The Tommyknockers (85 page)

Something big . . . strange meat.

Nor was that all of the weirdness emanating out of Haven these days. A fire, also in July, had killed a couple on the Nista Road. This month a doctor piloting a small plane had crashed and burned. That had happened in Newport, true, but the FAA controller at BIA had confirmed that the unfortunate doc had overflown Haven, and at an illegally low altitude. Phone service in Haven had begun to get oddly glitchy. Sometimes people could get through, sometimes they couldn't. He had sent to the Augusta Bureau of Taxation for a list of Haven voters (paying the required fee of six dollars to get the nine computer sheets) and had managed to trace relatives of nearly sixty of these Havenites—relatives living in Bangor, Derry, and surrounding areas—in his spare time.

He couldn't find one—
not one
—who had seen his or her Haven relations since July 10th or so . . . over a month before.
Not one.

Of course, a lot of those he interviewed didn't find this strange at all. Some of them weren't on good terms with
their Haven relations and couldn't care less if they didn't hear from or see them in the next six months . . . or six years. Others seemed first surprised, then thoughtful when Leandro pointed out the length of time they were talking about. Of course, summer was an active season for most people. Time passed with a light easiness that winter knew nothing about. And, of course, they had spoken to Aunt Mary or Brother Bill a time or two on the phone—sometimes you couldn't get through, but mostly you could.

There were other suspicious similarities in the testimony of the people Leandro interviewed, similarities that had made his nose flare with the smell of something decidedly off:

Ricky Berringer was a house-painter in Bangor. His older brother, Newt, was a carpenter-contractor who also happened to be a Haven selectman. “We invited Newt up for dinner near the end of July,” Ricky said, “but he said he had the flu.”

Don Blue was a Derry realtor. His Aunt Sylvia, who lived in Haven, had been in the habit of coming up to take dinner with Don and his wife every Sunday or so. The last three Sundays she had begged off—once with the flu
(flu seems to be going around in Haven,
Leandro thought,
nowhere else, you understand—just in Haven),
and the other times because it was so hot she just didn't feel like traveling. After further questioning Blue realized it had been more like
five
Sundays since his aunt had favored them—and maybe as many as six.

Bill Spruce kept a herd of dairy cows in Cleaves Mills. His brother Frank kept a herd in Haven. They usually got together every week or two, merging two extremely large families for a few hours—the clan Spruce would eat tons of barbecue, drink gallons of beer and Pepsi-Cola, and Frank and Bill would sit either at the picnic table in Frank's back yard or on the front porch of Bill's house and compare notes about what they simply called the Business. Bill admitted it had been a month or more since he'd seen Frank—there had been some problem first with his feed supplier, Frank had told him, then with the milk inspectors. Bill, meanwhile, had had a few problems of his own. Half a dozen of his holsteins had died during this last hot-spell. And, he added as an afterthought, his wife had had a heart attack. He and his brother just hadn't had time to visit much this summer . . .
but the man had still expressed unfeigned surprise when Leandro dragged out his wallet calendar and the two of them figured out just how long it had been: the two brothers hadn't gotten together since June 30th. Spruce whistled and tilted his cap back on his head. “Gorry, that
is
a long time,” he had said. “Guess I'll have to take a ride down Haven and see Frank, now that my Evelyn's on the mend.”

Leandro said nothing, but some of the other testimony he had gathered over the last couple of weeks made him think that Bill Spruce might find a trip like that hazardous to his health.

“Felt like I was dine,” Alvin Rutledge told Leandro. Rutledge was a long-haul trucker, currently unemployed, who lived in Bangor. His grandfather was Dave Rutledge, a lifelong Haven resident.

“What exactly do you mean?” Leandro asked.

Alvin Rutledge looked at the young reporter shrewdly. “Another beer'd go down good just about now,” he said. They were sitting in Nan's Tavern in Bangor. “Talkin's amazin dusty work, chummy.”

“Isn't it,” Leandro said, and told the waitress to draw two.

