that? Surely not. Maybe…
Maybe it had been a psychic vibration. She did not absolutely disbelieve in such things. Maybe her mind had sensed something about that buried object and had told her about it in the only way it could, by giving her a tactile impression: one of vibration. Peter had certainly sensed something about it; the old beagle hadn't wanted to go near it.
Forget it. She did.
For a little while.
That night a high, mild wind arose and Anderson went out on her front porch to smoke and listen to the wind walk and talk. At one time-even a year earlier -Peter would have come out with her, but now he remained in the parlor, curled up on his small hooked rug by the stove, nose to tail.
Anderson found her mind replaying that last look back at the plate sticking out of the earth, and she later came to believe that there was a moment perhaps when she flicked the cigarette into the gravel drive-when she decided she would have to dig it up and see what it was… although she didn't consciously recognize the decision then.
Her mind worried restlessly at what it might be, and this time she allowed it to run-she had learned that if your mind insisted on returning to a topic no matter how you tried to divert it, it was best to let it return. Only obsessives worried about obsession.
Part of some building, her mind hazarded, a pre-fab. But no one built Quonset huts out in the woods-why drag all that metal in when three men could throw up a cutter's lean-to with saws, axs, and a two-handed buck-saw in six hours? Not a car, either, or the protruding metal would have been flaked with rust. An engine-block seemed slightly more likely, but why?
And now, with dark drawing down, that memory of vibration returned with unarguable certainty. It must have been a psychic vibration, if she had felt it at all. It
Suddenly a cold and terrible certainty rose in her: someone was buried there. Maybe she had uncovered the leading edge of a car or an old refrigerator or even some sort of steel trunk, but whatever it had been in its aboveground life, it was now a coffin. A murder victim? Who else would be buried in such a way, in such a box? Guys who happened to wander into the woods during hunting season and got lost there and died there didn't carry along metal caskets to pop themselves into when they died… and even given such an idiotic idea, who would shovel the dirt back in? Cut me a break, folks, as we used to say back in the glorious days of our youth.
The vibration. It had been the call of human bones.
Come on, Bobbi-don't be so fucking stupid.
A shudder worked through her nevertheless. The idea had a certain weird persuasiveness, like a Victorian ghost story that had no business working as the world hurtled down Microchip Alley toward the unknown wonders and horrors of the twenty-first century-but somehow produced the gooseflesh just the same. She could hear Anne laughing and saying You're getting as funny in the head as Uncle Frank, Bobbi, and it's just what you deserve, living out there alone with your smelly dog. Sure. Cabin fever. The hermit complex. Call the doctor, call the nurse, Bobbi's bad… and getting worse.
All the same, she suddenly wanted to talk to Jim Gardener-needed to talk to him. She went in to call his place up the road in Unity. She had dialed four numbers when she remembered he was off doing readings-those and the poetry workshops were the way he supported himself. For itinerant artists summer was prime time. All those stupid menopausal matrons have to do something with their summers, she could hear Jim saying ironically, and I have to eat in the winter. One hand washes the other. You ought to thank God you're saved the reading circuit, anyway, Bobbi.
Yes, she was saved that-although she thought Jim liked it more than he let on. Certainly did get laid enough.
Anderson put the phone back in the cradle and looked at the bookcase to the left of the stove. It wasn't a handsome bookcase-she was no one's carpenter, nor ever would be-but it served the purpose. The bottom two shelves were taken up by the Time-Life series of volumes on the old west. The two shelves above were filled with a mixture of fiction and fact on that same subject; Brian Garfield's early westerns jostled for place with Hubert Hampton's massive Western Territories Examined. Louis L'Amour's Sackett saga lay cheek by jowl with Richard Marius's wonderful two novels, The Coming of Rain and Bound for the Promised Land. Jay R. Nash's Bloodletters and Badmen and Richard F. K. Mudgett's Westward Expansion bracketed a riot of paperback westerns by Ray Hogan, Archie Joceylen, Max Brand, Ernest Haycox, and, of course, Zane Grey-Anderson's copy of Riders of the Purple Sage had been read nearly to tatters.
On the top shelf were her own books, thirteen of them. Twelve were westerns, beginning with Hangtown, published in 1975, and ending with The Long Ride Back, published in “87. Massacre Canyon, the new one, would be published in September, as all of her westerns had been since the beginning. It occurred to her now that she had been here, in Haven, when she had received her first copy of Hangtown, although she'd begun the novel in the room of a scuzzy Cleaves Mills apartment, on a thirties-vintage Underwood dying of old age. Still, she'd finished here, and it was here that she'd held the first actual copy of the book in her hands.
Here, in Haven. Her entire career as a publishing writer was here… except for the first book.
She took that down now and looked at it curiously, realizing it had been perhaps five years since she had last held this slim volume in her hands. It was not only depressing to realize how fast time got by; it was depressing to think of how often she thought about that lately.
