Scared. Has he ever been so scared? No. And his father is looking at him in a way that scares him even more. Because it is a knowing way.
--Why, I guess it depends on you, Scoot. You've made him better a lot of times . . . and why do you want to come over all cow's eyes that way? You think I didn't know? Jayzus, for a smart boy ain't you dumb! He turns his head and spits on the dirt floor. You've made him better of a lot of things. Maybe you can make him better of this. I never heard of anyone getting better from the badgunky . . . not the real badgunky . . . but I never heard of anybody just like you, either, so maybe you can. Have on 'til your cheeks crack, my old man would've said. But for now just fetch out that coil of rope from understair. And step to it, you little gluefoot motherfuck, because he's
11
"He's stirring already," Lisey said as she lay on the oyster-white carpet of her dead husband's study. "He's
12
"Stirring already," Lisey says as she sits on the cold floor of the guest room, holding her husband's hand--a hand that is warm but dreadfully lax and waxy in her own. "Scott said
13
The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound;
these are the sounds of dead voices on dead records
floating down the broken shaft of memory.
When I turn to you to ask if you remember,
When I turn to you in our bed
14
In bed with him is where she hears these things; in bed with him at The Antlers, after a day when something happened she absolutely cannot explain. He tells her as the clouds thin and the moon nears like an announcement and the furniture swims to the very edge of visibility. She holds him in the dark and listens, not wanting to believe (helpless not to), as the young man who will shortly become her husband says, "Daddy tole me to fetch out that coil of rope from understair. 'And you want to step to it, you little gluefoot motherfuck,' he says, 'because he's not gonna stay out for long. And when he comes to
15
--When he comes to he's gonna be one ugly bug.
Ugly bug. Like Scooter you old Scoot and the badgunky, ugly bug is an interior idiom of his family that will haunt his dreams (and his speech) for the rest of his productive but too-short life.
Scott gets the coil of rope from beneath the stairs and brings it to Daddy. Daddy trusses Paul up with quick, dancing economy, his shadow looming and turning on the cellar's stone walls in the light of three hanging seventy-five-watt bulbs, which are controlled by a turn-switch at the top of the stairs. He ties Paul's arms so stringently behind him that the balls of his shoulders stand out even through his shirt. Scott is moved to speak again, afraid of Daddy though he is.
--Daddy, that's too tight!
Daddy shoots a glance Scott's way. It's just a quick one, but Scott sees the fear there. It scares him. More than that, it awes him. Before today he would have said his Daddy wasn't ascairt of nothing but the School Board and their damned Registered Mails.
--You don't know, so shut up! I aint having him get a-loose! He might not kill us before it was over if that happen, but I'd most certainly have to kill him. I know what I'm doin!
You don't, Scott thinks, watching Daddy tie Paul's legs together first at the knees, then at the ankles. Already Paul has begun to stir again, and to mutter deep in his throat. You're only guessing. But he understands the truth of Daddy's love for Paul. It may be ugly love, but it's true and strong. If it wasn't, Daddy wouldn't guess at all. He would have just kept hammering Paul with that stovelength until he was dead. For just a moment part of Scott's mind (a cold part) wonders if Daddy would run the same risk for him, for Scooter old Scoot who didn't even dare jump off a three-foot bench until his brother stood cut and bleeding before him, and then he swats the thought into darkness. It isn't him who got the badgunky.
At least, not yet.
Daddy finishes by tying Paul around the middle to one of the painted steel posts that hold up the cellar's ceiling.--There, he says, stepping away, panting like a man who's just roped a steer in a rodeo ring. That'll hold him awhile. You go on out to the shed, Scott. Get the light chain that's laying just inside the door and the big heavy tractor-chain that's in the bay on the left, with the truck parts. Do you know where I mean?
Paul has been sagging over the rope around his torso. Now he sits up so suddenly he bangs his head on the post with sickening force. It makes Scott grimace. Paul looks at him with eyes that were blue only an hour ago. He grins, and the corners of his mouth stretch up far higher than they should be able to . . . almost to the lobes of his ears, it seems.
--Scott, his father says.
