“Bobbi-”
“There's a gadget like the thing in the water heater and the one behind my typewriter in the junction box out back, but that one's the granddaddy of them all.” Anderson laughed-the laugh of a woman in the grip of pleasant reminiscences. “There's twenty 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 how 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.
“I was out of egg cartons by then, and the thing was going to have too many batteries for just one or two anyway. So I got one of Uncle Frank's cigar boxes -there must be a dozen old wooden ones up in the attic, probably even Mabel Noyes down at Junque-a-Torium would pay a few bucks for them, and you know what a skinflint she is-and I stuffed them with toilet paper and tried to make nests in the paper for the batteries to stand up in. You know… nests?”
Anderson made quick poking gestures with her right index finger and then looked, bright-eyed, at Gard, to see if he got it. Gardener nodded. That feeling of unreality was stealing back, that feeling of his mind getting ready to seep through to the top of his skull and float up to the ceiling. A drink would fix that, he thought, and the pulse in his head sharpened.
“But the batteries kept failing over anyway.” She snuffed her cigarette and immediately lit another one. “They were wild, just wild. I was wild, too. Then I got an idea.”
They?
“I went down to Chip McCausland's. Down on the Dugout Road?”
Gardener shook his head. He had never been down the Dugout Road.
“Well, he lives out there with this woman-she's his common-law wife, I guess -and about ten kids. Man, you talk about sluts… the dirt on her neck, Gard… you couldn't wash it off unless you used a jackhammer on it first. I guess he was married before, and… doesn't matter… it's just… I haven't had anyone to talk to… I mean, they don't talk, not the way a couple of people do, and I keep mixing up the stuff that's not important with the stuff that is-”
Anderson's words had started to come out quicker and quicker, until now they were almost tripping over each other. She's speed-rapping, Gardener thought with some alarm, and pretty soon she's going to start either yelling or crying. He didn't know which he dreaded more and thought again of Ishmael, Ishmael rambling through the streets of Bedford, Massachusetts, stinking more of madness than whale-oil, finally grabbing some unlucky passerby and screaming: Listen! I'm the only fucking one left to tell you and so you better listen, damn you! You better listen if you don't want to be using this harpoon for a fucking suppository! I got a tale to tell, it's about this white fucking whale and YOU'RE GOING TO LISTEN!
He reached across the table and touched her hand. “You tell it any old way you want to. I'm here and I'm going to listen. We've got time; like you said, it's your day off. So slow down. If I fall asleep you'll know you got too far from the point. Okay?”
Anderson smiled and relaxed visibly. Gardener wanted to ask again what was going on in the woods. More than that, who they were. But it would be best to wait. All bad things come to him who waits, he thought, and after a pause to collect herself, Bobbi went on.
“Chip McCausland's got three or four henhouses, that's all I started to say. For a couple of bucks I was able to get all the egg cartons I wanted… even a few of the big egg-crate sheets. Those sheets each have ten dozen cradles.”
Anderson laughed cheerfully and added something that brought gooseflesh out on Gardener's skin.
“Haven't used one of those yet, but when I do I guess we'll have enough zap for the whole town of Haven to let go of the CMP tit. With enough left over for Albion and most of Troy, as well.
“So I got the power going here-Jesus, I'm rambling-and I already had the gadget hooked up to the typewriter-and I really did sleep-napped, anyway-and that's about where we came in, isn't it?”
Gardener nodded, still trying to cope with the idea that there might be fact as well as hallucination in Bobbi's casual statement that she could build a,gadget” which could power three small towns from a source consisting of one hundred and twenty D-cell batteries.
“What the gadget on the typewriter does is…” Anderson frowned. Her head cocked a little, almost as if she were listening to a voice Gardener could not hear. “It might be easier to show you. Go on over there and roll in a sheet of paper, would you?”
“Okay.” He headed for the door into the living room, then looked back at Anderson. “Aren't you coming?”
