The Tommyknockers

“Look good, Pete?”

Pete barked feebly, and Anderson looked at the beagle with a sadness so deep it surprised and disquieted her. Peter was done up. He seldom took after birds and squirrels and chipmunks and the occasional woodchuck these days; the thought of Peter ru

Because without Peter, she would be alone. Except for Jim, and Jim

Gardener had gotten just a trifle wiggy over the last three years or so. Still a friend, but… wiggy.

“Glad you approve, Pete old man,” she said, putting a ribbon or two around the trees, knowing perfectly well she might decide to cut another stand and the ribbons would rot here. “Your taste is only exceeded by your good looks.”

Peter, knowing what was expected of him (he was old, but not stupid), wagged his scraggy stub of a tail and barked.

“Be a Viet Cong!” Anderson ordered.

Peter obediently fell on his side-a little wheeze escaped him-and rolled on his back, legs splayed out. That almost always amused Anderson, but today the sight of her dog playing Viet Cong (Peter would also play dead at the words “hooch” or “My Lai') was too close to what she had been thinking about.

“UP, Pete.”

Pete got up slowly, panting below his muzzle. His white muzzle.

“Let's go back.” She tossed him a dog biscuit. Peter snapped at it and missed. He snuffed for it, missed it, then came back to it. He ate it slowly, without much relish. “Right,” Anderson said. “Move out.”

For want of a shoe, the kingdom was lost… for the choice of a path, the ship was found.

Anderson had been down here before in the thirteen years that the Garrick Farm hadn't become the Anderson Farm; she recognized the slope of land, a deadfall left by pulpers who had probably all died before the Korean war, a great pine with a split top. She had walked this land before and would have no trouble finding her way back to the path she would use with the Tomcat. She might have passed the spot where she stumbled once or twice or half a dozen times before, perhaps by yards, or feet, or bare inches.

This time she followed Peter as the dog moved slightly to the left, and with the path in sight, one of her elderly hiking boots fetched up against something… fetched up hard.

“Hey!” she yelled, but it was too late, in spite of her pinwheeling arms. She fell to the ground. The branch of a low bush scratched her cheek hard enough to bring blood.

“Shit!” she cried, and a bluejay scolded her.

Peter returned, first sniffing and then licking her nose.

“Christ, don't do that, your breath stinks!”

Peter wagged his tail. Anderson sat up. She rubbed her left cheek and saw blood on her palm and fingers. She grunted.

“Nice going,” she said, and looked to see what she had tripped over-a fallen piece of tree, most likely, or a rock poking out of the ground. Lots of rock in Maine.

What she saw was a gleam of metal.

She touched it, ru

“What's this?” she asked Peter.

Peter approached it, sniffed at it, and then did a peculiar thing. The beagle backed off two dog-paces, sat down, and uttered a single low howl.

“Who got on your case?” Anderson asked, but Peter only sat there. Anderson hooked herself closer, still sitting down, sliding on the seat of her jeans. She examined the metal in the ground.

Roughly three inches stuck out of the mulchy earth-just enough to trip over. There was a slight rise here, and perhaps the runoff from the heavy spring rains had freed it. Anderson's first thought was that the skidders who had logged this land in the twenties and thirties must have buried a bunch of their leavings here-the cast-off swill of a three-day cutting, which in those days had been called a “loggers” weekend.”

A tin can, she thought-B amp; M Beans or Campbell's soup. She wiggled it the way you'd wiggle a tin can out of the earth. Then it occurred to her that no one except a toddler would be apt to trip over the leading edge of a can. The metal in the earth didn't wiggle. It was as solid as mother-rock. A piece of old logging equipment, maybe?

Intrigued, Anderson examined it more closely, not seeing that Peter had gotten to his feet, backed away another four paces, and sat down again.

The metal was a dull gray-not the bright color of tin or iron at all. And it was thicker than a can, maybe a quarter-inch at its top. Anderson placed the pad of her right index finger on this edge and felt a momentary odd tingling, like a vibration.

She took her finger away and looked at it quizzically.

Put it back.

Nothing. No buzz.

Now she pinched it between her thumb and finger and tried to draw it from the earth like a loose tooth from a gum. It didn't come. She was gripping the protrusion in the rough center. It sank back into the earth-or that was the impression she had then-on either side at a width of less than two inches. She would later tell Jim Gardener that she could have walked past it three times a day for forty years and never stumbled over it.

She brushed away loose soil, exposing a little more of it. She dug a cha

She scraped away more soil with her fingers and quickly exposed more-now she saw six inches of gray metal, now nine, now a foot.

It's a car or a truck or a skidder, she thought suddenly. Buried out here in the middle of nowhere. Or maybe a Hooverville kind of stove. But why here?

No reason that she could think of; no reason at all. She found things in the woods from time to time-shell casings, beer cans (the oldest not with pop-tops but with triangle-shaped holes made by what they had called a “churchkey” back in those dim dead days of the 1960s), candy wrappers, other stuff. Haven was not on either of Maine's two major tourist tracks, one of which runs through the take and mountain region to the extreme west of the state and the other of which runs up the coast to the extreme east, but it had not been the forest primeval for a long, long time. Once (she had been over the decayed stone wall at the back of her land and actually trespassing on New England Paper Company's land at the time) she had found the rusted hulk of a late-forties Hudson Hornet standing in what had once been a woods road and what was now, over twenty years after the cutting had stopped, a tangle of second growth-what the locals called shitwood. No reason that hulk of a car should have been there, either… but it was easier to explain than a stove or a refrigerator or any other damn thing actually buried in the ground.

She had dug twin trenches a foot long on either side of the object without finding its end. She got down almost a foot before scraping her fingers on rock. She might have been able to pull the rock out-that at least had some wiggle-but there was no reason to do it. The object in the earth continued down past it.

Peter whined.

Anderson glanced at the dog, then stood up. Both knees popped. Her left foot tingled with pins and needles. She fished her pocket watch out of her pants-old and tarnished, the Simon watch was another part of her legacy from Uncle Frank -and was astonished to see that she had been here a long time-an hour and a quarter at least. It was past four.