The Collective

by The Collective [lit]

  head."

  She stood by her clothesline in the hot backyard, looking

  blankly off toward the woods on the other side of the Nista Road,

  blue-gray-hazy in the heat. She wrung her hands in front of her and

  begun to weep.

  "I ain't no heard no voices in my head."

  Crazy, her dead father's implacable voice replied. Crazy with

  the heat. You come on over here, 'Becka Bouchard, I'm gonna beat

  you three shades of blister-blue for that crazy talk.

  "I ain't heard no voices in my head," 'Becka moaned. "That

  picture really did talk, I swear, I can't do ventriloquism!"

  Better believe the picture. If it was the hole, it was a brain

  tumor, sure. If it was the picture, it was a miracle. Miracles came

  from God. Miracles came from Outside. A miracle could drive you

  crazy and the dear God knew she felt like she was going crazy now

  but it didn't mean you were crazy, or that your brains were

  scrambled. As for believing that you could hear other people's

  thoughts ... that was just crazy.

  'Becka looked down at her legs and saw blood gushing from her

  left knee. She shrieked again and ran back into the house to call the

  doctor, MEDIX, somebody. She was in the living room again,

  pawing at the dial with the phone to her ear, when Jesus said:

  "That's raspberry filling from your coffeecake, 'Becka. Why

  don't you just relax, before you have a heart attack?"

  She looked at the TV, the telephone receiver falling to the table

  with a clunk. Jesus was still sitting on the rock outcropping. It looked

  as though He had crossed His legs. It was really surprising how much

  He looked like her own father ... only He didn't seem forbidding,

  ready to be hitting angry at a moment's notice. He was looking at her

  with a kind of exasperated patience.

  "Try it and see if I'm not right," Jesus said.

  She touched her knee gently, wincing, expecting pain. There

  was none. She saw the seeds in the red stuff and relaxed. She licked

  the raspberry filling off her fingers.

  "Also," Jesus said, "you have got to get these ideas about

  hearing voices and going crazy out of your head. It's just Me. And I

  can talk to anyone I want to, any way I want to."

  "Because you're the Savior," 'Becka whispered.

  "That's right," Jesus said, and looked down. Below Him, a

  couple of animated salad bowls were dancing in appreciation of the

  hidden Valley Ranch Dressing which they were about to receive.

  "And I'd like you to please turn that crap off, if you don't mind. We

  don't need that thing running. Also, it makes My feet tingle."

  'Becka approached the TV and turned it off.

  "My Lord," she whispered.

  Now it was Sunday, July 10th. Joe was lying fast asleep out in

  the backyard hammock with Ozzie lying limply across him ample

  stomach like a black and white fur stole. She stood in the living

  room, holding the curtain back with her left hand and looking out at

  Joe. Sleeping in the hammock, dreaming of The Hussy, no doubt

  dreaming of throwing her down in a great big pile of catalogs from

  Carroll Reed and fourth-class junk mail and then how would Joe

  and his piggy poker-buddies out it? "putting the boots to her."

  She was holding the curtain with her left hand because she had

  a handful of square nine-volt batteries in her right. She had

  bought them yesterday down at the town hardware store. Now she let

  the curtain drop and took the batteries into the kitchen, where she was

  assembling a little something on the counter. Jesus had told her how

  to make it. She told Jesus she couldn't build things. Jesus told her not

  to be a cussed fool. If she could follow a recipe, she could build this

  little gadget. She was delighted to find that Jesus was absolutely

  right. It was not only easy, it was fun. A lot more fun than cooking,

  certainly; she had never really had the knack for that. Her cakes

  almost always fell and her breads almost never rose. She had begun

  this little thing yesterday, working with the toaster, the motor from

  her old Hamilton-Beach blender, and a funny board full of electronic

  things which had come from the back of an old radio in the shed. She

  thought she would be done long before Joe woke up and came in to

  watch the Red Sox on TV at two o'clock.

  Actually, it was funny how many ideas she'd had in the last few

  days. Some Jesus had told her about; others just seemed to come to

  her at odd moments.

  Her sewing machine, for instance she'd always wanted one of

  those attachments that made the zigzag stitches, but Joe had told her

  she would have to wait until he could afford to buy her a new

  machine (and that would probably be along about the twelfth of

  Never, if she knew Joe). Just four days ago she had seen how, if she

  just moved the button stitcher and added a second needle where it had

  been at an angle of forty-five degrees to the first needle, she could

  make all the zigzags she wanted. All it took was a screwdriver even

  a dummy like her could use one of those and it worked just as well

  as you could want. She saw that the camshaft would probably warp

  out of true before long because of the weight differential, but there

  were ways to fix that, too, when it happened.

  Then there was the Electrolux. Jesus had told her about that

  one. Getting her ready for Joe, maybe. It had been Jesus who told her

  how to use Joe's little butane welding torch, and that made it easier.

