The Tommyknockers, Page 50

  I've a feeling the boy might come in handy, Kyle said. (how)

  As a diversion.

  (what do you mean)

  Kyle didn't know exactly what he meant. It was only a feeling that if a spotlight were to be trained on Haven again--the way Ruth had tried to train one on the town with her damned exploding dolls, which had worked ever so much better than they were supposed to work--perhaps they could bring David Brown back and set him down somewhere else. If that was done in the right way, they might gain a little more time here. Time was always a problem. Time to "become."

  Kyle expressed these ideas in no coherent way, but the others nodded at the drift of his thoughts. It would be well to keep David Brown waiting in the wings, so to speak, awhile longer.

  (don't let Marie know--shehasn't gone far enough in the "becoming"--youmust hide this from Marie yet awhile)

  All six looked around, eyes widening. That voice, weak but clear, belonged to none of them. It had come from Bobbi Anderson.

  Bobbi! Hazel cried, half-rising from her seat. Bobbi, are you all right? How you doing?

  No answer.

  Bobbi was gone--there was not even a feel of her left in the air. They looked at each other cautiously, testing each other's impressions of that thought, confirming that it had been Bobbi. Each knew that if he or she had been alone, with no confirmation available, he or she would have dismissed it as an incredibly powerful hallucination.

  How are we going to keep it from Marie? Dick Allison asked, almost angrily. We can't hide nothing from anybody else!

  Yes, Newt returned. We can. Not good enough yet, maybe, but we can dim out our thoughts a little. Make them hard to see. Because--

  (because we've been)

  (been out there)

  (been in the shed)

  (Bobbi's shed)

  (we wore the headphones in Bobbi's shed)

  (and ate ate to "become")

  (take ye eat do this in remembrance of me)

  A sigh ran gently through them.

  We'll have to go back, Adley McKeen said. Won't we?

  "Yes," Kyle said. "We will." It was the only time anyone spoke aloud during the entire meeting, and it marked its end.

  7

  Wednesday, August 3rd:

  Andy Bozeman, who had been Haven's only realtor up until three weeks ago, when he simply closed his office, had discovered that mind-reading was something a fellow got used to very quickly. He didn't realize how quickly, or how much he had come to depend on it, until it was his turn to go on out to Bobbi's place to help and to keep an eye on the drunk.

  Part of his problem--he knew it was going to be a problem after talking to Enders and the Tremain lad--was being this close to the ship. It was like standing next to the biggest power generator in the world; constant eddies and flows of its weird force ran over his skin like skirling sand-devils in the desert. Sometimes large ideas would float dreamily into his mind, making it impossible to concentrate on what he was doing. Sometimes the exact opposite would occur: thought would break up completely, like a microwave transmission interrupted by a burst of ultraviolet rays. But most of it was just the physical fact of the ship, looming there like something out of a dream. It was exhilarating, awe-inspiring, frightening, wonderful. Bozeman thought he now understood how the Israelites must have felt carrying the Ark of the Covenant through the desert. In one of his sermons, the Rev. Goohringer said that some fellow had ventured to stick his head in there, just to see what all the shouting was about, and he had dropped dead on the spot.

  Because it had been God in there.

  There might be a kind of God in that ship, too, Andy thought. And even if that God had fled, It had left some residue . . . some of Itself . . . and thinking about it made it hard to keep your mind on the business at hand.

  Then there was Gardener's unsettling blankness. You kept running into it like a closed door that should have been open. You'd yell at him to hand you something, and he would go right on with what he was doing.

  Just . . . no response. Or you'd go to tune in on him--just sort of fall into the run of his thoughts, like picking up a telephone on a party line to see who was talking, and there would be no one there. No one at all. Nothing but a dead line.

  There was a buzz from the intercom nailed to the inside wall of the lean-to. Its wire ran across the muddy, churned ground and into the trench from which the ship jutted.

  Bozeman flipped the toggle over to Talk. "I'm here."

