6

   It took him nearly twenty minutes to read all of it, and when he finished he looked up uncertainly into a deep and perfect well of silence. He had time to think he had never read the damned thing at all, that it had just been a vivid hallucination in the moment or two before the faint.
   Then someone stood up and began to clap steadily and hard. It was a young man with tears on his cheeks. The girl beside him also stood and began to clap and she was also crying. Then they were all standing and applauding, yeah, they were giving him a fucking standing 0, and in their faces he saw what every poet or would-be poet hopes to see when he or she finishes reading: the faces of people suddenly awakened from a dream brighter than any reality. They looked as dazed as Bobbi had on that day, not quite sure where they were.
   But they weren't all standing and applauding, he saw; Patricia McCardle sat stiff and straight in her third-row seat, her hands clasped tightly together in her lap over her small evening bag. Her lips had closed. No sign of the old pearly-whites now; her mouth had become a small bloodless cut. Gard felt a weary amusement. As far as you're concerned, Patty, the real Puritan ethic is no one who's a black sheep should dare rise above his designated level of mediocrity, correct? But there's no mediocrity clause in your contract, is there?
   'Thank you,' he muttered into the mike, sweeping his books and papers together into an untidy pile with his shaking hands – and then almost dropping them all over the floor as he stepped away from the podium. He dropped into his seat next to Ron Cummings with a deep sigh.
   'My God,' Ron whispered, still applauding. 'My God!'
   'Stop clapping, you ass,' Gardener whispered back.
   'Damned if I will. I don't care when you wrote it, it was fucking brilliant,' Cummings said. 'And I'll buy you a drink on it later on.'
   'I'm not drinking anything stronger than club soda tonight,' Gardener said, and knew it was a lie. His headache was already creeping back. Aspirin wouldn't cure that, Percodan wouldn't, a 'Iude wouldn't. Nothing would fix his head but a great big shot of booze. Fast, fast relief.
   The applause was finally beginning to die away. Patricia McCardle looked acidly grateful.

