long enough for the desk clerk to see he had no shoes on. The clerk nodded to a husky bellman when Gardener began to protest, and the two of them gave him the bum's rush.
They would have booted me even if I had been wearing shoes, Gard reflected. Shit, I would have booted me.
He had gotten a good look at himself in the glass of the lobby door. Too good. He had managed to mop most of the blood off his face with his sleeve, but there were still traces. His eyes were bloodshot and starey. His week's growth of beard made him look like a porcupine about six weeks after a shearing. In the genteel summer world of the Alhambra, where men were men and women wore tennis skirts, he looked like a male bag-lady.
Because only the earliest risers had begun to stir, the bellman took the time to inform him there was a pay phone at the Mobil station.
'Intersection of US 1 and Route 26. Now get the hell out before I call the cops.'
If he had needed to know any more about himself than he already did, it was in the husky bellman's disgusted eyes.
Gardener trudged slowly down the hill toward the gas station. His socks flapped and flailed against the tar. His heart knocked like a wheezy Model T engine that's experienced too much hard traveling and too little maintenance. He could feel the headache moving to the left, where it would eventually center in a brilliant pinpoint ... if he'd had plans to live that long, anyway. And suddenly he was seventeen again.
He was seventeen, and his obsession wasn't nukes but nooky. The girl's name was Annmarie and he thought he was going to make it with her pretty soon, maybe, if he didn't lose his nerve. If he kept his cool. Maybe even tonight. But part of keeping his cool was doing okay today. Today, right here, here being Straight Arrow, an intermediate ski trail at Victory Mountain in Vermont. He was looking down at his skis, mentally reviewing the steps necessary to come to your basic snowplow stop, reviewing as he would study for a test, wanting to pass, knowing he was still pretty new at this and Annmarie wasn't, and he somehow didn't think she would be so apt to come across if he ended up looking like Frosty the Snowman his first day off the beginners' slopes; he didn't mind looking a little inexperienced as long as he didn't look downright stupid, so there he had been, looking stupidly down at his feet instead of where he was going, which was directly at a gnarled old pine with the warning red stripe painted on its bark, and the only sounds were the wind in his ears and the snow sliding dryly under his skis, and they were the same soothing hush-a-bye sound: Shhhhhh ...
It was the rhyme that broke into the memory, making him stop near the Mobil station. The rhyme came and it stayed, beating in time with his heart and throbbing head. Late last night and the night before, Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.
Gard hawked, tasted the coppery, unpleasant flavor of his own blood, and spat a reddish glob of phlegm into the trash-littered dirt of the soft shoulder. He remembered asking his mother who or what Tommyknockers were. He couldn't remember what, if anything, she had replied, but he knew he'd always thought they must be highwaymen, robbers who stole by moonlight, killed in shadow, and buried in the darkest part of the night. And hadn't he spent one tortured, endless half-hour in the darkness of his bedroom before sleep finally decided to be merciful and claim him, thinking they might be cannibals as well as robbers? That instead of burying their victims in the dark of the night, they might have cooked them and ... well ...
Gardener wrapped his thin arms (there didn't seem to be any restaurants up in the cyclone) around his chest and shuddered.
He crossed to the Mobil station, which was hung with bunting but not yet open. The signs out front read SUPERUNLEADED .89 and GOD BLESS AMERICA and WE LUV WINNEBAGOS! The pay phone was on the side of the building. Gardener was grateful to find it was one of the new ones; you could dial long distance without depositing any money. That at least spared him the indignity of spending part of his last morning on earth panhandling.
He punched zero,