  "The charge is set," Gardener said. "Haul me up." He sounded very, very tired. He had thrown himself a pretty fair country drunk last night, Bozeman thought, judging by the sound of the puking he had heard from the back porch around midnight. And when he glanced into Gardener's room this morning, he had seen blood on his pillow.

  "Right away." The episode with Enders had taught them all that when Gardener asked to be brought up, you didn't waste time.

  He went to the windlass and began to crank. It was a pain in the ass, having to do this by hand, but there was a temporary shortage of batteries again. Give them another week and everything out here would be running like clockwork . . . except Bozeman doubted if he would be here to see it. Being near the ship was exhausting. Being near Gardener was exhausting in a different way--it was like being near a loaded gun that had a hair trigger. The way he had sucker-punched poor John Enders, now--the only reason John hadn't known it was coming was because Gardener was such an infuriating blank. Every now and then a bubble of thought--partial or complete--would rise to the surface of his mind, as readable as a newspaper headline, but that was all. Maybe Enders had it coming--Bozeman knew that he wouldn't be too nuts about being stuck at the bottom of a trench with one of those explosive radios. But that wasn't the point. The point was that Johnny hadn't been able to see it coming. Gardener could do anything, at any time, and no one could stop him, because no one could see it coming.

  Andy Bozeman almost wished Bobbi would die so they could get rid of him. It would be tougher with just Havenites working on the project, true, it would slow them down, but it would almost be worth it.

  The way he could come out of left field at you was so fucking unsettling.

  This morning, for instance. Coffee break. Bozeman sitting on a stump eating some of those little peanut-butter-and-cracker sandwiches and drinking iced coffee from his thermos. He had always preferred hot coffee to cold even in warm weather, but since he'd lost his teeth, really hot drinks seemed to bother him.

  Gardener had been sitting cross-legged like one of those Yoga masters on a dirty swatch of tarpaulin, eating an apple and drinking a beer. Bozeman didn't see how anyone could eat an apple and drink a beer at the same time, especially in the morning, but Gardener was doing it. From here, Bozeman could see the scar an inch or so above Gardener's left eyebrow. The steel plate would be under that scar. It--

  Gardener had turned his head and caught Bozeman looking at him. Bozeman flushed, wondering if Gardener was going to start to yell and rant. If maybe he was going to come over here and try to sucker-punch him the way he had Johnny Enders. If he tries that, Bozeman thought, curling his hands into fists, he's going to find that I'm no sucker.

  Instead, Gard had begun to speak in a clear, carrying voice--there was a small, cynical smile on his mouth as he did it. After a moment, Bozeman realized he wasn't just speaking, he was reciting. The man was sitting out here in the woods cross-legged on a dirty tarp, hung-over out of his mind, the glittering body of the ship in the earth casting moving ripples of reflection on his cheek, and reciting like a schoolboy--the man was un-fucking-stable, Bozeman would tell the world. He sincerely wanted Gardener dead.

  " 'Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart,' " Gardener said, eyes half-closed, face turned up toward the warm morning sun. That little smile never left his lips. " 'And while the late steamer Big Missouri worked and sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned th
e slaughter of more innocents.' "

  "What--" Andy began, but Gardener, his smile now spreading into a genuine--if nonetheless cynical--grin, overrode him.

  " 'There was no lack of material; boys happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but they remained to whitewash. By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy Fisher for a kite, in good repair; and when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in for a dead rat, and a string to swing it with . . .' "

  Gardener drank the rest of his beer, belched, and stretched.

  "You never brought me a dead rat and a string to swing it with, but I got an intercom, Bozie, and I guess that's a start, huh?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about," Bozeman said slowly. He had only gotten two years of college, business admin, before having to drop out and go to work. His father had a heart condition and chronic high blood pressure. High-flown fellows like this made him nervous and angry. Lording it over ordinary folks, as if being able to quote from something written by someone who had died a long time ago made their shit smell sweeter than other people's.

