Downstream”, The Rainmakers 6 page

He always got stage-fright before reading, even if the group was a small one (and groups which turned out to hear readings of modern poetry tended to be just that). On the night of June 27th, however, Jim Gardener's stage-fright was intensified by his headache. When he woke from his nap in the hotelroom chair the shakes and the fluttery stomach were gone, but the headache had gotten even worse: it had graduated to a Genuine Class-A Thumper & World-Beater, maybe the worst of all time.

When his turn to read finally came, he seemed to hear himself from a great distance. He felt a little like a man listening to a recording of himself on a shortwave broadcast coming in from Spain or Portugal. Then a wave of lightheadedness coursed through him and for a few moments he could only pretend to be looking for a poem, some special poem, perhaps, that had been temporarily misplaced. He shuffled papers with dim and nerveless fingers, thinking: I'm going to faint, I think. Right up here in front of everyone. Fall

against this lectern and pitch both it and me into the front row. Maybe I can land on that blue-blooded cunt and kill her. That would almost make my whole life seem worthwhile.

Get through it, that implacable inner voice responded. Sometimes that voice sounded like his father's; more often it sounded like the voice of Bobbi Anderson. Get through it, that's all. That's what's to do.

The audience that night was larger than usual, maybe a hundred people squeezed behind the desks of a Northeastern lecture hall. Their eyes seemed too big. What big eyes you have, Gramma! It was as if they would eat him up with their eyes. Suck out his soul, his ka, his whatever you wanted to call it. A snatch of old T. Rex occurred to him: Girl, I'm just a vampire for your love... and I'm gonna SUCK YA!

Of course there was no more T. Rex. Marc Bolan had wrapped his sports-car around a tree and was lucky not to be alive. Bang-a-Gong, Marc, you sure got it on. Or got it off. Or whatever. A group called Power Station is going to cover your tune in 1986 and it's going to be really bad, it... it...

He raised an unsteady hand to his forehead, and a quiet murmur ran through the audience.

Better get going, Gard. Natives are getting restless.

Yeah, that was Bobbi's voice, all right.

The fluorescents, embedded in pebbled rectangles overhead, seemed to be pulsing in cycles which perfectly matched the cycles of pain driving into his head. He could see Patricia McCardle. She was wearing a little black dress that surely hadn't cost a penny more than three hundred dollars—distress-sale stuff from one of those tacky little shops on Newbury Street. Her face was as narrow and pallid and unforgiving as any of her Puritan forebears, those wonderful, fun-loving guys who had been more than happy to stick you in some stinking jail if you had the bad luck to be spied going out on the Sabbath without a snotrag in your pocket. Patricia's dark eyes lay upon him like dusty stones and Gard thought: She sees what's happening and she couldn't be more pleased. Look at her. She's waiting for me to fall down. And when I do, you know what she'll be thinking, don't you?

Of course he did.

That's what you get for calling me Patty, you drunken son of a bitch. That was what she would be thinking. That's what you get for calling me Patty, that's what you get for doing everything but making me get down on my knees and beg. So go on, Gardener. Maybe I'll even let you keep the up-front money. Three hundred dollars seems a cheap enough price to pay for the exquisite pleasure of watching you crack up in front of all these people. Go on. Go on and get it over with.

Some members of the audience were becoming visibly uneasy now—the delay between poems had stretched out far beyond what might be considered normal. The murmur had become a muted buzz. Gardener heard Ron Cummings clear his throat uneasily behind him.

Get tough! Bobbi's voice yelled again, but the voice was fading now. Fading.

Getting ready to highside it. He looked at their faces and saw only pasty-pale blank circles, ciphers, big white holes in the universe.

The buzz was growing. He stood at the podium, swaying noticeably now, wetting his lips, looking at his audience with a kind of numb dismay. And then, suddenly, instead of hearing Bobbi, Gardener actually saw her. This image had all the force of vision.