7

   The name of the fat shit who had introduced each of the poets was Arberg (although Gardener kept wanting to call him Arglebargle), and he was the assistant professor of English who headed the sponsoring group. He was the sort of man his father had called a 'beefy sonofawhore.'
   The beefy sonofawhore threw a party for the Caravan, the Friends of Poetry, and most of the English Department faculty at his house after the reading. It began around eleven o'clock. It was stiffish at first – men and women standing in uncomfortable little groups with glasses and paper plates in their hands, talking your usual brand of cautious academic talk. This sort of bullshit had struck Gard as a stupid waste of time when he was teaching. It still did, but there was also something nostalgic and pleasing – in a melancholy way – about it now.
   His Party Monster streak told him that, stiff or not, this was a Party with Possibilities. By midnight the Bach etudes would almost certainly be replaced by the Pretenders, and talk of classes, politics, and literature would be replaced by more interesting fare – the Red Sox, who on the faculty was drinking too much, and that all-time favorite, who was fucking whom.
   There was a large buffet for which most of the poets made a beeline, reliably following Gardener's First Rule for Touring Poets: If it's gratis, grab it. As he watched, Ann Delaney, who wrote spare, haunting poems about rural working-class New England, stretched her jaws wide and ripped into the huge sandwich she was holding. Mayonnaise the color and texture of bull semen squirted between her fingers, and Ann licked it off her hand nonchalantly. She tipped Gardener a wink. To her left, last year's winner of Boston University's Hawthorne Prize (for his long poem Harbor Dreams 1650-1980) was cramming green olives into his mouth with blurry speed. This fellow, Jon Evard Symington by name, paused long enough to drop a handful of wrapped mini-wheels of Bonbel cheese into each pocket of his corduroy sport-coat (patched elbows, naturally), and then went back to the olives.
   Ron Cummings strolled over to where Gardener was standing. As usual, he wasn't eating. He had a Waterford glass that looked full of straight whiskey in one hand. He nodded toward the buffet. 'Great stuff. If you're a connoisseur of Kirschner's bologna and iceberg lettuce, you're in like Flynn, ho.'
   'That Arglebargle really knows how to live,' Gardener said.
   Cummings, in the act of drinking, snorted so hard his eyes bulged. 'You're on the hit-line tonight, Jim. Arglebargle. Jesus.' He looked at the glass in Gardener's hand. It was a vodka and tonic – weak, but his second, just the same.
   'Tonic water?' Cummings asked slyly. 'Pure tonic water?'
   'Well … mostly.'
   Cummings laughed again and walked away.
   By the time someone pulled Bach and put on B. B. King, Gard was working on his fourth drink – on this one he'd asked the bartender, who had been at the reading, to go a little heavier on the vodka. He had begun to repeat two remarks that seemed wittier as he got drunker: first, that if you were a connoisseur of Kirschner's bologna and iceberg lettuce you were in like Flynn here, bo, and second, that all assistant professors were like T. S. Eliot's Practical Cats in at least one way: they all had secret names. Gardener confided that he had intuited that of their host: Arglebargle. He went back for a fifth drink, and told the bartender just to wave the tonic bottle in that old drink's face – that would be fine. The bartender waggled the bottle of Schweppes solemnly in front of Gardener's glass of vodka. Gardener laughed until tears stood in his eyes and his stomach hurt. He really was feeling fine tonight … and who, sir or madam, deserved it more? He had read better than he had in years, maybe in his whole life.
   'You know,' he told the bartender, a needy postgrad hired especially for the occasion, 'all assistant professors are like T. S. Eliot's Practical Cats in one way.'
   'Is that so, Mr Gardener?'
   'Jim. Just Jim.' But he could see from the look in the kid's eyes that he was never going to be just Jim to this guy. Tonight he had seen Gardener blaze, and men who blazed could never be anything so mundane as just Jim.
   'It is,' he told the kid. 'Each of them has a secret name. I have intuited that of our host. It's Arglebargle. Like the sound you make when you use the old Listerine.' He paused, considering. 'Of which the gentleman under discussion could use a good dose, now that I think of it.' Gardener laughed quite loudly. It was a fine addition to the basic thrust. Like adding a tasteful hood ornament to a fine car, he thought, and laughed again. This time a few people glanced around before going back to their conversations.
   Too loud, he thought. Turn down your volume control, Gard, old buddy. He grinned widely, thinking he was having one of those magic nights – even his damn thoughts were funny tonight.
   The bartender was also smiling, but his smile had a slightly concerned edge to it. 'You ought to be careful what you say about Professor Arberg,' he said, ,or who you say it to. He's … a bit of a bear.'
   'Oh is he!' Gardener popped his eyes round and waggled his eyebrows energetically up and down like Groucho Marx. 'Well, he's got the build for it. Beefy sonofawhore, ain't be?' But he was careful to keep the old volume control down when he said it.
   'Yeah,' the bartender said. He looked around and then leaned over the makeshift bar toward Gardener. 'There's a story that he happened to be passing by the grad assistants' lounge last year and heard one of them joking about how he'd always wanted to be associated with a school where Moby Dick wasn't just another dry classic but an actual member of the faculty. That guy was one of the most promising English students Northeastern has ever had, I heard, but he was gone before the semester was over. So was everyone who laughed, The ones who didn't laugh stayed.'
   'Jesus Christ,' Gardener said. He had heard stories like it before – one or two that were even worse – but still felt disgusted. He followed the bartender's glance and saw Arglebargle at the buffet, standing next to Patricia McCardle. Arglebargle had a stein of beer in one hand and was gesturing with it. His other hand was plowing potato chips through a bowl of clam dip and then conveying them to his mouth, which went right on talking as it slobbered them chips in. Gardener could not remember ever having seen anything so quintessentially disgusting. Yet the McCardle bitch's rapt attention suggested that she might at any moment drop to her knees and give the man a blowjob out of sheer adoration. Gardener thought, and the fat fuck would go right on eating while she did it, dropping potato-chip crumbs and globs of clam dip in her hair.
   'Jesus wept,' he said, and slugged back half of his vodka-sans-tonic. It hardly burned at all … what burned was the evening's first real hostility – the first outrider of that mute and inexplicable rage that had plagued him almost since the time he began drinking. 'Freshen this up, would you?'
   The bartender dumped in more vodka and said shyly: 'I thought your reading tonight was wonderful, Mr Gardener.'
   Gardener was absurdly touched. 'Leighton Street' had been dedicated to Bobbi Anderson, and this boy behind the bar – barely old enough to drink legally himself -reminded Gardener of Bobbi as she had been when she first came to the university.
   'Thank you.'
   You want to be a little careful of that vodka,' the bartender said. 'It has a way of blindsiding you.'
   'I'm in control,' Gardener said, and gave the bartender a reassuring wink. 'Visibility ten miles to unlimited.'
   He pushed off from the bar, glancing toward the beefy sonofawhore and McCardle again. She caught him looking at her and gazed back, cool and unsmiling, her blue eyes chips of ice. Bite my bag, you frigid bitch, he thought, and raised his drink to her in a boorish barrelhouse salute, at the same time favoring her with an insultingly wide grin.
   'Just tonic, right? Pure tonic.'
   He looked around. Ron Cummings had appeared at his side as suddenly as Satan. And his grin was properly satanic.
   'Bugger off,' Gardener said, and more people turned around to look.
   'Jim, old buddy – '
   'I know, I know, turn down the volume control,' he mumbled, but he could feel that pulse in his head getting harder, more insistent. It wasn't like the headaches the doctor had predicted following his accident; it didn't come from the front of his head but rather from someplace deep in the back. And it didn't hurt.
   It was, in fact, rather pleasant.
   'You got it.' Cummings nodded almost imperceptibly toward McCardle. 'She's got a down on you, Jim. She'd love to dump you off the tour. Don't give her a reason.'
   'Fuck her.'
   'You fuck her,' Cummings said. 'Cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, and brain damage are all statistically proven results of heavy drinking, so I can reasonably expect any of them in my future, and if one of them were to come down on my head, I'd have no one to blame but myself. Diabetes, glaucoma, and premature senility all run in my family. But hypothermia of the penis? That I can do without. Excuse me.'
   Gardener stood still for a moment, puzzled, watching him go. Then he got it and brayed laughter. This time the tears did not just stand in his eyes; this time they actually rolled down his cheeks. For the third time that evening people were looking at him – a big man in rather shabby clothes with a glass full of what looked suspiciously like straight vodka, standing by himself and laughing at the top of his voice.
   Put a lid on it, he thought. Turn down the volume, he thought. Hypothermia of the penis, he thought, and sprayed more laughter.
   Little by little he managed to regain control. He headed for the stereo in the other room – that was where the most interesting people at a party were usually found. He grabbed a couple of canapes from a tray and swallowed them. He had a strong feeling that Arglebargle and McCarglebargle were looking at him still, and that McCarglebargle was giving the Arglebargle a complete rundown on him in neat phrases, that cool, maddening little smile never leaving her face. You didn't know? It's quite true – he shot her. Right through the face. She told him she wouldn't press charges if he would give her an uncontested divorce. Who knows if it was the right decision or not? He hasn't shot any more women … at least, not yet. But however well he might have read tonight – after that rather eccentric lapse, I mean – he is unstable, and as you can see, he's not able to control his drinking …
   Better watch it, Gard, he thought, and for the second time that night a thought came in a voice that was very much like Bobbi's. Your paranoia's showing. They're not talking about you, for Chrissake.
   At the doorway he turned and looked back.
   They were looking directly at him.
   He felt nasty, dismayed shock race through him … and then he forced another big, insulting grin and tipped his glass toward both of them.
   Get out of here, Gard. This could be bad. You're drunk.
   I'm in control, don't worry. She wants me to leave, that's why she keeps looking at me, that's why she's telling that fat fuck all about me – that I shot my wife, that I was busted at Seabrook with a loaded gun in my packsack – she wants to get rid of me because she doesn't think drunken wifeshooting commiesymp nuclear protestors should get the biggest motherfucking hand of the night. But I can be cool. No problem, baby. I'm just going to hang out, taper off on the firewater, grab some coffee, and go home early. No problem.
   And although he didn't grab any coffee, didn't go home early, and most certainly didn't taper off on the firewater, he was okay for the next hour or so. He turned down the volume control every time he heard it start going up, and made himself quit every time he heard himself doing what his wife had called holding forth. 'When you get drunk, Jim,' she had said, 'not the least of your problems is a tendency to stop conversing and start holding forth.'
   He stayed mostly in Arberg's living room, where the crowd was younger and not so cautiously pompous. Their conversation was lively, cheerful, and intelligent. The thought of the nukes rose in Gardener's mind – at hours such as this it always did, like a rotting body floating to the surface in response to cannonfire. At hours such as these – and at this stage of drunkenness – the certainty that he must alert these young men and women to the problem always floated up, trailing its heat of anger and irrationality like rotted waterweed. As always. The last eight years of his life had been bad, and the last three had been a nightmare time in which he had become inexplicable to himself and scary to almost all the people who really knew him. When he drank, this rage, this terror, and most of all, this inability to explain whatever had happened to Jimmy Gardener, to explain even to himself – found outlet in the subject of the nukes.
   But tonight he had hardly raised the subject when Ron Cummings staggered into the parlor, his narrow, gaunt face glowing with feverish color. Drunk or not, Cummings was still perfectly able to see how the wind was blowing. He adroitly turned the conversation back toward poetry. Gardener was weakly grateful but also angry. It was irrational, but it was there: he had been denied his fix.
   So, partly thanks to the tight checkrein he had imposed on himself and partly due to Ron Cummings's timely intervention, Gardener avoided trouble until Arberg's party was almost over. Another half-hour and Gardener might have avoided trouble completely . . . at least, for that night.
   But when Ron Cummings began to hold forth on the beat poets with his customary cutting wit, Gardener wandered back into the dining room to get another drink and perhaps something to nosh on from the buffet. What followed might have been arranged by the devil with a particularly malignant sense of humor.
   'Once we've got Iroquois on-line, you'll have the equivalent of three dozen full scholarships to give away,' a voice on Gardener's left was saying. Gardener looked around so suddenly that he almost spilled his drink. Surely he must be imagining this conversation – it was too coincidental to be real.
   Half a dozen people were grouped at one end of the buffet – three men and three women. One of the couples was that World-Famous Vaudeville Team of Arglebargle and McCarglebargle. The man speaking looked like a car salesman with better taste in clothes than most of the breed. His wife stood next to him. She was pretty in a strained way, her fading blue eyes magnified by thick spectacles. Gardener saw one thing at once. He might be an alky, and obsessive on this one subject, but he had always been a sharp observer and still was. The woman with the thick spectacles was aware that her husband was doing exactly that which Nora had accused Gard himself of doing at parties once he got drunk: holding forth. She wanted to get her husband out, but as yet couldn't see how to do it.
   Gardener took a second look and guessed they had been married eight months. Maybe a year, but eight months was a better guess.
   The man speaking had to be some sort of wheel with Bay State Electric. Had to be Bay State, because Bay State owned the boondoggle that was the Iroquois plant. The guy was making it sound like the greatest thing since sliced bread, and because he looked as though he really believed it, Gardener decided he must be a wheel of a rather small sort, maybe even a spare tire. He doubted if the big guys were so crazy about Iroquois. Even putting aside the insanity of nuclear power for a moment, there was the fact that Iroquois was five years late coming 'on-line' and the fate of three interconnected New England bank chains depended on what would happen when – and if – it did. They were all standing chest-deep in radioactive quicksand and trading paper. It was like some crazy game of musical chairs.
   Of course, the courts had finally given the company permission to begin loading hot rods the month before, and Gardener supposed that had the motherfuckers breathing a little easier.
   Arberg was listening with solemn respect. He wasn't a trustee of the college, but anyone above the post of instructor would know enough to butter up an emissary from Bay State Electric, even a spare tire. Big private utilities like Bay State could do a lot for a school if it wanted to.
   Was Reddy Kilowatt here a Friend of Poetry? About as much, Gard suspected, as he himself was a Friend of the Neutron Bomb. His wife, however – she of the thick glasses and the strained, pretty face – she looked like a Friend of Poetry.