  Gardener said, "That's okay. It's from chapter two of Tom Sawyer. When Bobbi was a kid back in Utica, seventh grade, they had this thing called Junior Exhibition. It was a recitation competition. She didn't want to be in it, but her sister Anne decided she ought to be, that it would be good for her, or something, and when sister Anne decided something, brother, it was decided. Anne was a real tartar then, Bozie, and she's a real tartar now. At least I guess she is. I haven't seen her in a long time, and that's the way, oh-ho, uh-huh, I like it. But I think it's fair to say she's still the same. People like her very rarely change."

  "Don't call me Bozie," Andy said, hoping he sounded more dangerous than he felt. "I don't like it."

  "When I had Bobbi in freshman comp, she wrote once about how she froze trying to recite Tom Sawyer. I just about cracked up." Gardener got to his feet and started walking toward Andy, a development the ex-realtor viewed with active alarm. "I saw her after class the next day and asked her if she still remembered how 'Whitewashing the Fence' went. She did. I wasn't surprised. There are some things you never forget, like when your sister or your mother bulldozed you into some horror-show like Junior Ex. You may forget the piece when you're standing up there in front of all those people. Otherwise, you could recite it on your deathbed."

  "Look," Andy said, "we ought to get back to work--"

  "I let her get about four sentences in, then I joined her. Her jaw dropped almost down to her knees. Then she started grinning, and we went through it together, word for word. It wasn't so strange. We were both shy kids, Bobbi and I. Her sister was the dragon in front of her cave, my mother was the dragon in front of mine. People like that often get this very weird idea that the way to cure a shy kid is to put him into the sort of situation he dreads the most--something like Junior Ex. It wasn't even much of a coincidence that we'd both gotten that whitewashing thing by heart. The only one more popular for recitation is 'The Tell-Tale Heart.' "

  Gardener drew in breath and screamed:

  "Stop, fiends! Dissemble no more! Tear up the floor-boards! Here! Here! 'Tis the beating of his hideous heart!"

  Andy had uttered a small shriek. He dropped his thermos, and half a cup of cold coffee stained the crotch of his pants.

  "Uh-oh, Bozie," Gardener said conversationally. "Never get that out of those polyester slacks.

  "Only difference between the two of us was that I didn't freeze," Gardener said. "In fact, I won a second-prize ribbon. But it didn't cure my fear of talking in front of crowds . . . only made it worse. Whenever I stand up in front of a group to read poetry, I look at all those hungry eyes . . . I think of 'Whitewashing the Fence.' Also, I think about Bobbi. Sometimes that's enough to get me through. Anyway, it made us friends."

  "I don't see what any of that has to do with getting this work done!" Andy cried in a hectoring voice utterly unlike him. But his heart had been beating too fast. For a moment there, when Gardener had shrieked, he really had believed the man had gone insane.

  "You don't see what this has to do with whitewashing the fence?" Gardener asked, and laughed. "Then you must be blind, Bozie."

  He pointed to the ship leaning skyward at its perfect forty-five-degree angle, rising out of the wide trench.

  "We're digging it up instead of whitewashing it, but that doesn't change the principle a bit. I have fagged out Bobby Tremain and John Enders, and if you're back tomorrow I'll eat your Hush Puppies. Thing is, I never seem to get any prizes for it. You tell whoever comes out tomorrow I want a dead rat and a string to swing it by, Bozie ... or a bully taw, at the very least." Gardener had stopped halfway to the trench. He looked around at Andy. Andy's failure to read this big man with the sloping shoulders and the indistinct, oddly broken face had never made Bozeman more uncomfortable than it did then.

  "Better still, Bozie," Gardener had said in a voice so soft Andy could hardly hear it, "get Bobbi out here tomorrow. I'd like to find out if the New Improved Bobbi still remembers how to recite 'Whitewashing the Fence' from Tom Sawyer."

  Then, without another word, he had gone to the sling and waited for Andy to lower him down.

