Dooley squatted on his hunkers, his butt almost touching the raised heels of his boots, one arm wrapped around his knees. He could have been a farmer watching a cow drink at a stream in the north forty. She judged he was on alert but not on high alert. He didn't expect her to throw the clunky drinking glass, and of course he was right not to expect it. Lisey didn't want her ankles snapped.
Why, I've never even taken that all-important first in-line skating lesson, she thought, and Tuesday nights are Singles Nights at Oxford Skate Central.
When her thirst was slaked, she held the glass out to him. Dooley took it, examined it. "You sure you don't want them--those--last two swallows, Missus?" Not even close to swallers, and Lisey had a sudden tuition of her own: Dooley was exaggerating the good-old-boy thing. Maybe on purpose, maybe without even realizing it. When it came to language he corrected up because it would have been pretentious to correct down. Did it matter? Probably not.
"I've had enough."
Dooley polished the last two swallows off himself, his adam's apple sliding in his skinny throat. Then he asked if she was feeling any better.
"I'll feel better when you're gone."
"Fair enough. I won't take up much of your time." He tucked the gun back into his waistband and got to his feet. His knees popped and Lisey thought again (marveled, really), This is no dream. This is really happening to me. He kicked the glass absently, and it rolled a little way onto the oyster-white wall-to-wall carpet out there in the main office. He hitched up his pants. "Can't afford to linger in any case, Missus. Your cop'll be back, him or another, and I got an idear you got some kind of sister-twister goin on as well, isn't that so?"
Lisey made no reply.
Dooley shrugged as if to say Have it your way and then leaned out of the bar alcove. For Lisey it was a surreal moment, because she had seen Scott do exactly the same thing many times, one hand gripping each side of the doorless doorway, feet on the bare wood of the alcove, head and torso out in the study. But Scott would never have been caught dead in khakis; he had been a bluejeans man to the end. Also, there had been no bald spot at the back of his head. My husband died with a full head of hair, she thought.
"Awful nice place," he said. "What is it? Converted hayloft? Must be."
She said nothing.
Dooley continued to lean out, now rocking back and forth a little, looking first left, then right. Lord of all he surveys, she thought.
"Real nice place," he said. "Just about what I would have expected. You got your three rooms--what I'd call rooms--and your three skylights, so there's plenty of natural light. Down home we call places all a-row like this shotgun houses or sometimes shotgun shacks, but ain't nothing shacky about this, is it?"
Lisey said nothing.
He turned to her, looking serious. "Not that I begrudge him, Missus--or you, now that he's dead. I did some time in Brushy Mountain State Prison. Maybe the Prof told you that. And it was your husbun got me through the worst of it. I read all his books, and you know which one I liked best?"
Of course, Lisey thought. Empty Devils. You probably read it nine times.
But Dooley surprised her. "The Coaster's Daughter. And I didn't just like it, Missus, I loved it. I've made it my bi'ness to read that book ever' two or three years since I found it in the jailhouse library, and I could quote you whole long passages of it. You know what part I like best? Where Gene finally talks back and tells his father he's leaving whether the old man likes it or not. Do you know what he tells that miserable holy-rollin old fuck, pardon my French?"
That he has never understood the duty of love, Lisey thought, but she said nothing. Dooley didn't seem to mind; he was on a roll now, enraptured.
"Gene says his old man has never understood the duty of love. The duty of love! How beautiful is that? How many of us have felt something like that but haven't never had the words to say it? But your husbun did. For all of us who otherwise would have stood mute, that's what the Prof said. God must have loved your man, Missus, to give him such a tongue."
Dooley looked up at the ceiling. The cords on his neck stood out.
"The DUTY! Of LOVE! And the ones God loves best he takes home soonest, to be with Him. Amen." He lowered his head briefly. His wallet stuck out of his back pocket. It was on a chain. Of course it was. Men like Jim Dooley always wore their wallets on chains that were attached to their belt-loops. Now he looked up again and said: "He deserved a nice place like this. I hope he enjoyed it, when he wasn't agonizin over his creations."