For once in his life, Scott pays no attention. He's mesmerized by the Halloween mask that used to be his brother's face. Paul's tongue comes dancing from between his parted teeth and does a jitterbug in the dank cellar air. At the same time his crotch darkens as he pisses his pa--
There's a clout upside his head that sends Scott reeling backward and he hits the printing-press table again.
--Don't look at him, nummie, look at me! That ugly bug'll hypnotize you like a snake does a bird! You better wake the smuck up, Scooter--that aint your brother anymore.
Scott gapes at his father. Behind them, as if to underline Daddy's point, the thing tied to the post lets out a roar much too loud to have come from a human chest. But that's all right, because it isn't a human sound. Not even close.
--Go get those chains, Scotty. Both of em. And be quick. That tie-job aint gonna hold him. I'm gonna go upstairs and get my .30-06. If he gets a-loose before you get back with those chains--
--Daddy, please don't shoot him! Don't shoot Paul!
--Bring the chains. Then we'll see what we can figger out.
--That tractor-chain's too long! Too heavy!
--Use the wheelbarra, nummie. The big barra. Go on, now, step to it.
Scott looks over his shoulder once and sees his father backing to the foot of the stairs. He does it slowly, like a lion-tamer leaving the cage after the act is over. Below him, spotlighted in the glare of one hanging bulb, is Paul. He's whamming the back of his head so rapidly against the post that Scott thinks of a jackhammer. At the same time he's jerking from side to side. Scott can't believe Paul isn't bleeding or knocking himself unconscious, but he's not. And he sees his father is right. The ropes won't hold him. Not if he keeps up that constant assault.
He won't be able to, he thinks as his father goes one way (to get his gun out of the front closet) and Scott goes another (to yank on his boots). He'll kill himself if he goes on like that. But then he thinks of the roar he heard bursting out of his brother's chest--that impossible catmurder roar--and doesn't really believe it.
And as he runs coatless into the cold, he thinks he might even know what's happened to Paul. There's a place where he can go when Daddy has hurt him, and he has taken Paul there when Daddy has hurt Paul. Yes, plenty of times. There are good things in that place, beautiful trees and healing water, but there are also bad things. Scott tries not to go there at night, and when he does he's quiet and comes back quick, because the deep intuition of his child's heart tells him night is when the bad things mostly come out. Night is when they hunt.
If he can go there, is it so hard to believe that something--a badgunky something--could get inside Paul and then come over here? Something that saw him and marked him, or maybe just a dumb germ that crawled up his nose and stuck in his brain?
And if so, whose fault is that? Who took Paul in the first place?
In the shed, Scott throws the light chain in the wheelbarrow. That's easy, the work of only seconds. Getting the tractor-chain in there is a lot harder. The tractor-chain is puffickly huh-yooge, talking all the while in its clanky language, which is all steel vowels. Twice heavy loops slip through his trembling arms, the second time pinching his skin and dragging it open, bringing blood in bright rosettes. The third time he almost has it in the wheelbarrow when a twenty-pound armload of links lands crooked, on the side of the barrowbed instead of o
n the square, and the entire load of chainlink topples over on Scott's foot, burying it in steel and making him scream a perfect soprano choir-cry of pain.
--Scooter, you comin before the turn of two thousand? Daddy bawls from the house. If you're comin, you better damn well motherfuckin come!
Scott looks that way, eyes wide and terrified, then sets the wheelbarrow up again and bends over the big greasy heap of chain. His foot will still be bruise-gaudy a month later and he'll feel pain there all the way to the end of his life (that's one problem traveling to that other place is never able to fix), but at the time he feels nothing after the initial flare. He again begins the job of loading the links into the wheelbarrow, feeling the hot sweat go rolling down his sides and back, smelling the wild stink of it, knowing that if he hears a gunshot it will mean Paul's brains are out on the cellar floor and it's his fault. Time becomes a physical thing with weight, like dirt. Like chain. He keeps expecting Daddy to yell at him again from the house and when he still hasn't by the time Scott begins trundling the wheelbarrow back toward the yellow gleam of the kitchen lights, Scott begins to have a different fear: that Paul has gotten a-loose after all. It isn't Paul's brains lying down there on the sour-smelling dirt, it's Daddy's guts, pulled from his living stomach by the thing that was Scott's brother just this afternoon. Paul's up the stairs and hiding in the house and as soon as Scott goes inside the bool hunt will start. Only this time he will be the prize.
