The Tommyknockers

Running out of friends? Or running them out? Which is it, Gard?

At first hugging her was like hugging an ironing board and he was afraid she would try to pull away and he would make the mistake of trying to hold on, but she finally softened.

'I want breakfast,' he said, 'and to say I'm sorry.'

'It's all right,' she said, and turned away before he could see her face - but her voice held that dry briskness that meant she was either crying or near it. 'I keep forgetting it's bad manners to offer money to Yankees.'

Well, he didn't know if it was bad manners or not, but he would not take money from Bobbi. Never had, never would.

The New England Poetry Caravan, however, was a different matter.

Grab that chicken, son, Ron Cummings, who needed money about as much as the Pope needed a new hat, would have said. The bitch is too slow to run and too fat to pass up.

The New England Poetry Caravan paid cash. Coin of the realm for poetry - three hundred up front and three hundred at the end of the tour. The word made flesh, as you might say. But hard cash, it was understood, was only part of the deal.

The rest of the deal was THE TAB.

While you were on tour, you took advantage of every opportunity. You got your meals from room service, your hair cut in the hotel barbershop if there was one, brought your extra pair of shoes (if you had one) and put them out one night instead of your regulars so you could get the extras shined up.

Then there were the in-room movies, movies you never got a chance to see in a theater, because theaters persisted in wanting money for much the same thing poets, even the very good ones, were for some reason supposed to provide for free or next to it - three bags of spuds = one (1) sonnet, for instance. There was a room charge for the movies, of course, but what of that? You didn't even have to put them On THE TAB; some computer did it automatically, and all Gardener had to say on the subject was God bless and keep THE TAB, and bring those f**kers on! He watched everything, from Emmanuelle in New York (finding the part where the girl flogs the guy's doggy under a table at Windows on the World particularly artistic and uplifting; it certainly uplifted part of him, anyway) to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to Rainbow Brite and the Star-Stealer.

And that's what I'm going to do now, he thought, rubbing his throat and thinking about the taste of good aged whiskey. EXACTLY what I'm going to do. Just sit here and watch them all over again, even Rainbow Brite. And for lunch I'm going to order three bacon cheeseburgers and eat one cold at three o'clock. Maybe skip Rainbow Brite and take a nap. Stay in tonight. Go to bed early. And stand it off.

Bobbi Anderson tripped over a three-inch tongue of metal protruding from the earth.

Jim Gardener tripped over Ron Cummings.

Different objects, same result.

For want of a nail.

Ron popped in around the same time that, some two hundred and ten miles away, Anderson and Peter were finally getting home from their less-than-normal trip to the vet's. Cummings suggested they go down to the hotel bar and have a drink or ten.

'Or,' Ron continued brightly, 'we could just skip the foreplay and get shitfaced.'

If he had put it more delicately, Gard might have been okay. Instead, he found himself in the bar with Ron Cummings, raising a jolly Jack Daniel's to his lips and telling himself the old one about how he could choke it off when he really wanted to.

Ron Cummings was a good, serious poet who just happened to have money practically falling out of his ass**le ... or so he often told people. 'I am my own de Medici,' he would say; 'I have money practically falling out of my ass**le.' His family had been in textiles for roughly nine hundred years and owned most of southern New Hampshire. They thought Ron was crazy, but because he was the second son, and because the first one was not crazy (i.e., interested in textiles), they let Ron do what he wanted to do, which was write poems, read poems, and drink almost constantly. He was a narrow young man with a TB face. Gardener had never seen him eat anything but beer-nuts and goldfish crackers. To his dubious credit, he had no idea of Gardener's own problem with booze ... or the fact that he had come very close to killing his wife while drunk.

'Okay,' Gardener said. 'I'm up for it. Let's get "faced".'

After a few drinks in the hotel bar, Ron suggested that a couple of smart fellers like them could find a place with entertainment a tad more exciting than the piped-in Muzak drifting down from the overhead speakers. 'I think my heart can take it,' Ron said. 'I mean, I'm not sure, but - '

God hates a coward,' Gardener finished.

Ron cackled, clapped him on the back, and called for THE TAB. He signed it with a flourish and then added a generous tip from his money clip. 'Let's boogie, m'man.' And off they went.

The late-afternoon sun lanced Gardener's eyes like glass spears and it suddenly occurred to him that this might be a bad idea.

