The Tommyknockers, Page 5

  She ran warm water over the Gravy Train nuggets, then stirred them with the old battered spoon she kept for the purpose. Soon the softening nuggets floated in a muddy liquid that actually did look like gravy ... either that, Anderson thought, or something out of a backed-up septic tank.

  "Here you go," she said, turning away from the sink. Peter was now in his accustomed spot on the linoleum--a polite distance away so Anderson wouldn't trip over him when she turned around--and thumping his tail. "Hope you enjoy it. Myself, I think I'd ralph my g--"

  That was where she stopped, bent over with Peter's red dish in her right hand, her hair falling over one eye. She brushed it away.

  "Pete?" she heard herself say.

  Peter looked at her quizzically for a moment and then padded forward to get his morning kip. A moment later he was slurping it up enthusiastically.

  Anderson straightened, looking at her dog, rather glad she could no longer see Peter's face. In her head her grandfather's voice told her again to leave it alone, it was dangerous, and did she need any more string for her beads?

  There are about a million people in this country alone who would come running if they got wind of this kind of dangerous, Anderson thought. God knows how many in the rest of the world. And is that all it does? How is it on cancer, do you suppose?

  All the strength suddenly ran out of her legs. She felt her way backward until she touched one of the kitchen chairs. She sat down and watched Peter eat.

  The milky cataract which had covered his left eye was now half gone.

  2

  "I don't have the slightest idea," the vet said that afternoon.

  Anderson sat in the examining room's only chair while Peter sat obediently on the examining table. Anderson found herself remembering how she had dreaded the possibility of having to bring Peter to the vet's this summer ... only now it didn't look as if Peter would have to be put down after all.

  "But it isn't just my imagination?" Anderson asked, and she supposed that what she really wanted was for Dr. Etheridge to either confirm or confute the Anne in her head: It's what you deserve, living out there alone with your smelly dog....

  "Nope," Etheridge said, "although I can understand why you feel flummoxed. I feel a little flummoxed myself. His cataract is in active remission. You can get down, Peter." Peter climbed down from the table, going first to Etheridge's stool and then to the floor and then to Anderson.

  Anderson put her hand on Peter's head and looked closely at Etheridge, thinking: Did you see that? Not quite wanting to say it out loud. For a moment Etheridge met her eyes, and then he looked away. I saw it, yes, but I'm not going to admit that I saw it. Peter had gotten down carefully, in a descent that was miles from the devil-take-the-hindmost bounds of the puppy he had once been, but neither was it the trembling, tentative, wobbly descent Peter would have made even a week ago, cocking his head unnaturally to the right so he could see where he was going, his balance so vague that your heart stopped until he was down with no bones broken. Peter came down with the conservative yet solid confidence of the elder statesman he had been two or three years ago. Some of it, Anderson supposed, was the fact that the vision in his left eye was returning--Etheridge had confirmed that with a few simple perception tests. But the eye wasn't all of it. The rest was overall improved body coordination. Simple as that. Crazy, but simple.

  And the shrinking cataract hadn't caused Pete's muzzle to return to salt-and-pepper from an almost solid white, had it? Anderson had noticed that in the pickup truck as they headed down to Augusta. She had almost driven off the road.

  How much of this was Etheridge seeing and not being prepared to admit he was seeing? Quite a bit, Anderson guessed, but part of it was just that Etheridge wasn't Doc Daggett.

  Daggett had seen Peter at least twice a year during the first ten years of Peter's life ... and then there were the things that came up, like the time Pete had mixed in with a porcupine, for instance, and Daggett had removed the quills, one by one, whistling the theme music from The Bridge on the River Kwai as he did so, soothing the trembling year-old dog with one big kindly hand. On another occasion Peter had come limping home with a backside full of birdshot--a cruel present from a hunter either too stupid to look before he shot or perhaps sadistic enough to inflict misery on a dog because he couldn't find a partridge or pheasant to inflict it on. Dr. Daggett would have seen all the changes in Peter, and would not have been able to deny them even if he had wished to. Dr. Daggett would have taken off his pink-rimmed glasses, polished them on his white coat, and said something like: We have to find out where he's been and what he's gotten into, Roberta. This is serious. Dogs don't just get younger, and that is what Peter appears to be doing. That would have forced Anderson to reply: I know where he's been, and I've got a pretty good idea of what did it. And that would have taken a lot of the pressure off, wouldn't it? But old Doc Daggett had sold the practice to Etheridge, who seemed nice enough, but who was still something of a stranger, and retired to Florida. Etheridge had seen Peter more often than Daggett had done--four times in the last year, as it happened--because as Peter grew older he had grown steadily more infirm. But he still hadn't seen him as often as his predecessor ... and, she suspected, he didn't have his predecessor's clear-eyed perceptions. Or his guts.

