(they fixed the water heater and the Tomcat. too there's lots of things the Tommyknockers do)

The Tomcat was a small working vehicle which would have been almost useless on a big spread where farming was the main work. It was bigger than a riding lawnmower but smaller than the smallest tractor Deere or Farmall had ever made, but just right for someone who kept a garden that was just a little too big to be called a plot-and that was the case here. Bobbi had a garden of about an acre and a half -beans, cukes, peas, corn, radishes, and potatoes. No carrots, no cabbages, no zucchini, no squash.

“I don't grow what I don't like,” she had told Gardener once. “Life's too short.”

The Tomcat was fairly versatile; it had to be-even a well-off gentleman farmer would have trouble justifying the purchase of a $2,500 mini-tractor on the basis of a one-acre garden. It could roto-till, mow grass with one attachment and cut hay with another; it could haul stuff over rough terrain (she had used it as a skidder in the fall, and so far as Gardener knew Bobbi had gotten stuck only once), and in the winter she attached a snow-blower unit and cleared her driveway in half an hour. It was powered by a sturdy four-cc engine.

Or had been.

The engine was still in there, but now it was tarted up with the weirdest array of gadgets and attachments imaginable-Gardener found himself thinking of the doorbell/radio thing on the table in Anderson's basement, and wondering if Bobbi meant to put it on the Tomcat soon… maybe it was radar, or something. A single bewildered bark of laughter escaped him.

A mayonnaise jar jutted from one side of the engine. It was filled with a fluid too colorless to be gasoline and screwed into a brass fitting on the engine head. Sitting on the cowling was something that would have looked more at home on a Chevy Nova or SuperSport: the air scoop of a supercharger.

The modest carb had been replaced with a scrounged four-barrel. Bobbi had had to cut a hole through the cowling to make room for it.

And there were wires-wires everywhere, snaking in and out and up and down and all around, making connections that made absolutely no sense… at least, not as far as Gardener could see.

He looked at the Tomcat's rudimentary instrument panel, started to look away… and then his gaze snapped back, his eyes widening.

The Tomcat had a stick shift, and the gearing pattern had been printed on a square of metal bolted to the dashboard above the oil-pressure gauge. Gardener had seen that square of metal often enough; he had driven the Tomcat frequently over the years. Before it had always been:

Now, something new had been added-something which was just simple enough to be terrifying:

You don't believe that, do you?

I don't know.

Come on, Gard -flying tractors? Give me a break!

She's got a miniature sun in her water heater.

Bullshit. I think it might have been a light bulb, a bright one, like a two-hundred-watt

It was not a light bulb!

Okay, all right, calm down. It just sounds like an ad for a really E. T. ripoff, that's all. “You'll believe a tractor can fly.”

Shut up.

Or “John Deere, phone home.” How's that?

He stood in Anderson's kitchen again, looking longingly at the cabinet where the booze was. He shifted his eyes away-it was not easy because they felt as if they had gained weight-and walked back into the living room. He saw that Bobbi had changed positions, and that her respiration was moving along a bit more rapidly. First signs of waking up. Gardener glanced at his watch again and saw it was nearly ten o'clock. He went over to the bookcase by Bobbi's desk, wanting to find something to read until she came around, something that would take his mind off this whole business for a little while.

What he saw on Bobbi's desk, beside the battered old typewriter, was in some ways the worst shock of all. Shocking enough, anyway, so that he barely noticed another change: a roll of perforated computer paper hung on the wall above and behind the desk and typewriter like a giant roll of paper towels.

A novel by Roberta Anderson

Gardener put the top sheet aside, face-down, and saw his own name-or rather, the nickname only he and Bobbi used.

For Gard, who's always there when I need him.

Another shudder worked through him. He put the second sheet aside face-down on the first.

In those days, just before Kansas began to bleed, the buffalo were still plentiful on the plains-plentiful enough, anyway, for poor men, white and Indian alike, to be buried in buffalo skins rather than in coffins.

“Once you get a taste of buffaler meat, you'll never want what come off'n a cow again,” the old-timers said, and they must have believed what they said, because these hunters of the plains, these buffalo soldiers, seemed to exist in a world of hairy, humpbacked ghosts-all about them they carried the memory of the buffalo, the smell of the buffalo-the smell, yes, because many of them smeared buff-tallow on their necks and faces and hands to keep the prairie sun from burning them black. They wore buffalo teeth in necklaces and sometimes in their ears; their chaps were of buffalo hide; and more than one of these nomads carried a buffalo penis as a good luck charm or guarantee of continued potency.

Ghosts themselves, following herds that crossed the short-wire grass like the great clouds which cover the prairie with their shadows; the clouds remain but the great herds are gone… and so are the buffalo soldiers, madmen from wastes that had as yet never known a fence, men who came striding out of nowhere and went striding back into that same place, men with buffalo-hide moccasins on their feet and bones clicking about their necks; ghosts out Of time, out of a place that existed just before the whole country began to bleed.

Late in the afternoon of August 24th, 1848, Robert Howell, who would die at Gettysburg not quite fifteen years later, made camp near a small stream far out along the Nebraska panhandle, in that eerie section known as the Sand Hill Country. The stream was small but the water smelled sweet enough…

Gardener was forty pages into the story and utterly absorbed when he heard Bobbi Anderson call sleepily:

“Gard? Gard, are you still around?”

“I'm here, Bobbi,” he said, and stood up, dreading what would come next and already half-believing he had gone insane. That had to be it, of course. There could not be a tiny sun in the bottom of Bobbi's hot-water tank, nor a new gear on her Tomcat which suggested levitation… but it would have been easier for him to believe either of those things than to believe that Bobbi had written a four-hundred-page novel called The Buffalo Soldiers in the three weeks or so since Gard had last seen her-a novel that was, just incidentally, the best thing she had ever written. Impossible, yeah. Easier-hell, saner-to believe he had gone crazy and simply leave it at that.

If only he could.