'Listen, Ron,' he said, 'I think maybe I'll just - '

Cummings clapped him on the shoulder, his formerly pale cheeks flushed, his formerly watery blue eyes blazing (to Gard, Cummings now looked rather like Toad of Toad Hall after the acquisition of his motor-car), and cajoled: 'Don't crap out on me now, Jim! Boston lies before us, so various and new, glistening like the fresh ejaculate of a young boy's first wetdream

Gardener burst into helpless gales of laughter.

'That's more like the Gardener we've all come to know and love,' Ron said, cackling himself.

'God hates a coward,' Gardener said. 'Hail us a cab, Ronnie.'

He saw it then: the funnel in the sky. Big and black and getting closer. Soon it was going to touch down and carry him away.

Not to Oz, though.

A cab pulled over to the curb. They got in. The driver asked them where they wanted to go.

'Oz,' Gardener muttered.

Ron cackled. 'What he means is someplace where they drink fast and dance faster. Think you can manage that?'

'Oh, I think so,' the driver said, and pulled out.

Gardener draped an arm around Ron's shoulders and cried: 'Let the wild rumpus start!'

'I'll drink to that,' Ron said.

2

Gardener awoke the next morning fully dressed in a tubful of cold water. His best set of clothes - which he'd had the misfortune to be wearing when he and Ron Cummings set sail the day before - were bonding themselves slowly to his skin. He looked at his fingers and saw they were very white and very pruney. Fishfingers. He'd been here for a while, apparently. The water might even have been hot when he climbed in. He didn't remember.

He opened the tub's drain. Saw a bottle of bourbon standing on the toilet seat. It was half-full, its surface bleary with some sort of grease. He picked it up. The grease smelled vaguely of fried chicken. Gardener was more interested in the aroma coming from inside the bottle. Don't do this, he thought, but the neck of the bottle was rapping against his teeth before the thought was even half-finished. He had a drink. Blacked out again.

When he came to, he was standing naked in his bedroom with the phone to his ear and the vague idea that he had just finished dialing a number. Whose? He had no idea until Cummings answered. Cummings sounded even worse than Gardener felt. Gardener would have sworn this was impossible.

'How bad was it?' Gardener heard himself ask. It was always this way when he was in the grip of the cyclone; even when he was conscious, everything seemed to have the gray grainy texture of a tabloid photograph, and he never seemed to exactly be inside of himself. A lot of the time he seemed to be floating above his own head, like a kid's silvery Puffer balloon. 'How much trouble did we get into?'

'Trouble?' Cummings repeated, and then fell silent. At least Gardener thought he was thinking. Hoped he was thinking. Or maybe dreaded the idea. He waited, his hands very cold. 'No trouble,' Cummings said at last, and Gard relaxed a little. 'Except for my head, that is. I got my head in plenty of trouble. Jee-zus!'

'You sure? Nothing? Nothing at all?'

He was thinking of Nora.

Shot your wife, uh? a voice spoke up suddenly in his mind - the voice of the deputy with the comic book. Good f**king deal.

'We-ell . . .' Cummings said reflectively, and then stopped.

Gardener's hand clenched tight on the phone again.

'Well what?' Suddenly the lights in the room were too bright. Like the sun when they had stepped out of the hotel late yesterday afternoon.

You did something. You had another f**king blackout and did another stupid thing. Or crazy thing. Or horrible thing. When are you going to learn to leave it alone? Or can you learn?

An exchange from an old movie clanged stupidly into his mind.

Evil El Comandante: Tomorrow before daybreak, senor, you will be dead! You have seen the sun for the last time!

Brave Americano: Yeah, but you'll be bald for the rest of your life.

'What was it?' he asked Ron. 'What did I do?'

'You got into an argument with some guys at a place called The Stone Country Bar and Grille,' Cummings said. He laughed a little. 'Ow! Christ, when it hurts to laugh, you know you abused yourself. You remember The Stone Country Bar and Grille and them thar good ole boys, James, my dear?'

He said he didn't. By really straining, he could remember a place called Smith Brothers. The sun had just been going down in a kettle of blood, and this being late June, that meant it had been ... what? eight-thirty? quarter of nine? about five hours after he and Ron had gotten started, give or take. He could remember the sign outside bore the likeness of the famous cough-drop siblings. He could remember arguing furiously about Wallace Stevens with Cummings, shouting to be heard over the juke, which had been thundering out something by John Fogarty. It was where the last jagged edges of memory came to a halt.

'It was the place with the WAYLON JENNINGS FOR PRESIDENT bumper-sticker over the bar,' Cummings said. 'That refresh the old noggin?'

'No,' Gardener said miserably.

'Well, you got into an argument with a couple of the good ole boys. Words were passed. These words grew first warm and then hot. A punch was thrown.'