  From the ward behind them, a German shepherd suddenly exploded a string of heavy barks that sounded like a string of canine curses. Other dogs picked it up. Peter's ears cocked forward and he began to tremble under Anderson's hand. The Benjamin Button routine apparently hadn't done a thing for the beagle's equanimity, Anderson thought; once through his puppyhood storms, Peter had been so laid-back he was damn near paralytic. This high-strung trembling was brand-new.

  Etheridge was listening to the dogs with a slight frown--now almost all of them were barking.

  "Thanks for seeing us on such short notice," Anderson said. She had to raise her voice to be heard. A dog in the waiting room also started to bark--the quick, nervous yappings of a very small animal ... a Pom or a poodle, most likely. "It was very--" Her voice broke momentarily. She felt a vibration under her fingertips and her first thought

  (the ship)

  was of the thing in the woods. But she knew what this vibration was. Although she had felt it very, very seldom, there was no mystery about it.

  This vibration was coming from Peter. Peter was growling, very low and deep in his throat.

  "--kind of you, but I think we ought to split. It sounds like you've got a mutiny on your hands." She meant it as a joke, but it no longer sounded like a joke. Suddenly the entire small complex--the cinderblock square that was Etheridge's waiting room and treatment room, plus the attached cinderblock rectangle that was his ward and operating theater--was in an uproar. All the dogs out back were barking, and in the waiting room the Pom had been joined by a couple of other dogs ... and a feminine, wavering wail that was unmistakably feline.

  Mrs. Alden popped in, looking distressed. "Dr. Etheridge--"

  "All right," he said, sounding cross. "Excuse me, Ms. Anderson."

  He left in a hurry, heading for the ward first. When he opened the door, the noise of the dogs seemed to double----they're going bugshit, Anderson thought, and that was all she had time to think, because Peter almost lunged out from under her hand. That idling growl deep in his throat suddenly roughened into a snarl. Etheridge, already hurrying down the ward's central corridor, dogs barking all around him and the door swinging slowly shut on its pneumatic elbow behind him, didn't hear, but Anderson did, and if she hadn't been lucky in her grab for Peter's collar, the beagle would have been across the room like a shot and into the ward after the doctor. The trembling and the deep growl ... those hadn't been fear, she realized. They had been rage--it was inexplicable, completely unlike Peter, but that's what it had been.

  Peter's snarl turned to a strangled sound--yark!--as Anderson pulled him back by the collar. He turned his head, and in Peter's rolling red-rimmed right eye Anderson saw what she would later
characterize only as fury at being turned from the course he wanted to follow. She could acknowledge the possibility that there was a flying saucer three hundred yards around its outer rim buried on her property; the possibility that some emanation or vibration from this ship had killed a woodchuck that had the bad luck to get a little too close, killed it so completely and unpleasantly that even the flies seemingly wanted no part of it; she could deal with an anomalous menstrual period, a canine cataract in remission, even with the seeming certainty that her dog was somehow growing younger.

  All this, yes.

  But the idea that she had seen an insane hate for her, for Bobbi Anderson, in her good old dog Peter's eyes ...no.

  3

  That moment was thankfully brief. The door to the ward shut, muffling the cacophony. Some of the tenseness seemed to go out of Peter. He was still trembling, but at least he sat down again.

  "Come on, Pete, we're getting out of here," Anderson said. She was badly shaken--much more so than she would later admit to Jim Gardener. For to admit that would have perhaps led back to that furious leer of rage she had seen in Peter's good eye.

