Lisey's Story

  (was there a sound, a clap of collapsing air under the yum-yum tree when we went, when we left)

  about something she's already working to put out of her mind.

  Meanwhile, the silence is stretching out. She has just about decided he won't answer when he does. And his tone makes her believe it was careful thought and not reluctance that made him pause. "I'm pretty sure the tea-cure came later, Lisey." He thinks a little more, nods. "Yeah, I know it did, because by then I was doing fractions. One-third plus one-fourth equals seven-twelfths, stuff like-a dat." He grins . . . but Lisey, who is coming to know his repertoire of expressions well, thinks it is a nervous grin.

  "In school?" she asks.

  "No, Lisey." His tone says she should know better than this, and when he speaks again, she can hear that somehow chilling childishness

  (I trite and I trite)

  creeping into his voice. "Me n Paul, we 'us home-schooled. Daddy called public school the Donkey Corral." On the night-table beside the lamp is an ashtray sitting on top of his copy of Slaughterhouse-Five (Scott takes a book with him everywhere he goes, there are absolutely no exceptions), and he flicks his cigarette into it. Outside, the wind gusts and the old inn creaks.

  It suddenly seems to Lisey that perhaps this isn't such a good idea after all, that the good idea would be to just roll over and go to sleep, but she is two-hearted and her curiosity drives her on. "And Paul's cuts that day--the day you jumped from the bench--were bad? Not just nicks? I mean, you know the way kids see things . . . any busted pipe looks like a flood . . ."

  She trails off. There's a very long pause while he watches the smoke from his cigarette rise out of the lamp's beam and disappear. When he speaks again, his voice is dry and flat and certain. "Daddy cut deep."

  She opens her mouth to say something conventional that will put an end to this discussion (all kinds of warning bells are going off in her head, now; whole banks of red lights are flashing), but before she can, he goes on.

  "Anyway, that's not what you want to ask. Ask what you want, Lisey. Go ahead. I'll tell you. I'm not going to keep secrets from you--not after what happened this afternoon--but you have to ask."

  What did happen this afternoon? That would seem to be the logical question, but Lisey understands this cannot be a logical discussion because it's madness they're circling, madness, and now she's a part of it, too. Because Scott took her somewhere, she knows it, that was not her imagination. If she asks what happened, he'll tell her, he's as much as said so . . . but it's not the right way in. Her post-coital drowse has departed and she's never felt more awake in her life.

  "After you jumped off the bench, Scott . . ."

  "Daddy gave me a kiss, a kiss 'us Daddy's prize. To show the blood-bool was over."

  "Yes, I know, you told me. After you jumped off the bench and the cutting was done, did Paul . . . did he go away somewhere to heal? Is that how come he could go to the store for bottles of dope and then run around the house making a bool hunt so soon after?"

  "No." He crushes his cigarette out in the ashtray sitting on top of the book.

  She feels the oddest mixture of emotions at that simple negative: sweet relief and deep disappointment. It's like having a thunderhead in her chest. She doesn't know exactly what she was thinking, but that no means she doesn't have to think it any mo--

  "He couldn't." Scott speaks in that same dry, flat tone of voice. With that same certainty. "Paul couldn't. He couldn't go." The emphasis on the last word is slight but unmistakable. "I had to take him."

  Scott rolls toward her and takes her . . . but only into his arms. His face against her neck is hot with suppressed emotion.

  "There's a place. We called it Boo'ya Moon, I forget why. It's mostly pretty." Purdy. "I took him when he was hurt and I took him when he was dead, but I couldn't take him when he was badgunky. After Daddy kilt him I took him there, to Boo'ya Moon, and burrit him away." The dam gives way and he begins sobbing. He's able to muffle the sounds a little by closing his lips, but the force of those sobs shakes the bed, and for a little while all she can do is hold him. At some point he asks her to turn the lamp out and when she asks him why he tells her, "Because this is the rest of it, Lisey. I think I can tell it, as long as you're holding me. But not with the light on."