  She had gone over to Derry and bought three of those electronic

  Simon games at KayBee Toys. Once she was back home she broke

  them open and pulled out the memory boards. Following Jesus'

  instructions, she connected the boards and wired Eveready dry cells

  to the memory circuits she had created. Jesus told her how to

  program the Electrolux and power it (she had in fact, already figured

  this out for herself, but she was much too polite to tell Him so). Now

  it vacuumed the kitchen, living room, and downstairs bathroom all by

  itself. It had a tendency to get caught under the piano bench or in the

  bathroom (where it just kept on butting its stupid self against the

  toilet until she came running to turn it around), and it scared the

  granola out of Ozzie, but it was still an improvement over dragging a

  thirty-pound vac around like a dead dog. She had much more time to

  catch up on the afternoon stories and now these included true

  stories Jesus told her. Her new, improved Electrolux used juice

  awfully fast, though, and sometimes it got tangled in its own

  electrical cord. She thought she might just scratch the dry cells and

  hook up a motorcycle battery to it one day soon. There would be time

  after this problem of Joe and The Hussy had been solved.

  Or ... just last night. She had lain awake in bed long after Joe

  was snoring beside her, thinking about numbers. It occurred to

  'Becka (who had never gotton beyond Business Math in high school)

  that if you gave numbers letter values, you could un-freeze them

  you could turn them into something that was like Jell-O. When they

  the numbers were letters,
you could pour them into any old mold

  you liked. Then you could turn the letters back into numbers, and

  that was like putting the Jell-O into the fridge so it would set, and

  keep the shape of the mold when you turned it out onto a plate later

  on.

  That way you could always figure things out, 'Becka had

  thought, delighted. She was unaware that her fingers had gone to the

  spot above her left eye and were rubbing, rubbing, rubbing. For

  instance, just look! You could make things fall into a line every time

  by saying ax + bx + c = 0, and that proves it. It always works. It's

  like Captain Marvel saying Shazam! Well, there is the zero factor;

  you can't let "a" be zero or that spoils it. But otherwise

  She had lain awake a while longer, considering this, and then

  had fallen asleep, unaware that she had just reinvented the quadratic

  equation, and polynomials, and the concept of factoring.

  Ideas. Quite a few of them just lately.

  'Becka picked up Joe's little blowtorch and lit it deftly with a

  kitchen match. She would have laughed last month if you'd told her

  she would ever be working with something like this. But it was easy.

  Jesus had told her exactly how to solder the wires to the electronics

  board from the old radio. It was just like fixing up the vacuum

  cleaner, only this idea was even better.

  Jesus had told her a lot of other things in the last three days or

  so. They had murdered her sleep (and what little sleep she had gotton

  was nightmare-driven), they had made her afraid to show her face in

  the village itself (I'll always know when you've done something

  wrong, 'Becka, her father had told her, because your face just can't

  keep a secret), they had made her lose her appetite. Joe, totally

  bound up in his work, the Red Sox, and his Hussy, noticed none of

  these tings ... although he had noticed the other night as the watched

  television that 'Becka was gnawing her fingernails, something she

  had never done before it was, in fact, one of the many things she

  nagged him about. But she was doing it now, all right; they were

  bitten right down to the quick. Joe Paulson considered this for all of

  twelve seconds before looking back at the Sony TV and losing

  himself in dreams of Nancy Voss's billowy white breasts.

  Here were just a few of the afternoon stories Jesus had told her

  which had caused 'Becka to sleep poorly and to begin biting her

  fingernails at the advanced age of forty-five:

  In 1973, Moss Harlingen, one of Joe's poker buddies, had

  murdered his father. They had been hunting deer up in

  Greenville and it had supposedly been one of those tragic

  accidents, but the shooting of Abel Harlingen had been no

  accident. Moss simply lay up behind a fallen tree with his rifle

  and waited until his father splashed towards him across a small

  stream about fifty yards down the hill from where Moss was.

  Moss shot his father carefully and deliberately through the

  head. Moss thought he had killed his father for money. His

  (Moss's) business, Big Ditch Construction, had two notes

  falling due with two different banks, and neither bank would

  extend because of the other. Moss went to Abel, but Abel

  refused to help, although he could afford to. So Moss shot his

  father and inherited a lot of money as soon as the county

  coroner handed down his verdict of death by misadventure. The

  note was paid and Moss Harlingen really believed (except

  perhaps in his deepest dreams) that he had committed the

  murder for gain. The real motive had been something else. Far

  in the past, when Moss was ten and his little brother Emery but

  seven, Abel's wife went south to Rhode Island for one whole

  winter. Moss's and Emery's uncle had died suddenly, and his

  wife needed help getting on her feet. While their mother was

  gone, there were several incidents of buggery in the Harlingens'

