The Tommyknockers by Stephen King Page B

the tour. He said it with a nervous bad-boy-at-the-back-of-the-classroom giggle. “But then, Bill Claughtsworth always was a derivative son of a bitch.”
    Patricia McCardle had gotten twelve reading dates and fairly good advances on a deal which, when stripped of all the high-flown rhetoric, boiled down to six poets for the price of one. Following Claughtsworth’s suicide, she found herself with three days to find a publishing poet in a season when most publishing poets were booked solid (“Or on permanent vacation like Silly Billy Claughtsworth,” Cummings said, laughing rather uneasily).
    Few if any of the booked groups would balk at paying the stipulated fee just because the Caravan happened to be short one poet—to do such a thing would be in rawther shitty taste, particularly when one considered the reason the Caravan was a poet short. All the same, it put Caravan, Inc., in a position of contractual default, at least technically, and Patricia McCardle was not a woman to brook loopholes.
    After trying four poets, each more minor-league than the last, and with only thirty-six hours before the first reading, she had finally called Jim Gardener.
    â€œAre you still drinking, Jimmy?” she asked bluntly. Jimmy—he hated that. Most people called him Jim. Jim was all right. No one called him Gard except himself . . . and Bobbi Anderson.
    â€œDrinking a little,” he said. “Not bingeing at all.”
    â€œI’m dubious,” she said coldly.
    â€œYou always have been, Patty,” he replied, knowing she hated that even more than he did Jimmy—her Puritan blood screamed against it. “Were you asking because youhappen to be short a quart, or did you have a more pressing reason?”
    Of course he knew, and of course she knew he knew, and of course she knew he was grinning, and of course she was infuriated, and of course all of this tickled him just about to death, and of course she knew he knew that too, and that was just the way he liked it.
    They sparred a few more minutes, and then came to what was not a marriage of convenience but one of necessity. Gardener wanted to buy a good used wood furnace for the coming winter; he was tired of living like a slut, bundled up at night in front of the kitchen stove while the wind rattled the plastic stapled over the windows; Patricia McCardle wanted to buy a poet. There would be no handshake agreement, though, not with Patricia McCardle. She had driven down from Derry that afternoon with a contract (in triplicate) and a notary public. Gard was a little surprised she hadn’t brought a second notary, just in case the first one happened to suffer a coronary or something.
    Feelings and hunches aside, there was really no way he could leave the tour and get the wood furnace, because if he left the tour he would never see the second half of his fee. She’d haul him into court and spend a thousand dollars trying to get him to cough up the three hundred Caravan, Inc., had paid up front. She might be able to do it, too. He had done almost all the dates, but the contract he had signed was crystal clear on the subject: if he took off for any reason unacceptable to the Tour Co-Ordinator, any and all fees unpaid shall be declared null and void, and any and all fees prepaid shall be refundable to Caravan, Inc., within thirty (30) days.
    And she would go after him. She might think she was doing it on principle, but it would really be because he had called her Patty in her hour of need.
    Nor would that be the end of it. If he left, she would work with unflagging energy to get him blackballed. He would certainly never read again for another poetry tour with which she was associated, and that was a lot of poetry tours. Then there was the delicate matter of grants. Her husband had left her a lot of money (although he didn’t think you could say, as Ron Cummings did, that she practically had money falling out of her asshole,