5

   Bobbi didn't want to wait – or couldn't – to get back before having the drink she had promised herself. Just outside the Augusta city limits was a roadhouse that went by the charming name of The Big Lost Weekend Bar and Grille (Whopper Spareribs Our Specialty, The Nashville Kitty-Cats This Fri and Sad).
   Anderson pulled in between an old station wagon and a John Deere tractor with a dirty harrow on the back with its blades kicked up. Further down was a big old Buick with a horse-trailer behind. Anderson had kept away from that on purpose.
   'Stay,' Anderson said, and Peter, now curled up on the seat, gave her a look as if to say, Why would I want to go anywhere with you? So you can choke me some more with that stupid leash?
   The Big Lost Weekend was dark and nearly deserted on a Wednesday afternoon, its dance-floor a cavern which glimmered faintly. The place reeked of sour beer. The bartender cum counterman strolled down and said, 'Howdy, purty lady. The chili's on special. Also -'
   'I'd like Cutty Sark,' Anderson said. 'Double. Water back.'
   'You always drink like a man?'
   Usually from a glass,' Anderson said, a quip which made no sense at all, but she felt very tired … and harrowed to the bone. She went into the ladies' to change her pad and did slip one of the minis from her purse into the crotch of her panties as a precaution … but precaution was all it was, and that was a relief. It seemed that the cardinal had flown off for another month.
   She returned to her stool in a better humor than she had left it, and felt better still when she had gotten half the drink inside her.
   'Say, I sure didn't mean to offend you,' the bartender said. 'It gets lonely in here, afternoons. When a stranger comes in, my lip gets runny.'
   'My fault,' Anderson said. 'I haven't been having the best day of my life.'
   She finished her drink and sighed.
   'You want another one, miss?'
   I think I liked 'purty lady' better, Anderson thought, and shook her head. 'I'll take a glass of milk, though. Otherwise I'll have acid indigestion all afternoon.'
   The bartender brought her the milk. Anderson sipped it and thought about what had happened at the vet's. The answer was quick and simple: she didn't know.
   But I'll tell you what happened when you brought him in, she thought. Not a thing.
   Her mind seized on this. The waiting room had been almost as crowded when she brought Peter in as it had been when she dragged him back out, only there had been no bedlam scene the first time. The place had not been quiet – animals of different types and species, many of them ancient and instinctive antagonists, do not make for a library atmosphere when brought together – but it had been normal. Now, with the booze working in her, she recalled the man in the mechanic's coverall leading the boxer in. The boxer had looked at Peter. Peter had looked mildly back. No big deal.
   So?
   So drink your milk and get on home and forget it.
   Okay. And what about that thing in the woods? Do I forget that, too?
   Instead of an answer, her grandfather's voice came: By the way, Bobbi, what's that thing doing to you? Have you thought about that?
   She hadn't.
   Now that she had, she was tempted to order another drink … except another, even a single, would make her drunk, and did she really want to be sitting in this huge barn in the early afternoon, getting drunk alone, waiting for the inevitable someone (maybe the bartender himself) to cruise up and ask what a pretty place like this was doing around a girl like her?
   She left a five on the counter and the bartender saluted her. On her way out she saw a pay phone. The phone-box was dirty and dog-eared and smelled of used bourbon, but at least it was still there. Anderson deposited twenty cents, crooked the handset between shoulder and ear while she hunted through in the Yellow Pages, then called Etheridge's clinic. Mrs Alden sounded quite composed. In the background she could hear one dog barking. One.
   'I didn't want you to think I stiffed you,' she said, 'and I'll mail your leash back tomorrow.'
   'Not at all, Ms Anderson,' she said. 'After all the years you have done business with us, you're the last person we'd worry about when it comes to deadbeats. As for leashes, we've got a closetful.'
   'Things seemed a little crazy there for a while.'
   'Boy, were they ever! We had to call Medix for Mrs Perkins. I didn't think it was bad – she'll have needed stitches, of course, but lots of people who need stitches get to the doctor under their own power.' She lowered her voice a little, offering Anderson a confidence that she probably wouldn't have offered a man. 'Thank God it was her own dog bit her. She's the sort of woman who starts shouting lawsuit at the drop of a hat.'
   'Any idea what might have caused it?'
   'No – neither does Dr Etheridge. The heat after the rain, maybe. Dr Etheridge said he heard of something like it once at a convention. A vet from California said that all the animals in her clinic had what she called “a savage spell” just before the last big quake out there.'
   'Is that so?'
   'There was an earthquake in Maine last year,' Mrs Alden said. 'I hope there won't be another one. That nuclear plant at Wiscassett is too close for comfort.'
   Just ask Gard, Bobbi thought. She said thanks again and hung up.
   Anderson went back to the truck. Peter was sleeping. He opened his eyes when Anderson got in, then closed them again. His muzzle lay on his paws. The gray on his muzzle was fading away. No question about that; no question at all.
   And by the way, Bobbi, what's that thing doing to you?
   Shut up, Granddad.
   She drove home. And after fortifying herself with a second Scotch – a weak one she went into the bathroom and stood close to the mirror, first examining her face and then running her fingers through her hair, lifting it and then letting it drop.
   The gray was still there – all of it that had so far come in, as far as she could tell.
   She never would have thought she would be glad to see gray hair, but she was. Sort of.

