The Tommyknockers

  "Laughed," Jesus told 'Becka. "What do you think of that?"

  'Becka thought it was a low-down mean trick. And such things were only the beginning, it seemed. Jesus knew something unpleasant or upsetting about everyone 'Becka came in contact with, it seemed.

  She couldn't live with such an awful outpouring.

  She couldn't live without it, either.

  One thing was certain: she had to do something about it.

  "You are," Jesus said. He spoke from behind her, from the picture on top of the Sony. Of course He did. The idea that His voice was coming from inside her own head--that she was somehow ... well ... somehow reading people's thoughts ... that was only a dreadful passing illusion. It must be. That alternative was horrifying.

  Satan. Witchcraft.

  "In fact," Jesus said, confirming His existence with that dry, no-nonsense voice so like her father's, "you're almost done with this part. Just solder that red wire to that point to the left of the long doohickey ... no, not there ... there. Good girl! Not too much solder, mind! It's like Brylcreem, 'Becka. A little dab'll do ya."

  Strange, hearing Jesus Christ talk about Brylcreem.

  4

  Joe woke up at a quarter to two, tossed Ozzie off his lap, strolled to the back of his lawn, brushing cat hairs off his T-shirt, and had a comfortable whiz into the poison ivy back there. Then he headed into the house. Yankees and Red Sox. Great. He opened the fridge, glancing briefly at the snippets of wire on the counter and wondering just what in the hell that dimbulb 'Becka had been up to. But mostly he dismissed it. He was thinking of Nancy Voss. He was wondering what it would feel like to squirt off between Nancy's tits. He thought maybe Monday he'd find out. He squabbled with her; Christ, sometimes they squabbled like a couple of dogs in August. Seemed like it wasn't just them; everyone seemed short-fused lately. But when it came to fucking ... son of a bitch! He hadn't been so randy since he was eighteen, and she was the same way. Seemed like neither of them could get enough. He'd even squirted in the night a couple of times. It was like he was sixteen again. He grabbed a quart of Bud and headed toward the living room. Boston was almost certainly going to win today. He had the odds figured at 8-5. Lately he seemed to have an amazing head for odds. There was a guy down in Augusta who'd take bets, and Joe had made almost five hundred bucks in the last three weeks ... not that 'Becka knew. He'd ratholed it. It was funny; he'd know exactly who was going to win and why, and then he'd get down to Augusta and forget the why and only remember the who. But that was the important thing, wasn't it? Last time the guy in Augusta had grumbled, paying off at three to one on a twenty-dollar bet. Mets against the Pirates, Gooden on the mound, looked like a cinch for the Mets, but Joe had taken the Pirates and they'd won, 5-2. Joe didn't know how much longer the guy in Augusta would take his bets, but if he stopped, so what? There was always Portland. There were two or three books there. It seemed like lately he got a headache whenever he left Haven--needed glasses, maybe--but when you were rolling hot, a headache was a small price to pay. Enough money and the two of them could go away. Leave 'Becka with Jesus. That was who 'Becka wanted to be married to anyway.

  Cold as ice, she was. But that Nancy? One hot ticket! And smart! Why, just today she'd taken him out back at the P.O. to show him something. "Look! Look what I thought of! I think I ought to patent it, Joe! I really do!"

  "What idear?" Joe asked. The truth was, he felt a little mad with her. The truth was, he was more interested in her tits than her idears, and mad or not, he was already getting a blue-steeler. It really was like being a kid again. But what she showed him was enough to make him forget all about his blue-steeler. For at least four minutes, anyway.

  Nancy Voss had taken a kid's Lionel train transformer and hooked it somehow to a bunch of D-cell batteries. This gadget was wired to seven flour sifters with their screens knocked out. The sifters were lying on their sides. When Nancy turned on the transformer, a number of filament-thin wires hooked to something that looked like a blender began to scoop first-class mail from a pile on the floor into the sifters, seemingly at random.

  "What's it doing?" Joe asked.

  "Sorting the first-class," she said. She pointed at one sifter after another. "That one's Haven Village ... that's RFD 1, Derry Road, you know ... that one's Ridge Road ... that one's Nista Road ... that one's ..."

