Well, he didn't know if it was bad manners or not, but he would not take money from Bobbi. Never had, never would.

The New England Poetry Caravan, however, was a different matter.

Grab that chicken, son, Ron Cummings, who needed money about as much as the Pope needed a new hat, would have said. The bitch is too slow to run and too fat to pass up.

The New England Poetry Caravan paid cash. Coin of the realm for poetry-three hundred up front and three hundred at the end of the tour. The word made flesh, as you might say. But hard cash, it was understood, was only part of the deal.

The rest of the deal was THE TAB.

While you were on tour, you took advantage of every opportunity. You got your meals from room service, your hair cut in the hotel barbershop if there was one, brought your extra pair of shoes (if you had one) and put them out one night instead of your regulars so you could get the extras shined up.

Then there were the in-room movies, movies you never got a chance to see in a theater, because theaters persisted in wanting money for much the same thing poets, even the very good ones, were for some reason supposed to provide for free or next to it-three bags of spuds = one (1) sonnet, for instance. There was a room charge for the movies, of course, but what of that? You didn't even have to put them On THE TAB; some computer did it automatically, and all Gardener had to say on the subject was God bless and keep THE TAB, and bring those fuckers on! He watched everything, from Emmanuelle in New York (finding the part where the girl flogs the guy's doggy under a table at Windows on the World particularly artistic and uplifting; it certainly uplifted part of him, anyway) to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to Rainbow Brite and the Star-Stealer.

And that's what I'm going to do now, he thought, rubbing his throat and thinking about the taste of good aged whiskey. EXACTLY what I'm going to do. Just sit here and watch them all over again, even Rainbow Brite. And for lunch I'm going to order three bacon cheeseburgers and eat one cold at three o'clock. Maybe skip Rainbow Brite and take a nap. Stay in tonight. Go to bed early. And stand it off.

Bobbi Anderson tripped over a three-inch tongue of metal protruding from the earth.

Jim Gardener tripped over Ron Cummings.

Different objects, same result.

For want of a nail.

Ron popped in around the same time that, some two hundred and ten miles away, Anderson and Peter were finally getting home from their less-than-normal trip to the vet's. Cummings suggested they go down to the hotel bar and have a drink or ten.

“Or,” Ron continued brightly, “we could just skip the foreplay and get shitfaced.”

If he had put it more delicately, Gard might have been okay. Instead, he found himself in the bar with Ron Cummings, raising a jolly Jack Daniel's to his lips and telling himself the old one about how he could choke it off when he really wanted to.

Ron Cummings was a good, serious poet who just happened to have money practically falling out of his asshole… or so he often told people. “I am my own de Medici,” he would say; “I have money practically falling out of my asshole.” His family had been in textiles for roughly nine hundred years and owned most of southern New Hampshire. They thought Ron was crazy, but because he was the second son, and because the first one was not crazy (i. e., interested in textiles), they let Ron do what he wanted to do, which was write poems, read poems, and drink almost constantly. He was a narrow young man with a TB face. Gardener had never seen him eat anything but beer-nuts and goldfish crackers. To his dubious credit, he had no idea of Gardener's own problem with booze… or the fact that he had come very close to killing his wife while drunk.

“Okay,” Gardener said. “I'm up for it. Let's get “faced”.”

After a few drinks in the hotel bar, Ron suggested that a couple of smart fellers like them could find a place with entertainment a tad more exciting than the piped-in Muzak drifting down from the overhead speakers. “I think my heart can take it,” Ron said. “I mean, I'm not sure, but-”

God hates a coward,” Gardener finished.

Ron cackled, clapped him on the back, and called for THE TAB. He signed it with a flourish and then added a generous tip from his money clip. “Let's boogie, m'man.” And off they went.

The late-afternoon sun lanced Gardener's eyes like glass spears and it suddenly occurred to him that this might be a bad idea.

“Listen, Ron,” he said, “I think maybe I'll just-”

Cummings clapped him on the shoulder, his formerly pale cheeks flushed, his formerly watery blue eyes blazing (to Gard, Cummings now looked rather like Toad of Toad Hall after the acquisition of his motor-car), and cajoled: “Don't crap out on me now, Jim! Boston lies before us, so various and new, glistening like the fresh ejaculate of a young boy's first wetdream

Gardener burst into helpless gales of laughter.

“That's more like the Gardener we've all come to know and love,” Ron said, cackling himself.

“God hates a coward,” Gardener said. “Hail us a cab, Ronnie.”

He saw it then: the funnel in the sky. Big and black and getting closer. Soon it was going to touch down and carry him away.

Not to Oz, though.

A cab pulled over to the curb. They got in. The driver asked them where they wanted to go.

“Oz,” Gardener muttered.

Ron cackled. “What he means is someplace where they drink fast and dance faster. Think you can manage that?”

“Oh, I think so,” the driver said, and pulled out.

Gardener draped an arm around Ron's shoulders and cried: “Let the wild rumpus start!”

“I'll drink to that,” Ron said.

Gardener awoke the next morning fully dressed in a tubful of cold water. His best set of clothes-which he'd had the misfortune to be wearing when he and Ron Cummings set sail the day before-were bonding themselves slowly to his skin. He looked at his fingers and saw they were very white and very pruney. Fishfingers. He'd been here for a while, apparently. The water might even have been hot when he climbed in. He didn't remember.

He opened the tub's drain. Saw a bottle of bourbon standing on the toilet seat. It was half-full, its surface bleary with some sort of grease. He picked it up. The grease smelled vaguely of fried chicken. Gardener was more interested in the aroma coming from inside the bottle. Don't do this, he thought, but the neck of the bottle was rapping against his teeth before the thought was even half-finished. He had a drink. Blacked out again.

When he came to, he was standing naked in his bedroom with the phone to his ear and the vague idea that he had just finished dialing a number. Whose? He had no idea until Cummings answered. Cummings sounded even worse than Gardener felt. Gardener would have sworn this was impossible.

“How bad was it?” Gardener heard himself ask. It was always this way when he was in the grip of the cyclone; even when he was conscious, everything seemed to have the gray grainy texture of a tabloid photograph, and he never seemed to exactly be inside of himself. A lot of the time he seemed to be floating above his own head, like a kid's silvery Puffer balloon. “How much trouble did we get into?”

“Trouble?” Cummings repeated, and then fell silent. At least Gardener thought he was thinking. Hoped he was thinking. Or maybe dreaded the idea. He waited, his hands very cold. “No trouble,” Cummings said at last, and Gard relaxed a little. “Except for my head, that is. I got my head in plenty of trouble. Jee-zus!”

“You sure? Nothing? Nothing at all?”

He was thinking of Nora.

Shot your wife, uh? a voice spoke up suddenly in his mind-the voice of the deputy with the comic book. Good fucking deal.