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The kid with the firecrackers came toward him . . . but not too close. Wants to be able to take off in a hurry if I turn out to be as weird as I undoubtedly look, Gardener thought. Smart kid.
“That your stuff?” the kid asked. His T-shirt showed a guy blowing his groceries. SCHOOL-LUNCH VICTIM, the shirt said.
“Yeah,” Gardener said. He bent down and picked up the soggy notebook, looked at it for a moment, and then tossed it down again.
The kid handed him the other two. What could he say? Don’t bother, kid? The poems suck, kid? Poetry and politics rarely mix, kid, poetry and propaganda never?
“Thanks,” he said.
“Sure.” The kid held the bag so Gardener could drop the two dry notebooks back inside. “Surprised you got anything left at all. This place is full of ripoff artists in the summer. The park, I guess.”
The kid gestured with his thumb and Gardener saw the roller coaster silhouetted against the sky. Gard’s first thought was that he had somehow managed to roister all the way north to Old Orchard Beach before collapsing. A second look changed his mind. No pier.
“Where am I?” Gardener asked, and his mind harked back with an eerie totality to the jail cell and the nose-picking deputy. For a moment he was sure the kid would say, Where do you think you are?
“Arcadia Beach.” The kid looked half-amused, half-contemptuous. “You must have really hung one on last night, mister.”
“Last night, and the night before,” Gardener chanted, his voice a little rusty, a little eerie. “Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.”
The boy blinked at Gardener in surprise . . . and then delighted him by unexpectedly adding a couplet Gardener had never heard: “Wanna go out, dunno if I can, cause I’m so afraid of the Tommyknocker man.”
Gardener grinned ... but the grin turned into a wince of fresh pain. “Where’d you hear that, kid?”
“My mom. When I was a baby.”
“I heard about the Tommyknockers from my mother too,” Gardener said, “but never that part.”
The kid shrugged as if the topic had lost whatever marginal interest it might have had for him. “She used to make all kinds of stuff up.” He appraised Gardener.
“Don’t you ache?”
“Kid,” Gardener said, leaning forward solemnly, “in the immortal words of Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, I feel like homemade shit.”
“You look like you been drunk a long time.”
“Yeah? How would you know?”
“My mom. With her it was always funny stuff like the Tommyknockers or too hung-over to talk.”
“She give it up?”
“Yeah. Car crash,” the kid said.
Gardener was suddenly racked with shivers. The boy appeared not to notice; he studied the sky, tracing the path of a gull. It coursed a morning sky of blue delicately shelled with mackerel scales, turning black for a moment as it flew in front of the sun’s rising red eye. It landed on the breakwater, where it began to pick at something which gulls presumably found tasty.
Gardener looked from the gull to the kid. All of this was taking on decidedly omenish tones. The kid knew about the fabled Tommyknockers. How many kids in the world knew about them, and what were the odds that Gardener would happen to stumble on one who both (a) knew about them and (b) had lost his mother because of drink?
The kid reached in his pocket and brought out a small tangle of firecrackers. Sweet bird of youth, Gard thought, and smiled.
“Want to light a couple? Celebrate the Fourth? Might cheer you up.”
“The Fourth? The Fourth of July? Is that what this is?”
The kid gave him a dry smile. “It ain’t Arbor Day.”
The twenty-sixth of June had been . . . he counted backwards. Good Christ. He had eight days which were painted black. Well ... not quite. That actually would have been better. Patches of light, not at all welcome, were beginning to illuminate parts of that blackness. The idea that he had hurt someone—again—arose now in his mind as a certainty. Did he want to know who that (arglebargle) was, or what he had done to him or her? Probably not. Best to call Bobbi and finish himself before he remembered.
“Mister, how’d you get that scar on your forehead?”
“Ran into a tree while I was skiing.”
“Bet it hurt.”
“Yeah, even worse than this, but not by much. Do you know where there’s a pay phone?”
The kid pointed to an eccentric green-roofed manse which stood perhaps a mile down the beach. It topped a crumbling granite headland and looked like the cover of a paperback gothic. It had to be a resort. After a moment’s fumbling, Gard came up with the name.
“That’s the Alhambra, isn’t it?”
“The one and only.”
“Thanks,” he said, and started off.
“Mister?”
He turned.
“Don’t you want that last book?” The kid pointed to the wet notebook lying on the high-tide line. “You could dry it out.”
Gardener shook his head. “Kid,” he said, “I can’t even dry me out.”
“You sure you don’t want to light off some firecrackers?”
Gardener shook his head, smiling. “Be careful with ’em, okay? People hurt themselves with things that go bang.”
“Okay.” He smiled, a little shyly. “My mother did for a long time before the, you know—”
“I know. What’s your name?”
“Jack. What’s yours?”
“Gard.”
“Happy Fourth of July, Gard.”
“Happy Fourth, Jack. And watch out for the Tommyknockers.”
“Knocking at my door,” the kid agreed solemnly, and looked at Gardener with eyes which seemed queerly knowing.
For a moment Gardener seemed to feel a second premonition (whoever would have guessed a hangover was so conducive to the psychic emanations of the universe? a bitterly sarcastic voice inside asked). He didn’t know what of, exactly, but it filled him with urgency about Bobbi again. He tipped the kid a wave and set off up the beach.
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