  She fumbled for the unfamiliar leash which she had taken off Peter as soon as they got into the examination room (that dogs should be leashed when owners brought them in for examination was a requirement Anderson had always found annoying--until now), almost dropping it. At last she managed to attach it to Peter's collar.

  She led Peter to the door of the waiting room and pushed it open with her foot. The noise was worse than ever. The yapper was indeed a Pomeranian, the property of a fat woman wearing bright yellow slacks and a yellow top. Fatso was trying to hold the Pom, telling it to "be a good boy, Eric, be a good boy for Mommy." Very little save the dog's bright and somehow ratty eyes were visible between Mommy's large and flabby arms.

  "Ms. Anderson--" Mrs. Alden began. She looked bewildered and a little frightened, a woman trying to conduct business as usual in a place that had suddenly become a madhouse. Anderson understood how she felt.

  The Pom spotted Peter--Anderson would later swear that was what set it off--and seemed to go crazy. It certainly had no problem choosing a target. It sank its sharp teeth into one of Mommy's arms.

  "Cocksucker!" Mommy screamed, and dropped the Pom on the floor. Blood began to run down her arm.

  At the same time, Peter lunged forward, barking and snarling, fetching up at the end of the short leash hard enough to jerk Anderson forward. Her right arm flagged out straight. With the clear eye of her writer's mind Anderson saw exactly what was going to happen next. Peter the beagle and Eric the Pom were going to meet in the middle of the room like David and Goliath. But the Pom had no brains, let alone a sling. Peter would tear its head off with one large chomp.

  This was averted by a girl of perhaps eleven, who was sitting to Mommy's left. The girl had a Porta-Carry on her lap. Inside was a large blacksnake, its scales glowing with luxuriant good health. The little girl shot out one jeans-clad leg with the unearthly reflexes of the very young and stomped on the trailing end of Eric's leash. Eric did one complete snap-roll. The little girl reeled the Pom in. She was by far the calmest person in the waiting room.

  "What if that little fucker gave me the rabies?" Mommy was screaming as she advanced across the room toward Mrs. Alden. Blood twinkled between the fingers clapped to her arm. Peter's head turned toward her as she passed, and Anderson pulled him back, heading toward the door. Fuck the little sign in Mrs. Alden's cubbyhole reading IT IS CUSTOMARY TO PAY CASH FOR PROFESSIONAL SERVICES UNLESS OTHER ARRANGEMENTS HAVE BEEN MADE IN ADVANCE. She wanted to get out of here and drive the speed limit all the way home and have a drink. Cutty. A double. On second thought, make that a triple.

  From her left came a long, low, virulent hissing sound. Anderson turned in that direction and saw a cat that might have stepped out of a Halloween decoration. Black except for a single dab of white at the end of its tail, it had backed up as far as its carrying cage would allow. Its back was humped up; its fur stood straight up in hackles; its green eyes, fixed unwaveringly on Peter, glowed fantastically. Its pink mouth was jointed wide, ringed with teeth.

  "Get your dog out, lady," the woman with the cat said in a voice cold as a cocking trigger. "Blacky don't like im."

  Anderson wanted to tell her she didn't care if Blacky farted or blew a tin whistle, but she would not think of this obscure but somehow exquisitely apt expression until later--she rarely did in hot situations. Her characters always knew exactly the right things to say, and she rarely had to deliberate over them--they came easily and naturally. This was almost never the case in real life.

  "Hold your water," was the best she could do, and she spoke in such a craven mutter that she doubted if Blacky's owner had the slightest idea what she had said, or maybe even that she had said anything at all. She really was pulling Peter now, using the leash to yank the dog along in a way she hated to see a dog pulled whenever she observed it being done on the street. Peter was making coughing noises in his throat and his tongue was a saliva-dripping runner hanging askew from one side of his mouth. He stared at a boxer whose right foreleg was in a cast. A big man in a blue mechanic's coverall was holding the boxer's rope leash with both hands; had, in fact, taken a double-twist of the hayrope around one big grease-stained fist and was still having trouble holding his dog, which could have killed Peter as quickly and efficiently as Peter himself could have the Pomeranian. The boxer was pulling mightily in spite of its broken leg, and Anderson had more faith in the mechanic's grip than she did the hayrope leash, which appeared to be fraying.