   Knowing it was a terrible mistake, Gardener drifted over. He was wearing a pleasant late-in-the-party-gotta-go-soon smile, but the pulse in his head was faster, centering on the left. The old helpless anger was rising in a red wave. Don't you know what you're talking about? was almost all that his heart could cry. There were logical arguments against nuclear-power plants that he could muster, but at times like this he could only find the inarticulate cry of his heart.
   Don't you know what you're talking about? Don't you know what the stakes are? Don't any of you remember what happened in Russia two years ago? They haven't; they can't. They'll be burying the cancer victims far into the next century. Jesus-jumped-up-fiddling-Christ! Stick one of those used core rods up your ass for half an hour or so and tell everyone how safe nuclear-fucking-power is when your turds start to glow in the dark! Jesus! JESUS! You jerks are standing here listening to this man talk as if he was sane!
   He stood there, drink in hand, smiling pleasantly, listening to the spare tire spout his deadly nonsense.
   The third man in the group was fifty or so and looked like a college dean. He wanted to know about the possibility of further organized protests in the fall. He called the spare tire Ted.
   Ted the Power Man said he doubted there was much to worry about. Seabrook had had its vogue, and the Arrowhead installation in Maine – but since the federal judges had started to deal out some stiff sentences for what they saw as merely hell-raising, the protests had slowed down fast. 'These groups go through targets almost as fast as they go through rock groups,' he said. Arberg, McCardle, and the others laughed – all except the wife of Ted the Power Man. Her smile only frayed a little more.
   Gardener's pleasant smile remained. It felt flash-frozen onto his face.
   Ted the Power Man grew more expansive. He said it was time to show the Arabs once and for all that America and Americans didn't need them. He said that even the most modern coal-fired generators were too dirty to be acceptable by the EPA. He said that solar power was great 'as long as the sun shines.' There was another burst of laughter.
   Gardener's head thudded and whipped, whipped and thudded. His ears, tuned to an almost preternatural pitch, heard a faint crackling sound, like ice shifting, and he relaxed his hand a bare moment before it tightened enough to shatter the glass.
   He blinked and Arberg had the head of a pig. This hallucination was utterly complete and utterly perfect, right down to the bristles on the fat man's snout. The buffet was in ruins, but Arberg was scavenging, finishing up the last few Triscuits, spearing a final slice of salami and a chunk of cheese on the same plastic toothpick, chasing them with the last potato-chip crumbs. It all went into his snuffling snout, and he went on nodding all the while as Ted the Power Man explained that nuclear was the only alternative, really. 'Thank God the American people are finally getting that Chernobyl business into some kind of perspective,' he said. 'Thirty-two people dead. It's horrible, of course, but there was an airplane crash just a month ago that killed a hundred and ninety-some. You don't hear people yelling for the government to shut down the airlines, though, do you? Thirty-two dead is horrible, but it's far from the Armageddon these nuke-freaks made it sound like.' He lowered his voice a little. 'They're as nuts as the LaRouche people you see in airports, but in a way, they're worse. They sound more rational. But if we gave them what they wanted, they'd turn around a month or so later and start whining about not being able to use their blow-dryers, or found out their Cuisinarts weren't going to work when they wanted to mix up a bunch of macrobiotic food.'
   To Gard he didn't look like a man anymore. The shaggy head of a wolf poked out of the collar of his white shirt with the narrow red pinstripes. It looked around, pink tongue lolling, greenish-yellow eyes sparkling. Arberg squealed some sort of approval and stuffed more odd lots into his pink pig's snout. Patricia McCardle now had the smooth sleek head of a whippet. The college dean and his wife were weasels. And the wife of the man from the electric company had become a frightened rabbit, pink eyes rolling behind thick glasses.
   Oh, Gard, no, his mind moaned.
   He blinked again and they were just people.
   'And one thing these protestors never remember to mention at their protest rallies is just this,' Ted the Power Man finished, looking around like a trial lawyer reaching the climax of his summation. 'In thirty years of peaceful nuclear-power development, there has never been one single fatality as the result of nuclear power in the United States of America.' He smiled modestly and tossed off the rest of his Scotch.
   'I'm sure we'll all rest easier knowing that,' the man who looked like a college dean said. 'And now I think my wife and I -'
   'Did you know that Marie Curie died of radiation poisoning?' Gardener asked conversationally. Heads turned. 'Yeah. Leukemia induced by direct exposure to gamma rays. She was the first casualty along the death march with this guy's power plant at the end. She did a lot of research, and recorded it all.'
   Gardener looked around the suddenly silent room.
   'Her notebooks are locked up in a vault,' he said. 'A vault in Paris. It's lead-lined. The notebooks are whole, but too radioactive to touch. As for who's died here, we don't really know. The AEC and the EPA keep a lid on it.'
   Patricia McCardle was frowning at him. With the dean temporarily forgotten, Arberg went back to scrounging along the denuded buffet table.
   'On the fifth of October 1966,' Gardener said, 'there was a partial nuclear meltdown of the Enrico Fermi breeder reactor in Michigan.'
   'Nothing happened,' Ted the Power Man said, and spread his hands to the assembled company as if to say, You see? QED.
   'No,' Gardener said. 'Nothing did. God may know why, but my guess is no one else does. The chain reaction stopped on its own. No one knows why. One of the engineers the contractors called in took a look, smiled, and said, “You guys almost lost Detroit.” Then he fainted.'
   'Oh, but Mr Gardener! That was -'
   Gardener held up a hand. 'When you examine the cancer-death stats for the areas surrounding every nuclear-power facility in the country, you find anomalies, deaths that are way out of line with the norm.'
   'That is utterly untrue, and – '
   ' Let me finish, please. I don't think the facts make any difference anymore, but let me finish anyway. Long before Chernobyl, the Russians had an accident at a reactor in a place called Kyshtym. But Khrushchev was Premier then, and the Soviets kept their lips a lot tighter. It looks like maybe they were storing used rods in a shallow ditch. Why not? As Madame Curie might have said, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Our best guess is that the core rods oxydized, only instead of creating ferrous oxide, or rust, the way steel rods do, these rods rusted pure plutonium. It was like building a campfire next to a tank filled with LP gas, but they didn't know that. They assumed it would be all right. They assumed.' He could hear the rage filling his voice and was helpless to stop it. 'They assumed, they played with the lives of living human beings as if they were … well, so many dolls … and guess what happened?'
   The room was silent. Patty's mouth was a frozen red slash. Her complexion was milky with rage.
   'It rained,' Gardener said. 'It rained hard. And that started a chain reaction that caused an explosion. It was like the eruption of a mud volcano. Thousands were evacuated. Every pregnant woman was given an abortion. There was no choice involved. The Russian equivalent of a turnpike in the Kyshtym area was closed for almost a year. Then, when word started to leak out that a very bad accident had happened on the edge of Siberia, the Russians opened the road again. But they put up some really hilarious signs. I've seen the photos. I don't read Russian, but I've asked four or five different people for a
   translation, and they all agree. it sounds like a bad ethnic joke. Imagine yourself driving along an American thruway – I-95 or I-70, maybe – and coming up on a sign that says PLEASE CLOSE ALL WINDOWS, TURN OFF ALL VENTILATION ACCESSORIES, AND DRIVE AS FAST AS YOUR CAR WILL GO FOR THE NEXT TWENTY MILES.'
   'Builshit!' Ted the Power Man said loudly.
   'Photographs available under the Freedom of Information Act,' Gard said. ,If this guy was only lying, maybe I could live with it. But he and the rest of the people like him are doing something worse. They're like salesmen telling the public +that cigarettes not only don't cause lung cancer, they're full of vitamin C and keep you from having colds.'
   'Are you implying -'
   'Thirty-two at Chernobyl we can verify. Hell, maybe it is only thirty-two. We've got photos taken by American doctors which suggest there must be well over two hundred already, but say thirty-two. It doesn't change what we've learned about high-rad exposure. The deaths don't all come at once. That's what's so deceiving. The deaths come in three waves. First, the people who get fried in the accident. Second, the leukemia victims, mostly kids. Third, the most lethal wave: cancer in adults forty and over. So much cancer you might as well go on and call it a plague. Bone cancer, breast cancer, liver cancer, and melanoma – skin cancer, in other words – are the most common. But you also got your intestinal cancer, your bladder cancer, your brain tumors, your – '
   'Stop, can't you please stop?" Ted's wife cried. Hysteria lent her voice a surprising power.
   'I would if I could, dear,' he said gently. 'I can't. In 1964 the AEC commissioned a study on a worst-case scenario if an American reactor one-fifth the size of Chernobyl blew. The results were so scary the AEC buried the report. It suggested -'
   'Shut up, Gardener,' Patty said loudly. 'You're drunk.'
   He ignored her, fixing his eyes on the power-man's wife. 'It suggested that such an accident in a relatively rural area of the USA – the one they picked was midstate Pennsylvania, where Three-Mile Island is, by the way – would kill 45,000 folks, rad seventy per cent of the state and do seventeen million dollars' worth of damage.'
   'Holy fuck!' someone cried. 'Are you shitting?'
   'Nope,' Gardener said, never taking his eyes from the woman, who now seemed hypnotized with terror. 'If you multiply by five, you get 225,000 dead and eighty-five million dollars' worth of damage.' He refilled his glass nonchalantly in the silent grave of the room, tipped it at Arberg, and drank two mouthfuls of straight vodka. Uncontaminated vodka, one hoped. 'So!' he finished. 'We're talking almost a quarter of a million people dead by the time the third wave dissipates, around 2040.' He winked at Ted the Power Man, whose lips had pulled back from his teeth. 'Be hard to get that many people even on a 767, wouldn't it?'
   'Those figures came directly out of your butt,' Ted the Power Man said angrily.
   'Ted – ' the man's wife said nervously. She had gone dead pale except for tiny spots of red burning high up on her cheekbones.
   'You expect me to stand here and listen to that … that party-line rhetoric?' he asked, approaching Gardener until they were almost chest to chest. 'Do you?'
   'At Chernobyl they killed the kids,' Gardener said. 'Don't you understand that? The ones ten years old, the ones in utero. Most may still be alive, but they are dying right now while we stand here with our drinks in our hands. Some can't even read yet. Most will never kiss a girl in passion. Right now while we're standing here with our drinks in our hands.
   'They killed their children.'
   He looked at Ted's wife, and now his voice began to shake and to rise slightly, as if in a plea.
   'We know from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, from our own tests at Trinity and on Bikini. They killed their own children, do you dig what I'm saying? There are nine-year-olds in Pripyat who are going to die shitting out their own intestines! They killed the children!'
   Ted's wife took a step back, eyes wide behind her glasses, mouth twitching.
   'We'll acknowledge that Mr Gardener is a fine poet, I think,' Ted the Power Man said, putting an arm around his wife and pulling her to his side again. It was like watching a cowboy rope a calf. 'He's not very well-informed about nuclear power, however. We really have no idea what may or may not have happened at Kyshtym, and the Russian figures on the Chernobyl casualties are – '
   'Cut the shit,' Gardener said. 'You know what I'm talking about. Bay State Electric has got all this stuff in its files, along with the elevated cancer rates in the areas surrounding American nuclear-power facilities, the water contaminated by nuclear waste – the water in deep aquifers, the water people wash their clothes and their dishes and themselves in, the water they drink. You know. You and every other private, municipal, state, and federal company in America.'
   'Stop it, Gardener,' McCardle warned, stepping forward. She flashed an overbrilliant smile around the group. 'He's a little
   'Ted, did you know?' Ted's wife asked suddenly.
   'Sure, I've got some stats, but – '
   He broke off. His jaw snapped shut so hard you could almost hear it. It wasn't much … but it was enough. Suddenly they knew – all of them – that he had omitted a good deal of scripture from his sermon. Gardener felt a moment of sour, unexpected triumph.
   There was a moment of awkward silence and then, quite deliberately, Ted's wife stepped away from him. He flushed. To Gard he looked like a man who has just whanged his thumb with a hammer.
   'Oh, we have all kinds of reports,' he said. 'Most are nothing but a tissue
   of lies – Russian propaganda. People like this idiot are more than happy to swallow it hook, line, and sinker. For all we know, Chernobyl may have been no accident at all, but an effort to keep us from – '
   'Jesus, next you'll be telling us the earth is flat,' Gardener said. 'Did you see the photographs of the Army guys in radiation suits walking around a power plant half an hour's drive from Harrisburg? Do you know how they tried to plug one of the leaks there? They stuffed a basketball wrapped with friction-tape into a busted waste-pipe. It worked for a while, then the pressure spit it out and busted a hole right through the containment wall.'
   'You spout some pretty goddam good propaganda.' Ted grinned savagely. 'The Russians love people like you! Do they pay you, or do you do it for free?'
   'Who sounds like an airport Moonie now?' Gardener asked, laughing a little. He took a step closer to Ted. 'Nuclear reactors are better built than Jane Fonda, right?'
   'As far as I'm concerned, that's about the size of it, yes.'
   'Please,' the dean's wife said, distressed. 'We may discuss, but let's not shout, please – after all, we're college people -'
   'Somebody better fucking shout about it!' Gardener shouted. She recoiled, blinking, and her husband stared at Gardener with eyes as bright as chips of ice. Stared as if he were marking Gard forever. Gard supposed he was. 'Would you shout if your house was on fire and you were the only one in your family to wake up in the middle of the night and realize what was happening? Or just kinda tiptoe around and whisper, on account of you're a college person?'
   'I just believe this has gone far en – '
   Gardener dismissed her, turned to Mr Bay State Electric, and winked at him confidentially. 'Tell me, Ted, how close is your house located to this nifty new nuclear facility you guys are building?'
   'I don't have to stand here and – '
   'Not too close, uh? That's what I thought.' He looked at Mrs Ted. She shrank away from him, clutching at her husband's arm. Gard thought, What is it that she sees to make her shrink away from me like that? What, exactly?
   The voice of the booger-hooking, comic-book-reading deputy clanged back in dolorous answer: Shot your wife, uh? Good fucking deal.
   'Are you planning to have children?' he asked her gently. 'If so, I would hope for your sake that you and your husband really are located a safe distance from the plant … they keep goofing, you know. Like at Three-Mile Island. Not long before they opened the sucker, someone discovered the plumbers had somehow hooked up a 3,000-gallon tank for liquid radioactive waste to the drinking fountains instead of the scuts. In fact, they found out about a week before the place went on line. You like it?'
   She was crying.
   She was crying, but he couldn't stop.
   The guys investigating wrote in their report that hooking up radioactive waste-coolant pipes to the ones feeding water to the drinking fountains was a generally inadvisable practice. If your hubby here invites you to take the company tour, I'd do the same thing they tell you to do in Mexico: don't drink the water. And it your hubby invites you after you're pregnant – or after you even think you might be – tell him . . .' Gardener smiled, first at her, then at Ted. 'Tell him you've got a headache,' he said.
