typewriter.”

Gardener had glanced at Bobbi's old machine when he sat down, but that was all—his attention had been riveted immediately by the manuscript. He had seen the old black Underwood thousands of times. The manuscript, on the other hand, was new.

“If you'd looked closely, you would have seen the roll of computer paper on the wall behind it and another of those gadgets behind it. Egg crate, heavy-duty batteries, and all. What? These?”

She pushed the cigarettes across to Gardener, who took one.

“I don't know how it works, but then, I don't really know how any of them work—including the one that's running
all
the juice in this place.” She smiled at Gardener's expression. “I'm off the Central Maine Power tit, Gard. I had them interrupt service . . . that's how
they put it, as if they know damned well you'll want it back before too long . . . let's see . . . four days ago. That I
do
remember.”

“Bobbi—”

“There's a gadget like the thing in the water heater and the one behind my typewriter in the junction box out back, only that one's the granddaddy of them all.” Anderson laughed—the laugh of a woman in the grip of pleasant reminiscences. “There's twenty or thirty D-cells in that one. I think Poley Andrews down at Cooder's Market thinks I've gone nuts—I bought every battery he had in stock, and then I went to Augusta for more.

“Was that the day I got the dirt for the cellar?” She addressed this last to herself, frowning. Then her face cleared. “I think so, yeah. The Historic Battery Run of 1988. Hit about seven different stores, came back with
hundreds
of batteries, and then I stopped in Albion and got a truckload of loam to sweeten the cellar. I'm almost positive I did both of those things the same day.”

The troubled frown resurfaced, and for a moment Gardener thought Bobbi looked scared and exhausted again—of
course
she was still exhausted. Exhaustion of the sort Gardener had seen last night went bone-deep. A single night's sleep, no matter how long and deep, wouldn't erase it. And then there was this wild, hallucinatory talk—books written in her sleep; all the AC current in the house being run by D-cells, runs to Augusta on crazy errands—

Except that the proof was here, all around him. He had
seen
it.

“—that
one,” Anderson said, and laughed.

“What, Bobbi?”

“I said I had a devil of a job setting up the one that generates the juice here in the house, and out at the dig.”

“What dig? Is it the thing in the woods you want to show me?”

“Yes. Soon. Just give me a few more minutes.” Anderson's face again assumed that look of pleasure in telling, and Gardener suddenly thought it must be the expression on the faces of all those who have tales they don't just
want
to tell but tales they
must
tell—from the lecture-hall bore who was part of an Antarctic expedition in 1937 and who still has his fading slides to prove it, to
Ishmael the Sailor-Man, late of the ill-fated
Pequod,
who finishes his tale with a sentence that seems a desperate cry only thinly and perfunctorily disguised as information: “Only I am left to tell you.” Was it desperation and madness that Gardener detected beneath Bobbi's cheerful, disjointed remembrances of Ten Wacky Days in Haven? Gardener thought so . . .
knew
so. Who was better equipped to see the signs? Whatever Bobbi had faced here while Gardener was reading poetry to overweight matrons and their bored husbands, it had nearly broken her mind.

Anderson lit another cigarette with a hand that trembled slightly, making the matchflame quiver momentarily. It was the sort of thing you would have seen only if you were looking for it.

“I was out of egg cartons by then, and the thing was going to have too many batteries for just one or two anyway. So I got one of Uncle Frank's cigar boxes—there must be a dozen old wooden ones up in the attic, probably even Mabel Noyes down at Junque-a-Torium would pay a few bucks for them, and you know what a skinflint
she
is—and I stuffed them with toilet paper and tried to make nests in the paper for the batteries to stand up in. You know . . . nests?”

Anderson made quick poking gestures with her right index finger and then looked, bright-eyed, at Gard, to see if he got it. Gardener nodded. That feeling of unreality was stealing back, that feeling of his mind getting ready to seep through the top of his skull and float up to the ceiling.
A drunk would fix that,
he thought, and the pulse in his head sharpened.