Bobbi smiled. “I'll stay here,” she said, and then Gardener got it. He got it, and even understood on some mental level where only pure logic was allowed that it might be so-hadn't the immortal Holmes himself said that when you eliminated the impossible, you had to believe whatever was left, no matter how improbable? And there was a new novel sitting in there on the table by what Bobbi sometimes called her word-accordion.
Yeah, except typewriters don't write books by themselves, Gard old buddy. You know what the immortal Holmes probably would say? That the fact that there is a novel sitting next to Bobbi's typewriter, and the added fact that this is a novel you never saw before does not mean it is a new novel. Holmes would say Bobbi wrote that book at some time in the past. Then, while you were gone and Bobbi was losing her marbles, she brought it out and sat it beside the typewriter. She may even believe what she's telling you, but that doesn't make it so.
Gardener walked into the cluttered corner of the living room that served as Bobbi's writing quarters. It was handy enough to the bookshelf so she could simply rock back on the legs of her chair and grab almost anything she wanted. It's too good to be a trunk novel.
He knew what the immortal Holmes would say about that, too: he would agree that The Buffalo Soldiers being a trunk novel was improbable; he would argue, however, that writing a novel in three days-and not at the typewriter but while taking cat-naps between repeated frenzies of activity-was imfucking-possible.
Except that novel hadn't come out of any trunk. Gardener knew it, because he knew Bobbi. Bobbi would have been just as incapable of sticking a novel that good in her trunk as Gard was of remaining rational in a discussion on the subject of nuclear power.
Fuck you, Sherlock, and the hansom cab you and Dr W. rode in on. Christ I want a drink.
The urge-the need-to drink had come back in full, frightening force.
“You there, Gard?” Anderson called.
This time he consciously saw the roll of computer paper. It hung down loosely. He looked behind the typewriter and did indeed see another of Bobbi's “gadgets.” This one was smaller-half an egg carton with the last two egg-cradles standing empty. D-cells stood in the other four, each neatly capped with one of those little funnels (looking at them more closely, Gard decided they were scraps of tin can carefully cut to shape with tin-snips), each with a wire coming out of the funnel over the + post… one red, one blue, one yellow, one green. These went to another circuit board. This one, which looked as if it might have come from a radio, was held vertical by two short, flat pieces of wood that had been glued to the desk with the board sandwiched in between. Those pieces of wood, each looking a little like the chalk gutter at the foot of a blackboard, were so absurdly familiar to Gardener that for a moment he was unable to identify them. Then it came. They were the tile-holders you put your letters on when you were playing Scrabble.
One single wire, almost as thick as an AC cord, ran from the circuit board into the typewriter.
“Put in some paper!” Anderson called. She laughed. “That was the part I almost forgot, isn't that stupid? They were no help there and I almost went crazy before I saw the answer. I was sitting on the jakes one day, wishing I'd gotten one of those damned word-crunchers after all, and when I reached for the toilet paper… eureka! Boy, did I feel dumb! Just roll it in, Gard!”
No. I'm getting out of here right now, and then I'm going to hitch a ride up to the Purple Cow in Hampden and get so fucking drunk I'll never remember this stuff. I don't ever want to know who “they” are.
Instead, he pulled on the roll, slipped the perforated end of the first sheet
under the roller, and turned the knob on the side of the old machine until he could snap the bar down. His heart was beating hard and fast. “Okay!” he called. “Do you want me to… uh, turn something on?” He didn't see any switch, and even if he had, he wouldn't have wanted to touch it.
“Don't need to!” she called back, and Gardener heard a click. It was followed by a hum-the sound of a kid's electric train transformer.
Green light began to spill out of Anderson's typewriter.
Gardener took an involuntary, shambling step backward on legs that felt like stilts. That light rayed out between the keys in weird, diverging strokes. There were glass panels set into the Underwood's sides and now they glowed like the walls of an aquarium.
Suddenly the keys of the typewriter began to depress themselves, moving up and down like the keys of a player piano. The carriage moved rapidly and letters spilled across the page:
Full fathom five my father lies
Ding! Bang!
The carriage returned.
No, I'm not seeing this. I don't believe I'm seeing this.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