6

   By early evening, dark clouds had begun to build up in the west, and by dark it had commenced thundering. The rains were going to return, it seemed, at least for a one-night stand. Anderson knew she wouldn't get Peter outside that night to do more than the most pressing doggy business; since his puppyhood, the beagle had been utterly terrified of thunderstorms.
   Anderson sat in her rocker by the window, and if someone had been there she supposed it would have looked like she was reading, but what she was really doing was grinding: grinding grimly away at the thesis, Range War and Civil War. It was as dry as dust, but she thought it was going to be extremely useful when she finally got around to the new one … which should be fairly soon now.
   Each time the thunder rolled, Peter edged a little closer to the rocker and Anderson, seeming almost to grin shamefacedly. Yeah, it's not going to hurt me, I know, I know, but I'll just get a little closer to you, okay? And if there comes a real blast, I'll just about crowd you out of that fucking rocker, what do you say? You don't mind, do you, Bobbi?
   The storm held off until nine o'clock, and by then Anderson was pretty sure they were going to have a good one – what Havenites called 'a real Jeezer.' She went into the kitchen, rummaged in the walk-in closet that served as her pantry, and found her Coleman gas lantern on a high shelf. Peter followed directly behind her, tail between his legs, shamefaced grin on his face. Anderson almost fell over him coming out of the closet with the lantern.
   'Do you mind, Peter?'
   Peter gave a little ground … and then crowded up to Anderson's ankles again when thunder cannonaded hard enough to rattle the windows. As Anderson got back to her chair, lightning sheeted blue-white and the phone tinged. The wind began to rise, making the trees rustle and sigh.
   Peter sat hard by the rocker, looking up at Anderson pleadingly.
   'Okay,' she said with a sigh. 'Come on up, jerk.'
   Peter didn't have to be asked twice. He sprang into Anderson's lap, getting her crotch a pretty good one with one forepaw. He always seemed to whang her there or on one boob; he didn't aim – it was just one of those mysterious things, like the way elevators invariably stopped at every floor when you were in a hurry. If there was a defense, Bobbi Anderson had yet to find it.
   Thunder tore across the sky. Peter crowded against her. His smell – Eau de Beagle – filled Anderson's nose.
   'Why don't you just jump down my throat and have done with it, Pete?'
   Peter grinned his shamefaced grin, as if to say I know it, I know it, don't rub it in.
   The wind rose. The lights began to flicker, a sure sign that Roberta Anderson and Central Maine Power were about to bid each other a fond adieu … at least until three or four in the morning. Anderson laid the thesis aside and put her arm around her dog. She didn't really mind the occasional summer storm, or the winter blizzards, for that matter. She liked their big power. She liked the sight and sound of that power working on the land in its crude and blindly positive way. She sensed insensate compassion in the workings of such storms. She could feel this one working inside her – the hair on her arms and the nape of her neck would stir, and a particularly close shot of lightning left her feeling almost galvanized with energy.
   She remembered an odd conversation she'd once had with Jim Gardener. Gard had a steel plate in his skull, a souvenir of a skiing accident that had almost killed him at the age of seventeen. Gardener had told her that once, while changing a light bulb, he had gotten a hell of a shock by inadvertently sticking his forefinger into the socket. This was hardly uncommon; the peculiar part was that, for the next week, he had heard music and announcers and newscasts in his head. He told Anderson he had really believed for a while he was going crazy. On the fourth day of this, Gard had even identified the call letters of the station he was receiving: WZON, one of Bangor's three AM radio stations. He had written down the names of three songs in a row and then called the station to see if they had indeed played those songs – plus ads for Sing's Polynesian Restaurant, Village Subaru, and the Bird Museum in Bar Harbor. They had.
   On the fifth day, he said, the signal started to fade, and two days later it was gone entirely.
   'It was that damned skull plate,' he had told her, rapping his fist gently on the scar by his left temple. 'No doubt about it. I'm sure thousands would laugh, but in my mind I'm completely sure.'
   If someone else had told her the story, Anderson would have believed she was having her leg pulled, but Jim hadn't been kidding – you looked in his eyes and you knew he wasn't.
   Big storms had big power.
   Lightning flared in a blue sheet, giving Anderson a shutter-click of what she had come to think of – as her neighbors did – as her dooryard. She saw the truck, with the first drops of rain on its windshield; the short dirt driveway; the mailbox with its flag down and tucked securely against its aluminum side; the writhing trees. Thunder exploded a bare moment later, and Peter jumped against her, whining. The lights went out. They didn't bother dimming or flickering or messing around; they went out all at once, completely. They went out with authority.
   Anderson reached for the lantern – and then her hand stopped.
   There was a green spot on the far wall, just to the right of Uncle Frank's Welsh dresser. It bobbed up two inches, moved left, then right. It disappeared for a moment and then came back. Anderson's dream recurred with all the eerie power of deja vu. She thought again of the lantern in Poe's story, but mixed in this time was another memory: The War of the Worlds. The Martian heat-ray, raining green death on Hammersmith.
   She turned toward Peter, hearing the tendons in her neck creak like dirty doorhinges, knowing what she was going to see– The light was coming from Peter's eye. His left eye. It glared with the witchy green light of St Elmo's fire drifting over a swamp after a still, muggy day.
   No … not the eye. It was the cataract that was glowing … at least, what remained of the cataract. It had gone back noticeably even from that morning, at the vet's office. That side of Peter's face was lit with a lurid green light, making him look like a comic-book monstrosity.
   Her first impulse was to get away from Peter, dive out of the chair and simply run …
   … but this was Peter, after all. And Peter was scared to death already. If she deserted him, Peter would be terrified.
   Thunder cracked in the black. This time both of them jumped. Then the rain came in a great sighing sheetlike rush. Anderson looked back at the wall across the room again, at the green splotch bobbing and weaving there. She was reminded of times she had lain in bed as a child, using the watchband of her Timex to play a similar spot off the wall by moving her wrist.
   And by the way, what's it doing to you, Bobbi?
   Green sunken fire in Peter's eye, taking away the cataract. Eating it. She looked again, and had to restrain herself from jerking back when Peter licked her hand.
   That night Bobbi Anderson slept hardly at all.

