Downstream”, The Rainmakers 12 page

“Sure.” He kept trying not to look at her stacked ribs, the painful jut of her pelvic bones above the waist of her jeans, which were drooping in spite of a belt cinched so tight it looked like a hobo's length of clothesline. “I guess so.” He smiled cautiously. “Look, ma, no cavities.”

Anderson tried to return Gardener's smile with her lips still pulled back to the gums; the result of this experiment was mildly grotesque. She put a forefinger on a molar and pressed.

“Oes it iggle en I ooo at?”

“What?”

“Does it wiggle when I do that?”

“No. Not that I can see, anyway. Why?”

“It's just this dream I keep having. It—” She looked down at herself. “Get out of here, Gard, I'm in dishabilly.”

Don't worry, Bobbi. I wasn't going to jump your bones. Mostly because that'd be too close to what I'd really be doing.

“Sorry,” he said. “Door was open. I thought you'd gone out.”

He closed the door, latching it firmly.

Through it she said clearly: “I know what you're wondering.”

He said nothing—only stood there. But he had a feeling she knew—knew—he was still there. As if she could see through the door.

“You're wondering if I'm losing my mind.”

“No,” he said then. “No, Bobbi. But—”

“I'm as sane as you are,” Anderson said through the door. “I'm so stiff I can hardly walk and I've got an Ace bandage wrapped around my right knee for some reason I can't quite remember and I'm hungry as a bear and I know I've lost too much weight... but I am sane, Gard. I think you may have

times before the day's over when you wonder if you are. The answer is, we both are.”

“Bobbi, what's happening here?” Gardener asked. It came out in a helpless sort of cry.

“I want to unwrap the goddam Ace bandage and see what's under it,” Anderson said through the door. “Feel like I jobbed my knee pretty good. Out in the woods, probably. Then I want to take a hot shower and put on some clean clothes. While I do that, you could make us some breakfast. And I'll tell you everything.”

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, Bobbi.”

“I'm glad to have you here, Gard,” she said. “I had a bad feeling once or twice. Like maybe you weren't doing so good.”

Gardener felt his vision double, treble, then float away in prisms. He wiped an arm across his face. “No pain, no strain,” he said. “I'll make some breakfast.”

“Thanks, Gard.”

He walked away then, but he had to walk slow, because no matter how many times he wiped his eyes, his vision kept trying to break up on him.

He stopped just inside the kitchen and went back to the closed bathroom door as a new thought occurred to him. Water was running in there now.

“Where's Peter, Bobbi?”

“What?” she called over the drumming shower.

“I said, where's Peter?” he called, raising his voice.

“Dead,” Bobbi called back over the drumming water. “I cried, Gard. But he was... you know...”

“Old,” Gardener muttered, then remembered and raised his voice again. “It was old age, then?”

“Yes,” Anderson called back over the drumming water.

Gardener stood there for just a moment before going back to the kitchen, wondering why he believed Bobbi was lying about Peter and how he had died.

Gard scrambled eight eggs and fried bacon on Bobbi's grill. He noticed that a microwave oven had been installed over the conventional one since he'd last been here, and there was now track lighting over the main work areas and the kitchen table, where Bobbi was in the habit of eating most of her meals—usually with a book in her free hand.

He made coffee, strong and black, and was just bringing everything to the table when Bobbi came in, wearing a fresh pair of cords and a T-shirt with a picture of a blackfly on it and the legend MAINE STATE BIRD. Her wet hair was wrapped in a towel.

Anderson surveyed the table. “No toast?” she asked.

“Make your own frigging toast,” Gardener said amiably. “I didn't hitchhike two hundred miles to buttle your breakfast.”

Anderson stared. “You did what? Yesterday? In the rain?”

“Yeah.”

“What in God's name happened? Muriel said you were doing a reading tour and your last one was June 30th.”

“You called Muriel?” He was absurdly touched. “When?”

Anderson flapped a hand as if that didn't matter—probably it didn't. “What happened?” she asked again.

Gardener thought about telling her—wanted to tell her, he realized, dismayed. Was that what Bobbi was for, then? Was Bobbi Anderson really no more than the wall he wailed to? He hesitated, wanting to tell her... and didn't. There would be time for that later.