  And although she is more frightened than ever--even more frightened than on the night when he came out of the dark with his hand in bloody ruins--she frees an arm long enough to turn out the bedside light, brushing his face with the breast that will later suffer Jim Dooley's madness. At first the room is dark and then the furniture reappears dimly as her eyes adjust; it even takes on a faint and hallucinatory glow that announces the moon's approach through the thinning clouds.

  "You think Daddy murdered Paul, don't you? You think that's how this part of the story ends."

  "Scott, you said he did it with his rifle--"

  "But it wasn't murder. They would have called it that if he'd ever been tried for it in court, but I was there and I know it wasn't." He pauses. She thinks he'll light a fresh cigarette, but he doesn't. Outside the wind gusts and the old building groans. For a moment the furniture brightens, just a little, and then the gloom returns. "Daddy could have murdered him, sure. Lots of times. I know that. There were times he would have, if I hadn't been there to help, but in the end that isn't how it was. You know what euthanasia means, Lisey?"

  "Mercy-killing."

  "Yeah. That's what my Daddy did to Paul."

  In the room beyond the bed, the furniture once more shivers toward visibility, then once more retreats into shadow.

  "It was the badgunky, don't you see? Paul got it just like Daddy. Only Paul got too much for Daddy to cut and let out."

  Lisey sort of understands. All those times the father cut the sons--and himself as well, she presumes--he was practicing a kind of wacky preventative medicine.

  "Daddy said it mos'ly skip' two generations and then came down twice as hard. 'Come down on you like that tractor-chain on your foot, Scoot,' he said."

  She shakes her head. She doesn't know what he's talking about. And part of her doesn't want to.

  "It was December," Scott says, "and there come a cold snap. First one of the winter. We lived on that farm way out in the country with open fields all around us and just the one road that went down to Mulie's Store and then to Martensburg. We were pretty much cut off from the world. Pretty much on our own hook, see?"

  She does. She does see. She imagines the postman came up that road once in awhile, and of course "Sparky" Landon would drive down it in order to get to

  (U.S. Gyppum)

  work, but that would have been pretty much it. No school busses, because me'n Paul, we 'us home-schooled. The school busses went to the Donkey Corral.

  "Snow made it worse, and cold made it worse still--the cold kept us inside. Still, that year wasn't so bad at first. We had a Christmas tree, at least. There were years when Daddy would get in the badgunky . . . or just plain broody . . . and there wouldn't be any tree or any presents." He gives out a short, humorless laugh. "One Christmas he must have kept us up until three in the morning, reading from the Book of Revelation, about jars being opened, and plagues, and riders on horses of various shades, and he finally threw the Bible into the kitchen and roared, 'Who writes this smogging bullshit? And who are the morons who believe it?' When he was in a roaring mood, Lisey, he could roar like Ahab during the last days of the Pequod. But this particular Christmas seemed nice enough. Know what we did? We all went up to Pittsburgh together for the shopping, and Daddy even took us to a movie--Clint Eastwood playing a cop and shooting up some city. It gave me a headache, and the popcorn gave me a bellyache, but I thought it was the most wonderful goddam thing I'd ever seen. I went home and started writing a story just like it and read it to Paul that night. It probably stank to high heaven, but he said it was good."

  "He sounds like a great brother," Lisey says carefully.

  Her care is wasted. He hasn't even heard her. "Wha
t I'm telling you is that we were all getting along, had been for months, almost like a normal family. If there is such a thing, which I doubt. But . . . but."

  He stops, thinking. At last, he begins again.

  "Then one day not long before Christmas, I was upstairs in my room. It was cold--colder than a witch's tit--and getting ready to snow. I was on my bed, reading my history lesson, when I looked out my window and saw Daddy coming across the yard with an armload of wood. I went down the back stairs to help him stack it in the woodbox so the stovelengths wouldn't get bark all over the floor--that always made him mad. And Paul was

  10

  Paul is sitting at the kitchen table when his kid brother, just ten years old and needing a haircut, comes down the back stairs with the laces of his sneakers flapping. Scott thinks he'll ask if Paul wants to go out sledding on the hill behind the barn once the wood's in. If Daddy doesn't have any more chores, that is.