Chapter 4. The Dig, Continued

1

   When Anderson finally woke up, it was almost ten A.M. and most of the lights in the place were on – Central Maine Power had gotten its shit together again, it seemed. She walked around the place in her socks, turning off lights, and then looked out the front window. Peter was on the porch. Anderson let him in and looked closely at his eye. She could remember her terror of the night before, but in this morning's bright summer daylight, terror had been supplanted by fascination. Anyone would have been scared, she thought, seeing something like that in the dark, with the power out, and a thunderstorm stomping the earth and the sky outside.
   Why in hell didn't Etheridge see this?
   But that was easy. The dials of radium watches glow in the day as well as in the dark; you just can't see the glow in bright light. She was a little surprised she had missed the green glow in Peter's eye on the previous nights, but hardly flabbergasted … after all, it had taken her a couple of days to even realize the cataract was shrinking. And yet . . . Etheridge had been close, hadn't he? Etheridge had been right in there with the old ophthalmoscope, looking into Peter's eye.
   He had agreed with Anderson that the cataract was shrinking … but hadn't mentioned any glow, green or otherwise.
   Maybe he saw it and decided to unsee it. The way he saw Peter was looking younger and decided he didn't see that. Because he didn't want to see that.
   There was a part of her that didn't like the new vet a whole hell of a lot; she supposed it was because she had liked old Doc Daggett so much and had made that foolish (but apparently unavoidable) assumption that Daggett would be around as long as she and Peter were. But it was a silly reason to feel hostility toward the old man's replacement, and even if Etheridge had failed (or refused) to see Peter's apparent age regression, that didn't change the fact that he seemed a perfectly competent vet.
   A cataract that glowed green … she didn't think he would have ignored something like that.
   Which led her to the conclusion that the green glow hadn't been there for Etheridge to see.
   At least, not right away.
   There hadn't been any big hooraw right away, either, had there? Not when they came in. Not during the exam. Only when they were getting ready to go out.
   Had Peter's eye started to glow then?
   Anderson poured Gravy Train into Peter's dish and stood with her left hand under the tap, waiting for the water to come in warm so she could wet it down. The wait kept getting longer and longer. Her water heater was slow, balky, sadly out of date. Anderson had been meaning to have it replaced – would certainly have to do so before the cold weather – but the only plumber in either Haven or the rural towns to Haven's immediate north and south was a rather unpleasant fellow named Delbert Chiles, who always looked at her as if he knew exactly what she would look like with her clothes off (not much, his eyes said, but I guess it'd do in a pinch) and always wanted to know if Anderson was 'writing any new books lately.' Chiles liked to tell her he could have been a damned good writer himself, but he had too much energy and ,not enough glue on the seat of my pants, get me?' The last time she'd been forced to call him had been when the pipes burst in the minus-twenties cold snap, winter before last. After he set things to rights, he had asked her if she would like 'to go steppin' sometime. Anderson declined politely, and Chiles tipped her a wink that aspired to worldly wisdom and made it almost to informed vacuity. 'You don't know what you're missin', sweetie,' he said. I'm pretty sure I do, which is why I said no had come to her lips, but she said nothing – as little as she liked him, she had known she might need Chiles again sometime. Why was it the really good zingers only came immediately to mind in real life when you didn't dare use them?
   You could do something about that hot-water heater, Bobbi, a voice in her mind spoke up, one that she couldn't identify. A stranger's voice in her head? Oh golly, should she call the cops? But you could, the voice insisted. All you'd need to do would be
   But then the water started to come in warm – tepid, anyway – and she forgot about the water heater. She stirred the Gravy Train, then set it down and watched Peter eat. He was showing a much better appetite these days.
   Ought to check his teeth, she thought, maybe you can go back to Gaines Meal. A penny saved is a penny earned, and the American reading public is not exactly beating a path to your door, babe. And
   And exactly when had the uproar in the clinic started?
   Anderson thought about this carefully. She couldn't be completely sure, but the more she thought about it the more it seemed that it might have been – not for sure but might have been – right after Dr Etheridge finished examining Peter's cataract and put down the ophthalmoscope.
   Attend, Watson, the voice of Sherlock Holmes suddenly spoke up in the quick, almost urgent speech rhythms of Basil Rathbone. The eye glows. No … not the eye; the cataract glows. But Anderson does not observe it, although she should. Etheridge does not observe it, and he definitely should. May we say that the animals at the veterinary clinic do not become upset until Peter's cataract begins to glow … until, we might further theorize, the healing process has resumed? Possibly. That the glow is seen only when being seen is safe? Ah' Watson, that is an assumption as frightening as it is unwarranted. Because that would indicate some sort of
   – some sort of intelligence.
   Anderson didn't like where this was leading and tried to choke it off with the old reliable advice: Let it go.
   This time it worked.
   For a while.

2

   Anderson wanted to go out and dig some more.
   Her forebrain didn't like that idea at all.
   Her forebrain thought that idea sucked.
   Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous.
   Right.
   And by the way, what's it doing to you?
   Nothing she could see. But you couldn't see what cigarette smoke did to your lungs, either; that's why people went on smoking. It could be that her liver was rotting, that the chambers of her heart were silting up with cholesterol, or that she had rendered herself barren. For all she knew her bone marrow might be producing outlaw white cells like mad right this minute. Why settle for an early period when you could have something really interesting like leukemia, Bobbi?
   But she wanted to dig it up just the same.
   This urge, simple and elemental, had nothing to do with her forebrain. It came baking up from someplace deeper inside. It had all the earmarks of some physical craving – for salt, for some coke or heroin or cigarettes or coffee. Her forebrain supplied logic; this other part supplied an almost incoherent imperative: Dig on it, Bobbi, it's okay, dig on it, dig on it, shit, why not dig on it a while more, you know you want to know what it is, so dig on it till you see what it is, dig dig dig
   She was able to turn the voice off by conscious effort and would then realize fifteen minutes later she had been listening to it again, as if to a Delphic oracle.
   You've got to tell somebody what you've found.
   Who? The police? Huh-uh. No way. Or -
   Or who?
   She was in her garden, madly weeding . . . a junkie in withdrawal.
   – or anyone in authority, her mind finished.
   Her right-brain supplied Anne's sarcastic laughter, as she had known it would … but the laughter didn't have as much force as she had feared. Like a good many of her generation, Anderson didn't put a great deal of stock in 'let the authorities handle it.' Her distrust in the way the authorities handled things had begun at the age of twelve, in Utica. She had been sitting on the sofa in their living room with Anne on one side and her mother on the other. She had been eating a hamburger and watching the Dallas police escort Lee Harvey Oswald across an underground parking garage. There were lots of Dallas police. So many, in fact, that the TV announcer was telling the country that someone had shot Oswald before all those police – all those people in authority – seemed to have the slightest inkling something had gone wrong. let alone what it was.
   So far as she could tell, the Dallas police had done such a good job protecting John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald that they had been put in charge of the summer race-riots two years later, and then the war in Vietnam. Other assignments followed: handling the oil embargo ten years after the Kennedy assassination, the negotiations to secure the release of the American hostages at the embassy in Tehran, and, when it became clear that the wogs were not going to listen to the voice of reason and authority, Jimmy Carter had sent the Dallas police in to rescue those pore fellers – after all, authorities who had handled that Kent State business with such cool-headed aplomb could surely be counted upon to perform the sort of job those Mission: Impossible guys did every week. Well, the old Dallas police had had a spot of tough luck on that one, but by and large, they had the situation under control. All you had to do was look at how damned orderly the world situation had become in the years since a man in a strappy T-shirt with Vitalis on his thinning hair and fried-chicken grease under his fingernails had blown out a President's brains as he sat in the back seat of a Cadillac rolling down the street of a Texas cow-town.
   I'll tell Jim Gardener. When he gets back. Gard'll know what to do, how to handle it. He'll have some ideas, anyway.
   Anne's voice: You're going to ask a certified loony for advice. Great.
   He's not a loony. Just a little bit weird.
   Yeah, arrested at the last Seabrook demonstration with a loaded .45 in his back-pack. That's weird, all right.
   Anne, shut up.
   She weeded. All that morning in the hot sun she weeded, the back of her T-shirt wet with sweat, last year's scarecrow wearing the hat she usually put on to keep the sun off.
   After lunch she lay down to take a nap and couldn't sleep. Everything kept going through her mind, and that stranger's voice never shut up. Dig on it, Bobbi, it's okay, dig on it
   Until at last she did get up, grabbed the crowbar, spade, and shovel, and set out for the woods. At the far end of her field she paused, forehead grooved in thought, and came back for her pickax. Peter was on the porch. He looked up briefly but made no move to come with Anderson.
   Anderson was not really surprised.

