The Tommyknockers

  What he saw on Bobbi's desk, beside the battered old typewriter, was in some ways the worst shock of all. Shocking enough, anyway, so that he barely noticed another change: a roll of perforated computer paper hung on the wall above and behind the desk and typewriter like a giant roll of paper towels.

  9

  THE BUFFALO SOLDIERS

  a novel by Roberta Anderson

  Gardener put the top sheet aside, facedown, and saw his own name--or rather, the nickname only he and Bobbi used.

  For Gard, who's always there when I need him.

  Another shudder worked through him. He put the second sheet aside facedown on the first.

  1

  In those days, just before Kansas began to bleed, the buffalo were still plentiful on the plains--plentiful enough, anyway, for poor men, white and Indian alike, to be buried in buffalo skins rather than in coffins.

  "Once you get a taste of buffaler meat, you'll never want what come off'n a cow again," the old-timers said, and they must have believed what they said, because these hunters of the plains, these buffalo soldiers, seemed to exist in a world of hairy, humpbacked ghosts--all about them they carried the memory of the buffalo, the smell of the buffalo--the smell, yes, because many of them smeared buff-tallow on their necks and faces and hands to keep the prairie sun from burning them black. They wore buffalo teeth in necklaces and sometimes in their ears; their chaps were of buffalo hide; and more than one of these nomads carried a buffalo penis as a good-luck charm or guarantee of continued potency.

  Ghosts themselves, following herds that crossed the short-wire grass like the great clouds which cover the prairie with their shadows; the clouds remain but the great herds are gone ... and so are the buffalo soldiers, madmen from wastes that had as yet never known a fence, men who came striding out of nowhere and went striding back into that same place, men with buffalo-hide moccasins on their feet and bones clicking about their necks; ghosts out of time, out of a place that existed just before the whole country began to bleed.

  Late in the afternoon, of August 24th, 1848, Robert Howell, who would die at Gettysburg not quite fifteen years later, made camp near a small stream far out along the Nebraska panhandle, in that eerie section known as the Sand Hill Country. The stream was small but the water smelled sweet enough ...

  Gardener was forty pages into the story and utterly absorbed when he heard Bobbi Anderson call sleepily:

  "Gard? Gard, are you still around?"

  "I'm here, Bobbi," he said, and stood up, dreading what would come next and already half-believing he had gone insane. That had to be it, of course. There could not be a tiny sun in the bottom of Bobbi's hot-water tank, nor a new gear on her Tomcat which suggested levitation ... but it would have been easier for him to believe either of those things than to believe that Bobbi had written a four-hundred-page novel called The Buffalo Soldiers in the three weeks or so since Gard had last seen her--a novel that was, just incidentally, the best thing she had ever written. Impossible, yeah. Easier--hell, saner--to believe he had gone crazy and simply leave it at that.

  If only he could.

  9.

  ANDERSON SPINS A TALE

  1

  Bobbi was getting off the couch slowly, wincing like an old woman.

  "Bobbi--" Gardener began.

  "Christ, I ache all over," Anderson said. "And I've got to change my--never mind. How long did I sleep?"

  Gardener glanced at his watch. "Fourteen hours, I guess. A little more. Bobbi, your new book--"

  "Yeah. Hold that until I get back." She walked slowly across the floor toward the bathroom, unbuttoning the shirt she'd slept in. As she hobbled toward the bathroom, Gardener got a good look--a better one than he wanted, actually--of just how much weight Bobbi had lost. This went beyond scrawniness to the point of emaciation.

  She stopped, as if aware Gardener was looking at her, and without looking around she said: "I can explain everything, you know."

  "Can you?" Gardener asked.

  2

  Anderson was in the bathroom a long time--much longer than it should have taken her to use the toilet and change her pad--Gardener was pretty sure that was what she'd gone to do. Her face just had that I-got-the-curse look. He listened for the shower but it wasn't running, and he began to feel uneasy. Bobbi had seemed perfectly lucid when she woke up, but did that necessarily mean she was? Gardener began to have uncomfortable visions of Bobbi wriggling out the bathroom window and then running off into the woods in nothing but blue jeans, cackling wildly.

  He put his right hand to the left side of his forehead, where the scar was. His head had started to throb a little. He let another minute or two slip by, and then he got up and walked toward the bathroom, making an effort to step quietly that was not quite unconscious. Visions of Bobbi escaping through the bathroom window to avoid explanations had been replaced by one of Bobbi serenely cutting her throat with one of Gard's own razor blades to avoid explanations permanently.

  He decided he would just listen. If he heard normal-sounding movements, he would go on out to the kitchen and put on coffee, maybe scramble a few eggs. If he didn't hear anything--

  His worries were needless. The bathroom door hadn't latched when she closed it, and other improvements aside, the unlatched doors in the place apparently still had their old way of swinging open. She'd probably have to shim up the whole north side of the house to do that. Maybe that was next week's project, he thought.

  The door had swung open enough for him to see Bobbi standing at the mirror where Gardener had stood himself not long ago. She had her toothbrush in one hand and a tube of toothpaste in the other ... but she hadn't uncapped the tube yet. She was looking into the mirror with an intensity that was almost hypnotic. Her lips were pulled back, her teeth bared.

  She caught movement in the mirror and turned around, making no particular effort to cover her wasted breasts.

  "Gard, do my teeth look all right to you?"

  Gardener looked at them. They looked to him about as they always had, although he couldn't remember ever having seen quite this much of them--he was reminded of that terrible photo of Karen Carpenter again.

  "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. "Fe
els 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, but he had to walk slow, because no matter how often he wiped his eyes, his vision kept trying to break up on him.

  3

  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?"

  "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.

  4

  Gard scrambled 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."

  5

  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.

  6

  "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 forty pages or so 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."

  "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 smiled.

  Gardener stopped smiling.

  "My time sense is pretty fucked up," she admitted. "I do know I wasn't working on it the twenty-seventh. 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, only that one's the granddaddy of them all." Anderson laughed--the laugh of a woman in the grip of pleasant reminiscences. "There's twent
y 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 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.