'By me?' Gardener's voice was now only dull.

'By you,' Cummings agreed cheerfully. 'At which point we flew through the air with the greatest of ease, landing on the sidewalk. I thought we got off pretty cheap, to tell you the truth. You had them frothing, Jim.'

'Was it about Seabrook or Chernobyl?'

'Shit, you do remember!'

'If I remembered, I wouldn't be asking you which one it was.'

'As a matter of fact, it was both.' Cummings hesitated. 'Are you all right, Gard? You sound real low.'

Yeah? Well, actually, Ron, I'm way up. Up in the cyclone. Going around and around and up and down, and where it ends nobody knows.

'I'm okay.'

'That's good. One hopes you know who you have to thank for it.'

'You, maybe?'

'None other. Man, I landed on that sidewalk like a kid hitting the ground the first time he comes off the end of a slide. I can't quite see my ass in the mirror, but that's probably a good thing. I bet it looks like a Day-Glo Grateful Dead poster from sixty-nine. But you wanted to go back in and talk about how all the kids around Chernobyl were gonna be dead of leukemia in five years. You wanted to talk about how some guys almost blew up Arkansas looking for faulty wiring with a candle in a nuclear-power plant. You said they caught the place on fire. Me, I'd bet my watch -and it's a Rolex - that they were Snopeses from Em-Eye-Double-Ess-Eye-Pee-Pee-Eye. Only way I could get you into a cab was by telling you we'd come back later and bust heads. I sweet-talked you up to your room and started the tub for you. You said you were all right. You said you were going to take a bath and then call some guy named Bobby.'

'The guy's a girl,' Gardener said absently. He was rubbing at his right temple with his free hand.

'Good-looking?'

'Pretty. No knockout.' An errant thought, nonsensical but perfectly concrete - Bobbi's in trouble - kicked across his mind the way an errant billiard ball will roll across the clean green felt of a pool table. Then it was gone.

3

He walked slowly over to a chair and sat down, now massaging both temples. The nukes. Of course it had been the nukes. What else? If it wasn't Chernobyl it was Seabrook, and if it wasn't Seabrook it was Three-Mile Island and if it wasn't Three-Mile Island it was Maine Yankee in Wiscasset or what could have happened at the Hanford Plant in Washington State if someone hadn't happened to notice, just in the nick of time, that their used core rods, stored in an unlined ditch outside, were getting ready to blow sky-high.

How many nicks of time could there be?

Spent fuel rods that were stacking up in big hot piles. They thought the Curse of King Tut was bad? Brother! Wait until some twenty-fifth-century archaeologist dug up a load of this shit! You tried to tell people the whole thing was a lie, nothing but a baldfaced naked lie, that nuclear-generated power was eventually going to kill millions and render huge tracts of land sterile and unlivable. What you got back was a blank stare. You talked to people who had lived through one administration after another in which their elected officials told one lie after another, then lied about the lies, and when those lies were found out the liars said: 'Oh jeez, I forgot, sorry' - and since they forgot, the people who elected them behaved like Christians and forgave. You couldn't believe there were so f**king many of them willing to do that until you remembered what P. T. Barnum said about the extraordinarily high birth rate of suckers. They looked you square in the face when you tried to tell them the truth and informed you that you were full of shit, the American government didn't tell lies, not telling lies was what made America great, Oh dear Father, here's the facts, I did it with my little ax, I can't keep silent for it was I, and come what may, I cannot tell a lie. When you tried to talk to them, they looked at you as if you were babbling in a foreign language. It had been eight years since he had almost killed his wife, and three since he and Bobbi had been arrested at Seabrook, Bobbi on the general charge of illegal demonstration, Gard on a much more specific one -possession of a concealed and unlicensed handgun. The others paid a fine and got out. Gardener did two months. His lawyer told him he was lucky. Gardener asked his lawyer if he knew he was sitting on a time bomb and jerking his meat. His lawyer asked him if he had considered psychiatric help. Gardener asked his lawyer if he had ever considered getting stuffed.

But he had had sense enough not to attend any more demonstrations. That much, anyway. He kept away from them. They were poisoning him. When he got drunk, however, his mind - whatever the booze had left of it - returned obsessively to the subject of the reactors, the core rods, the containments, the inability to slow down a runaway once it really got going.

To the nukes, in other words.

When he got drunk, his heart got hot. The nukes. The goddam nukes. It was symbolic, yeah, okay, you didn't have to be Freud to figure that what he was really protesting against was the reactor in his own heart. When it came to matters of restraint, James Gardener had a bad containment system. There was some technician inside who should have long since been fired. He sat and played with all the wrong switches. That guy wouldn't be really happy until Jim Gardener went China Syndrome.