Maybe.

“Later,” he said. “I want to know what happened here.”

“Breakfast first,” Anderson said, “and that's an order.”

Gard gave Bobbi most of the eggs and bacon, and Bobbi didn't waste time—she went to them like a woman who hasn't eaten well for a long time. Watching her eat, Gardener remembered a biography of Thomas Edison he had read when he was quite young—no more than ten or eleven. Edison had gone on wild work-jags in which idea had followed idea, invention had followed invention. During these spurts, he had ignored wife, children, baths, even food. If his wife hadn't brought him his meals on a tray, the man might literally have starved to death between the light bulb and the phonograph. There had been a picture of him, hands plunged into hair that was wildly awry—as if it had been actually trying to get at the brain beneath hair and skull, the brain which would not let him rest—and Gardener remembered thinking that the man looked quite insane.

And, he thought, touching the left side of his forehead, Edison had been subject to migraines. Migraines and deep depressions.

He saw no sign of depression in Bobbi, however. She gobbled eggs, ate seven or eight slices of bacon wrapped in a slice of toast slathered with oleo, and swallowed two large glasses of orange juice. When she had finished, she uttered a resounding belch.

“Gross, Bobbi.”

“In Portugal, a good belch is considered a compliment to the cook.”

“What do they do after a good lay? Fart?”

Anderson threw her head back and roared with laughter. The towel fell off her hair, and all at once Gard wanted to take her to bed, bag of bones or not.

Smiling a little, Gardener said: “Okay, it was good. Thanks. Some Sunday I'll make you some swell eggs Benedict. Now give.”

Anderson reached behind him and brought down a half-full package of Camels. She lit one and pushed the pack toward Gardener.

“No thanks. It's the only bad habit I ever succeeded in mostly giving up.”

But before Bobbi was done, Gardener had smoked four of them.

“You looked around,” Anderson said. “I remember telling you to do that—just barely -and I know you did. You look like I felt after I found the thing in the woods.”

“What thing?”

“If I told you now you'd think I was crazy. Later on I'll show you, but right now I think we'd better just talk. Tell me what you saw around the place. What changes.”

So Gardener ticked them off: the cellar improvements, the litter of projects, the weird little sun in the water heater. The strange job of customizing on the Tomcat's engine. He hesitated for a moment, thinking of the addition to the shifting diagram, and let that go. He supposed Bobbi knew he had seen it, anyway.

“And somewhere in the middle of all that,” he said, “you found time to write another book. A long one. I read the first thirty or forty pages while I was waiting for you to wake up, and I think it's good as well as long. The best novel you've ever written, probably... and you've written some good ones.”

Anderson was nodding, pleased. “Thank you. I think it is, too.” She pointed to the last slice of bacon on the platter. “You want that?”

“No. I

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

She took it and made it gone.

“How long did it take you to write it?”

“I'm not completely sure,” Anderson said. “Maybe three days. No more than a week, anyway. Did most of it in my sleep.”

Gard smiled.

“I'm not joking, you know,” Anderson said.

Gardener stopped smiling.

“My time sense is pretty fucked up,” she admitted. “I do know I wasn't working on it the 27th. That's the last day when time—sequential time—seemed completely clear to me. You got here last night, July 4th, and it was done. So... a week, max. But I really don't think it was more than three days.”

Gardener gaped. Anderson looked back calmly, wiping her fingers on a napkin. “Bobbi, that's impossible,” Gardener said finally.

“If you think so, you missed my typewriter.”

Gardener had glanced at Bobbi's old machine when he sat down, but that was all -his attention had been riveted immediately by the manuscript. He had seen the old black Underwood thousands of times. The manuscript, on the other hand, was new.

“If you'd looked closely, you would have seen the roll of computer paper on the wall behind it and another of those gadgets behind it. Egg crate, heavy-duty batteries, and all. What? These?”

She pushed the cigarettes across to Gardener, who took one.

“I don't know how it works, but then, I don't really know how any of them work -including the one that's running all the juice in this place.” She smiled at Gardener's expression. “I'm off the Central Maine Power tit, Gard. I had them interrupt service... that's how they put it, as if they know damned well you'll want it back before too long... let's see... four days ago. That I do remember.”