  Paul Landon, slim and tall and already handsome at thirteen, has a book open in front of him. The book is Introduction to Algebra, and Scott has no reason to believe Paul is doing anything other than solving for x until Paul turns his head to look at him. Scott is still three steps from the bottom of the stairs when Paul does that. It is only an instant before Paul lunges at his younger brother, to whom he has never so much as raised a hand in their lives together, but it is long enough to see that no, Paul wasn't just sitting there. No, Paul wasn't just reading. No, Paul wasn't studying.

  Paul was lying in wait.

  It isn't blankness he sees in his brother's eyes when Paul comes surging out of his chair hard enough to knock it skittering back against the wall, but pure badgunky. Those eyes are blue no more. Something has burst in the brain behind them and filled them with blood. Scarlet seeds stand in the corners.

  Another child might have frozen to the spot and been killed by the monster who an hour before had been an ordinary brother with nothing on his mind but homework or perhaps what he and Scott could get Daddy for Christmas if they pooled their money. Scott, however, is no more ordinary than Paul. Ordinary children could never have survived Sparky Landon, and it's almost certainly the experience of living with his father's madness that saves Scott now. He knows the badgunky when he sees it, and wastes no time on disbelief. He turns instantly and tries to flee back up the stairs. He makes only three steps before Paul grabs him by the legs.

  Snarling like a dog whose yard has been invaded, Paul curls his arms around Scott's shins and yanks the younger boy's legs out from under him. Scott grabs the banister and holds on. He gives a single two-word yell--"Daddy, help!"--and then is quiet. Yelling wastes energy. He needs all of his to hold on.

  He doesn't have enough strength to do so, of course. Paul is three years older, fifty pounds heavier, and much stronger. In addition to these things, he has run mad. If Paul pulls him free of the banister then, Scott will be badly hurt or killed in spite of his quick reaction, but instead of getting Scott, what Paul gets are Scott's corduroy pants and both sneakers, which he forgot to tie when he jumped down off his bed.

  ("If I'd tied my sneakers," he will tell his wife much later as they lie in bed on the second floor of The Antlers in New Hampshire, "we're most likely not here tonight. Sometimes I think that's all my life comes down to, Lisey--a pair of untied Keds, size seven.")

  The thing that was Paul roars, stumbles backward with a hug of pants in its arms, and trips over the chair in which a handsome young fellow sat down an hour previous to map Cartesian coordinates. One sneaker falls to the bumpy, hillocky linoleum. Scott, meanwhile, is struggling to get going again, to get up to the second-floor landing while there's still time, but his sock feet spin out from under him on the smooth stair-riser and he goes back down to one knee. His tattered underwear has been pulled partway down, he can feel a cold draft blowing on the crack of his ass, and there's time to think Please God, I don't want to die this way, with my fanny out to the wind. Then the brother-thing is up, bellowing and casting aside the pants. They skid across the kitchen table, leaving the algebra book but knocking the sugar-bowl to the floor--knocking it galley-west, their father might have said. The thing that was Paul leaps for him and Scott is bracing for its hands and the feel of its nails biting into his skin when there's a terrific wooden thonk! and a hoarse, furious shout:--Leave 'im alone, you smuckin bastard! You badgunky fuck!

  He forgot all about Daddy. The draft on his ass was Daddy coming in with the wood. Then Paul's hands do grab him, the fingernails do bite in, and he's pulled backward, his grip on the banister broken as easily as if it were a baby's. In a moment he will feel Paul's teeth. He knows it, this is the real badgunky, the deep badgunky, not what happens to Daddy when Daddy sees people who aren't there or makes a blood-bool on himself or one of them (a thing he does less and less to Scott as Scott grows older), but the real deal, what Daddy meant all the times he'd just laugh and shake his head when they asked him why the Landreaus left France even though it meant leaving all their money and land behind, and they were rich, the Landreaus were rich, and he's going to bite now, he's going to bite me right now, RAH-CHEER--

  He never feels Paul's teeth. He feels hot breath on the unprotected meat of his left side just above the hip, and then there's another heavy wooden thonk! as Daddy brings the stovelength down on Paul's head again--two-handed, with all his strength. The sound is followed by a number of loose sliding sounds as Paul's body goes slithering down to the kitchen linoleum.