3

   So about twenty minutes later she stood above it, looking down the forested slope to the trench she had begun in the ground, freeing what she now believed was a very tiny section of an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Its gray hull was as solid as a wrench or a screwdriver, denying dreams and vapors and supposings; it was there. The dirt she had thrown to either side, moist and black and forest-secret, was now a dark brown – still damp from last night's rain.
   Going down the slope, her foot crunched on something that sounded like newspaper. It wasn't newspaper; it was a dead sparrow. Twenty feet further down was a dead crow, feet pointed comically skyward like a dead bird in a cartoon. Anderson paused, looked around, and saw the bodies of three other birds – another crow, a bluejay, and a scarlet tanager. No marks. Just dead. And no flies around any of them.
   She reached the trench and dropped her tools on the bank. The trench was muddy. She stepped in nevertheless, her workshoes squashing in the mud. She bent down and could see smooth gray metal going into the earth, a puddle standing on one side.
   What are you?
   She put her hand on it. That vibration sank into her skin and seemed for a moment to go all through her. Then it stopped.
   Anderson turned and put her hand on her shovel, feeling its smooth wood, slightly warmed by the sun. She was vaguely aware that she could hear no forest noises, none at all … no birds singing, no animals crashing through the undergrowth and away from the smell of a human being. She was more sharply aware of the smells: peaty earth, pine needles, bark and sap.
   A voice inside her – very deep inside, not coming from the right of her brain but perhaps from the very root of her mind – screamed in terror.
   Something's happening, Bobbi, something is happening right NOW. Get out of here dead chuck dead birds Bobbi please please PLEASE
   Her hand tightened on the shovel's handle and she saw it again as she had sketched it – the gray leading edge of something titanic in the earth.
   Her period had started again, but that was all right; she had put a pad in the crotch of her panties even before she went out to weed the garden. A Maxi. And there were half a dozen more in her pack, weren't there? Or was it more like a dozen?
   She didn't know, and it didn't matter. Not even discovering some part of her had known she would end up here in spite of whatever foolish conceptions of free will the rest of her mind might possess disturbed her. A shining sort of peace had filled her. Dead animals … periods that stopped and started again … arriving prepared even after you had assured yourself the decision had not yet been taken … these were small things, smaller than small, a whole lot of boolsheet. She would just dig for a while, dig on this sucker, see if there was anything but smooth metal skin to see. Because everything
   'Everything's fine,' Bobbi Anderson said in the unnatural stillness, and then she began to dig.