   'Shut up,' Ted said. His wife had begun to moan,
   'That's right,' Arberg said. 'I really do think it's time for you to shut up, Mr Gardener.'
   Gard looked at them, then at the rest of the partygoers, who were staring at the tableau by the buffet, wide-eyed and silent, the young bartender among them.
   'Shut up!' Gardener yelled. Pain drove a gleaming chrome spike into the left side of his head. 'Yeah! Shut up and let the goddam house burn! You can bet these fucking slum-lords will be around to collect the fire-insurance later on, after the ashes cool and they rake out what's left of the bodies! Shut up! That's what all these guys want us to do! And if you don't shut up on your own, maybe you get shut up, like Karen Silkwood – '
   'Quit it, Gardener,' Patricia McCardle hissed. There were no sibilants in the words she spoke, making a hiss an impossibility, but she hissed just the same.
   He bent toward Ted's wife, whose sallow cheeks were now wet with tears. 'Also, you might cheek the IDS rates – infant-death syndrome, that is. They go way up in plant areas. Birth defects, such as Down's Syndrome – mongoloidism, in other words – and blindness, and …
   ‘I want you to get out of my house,' Arberg said.
   'You've got potato chips on your chin,' Gardener said, and turned back to Mr and Mrs Bay State Electric. His voice was coming from deeper and deeper inside him. It was like listening to a voice coming out of a well. Everything going critical. Red lines showing up all over the control panel.
   'Ted here can lie about how vastly overrated it all was, nothing but a little fire and a lot of headline fodder, and all of you can even believe him … but the fact is, what happened at the Chernobyl nuclear plant released more radioactive waste into the atmosphere of this planet than all the A-bombs set off aboveground since Trinity.
   'Chernobyl's hot.
   'It's going to stay that way for a long time. How long? No one really knows, do they, Ted?'
   He tipped his glass toward Ted and then looked around at the partygoers, all of them now standing silent and watching him, many looking just as dismayed as Mrs Ted.
   'And it'll happen again. Maybe in Washington State. They were storing core rods in unlined ditches at the Hanford reactors just like they were at Kyshtym. California the next time there's a big quake? France? Poland? Or maybe right here in Massachusetts, if this fellow here has his way and the Iroquois plant goes on-line in the spring. Just let one guy pull the wrong switch at the wrong time, and the next time the Red Sox open at Fenway will be around 2075.'
   Patricia McCardle was as white as a wax candle … except for her eyes, which were spitting blue sparks that looked freshly dropped from an arcwelder. Arberg had gone the other route: he was as red and dark as the bricks of his fine-old-family Back Bay home. Mrs Ted was looking from Gardener to her husband and back again as if they were a pair of dogs that might bite. Ted saw the look; felt her trying to back out of his encircling, imprisoning arm. Gardener supposed it was her reaction to what he had been saying which provoked the final escalation. Ted had doubtless been instructed about how to handle hysterics like Gardener; the company taught their Teds to do that as routinely as the airlines taught stewardesses how to demonstrate the emergency oxygen system of the jets in which they flew.
   But it was late, Gardener's drunken but eloquent rebuttal had blown up like a pocket thunderstorm … and now his wife was acting as though he might be the Butcher of Riga.
   'God, I get tired of you guys and your simpering! There you were tonight, reading your incoherent poems into a microphone that runs on electricity, having your braying voice amplified by speakers that run on electricity, using electric lights to see by … where do you Luddites think that power comes from ? The Wizard of Oz? Jesus!'
   'It's late,' McCardle said hurriedly, 'and we all
   'Leukemia,' Gardener said, speaking directly to Ted's wide-eyed wife with dreadful confidentiality. 'The children. The children are always the ones to go first after a meltdown. One good thing: if we lose Iroquois, it'll keep the Jimmy Fund busy.'
   'Ted?' she whimpered. 'He's wrong, isn't he? I mean – ' She was fumbling for a handkerchief or tissue in her purse and dropped it. There was the brittle sound of something breaking inside.
   'Stop it,' Ted said to Gardener. 'We'll talk about it if you want, but stop deliberately upsetting my wife.'
   'I want her to be upset.' Gardener said. He had embraced the darkness completely now. He belonged to it and it belonged to him and that was just fine. 'There's so much she doesn't seem to know. Stuff she ought to know. Considering who she's married to, and all.'
   He turned the beautiful, wild grin on her. She looked into it without flinching this time, mesmerized like a doe in a pair of oncoming headlights.
   'Used core rods, now. Do you know where they go when they're no more good in the pile? Did he tell you that the Core Rod Fairy takes them? Not true. The power folks sort of squirrel them away. There are great big hot piles of core rods here. there, and everywhere, sitting in nasty pools of shallow water. They're really hot, ma'am. And they're going to stay that way for a long time.'
   'Gardener, I want you out,' Arberg said again.
   Ignoring him, Gardener went on, speaking to Mrs Ted and Mrs Ted only: 'They're already losing track of some of those piles of used rods, did you know that? Like little kids who play all day and go to bed tired and wake up the next day and can't remember where they left their toys. And then there's the stuff that just goes poof. The ultimate Mad Bomber stuff. Enough plutonium has already disappeared to blow up the eastern seaboard of the United States. But I've got to have a mike to read my incoherent poems into. God forbid I should have to raise my v
   Arberg grabbed him suddenly. The man was big and flabby but quite powerful. Gardener's shirt pulled out of his pants. His glass tumbled out of his fingers and shattered on the floor. In a rolling, carrying voice – a voice which maybe only an indignant teacher who has spent many years in lecture halls could muster – Arberg announced to everyone present: 'I'm throwing this bum out.'
   This declaration was greeted by spontaneous applause. Not everyone in the room applauded – maybe not even half of them did. But the power guy's wife was crying hard now, pressing against her husband, no longer trying to get away; until Arberg grabbed him, Gardener had been hulking over her, seeming to menace her.
   Gardener felt his feet skim over the floor, then leave it entirely. He caught a glimpse of Patricia McCardle, her mouth compressed, her eyes glaring, her hands smacking together in the furious approval she had refused to accord him earlier. He saw Ron Cummings standing in the library door, a monstrous drink in one hand, his arm round a pretty blonde girl, his hand pressed firmly against the sideswell of her breast. Cummings looked concerned but not exactly surprised. After all, it was only the argument in the Stone Country Bar and Grille continued to another night, wasn't it?
   Are you going to let this swollen bag of shit just put you out on the doorstep like a stray cat?
   Gardener decided he wasn't.
   He drove his left elbow backward as hard as he could. It slammed into Arberg's chest. Gardener thought that was what it would feel like to drive your elbow into a bowl of extremely firm Jell-O.
   Arberg uttered a strangled cry and let go of Gardener. He turned, hands doubling into fists, ready to punch Arberg if Arberg tried to grab him again, tried to so much as touch him again. He rather hoped Arglebargle wanted to fight.
   But the beefy sonofawhore showed no signs of wanting to fight. He had also lost interest in putting Gardener out. He was clutching his chest like a hammy actor preparing to sing a bad aria. Most of the brick-color had left his face, although flaring strips stood out on each cheek. Arberg's thick lips flexed into an O; slacked; flexed into an 0 again; slacked again.
   ' – heart – ' he wheezed.
   'What heart?' Gardener asked. 'You mean you have one?' attack – ' Arberg wheezed.
   'a cr-'
   'Heart attack, bullshit,' Gardener said. 'The only thing getting attacked is your sense of propriety. And you deserve it, you son of a bitch.'
   He brushed past Arberg, still standing frozen in his about-to-sing pose, both hands clutched to the left side of his chest, where Gardener had connected with his elbow. The door between the dining room and the hallway had been crowded with people; they stepped back hurriedly as Gardener strode toward them and past them, heading for the front door.
   From behind him a woman screamed: 'Get out, do you hear me? Get out, you bastard! Get out of here! I never want to see you again!'
   This shrewish, hysterical voice was so unlike Patricia McCardle's usual ladylike purr (steel claws buried somewhere inside pads of velvet) that Gardener stopped. He turned around . . . and was rocked by an eye-watering roundhouse slap. Her face was ill with rage.
   'I should have known better,' she breathed. 'You're nothing but a worthless, drunken lout – a contentious, obsessive, bullying, ugly human being. But I'll fix you. I'll do it. You know I can.'
   'Why, Patty, I didn't know you cared,' he said. 'How sweet of you. I've been waiting to be fixed by you for years. Shall we go upstairs or give everyone a treat and do it on the rug?'
   Ron Cummings, who had moved closer to the action, laughed. Patricia McCardle bared her teeth. Her hand flickered out again, this time connecting with Gardener's ear.
   She spoke in a voice which was low but perfectly audible to everyone in the room: 'I shouldn't have expected anything better from a man who would shoot his own wife.'
   Gardener looked around, saw Ron, and said: 'Excuse me, would you?' and plucked the drink from Ron's hand. In a single, quick, smooth gesture, he hooked two fingers into the bodice of McCardle's little black dress – it was elastic and pulled out easily – and dumped the whiskey inside.
   'Cheers, dear,' he said, and turned for the door. It was, he decided, the best exit line he could hope to manage under the circumstances.
   Arberg was still frozen with his fists clutched to his chest, mouth flexing into an 0 and then relaxing.
   ' – heart – ' he wheezed again to Gardener – Gardener or anyone who would listen to him. In the other room, Patricia McCardle was shrieking: 'I'm all right! Don't touch me! Leave me alone! I'm all right!'
   'Hey. You.'
   Gardener turned toward the voice and Ted's fist struck him high on one cheek. Gardener stumbled most of the way down the hall, clawing at the wall for balance. He struck the umbrella stand, knocked it over, then hit the front door hard enough to make the glass in the fanlight quiver.
   Ted was walking down the hall toward him like a gunfighter.
   'My wife's in the bathroom having hysterics because of you, and if you don't get out of here right now, I'm going to beat you silly.'
   The blackness exploded like a rotted, gas-filled pocket of guts.
   Gardener seized one of the umbrellas. It was long, furled, and black – an English lord's umbrella if there had ever been one. He ran toward Ted, toward this fellow who knew exactly what the stakes were but who was going ahead anyway, why not, there were seven payments left on the Datsun Z and eighteen on the house, so why not, right? Ted who saw a six-hundred-per-cent increase in leukemia merely as a fact which might upset his wife. Ted, good old Ted, and it was just lucky for good old Ted that it had been umbrellas instead of hunting rifles at the end of the hall.
   Ted stood looking at Gardener, eyes widening, jaw dropping. The look of flushed anger gave way to uncertainty and fear – the fear that comes when you decide you Ire dealing with an irrational being.
   ' Hey – !'
   'Caramba, you asshole!' Gardener screamed. He waggled the umbrella and then poked Ted the Power Man in the belly with it.
   'Hey!' Ted gasped, doubling over. 'Stop it!'
   'Andale, andale!' Gardener yelled, now beginning to whack Ted with the umbrella – back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The strap which held the umbrella furled against its handle came loose. The umbrella, still closed but now loose, slopped round the handle. 'Arriba, arriba!'
   Ted was now too unnerved to think about renewing his attack or to think about anything but escape. He turned and ran. Gardener chased him, cackling, beating the back of his head and the nape of his neck with the umbrella. He was laughing … but nothing was funny. His head smashed and thudded. What victory was there in getting the best of a man like this in an argument, even temporarily? Or of making his wife cry? Or of beating him with a closed umbrella? Would any of those things keep the Iroquois nuclear-power plant from going on-line next May? Would any of those things save what was left of his own miserable life, or kill those tapeworms inside him that kept digging and munching and growing, eating whatever was left inside that was sane?
   No, of course not. But for now, senseless forward motion was all that mattered … because that was all there was left.
   'Arriba, you bastard!' he cried, chasing Ted into the dining room.
   Ted had his hands up to his head and was waving them about his ears; he looked like a man beset by bats, and the umbrella did look a little batlike as it lashed up and down.
   'Help me!' Ted squealed. 'Help me, man's gone crazy!'
   But they were all backing away, eyes wide and scared.
   Ted's hip struck one corner of the buffet. The table rocked forward and upward, silverware sliding down the inclined plane of the wrinkling tablecloth, plates falling and shattering on the floor. Arberg's Waterford punch-bowl detonated like a bomb. and a woman screamed. The table tottered for a moment and then went over.
   'Help? Help? Heellllp!'
   'Andale!' Gardener brought the umbrella down on Ted's head in a particularly hard swipe. Its trigger engaged and the umbrella popped open with a
   hollow pwushhh! Now Gardener looked like a mad Mary Poppins, chasing Ted the Power Man with an umbrella in one hand. Later it would occur to him that opening an umbrella in the house was supposed to be bad luck.
   Hands grabbed him from behind.
   He whirled, expecting that Arberg was over his impropriety attack and was back to have another go at giving him the bum's rush.
   It wasn't Arberg. It was Ron. He still seemed calm – but there was something in his face, something dreadful. Was it compassion? Yes, Gardener saw, that was what it was.
   Suddenly he didn't want the umbrella anymore. He threw it aside. The dining room was perfectly silent for a moment, except for Gardener's rapid breathing and Ted's harsh, sobbing gasps. The overturned buffet table lay in a puddle of linen, broken crockery, shattered crystal. The odor of spilled rum punch rose in an eye-watering fog.
   'Patricia McCardle is on the telephone, talking to the cops,' Ron said, 'and when it's Back Bay, they show up in a hurry. You want to bug out of here, Jim.'
   Gardener looked around and saw knots of partygoers standing against the walls and in the doorways, looking at him with those wide, frightened eyes. By tomorrow they won't remember if it was about nuclear power or William Carlos Williams or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, he thought. Half of them will tell the other half I made a pass at his wife. Just that good old fun-loving wifeshooting Jim Gardener, going crazy and beating the shit out of a guy with an umbrella. Also dumping about a pint of Chivas between the teeny tits of the woman who gave him a job when he had none. Nuclear power, what did that have to do with it?
   'What a Christless mess,' he said hoarsely to Ron.
   'Shit, they'll talk about it for years,' Ron said. 'The best reading they ever heard followed by the best party blow-off they ever saw. Now get going. Get your ass up to Maine. I'll call.'
   Ted the Power Man, eyes wide and teary, made a lunge for him. Two young men -one was the bartender – held him back.
   'Goodbye,' Gardener said to the huddled knots of people. 'Thank you for a lovely time.'
   He went to the door, then turned back.
   'And if you forget everything else, remember about the leukemia and the children. Remember – '
   But what they'd remember was him whacking Ted with an umbrella. He saw it in their faces.
   Gardener nodded and went down the hallway past Arberg, who was still standing with his hands clutched to his chest, lips flexing and closing. Gardener did not look back. He kicked aside the litter of umbrellas, opened the door, and stepped out into the night. He wanted a drink more than he ever had in his life, and he supposed he must have found one, because that was when he fell into the belly of the big fish and the blackout swallowed him.

