Eddie whipped off his hat (DON'T BLAME ME; I VOTED FOR HOWARD THE DUCK written over the visor) and said: “Cough up, you guys.” Wallets appeared; change jingled in jeans pockets.
“No! Hey, thanks, but no!” Gardener felt hot blood rush into his cheeks and burn there. Not embarrassment but outright shame. Somewhere inside him he felt a strong painful thud-it didn't rattle his teeth or bones. It was, he thought, his soul taking some final fall. It sounded melodramatic as bell. As for how it felt… well, it just felt real. That was the horrible part about it. Just… real. Okay, he thought. That's what it feels like. All your life you've heard people talk about hitting bottom, this is what it feels like. Here it is. James Gardener, who was going to be the Ezra Pound of his generation, taking spare change from a Delaware bar band.
“Really… no-”
Eddie Parker went on passing the hat just the same. There was a bunch of change and a few one-dollar bills in it. Beaver got the hat last. He tossed in a couple of quarters.
“Look,” Gardener said, “I appreciate it, but
“C'mon, Beaver,” Eddie said. “Cough up, you fuckin” Scrooge.”
“Really, I have friends in Portland, I'll just call a few up… and I think I might have left my checkbook with this one guy I know in Falmouth,” Gardener added wildly.
“Bea-ver's a Scrooge,” the girl in the cutoffs began to chant gleefully. “Bea-ver's a Scrooge, Bea-ver's a Scrooge!” The others picked it up until Beaver, laughing and rolling his eyes, added another quarter and a New York Lottery ticket.
“There, I'm tapped,” he said, “unless you want to wait around for the prunes to work.” The guys in the band and the girl in the cutoffs were laughing wildly again. Looking resignedly at Gardener, as if to say, You see the morons I have to deal with? You dig it?, Beaver handed the hat to Gardener, who had to take it; if he hadn't, the change would have rolled all over the van floor.
“Really,” he said, trying to give the hat back to Beaver. “I'm perfectly okay-”
“You ain't,” Eddie Parker said. “So cut the bullshit, what do you say?”
“I guess I say thanks,” Gardener said. “It's all I can think of right now.”
“Well, it ain't so much you'll have to declare it on your income taxes,” Eddie said. “But it”?] buy you some burgers and a pair of those rubber sandals.”
The girl slid open the door in the Caravel's sidewall. “Get better, understand?” she said. Then, before he could reply, she hugged him and gave him a kiss, her mouth moist, friendly, half-open, and redolent of pot. “Take care, big guy.”
“I'll try.” On the verge of getting out he suddenly hugged her again, fiercely. “Thank you. Thank you all.”
He stood in the breakdown lane of the ramp, the rain failing a little harder now, watching as the van's sidewall door rumbled shut on its track. The girl waved. Gardener waved back and then the van was rolling down the breakdown lane, gathering speed, finally sliding over into the travel lane. Gardener watched them go, one hand still raised in a wave in case they might be looking back. Tears were running freely down his cheeks now, to mix with the rain.
He never did get a chance to buy a pair of rubber sandals, but he got to Haven before dark and he didn't have to walk the last ten or so miles to Bobbi's house, as he'd thought he might; you'd think people would be more apt to pick up a guy hitching in the rain, but that was just when they were most likely to pass you by. Who needed a human puddle in the passenger seat?
But he got a ride outside of Augusta with a farmer who complained constantly and bitterly about the government all the way up to the China town line, where he let Gard out. Gard walked a couple of miles, thumbing the few cars that passed, wondering if his feet were turning to ice or if it was just his imagination, when a pulp-truck pulled to a rackety halt beside him.
Gardener climbed into the cab as fast as he could. It smelled of old woodchips and sour loggers” sweat… but it was warm.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Don't mention it,” the driver said. “Name's Freeman Moss.” He stuck out a hand. Gardener, who had no idea that he would meet this man in the not-too- distant future under far less cheery circumstances, took it and shook it.
“Jim Gardener. Thanks again.”
“Shoot a pickle,” Freeman Moss scoffed. He got the truck moving. It shuddered along the edge of the road, picking up speed, Gard thought, not just grudgingly but with actual pain. Everything shook. The universal moaned beneath them like a hag in a chimney corner. The world's oldest toothbrush, its eroded bristles dark with the grease it had been employed to coax out of some clotted gearor cog-tooth, chittered along the dashboard, passing an old air freshener of a naked woman with very large breasts on its way. Moss punched the clutch, managed to find second after an endless time spent grinding gears, and wrestled the pulp-truck back onto the road. “Y'look half-drowned. Got half a thermos of coffee from the Drunken Donuts in Augusta left over from my dinner… you want it?”
Gardener drank it gratefully. It was strong, hot, and heavily laced with sugar. He also accepted a cigarette from the driver, dragging deeply and with pleasure, although it hurt his throat, which was getting steadily sorer.