“But the batteries kept falling over anyway.” She snuffed her cigarette and immediately lit another one. “They were wild, just wild. I was wild, too. Then I got an idea.”

They?

“I went down to Chip McCausland's. Down on the Dugout Road?”

Gardener shook his head. He had never been down the Dugout Road.

“Well, he lives out there with this woman—she's his common-law wife, I guess—and about ten kids. Man, you talk about sluts . . . the dirt on her neck, Gard . . . you couldn't wash it off unless you used a jackhammer on it first. I guess he was married before, and . . . doesn't
matter . . . it's just . . . I haven't had anyone to talk to . . . I mean,
they
don't talk, not the way a couple of people do, and I keep mixing up the stuff that's not important with the stuff that is—”

Anderson's words had started to come out quicker and quicker, until now they were almost tripping over each other.
She's speed-rapping,
Gardener thought with some alarm,
and pretty soon she's going to start either yelling or crying.
He didn't know which he dreaded more and thought again of Ishmael, Ishmael rambling through the streets of Bedford, Massachusetts, stinking more of madness than whale oil, finally grabbing some unlucky passerby and screaming:
Listen! I'm the only fucking one left to tell you and so you better listen, damn you! You better listen if you don't want to be using this harpoon for a fucking suppository! I got a tale to tell, it's about this white fucking whale and
YOU'RE GOING TO LISTEN!

He reached across the table and touched her hand. “You tell it any old way you want to. I'm here and I'm going to listen. We've got time; like you said, it's your day off. So slow down. If I fall asleep, you'll know you got too far from the point. Okay?”

Anderson smiled and relaxed visibly. Gardener wanted to ask again what was going on in the woods. More than that, who
they
were. But it would be best to wait.
All bad things come to him who waits,
he thought, and after a pause to collect herself, Bobbi went on.

“Chip McCausland's got three or four henhouses, that's all I started to say. For a couple of bucks I was able to get all the egg cartons I wanted . . . even a few of the big egg-crate sheets. Those sheets each have ten dozen cradles.”

Anderson laughed cheerfully and added something that brought gooseflesh out on Gardener's skin.

“Haven't used one of those yet, but when I do I guess we'll have enough zap for the whole town of Haven to let go of the CMP tit. With enough left over for Albion and most of Troy as well.

“So I got the power going here—Jesus, I'm rambling—and I already had the gadget hooked up to the typewriter—and I really did sleep—napped, anyway—and that's about where we came in, isn't it?”

Gardener nodded, still trying to cope with the idea that there might be fact as well as hallucination in Bobbi's
casual statement that she could build a “gadget” which could power three small towns from a source consisting of one hundred and twenty D-cell batteries.

“What the gadget on the typewriter does is . . .” Anderson frowned. Her head cocked a little, as if she were listening to a voice Gardener could not hear. “It might be easier to show you. Go on over there and roll in a sheet of paper, would you?”

“Okay.” He headed for the door into the living room, then looked back at Anderson. “Aren't you coming?”

Bobbi smiled. “I'll stay here,” she said, and then Gardener got it. He got it, and even understood on some mental level where only pure logic was allowed that it might be so—hadn't the immortal Holmes himself said that when you eliminated the impossible, you had to believe whatever was left, no matter how improbable? And there
was
a new novel sitting in there on the table by what Bobbi sometimes called her word-accordion.

Yeah, except typewriters don't write books by themselves, Gard old buddy. You know what the immortal Holmes probably would say? That the fact that there is a novel sitting next to Bobbi's typewriter, and the added fact that this is a novel you never saw before does not mean it is a new novel. Holmes would say Bobbi wrote that book at some time in the past. Then, while you were gone and Bobbi was losing her marbles, she brought it out and set it beside the typewriter. She may believe what she's telling you, but that doesn't make it so.