Lisey thought of Scott at the desk he called Dumbo's Big Jumbo, sitting before his big-screen Mac and laughing at something he'd just written. Chewing either a plastic straw or his own fingernails. Sometimes singing along with the music. Making arm-farts if it was summer and hot and his shirt was off. That was how he agonized over his smucking creations. But she still said nothing. On the sound-system, Ole Hank gave way to his son. Junior was singing "Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound."
Dooley said: "Giving me the old silent treatment? Well, more power to you, but it won't do you no good, Missus. You have got some correction comin. I won't try to sell you the old one about how it's gonna hurt me more than it's gonna hurt you, but I will say I've come to like your spunk in the short time I've known you, and that it's gonna--going to--hurt both of us. I also want to say I'll go as easy as I can, because I don't want to break that spirit of yours. Still--we had an agreement, and you didn't keep to it."
An agreement? Lisey felt a chill sweep through her body. For the first time she got a clear picture of the breadth and complexity of Dooley's insanity. The gray wings threatened to descend across her vision and this time she fought them fiercely.
Dooley heard the rattle of the handcuff-chain (he must have had the cuffs in his sack, along with the mayonnaise jar) and turned to her.
Easy, babyluv, easy, Scott murmured. Talk to the guy--run your everlasting mouth.
This was advice Lisey hardly needed. As long as the talking was going on, the correctin would remain deferred.
"Listen to me, Mr. Dooley. We didn't have an agreement, you're mistaken about that--" She saw his brow begin to furrow, his look begin to darken, and hurried on. "Sometimes it's hard to get things together over the phone, but I'm ready to work with you now." She swallowed and heard a distinct click in her throat. She was ready for more water, a good long cool drink of it, but this didn't seem like a good time to ask. She leaned forward, fixed his eyes with her own, blue on blue, and spoke with all the earnestness and sincerity she could muster. "I'm saying that as far as I'm concerned, you've made your point. And you know what? You were just looking at the manuscripts your . . . um . . . your colleague especially wants. Did you notice the black file-cabinets in the central space?"
Now he was looking at her with his eyebrows hoisted and a skeptical little smile playing on his mouth . . . but that might only be his dickering look. Lisey allowed herself to hope. "Looked to me like there was a right smart of boxes downstairs, too," he said. "More of his books, from the look of them."
"Those are--" What was she going to tell him? Those are bools, not books? She guessed that most of them were, but Dooley wouldn't understand. They're practical jokes, Scott's version of itchy-powder and plastic vomit? That he'd understand but likely not believe.
He was still looking at her with that skeptical smile. Not a dickering look at all. No, this was a look that said While you're at it, why don't you go on and pull the other one, Missus?
"There's nothing in those cartons downstairs but carbon copies and Xeroxes and blank sheets," she said, and it sounded like a lie because it was a lie, and what was she supposed to say? You're too crazy to understand the truth, Mr. Dooley? Instead she rushed on. "The stuff Woodsmucky wants--the good stuff--is all up here. Unpublished stories . . . copies of letters to other writers . . . their letters back to him . . ."
Dooley threw back his head and laughed. "Woodsmucky! Missus, you got your husbun's way with words." Then the laughter faded, and although the
smile stayed on his lips, there was no more amusement in his eyes. His eyes looked like ice. "So what do you think I sh'd do? Hie over to Oxford or Mechanic Falls and rent a U-Haul, then come back here to load those filing cabinets up? Say, maybe you could get one of those deputy-boys to he'p me!"
"I--"
"Shut up." Pointing a finger at her. The smile all gone by now. "Why, if I was to go away and then come back, you'd have a dozen State Police graybacks here waitin for me, I reckon. They'd take me in and Missus, I tell you what, I'd deserve another ten years inside just for believin such a thing."
"But--"
"And besides, that wadnt--wasn't--the deal we made. The deal was that you'd call the Prof, ole Woodsmucky--girl, I like that--and he'd send me a e-mail the special way we have, and then he'd arrange about the papers. Right?"
Some part of him actually believed this. Had to believe it, or why would he keep on with it when it was just the two of them?