The goddam f**king nukes.

Forget it.

He tried. For a start, he tried thinking about tonight's reading at Northeastern - a fun-filled frolic that was being co-sponsored by the university and a group that called itself The Friends of Poetry, a name which filled Gardener with fear and trembling. Groups with such names tended to be made up exclusively of women who called themselves ladies (most of said ladies of a decidedly blue-haired persuasion). The ladies of the club tended to be a good deal more familiar with the works of Rod McKuen than those of John Berryman, Hart Crane, Ron Cummings, or that good old drunken blackout brawler and wifeshooter, James Eric Gardener.

Get out of here, Gard. Never mind The New England Poetry Caravan. Never mind Northeastern or The Friends of Poetry or the McCardle bitch. Get out Of here right now before something bad happens. Something really bad. Because if you stay, something really bad will. There's blood on the moon.

But he was damned if he'd go running back to Maine with his tail between his legs. Not him.

Besides, there was the bitch.

Patricia McCardle was her name, and if she wasn't one strutting world-class bitch, Gard had never met one.

She had a contract, and it specified no play, no pay.

'Jesus,' Gardener said, and put a hand over his eyes, trying to shut away the growing headache, knowing there was only one kind of medicine that would do that, and also knowing it was exactly the sort of medicine that could bring that really bad thing on.

And also knowing that knowing would do no good at all. So after a while the booze started to flow and the cyclone started to blow.

Jim Gardener, now in free fall.

4

Patricia McCardle was The New England Poetry Caravan's principal contributor and head ramrod. Her legs were long but skinny, her nose aristocratic but too bladelike to be considered attractive. Gard had once tried to imagine kissing her and had been horrified by the image which had risen, unbidden, in his mind: her nose not just sliding up his cheek but slicing it open like a razor-blade. She had a high forehead, nonexistent br**sts, and eyes as gray as a glacier on a cloudy day. She traced her ancestry back to the Mayflower.

Gardener had worked for her before and there had been trouble before. He had become part of the 1988 New England Poetry Caravan in rather grisly fashion . . . but the reason for his abrupt inclusion was no more unheard of in the world of poetry than it was in those of jazz and rock and roll. Patricia McCardle had been left with a last-minute hole in her announced program because one of the six poets who had signed on for this summer's happy cruise had hung himself in his closet with his belt.

'Just like Phil Ochs,' Ron Cummings had said to Gardener as they sat near the back of the bus on the first day of the tour. He said it with a nervous bad-boy-at-the-back-of-the-classroom giggle. 'But then, Bill Claughtsworth always was a derivative son of a bitch.'

Patricia McCardle had gotten twelve reading dates and fairly good advances on a deal which, when stripped of all the high-flown rhetoric, boiled down to six poets for the price of one. Following Claughtsworth's suicide, she found herself with three days to find a publishing poet in a season when most publishing poets were booked solid ('Or on permanent vacation like Silly Billy Claughtsworth,' Cummings said, laughing rather uneasily).

Few if any of the booked groups would balk at paying the stipulated fee just because the Caravan happened to be short one poet - to do such a thing would be in rawther shitty taste, particularly when one considered the reason the Caravan was a poet short. All the same, it put Caravan, Inc. in a position of contractual default, at least technically, and Patricia McCardle was not a woman to brook loopholes.

After trying four poets, each more minor-leaguer than the last, and with less than thirty-six hours before the first reading, she had finally called Jim Gardener.

'Are you still drinking, Jimmy?' she asked bluntly. Jimmy - he hated that. Most people called him Jim. Jim was all right. No one called him Gard except himself ... and Bobbi Anderson.

'Drinking a little,' he said. 'Not bingeing at all.'

'I'm dubious,' she said coldly.

'You always have been, Patty,' he replied, knowing she hated that even more than he did Jimmy - her Puritan blood screamed against it. 'Were you asking because you just happened to be short a quart, or did you have a more pressing reason?'

Of course he knew, and of course she knew he knew, and of course she knew he was grinning, and of course she was infuriated, and of course all of this tickled him just about to death, and of course she knew he knew that, too, and that was just the way he liked it.

They sparred a few more minutes, and then came to what was not a marriage of convenience but one of necessity. Jim Gardener wanted to buy a good used wood-furnace for the coming winter; he was tired of living like a slut, bundled up in front of a kitchen stove while the wind rattled the plastic stapled over the windows; Patricia McCardle wanted to buy a poet. There would be no handshake agreement, though, not with Patricia McCardle. She had driven down from Derry that afternoon with a contract (in triplicate) and a notary public. Gard was a little surprised she hadn't brought a second notary, just in case the first one happened to suffer a coronary or something.