“Bobbi—”

“There's a gadget like the thing in the water heater and the one behind my typewriter in the junction box out back, but that one's the granddaddy of them all.” Anderson laughed—the laugh of a woman in the grip of pleasant reminiscences. “There's twenty or thirty D-cells in that one. I think Poley Andrews down at Cooder's market thinks I've gone nuts—I bought every battery he had in stock, and then I went to Augusta for more.

“Was that the day I got the dirt for the cellar?” She addressed this last to herself, frowning. Then her face cleared. “I think so, yeah. The Historic Battery Run of 1988, hit about seven different stores, came back with hundreds of batteries, and then I stopped in Albion and got a truckload of loam to sweeten the cellar. I'm almost positive I did both of those things the same day.”

The troubled frown resurfaced, and for a moment Gardener thought Bobbi looked scared and exhausted again—of course she was still exhausted. Exhaustion of the sort Gardener had seen last night went bone-deep. A single night's sleep, no matter how long and how deep, wouldn't erase it. And then there was this wild, hallucinatory talk—books written in her sleep; all the AC current in the house being run by D-cells, runs to Augusta on crazy errands

Except that the proof was here, all around him. He had seen it.

“—that one,” Anderson said, and laughed.

“What, Bobbi?”

“I said I had a devil of a job setting up the one that generates the juice here in the house, and out at the dig.”

“What dig? Is it the thing in the woods you want to show me?”

“Yes. Soon. Just give me a few more minutes.” Anderson's face again assumed that look of pleasure in telling, and Gardener suddenly thought it must be the expression on the faces of all those who have tales they don't just want to tell but tales they must tell—from the lecture-hall bore who was part of an Antarctic expedition in 1937 and who still has his fading slides to prove it, to Ishmael the Sailor-Man, late of the ill-fated Pequod, who finishes his tale with a sentence that seems a desperate cry only thinly and perfunctorily disguised as information: “Only I am left to tell you.” Was it desperation and madness that Gardener detected beneath Bobbi's cheerful, disjointed remembrances of Ten Wacky Days in Haven? Gardener thought so... knew so. Who was better equipped to see the signs? Whatever Bobbi had faced here while Gardener was reading poetry to overweight matrons and their bored husbands, it had nearly broken her mind.

Anderson lit another cigarette with a hand that trembled slightly, making the matchflame quiver momentarily. It was the sort of thing you would have seen only if you were looking for it.

“I was out of egg cartons by then, and the thing was going to have too many batteries for just one or two anyway. So I got one of Uncle Frank's cigar boxes -there must be a dozen old wooden ones up in the attic, probably even Mabel Noyes down at Junque-a-Torium would pay a few bucks for them, and you know what a skinflint she is—and I stuffed them with toilet paper and tried to make nests in the paper for the batteries to stand up in. You know... nests?”

Anderson made quick poking gestures with her right index finger and then looked, bright-eyed, at Gard, to see if he got it. Gardener nodded. That feeling of unreality was stealing back, that feeling of his mind getting ready to seep through to the top of his skull and float up to the ceiling. A drink would fix that, he thought, and the pulse in his head sharpened.

“But the batteries kept failing over anyway.” She snuffed her cigarette and immediately lit another one. “They were wild, just wild. I was wild, too. Then I got an idea.”

They?

“I went down to Chip McCausland's. Down on the Dugout Road?”

Gardener shook his head. He had never been down the Dugout Road.

“Well, he lives out there with this woman—she's his common-law wife, I guess -and about ten kids. Man, you talk about sluts... the dirt on her neck, Gard... you couldn't wash it off unless you used a jackhammer on it first. I guess he was married before, and... doesn't matter... it's just... I haven't had anyone to talk to... I mean, they don't talk, not the way a couple of people do, and I keep mixing up the stuff that's not important with the stuff that is—”

Anderson's words had started to come out quicker and quicker, until now they were almost tripping over each other. She's speed-rapping, Gardener thought with some alarm, and pretty soon she's going to start either yelling or crying. He didn't know which he dreaded more and thought again of Ishmael, Ishmael rambling through the streets of Bedford, Massachusetts, stinking more of madness than whale-oil, finally grabbing some unlucky passerby and screaming: Listen! I'm the only fucking one left to tell you and so you better listen, damn you! You better listen if you don't want to be using this harpoon for a fucking suppository! I got a tale to tell, it's about this white fucking whale and YOU'RE GOING TO LISTEN!