Chapter 5. Gardener Takes a Fall

1

   While Bobbi Anderson was tracing a titanic shape with a compass and thinking the unthinkable with a brain more numbed with exhaustion than she knew, Jim Gardener was doing the only work he seemed capable of these days. This time he was doing it in Boston. The poetry reading on June 25th was at BU. That went all right. The 26th was an off-day. It was also the day that Gardener stumbled – only stumble didn't really describe what happened, unfortunately. It was no minor matter like snagging your foot under a root while you were walking in the woods. It was a fall that he took, one long fucking fall, like taking a no-expenses-paid bone-smasher of a tumble down a long flight of stairs. Stairs? Shit, he had almost fallen off the face of the earth.
   The fall started in his hotel room; it ended on the breakwater at Arcadia Beach, New Hampshire, eight days later.
   Bobbi wanted to dig (although she would be at least temporarily diverted by the odd things which were happening to her beagle's cataract); Gard woke up on the morning of the 26th wanting to drink.
   He knew there was no such thing as a 'partially arrested alcoholic.' You were either drinking or you weren't. He wasn't drinking now, and that was good, but there had always been long periods when he didn't even think about booze. Months, sometimes. He would drop into a meeting once in a while (if two weeks went by in which Gard didn't attend an AA meeting, he felt uneasy – the way he felt if he spilled the salt and didn't toss some over his shoulder) and stand up and say, 'Hi, my name's Jim and I'm an alcoholic.' But when the urge was absent, it didn't feel like the truth. During these periods, he wasn't actually dry; he could and did drink drink, that was, as opposed to boozing. A couple of cocktails around five, if he was at a faculty function or a faculty dinner party. Just that and no more. Or he could call Bobbi Anderson and ask if she'd like to come over to go out for a couple of cold ones and it was fine. No sweat.
   Then there would come a morning like this when he would wake up wanting all the booze in the world. This seemed to be an actual thirst, a physical thing – it made him think of those cartoons Virgil Partch used to do in the Saturday Evening Post, the ones where some funky old prospector is always crawling across the desert, his tongue hanging out, looking for a waterhole.
   All he could do when the urge came on him was fight it off – stand it off, try to earn a draw. Sometimes it was actually better to be in a place like Boston when this happened, because you could go to a meeting every night – every four hours, if that was what it took. After three or four days, it would go away.
   Usually.
   He would, he thought, just wait it out. Sit in his room and watch movies on cable TV and charge them to room service. He had spent the eight years since his divorce and separation from the University of Maine as a Full-Time Poet, which meant he had come to live in an odd little subsociety where barter was usually more important than money.
   He had traded poems for food: on one occasion a birthday sonnet for a farmer's wife in exchange for three shopping bags of new potatoes. 'Goddam thing better rhyme, too,' the farmer had said, fixing a stony eye upon Gardener. 'Real poimes rhyme.'
   Gardener, who could take a hint (especially when his stomach was concerned), composed a sonnet so filled with exuberant masculine rhymes that he burst into gales of laughter after scanning the second draft. He called Bobbi, read it to her, and they both howled. It was even better out loud. Out loud it sounded like a love-letter from Dr Seuss. But he hadn't needed Bobbi to point out to him that it was still an honest piece of work, jangly but not condescending.
   On another occasion, a small press in West Minot agreed to publish a book of his poems (this had been in early 1983 and was, in fact, the last book of poems Gardener had published), and offered half a cord of wood as an advance. Gardener took it.
   'You should have held out for three-quarters of a cord,' Bobbi told him that night, as they sat in front of her stove, feet up on the fender, smoking cigarettes as a wind shrieked fresh snow across the fields and into the trees. 'Those're good poems. There's a lot of them, too.'
   'I know,' Gardener said, 'but I was cold. Half a cord'll get me through until spring.' He dropped her a wink. 'Besides, the guy's from Connecticut. I don't think he knew most of it was ash.'
   She dropped her feet to the floor and stared at him. 'You kidding?'
   'Nope.'
   She began to giggle and he kissed her soundly and later took her to bed and they slept together like spoons. He remembered waking up once, listening to the wind, thinking of all the dark and rushing cold outside and all the warmth of this bed. filled with their peaceful heat under two quilts, and wishing it could be like this forever – only nothing ever was. He had been raised to believe God was love, but you had to wonder how loving a God could be when He made men and women smart enough to land on the moon but stupid enough to have to learn there was no such thing as forever over and over again.
   The next day Bobbi had again offered money and Gardener again refused. He wasn't exactly rolling in dough, but he made out. And he couldn't help the little spark of anger he felt in spite of her matter-of-fact tone. 'Don't you know who's supposed to get the money after a night in bed?' he asked.
   She stuck out her chin. 'You calling me a whore?'
   He smiled. 'You need a pimp? There's money in it, I hear.'
   You want breakfast, Gard, or do you want to piss me off?'
   How about both?'
   'No,' she said, and he saw she was really mad – Christ, he was getting worse and worse at seeing things like that, and it used to be so easy. He hugged her. I was only kidding, couldn't she see that? he thought. She always used to be able to tell when I was kidding. But of course she hadn't known he was kidding because he hadn't been. If he believed different, the only one getting kidded was himself. He had been trying to hurt her because she'd embarrassed him. And it wasn't her offer that had been stupid; it was his embarrassment. He had more or less chosen the life he was living, hadn't he?
   And he didn't want to hurt Bobbi, didn't want to drive Bobbi away. The bed part was fine, but the bed part wasn't the really important part. The really important part was that Bobbi Anderson was a friend, and something scary seemed to be happening just lately. How fast he seemed to be running out of friends. That was pretty scary, all right.
   Running out of friends? Or running them out? Which is it, Gard?
   At first hugging her was like hugging an ironing board and he was afraid she would try to pull away and he would make the mistake of trying to hold on, but she finally softened.
   'I want breakfast,' he said, 'and to say I'm sorry.'
   'It's all right,' she said, and turned away before he could see her face – but her voice held that dry briskness that meant she was either crying or near it. 'I keep forgetting it's bad manners to offer money to Yankees.'
   Well, he didn't know if it was bad manners or not, but he would not take money from Bobbi. Never had, never would.
   The New England Poetry Caravan, however, was a different matter.
   Grab that chicken, son, Ron Cummings, who needed money about as much as the Pope needed a new hat, would have said. The bitch is too slow to run and too fat to pass up.
   The New England Poetry Caravan paid cash. Coin of the realm for poetry – three hundred up front and three hundred at the end of the tour. The word made flesh, as you might say. But hard cash, it was understood, was only part of the deal.
   The rest of the deal was THE TAB.
   While you were on tour, you took advantage of every opportunity. You got your meals from room service, your hair cut in the hotel barbershop if there was one, brought your extra pair of shoes (if you had one) and put them out one night instead of your regulars so you could get the extras shined up.
   Then there were the in-room movies, movies you never got a chance to see in a theater, because theaters persisted in wanting money for much the same thing poets, even the very good ones, were for some reason supposed to provide for free or next to it – three bags of spuds = one (1) sonnet, for instance. There was a room charge for the movies, of course, but what of that? You didn't even have to put them On THE TAB; some computer did it automatically, and all Gardener had to say on the subject was God bless and keep THE TAB, and bring those fuckers on! He watched everything, from Emmanuelle in New York (finding the part where the girl flogs the guy's doggy under a table at Windows on the World particularly artistic and uplifting; it certainly uplifted part of him, anyway) to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to Rainbow Brite and the Star-Stealer.
   And that's what I'm going to do now, he thought, rubbing his throat and thinking about the taste of good aged whiskey. EXACTLY what I'm going to do. Just sit here and watch them all over again, even Rainbow Brite. And for lunch I'm going to order three bacon cheeseburgers and eat one cold at three o'clock. Maybe skip Rainbow Brite and take a nap. Stay in tonight. Go to bed early. And stand it off.
   Bobbi Anderson tripped over a three-inch tongue of metal protruding from the earth.
   Jim Gardener tripped over Ron Cummings.
   Different objects, same result.
   For want of a nail.
   Ron popped in around the same time that, some two hundred and ten miles away, Anderson and Peter were finally getting home from their less-than-normal trip to the vet's. Cummings suggested they go down to the hotel bar and have a drink or ten.
   'Or,' Ron continued brightly, 'we could just skip the foreplay and get shitfaced.'
   If he had put it more delicately, Gard might have been okay. Instead, he found himself in the bar with Ron Cummings, raising a jolly Jack Daniel's to his lips and telling himself the old one about how he could choke it off when he really wanted to.
   Ron Cummings was a good, serious poet who just happened to have money practically falling out of his asshole … or so he often told people. 'I am my own de Medici,' he would say; 'I have money practically falling out of my asshole.' His family had been in textiles for roughly nine hundred years and owned most of southern New Hampshire. They thought Ron was crazy, but because he was the second son, and because the first one was not crazy (i.e., interested in textiles), they let Ron do what he wanted to do, which was write poems, read poems, and drink almost constantly. He was a narrow young man with a TB face. Gardener had never seen him eat anything but beer-nuts and goldfish crackers. To his dubious credit, he had no idea of Gardener's own problem with booze … or the fact that he had come very close to killing his wife while drunk.
   'Okay,' Gardener said. 'I'm up for it. Let's get “faced”.'
   After a few drinks in the hotel bar, Ron suggested that a couple of smart fellers like them could find a place with entertainment a tad more exciting than the piped-in Muzak drifting down from the overhead speakers. 'I think my heart can take it,' Ron said. 'I mean, I'm not sure, but – '
   God hates a coward,' Gardener finished.
   Ron cackled, clapped him on the back, and called for THE TAB. He signed it with a flourish and then added a generous tip from his money clip. 'Let's boogie, m'man.' And off they went.
   The late-afternoon sun lanced Gardener's eyes like glass spears and it suddenly occurred to him that this might be a bad idea.
   'Listen, Ron,' he said, 'I think maybe I'll just – '
   Cummings clapped him on the shoulder, his formerly pale cheeks flushed, his formerly watery blue eyes blazing (to Gard, Cummings now looked rather like Toad of Toad Hall after the acquisition of his motor-car), and cajoled: 'Don't crap out on me now, Jim! Boston lies before us, so various and new, glistening like the fresh ejaculate of a young boy's first wetdream
   Gardener burst into helpless gales of laughter.
   'That's more like the Gardener we've all come to know and love,' Ron said, cackling himself.
   'God hates a coward,' Gardener said. 'Hail us a cab, Ronnie.'
   He saw it then: the funnel in the sky. Big and black and getting closer. Soon it was going to touch down and carry him away.
   Not to Oz, though.
   A cab pulled over to the curb. They got in. The driver asked them where they wanted to go.
   'Oz,' Gardener muttered.
   Ron cackled. 'What he means is someplace where they drink fast and dance faster. Think you can manage that?'
   'Oh, I think so,' the driver said, and pulled out.
   Gardener draped an arm around Ron's shoulders and cried: 'Let the wild rumpus start!'
   'I'll drink to that,' Ron said.