"Ma'am?" Dooley asked her. He sounded solicitous. "Missus?"
If there was a part of him that had to go on telling lies when it was just the two of them, maybe it was because there was a part of him that needed lying to. If so, that was the part of Jim Dooley she needed to reach. The part that might still be sane.
"Mr. Dooley, listen to me." She pitched her voice low and kept her delivery slow. It had been the way she talked to Scott when Scott was ready to go off half-cocked over anything from a bad review to a shoddy piece of plumbing. "Professor Woodbody has no way of getting in touch with you, and down inside somewhere, you know that. But I can get in touch with him. I already have. I called him last night."
"You're lyin," he said, but this time she wasn't and he knew she wasn't, and for some reason it upset him. That reaction ran exactly counter to the one she wanted to provoke--she wanted to soothe him--but she thought she had to go on, hoping the sane part of Jim Dooley was in there somewhere, listening.
"I'm not," she said. "You left me his number and I called him." Holding Dooley's eyes with hers. Mustering every bit of sincerity she could manage as she headed back into the Land of Fabrication. "I promised him the manuscripts and told him to call you off and he said he couldn't call you off because he had no way of getting in touch with you anymore, he said his first two e-mails went through, but after that they just bounced ba--"
"One lies and the other swears to it," Jim Dooley said, and after that things happened with a speed and a ferocity Lisey could hardly credit, although every moment of the beating and mutilation that followed remained vivid in her mind for the rest of her life, right down to the sound of his dry and rapid breathing, right down to the way his khaki shirt strained at the buttons, showing little winks of the white tee-shirt he wore beneath as he slapped her across the face, backhand and then forehand, backhand and then forehand, backhand and then forehand, backhand and then forehand again. Eight blows in all, eight-eight-lay-them-straight they chanted as children skip-roping in the dooryard dust, and the sound of his skin on her skin was like dry kindling snapped over a knee, and although the hand he used was ringless--there was that much to be grateful for--the fourth and fifth blows beat the blood from her lips, the sixth and seventh sent it spraying, and the last rode high enough to smash into her nose and set that gushing, as well. By then she was crying in fear and pain. Her head thumped repeatedly against the underside of the bar sink, making her ears ring. She heard herself crying out for him to stop, that he could have whatever he wanted if he would only stop. Then he did stop and she heard herself saying, "I can give you the manuscript of a new novel, his last novel, it's all done, he finished it a month before he died and never got a chance to revise it, it's a real treasure, Woodsmucky'll love it." She had time to think That's pretty inventive, what are you going to do if he takes you up on it, but Jim Dooley wasn't taking her up on anything. He was on his knees in front of her, panting harshly--it was hot up here already, if she'd known she was going to be taking a beating in Scott's study today she certainly would have turned on the air-conditioning first thing--and rummaging in his lunch-sack again. There were big sweat-rings spreading out from under his arms.
"Missus, I'm sorry as hell to do this, but at least it ain't your pussy," he said, and she had time to register two things before he swept his left hand down the front of her, tearing open her blouse and popping the catch at the front of her bra so that her small breasts tumbled free. The first was that he wasn't sorry a bit. The second was that the object in his right hand had almost certainly come from her very own Things Drawer. Scott had called it Lisey's yuppie church key. It was her Oxo can opener, the one with the heavy-duty rubber handgrips.
X. Lisey and The Arguments Against Insanity (The Good Brother)
1
The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound.
This line kept going through Lisey's head as she crawled from the memory nook and then slowly across the center space of her dead husband's long and rambling office, leaving an ugly trail behind her: splotches of blood from her nose, mouth, and mutilated breast.
The blood will never come out of this carpet, she thought, and the line recurred, as if in answer: The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound.
There was insanity in this story, all right, but the only sound she remembered just lately wasn't whirring, purring, or shirring; it was the sound of her screams when Jim Dooley had attached her can opener to her left breast like a mechanical leech. She had screamed, and then she had fainted, and then he had slapped her awake to tell her one more thing. After that he'd let her go back under again, but he had pinned a note to her shirt--after considerately pulling off her ruined bra and buttoning the shirt back up, that was--to make sure she wouldn't forget. She hadn't needed the note. She remembered what he'd said perfectly.
