the new socket, looked at the smear of blood on his fingerpad He went to the kitchen doorway and listened. Bobbi was snoring gustily in her bedroom. Sounded as if her sinuses were closed up as tight as timelocks.
A summer cold, she said. Maybe so. Maybe that's what it is.
But he remembered the way Peter would sometimes leap up into her lap when Bobbi sat in her old rocker by the windows to read, or when she sat out on the porch. Bobbi said Peter was most apt to make one of his boob destroying leaps when the weather was unsettled, just as he was more apt to bring on one of her allergy attacks when the weather was hot and unsettled. It's like he knows. she'd said once, and ruffled the beagle's ears. DO you, Pete? Do you know? Do you LIKE to make me sneeze? Misery loves company, is that it? And Pete had seemed to laugh up at her in that way of his.
in that way of his.
Gardener remembered, when Bobbi's return had briefly wakened him last night (Bobbi's return and that flare of green light), hearing distant and meaningless heatwave thunder.
Now he remembered that sometimes Pete needed a little comfort, too.
Especially when it thundered. Pete was deathly afraid of that sound. The sound of thunder.
Dear Christ, has she got Peter out in that shed? And if she does, in God's name WHY?
There had been smears of some funny green goo on Bobbi's dress.
And hairs.
Very familiar short brown and white hairs. Peter was in the shed, and had been all this time. Bobbi had lied about Peter being dead. God alone knew how many other things she had lied about… but why this?
Why?
Gardener didn't know.
He changed direction, went to the cupboard to the right and beneath the sink, bent, pulled out a fresh bottle of Scotch, and broke the seal. He held the bottle up and said, “To man's best friend.” He drank from the neck, gargled viciously, and swallowed.
First swallow.
Peter. What the fuck did you do to Peter, Bobbi?
He meant to get drunk.
Very drunk.
Fast.
BOOK III
THE TOMMYKNOCKERS
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
Over on the mountain: thunder, magic foam, let the people know my wisdom, fill the land with smoke. Run through the jungle… Don't look back to see.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
I slept and I dreamed the dream. This time there was no disguise anywhere. I was the malicious male-female dwarf figure, the principle of joy- in-destruction; and Saul was my counterpart, malefemale, my brother and my sister, and we were dancing in some open place, under enormous white buildings, which were filled with hideous, menacing, black machinery which held destruction. But in the dream, he and I, or she and I, were friendly, we were not hostile, we were together in spiteful malice. There was a terrible yearning nostalgia in the dream, the longing for death. We came together and kissed, in love. It was terrible, and even in the dream I knew it. Because I recognised in the dream those other dreams we all have, when the essence of love, of tenderness, is concentrated into a kiss or a caress, but now it was the caress of two half-human creatures, celebrating destruction.
Chapter 1
Sissy
“I hope you enjoyed the flight,” the stewardess by the hatch told the fortyish woman who left Delta's flight 230 with a trickle of other passengers who had stuck it out all the way to Bangor, 230's terminating point.
Bobbi Anderson's sister Anne, who was only forty but who thought fifty as well as looking it (Bobbi would say-during those infrequent times she was in her cups-that sister Anne had thought like a woman of fifty since she was thirteen or so), halted and fixed the stew with a gaze that might have stopped a clock.
“Well, I'll tell you, babe,” she said. “I'm hot. My pits stink because the plane was late leaving La Garbage and even later leaving Logan. The air was bumpy and I hate to fly. The trainee they sent back to Livestock Class spilled someone's screwdriver all over me and I've got orange juice drying to a fine crack-glaze all over my arm. My panties are sticking in the crack of my ass and this little town looks like a pimple on the cock of New England. Other questions?”
“No,” the stew managed. Her eyes had gone glassy, and she felt as if she had suddenly gone about three quick rounds with Boom-Boom Mancini on a day when Mancini was pissed at the world. This was an effect Anne Anderson often had on people.
“Good for you, dear.” Anne marched past the attendant and up the jetway, swinging a large, screamingly purple totebag in one hand. The attendant never even had time to wish her a pleasant stay in the Bangor area. She decided it would have been a wasted effort anyway. The lady looked as if she had never had a pleasant stay anywhere. She walked straight, but she looked like a woman who did it in spite of pain somewhere -like the little mermaid, who went on walking even though every step was like knives in her feet.
Only, the flight attendant thought, if that babe has got a True Love stashed anywhere, I hope to God he knows about the mating habits of the trapdoor spider.
The Avis clerk told Anne she had no cars to rent; that if Anne hadn't made a reservation in advance, she was out of luck, so sorry. It was summer in Maine, and rental cars were at a premium.
This was a mistake on the part of the clerk. A bad one.
Anne smiled grimly, mentally spat on her hands, and went to work. Situations like this were meat and drink to sister Anne, who had nursed her father until he had died a miserable death on the first of August, eight days ago. She had refused to have him removed to an I. C. facility, preferring instead to wash him, medicate his bedsores, change his continence pants, and give him his pills in the middle of the night, by herself. Of course she had driven him to the final stroke, worrying at him constantly about selling the house on Leighton Street (he didn't want to; she was determined that he would; the final monster stroke, which occurred after three smaller ones at two-year intervals, came three days after the house was put up for sale), but she would no more admit that she knew this than she would admit the fact that, although she had attended St Bart's in Utica ever since earliest childhood and was one of the leading lay-women in that fine church, she believed the concept of God was a crock of shit. By the time she was eighteen she had bent her mother to her will, and now she had destroyed her father and watched dirt shoveled over his coffin. No slip of an Avis clerk could stand against Sissy. It took her about ten minutes to break the clerk down, but she brushed aside the offer of the compact car which Avis held in reserve for the occasional-very occasional-celebrity passing through Bangor and pressed on, scenting the young clerk's increasing fear of her as clearly as a hungry carnivore scents blood. Twenty minutes after the offer of the compact, Anne drove serenely away from Bangor International behind the wheel of a Cutlass Supreme reserved for a businessman scheduled to deplane at 6:15 P. m. By that time the clerk would be off-duty-and besides, she had been so unnerved by Anne's steady flailing that she wouldn't have cared if the Cutlass had been earmarked for the President of the United States. She went tremblingly into the inner office, shut the door, locked it, put a chair under the knob, and smoked a joint one of the mechanics had laid on her. Then she burst into tears.
Anne Anderson had a similar effect on many people.