Chapter 6. Gardener on the Rocks

1

   Not long after dawn on the morning of July 4th, 1988, Gardener awoke – came to, anyway – near the end of the stone breakwater which extends out into the Atlantic not far from the Arcadia Funworld Amusement Park in Arcadia Beach, New Hampshire. Not that Gardener knew where he was then. He barely knew anything save for his own name, the fact that he was in what seemed to be total physical agony, and the somewhat less important fact that he had apparently almost drowned in the night.
   He was lying on his side, his feet trailing in the water. He supposed that he had been high and dry when he had waltzed out here the night before but he had apparently rolled over in his sleep, slid a little way down the breakwater's sloped north side … and now the tide was coming in. If he had been half an hour later in waking up, he thought he very well might have simply floated off the rocks of the breakwater as a grounded ship may float off a sandbar.
   One of his loafers was still on, but it was shrivelled and useless. Gardener kicked it off and watched apathetically as it floated down into greeny darkness. Something for the lobsters to shit in, he thought, and sat up.
   The bolt of pain which went through his head was so immense he thought for a moment that he was having a stroke; that he had survived his night on the breakwater only to die of an embolism the morning after.
   The pain receded a little and the world came back from the gray mist into which it had receded. He was able to appreciate just how miserable he was. It was what Bobbi Anderson would undoubtedly have called 'the whole body trip,' as in Savor the whole body trip, Jim. What can be better than the way you feel after a night in the eye of the cyclone?
   A night? One night?
   No way, baby. This had been a genuine jag. The real fucking thing.
   His stomach felt sour and bloated. His throat and sinuses were caked with elderly puke. He looked to his left and sure enough, there it was, a little above him in what must have been his original position, the drinker's signature – a great big splash of drying vomit.
   Christ, his body ached all over.
   Gardener wiped a shaking, dirty right hand under his nose and saw flakes of dried blood. He'd had a nosebleed. He'd had them off and on ever since the skiing accident at Sunday River when he was seventeen. He could almost count on the nosebleeds when he had been drinking.
   At the end of all his previous binges – and this was the first time he had gone whole hog in almost three years – Gardener had felt what he was feeling now: a sickness that went deeper than the thudding head, the stomach curled up like a living sponge filled with acid, the aches, the quivering muscles. That deep sickness couldn't even be called depression – it was a feeling of utter doom.
   This was the worst ever, even worse than the depression that had followed the Famous Thanksgiving Jag of 1980, the one that had ended his teaching career and his marriage. It had also come close to ending Nora's life. He had come to that time in Penobscot County Jail. A deputy was sitting outside his cell, reading a copy of Crazy magazine and picking his nose. Gardener learned later that all police departments are aware that jag-drinkers frequently come off their hinges deeply depressed. So if there happens to be a man available, he keeps an eye on you, just to make sure you don't highside it … at least not until you post bond and get off the county property.
   'Where am IT Gardener had asked.
   'Where do you think you are?' the deputy asked. He looked at the large green booger he had just scraped out of his nose and then wiped it slowly and with apparent enjoyment onto the sole of his shoe, squashing it down, smearing it along the dark dirt there. Gardener had been unable to take his eyes from this operation; a year later he would write a poem about it.
   'What did I do?'
   Save for occasional flashes, the previous two days had been totally black. The flashes were unrelated, like cloud-rifts which let through uncertain flickers of sunlight as a storm approaches. Bringing Nora a cup of tea and then starting to harangue her about the nukes. Oh yes, the nukes. Ave Nukea Eterna. When he died, his final word on the whole fucking mess wouldn't be Rosebud but Nukes. He could remember failing down in the driveway beside his house. Getting a pizza and being so drunk great big runny clots of cheese went down inside his shirt, burning his chest. He could remember calling Bobbi. Calling and babbling something to her, something awful, and had Nora been screaming? Screaming?
   'What did I do?' he asked, more urgently.
   The deputy looked at him for a moment with a perfect clear-eyed contempt. 'Shot your wife. That's what you did. Good fucking deal, uh?'
   The deputy had gone back to his Crazy magazine.
   That had been bad; this was worse. That depthless feeling of self-contempt, the grisly certainty that you had done bad things you couldn't remember. Not a few too many glasses of champagne at the New Year's Eve party where you put a lampshade on your head and boogied around the room with it slipping down over your eyes, everybody in attendance (with the exception of your wife) thinking it was just the funniest thing they'd ever seen in their lives. . Not knowing you did fun things like punching department heads. Or shooting your wife.
   It had been worse this time.
   How could it be worse than Nora?
   Something. For the time being his head hurt too badly to even try reconstructing the last unknown period of time.
   Gardener looked down at the water, the waves bulging smoothly up toward where he sat, forearms on his knees, head sagging. When the troughs passed he could see barnacles and slick green seaweed. No . . . not really seaweed. Green slime. Like boogers.
   Shot your wife … good fucking deal, uh?
   Gardener closed his eyes against the sickening pulses of pain, then opened them again.
   Jump in, a voice cajoled him softly. I mean, what the fuck, you don't really need any more of this shit, do you? Game called in the bottom of the first. Not official. Rainout. To be rescheduled when the Great Wheel of Karma turns into the next life … or the one after that, if I have to spend the next making up for this one by being a dung beetle or something. Hang up your jock, Gard. Jump in. In your current state, both of your legs will cramp and it'll be over quick. Gotta beat a bedsheet in a jail cell, anyway. Go on, jump.
   He got up and stood swaying on the rocks, looking at the water. Just one big step, that's all it would take. He could do it in his sleep. Shit, almost had.
   Not yet. Want to talk to Bobbi first.
   The part of his mind which still wanted a little to live grasped at this idea. Bobbi. Bobbi was the only part of his old life that still seemed somehow whole and good. Bobbi was living down there in Haven, writing her westerns, still sane, still his friend if no longer his lover. His last friend.
   Want to talk to Bobbi first, okay?
   Why? So you can make a last stab at fucking her up, too? God knows you've tried hard enough. She's got a police record because of you, and undoubtedly her own FBI folder as well. Leave Bobbi out of this. Jump and stop fucking around.
   He swayed forward, very close to doing it. The part of him that still wanted to live seemed to have no arguments left, no delaying tactics. It could have said that he had stayed sober – more or less – for the last three years, there had been no blackouts since he and Bobbi had been arrested at Seabrook in 1985. But that was a hollow argument. Except for Bobbi he was now completely alone. His mind was in turmoil almost all of the time, returning again and again – even sober – to the subject of the nukes. He recognized that his original concern and anger had rotted into obsession … but recognition and rehabilitation were not the same things at all. His poetry had deteriorated. His mind had deteriorated. Worst of all, when he wasn't drinking he wished he was. It's just that the hurting's all the time now. I'm like a bomb walking around and looking for a place to go off. Time to defuse.
   Okay, then. Okay. He closed his eyes and got ready.
   As he did, an odd certainty came to him, an intuition so strong that it was nearly precognitive. He felt that Bobbi needed to talk to him, rather than the other way around. That it was no mind trick. She really was in some kind of trouble. Bad trouble.
   He opened his eyes and looked around, like a man coming out of a deep daze. He would find a phone and call her. He wouldn't say 'Hey Bobbi I had another blackout' and he wouldn't say 'I don't know where I am Bobbi but this time there's no nose-picking deputy to stop me.' He would say 'Hey, Bobbi, how you doin'?' and when she told him she was doin' okay, never better, shooting it out with the James gang in Northfield, or lighting out for the territories with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and by the way, Gard, how's your own bad self, Gard would tell her he was fine, writing some good stuff for a change, thinking of going over Vermont way for a bit, see some friends. Then he would go back out to the end of the breakwater and jump off. Nothing fancy; he would just bellyflop into the dead zone. That seemed to fit; after all, it was the way he had mostly gotten through the live one. The ocean had been here for a billion years or so. It would wait another five minutes while he did that.
   But no laying it off on her, you hear me? Promise, Gard. No breaking down and blubbering. You're supposed to be her friend, not the male equivalent of her slimebucket sister. None of that shit.
   He had broken promises in his life, God knew – a few thousand of them to himself. But this one he would keep.
   He climbed clumsily up to the top of the breakwater. It was rough and rocky, a really fine place to break an ankle. He looked around apathetically for his scuffed brown totebag, the one he always took with him when he went off to read, or just to ramble, thinking it might be lodged in one of the holes between the rocks, or maybe just lying there. It wasn't. It was an old campaigner, scuffed and battered, going back to the last troubled years of his marriage, something he had managed to hold onto while all the valuable things got lost. Well, now the tote was finally gone, too. Clothes, toothbrush, bar of soap in a plastic dish, a bunch of jerky meat-sticks (it amused Bobbi to cure jerky in her shed, sometimes), a twenty-dollar bill under the tote's bottom … and all his unpublished poems, of course.
   The poems were the least of his worries. The ones he had written over the last couple of years, and to which he had given the wonderfully witty and upbeat title 'The Radiation Cycle', had been submitted to five different publishers and rejected by all five. One anonymous editor had scribbled: 'Poetry and politics rarely mix; poetry and propaganda, never.' This little homily was perfectly true, he knew it … and still hadn't been able to stop.
   Well, the tide had administered the Ultimate Blue Pencil to them. Go and do thou likewise, he thought, and lurched slowly along the breakwater toward the beach, thinking that his walk out to where he had awakened must have been better than a death-defying circus act. He walked with the summer sun rising up red and bloated from the Atlantic behind him, his shadow trailing out in front of him, and on the beach a kid in jeans and a T-shirt set off a string of firecrackers.