All that's his imagination, of course, his damned old imagination that runs like a wildeyed nighthorse, but when his father leaps out onto the porch it has done enough work so that for a moment Scott sees not Andrew Landon but Paul, grinning like a goblin, and he shrieks. When he raises his hands to guard his face the wheelbarrow almost tips over again. Would have, if Daddy hadn't reached out to steady it. Then he raises one of those hands to swat his son but lowers it almost at once. Later there may be swatting, but not now. Now he needs him. So instead of hitting Daddy only spits into his right hand and rubs it against his left. Then he bends, oblivious of the cold out here on the back stoop in his underwear shirt and grabs hold of the wheelbarrow's front end.
--I'm gonna yank it up, Scooter. You hang on those handles and steer and don't let the mother tip. I gave him another tonk--I had to--but it won't keep him out long. If we spill this load of chain, I don't think he's gonna live through the night. I won't be able to let him. You understand?
Scott understands that his brother's life is now riding in a seriously overloaded wheelbarrow filled with chain that weighs three times what he does. For one wild moment he seriously considers simply running away into the windy dark, and as fast as he can go. Then he grabs the handles. He is unaware of the tears spilling from his eyes. He nods at his Daddy and his Daddy nods back. What passes between them is nothing but life and death.
--On three. One . . . two . . . keep it straight now, you little whoredog . . . three!
Sparky Landon lifts the wheelbarrow from the ground to the stoop with a cry of effort that escapes in white vapor. His underwear shirt splits open beneath one arm and a tuft of crazy ginger hair springs free. While the overloaded barrow is in the air the damned thing yaws first left and then right and the boy thinks stay up you mother, you whoredog mothersmuck. He corrects each tilt, crying at himself not to push too hard, not to overdo it you stupid mother, you stupid whoredog badgunky mother. And it works, but Sparky Landon wastes no time in congratulations. What Sparky Landon does is to back his way into the house, rolling the wheelbarrow after him. Scott limps behind on his ballooning foot.
In the kitchen, Daddy turns the wheelbarrow around and trundles it straight for the cellar door, which he has closed and bolted. The wheel makes a track through the spilled sugar. Scott never forgets that.
--Get the door, Scott.
--Daddy, what if he's . . . there?
--Then I'll knock him galley-west with this thing. If you want a shot at saving him, quit running your nonsense and open that smogging door!
Scott pulls back the bolt and opens the door. Paul isn't there. Scott can see Paul's bloated shadow still attached to the pole, and something that has been strung up high and tight inside him relaxes a little.
--Stand aside, son.
Scott does. His father runs the wheelbarrow to the top of the cellar stairs. Then, with another grunt, he tips it up, braking the barrow's wheel with one foot when it tries to backroll. The chain hits the stairs with a mighty unmusical clang, splintering two of the risers and then crashing most of the way down. Daddy slings the wheelbarrow to one side and starts down himself, reaching the come-to-rest chain at the halfway mark and kicking it ahead of him the rest of the way. Scott follows and has just stepped over the first broken riser when he sees Paul lolling sideways from the post, the left side of his face now covered with blood. The corner of his mouth is twitching senselessly. One of his teeth lies on the shoulder of his shirt.
--Wha'd you do to him? Scott nearly screams.
--Whacked him with a board, I had to, his father replies, sounding oddly defensive. He was coming around and you were still out there playin fiddly-fuck in the shed. He'll be all right. You can't hurt em much when they're badgunky.
Scott barely hears him. Seeing Paul covered with blood that way has swept what happened in the kitchen from his mind. He tries to dart around Daddy and get to his brother, but Daddy grabs him.
--Not unless you don't want to go on living, Sparky Landon says, and what stops Scott isn't so much the hand on his shoulder as the terrible tenderness he hears in his father's voice. Because he'll smell you if you get right up close. Even unconscious. Smell you and come back.
He sees his younger son looking up at him and nods.