2

   Gardener awoke the next morning fully dressed in a tubful of cold water. His best set of clothes – which he'd had the misfortune to be wearing when he and Ron Cummings set sail the day before – were bonding themselves slowly to his skin. He looked at his fingers and saw they were very white and very pruney. Fishfingers. He'd been here for a while, apparently. The water might even have been hot when he climbed in. He didn't remember.
   He opened the tub's drain. Saw a bottle of bourbon standing on the toilet seat. It was half-full, its surface bleary with some sort of grease. He picked it up. The grease smelled vaguely of fried chicken. Gardener was more interested in the aroma coming from inside the bottle. Don't do this, he thought, but the neck of the bottle was rapping against his teeth before the thought was even half-finished. He had a drink. Blacked out again.
   When he came to, he was standing naked in his bedroom with the phone to his ear and the vague idea that he had just finished dialing a number. Whose? He had no idea until Cummings answered. Cummings sounded even worse than Gardener felt. Gardener would have sworn this was impossible.
   'How bad was it?' Gardener heard himself ask. It was always this way when he was in the grip of the cyclone; even when he was conscious, everything seemed to have the gray grainy texture of a tabloid photograph, and he never seemed to exactly be inside of himself. A lot of the time he seemed to be floating above his own head, like a kid's silvery Puffer balloon. 'How much trouble did we get into?'
   'Trouble?' Cummings repeated, and then fell silent. At least Gardener thought he was thinking. Hoped he was thinking. Or maybe dreaded the idea. He waited, his hands very cold. 'No trouble,' Cummings said at last, and Gard relaxed a little. 'Except for my head, that is. I got my head in plenty of trouble. Jee-zus!'
   'You sure? Nothing? Nothing at all?'
   He was thinking of Nora.
   Shot your wife, uh? a voice spoke up suddenly in his mind – the voice of the deputy with the comic book. Good fucking deal.
   'We-ell . . .' Cummings said reflectively, and then stopped.
   Gardener's hand clenched tight on the phone again.
   'Well what?' Suddenly the lights in the room were too bright. Like the sun when they had stepped out of the hotel late yesterday afternoon.
   You did something. You had another fucking blackout and did another stupid thing. Or crazy thing. Or horrible thing. When are you going to learn to leave it alone? Or can you learn?
   An exchange from an old movie clanged stupidly into his mind.
   Evil El Comandante: Tomorrow before daybreak, senor, you will be dead! You have seen the sun for the last time!
   Brave Americano: Yeah, but you'll be bald for the rest of your life.
   'What was it?' he asked Ron. 'What did I do?'
   'You got into an argument with some guys at a place called The Stone Country Bar and Grille,' Cummings said. He laughed a little. 'Ow! Christ, when it hurts to laugh, you know you abused yourself. You remember The Stone Country Bar and Grille and them thar good ole boys, James, my dear?'
   He said he didn't. By really straining, he could remember a place called Smith Brothers. The sun had just been going down in a kettle of blood, and this being late June, that meant it had been … what? eight-thirty? quarter of nine? about five hours after he and Ron had gotten started, give or take. He could remember the sign outside bore the likeness of the famous cough-drop siblings. He could remember arguing furiously about Wallace Stevens with Cummings, shouting to be heard over the juke, which had been thundering out something by John Fogarty. It was where the last jagged edges of memory came to a halt.
   'It was the place with the WAYLON JENNINGS FOR PRESIDENT bumper-sticker over the bar,' Cummings said. 'That refresh the old noggin?'
   'No,' Gardener said miserably.
   'Well, you got into an argument with a couple of the good ole boys. Words were passed. These words grew first warm and then hot. A punch was thrown.'
   'By me?' Gardener's voice was now only dull.
   'By you,' Cummings agreed cheerfully. 'At which point we flew through the air with the greatest of ease, landing on the sidewalk. I thought we got off pretty cheap, to tell you the truth. You had them frothing, Jim.'
   'Was it about Seabrook or Chernobyl?'
   'Shit, you do remember!'
   'If I remembered, I wouldn't be asking you which one it was.'
   'As a matter of fact, it was both.' Cummings hesitated. 'Are you all right, Gard? You sound real low.'
   Yeah? Well, actually, Ron, I'm way up. Up in the cyclone. Going around and around and up and down, and where it ends nobody knows.
   'I'm okay.'
   'That's good. One hopes you know who you have to thank for it.'
   'You, maybe?'
   'None other. Man, I landed on that sidewalk like a kid hitting the ground the first time he comes off the end of a slide. I can't quite see my ass in the mirror, but that's probably a good thing. I bet it looks like a Day-Glo Grateful Dead poster from sixty-nine. But you wanted to go back in and talk about how all the kids around Chernobyl were gonna be dead of leukemia in five years. You wanted to talk about how some guys almost blew up Arkansas looking for faulty wiring with a candle in a nuclear-power plant. You said they caught the place on fire. Me, I'd bet my watch -and it's a Rolex – that they were Snopeses from Em-Eye-Double-Ess-Eye-Pee-Pee-Eye. Only way I could get you into a cab was by telling you we'd come back later and bust heads. I sweet-talked you up to your room and started the tub for you. You said you were all right. You said you were going to take a bath and then call some guy named Bobby.'
   'The guy's a girl,' Gardener said absently. He was rubbing at his right temple with his free hand.
   'Good-looking?'
   'Pretty. No knockout.' An errant thought, nonsensical but perfectly concrete – Bobbi's in trouble – kicked across his mind the way an errant billiard ball will roll across the clean green felt of a pool table. Then it was gone.