2

   A marvel: his totebag wasn't lost after all. It was lying upside-down on the beach just above the high-tide line, unzipped, looking to Gardener like a big leather mouth biting at the sand. He picked it up and looked inside. Everything was gone. Even his frayed undies. He pulled up the tote's imitation leather bottom. The twenty was gone too. Fond hope, too quickly banish'd.
   Gardener dropped the tote. His notebooks, all three of them, lay a little further along the beach. One was resting on its covers in a tent shape, one lay soggily just below the high-tide line, swelled up to the size of a telephone book, and the wind was leafing through the third idly. Don't bother, Gardener thought. Lees of an ass.
   The kid with the firecrackers came toward him . but not too close. Wants to be able to take off in a hurry if I turn out to be as weird as I undoubtedly look, Gardener thought. Smart kid.
   'That your stuff ?' the kid asked. His T-shirt showed a guy blowing his groceries. SCHOOL LUNCH VICTIM, the shirt said.
   'Yeah,' Gardener said. He bent down and picked up the soggy notebook, looked at it for a moment and then tossed it down again.
   The kid handed him the other two. What could he say? Don't bother, kid? The poems suck, kid? Poetry and politics rarely mix, kid, poetry and progaganda never?
   'Thanks,' he said.
   'Sure.' The kid held the bag so Gardener could drop the two dry notebooks back inside. 'Surprised you got anything left at all. This place is full of ripoff artists in the summer. The park, I guess.'
   The kid gestured with his thumb and Gardener saw the roller coaster silhouetted against the sky. Gard's first thought was that he had somehow managed to roister all the way north to Old Orchard Beach before collapsing. A second look changed his mind. No pier.
   'Where am IT Gardener asked, and his mind harked back with an eerie totality to the jail-cell and the nose-picking deputy. For a moment he was sure the kid would say, Where do you think you are?
   'Arcadia Beach.' The kid looked half-amused, half-contemptuous. 'You must have really hung one on last night, mister.'
   'Last night, and the night before,' Gardener chanted, his voice a little rusty, a little eerie. 'Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.'
   The boy blinked at Gardener in surprise … and then delighted him by unexpectedly adding a couplet Gardener had never heard: 'Wanna go out, dunno if I can, cause I'm so afraid of the Tommyknocker man.'
   Gardener grinned … but the grin turned into a wince of fresh pain. Where'd you hear that, kid?'
   'My mom. When I was a baby.'
   'I heard about the Tommyknockers from my mother too,' Gardener said, 'but never that part.'
   The kid shrugged as if the topic had lost whatever marginal interest it might have had for him. 'She used to make all kinds of stuff up.' He appraised Gardener. 'Don't you ache?'
   'Kid,' Gardener said, leaning forward solemnly, 'in the immortal words of Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, I feel like homemade shit.'
   'You look like you been drunk a long time.'
   'Yeah? How would you know?'
   'My mom. With her it was always funny stuff like the Tommyknockers or too hungover to talk.'
   'She give it up?'
   'Yeah. Car crash,' the kid said.
   Gardener was suddenly racked with shivers. The boy appeared not to notice; he studied the sky, tracing the path of a gull. It coursed a morning sky of blue delicately shelled with mackerel scales, turning black for a moment as it flew in front of the sun's rising red eye. It landed on the breakwater, where it began to pick at something which gulls presumably found tasty.
   Gardener looked from the gull to the kid, feeling disconcerted and strange. All of this was taking on decidedly omenish tones. The kid knew about the fabled Tommyknockers. How many kids in the world knew about them, and what were the odds that Gardener would happen to stumble on one who both (a) knew about them and (b) had lost his mother because of drink?
   The kid reached in his pocket and brought out a small tangle of firecrackers. Sweet bird of youth, Gard thought, and smiled.
   'Want to light a couple? Celebrate the Fourth? Might cheer you up.
   'The Fourth? The Fourth of July? Is that what this is?'
   The kid gave him a dry smile. 'It ain't Arbor Day.'
   The twenty-sixth of June had been … he counted backwards. Good Christ. He had eight days which were painted black. Well … not quite. That actually would have been better. Patches of light, not at all welcome, were beginning to illuminate parts of that blackness. The idea that he had hurt someone – again – arose now in his mind as a certainty. Did he want to know who that
   (arglebargle)
   was, or what he had done to him or her? Probably not. Best to call Bobbi and finish himself before he remembered.
   'Mister, how'd you get that scar on your forehead?'
   'Ran into a tree while I was skiing.'
   'Bet it hurt.'
   'Yeah, even worse than this, but not by much. Do you know where there's a pay phone?'
   The kid pointed to an eccentric green-roofed manse which stood perhaps a mile down the beach. It topped a crumbling granite headland and looked like the cover of a paperback gothic. It had to be a resort. After a moment's fumbling, Gard came up with the name.
   'That's the Alhambra, isn't it?'
   'The one and only.'
   'Thanks,' he said, and started off.
   'Mister?'
   He turned.
   'Don't you want that last book?' The kid pointed to the wet notebook lying on the high-tide line. 'You could dry it out.'
   Gardener shook his head. 'Kid,' he said, 'I can't even dry me out.'
   'You sure you don't want to light off some firecrackers?'
   Gardener shook his head, smiling. 'Be careful with 'em, okay? People hurt themselves with things that go bang.'
   'Okay.' He smiled, a little shyly. 'My mother did for a long time before the, you know -'
   'I know. What's your name?'
   'Jack. What's yours?'
   'Gard.'
   'Happy Fourth of July, Gard.'
   'Happy Fourth, Jack. And watch out for the Tommyknockers.'
   'Knocking at my door,' the kid agreed solemnly, and looked at Gardener with eyes which seemed queerly knowing.
   For a moment Gardener seemed to feel a second premonition (whoever would have guessed a hangover was so conducive to the psychic emanations of the universe? a bitterly sarcastic voice inside asked). He didn't know what of, exactly, but it filled him with urgency about Bobbi again. He tipped the kid a wave and set off up the beach. He walked at a fast, steady pace, although the sand drew at his feet, clinging, pulling. Soon his heart was racing and his head was thudding so hard his eyeballs seemed to pulse.
   The Alhambra did not seem to be drawing appreciably closer.
   Slow down or you'll have a heart attack. Or a stroke. Or both.
   He did slow down … and then doing so struck him as palpably absurd. Here he was, planning to drown himself in fifteen minutes or so, but minding his heart in the meantime. It was like the old joke about the condemned man turning down the cigarette offered by the captain of the firing squad. 'I'm trying to quit,' the guy says.
   Gardener picked up his pace again, and now the bolts of pain began to beat out steady pulses of jingle-jangle verse:
   Late last night and the night before,
   Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers,
   Knocking at the door.
   I was crazy and Bobbi was sane
   But that was before the Tommyknockers came.
   He stopped. What is this Tommyknockers shit?
   instead of an answer, that deep voice, as terrifying and yet as sure as the voice of a loon crying out on an empty lake, came back: Bobbi's in trouble.
   He began to walk again, getting up to his former brisk pace … and then moving even faster. Wanna go out, he thought. Dunno if I can, cause I'm so afraid of the Tommyknocker man.
   He was climbing the weather-whitened stairs which led up the side of the granite headland from the beach to the hotel when he wiped his hand across his nose and saw that it was bleeding again.

3

   Gardener lasted exactly eleven seconds in the lobby of the Alhambra – long enough for the desk clerk to see he had no shoes on. The clerk nodded to a husky bellman when Gardener began to protest, and the two of them gave him the bum's rush.
   They would have booted me even if I had been wearing shoes, Gard reflected. Shit, I would have booted me.
   He had gotten a good look at himself in the glass of the lobby door. Too good. He had managed to mop most of the blood off his face with his sleeve, but there were still traces. His eyes were bloodshot and starey. His week's growth of beard made him look like a porcupine about six weeks after a shearing. In the genteel summer world of the Alhambra, where men were men and women wore tennis skirts, he looked like a male bag-lady.
   Because only the earliest risers had begun to stir, the bellman took the time to inform him there was a pay phone at the Mobil station.
   'Intersection of US 1 and Route 26. Now get the hell out before I call the cops.'
   If he had needed to know any more about himself than he already did, it was in the husky bellman's disgusted eyes.
   Gardener trudged slowly down the hill toward the gas station. His socks flapped and flailed against the tar. His heart knocked like a wheezy Model T engine that's experienced too much hard traveling and too little maintenance. He could feel the headache moving to the left, where it would eventually center in a brilliant pinpoint … if he'd had plans to live that long, anyway. And suddenly he was seventeen again.
   He was seventeen, and his obsession wasn't nukes but nooky. The girl's name was Annmarie and he thought he was going to make it with her pretty soon, maybe, if he didn't lose his nerve. If he kept his cool. Maybe even tonight. But part of keeping his cool was doing okay today. Today, right here, here being Straight Arrow, an intermediate ski trail at Victory Mountain in Vermont. He was looking down at his skis, mentally reviewing the steps necessary to come to your basic snowplow stop, reviewing as he would study for a test, wanting to pass, knowing he was still pretty new at this and Annmarie wasn't, and he somehow didn't think she would be so apt to come across if he ended up looking like Frosty the Snowman his first day off the beginners' slopes; he didn't mind looking a little inexperienced as long as he didn't look downright stupid, so there he had been, looking stupidly down at his feet instead of where he was going, which was directly at a gnarled old pine with the warning red stripe painted on its bark, and the only sounds were the wind in his ears and the snow sliding dryly under his skis, and they were the same soothing hush-a-bye sound: Shhhhhh …
   It was the rhyme that broke into the memory, making him stop near the Mobil station. The rhyme came and it stayed, beating in time with his heart and throbbing head. Late last night and the night before, Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.
   Gard hawked, tasted the coppery, unpleasant flavor of his own blood, and spat a reddish glob of phlegm into the trash-littered dirt of the soft shoulder. He remembered asking his mother who or what Tommyknockers were. He couldn't remember what, if anything, she had replied, but he knew he'd always thought they must be highwaymen, robbers who stole by moonlight, killed in shadow, and buried in the darkest part of the night. And hadn't he spent one tortured, endless half-hour in the darkness of his bedroom before sleep finally decided to be merciful and claim him, thinking they might be cannibals as well as robbers? That instead of burying their victims in the dark of the night, they might have cooked them and … well …
   Gardener wrapped his thin arms (there didn't seem to be any restaurants up in the cyclone) around his chest and shuddered.
   He crossed to the Mobil station, which was hung with bunting but not yet open. The signs out front read SUPERUNLEADED .89 and GOD BLESS AMERICA and WE LUV WINNEBAGOS! The pay phone was on the side of the building. Gardener was grateful to find it was one of the new ones; you could dial long distance without depositing any money. That at least spared him the indignity of spending part of his last morning on earth panhandling.
   He punched zero, then had to stop. His hand was shaking wildly, it was all over the place. He cocked the phone between head and shoulder this time, leaving both hands free. Grasped his right wrist with his left hand to hold the hand steady … as steady as possible, anyway. Now, looking like a shooter on a target range, he used his forefinger to punch the buttons with slow and horrible deliberation. The robot voice told him to either punch in his telephone credit-card number (a task Gard thought he would have been utterly incapable of performing, even if he'd had such a card) or zero for an operator. Gardener hit zero.
   'Hi, happy holiday, this is Eileen,' a voice chirruped brightly. 'May I have your billing, please?'
   'Hi, Eileen, happy holiday to you, too,' Gard said. 'I'd like to bill the call collect to anyone from Jim Gardener.'
   'Thank you, Jim.'
   'You're welcome,' he said, and then, suddenly: 'No, change that. Tell her it's Gard calling.'
   As Bobbi's telephone began to ring up there in Haven, Gardener turned and looked toward the rising sun. It was even redder than before, rising toward the scud of thickening mackerel-scale clouds like a great round blister in the sky. The sun and the clouds together brought another childhood rhyme to mind: Red sky at night, sailor's delight. Red sky at morning, sailor, take warning. Gard didn't know about red sky at morning, or at night, but he knew those delicate scales of cloud were a reliable harbinger of rain.
   Too goddam many rhymes for a man's last morning on earth, he thought irritably, and then: I'm going to wake you up, Bobbi. Going to wake you up, but I promise you I'll never do it again.
   But there was no Bobbi to wake up. The phone rang, that was all. Rang … and rang … and rang.
   'Your party doesn't answer,' the operator told him, just in case he was deaf or had maybe forgotten what he was doing for a few seconds and had been holding the phone against his asshole instead of his ear. 'Would you like to try again later?'
   Yeah, maybe. But it'd have to be by Ouija board, Eileen.
   'Okay,' he said. 'You have a good one.'
   'Thank you, Gard!'
   He pulled the phone away from his ear as if it had bitten him and stared at it. For a moment she had sounded so much like Bobbi … so goddam much …
   He put the phone back and got as far as, 'What did you – 'before realizing that cheerful Eileen had clicked off.
   Eileen. Eileen, not Bobbi. But
   She had called him Gard. Bobbi was the only one who
   No, change that. Tell her it's Gard calling.
   There. Perfectly reasonable explanation.
   Then why didn't it seem that way?
   He hung up slowly. He stood at the side of the Mobil station in his wet socks and shrunken pants and untucked shirt, his shadow long and long. A phalanx of motorcycles went by on Route 1, headed for Maine.
   Bobbi's in trouble.
   Will you please just let that go? It's boolsheet, as Bobbi herself would say. Somebody tell you the only holiday you could go home for was Christmas? She went back to Utica for The Glorious Fourth, that's all.
   Yes. Of course. Bobbi was about as likely to go back to Utica for the Fourth as he was to apply as an intern at the new Bay State nuclear plant. Anne would probably celebrate the holiday by ramming a few M-80s up Bobbi's cooze and lighting them off.
   Well, maybe she got invited to be parade marshal – or sheriff marshall, ha-ha
   – in one of those cow-towns she's always writing about. Deadwood, Abilene, Dodge City, someplace like that. You did what you could. Now finish what you started.
   His mind made no effort to argue; he could have dealt with that. Instead it only reiterated its original thesis: Bobbi's in trouble.
   Just an excuse, you chickenshit bastard.
   He didn't think so. Intuition was solidifying into certainty. And whether it was boolsheet or not, that voice continued to insist that Bobbi was in a jam. Until he knew one way or the other for sure, he supposed he could table his personal business. As he had told himself not long ago, the ocean wasn't going anywhere.
   'Maybe the Tommyknockers got her,' he said out loud, and then laughed – a scared, husky little laugh. He was going crazy, all right.