Rutledge took a deep swallow when it came, wiped foam from his upper lip with the heel of his hand, and said: “Heart beatin too fast. Headache. Felt like I was gonna puke my guts out. I
did
puke, as a matter of fact. Just 'fore I turned around. Rolled down the window and just let her fly into the slipstream, I did.”

“Wow,” Leandro said, since some remark seemed called for. The image of Rutledge “letting her fly into the slipstream” flapped in his mind. He dismissed it. At least, he tried.

“And looka here.”

He rolled back his upper lip, revealing the remains of his teeth.

“Ooo see a ho in funt?” Rutledge asked. Leandro saw a good many holes in front, but thought it might not be politic to say so. He simply agreed. Rutledge nodded and let his lip fall back into place. It was something of a relief.

“Teeth never have been much good,” Rutledge said indifferently. “When I get workin again and can afford me a good set of dentures, I'm gonna have all of em
jerked. Fuck em. Point is, I had my two front teeth there on top before I headed up to Haven week before last to check on Gramp. Hell, they wasn't even
loose.
”

“They fell out when you started to get close to Haven?”

“Didn't
fall
out.” Rutledge finished his beer. “I
puked
em out.”

“Oh,” Leandro had replied faintly.

“You know, another brew'd go down good. Talkin's—”

“Thirsty work, I know,” Leandro said, signaling the waitress. He was over his limit, but he found he could use another one himself.

Alvin Rutledge wasn't the only person who had tried to visit a friend or relative in Haven during July, nor the only one to become ill and turn back. Using the voting lists and area phone-books as a starting point, Leandro turned up three people who told stories similar to Rutledge's. He uncovered a fourth incident through pure coincidence—or almost pure. His mother knew he was “following up” some aspect of his “big story,” and happened to mention that her friend Eileen Pulsifer had a friend who lived down in Haven.

Eileen was fifteen years older than Leandro's mother, which put her close to seventy. Over tea and cloyingly sweet gingersnaps, she told Leandro a story similar to those he had already heard.

Mrs. Pulsifer's friend was Mary Jacklin (whose grandson was Tommy Jacklin). They had visited back and forth for more than forty years, and often played in local bridge tournaments. This summer she hadn't seen Mary at all. Not even
once.
She'd spoken to her on the phone, and she seemed fine; her excuses always sounded believable . . . but all the same, something about them—a bad headache, too much baking to do, the family had decided on the spur of the moment to go down to Kennebunk and visit the Trolley Museum—wasn't quite
right.

“They were fine by the one-by-one, but they seemed odd by the bunch, if you see what I mean.” She offered the cookies. “More 'snaps?”

“No thank you,” Leandro said.

“Oh, go ahead! I know you boys! Your mother taught you to be polite, but no boy ever born could turn down a gingersnap! Now, you just go on and take what you hanker for!”

Smiling dutifully, Leandro took another gingersnap.

Settling back and folding her hands on her tight round belly, Mrs. Pulsifer went on: “I begun to think something might be wrong . . . I
still
think that maybe something's wrong, truth to tell. First thing to cross my mind was that maybe Mary didn't want to be my friend anymore . . . that maybe I did or said something to offend her. But no, says I to myself, if I'd done something, I guess she'd tell me. After forty years of friendship I guess she would. Besides, she didn't really sound
cool
to me, you know—”

“But she
did
sound different.”

Eileen Pulsifer nodded decisively. “Ayuh. And that got me thinking that maybe she was sick, that maybe, God save us, her doctor had found a cancer of something inside her, and she didn't want any of her old friends to know. So I called up Vera and I said, ‘We're going to go down to Haven, Vera, and see Mary. We ain't going to tell her we're coming, and that way she can't call us off. You get ready, Vera,' I says, ‘because I'm coming by your house at ten o'clock, and if you ain't ready, I'm going to go without you.' ”

“Vera is—”

“Vera Anderson, in Derry. Just about my best friend in the whole world, John, except for Mary and your mother. And your mother was down in Monmouth, visiting her sister that week.”

