then had to stop. His hand was shaking wildly, it was all over the place. He cocked the phone between head and shoulder this time, leaving both hands free. Grasped his right wrist with his left hand to hold the hand steady ... as steady as possible, anyway. Now, looking like a shooter on a target range, he used his forefinger to punch the buttons with slow and horrible deliberation. The robot voice told him to either punch in his telephone credit-card number (a task Gard thought he would have been utterly incapable of performing, even if he'd had such a card) or zero for an operator. Gardener hit zero.
'Hi, happy holiday, this is Eileen,' a voice chirruped brightly. 'May I have your billing, please?'
'Hi, Eileen, happy holiday to you, too,' Gard said. 'I'd like to bill the call collect to anyone from Jim Gardener.'
'Thank you, Jim.'
'You're welcome,' he said, and then, suddenly: 'No, change that. Tell her it's Gard calling.'
As Bobbi's telephone began to ring up there in Haven, Gardener turned and looked toward the rising sun. It was even redder than before, rising toward the scud of thickening mackerel-scale clouds like a great round blister in the sky. The sun and the clouds together brought another childhood rhyme to mind: Red sky at night, sailor's delight. Red sky at morning, sailor, take warning. Gard didn't know about red sky at morning, or at night, but he knew those delicate scales of cloud were a reliable harbinger of rain.
Too goddam many rhymes for a man's last morning on earth, he thought irritably, and then: I'm going to wake you up, Bobbi. Going to wake you up, but I promise you I'll never do it again.
But there was no Bobbi to wake up. The phone rang, that was all. Rang ... and rang ... and rang.
'Your party doesn't answer,' the operator told him, just in case he was deaf or had maybe forgotten what he was doing for a few seconds and had been holding the phone against his asshole instead of his ear. 'Would you like to try again later?'
Yeah, maybe. But it'd have to be by Ouija board, Eileen.
'Okay,' he said. 'You have a good one.'
'Thank you, Gard!'
He pulled the phone away from his ear as if it had bitten him and stared at it. For a moment she had sounded so much like Bobbi ... so goddam much ...
He put the phone back and got as far as, 'What did you - 'before realizing that cheerful Eileen had clicked off.
Eileen. Eileen, not Bobbi. But
She had called him Gard. Bobbi was the only one who
No, change that. Tell her it's Gard calling.
There. Perfectly reasonable explanation.
Then why didn't it seem that way?
He hung up slowly. He stood at the side of the Mobil station in his wet socks and shrunken pants and untucked shirt, his shadow long and long. A phalanx of motorcycles went by on Route 1, headed for Maine.
Bobbi's in trouble.
Will you please just let that go? It's boolsheet, as Bobbi herself would say. Somebody tell you the only holiday you could go home for was Christmas? She went back to Utica for The Glorious Fourth, that's all.
Yes. Of course. Bobbi was about as likely to go back to Utica for the Fourth as he was to apply as an intern at the new Bay State nuclear plant. Anne would probably celebrate the holiday by ramming a few M-80s up Bobbi's cooze and lighting them off.
Well, maybe she got invited to be parade marshal - or sheriff marshall, ha-ha
- in one of those cow-towns she's always writing about. Deadwood, Abilene, Dodge City, someplace like that. You did what you could. Now finish what you started.
His mind made no effort to argue; he could have dealt with that. Instead it only reiterated its original thesis: Bobbi's in trouble.
Just an excuse, you chickenshit bastard.
He didn't think so. Intuition was solidifying into certainty. And whether it was boolsheet or not, that voice continued to insist that Bobbi was in a jam. Until he knew one way or the other for sure, he supposed he could table his personal business. As he had told himself not long ago, the ocean wasn't going anywhere.
'Maybe the Tommyknockers got her,' he said out loud, and then laughed - a scared, husky little laugh. He was going crazy, all right.
BOOK 1. THE SHIP IN THE EARTH Chapter 7. Gardener Arrives
1
Shushhhhh ...
He's staring down at his skis, plain brown wood strips racing over the snow. He