Chapter 7. Gardener Arrives

1

   Shushhhhh …
   He's staring down at his skis, plain brown wood strips racing over the snow. He started looking down just to make sure he was keeping the skis nice and parallel, not wanting to look like a snowbunny with no business here after all. Now he's almost hypnotized by the liquid speed of his skis, by the crystal flicker of snow passing in a steady white strip, six inches wide, between the skis. He doesn't realize his state of semi-hypnosis until Annmarie screams: 'Gard, watch out! Watch out!'
   It's like being roused from a light doze. That's when he realizes he's been in a semi-trance, that he has been looking down at that shiny, flowing strip far too long.
   Annmarie screams: 'Stem christie! Gard! Stem christie!'
   She screams again, and this time is she telling him to fall down, just fall down? Christ, you could break a leg that way!
   In these last few seconds before the crunching impact, he still can't comprehend how things got serious so fast.
   He has somehow managed to drift far off to the left side of the trail. Pines and spruces, their blue-gray branches heavy with snow, are blurring past less than three yards from him. A rock poking out of the snow blips by; his left ski has missed it by inches. He realizes with cold horror that he has lost all control, has forgotten everything Annmarie has taught him, maneuvers that seemed so easy on the kiddie slopes.
   And now he's going … what? Twenty miles an hour? Thirty? Forty? Cold air cuts against his face and he sees the line of trees at the edge of the Straight Arrow trail getting ever closer. His own straight arrow has become a mild diagonal. Mild, but enough to be deadly, just the same. He sees his path will soon take him off the trail completely and then he will stop, you bet, then he will stop very quickly.
   She shrieks again and he thinks: Stem christie? Did she really say that? I can't even snowplow for beans and she wants me to do a stem christie?
   He tries to turn right but his skis remain stubbornly on course. Now he can see the tree he'll hit, a big, hoary old pine. A red stripe has been painted around its gnarly trunk – a wholly unnecessary danger signal.
   He tries again to turn but he's forgotten how to do it.
   The tree swells, seeming to rush toward him while he himself remains still; he can see jagged knobs, splintery groping butts of branches on which he may impale himself, he can see nicks in the old bark, he can see drips where the red paint has run.
   Annmarie shrieks again and he's aware he himself is screaming.
   Shusshhhhhh….

2

   'Mister? Mister, are you all right?'
   Gardener sat up suddenly, startled, expecting to pay for the movement with a whacking thud of pain through his head. There was none. He experienced a moment of nauseous vertigo that might have come from hunger, but his head was clear. The headache had passed in its sudden way while he slept – perhaps even while he was dreaming of his accident.
   'I'm okay,' he said, looking around. His head thudded now – but against a drum. A girl in cutoff denim jeans laughed. 'You're supposed to use sticks on those, man, not your head. You were mumbling in your sleep.'
   He saw he was in a van – and now everything fell into place. 'Was I?'
   'Yeah. Not good mumbles.'
   'It wasn't a good dream,' Gardener said.
   'Have a hit off this,' the girl said, and handed him a joint. The roach-clip it was in, he saw, was a golden oldie: Richard Nixon in a blue suit, fingers thrust up in the characteristic double-V gesture that probably not even the oldest of the five other people in this van remembered. 'Guaranteed to cure all bad dreams,' the girl added solemnly.
   That's what they told me about the booze, Lady Day. But sometimes they lie. Take it from me. Sometimes they lie.
   He took a small hit off the joint for politeness' sake and felt his head begin to swim almost at once. He handed it back to the girl, who was sitting against the van's sliding door, and said: 'I'd rather have something to eat.'
   'Got a box of crackers,' the driver said, and handed it back. 'We ate everything else. Beaver even ate the fucking prunes. Sorry.'
   'Beaver'd eat anything,' the girl in the cutoffs said.
   The kid in the van's shotgun seat looked back. He was a plump boy with a wide, pleasant face. 'Untrue,' he said. 'Untrue. I'd never eat my mother.'
   At that they were all laughing wildly, Gardener included. When he was able, he said: 'The crackers are fine. Really.' And they were. He ate slowly at first, tentatively, monitoring his works closely for signs of rebellion. There were none and he began to eat faster and faster, until he was gobbling the crackers in big handfuls, his stomach snarling and yapping.
   When had he last eaten? He didn't know. It was lost in the blackout. He did know from previous experience that he never ate much when he was busy trying to drink up the world – and a lot of what he tried to eat either ended up in his lap or down his shirt. That made him think of the big greasy pizza he had eaten – tried to eat – Thanksgiving evening, 1980. The night he had shot Nora through the cheeks.
   – or you could have severed one or both optic nerves! Nora's lawyer suddenly shouted furiously at him inside his head. Partial or total blindness! Paralysis! Death! All that bullet had to do was chip one tooth to go flying off in any direction, any damned direction at all! Just one! And don't sit there and try any bullshit like how you didn't mean to kill her, either. You shoot a person in the head, what else are you trying to do?
   The depression came rolling back – big, black, and a mile high. Should have killed yourself, Gard. Shouldn't have waited.
   Bobbi's in trouble.
   Well, maybe so. But getting help from a guy like you is like hiring a pyromaniac to fix the oil-burner.
   Shut up.
   You're wasted, Gard. Fried. What that kid back there on the beach would undoubtedly call a burnout.
   'Mister, you sure you're all right?' the girl asked. Her hair was red, cut punkily short. Her legs went approximately up to her chin.
   'Yeah,' he said. 'Did I look not all right?'
   'For a minute there you looked terrible,' she answered gravely. That made him grin – not what she'd said but the solemnity with which she'd said it – and she grinned back, relieved.
   He looked out the window and saw they were headed north on the Maine Turnpike – only up to mile thirty-six, so he couldn't have slept too long. The feathery mackerel scales of two hours ago were beginning to merge into a toneless gray that promised rain by afternoon – before he got to Haven, it would probably be dark and he would be soaked.
   After hanging up the telephone at the Mobil station, he had stripped off his socks and tossed them into the wastecan on one of the gasoline islands. Then he walked over to Route 1 northbound in his bare feet and stood on the shoulder, old totebag in one hand, the thumb of his other out and cocked north.
   Twenty minutes later this van had come along – a fairly new Dodge Caravel with Delaware plates. A pair of electric guitars, their necks crossed like swords, were painted on the side, along with the name of the group inside: THE EDDIE PARKER BAND. It pulled over and Gardener ran to it, panting, totebag banging his leg, headache pulsing white-hot pain into the left side of his head. In spite of the pain, he had been amused by the slogan carefully lettered across the van's back doors: IF EDDIE's ROCKIN', DON'T COME KNOCKIN'.
   Now, sitting on the floor in back and reminding himself not to turn around quickly and thump the snare drum again, Gardener saw the Old Orchard exit coming up. At the same time, the first drops of rain hit the windshield.
   'Listen,' Eddie said, pulling over, 'I hate to leave you off like this. It's starting to rain and you don't even have any fuckin' shoes.'
   'I'll be all right.'
   'You don't look so all right,' the girl in the cutoffs said softly.
   Eddie whipped off his hat (DON'T BLAME ME; I VOTED FOR HOWARD THE DUCK written over the visor) and said: 'Cough up, you guys.' Wallets appeared; change jingled in jeans pockets.
   'No! Hey, thanks, but no!' Gardener felt hot blood rush into his cheeks and burn there. Not embarrassment but outright shame. Somewhere inside him he felt a strong painful thud – it didn't rattle his teeth or bones. It was, he thought, his soul taking some final fall. It sounded melodramatic as bell. As for how it felt … well, it just felt real. That was the horrible part about it. Just … real. Okay, he thought. That's what it feels like. All your life you've heard people talk about hitting bottom, this is what it feels like. Here it is. James Gardener, who was going to be the Ezra Pound of his generation, taking spare change from a Delaware bar band.
   'Really … no – '
   Eddie Parker went on passing the hat just the same. There was a bunch of change and a few one-dollar bills in it. Beaver got the hat last. He tossed in a couple of quarters.
   'Look,' Gardener said, 'I appreciate it, but
   'C'mon, Beaver,' Eddie said. 'Cough up, you fuckin' Scrooge.'
   'Really, I have friends in Portland, I'll just call a few up . . . and I think I might have left my checkbook with this one guy I know in Falmouth,' Gardener added wildly.
   'Bea-ver's a Scrooge,' the girl in the cutoffs began to chant gleefully. 'Bea-ver's a Scrooge, Bea-ver's a Scrooge!' The others picked it up until Beaver, laughing and rolling his eyes, added another quarter and a New York Lottery ticket.
   'There, I'm tapped,' he said, 'unless you want to wait around for the prunes to work.' The guys in the band and the girl in the cutoffs were laughing wildly again. Looking resignedly at Gardener, as if to say, You see the morons I have to deal with? You dig it?, Beaver handed the hat to Gardener, who had to take it; if he hadn't, the change would have rolled all over the van floor.
   'Really,' he said, trying to give the hat back to Beaver. 'I'm perfectly okay – '
   'You ain't,' Eddie Parker said. 'So cut the bullshit, what do you say?'
   'I guess I say thanks,' Gardener said. 'It's all I can think of right now.'
   'Well, it ain't so much you'll have to declare it on your income taxes,' Eddie said. 'But it'?] buy you some burgers and a pair of those rubber sandals.'
   The girl slid open the door in the Caravel's sidewall. 'Get better, understand?' she said. Then, before he could reply, she hugged him and gave him a kiss, her mouth moist, friendly, half-open, and redolent of pot. 'Take care, big guy.'
   'I'll try.' On the verge of getting out he suddenly hugged her again, fiercely. 'Thank you. Thank you all.'
   He stood in the breakdown lane of the ramp, the rain failing a little harder now, watching as the van's sidewall door rumbled shut on its track. The girl waved. Gardener waved back and then the van was rolling down the breakdown lane, gathering speed, finally sliding over into the travel lane. Gardener watched them go, one hand still raised in a wave in case they might be looking back. Tears were running freely down his cheeks now, to mix with the rain.