Bobbi was up there in Haven, up there right now. He saw her sitting in her rocking chair, wearing a pair of shorts and a halter-top over what boobs she had, which wasn't much. There was a pair of battered old mocs on her feet and Peter was curled before them, deeply asleep. She had a book but wasn't reading it. It lay open face-down in her lap (this fragment of vision was so perfect Gardener could even read the book's title—it was Watchers, by Dean Koontz) while Bobbi looked out the window into the dark, thinking her own thoughts—thoughts which would follow one after the other as sanely and rationally as you could want a train of thought to run. No derailments; no late freights; no head-ons. Bobbi knew how to run a railroad.

He even knew what she was thinking about, he discovered. Something in the woods. Something... it was something she had found in the woods. Yes. Bobbi was in Haven, trying to decide what that thing might be and why she felt so tired. She was not thinking about James Eric Gardener, the noted poet, protestor, and Thanksgiving wifeshooter, who was currently standing in a lecture hall at Northeastern University under these lights with five other poets and some fat shit named Arberg or Arglebargle or something like that, and getting ready to faint. Here in this lecture hall stood The Master of Disaster. God bless Bobbi, who had somehow managed to keep her shit together while all about her people were losing theirs, Bobbi was up there in Haven, thinking the way people were supposed to think

No she's not. She's not doing that at all.

Then, for the first time, the thought came through with no soundproofing around it; it came through as loud and urgent as a firebell in the night: Bobbi's in trouble! Bobbi's in REAL TROUBLE!

This surety struck him with the force of a roundhouse slap, and suddenly the lightheadedness was gone. He fell back into himself with such a thud that he almost seemed to feel his teeth rattle. A sickening bolt of pain ripped through his head, but even that was welcome—if he felt pain, then he was back here, here, not drifting around someplace in the ozone.

And for one puzzling moment he saw a new picture, very brief, very clear, and very ominous: it was Bobbi in the cellar of the farmhouse she'd inherited from her uncle. She was hunkered down in front of some piece of machinery, working on it... or was she? It seemed so dark, and Bobbi wasn't much of a hand with mechanical stuff. But she sure was doing something, because ghostly blue fire leaped and flickered between her fingers as she fiddled with tangled wires inside... inside... but it was too dark to see what that dark, cylindrical shape was. It was familiar, something he had seen before, but

Then he could hear as well as see, although what he heard was even less comforting than that eldritch blue fire. It was Peter. Peter was howling. Bobbi took no notice, and that was utterly unlike her. She only went on fiddling with the wires, jiggering them so they would do something down there in the root-smelling dark of the cellar...

The vision broke apart on rising voices.

The faces which went with those voices were no longer white holes in the universe but the faces of real people; some were amused (but not many), a few more embarrassed, but most just seemed alarmed or worried. Most looked, in other words, the way he would have looked had his position been reversed with one of them. Had he been afraid of them? Had he? If so, why?

Only Patricia McCardle didn't fit. She was looking at him with a quiet, sure satisfaction that brought him all the way back.

Gardener suddenly spoke to the audience, surprised at how natural and pleasant his voice sounded. “I'm sorry. Please excuse me. I've got a batch of new poems here, and I went woolgathering among them, I'm afraid.” Pause. Smile. Now he could see some of the worried ones settling back, looking relieved. There was a little laughter, but it was sympathetic. He could, however, see a flush of anger rising in Patricia McCardle's cheeks, and it did his headache a world of good.

“Actually,” he went on, “even that's not the truth. Fact is, I was trying to decide whether or not to read some of this new stuff to you. After some furious sparring between those two thundering heavyweights, Pride of Authorship and Prudence, Prudence has won a split decision. Pride of Authorship vows to appeal the decision—”

More laughter, heartier. Now old Patty's cheeks looked like his kitchen stove through its little isinglass windows on a cold winter night. Her hands were locked together, the knuckles white. Her teeth weren't quite bared, but almost, friends and neighbors, almost.