He reached across the table and touched her hand. “You tell it any old way you want to. I'm here and I'm going to listen. We've got time; like you said, it's your day off. So slow down. If I fall asleep you'll know you got too far from the point. Okay?”

Anderson smiled and relaxed visibly. Gardener wanted to ask again what was going on in the woods. More than that, who they were. But it would be best to wait. All bad things come to him who waits, he thought, and after a pause to collect herself, Bobbi went on.

“Chip McCausland's got three or four henhouses, that's all I started to say. For a couple of bucks I was able to get all the egg cartons I wanted... even a few of the big egg-crate sheets. Those sheets each have ten dozen cradles.”

Anderson laughed cheerfully and added something that brought gooseflesh out on Gardener's skin.

“Haven't used one of those yet, but when I do I guess we'll have enough zap for the whole town of Haven to let go of the CMP tit. With enough left over for Albion and most of Troy, as well.

“So I got the power going here—Jesus, I'm rambling—and I already had the gadget hooked up to the typewriter—and I really did sleep—napped, anyway—and that's about where we came in, isn't it?”

Gardener nodded, still trying to cope with the idea that there might be fact as well as hallucination in Bobbi's casual statement that she could build a,gadget” which could power three small towns from a source consisting of one hundred and twenty D-cell batteries.

“What the gadget on the typewriter does is...” Anderson frowned. Her head cocked a little, almost as if she were listening to a voice Gardener could not hear. “It might be easier to show you. Go on over there and roll in a sheet of paper, would you?”

“Okay.” He headed for the door into the living room, then looked back at Anderson. “Aren't you coming?”

Bobbi smiled. “I'll stay here,” she said, and then Gardener got it. He got it, and even understood on some mental level where only pure logic was allowed that it might be so—hadn't the immortal Holmes himself said that when you eliminated the impossible, you had to believe whatever was left, no matter how improbable? And there was a new novel sitting in there on the table by what Bobbi sometimes called her word-accordion.

Yeah, except typewriters don't write books by themselves, Gard old buddy. You know what the immortal Holmes probably would say? That the fact that there is a novel sitting next to Bobbi's typewriter, and the added fact that this is a novel you never saw before does not mean it is a new novel. Holmes would say Bobbi wrote that book at some time in the past. Then, while you were gone and Bobbi was losing her marbles, she brought it out and sat it beside the typewriter. She may even believe what she's telling you, but that doesn't make it so.

Gardener walked into the cluttered corner of the living room that served as Bobbi's writing quarters. It was handy enough to the bookshelf so she could simply rock back on the legs of her chair and grab almost anything she wanted. It's too good to be a trunk novel.

He knew what the immortal Holmes would say about that, too: he would agree that The Buffalo Soldiers being a trunk novel was improbable; he would argue, however, that writing a novel in three days—and not at the typewriter but while taking cat-naps between repeated frenzies of activity—was imfucking-possible.

Except that novel hadn't come out of any trunk. Gardener knew it, because he knew Bobbi. Bobbi would have been just as incapable of sticking a novel that good in her trunk as Gard was of remaining rational in a discussion on the subject of nuclear power.

Fuck you, Sherlock, and the hansom cab you and Dr W. rode in on. Christ I want a drink.

The urge—the need—to drink had come back in full, frightening force.

“You there, Gard?” Anderson called.

This time he consciously saw the roll of computer paper. It hung down loosely. He looked behind the typewriter and did indeed see another of Bobbi's “gadgets.” This one was smaller—half an egg carton with the last two egg-cradles standing empty. D-cells stood in the other four, each neatly capped with one of those little funnels (looking at them more closely, Gard decided they were scraps of tin can carefully cut to shape with tin-snips), each with a wire coming out of the funnel over the + post... one red, one blue, one yellow, one green. These went to another circuit board. This one, which looked as if it might have come from a radio, was held vertical by two short, flat pieces of wood that had been glued to the desk with the board sandwiched in between. Those pieces of wood, each looking a little like the chalk gutter at the foot of a blackboard, were so absurdly familiar to Gardener that for a moment he was unable to identify them. Then it came. They were the tile-holders you put your letters on when you were playing Scrabble.

