Get out of here, Gard. Never mind The New England Poetry Caravan. Never mind Northeastern or The Friends of Poetry or the McCardle bitch. Get out Of here right now before something bad happens. Something really bad. Because if you stay, something really bad will. There's blood on the moon.

But he was damned if he'd go running back to Maine with his tail between his legs. Not him.

Besides, there was the bitch.

Patricia McCardle was her name, and if she wasn't one strutting world-class bitch, Gard had never met one.

She had a contract, and it specified no play, no pay.

“Jesus,” Gardener said, and put a hand over his eyes, trying to shut away the growing headache, knowing there was only one kind of medicine that would do that, and also knowing it was exactly the sort of medicine that could bring that really bad thing on.

And also knowing that knowing would do no good at all. So after a while the booze started to flow and the cyclone started to blow.

Jim Gardener, now in free fall.

Patricia McCardle was The New England Poetry Caravan's principal contributor and head ramrod. Her legs were long but skinny, her nose aristocratic but too bladelike to be considered attractive. Gard had once tried to imagine kissing her and had been horrified by the image which had risen, unbidden, in his mind: her nose not just sliding up his cheek but slicing it open like a razor-blade. She had a high forehead, nonexistent breasts, and eyes as gray as a glacier on a cloudy day. She traced her ancestry back to the Mayflower.

Gardener had worked for her before and there had been trouble before. He had become part of the 1988 New England Poetry Caravan in rather grisly fashion… but the reason for his abrupt inclusion was no more unheard of in the world of poetry than it was in those of jazz and rock and roll. Patricia McCardle had been left with a last-minute hole in her announced program because one of the six poets who had signed on for this summer's happy cruise had hung himself in his closet with his belt.

“Just like Phil Ochs,” Ron Cummings had said to Gardener as they sat near the back of the bus on the first day of the tour. He said it with a nervous bad-boy-at-the-back-of-the-classroom giggle. “But then, Bill Claughtsworth always was a derivative son of a bitch.”

Patricia McCardle had gotten twelve reading dates and fairly good advances on a deal which, when stripped of all the high-flown rhetoric, boiled down to six poets for the price of one. Following Claughtsworth's suicide, she found herself with three days to find a publishing poet in a season when most publishing poets were booked solid ('Or on permanent vacation like Silly Billy Claughtsworth,” Cummings said, laughing rather uneasily).

Few if any of the booked groups would balk at paying the stipulated fee just because the Caravan happened to be short one poet-to do such a thing would be in rawther shitty taste, particularly when one considered the reason the Caravan was a poet short. All the same, it put Caravan, Inc. in a position of contractual default, at least technically, and Patricia McCardle was not a woman to brook loopholes.

After trying four poets, each more minor-leaguer than the last, and with less than thirty-six hours before the first reading, she had finally called Jim Gardener.

“Are you still drinking, Jimmy?” she asked bluntly. Jimmy-he hated that. Most people called him Jim. Jim was all right. No one called him Gard except himself… and Bobbi Anderson.

“Drinking a little,” he said. “Not bingeing at all.”

“I'm dubious,” she said coldly.

“You always have been, Patty,” he replied, knowing she hated that even more than he did Jimmy-her Puritan blood screamed against it. “Were you asking because you just happened to be short a quart, or did you have a more pressing reason?”

Of course he knew, and of course she knew he knew, and of course she knew he was grinning, and of course she was infuriated, and of course all of this tickled him just about to death, and of course she knew he knew that, too, and that was just the way he liked it.

They sparred a few more minutes, and then came to what was not a marriage of convenience but one of necessity. Jim Gardener wanted to buy a good used wood-furnace for the coming winter; he was tired of living like a slut, bundled up in front of a kitchen stove while the wind rattled the plastic stapled over the windows; Patricia McCardle wanted to buy a poet. There would be no handshake agreement, though, not with Patricia McCardle. She had driven down from Derry that afternoon with a contract (in triplicate) and a notary public. Gard was a little surprised she hadn't brought a second notary, just in case the first one happened to suffer a coronary or something.

Feelings and hunches aside, there was really no way he could leave the tour and get the wood-furnace, because if he left the tour he would never see the second half of his fee. She'd haul him into court and spend a thousand dollars trying to get him to cough up the three hundred Caravan, Inc. had paid up front. She might be able to do it, too. He had done almost all the dates, but the contract he had signed was crystal clear on the subject: if he took off for any reason unacceptable to the Tour Co-Ordinator, any and all fees unpaid shall be declared null and void, and any and all fees pre-paid shall be refundable to Caravan, Inc., within thirty (30) days.

And she would go after him. She might think she was doing it on principle, but it would really be because he had called her Patty in her hour of need.

Nor would that be the end of it. If he left, she would work with unflagging energy to get him blackballed. He would certainly never read again for another poetry tour with which she was associated, and that was a lot of poetry tours. Then there was the delicate matter of grants. Her husband, now dead ten years, had left her a lot of money (although he didn't think you could say, as with Ron Cummings, that she practically had money failing out of her asshole, because Gard didn't believe Patricia McCardle had anything so vulgar as an asshole, or even a rectum-when in need of relief she probably performed an act he thought of as Immaculate Excretion). Patricia McCardle had taken a great deal of this money and had set up a number of grants-in-aid. This made her simultaneously a serious patron of the arts and an extremely smart businesswoman in regard to the nasty business of income taxes: the grants were write-offs. Some of them funded poets for specific time periods. Some funded cash poetry awards and prizes, and some underwrote magazines of modern poetry and fiction. Each grant was administered by committees. Behind each of them moved the hand of Patricia McCardle, making sure that they meshed as neatly as a Chinese puzzle… or the strands of a spider's web.

She could do a lot more to him than get back her lousy six hundred bucks. She could muzzle him. And it was just possible-unlikely, but possible-that he might write a few more good poems before the madmen who had stuffed a shotgun up the asshole of the world decided to pull the trigger.

So get through it, he thought. He had ordered a bottle of Johnny Walker from room service (God bless THE TAB, forever and ever, amen), and now he poured his second drink with a hand that had become remarkably steady. Get through it, that's all.

But as the day wore on, he kept thinking about grabbing a Greyhound bus at the Stuart Street terminal and getting off five hours later in front of the dusty little drugstore in Unity. Thumbing a ride up to Troy from there. Calling Bobbi Anderson on the phone and saying: I almost went up in the cyclone, Bobbi, but I found the storm cellar just in time. Lucky break, uh?

Shit on that. You make your own luck. If you be strong, Gard, you be lucky. Get through it, that's all. That's what's to do.