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.

Chapter 7

Gardener Arrives

Shushhhhh…

He's staring down at his skis, plain brown wood strips racing over the snow. He started looking down just to make sure he was keeping the skis nice and parallel, not wanting to look like a snowbunny with no business here after all. Now he's almost hypnotized by the liquid speed of his skis, by the crystal flicker of snow passing in a steady white strip, six inches wide, between the skis. He doesn't realize his state of semi-hypnosis until Annmarie screams: “Gard, watch out! Watch out!”

It's like being roused from a light doze. That's when he realizes he's been in a semi-trance, that he has been looking down at that shiny, flowing strip far too long.

Annmarie screams: “Stem christie! Gard! Stem christie!”

She screams again, and this time is she telling him to fall down, just fall down? Christ, you could break a leg that way!

In these last few seconds before the crunching impact, he still can't comprehend how things got serious so fast.

He has somehow managed to drift far off to the left side of the trail. Pines and spruces, their blue-gray branches heavy with snow, are blurring past less than three yards from him. A rock poking out of the snow blips by; his left ski has missed it by inches. He realizes with cold horror that he has lost all control, has forgotten everything Annmarie has taught him, maneuvers that seemed so easy on the kiddie slopes.

And now he's going… what? Twenty miles an hour? Thirty? Forty? Cold air cuts against his face and he sees the line of trees at the edge of the Straight Arrow trail getting ever closer. His own straight arrow has become a mild diagonal. Mild, but enough to be deadly, just the same. He sees his path will soon take him off the trail completely and then he will stop, you bet, then he will stop very quickly.

She shrieks again and he thinks: Stem christie? Did she really say that? I can't even snowplow for beans and she wants me to do a stem christie?

He tries to turn right but his skis remain stubbornly on course. Now he can see the tree he'll hit, a big, hoary old pine. A red stripe has been painted around its gnarly trunk-a wholly unnecessary danger signal.

He tries again to turn but he's forgotten how to do it.

The tree swells, seeming to rush toward him while he himself remains still; he can see jagged knobs, splintery groping butts of branches on which he may impale himself, he can see nicks in the old bark, he can see drips where the red paint has run.

Annmarie shrieks again and he's aware he himself is screaming.

Shusshhhhhh…

“Mister? Mister, are you all right?”

Gardener sat up suddenly, startled, expecting to pay for the movement with a whacking thud of pain through his head. There was none. He experienced a moment of nauseous vertigo that might have come from hunger, but his head was clear. The headache had passed in its sudden way while he slept-perhaps even while he was dreaming of his accident.

“I'm okay,” he said, looking around. His head thudded now-but against a drum. A girl in cutoff denim jeans laughed. “You're supposed to use sticks on those, man, not your head. You were mumbling in your sleep.”

He saw he was in a van-and now everything fell into place. “Was I?”

“Yeah. Not good mumbles.”

“It wasn't a good dream,” Gardener said.

“Have a hit off this,” the girl said, and handed him a joint. The roach-clip it was in, he saw, was a golden oldie: Richard Nixon in a blue suit, fingers thrust up in the characteristic double-V gesture that probably not even the oldest of the five other people in this van remembered. “Guaranteed to cure all bad dreams,” the girl added solemnly.

That's what they told me about the booze, Lady Day. But sometimes they lie. Take it from me. Sometimes they lie.

He took a small hit off the joint for politeness” sake and felt his head begin to swim almost at once. He handed it back to the girl, who was sitting against the van's sliding door, and said: “I'd rather have something to eat.”

“Got a box of crackers,” the driver said, and handed it back. “We ate everything else. Beaver even ate the fucking prunes. Sorry.”

“Beaver'd eat anything,” the girl in the cutoffs said.

The kid in the van's shotgun seat looked back. He was a plump boy with a wide, pleasant face. “Untrue,” he said. “Untrue. I'd never eat my mother.”

At that they were all laughing wildly, Gardener included. When he was able, he said: “The crackers are fine. Really.” And they were. He ate slowly at first, tentatively, monitoring his works closely for signs of rebellion. There were none and he began to eat faster and faster, until he was gobbling the crackers in big handfuls, his stomach snarling and yapping.

When had he last eaten? He didn't know. It was lost in the blackout. He did know from previous experience that he never ate much when he was busy trying to drink up the world-and a lot of what he tried to eat either ended up in his lap or down his shirt. That made him think of the big greasy pizza he had eaten-tried to eat-Thanksgiving evening, 1980. The night he had shot Nora through the cheeks.

–or you could have severed one or both optic nerves! Nora's lawyer suddenly shouted furiously at him inside his head. Partial or total blindness! Paralysis! Death! All that bullet had to do was chip one tooth to go flying off in any direction, any damned direction at all! Just one! And don't sit there and try any bullshit like how you didn't mean to kill her, either. You shoot a person in the head, what else are you trying to do?

The depression came rolling back-big, black, and a mile high. Should have killed yourself, Gard. Shouldn't have waited.

Bobbi's in trouble.

Well, maybe so. But getting help from a guy like you is like hiring a pyromaniac to fix the oil-burner.

Shut up.

You're wasted, Gard. Fried. What that kid back there on the beach would undoubtedly call a burnout.

“Mister, you sure you're all right?” the girl asked. Her hair was red, cut punkily short. Her legs went approximately up to her chin.

“Yeah,” he said. “Did I look not all right?”

“For a minute there you looked terrible,” she answered gravely. That made him grin-not what she'd said but the solemnity with which she'd said it-and she grinned back, relieved.