  Troy home. The buggery stopped when the boy's mother came

  back, and the incidents were never repeated. Moss had

  forgotten all about them. He never remembered lying awake in

  the dark anymore, lying awake in mortal terror and watching

  the doorway for the shadow of his father. He had absolutely no

  recollection of lying with his mouth pressed against his

  forearm, hot salty tears of shame and rage squeezing out of his

  eyes and coursing down his face to his mouth as Abel

  Harlingen slathered lard onto his cock and then slid it up his

  son's back door with a grunt and a sigh. It had all made so little

  impression on Moss that he could not remember biting his arm

  until it bled to keep from crying out, and he certainly could not

  remember Emery's breathless little cries from the next bed

  "Please, no, daddy, please not me tonight, please, daddy, please

  no." Children, of course, forget very easily. But some

  subconscious memory must have lingered, because when Moss

  Harlingen actually pulled the trigger, as he had dreamed of

  doing every night for the last thirty-two years of his life, as the

  echoes first rolled away and then rolled back, finally

  disappearing into the great forested silence of the up-Maine

  wilderness, Moss whispered: "Not you, Em, not tonight." That

  Jesus had told her this not two hours after Moss had stopped in

  to return a fishing rod which belonged to Joe never crossed

  'Becka's mind.

  1 Alice Kimball, who taught at the Haven Grammar School,

  was a lesbian. Jesus told 'Becka this Friday, not long after the

  lady herself, looking large and solid and respectable in a green

  pant suit, had stopped by, collecting for the American Cancer

  Society.

  2 Darla Gaines, the pretty seventeen-year-old girl who brought

  the Sunday paper, had half an ounce of "bitchin' reefer"

  between the mattress and box spring of her bed. Jesus told

  'Becka not fifteen minutes after Darla had come by on Saturday

  to collect for the last five weeks (three dollars plus a fifty-cent

  tip 'Becka now wished she had withheld). That she and her

  boyfriend smoked the reefer in Darla's bed after doing what

  they called "the horizontal bop." They did the horizontal bop

  and smoked reefer almost every weekday from two until three

  o'clock or so. Darla's parents both worked at Splended Shoe in

  Derry and they didn't get home until well past four.

  3 Hank Buck, another of Joe's poker buddies, worked at a

  large supermarket in Bangor and hated his boss so much that a

  year ago he had put half a box of Ex-Lax in the man's chocolate

  shake when he, the boss, sent Hank out to McDonald's to get

  his lunch one day. The boss had shit his pants promptly at

  quarter past three in the afternoon, as he was slicing luncheon

  meat in the deli of Paul's Down-East Grocery Mart. Hank

  managed to hold on until punching-out time, and then he sat in

  his car, laughing until he almost shit his pants. "He laughed,"

  Jesus told 'Becka. "He laughed. Can you believe that?"

  And these things were only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. It

  seemed that Jesus knew something unpleasant or upsetting abo
ut

  everyone everyone 'Becka herself came in contact with, anyway.

  She couldn't live with such an awful outpouring.

  But she didn't know if she could live without it anymore, either.

  One thing was certain she had to do something. Something.

  "You are doing something," Jesus said. He spoke from behind

  her, from the picture on top of the TV of course He did and the

  idea that the voice was coming from inside her own head, and that it

  was a cold mutation of her own thoughts ... that was nothing but a

  dreadful passing illusion. "In fact, you're almost done with this part,

  'Becka. Just solder that red wire to that point beside the long

  doohickey ... not that one, the one next to it ... that's right. Not too

  much solder! It's like Brylcreem, 'Becka. A little dab'll do ya."

  Strange, hearing Jesus Christ talk about Brylcreem.

  Joe woke up at quarter of two, tossed Ozzie off his lap, strolled

  to the back of his lawn, had a comfortable whizz into the poison ivy

  back there, then headed into the house to watch the Yankees and the

  Red Sox. He opened the refrigerator in the kitchen, glancing briefly

  at the little snips of wire on the counter and wondering just what the

  hell his wife had been up to. Then he dismissed it and grabbed a quart

  of Bud.

  He padded into the living room. 'Becka was sitting in her

  rocking chair, pretending to read a book. Just ten minutes before Joe

  came in, she had finished wiring her little gadget into the Zenith

  console television, following Jesus' instructions to the letter.

  "You got to be careful, taking the back off a television,

  'Becka," Jesus had told her. "More juice back there than there is in a

  Bird's Eye warehouse."

  "Thought you'd have this all warmed up for me," Joe said.

  "I guess you can do it," 'Becka said.

  "Ayuh, guess I can," Joe said, completing the last

  conversational exchange the two of them would ever have.

  He pushed the button that made the TV come on and better

  than two thousand volts of electricity slammed into him. His eyes

  popped wide open. When the electricity hit him, his hand clenched

  hard enough to break the bottle in his hand and drive brown glass

  into his palm and fingers. Beer foamed and ran.

  "EEEEEEOOOOOOOOAARRRRRRRUMMMMMMMM!"

  Joe screamed.

  His face began to turn black. Blue smoke began to pour from