3

   He walked slowly over to a chair and sat down, now massaging both temples. The nukes. Of course it had been the nukes. What else? If it wasn't Chernobyl it was Seabrook, and if it wasn't Seabrook it was Three-Mile Island and if it wasn't Three-Mile Island it was Maine Yankee in Wiscasset or what could have happened at the Hanford Plant in Washington State if someone hadn't happened to notice, just in the nick of time, that their used core rods, stored in an unlined ditch outside, were getting ready to blow sky-high.
   How many nicks of time could there be?
   Spent fuel rods that were stacking up in big hot piles. They thought the Curse of King Tut was bad? Brother! Wait until some twenty-fifth-century archaeologist dug up a load of this shit! You tried to tell people the whole thing was a lie, nothing but a baldfaced naked lie, that nuclear-generated power was eventually going to kill millions and render huge tracts of land sterile and unlivable. What you got back was a blank stare. You talked to people who had lived through one administration after another in which their elected officials told one lie after another, then lied about the lies, and when those lies were found out the liars said: 'Oh jeez, I forgot, sorry' – and since they forgot, the people who elected them behaved like Christians and forgave. You couldn't believe there were so fucking many of them willing to do that until you remembered what P. T. Barnum said about the extraordinarily high birth rate of suckers. They looked you square in the face when you tried to tell them the truth and informed you that you were full of shit, the American government didn't tell lies, not telling lies was what made America great, Oh dear Father, here's the facts, I did it with my little ax, I can't keep silent for it was I, and come what may, I cannot tell a lie. When you tried to talk to them, they looked at you as if you were babbling in a foreign language. It had been eight years since he had almost killed his wife, and three since he and Bobbi had been arrested at Seabrook, Bobbi on the general charge of illegal demonstration, Gard on a much more specific one -possession of a concealed and unlicensed handgun. The others paid a fine and got out. Gardener did two months. His lawyer told him he was lucky. Gardener asked his lawyer if he knew he was sitting on a time bomb and jerking his meat. His lawyer asked him if he had considered psychiatric help. Gardener asked his lawyer if he had ever considered getting stuffed.
   But he had had sense enough not to attend any more demonstrations. That much, anyway. He kept away from them. They were poisoning him. When he got drunk, however, his mind – whatever the booze had left of it – returned obsessively to the subject of the reactors, the core rods, the containments, the inability to slow down a runaway once it really got going.
   To the nukes, in other words.
   When he got drunk, his heart got hot. The nukes. The goddam nukes. It was symbolic, yeah, okay, you didn't have to be Freud to figure that what he was really protesting against was the reactor in his own heart. When it came to matters of restraint, James Gardener had a bad containment system. There was some technician inside who should have long since been fired. He sat and played with all the wrong switches. That guy wouldn't be really happy until Jim Gardener went China Syndrome.
   The goddam fucking nukes.
   Forget it.
   He tried. For a start, he tried thinking about tonight's reading at Northeastern – a fun-filled frolic that was being co-sponsored by the university and a group that called itself The Friends of Poetry, a name which filled Gardener with fear and trembling. Groups with such names tended to be made up exclusively of women who called themselves ladies (most of said ladies of a decidedly blue-haired persuasion). The ladies of the club tended to be a good deal more familiar with the works of Rod McKuen than those of John Berryman, Hart Crane, Ron Cummings, or that good old drunken blackout brawler and wifeshooter, James Eric Gardener.
   Get out of here, Gard. Never mind The New England Poetry Caravan. Never mind Northeastern or The Friends of Poetry or the McCardle bitch. Get out Of here right now before something bad happens. Something really bad. Because if you stay, something really bad will. There's blood on the moon.
   But he was damned if he'd go running back to Maine with his tail between his legs. Not him.
   Besides, there was the bitch.
   Patricia McCardle was her name, and if she wasn't one strutting world-class bitch, Gard had never met one.
   She had a contract, and it specified no play, no pay.
   'Jesus,' Gardener said, and put a hand over his eyes, trying to shut away the growing headache, knowing there was only one kind of medicine that would do that, and also knowing it was exactly the sort of medicine that could bring that really bad thing on.
   And also knowing that knowing would do no good at all. So after a while the booze started to flow and the cyclone started to blow.
   Jim Gardener, now in free fall.