  Scott turns over. He's lying splayed out on the lower stairs, dressed in nothing but an old flannel shirt, his underpants, and white athletic socks with holes in the heels. One foot is almost touching the floor. He's too stunned to cry. His mouth tastes like the inside of a piggybank. That last whack sounded awful, and for an instant his powerful imagination paints the kitchen with Paul's blood. He tries to cry out, but his shocked, flattened lungs can produce only a single dismayed squawk. He blinks and sees that there's no blood, only Paul lying facedown in the sugar from the now defunct bowl, which lies bust in four big and change. That one'll never dance the tango again, Daddy sometimes says when something breaks, a glass or a plate, but he doesn't say it now, just stands over his unconscious son in his yellow work coat. There's snow on his shoulders and in his shaggy hair, which is starting to go gray. In one gloved hand he holds the stovelength. Behind him, scattered in the entry like pickup sticks, is the rest of his armload. The door is still open and the cold draft is still blowing in. And now Scott sees there is blood, just a little, trickling from Paul's left ear and down the side of his face.

  --Daddy, is he dead?

  Daddy slings the stovelength into the woodbox and brushes his long hair back. There's melting snow in the stubble on his cheeks--No he aint. That would be too easy. He tromps to the back door and slams it shut, cutting off the draft. His every movement expresses disgust, but Scott has seen him act so before--when he gets Official Letters about taxes or schooling or things like that--and is pretty sure that what he really is is scared.

  Daddy comes back and stands over his floorbound boy. He rocks from one booted foot to the other awhile. Then he looks up at the other one.

  --Help me get him down cellar, Scoot.

  It isn't wise to question Daddy when he tells you to do a thing, but Scott is frightened. Also, he is next door to naked. He comes down to the kitchen and starts pulling his pants on.--Why, Daddy? What are you going to do with him?

  And for a wonder, Daddy doesn't hit him. Doesn't even yell at him.

  --I'll be smucked if I know. Truss him up down there for a start while I think about it. Hurry up. He won't be out long.

  --Is it really the badgunky? Like with the Landreaus? And your Uncle Theo?

  --What do you think, Scoot? Get his head, less you want it to bump all the way down. He won't be out long I tell you, and if he starts again, you might not be so lucky. Me either. Badgunky's strong.

  Scott does as his father says. It's the nineteen-sixties, it's America, men will soon be walking on the mo
on, but here they have a boy to deal with who has seemingly gone feral in the turn of a moment. The father simply accepts the fact. After his first shocked questions, the son does, as well. When they reach the bottom of the cellar stairs, Paul begins to stir again and make thick sounds deep in his throat. Sparky Landon puts his hands around his older son's throat and begins to choke him. Scott screams in horror and tries to grab his father.

  --Daddy, no!

  Sparky Landon releases one hand from what it's been doing long enough to administer an absent backhand blow to his younger son. Scott goes reeling back and strikes the table sitting in the middle of the dirt-floored room. Standing on it is an ancient hand-crank printing press that Paul has somehow coaxed back into working. He has printed some of Scott's stories on it; they are the younger brother's first publications. The crank of this quarter-ton behemoth bites painfully into Scott's back and he crumples up, grimacing, watching as his father resumes choking.

  --Daddy, don't kill 'im! PLEASE DON'T KILL 'IM!

  --I ain't, Landon says without looking around, I should, but I aint. Not yet, anyway. More fool me, but he's my own boy, my fuckin firstborn, and I won't unless I have to. Which I fear I will. Sweet Mother Machree! But not yet. Mother-fogged if I will. Only it won't do to let him wake up. You aint never seen anything like this, but I have. I got lucky upstairs because I was behind him. Down here I could chase him two hours and never catch him. He'd run up the walls and halfway across the sweetmother ceiling. Then, when he wore me down . . .

  Landon removes his hands from Paul's throat and peers fixedly into the still white face. That little trickle of blood from Paul's ear seems to have stopped.

  --There. How you like that, you mother, you motherfuck? He's out again. But he not for long. Fetch out that coil of rope from understair. That'll do until we can get some chain out of the shed. Then I dunno. Then it depends.

  --Depends on what, Daddy?