Leandro remembered it well: a week of such peace and quiet was a week to be treasured.

“So the two of you headed down.”

“Ayuh.”

“And you got sick.”

“Sick!
I thought I was dying. My
heart!”
She clapped a hand dramatically over one breast. “It was beating so
fast!
My head started to ache, I got a nosebleed, and Vera got scared. She says, ‘Turn around, Eileen, right now, you got to get to the hospital right away!'

“Well, I turned around somehow—I don't hardly remember how, the world was spinning so—and by then my mouth was bleeding, and two of my teeth fell out. Right out of my head! You ever hear the beat of it?”

“No,” he lied, thinking of Alvin Rutledge. “Where did it happen?”

“Why, I told you—we were going to see Mary Jacklin—”

“Yes, but were you actually in Haven when you got sick? And which way did you come in?”

“Oh,
I
see! No, we weren't. We were on Old Derry Road. In Troy.”

“Close
to Haven, then.”

“Oh, 'bout a mile from the town line. I'd been feeling sick for a little time—whoopsy, you know—but I didn't want to say so to Vera. I kept hoping that I would feel better.”

Vera Anderson hadn't gotten sick, and this troubled Leandro. It didn't fit. Vera hadn't gotten a bloody nose, nor lost any teeth.

“No, she didn't get sick at all,” Mrs. Pulsifer said. “Except with terror. I guess she was sick with that. For me . . . and for herself too, I imagine.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, that road's awful empty. She thought I was going to pass out. I almost did. It might have been fifteen, twenty minutes before someone came along.”

“She couldn't have driven you?”

“God bless you, John, Vera's had muscular dystrophy for years. She wears great big metal braces on her legs—cruel-looking things, they are, like something you'd expect to see in a torture chamber. It just about makes me cry sometimes to see her.”

At a quarter to ten on the morning of August 15th, Leandro crossed into the town of Troy. His stomach was tight with anticipation and—let's face it, folks—a tingle of fear. His skin felt cold.

I may get sick. I may get sick, and if I do, I'm going to leave about ninety feet of rubber reversing out of the area. Got that?

I got it, boss,
he answered himself.
I got it, I got it.

You may lose some teeth too,
he cautioned himself, but the loss of a few teeth seemed a small price to pay for a story which might win him a Pulitzer Prize . . . and, just
as important, one which would surely turn David Bright green with envy.

He passed through Troy Village, where everything seemed fine . . . if a little slower than usual. The first jag in the normal run of things came about a mile further south, and from a direction he wouldn't have expected. He had been listening to WZON out of Bangor. Now the normally strong AM signal began to waver and flutter. Leandro could hear one . . . no, two . . . no, three . . . other stations mixed in with its signal. He frowned. That sometimes happened at night, when radiant cooling thinned the atmosphere and allowed radio signals to travel further, but he had never heard of it happening on an AM bank in the morning, not even during those periods of optimum radio-transmission conditions which ham operators call “the skip.”

He ran the tuner on the Dodge's radio, and was amazed as a flood of conflicting transmissions poured out of the speakers—rock-and-roll, country-and-western, and classical music stepped all over each other. Somewhere in the background he could hear Paul Harvey extolling Amway. He turned the dial further and caught a clear transmission so surprising he pulled over. He sat staring at the radio with big eyes.

It was speaking in Japanese.

He sat and waited for the inevitable clarification—“This lesson in Beginners' Japanese has been brought to you by your local Kyanize Paint dealer,” something like that. The announcer finished. Then came the Beach Boys' “Be True to Your School.” In Japanese.

Leandro continued to tune down the kHz band with a hand that shook. It was much the same all the way. As it did at night, the tangle of voices and music got worse as he tuned toward the higher frequencies. At last the tangle grew so severe it began to frighten him—it was the auditory equivalent of a squirming mass of snakes. He turned the radio off and sat behind the wheel, eyes wide, body thrumming slightly, like a man on low-grade speed.

What is this?

Foolish to speculate when the answer lay no more than six miles up ahead . . . always assuming he could uncover it, of course.