"I'd better hear from the Prof by eight tonight, or next time the hurtin will be a lot worse. And tend yourself by yourself, Missus, you hear me, now? Tell anyone I was here and I'll kill you." That was what Dooley had said. To this the note pinned to her shirt had added: Let's get this business finish, we will both be happier when it is. Signed, your good freind, "Zack"!
Lisey had no idea how long she was out the second time. All she knew was that when she came to, the mangled bra was in the wastebasket and the note was pinned to the right side of her shirt. The left side was soaked with blood. She had unbuttoned enough to take one quick peek, then moaned and averted her eyes. It looked worse than anything Amanda had ever done to herself, including the thing with the navel. As to the pain . . . all she could remember was something enormous and obliterating.
The handcuffs had been removed, and Dooley had even left her a glass of water. Lisey drank it greedily. When she tried to get to her feet, however, her legs were trembling too badly to hold her. So she had crawled out of the alcove on all fours, dripping blood and bloody sweat on Scott's carpet as she went (ah, but she'd never cared for that oyster-white anyway, it showed every speck of dirt), hair plastered to her forehead, tears drying on her cheeks, blood drying to a crust on her nose, lips, and chin.
At first she thought she was headed for the phone, probably to call Deputy Buttercluck in spite of Dooley's admonitions and the failure of the Castle County Sheriff's Department to protect her on its first try. Then that line of poetry
(the arguments against insanity)
started to go through her head and she saw Good Ma's cedar box lying overturned on the carpet between the stairs going down to the barn and the desk Scott had called Dumbo's Big Jumbo. The cedar box's contents were spilled on the carpet in an untidy litter. She understood that the box and its spilled contents had been her destination all along. She especially wanted the yellow thing she could see draped over the bent purple shape of The Antlers menu.
The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound.
From one of Scott's poems. He didn't write many, and those he did he almost never published--he said they weren't good, and he wrote them j
ust for himself. But she had thought that one very good, even though she hadn't been entirely sure what it meant, or even what it was about. She had particularly liked that first line, because sometimes you just heard things going, didn't you? They fell down, level after level, leaving a hole you could look through. Or fall into, if you weren't careful.
SOWISA, babyluv. You're bound for the rabbit-hole, so strap on nice and tight.
Dooley must have brought Good Ma's box up to the study because he thought it had to do with what he wanted. Guys like Dooley and Gerd Allen Cole, aka Blondie, aka Monsieur Ding-Dong for the Freesias, thought everything had to do with what they wanted, didn't they? Their nightmares, their phobias, their midnight inspirations. What had Dooley thought was in the cedar box? A secret list of Scott's manuscripts (perhaps in code)? God knew. In any case he'd dumped it out, seen nothing but a jumble of uninteresting rickrack (uninteresting to him, at least), and then dragged the widow Landon deeper into the study, looking for a place where he could cuff her up before she regained consciousness. The pipes under the bar sink had done quite nicely.
Lisey crawled steadily toward the scattered contents of the box, her eyes fixed on the yellow knitted square. She wondered if she would have discovered it on her own. She had an idea the answer was no; she had gotten her fill of memories. Now, however--
The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound.
So it seemed. And if her precious purple curtain finally came down, would it make that same soft, sad sound? She wouldn't be at all surprised. It had never been much more than spun cobwebs to begin with; look at all she'd already remembered.
No more, Lisey, you don't dare, hush.
"Hush yourself," she croaked. Her outraged breast throbbed and burned. Scott had gotten his chest-wound; now she had hers. She thought of him coming back up her lawn that night, coming out of the shadows while Pluto barked and barked and barked next door. Scott holding up what had been a hand and was now nothing but a clot of blood with things that looked vaguely like fingers sticking out of it. Scott telling her it was a blood-bool, and it was for her. Scott later soaking that sliced-up meat in a basin filled with weak tea, telling her how it was something