One single wire, almost as thick as an AC cord, ran from the circuit board into the typewriter.

“Put in some paper!” Anderson called. She laughed. “That was the part I almost forgot, isn't that stupid? They were no help there and I almost went crazy before I saw the answer. I was sitting on the jakes one day, wishing I'd gotten one of those damned word-crunchers after all, and when I reached for the toilet paper... eureka! Boy, did I feel dumb! Just roll it in, Gard!”

No. I'm getting out of here right now, and then I'm going to hitch a ride up to the Purple Cow in Hampden and get so fucking drunk I'll never remember this stuff. I don't ever want to know who “they” are.

Instead, he pulled on the roll, slipped the perforated end of the first sheet

under the roller, and turned the knob on the side of the old machine until he could snap the bar down. His heart was beating hard and fast. “Okay!” he called. “Do you want me to... uh, turn something on?” He didn't see any switch, and even if he had, he wouldn't have wanted to touch it.

“Don't need to!” she called back, and Gardener heard a click. It was followed by a hum—the sound of a kid's electric train transformer.

Green light began to spill out of Anderson's typewriter.

Gardener took an involuntary, shambling step backward on legs that felt like stilts. That light rayed out between the keys in weird, diverging strokes. There were glass panels set into the Underwood's sides and now they glowed like the walls of an aquarium.

Suddenly the keys of the typewriter began to depress themselves, moving up and down like the keys of a player piano. The carriage moved rapidly and letters spilled across the page:

Full fathom five my father lies

Ding! Bang!

The carriage returned.

No, I'm not seeing this. I don't believe I'm seeing this.

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Sickly green light spilling up through the keyboard and over the words like radium.

Ding! Bang!

My beer is Rhinegold the dry beer

The line appeared in the space of a second, it seemed. The keys were a hammering blur of speed. It was like watching a news ticker.

Think of Rhinegold whenever you buy beer!

Dear God, is she really doing this? Or is it a trick?

With his mind tottering again in the face of this new wonder, he found himself grasping eagerly for Sherlock Holmes—a trick, of course it was a trick, all a part of poor old Bobbi's nervous breakdown... her very creative nervous breakdown.

Ding! Bang! The carriage shot back.

No trick, Gard.

The carriage returned, and the hammering keys typed this before his wide, staring eyes.

You were right the first time. I'm doing it from the kitchen. The gadget behind the typewriter is thought-sensitive, the way a photoelectric cell is light-sensitive. This thing seems to pick up my thoughts clearly up to a distance of five miles. If I'm further away than that, things start to get garbled. Beyond ten or so, it doesn't work at all.

Ding! Bang! The big silver lever to the left of the carriage worked itself twice, cranking the paper—which now held three perfectly typed messages—up a few lines. Then it resumed.

So you see I didn't have to be sitting at the typewriter to work on my novel -look, ma, no hands! This poor old Underwood ran like a bastard for those two or three days, Gard, and all the time it was running I was in the woods, working around the place, or down cellar. But as I say, mostly I was sleeping. It's funny... even if someone could have convinced me such a gadget existed, I wouldn't have believed it would work for me, because I've always been lousy at dictating. I have to write my own letters, I always said, because I have to see the words on paper. It was impossible for me to imagine how someone could dictate a whole novel into a tape recorder, for instance, although some writers apparently do just that. But this isn't like dictating, Gard—it's like a direct tap into the subconscious, more like dreaming than writing... but what comes out is unlike dreams, which are often surreal and disconnected. This really isn't a typewriter at all anymore. It's a dream machine. One that dreams rationally. There's something cosmically funny about them giving it to me, so I could write The Buffalo Soldiers. You're right, it really is the best thing I've ever written, but it's still your basic oat opera. It's like inventing a perpetual-motion machine so your little kid won't pester you any more about changing the batteries in his toy car! But can you imagine what the results might have been if F. Scott Fitzgerald had had one of these gadgets? Or Hemingway? Faulkner? Salinger?