This volume was a total contrast to the others, with their jackets showing mesas and buttes, riders and cows and dusty trail-drive towns. This jacket was a nineteenth-century woodcut of a clipper-ship quartering toward land. Its uncompromising blacks and whites were startling, almost shocking. Boxing the Compass was the title printed above the woodcut. And below it: Poems
by Roberta Anderson.
She opened the book, paging past the title, musing for a moment over the copyright date, 1968, then pausing at the dedication page. It was as stark as the woodcut. This book is for James Gardener. The man she had been trying to call. The second of the only three men she had ever had sex with, and the only one who had ever been able to bring her to orgasm. Not that she attached any special importance to that. Or not much, anyway. Or so she thought. Or thought she thought. Or something. And it didn't matter anyway; those days were also old days.
She sighed and put the book back on the shelf without looking at the poems. Only one of them was much good. That one had been written in March of 1967, a month after her grandfather died of cancer. The rest of them were crap-the casual reader might have been fooled, because she was a talented writer… but the heart of her talent had been somewhere else. When she had published Hangtown, the circle of writers she had known had all denied her. All except Jim, who had published Boxing the Compass in the first place.
She had dropped Sherry Fenderson a long chatty letter not long after coming to Haven, and had received a curt postcard in return: Please don't write me anymore. I don't know you. Signed with a single slashed S. as curt as the message. She had been sitting on the porch, crying over that card, when Jim showed up. Why are you crying over what that silly woman thinks? he had asked her. Do you really want to trust the judgment of a woman who goes around yelling “Power to the people” and smelling of Chanel Number Five?
She just happens to be a very good poet, she had sniffed.
Jim gestured impatiently. That doesn't make her any older, he had said, or any more able to recant the cant she's been taught and then taught herself. Get your mind right, Bobbi. If you want to go on doing what you like, get your fucking mind right and stop that fucking crying. That fucking crying makes me sick. That fucking crying makes me want to puke. You're not weak. I know weak when I'm with it. Why do you want to be something you're not? Your sister? Is that why? She's not here, and she's not you, and you don't have to let her in if you don't want to. Don't whine to me about your sister any more. Grow up. Stop bitching.
She'd looked at him, she remembered now, amazed.
There's a big difference between being good at what YOU Do and being smart about what you KNOW, he said. Give Sherry some time to grow up. Give yourself some time to grow up. And stop being your own jury. It's boring. I don't want to listen to you snivel. Snivelling is for jerks. Quit being a jerk.
She had felt herself hating him, loving him, wanting all of him and none of him. Did he say he knew weak when he was with it? Boy, he ought to. He was bent. She knew it even then.
Now, he had said, you want to lay an ex-publisher or do you want to cry all over that stupid postcard?
She had laid him. She didn't know now and hadn't known then if she wanted to lay him, but she had. And screamed when she came.
That had been near the end.
She remembered that, too-how it had been near the end. He had gotten married not long after, but it would have been near the end anyway. He was weak, and he was bent.
Doesn't matter anyway, she thought, and gave herself the old, good advice: Let it go.
Advice easier given than followed. It was a long time before Anderson got over into sleep that night. Old ghosts had stirred when she moved her book of undergraduate poems… or perhaps it was that high, mild wind, hooting the eaves and whistling the trees.
She had almost made it when Peter woke her up. Peter was howling in his sleep.
Anderson got up in a hurry, scared-Peter had made a lot of noises in his sleep before this (not to mention some unbelievably noxious dogfarts), but he had never howled. It was like waking to the sound of a child screaming in the grip of a nightmare.
She went into the living room naked except for her socks and knelt by Peter, who was still on the rug by the stove.
“Pete,” she muttered. “Hey, Pete, cool it.”
She stroked the dog. Peter was shivering and jerked away when Anderson touched him, baring the eroded remains of his teeth. Then his eyes opened-the bad one and the good one-and he seemed to come back to himself. He whined weakly and thumped his tail against the floor.
“You all right?” Anderson asked.
Peter licked her hand.
“Then lie down again. Stop whining. It's boring. Stop fucking off.”
Peter lay down and closed his eyes. Anderson knelt, looking at him, troubled.
He's dreaming of that thing.
Her rational mind rejected that, but the night insisted on its own imperative-it was true, and she knew it.
She went to bed at last, and sleep came sometime after two in the morning. She had a peculiar dream. In it she was groping in the dark… not trying to find something but to get away from something. She was in the woods. Branches whipped into her face and poked her arms. Sometimes she stumbled over roots and fallen trees. And then, ahead of her, a terrible green light shone out in a single pencil-like ray. In her dream she thought of Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the mad narrator's lantern, muffled up except for one tiny hole, which he used to direct a beam of light onto the evil eye he fancied his elderly benefactor possessed.
Bobbi Anderson felt her teeth fall out.
They went painlessly, all of them. The bottom ones tumbled, some outward, some back into her mouth where they lay on her tongue or under it in hard little lumps. The top ones simply dropped down the front of her blouse. She felt one catch in her bra, which clasped in front, poking her skin.
The light. The green light. The light was wrong.