Moss dropped him off just over the Haven town line at quarter to seven. The rain had slacked off, and the sky was lightening up in the west. “Do believe God's gonna let through some sunset,” the driver said. “I wish like hell I had a pair of shoes I could give you, mister-I usually carry an old pair of sneakers behind the seat, but it was so rainy today I never brought nothin” but m'gumrubbers.”
“Thanks, but I'll be fine. My friend is less than a mile up the road.” Actually Bobbi's place was still three miles away, but if he told Moss that, nothing would do but that he drive Gardener up there. Gardener was tired, increasingly feverish, still damp even after forty-five minutes of the heater's dry, blasting air… but he couldn't stand any more kindness today. In his present state of mind it could well drive him crazy.
“Okay. Good luck.”
“Thank you.”
He got down and waved as the truck turned off on a side-road and rumbled away toward home.
Even after Moss and his museum piece of a truck had disappeared, Gardener stood where he was for a moment longer, his wet totebag in one hand, his bare feet, white as Easter lilies, planted in the dirt of the soft shoulder, looking at the marker some two hundred feet back the way he had come. Home is the place where, when you have got there, they have to take you in, Frost had said. But he'd do well to remember he wasn't home. Maybe the worst mistake a man could make was to get to the idea that his friend's home was his own, especially when the friend was a woman whose bed you had once shared.
Not home, not at all-but he was in Haven.
He started to walk up the road toward Bobbi's house.
About fifteen minutes later, when the clouds in the west finally broke open to let through the westering sun, something strange happened: a burst of music, loud, clear, and brief, went through Gardener's head.
He stopped, looking at the sunlight as it spilled across rolling miles of wet woods and hayfields in the west, the rays beaming down like the dramatic sunrays in a DeMille Bible epic. Route 9 began to rise here, and the western view was long and gorgeous and solemn, the evening's light somehow English and pastoral in its clear beauty. The rain had given the landscape a sleek, washed look, deepening colors, seeming to fulfill the texture of things. Gardener was suddenly very glad he had not committed suicide-not in any corny Art Linkletter way, but because he had been allowed this moment of beauty and perceptual glow. Standing here, now almost at the end of his energy, feverish and sick, he felt a child's simple wonder.
All was still and silent in the final sunshine of evening. He could see no sign of industry or technology. Humanity, yes: a big red barn attached to a white farmhouse, sheds, a trailer or two, but that was all.
The light. It was the light that struck him so strongly.
Its sweet clarity, so old and deep-those rays of sun slanting almost horizontally through the unraveling clouds as this long, confusing, exhausting day neared its end. That ancient light seemed to deny time itself, and Gardener almost expected to hear a huntsman winding his horn, announcing “All Assemble.” He would hear dogs, and horses” hooves, and and that was when the music, jarring and modern, blasted through his head, scattering all thought. His hands flew to his temples in a startled gesture. The burst lasted at least five seconds, perhaps as long as ten, and what he heard was perfectly identifiable; it was Dr Hook singing “Baby Makes Her Blue Jeans Talk.”
The lyric was tinny but clear enough-as if he were listening to a small transistor radio, the kind that people used to take to the beach with them before that punk-rock group Walkman and the Ghetto-Blasters had taken over the world. But it wasn't pouring into his ears, that lyric; it was coming from the front of his head… from the place where the doctors had filled a hole in his skull with a piece of metal.
“The queen of all the nightbirds,
A player in the dark,
She don't say nothing
But baby makes her blue jeans talk.”
The volume was so loud it was almost unbearable. It had happened to him once before, this music in his head, after he'd stuck his finger into a light socket-and was he drunk at the time? My dear, does a dog piss on a fireplug?
He had discovered such musical visitations were neither hallucinatory nor all that rare-people had gotten radio transmissions on the lawn flamingoes in their yards; on teeth fillings; on the steel rims of their spectacles. For a week and a half in 1957 a family in Charlotte, North Carolina, had received signals from a classical-music station in Florida. They first heard them coming from the bathroom water glass. Soon other glasses in the house began to pick up the sound. Before it ended, the whole house was filled with the eerie sound of glassware broadcasting Bach and Beethoven, the music broken only by an occasional time-check. Finally, with a dozen violins holding one long, high note, almost all the glasses in the house shattered spontaneously and the phenomenon ceased.
So Gardener had known he wasn't alone, and had been sure he wasn't going crazy-but that wasn't much comfort, and it never had been as loud as this after the light-socket incident.
The sound of Dr Hook faded as quickly as it had come. Gardener stood tensely, waiting for it to come back. It didn't. What came instead, louder and more urgent than before, was a repetition of what had gotten him going in the first place: Bobbi's in trouble!
He turned away from the western view and started up Route 9 again. And although he was feverish and very tired, he walked fast-in fact, before long he