After each question-mark the typewriter fell momentarily silent and then burst out with another name. After Salinger's, it stopped completely. Gardener had read the material as it came out, but in a mechanical, almost uncomprehending way. His eyes went back to the beginning of the passage. I was thinking that it was a trick, that she might have hooked the typewriter up somehow to write those two little snatches of verse. And it wrote

It had written: No trick, Gard.

He thought suddenly: Can you read my mind, Bobbi?

Ding! Bang! The carriage returned suddenly, making him jump and almost cry out.

Yes. But only a little.

What did we do on the 4th July the year I quit teaching?

Drove up to Derry. You said you knew a guy who'd sell us some cherry bombs. He sold us the cherry bombs but they were all duds. You were pretty drunk. You wanted to go back and knock his block off. I couldn't talk you out of it, so we went back, and damned if his house wasn't on fire. He had a lot of real stuff in the basement, and he'd dropped a cigarette butt into a box of it. You saw the fire and the fire-trucks and got laughing so hard you fell down in the street.

That feeling of unreality had never been as strong as it was now. He fought it, keeping it at arm's length while his eyes searched through the previous passage for something else. After a second or two he found it: There's something almost cosmically funny about them giving it to me, you know...

And earlier Bobbi had said: The batteries kept falling over and they were wild, just wild...

His cheeks felt hotly flushed, as if with fever, but his forehead felt as cold as an icepack—even the steady pulse of pain from above his left eye seemed cold... shallow stabs hitting with metronomelike regularity.

Looking at the typewriter, which was filled with that somehow ghastly green light, Gardener thought: Bobbi, who are “they”?

Ding! Bang!

The keys rattled off a burst, letters forming words, the words forming a child's couplet:

Late last night and the night before

Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.

Jim Gardener screamed.

At last his hands stopped shaking—enough so he could get the hot coffee to his mouth without slopping it all over himself, thus finishing the morning's lunatic festivities with a few more burns.

Anderson kept watching him from the other side of the kitchen table with concerned eyes. She kept a bottle of very good brandy in the darkest depths of the pantry, far away from the “alcoholic staples,” and she had offered to spike Gard's coffee with a wallop of it. He had declined, not just with regret but with real pain. He needed that brandy—it would dull the ache in his head, maybe kill it entirely. More important, it would bring his mind back into focus. It would get rid of that I-just-sailed-off-the-edge-of-the-world feeling.

Only problem was, he'd finally gotten to “that” point, hadn't he? Correct. That point where it wouldn't stop with a single wallop of brandy in his coffee. There had been entirely too much input since he had opened the hatch at the bottom of Bobbi's water heater and then gone upstairs for a belt of whiskey.

It had been safe then; now the air was the unsteady sort that spawned tornadoes.

So: no more drinks. Not so much as an Irish sweetener in his coffee, until he understood what was happening here. Including what was happening to Bobbi. That, most of all.

“I'm sorry that last bit happened,” Anderson said, “but I'm not sure I could have stopped it. I told you it was a dream machine; it's also a subconscious machine. I'm really not getting much of your thoughts at all, Gard—I've tried this with other people, and in most cases it's as easy as sinking your thumb into fresh dough. You can core all the way down to what I guess you'd call the id... although it's awful down there, full of the most monstrous... you can't even call them ideas... images, I guess you'd say. Simple as a child's scrawl, but they're alive. Like those fish they find down deep in the ocean, the ones that explode if you bring them up.” Bobbi suddenly shuddered. “They're alive,” she repeated.

For a second there was no sound but the birds singing outside.

“Anyway, all I get from you is surface stuff, and most of that is all broken up and garbled. If you were like anyone else, I'd know what's been going on with you, and why you look so crappy—”

“Thanks, Bobbi. I knew there was a reason I keep coming here, and since it's not the cooking, it must be the flattery.” He grinned, but it was a nervous grin, and he lit another cigarette.

“As it is,” Bobbi went on as if he hadn't spoken, “I can make some educated guesses on the basis of what's happened to you before, but you'll have to tell me the details... I couldn't snoop even if I wanted to. I'm not sure I could get it clear even if you shoved it all up to the front of your mind and put out a Welcome mat. But when you asked who “they” were, that little rhyme about the Tommyknockers came up like a big bubble. And it ran itself off on the typewriter.”

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 622