  He didn't believe it at first. He thought it was a joke, and he wondered how she'd like a slap upside the head. Why'd you do that? she'd whine. Some men can take a joke, he'd answer like Sylvester Stallone in that movie Cobra, but I ain't one of em. Except then he saw it was really working. It was quite a gadget, all right, but the sound of the wires scraping across the floor was a little creepy. Harsh and whispery, like big old spiders' legs. It was working, all right; damned if he knew how, but it was. He saw one of the wires snag a letter for Roscoe Thibault and push it into the correct sifter--RFD 2, which was the Hammer Cut Road--even though it had been misaddressed to Haven Village.

  He wanted to ask her how it worked, but he didn't want to look like a goddam dummy, so he asked her where she got the wires instead.

  "Out of these telephones I bought at Radio Shack," she said. "The one at the Bangor Mall. They were on sale! There's some other stuff from the phones in it too. I had to change everything around, but it was easy. It just, you know ... come to me. You know?"

  "Yeah," Joe said slowly, thinking about the bookie's face when Joe had come in to collect his sixty bucks after the Pirates beat Gooden and the Mets. "Not bad. For a woman."

  For a moment her brow darkened and he thought: You want to say something? You want to fight? Come on. That's okay. That's just about as okay as the other.

  Then her brow cleared and she smiled. "Now we can do it even longer." Her fingers slid down the hard ridge in his pants. "You do want to do it don't you, Joe?"

  And Joe did. They slipped to the floor and he forgot all about being mad at her, and how all of a sudden he seemed to be able to figure the odds on everything from baseball games to horse races to golf matches in the wink of an eye. He slid into her and she moaned and Joe even forgot the tenebrous whispering sound those wires made as they sifted the first-class mail into the row of flour sifters.

  5

  When Joe entered the living room, 'Becka was sitting in her rocker, pretending to read the latest issue of The Upper Room. Just ten minutes before Joe came in, she had finished wiring the gadget Jesus had shown her how to make into the back of the Sony TV. She followed His instructions to the letter, because He said you had to be careful when you were fooling around inside the back of a television.

  "You could fry yourself," Jesus advised. "More juice back there than there is in a Birds Eye warehouse, even when it's turned off."

  The TV was off now and Joe said ill-temperedly, "I thought you'd have this all wa'amed up for me."

  "I guess you know how to turn on the damned TV," 'Becka said, speaking to her husband for the last time.

  Joe raised his eyebrows. Damned anything was damned odd, coming from 'Becka. He thought about calling her on it, and decided to let it ride. Could be there was one fat old mare who'd find herself keeping house by herself before much of a longer went by.

  "Guess I do," Joe said, speaking to his wife for the last time.

  He pushed the button that turned the Sony on, and better than two thousand volts of current slammed into him, AC which had been boosted, switched over to lethal DC, and then boosted again. His eyes popped wide open, bulged, and then burst like grapes in a microwave. He had started to set the quart of beer on top of the TV next to Jesus. When the electricity hit, his hand clenched tightly enough to break the bottle. Spears of brown glass drove into his fingers and palm. Beer foamed and ran. It hit the top of the TV (its plastic casing already blistering) and turned to steam that smelled like yeast.

  "EEEEEOOOOOOARRRRHMMMMMMM!" Joe Paulson screamed. His face began to turn black: Blue smoke poured out of his hair and his ears. His finger was nailed to the Sony's On button.
/>
  A picture popped on the TV. It was Dwight Gooden throwing the wild pitch that let in two runs and chased him, making Joe Paulson forty dollars richer. It flipped and showed him and Nancy Voss screwing on the post-office floor in a litter of catalogues and Congressional Newsletters and ads from insurance companies saying you could get all the coverage you needed even if you were over sixty-five, no salesman would call at your door, no physical examination would be required, your loved ones would be protected at a cost of pennies a day.

  "No!" 'Becka screamed, and the picture flipped again. Now she saw Moss Harlingen behind a fallen pine, notching his father in the sight of his .30-.30 and murmuring Not you, Em, not tonight. It flipped and she saw a man and a woman digging in the woods, the woman behind the controls of something that looked a little bit like a payloader and a little bit like something out of a Rube Goldberg cartoon, the man looping a chain around a stump. Beyond them, a vast dish-shaped object jutted out of the earth. It was silvery, but dull; the sun struck it in places but did not twinkle.

