The Tommyknockers

'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 f**king 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 f**king 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 f**king 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 ass**le!' 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!'