4

   Patricia McCardle was The New England Poetry Caravan's principal contributor and head ramrod. Her legs were long but skinny, her nose aristocratic but too bladelike to be considered attractive. Gard had once tried to imagine kissing her and had been horrified by the image which had risen, unbidden, in his mind: her nose not just sliding up his cheek but slicing it open like a razor-blade. She had a high forehead, nonexistent breasts, and eyes as gray as a glacier on a cloudy day. She traced her ancestry back to the Mayflower.
   Gardener had worked for her before and there had been trouble before. He had become part of the 1988 New England Poetry Caravan in rather grisly fashion . . . but the reason for his abrupt inclusion was no more unheard of in the world of poetry than it was in those of jazz and rock and roll. Patricia McCardle had been left with a last-minute hole in her announced program because one of the six poets who had signed on for this summer's happy cruise had hung himself in his closet with his belt.
   'Just like Phil Ochs,' Ron Cummings had said to Gardener as they sat near the back of the bus on the first day of the tour. He said it with a nervous bad-boy-at-the-back-of-the-classroom giggle. 'But then, Bill Claughtsworth always was a derivative son of a bitch.'
   Patricia McCardle had gotten twelve reading dates and fairly good advances on a deal which, when stripped of all the high-flown rhetoric, boiled down to six poets for the price of one. Following Claughtsworth's suicide, she found herself with three days to find a publishing poet in a season when most publishing poets were booked solid ('Or on permanent vacation like Silly Billy Claughtsworth,' Cummings said, laughing rather uneasily).
   Few if any of the booked groups would balk at paying the stipulated fee just because the Caravan happened to be short one poet – to do such a thing would be in rawther shitty taste, particularly when one considered the reason the Caravan was a poet short. All the same, it put Caravan, Inc. in a position of contractual default, at least technically, and Patricia McCardle was not a woman to brook loopholes.
   After trying four poets, each more minor-leaguer than the last, and with less than thirty-six hours before the first reading, she had finally called Jim Gardener.
   'Are you still drinking, Jimmy?' she asked bluntly. Jimmy – he hated that. Most people called him Jim. Jim was all right. No one called him Gard except himself … and Bobbi Anderson.
   'Drinking a little,' he said. 'Not bingeing at all.'
   'I'm dubious,' she said coldly.
   'You always have been, Patty,' he replied, knowing she hated that even more than he did Jimmy – her Puritan blood screamed against it. 'Were you asking because you just happened to be short a quart, or did you have a more pressing reason?'
   Of course he knew, and of course she knew he knew, and of course she knew he was grinning, and of course she was infuriated, and of course all of this tickled him just about to death, and of course she knew he knew that, too, and that was just the way he liked it.
   They sparred a few more minutes, and then came to what was not a marriage of convenience but one of necessity. Jim Gardener wanted to buy a good used wood-furnace for the coming winter; he was tired of living like a slut, bundled up in front of a kitchen stove while the wind rattled the plastic stapled over the windows; Patricia McCardle wanted to buy a poet. There would be no handshake agreement, though, not with Patricia McCardle. She had driven down from Derry that afternoon with a contract (in triplicate) and a notary public. Gard was a little surprised she hadn't brought a second notary, just in case the first one happened to suffer a coronary or something.
   Feelings and hunches aside, there was really no way he could leave the tour and get the wood-furnace, because if he left the tour he would never see the second half of his fee. She'd haul him into court and spend a thousand dollars trying to get him to cough up the three hundred Caravan, Inc. had paid up front. She might be able to do it, too. He had done almost all the dates, but the contract he had signed was crystal clear on the subject: if he took off for any reason unacceptable to the Tour Co-Ordinator, any and all fees unpaid shall be declared null and void, and any and all fees pre-paid shall be refundable to Caravan, Inc., within thirty (30) days.
   And she would go after him. She might think she was doing it on principle, but it would really be because he had called her Patty in her hour of need.
   Nor would that be the end of it. If he left, she would work with unflagging energy to get him blackballed. He would certainly never read again for another poetry tour with which she was associated, and that was a lot of poetry tours. Then there was the delicate matter of grants. Her husband, now dead ten years, had left her a lot of money (although he didn't think you could say, as with Ron Cummings, that she practically had money failing out of her asshole, because Gard didn't believe Patricia McCardle had anything so vulgar as an asshole, or even a rectum – when in need of relief she probably performed an act he thought of as Immaculate Excretion). Patricia McCardle had taken a great deal of this money and had set up a number of grants-in-aid. This made her simultaneously a serious patron of the arts and an extremely smart businesswoman in regard to the nasty business of income taxes: the grants were write-offs. Some of them funded poets for specific time periods. Some funded cash poetry awards and prizes, and some underwrote magazines of modern poetry and fiction. Each grant was administered by committees. Behind each of them moved the hand of Patricia McCardle, making sure that they meshed as neatly as a Chinese puzzle … or the strands of a spider's web.
   She could do a lot more to him than get back her lousy six hundred bucks. She could muzzle him. And it was just possible – unlikely, but possible – that he might write a few more good poems before the madmen who had stuffed a shotgun up the asshole of the world decided to pull the trigger.
   So get through it, he thought. He had ordered a bottle of Johnny Walker from room service (God bless THE TAB, forever and ever, amen), and now he poured his second drink with a hand that had become remarkably steady. Get through it, that's all.
   But as the day wore on, he kept thinking about grabbing a Greyhound bus at the Stuart Street terminal and getting off five hours later in front of the dusty little drugstore in Unity. Thumbing a ride up to Troy from there. Calling Bobbi Anderson on the phone and saying: I almost went up in the cyclone, Bobbi, but I found the storm cellar just in time. Lucky break, uh?
   Shit on that. You make your own luck. If you be strong, Gard, you be lucky. Get through it, that's all. That's what's to do.
   He scrummed through his totebag, looking for the best clothes he had left, since his reading clothes appeared to be beyond salvage. He tossed a pair of faded jeans, a plain white shirt, a tattered pair of skivvies, and a pair of socks onto the bedspread (thanks, ma'am, but there's no need to make up the room, I slept in the tub). He got dressed, ate some Certs, ate some booze, ate some more Certs, and then went through the bag again, this time looking for the aspirin. He found it and ate some of those. He looked at the bottle. Looked away. The pulse of the headache was getting worse. He sat down by the window with his notebooks, trying to decide what he should read that night.
   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 hotelroom 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 lightheadedness 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 any of her Puritan forebears, those wonderful, fun-loving guys who had been more than happy to stick you in some stinking jail if you had the bad luck to be spied going out on the Sabbath 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 highside 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 face-down 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, protestor, 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 lightheadedness was gone. He fell back into himself with such a thud that 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 leaped 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 and 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.