Feelings and hunches aside, there was really no way he could leave the tour and get the wood-furnace, because if he left the tour he would never see the second half of his fee. She'd haul him into court and spend a thousand dollars trying to get him to cough up the three hundred Caravan, Inc. had paid up front. She might be able to do it, too. He had done almost all the dates, but the contract he had signed was crystal clear on the subject: if he took off for any reason unacceptable to the Tour Co-Ordinator, any and all fees unpaid shall be declared null and void, and any and all fees pre-paid shall be refundable to Caravan, Inc., within thirty (30) days.

And she would go after him. She might think she was doing it on principle, but it would really be because he had called her Patty in her hour of need.

Nor would that be the end of it. If he left, she would work with unflagging energy to get him blackballed. He would certainly never read again for another poetry tour with which she was associated, and that was a lot of poetry tours. Then there was the delicate matter of grants. Her husband, now dead ten years, had left her a lot of money (although he didn't think you could say, as with Ron Cummings, that she practically had money failing out of her ass**le, because Gard didn't believe Patricia McCardle had anything so vulgar as an ass**le, or even a rectum - when in need of relief she probably performed an act he thought of as Immaculate Excretion). Patricia McCardle had taken a great deal of this money and had set up a number of grants-in-aid. This made her simultaneously a serious patron of the arts and an extremely smart businesswoman in regard to the nasty business of income taxes: the grants were write-offs. Some of them funded poets for specific time periods. Some funded cash poetry awards and prizes, and some underwrote magazines of modern poetry and fiction. Each grant was administered by committees. Behind each of them moved the hand of Patricia McCardle, making sure that they meshed as neatly as a Chinese puzzle ... or the strands of a spider's web.

She could do a lot more to him than get back her lousy six hundred bucks. She could muzzle him. And it was just possible - unlikely, but possible - that he might write a few more good poems before the madmen who had stuffed a shotgun up the ass**le of the world decided to pull the trigger.

So get through it, he thought. He had ordered a bottle of Johnny Walker from room service (God bless THE TAB, forever and ever, amen), and now he poured his second drink with a hand that had become remarkably steady. Get through it, that's all.

But as the day wore on, he kept thinking about grabbing a Greyhound bus at the Stuart Street terminal and getting off five hours later in front of the dusty little drugstore in Unity. Thumbing a ride up to Troy from there. Calling Bobbi Anderson on the phone and saying: I almost went up in the cyclone, Bobbi, but I found the storm cellar just in time. Lucky break, uh?

Shit on that. You make your own luck. If you be strong, Gard, you be lucky. Get through it, that's all. That's what's to do.

He scrummed through his totebag, looking for the best clothes he had left, since his reading clothes appeared to be beyond salvage. He tossed a pair of faded jeans, a plain white shirt, a tattered pair of skivvies, and a pair of socks onto the bedspread (thanks, ma'am, but there's no need to make up the room, I slept in the tub). He got dressed, ate some Certs, ate some booze, ate some more Certs, and then went through the bag again, this time looking for the aspirin. He found it and ate some of those. He looked at the bottle. Looked away. The pulse of the headache was getting worse. He sat down by the window with his notebooks, trying to decide what he should read that night.

In this dreadful long afternoon light all his poems looked as if they had been written in Punic. Instead of doing anything positive about his headache, the aspirin seemed to actually be intensifying it: slam, bam, thank you, ma'am. His head whacked with each heartbeat. It was the same old headache, the one that felt like an auger made of dull steel being slowly driven into his head at a point slightly above and to the left of his left eye. He touched the tips of his fingers to the faint scar there and ran his fingers lightly along it. The steel plate buried under the skin there was the result of a skiing accident in his teens. He remembered the doctor saying, You may suffer headaches from time to time, son. When they come, just thank God you can feel anything. You're lucky to be alive.

But at times like this he wondered.

At times like this he wondered a lot.

He put the notebooks aside with a shaking hand and closed his eyes.

I can't get through it.

You can.

I can't. There's blood on the moon, I feel it, I can almost see it.

Don't give me any of your Irish willywags! Just get tough, you weak f**king sister! Tough!

'I'll try,' he muttered, not opening his eyes, and fifteen minutes later, when his nose began to bleed slightly, he didn't notice. He had fallen asleep in the chair.