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.
4
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.