--Oh yeah. He's like a wild animal now. A maneater. And if we can't find a way to hold him we'll have to kill him. Do you understand?
Scott nods, then voices one loud sob that sounds like the bray of a donkey. With that same terrible tenderness, Daddy reaches out, wipes snot from his nose, and flicks it on the floor.
--Then stop your whingeing and help me with these chains. We'll use that central support-pole and the table with the printing-press on it. That damn press has got to weight four, five hunnert pounds.
--What if those things aren't enough to hold 'im?
Sparky Landon shakes his head slowly.
--Then I dunno.
16
Lying in bed with his wife, listening to The Antlers creak in the wind, Scott says: "It was enough. For three weeks, at least, it was enough. That's where my brother Paul had his last Christmas, his last New Year's Day, the last three weeks of his life--that stinking cellar." He shakes his head slowly. She feels the movement of his hair against her skin, feels how damp it is. It's sweat. It's on his face, too, so mixed with tears she can't tell which is which.
"You can't imagine what those three weeks were like, Lisey, especially when Daddy went to work and it was just him and me, it and me--"
"Your father went to work?"
"We had to eat, didn't we? And we had to pay for the Number Two, because we couldn't heat the whole house with wood, although God knows we tried. Most of all, we couldn't afford to make people suspicious. Daddy explained it all to me."
I bet he did, Lisey thinks grimly, but says nothing.
"I tole Daddy to cut him and let the poison out like he always did before and Daddy said it wouldn't do any good, cutting wouldn't help a mite because the badgunky had gone to his brain. And I knew it had. That thing could still think, though, at least a little. When Daddy was gone, it would call my name. It would say it had made me a bool, a good bool, and the end was a candybar and an RC. Sometimes it even sounded enough like Paul so I'd go to the cellar door and put my head to the wood and listen, even though I knew it was dangerous. Daddy said it was dangerous, said not to listen and always stay away from the cellar when I was alone, and to stick my fingers in my ears and say prayers real loud or yell 'Smuck you mother, smuck you motherfucker, smuck you and the horse you rode i
n on,' because that and prayers both came to the same and at least they'd shut him out, but not to listen, because he said Paul was gone and there wasn't nothing in the cellar but a bool-devil from the Land of the Blood-Bools, and he said 'The Devil can fascinate, Scoot, no one knows better than the Landons how the devil can fascinate. And the Landreaus before em. First he fascinates the mind and then he drinks up the heart.' Mostly I did what he said but sometimes I went close and listened . . . and pretended it was Paul . . . because I loved him and wanted him back, not because I really believed . . . and I never pulled the bolt . . ."
Here there falls a long pause. His heavy hair slips restlessly against her neck and chest and at last he says in a small, reluctant child's voice: "Well, once I did . . . and I dint open the door . . . I never opened that cellar door unless Daddy was home, and when Daddy was home he only screamed and made the chains rattle and sometimes hooted like a owl. And when he did that sometimes Daddy, he'd hoot back . . . it was like a joke, you know, how they hooted at each other . . . Daddy in the kitchen and the . . . you know . . . chained up in the cellar . . . and I'd be ascairt even though I knew it was a joke because it was like they were both crazy . . . crazy and talking winter-owl talk to each other . . . and I'd think, 'Only one left, and that's me. Only one who ain't badgunky and that one not even eleven and what would they think if I went to Mulie's and told?' But it didn't do no good thinkin about Mulie's because if he 'us home he'd just chase after me and drag me back. And if he wasn't . . . if they believed me and came up to t'house with me, they'd kill my brother . . . if my brother was still in 'ere somewhere . . . and take me away . . . and put me in the Poor Home. Daddy said without him to take care of me an Paul, we'd have to go to the Poor Home where they put a clo'pin on your dink if you pee in your bed . . . and the big kids . . . you have to give the big kids blowjobs all night long . . ."
He stops, struggling, caught somewhere between where he is and where he was. Outside The Antlers, the wind gusts and the building groans. She wants to believe that what he's telling her cannot be true--that it is some rich and dreadful childhood hallucination--but she knows it is true. Every awful word. When he resumes she can hear him trying to regain his adult voice, his adult self.