  If that whole thing hadn't been left-field, Andy didn't know what was. And, he added to himself as he turned the winch, that had only been Gardener's first beer of the day. He'll put away another five or six at lunch and really get wild and crazy.

  Gardener now came swaying to the top of the trench, and Andy had an urge to let go of the windlass crank. Solve the problem.

  Except he couldn't--Gardener belonged to Bobbi Anderson, and until Bobbi either died or came out of the shed, things had to go on pretty much as they were.

  "Come on, Bozie. Some of those rocks fly a long way." He started toward the lean-to. Andy fell in beside him, hurrying to keep up.

  "I told you I don't like you calling me Bozie," he said.

  Gardener spared him a curiously flat glance. "I know," he said.

  They went around the lean-to. About three minutes later another of those loud, crumping roars shuddered out of the trench. A spray of rocks rose into the sky and came down, rattling off the hull of the ship with dull clangs and clongs.

  "Well, let's--" Bozeman began.

  Gardener grabbed his arm. His head was tilted, his face alert, his eyes dark and lively. "Shhh!"

  Andy wrenched his arm away. "What in the hell's wrong with you?"

  "Don't you hear it?"

  "I don't h--"

  Then he did. A hissing sound, like a giant teakettle, was coming from the trench. It was growing. A mad excitement suddenly seized Andy. There was more than a little terror in it.

  "It's them!" he whispered, and turned toward Gard. His eyes were the size of doorknobs. His lips, shiny with loose spittle, were trembling. "They weren't dead, we woke them up ... they're coming out!"

  "Jesus is coming and is He pissed," Gardener remarked, unimpressed.

  The hissing grew louder. Now there was another crunching thud--this wasn't an explosion; it was the sound of something heavy collapsing. A moment later something else collapsed: Andy. The strength ran out of his legs and he fell to his knees.

  "It's them, it's them, it's them!" he slobbered.

  Gardener hooked a hand into the man's armpit, wincing a little at the hot, jungly dampness there, and pulled him to his feet.

  "That's not the Tommyknockers," he said. "It's water."

  "Huh?" Bozeman looked at him with dazed incomprehension.

  "Water!" Gardener cried, giving Bozeman a brisk little shake. "We just brought in our swimming pool, Bozie!"

  "Wh--"

  The hiss suddenly exploded into a soft, steady roar. Water jetted out of the trench and into the sky in a widening sheet. This was no column of water; it was as if a giant child had just pressed his finger over a giant faucet to watch the water spray everywhere. At the bottom of the trench, water was driving up through a number of fissures in just that way.

&n
bsp; "Water?" Andy asked weakly. He couldn't get it right in his mind.

  Gardener didn't reply. Rainbows danced in the water; it ran down the sleek hull of the ship in rivulets, leaving beads behind . . . and as he watched, he saw those drops begin to skitter, the way water flicked into hot fat on a griddle will skitter and hop. Only this was not random. The drops were lining up in obedience to lines of force which ran down the hull of the ship like lines of longitude on a globe.

  I can see it, Gardener thought. I can see the force radiating from the ship's skin in those drops. My God--

  There was another crunch. Gardener seemed to feel the earth actually drop a bit under his feet. At the bottom of the trench, water pressure was finishing the work the blasting had begun--widening fissures and holes, pulling the friable rock apart. More water began to escape, and more easily. The sheets of spray fell back. A last diffuse rainbow wavered in the air and disappeared.

  Gardener saw the ship shift as the rock weld which had prisoned it so long let go. It moved so slightly it might have been imagination, but it wasn't. In that brief movement he could see how it would look coming out of the ground--he could see its shadow rippling slowly over the ground as it came up and out, could hear the unearthly wailing of its hull scraping over the bones of bedrock, could sense everyone in Haven looking this way as it rose into the sky, hot and glittering, a monstrous silver coin slowly heeling over to the horizontal for the first time in millennia, floating soundlessly in the sky, floating free . . .

  He wanted that. God! Right or wrong, he wanted that so bad.

  Gardener gave his head a brisk shake, as if to clear it.