  Joe Paulson's clothes burst into flame.

  The living room was filled with the smell of cooking beer. The 3-D picture of Jesus jittered around and then exploded.

  'Becka shrieked, understanding that, like it or not, it had been her all along, her, her, her, and she was murdering her husband.

  She ran to him, seized his looping, spasming hand ... and was herself galvanized.

  Jesus oh Jesus save him, save me, save us both, she thought as the current slammed into her, driving her up on her toes like the world's heftiest ballerina en pointe. And a mad, cackling voice, the voice of her father, rose in her brain: Fooled you, 'Becka, didn't I?Fooled you good! Teach you to lie! Teach you for good and all!

  The rear of the television, which she had screwed back on after she had finished adding her alterations, blew-back against the wall with a mighty blue flash of light. 'Becka tumbled to the carpet, pulling Joe with her. Joe was already dead.

  By the time the smoldering wallpaper behind the TV had ignited the chintz curtains, 'Becka Paulson was dead too.

  3.

  HILLY BROWN

  1

  The day Hillman Brown did the most spectacular trick of his career as an amateur magician--the only spectacular trick of his career as an amateur magician, actually--was Sunday, July 17th, exactly one week before the Haven town hall blew up. That Hillman Brown had never managed a really spectacular trick before was not so surprising. He was only ten, after all.

  His given name had been his mother's maiden name. There had been Hillmans in Haven going back to the time when it had been Montgomery, and although Marie Hillman had no regrets about becoming Marie Brown--after all, she loved the guy!--she had wanted to preserve the name, and Bryant had agreed. The new baby wasn't home a week before everyone was calling him Hilly.

  Hilly grew up nervous. Marie's father, Ev, said he had cat whiskers for nerves and would spend his whole life on the jump. It wasn't news Bryant and Marie Brown wanted to hear, but after their first year with Hilly, it wasn't really news at all; just a fact of life. Some babies attempt to comfort themselves by rocking in their cribs or cradles; some by sucking a thumb. Hilly rocked in his crib almost constantly (crying angrily at the same time, more often than not), and sucked both thumbs--sucked them so hard that he had painful blisters on them by the time he was eight months old.

  "He'll stop now," Dr. Lester in Derry told them confidently, after examining the nasty blisters that ringed Hilly's thumbs ... blisters Marie had wept over as if they had been her own. But Hilly hadn't stopped. His need for comfort was apparently greater than whatever pain his hurt thumbs gave him. Eventually the blisters turned to hard calluses.

  "He'll always be on the jump," the boy's grandfather prophesied whenever anyone asked him (and even when no one did; at sixty-three, Ev Hillman was garrulous-going-on-tiresome). "Cat whiskers for nerves, ayuh! He'll keep his mom n dad on the hop, Hilly will."

  Hilly kept them hopping, all right. Lining both sides of the Brown driveway were stumps, placed there by Bryant, at Marie's instigation. Upon each she put a planter, and in each planter was a different sort of plant or bunch of flowers. At age three, Hilly one day climbed out of his crib where he was supposed to be taking a nap ("Why do I have to have a nap, Mom?" Hilly asked. "Because I need the rest, Hilly," his exhausted mother replied), wriggled out the window, and knocked over all twelve of the planters, stumps and all. When Marie saw what Hilly had done, she wept as inconsolably as she had wept over her boy's poor thumbs. Seeing her cry, Hilly had also burst into tears (around his thumbs; he was attempting to suck both of them at once). He hadn't knocked over the stumps and the planters to be mean; it had just seemed a good idea at the time.

  "You don't count the cost, Hilly," his father said on that occasion. He would say it a good many times before Sunday, July 17th, 1988.

  At the age of five, Hilly got on his sled and shot down the ice-coated Brown driveway one December day and out into the road. It never occurred to him, he told his ashy-faced mother later, to wonder if something might be coming down Derry Road; he had gotten up, seen the glaze of ice that had fallen, and had only wondered how fast his Flexible Flyer would go down their driveway. Marie saw him, saw the fuel tanker lumbering down Route 9, and shrieked Hilly's name so loudly that she could barely talk above a whisper for the next two days. That night, trembling in Bryant's arms, she told him she had seen the boy's tombstone in Homeland--had actually seen it: Hillman Richard Brown, 1978--1983, Taken Too Soon.