“In the meantime, I'm going to finish with a dangerous act: I'm going to read a fairly long poem from my first book, Grimoire.”

He winked in Patricia McCardle's direction, then took them all into his humorous confidence. “But God hates a coward, right?”

Ron snorted laughter behind him and then they were all laughing, and for a moment he actually did see a glint of her pearly-whites behind those stretched, furious lips, and oh boy howdy, that was just about as good as you'd want, wasn't it?

Watch out for her, Gard. You think you've got your boot on her neck now, and maybe you even do, for the moment, but watch out for her. She won't forget.

Or forgive.

But that was for later. Now he opened the battered copy of his first book of poems. He didn't need to look for “Leighton Street'; the book fell open to it of its own accord. His eyes found the subscript. For Bobbi, who first smelled sage in New York.

“Leighton Street” had been written the year he met her, the Year Leighton Street was all she could talk about. It was, of course, the street in Utica where she had grown up, the street she'd needed to escape before she could even start being what she wanted to be—a simple writer of simple stories. She could do that; she could do that with flash and ease. Gard had known that almost at once. Later that year he had sensed that she might be able to do more: to surmount the careless, profligate ease with which she wrote and do, if not great work, brave work. But first she had to get away from Leighton Street. Not the real one, but the Leighton Street which she carried with her in her mind, a demon geography populated by haunted tenements and her sick, loved father, her weak, loved mother, and her defiant crone of a sister, who rode over them all like a demon of endless power.

Once, that year, she had fallen asleep in class—Freshman Comp, that had been. He had been gentle with her, because he already loved her a little and he had seen the huge circles under her eyes.

“I've had problems sleeping at night,” she said, when he held her after class for a moment. She had still been half-asleep, or she never would have gone on from there; that was how powerful Anne's hold—which was the hold of Leighton Street -had been over her. But she was like a person who has been drugged, and exists with one leg thrown over each side of the sleep's dark and stony wall. “I almost fall asleep and then I hear her.”

“Who?” he asked gently.

“Sissy... my sister Anne, that is. She grinds her teeth and it sounds like b-b-b—”

Bones, she wanted to say, but then she woke into a fit of hysterical weeping that had frightened him very badly.

Anne.

More than anything else, Anne was Leighton Street.

Anne had been

(knocking at the door)

the gag of Bobbi's needs and ambitions.

Okay, Gard thought. For you, Bobbi. Only for you. And began to read “Leighton Street” as smoothly as if he had spent the afternoon rehearsing it in his room.

“These streets begin where the cobbles

surface through tar like the heads

of children buried badly in their textures,”

Gardener read.

“What myth is this? we ask, but

the children who play stickball and

Johnny-Jump-My-Pony round here just laugh.

No myth they tell us no myth, just they say hey motherfucker aint nothing but Leighton Street here, aint nothing but all small houses aint only but back porches where our mothers wash there and they're and their.

Where days grow hot and on Leighton Street they listen to the radio while pterodactyls flow between the TV aerials on the roof and they say hey motherfucker they say Hey motherfucker!

No myth they tell us no myth, just they say hey motherfucker aint nothing but Leighton Street round here

This they say is how you be silent in your silence of days, Motherfucker.

When we turned our back on these upstate roads, warehouses with faces of blank brick, when you say “O, but I have reached the end of all I know and still hear her grinding, grinding in the night ..

Because it had been so long since he had read the poem, even to himself, he did not just “perform” it (something, he had discovered, that was almost impossible not to do at the end of a tour such as this); he rediscovered it. Most of those who came to the reading at Northeastern that night—even those who witnessed the evening's sordid. creepy conclusion, agreed that Gardener's reading of “Leighton Street” had been the best of the night. A good many of them maintained it was the best they had ever heard.

Since it was the last reading Jim Gardener would ever give in his life, it was maybe not such a bad way to go out.

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.

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.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 659