3

   He never did get a chance to buy a pair of rubber sandals, but he got to Haven before dark and he didn't have to walk the last ten or so miles to Bobbi's house, as he'd thought he might; you'd think people would be more apt to pick up a guy hitching in the rain, but that was just when they were most likely to pass you by. Who needed a human puddle in the passenger seat?
   But he got a ride outside of Augusta with a farmer who complained constantly and bitterly about the government all the way up to the China town line, where he let Gard out. Gard walked a couple of miles, thumbing the few cars that passed, wondering if his feet were turning to ice or if it was just his imagination, when a pulp-truck pulled to a rackety halt beside him.
   Gardener climbed into the cab as fast as he could. It smelled of old woodchips and sour loggers' sweat … but it was warm.
   'Thanks,' he said.
   'Don't mention it,' the driver said. 'Name's Freeman Moss.' He stuck out a hand. Gardener, who had no idea that he would meet this man in the not-too-distant future under far less cheery circumstances, took it and shook it.
   'Jim Gardener. Thanks again.'
   'Shoot a pickle,' Freeman Moss scoffed. He got the truck moving. It shuddered along the edge of the road, picking up speed, Gard thought, not just grudgingly but with actual pain. Everything shook. The universal moaned beneath them like a hag in a chimney corner. The world's oldest toothbrush, its eroded bristles dark with the grease it had been employed to coax out of some clotted gear– or cog-tooth, chittered along the dashboard, passing an old air freshener of a naked woman with very large breasts on its way. Moss punched the clutch, managed to find second after an endless time spent grinding gears, and wrestled the pulp-truck back onto the road. 'Y'look half-drowned. Got half a thermos of coffee from the Drunken Donuts in Augusta left over from my dinner … you want it?'
   Gardener drank it gratefully. It was strong, hot, and heavily laced with sugar. He also accepted a cigarette from the driver, dragging deeply and with pleasure, although it hurt his throat, which was getting steadily sorer.
   Moss dropped him off just over the Haven town line at quarter to seven. The rain had slacked off, and the sky was lightening up in the west. 'Do believe God's gonna let through some sunset,' the driver said. 'I wish like hell I had a pair of shoes I could give you, mister – I usually carry an old pair of sneakers behind the seat, but it was so rainy today I never brought nothin' but m'gumrubbers.'
   'Thanks, but I'll be fine. My friend is less than a mile up the road.' Actually Bobbi's place was still three miles away, but if he told Moss that, nothing would do but that he drive Gardener up there. Gardener was tired, increasingly feverish, still damp even after forty-five minutes of the heater's dry, blasting air … but he couldn't stand any more kindness today. In his present state of mind it could well drive him crazy.
   'Okay. Good luck.'
   'Thank you.'
   He got down and waved as the truck turned off on a side-road and rumbled away toward home.
   Even after Moss and his museum piece of a truck had disappeared, Gardener stood where he was for a moment longer, his wet totebag in one hand, his bare feet, white as Easter lilies, planted in the dirt of the soft shoulder, looking at the marker some two hundred feet back the way he had come. Home is the place where, when you have got there, they have to take you in, Frost had said. But he'd do well to remember he wasn't home. Maybe the worst mistake a man could make was to get to the idea that his friend's home was his own, especially when the friend was a woman whose bed you had once shared.
   Not home, not at all – but he was in Haven.
   He started to walk up the road toward Bobbi's house

4

   About fifteen minutes later, when the clouds in the west finally broke open to let through the westering sun, something strange happened: a burst of music, loud, clear, and brief, went through Gardener's head.
   He stopped, looking at the sunlight as it spilled across rolling miles of wet woods and hayfields in the west, the rays beaming down like the dramatic sunrays in a DeMille Bible epic. Route 9 began to rise here, and the western view was long and gorgeous and solemn, the evening's light somehow English and pastoral in its clear beauty. The rain had given the landscape a sleek, washed look, deepening colors, seeming to fulfill the texture of things. Gardener was suddenly very glad he had not committed suicide – not in any corny Art Linkletter way, but because he had been allowed this moment of beauty and perceptual glow. Standing here, now almost at the end of his energy, feverish and sick, he felt a child's simple wonder.
   All was still and silent in the final sunshine of evening. He could see no sign of industry or technology. Humanity, yes: a big red barn attached to a white farmhouse, sheds, a trailer or two, but that was all.
   The light. It was the light that struck him so strongly.
   Its sweet clarity, so old and deep – those rays of sun slanting almost horizontally through the unraveling clouds as this long, confusing, exhausting day neared its end. That ancient light seemed to deny time itself, and Gardener almost expected to hear a huntsman winding his horn, announcing 'All Assemble.' He would hear dogs, and horses' hooves, and and that was when the music, jarring and modern, blasted through his head, scattering all thought. His hands flew to his temples in a startled gesture. The burst lasted at least five seconds, perhaps as long as ten, and what he heard was perfectly identifiable; it was Dr Hook singing 'Baby Makes Her Blue Jeans Talk.'
   The lyric was tinny but clear enough – as if he were listening to a small transistor radio, the kind that people used to take to the beach with them before that punk-rock group Walkman and the Ghetto-Blasters had taken over the world. But it wasn't pouring into his ears, that lyric; it was coming from the front of his head … from the place where the doctors had filled a hole in his skull with a piece of metal.
   'The queen of all the nightbirds,
   A player in the dark,
   She don't say nothing
   But baby makes her blue jeans talk.'
   The volume was so loud it was almost unbearable. It had happened to him once before, this music in his head, after he'd stuck his finger into a light socket – and was he drunk at the time? My dear, does a dog piss on a fireplug?
   He had discovered such musical visitations were neither hallucinatory nor all that rare – people had gotten radio transmissions on the lawn flamingoes in their yards; on teeth fillings; on the steel rims of their spectacles. For a week and a half in 1957 a family in Charlotte, North Carolina, had received signals from a classical-music station in Florida. They first heard them coming from the bathroom water glass. Soon other glasses in the house began to pick up the sound. Before it ended, the whole house was filled with the eerie sound of glassware broadcasting Bach and Beethoven, the music broken only by an occasional time-check. Finally, with a dozen violins holding one long, high note, almost all the glasses in the house shattered spontaneously and the phenomenon ceased.
   So Gardener had known he wasn't alone, and had been sure he wasn't going crazy – but that wasn't much comfort, and it never had been as loud as this after the light-socket incident.
   The sound of Dr Hook faded as quickly as it had come. Gardener stood tensely, waiting for it to come back. It didn't. What came instead, louder and more urgent than before, was a repetition of what had gotten him going in the first place: Bobbi's in trouble!
   He turned away from the western view and started up Route 9 again. And although he was feverish and very tired, he walked fast – in fact, before long he was almost running.

5

   It was seven-thirty when Gardener finally arrived at Bobbi's – what the locals still called the old Garrick place even after all these years. Gardener came swinging up the road, puffing, his color high and unhealthy. Here was the Rural Free Delivery box, its door slightly ajar, the way both Bobbi and Joe Paulson, the mailman, left it so it would be easier for Peter to paw open. There was the driveway, with Bobbi's blue pickup truck parked in it. The stuff in the truck bed had been covered with a tarp to protect it from the rain. And there was the house itself, with a light shining through the east window, the one where Bobbi kept her rocker and did her reading.
   Everything looked all right; not a single sour note. Five years ago – even three -Peter would have barked at the arrival of a stranger outside, but Peter had gotten older. Hell, they all had.
   Standing out here, Bobbi's place held the sort of quiet, pastoral loveliness that the western view at the town line had held for him – it represented all the things Gardener wished he had for himself. A sense of peace, or maybe just a sense of place. Certainly he could see nothing odd as he stood here by the mailbox. It looked – felt – like the house of a person who is content with herself. Not completely at rest, exactly, or retired, or checked out from the world's concerns … but rocking steady. This was the house of a sane, relatively happy woman. It had not been built in the tornado belt.
   All the same, something was wrong.
   He stood there, the stranger out here in the dark,
   (but I'm not a stranger I'm a friend her friend Bobbi's friend … aren't I?)
   and a sudden, frightening impulse rose within him: to leave. Just turn on one bare heel and bug out. Because he suddenly doubted if he wanted to find out what was going on inside that house, what kind of trouble Bobbi had gotten herself into.
   (Tommyknockers Gard that's what kind Tommyknockers)
   He shivered.
   (late last night and the night before Tommyknockers Tommyknockers at Bobbi's door and I don't know if you can)
   Stop it.
   (because Gard's so afraid of the Tommyknocker man)
   He licked his lips, trying to tell himself it was just the fever that made them feel so dry.
   Get out, Gard! Blood on the moon!
   The fear was now very deep indeed, and if it had been anyone but Bobbi – anyone but his last real friend – he would have split, all right. The farmhouse looked rustic and pleasant, the light spilling from the east window was cozy and all looked well … but the boards and the glass, the stones in the driveway, the very air pressing against his face … all these things screamed at him to leave, get out, that things inside that house were bad, dangerous, perhaps even evil.
   (Tommyknockers)
   But whatever else was in there, Bobbi was too. He hadn't come all these miles, most in the pouring rain, to turn and run at the last second. So, in spite of the dread, he left the mailbox and started up the driveway, moving slowly, wincing as the sharp stones dug at the tender soles of his feet.
   Then the front door jerked open, startling his heart up into his throat in a single nimble bound and he thought It's one of them, one of the Tommyknockers, it's going to rush down here and grab me and eat me up! He was barely able to stifle a scream.
   The silhouette in the doorway was thin – much too thin, he thought, to be Bobbi Anderson. who had never been beefy but who was solidly built and pleasantly round in all the right places. But the voice, shrill and wavering though it was, was unmistakably Bobbi's … and Gardener relaxed a little, because Bobbi sounded even more terrified than he felt, standing by the mailbox and looking at the house.
   'Who is it? Who's there?'
   'It's Gard, Bobbi.'
   There was a long pause. There were footfalls on the porch.
   Cautiously: 'Gard? Is it really you?'
   'Yeah.' He worked his way over the hard, biting stones of the driveway to the lawn. And he asked the question he had come all this way and deferred his own suicide to ask: 'Bobbi, are you all right?'
   The quaver left Bobbi's voice, but Gardener could still not see her clearly – the sun had long since gone behind the trees, and the shadows were thick. He wondered where Peter was.
   'I'm fine,' Bobbi said, just as if she had always looked so terribly thin, just as though she had always greeted arrivals in her dooryard with a shrill voice full of fear.
   She came down the porch steps, and passed out of the shadow of the overhanging porch roof. As she did, Gardener got his first good look at her in the ashy twilight. He was struck by horror and wonder.
   Bobbi was coming toward him, smiling, obviously delighted to see him. Her jeans fluttered and flapped on her, and so did her shirt; her face was gaunt, her eyes deep in their sockets, her forehead pale and somehow too wide, the skin taut and shiny. Bobbi's uncombed hair flopped against the nape of her neck and lay over her shoulders like waterweed cast up on a beach. The shirt was buttoned wrong. The fly of her jeans was three-quarters of the way down. She smelled dirty and sweaty and … well. as if she might have had an accident in her pants and then forgotten to change them.
   A picture suddenly flashed into Gardener's mind: a photo of Karen Carpenter taken shortly before her death, which had allegedly resulted from anorexia nervosa. It had seemed to him the picture of a woman already dead but somehow alive, a woman who was all smiling teeth and shrieking feverish eyes. Bobbi looked like that now.
   Surely she had lost no more than twenty pounds – that was all she could afford to lose and stay on her feet – but Gard's shocked mind kept insisting it was more like thirty, had to be.
   She seemed to be on the last raggedy end of exhaustion. Her eyes, like the eyes of that poor lost woman on the magazine cover, were huge and glittery, her smile the huge brainless grin of a KO'd fighter just before his knees come unhinged.
   'Fine!' this shambling, dirty, stumbling skeleton reiterated, and as Bobbi approached, Gardener could hear the waver in her voice again – not fear, as he'd thought, but utter exhaustion. 'Thought you'd given up on me! Good to see you, man!'
   'Bobbi … Bobbi, Jesus Christ, what .
   Bobbi was holding out a hand for Gardener to shake. It trembled wildly in the air, and Gardener saw how thin, how woefully, incredibly thin Bobbi Anderson's arm had become.
   'A lot of stuff going on,' Bobbi croaked in her wavering voice. 'A lot of work done, a hell of a lot more left to do, but I'm getting there, getting there, wait'll you see – '
   'Bobbi, what
   'Fine, I'm fine,' Bobbi repeated, and she fell forward, semi-conscious, into Gardener's arms. She tried to say something else but only a loose gargle and a little spit came out. Her breasts were small, wasted pads against his forearm.
   Gardener picked her up, shocked by how light she was. Yes, it was thirty, at least thirty. It was incredible, but not, unfortunately, deniable. He felt recognition that was both shocking and miserable: This isn't Bobbi at all. It's me. Me at the end of a jag.
   He carried Bobbi swiftly up the steps and into the house.