  It seemed to Anderson that she fumbled for the knob of the outer door with her free hand for a hundred years. It was like having a nightmare where your hands are full and your pants start, slowly and inexorably, to slip down.

  Peter did this. Somehow.

  She turned the knob, then took one final hasty glance around the waiting room. It had become an absurd little no-man's-land. Mommy was demanding first aid of Mrs. Alden (and apparently really did need some; blood was now coursing down her arm in freshets, spotting her yellow slacks and white institutional shoes); Blacky the cat was still hissing; even Dr. Etheridge's gerbils were going mad in the complicated maze of plastic tubes and towers on the far shelf that made up their home; Eric the Crazed Pomeranian stood at the end of his leash barking at Peter in a strangled voice. Peter was snarling back.

  Anderson's eye fell on the little girl's blacksnake and saw that it had reared up like a cobra inside its Porta-Carry and was also looking at Peter, its fangless mouth yawning, its narrow pink tongue shuttling at the air in stiff little jabs.

  Blacksnakes don't do that, I never saw a blacksnake do that in my life.

  Now in something very close to real horror, Anderson fled, dragging Peter after her.

  4

  Pete began to calm down almost as soon as the door sighed shut behind them. He stopped coughing and dragging on the leash and began to walk at Anderson's side, glancing at her occasionally in that way that said I don't like this leash and I'm never going to like it, but okay, okay, if it's what you want. By the time they were both in the cab of the pickup, Peter was entirely his old self again.

  Anderson was not.

  Her hands were shaking so badly that she had to try three times before she could get the ignition key into its slot. Then she popped the clutch and stalled the engine. The Chevy pickup gave a mighty jerk and Peter tumbled off the seat onto the floor. He gave Anderson a reproachful beagle look (although all dogs are capable of reproachful looks, only beagles seem to have mastered that long-suffering stare). Where did you say you got your license, Bobbi? that expression seemed to ask. Sears and Roebuck? Then he climbed up on the seat again. Anderson was already finding it hard to believe that only five minutes ago Peter had been growling and snarling, a bad-tempered dog she had never encountered before, apparently ready to bite anything that moved, and that expression, that ... But her mind snapped shut on that before it could go any furth
er.

  She got the engine going again and then headed out of the parking lot. As she passed the side of the building--AUGUSTA VETERINARY CLINIC, the neat sign read--she rolled her window down. A few barks and yaps. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  It had stopped.

  And that wasn't all that had stopped, she thought. Although she couldn't be completely sure, she thought her period was over, too. If so, good riddance to bad rubbish.

  To coin a phrase.

  5

  Bobbi didn't want to wait--or couldn't--to get back before having the drink she had promised herself. Just outside the Augusta city limits was a roadhouse that went by the charming name of the Big Lost Weekend Bar and Grille (Whopper Spareribs Our Specialty; The Nashville Kitty-Cats This Fri and Sad).

  Anderson pulled in between an old station wagon and a John Deere tractor with a dirty harrow on the back with its blades kicked up. Further down was a big old Buick with a horse-trailer behind. Anderson had kept away from that on purpose.

  "Stay," Anderson said, and Peter, now curled up on the seat, gave her a look as if to say, Why would I want to go anywhere with you? So you can choke me some more with that stupid leash?

  The Big Lost Weekend was dark and nearly deserted on a Wednesday afternoon, its dance floor a cavern which glimmered faintly. The place reeked of sour beer. The bartender cum counterman strolled down and said,

  "Howdy, purty lady. The chili's on special. Also--"

  "I'd like Cutty Sark," Anderson said. "Double. Water back."

  "You always drink like a man?"

  "Usually from a glass," Anderson said, a quip which made no sense at all, but she felt very tired ... and harrowed to the bone. She went into the ladies' to change her pad and did slip one of the minis from her purse into the crotch of her panties as a precaution ... but precaution was all it was, and that was a relief. It seemed that the cardinal had flown off for another month.