  "Hiiillyyyyyyyy!"

  Hilly's head snapped around at the sound of his mother's scream, which sounded to him as loud as a jet plane. As a result, he fell off his sled just before it reached the foot of the driveway. The driveway was asphalted, the glaze of sleet was really quite thin, and Hilly Brown never had that knack with which a kind God blesses most squirmy, active children--the knack of falling lucky. He broke his left arm just above the elbow and fetched his forehead such a dreadful crack that he knocked himself out.

  His Flexible Flyer shot into the road. The driver of the Webber Fuel truck reacted before he had a chance to see there was no one on the sled. He spun the wheel and the tanker-truck waltzed into a low embankment of snow with the huge grace of the elephant ballet dancers in Fantasia. It crashed through and landed in the ditch, canted alarmingly to one side. Less than five minutes after the driver wriggled out of the passenger door and ran to Marie Brown, the truck tipped over on its side and lay in the frozen grass like a dead mastodon, expensive No. 2 fuel oil gurgling out of its three overflow vents.

  Marie was running down the road with her unconscious child in her arms, screaming. In her terror and confusion she felt sure that Hilly must have been run over, even though she had quite clearly seen him fall off his sled at the bottom of the driveway.

  "Is he dead?" the tanker driver screamed. His eyes were wide, his face pale as paper, his hair standing on end. There was a dark spot spreading on the crotch of his pants. "Oh sufferin Jesus lady, is he dead?"

  "I think so," Marie wept. "I think he is, oh I think he's dead."

  "Who's dead?" Hilly asked, opening his eyes.

  "Oh, Hilly, thank God!" Marie screamed, and hugged him. Hilly screamed back with great enthusiasm. She was grinding together the splintered ends of the broken bone in his left arm.

  Hilly spent the next three days in Derry Home Hospital.

  "It'll slow him down, at least," Bryant Brown said the next evening over a dinner of baked beans and hot dogs.

  Ev Hillman happened to be taking dinner with them that evening; since his wife had died, Ev Hillman did that every now and again; about five evenings out of every seven on the average. "Want to bet?" Ev said now, cackling through a mouthful of cornbread.

  Bryant cocked a sour eye at his father-in-law and said nothing.

  As usual, Ev was right--that was one of the reasons Bryant so often felt sour about him. On his second night in the hospital, long after the other children in Pediatr
ics were asleep, Hilly decided to go exploring. How he got past the duty nurse was a mystery, but get past he did. He was discovered missing at three in the morning. An initial search of the pediatrics ward did not turn him up. Neither did a floor-wide search. Security was called in. A search of the whole hospital was then mounted--administrators who had at first only been mildly annoyed were now becoming worried--and discovered nothing. Hilly's father and mother were called and came in at once, looking shell-shocked. Marie was weeping, but because of her swollen larynx, she could only do so in a breathy croak.

  "We think he may have wandered out of the building somehow," the Head of Administrative Services told them.

  "How the hell could a five-year-old just wander out of the building?" Bryant shouted. "What kind of a place you guys running here?"

  "Well ... well ... you understand it's hardly a prison, Mr. Brown--"

  Marie cut them both off. "You've got to find him," she whispered. "It's only twenty-two degrees out there. Hilly was in his pj's. He could be ... be ..."

  "Oh, Mrs. Brown, I really think such worries are premature," the Head of Administrative Services broke in, smiling sincerely. He did not, in fact, think they were premature at all. The first thing he had done after ascertaining that the boy might have been gone ever since the eleven-o'clock bedcheck was to find out how cold the night had been. The answer had occasioned a call to Dr. Elfman, who specialized in cases of hypothermia--there were a lot of those in Maine winters. Dr. Elfman's prognosis was grave. "If he got out, he's probably dead," Elfman said.

  Another hospital-wide search, this one augmented by Derry police and firemen, turned up nothing. Marie Brown was given a sedative and put to bed. The only good news was of a negative sort; so far no one had found Hilly's frozen pajama-clad body. Of course, the Head of Administrative Services thought, the Penobscot River was close to the hospital. Its surface had frozen. It was just possible that the boy had tried to cross the ice and had plunged through. Oh, how he wished the Browns had taken their little brat to Eastern Maine Medical.