Lisey's Story

  Now Scott stands beside his Daddy, hypo in pocket, watching the dangerous thing loll against its post, snoring with its upper lip pulled back. It's grizzling from the corners of its mouth. The eyes are half-open but there's no sign of its irises; Scott can see only the gleaming, glabrous whites . . . Only the whites aint white anymore, he thinks.

  --Go on, goddam you, Daddy says, giving him a thump on the shoulder. If you're gonna do it, then go on before I lose my nerve or drop with a sweetmother heart-attack . . . or do you think he's shammin? Only pretendin to be out?

  Scott shakes his head. The thing's not trying to fool them, he would feel that--and then looks at his father wonderingly.

  --What? Daddy asks irritably. What's on your mind besides your smuckin hair?

  --Are you really--?

  --Am I really scared? That what you want to know?

  Scott nods, suddenly shy.

  --Yeah, to fuckin death. Did you think you 'us the only one? Now close your mouth and do it if you're gonna. Let's have an end to this.

  He will never understand why his father's acknowledgment of fear makes him feel braver; all he knows is that it does. He walks toward the center-post. He touches the barrel of the hypo inside his pocket one more time as he goes. He reaches the outer arc of turds and steps over it. The next step takes him over the inner ring and into what you might call the thing's den. Here the smell is intense: not the odor of shit or even hair and skin but rather of fur and pelt. The thing has a penis that is bigger than Paul's was. Paul's peach-fuzzy groin has thatched in with the thing's coarse, dense pubic hair, and the feet at the end of Paul's legs (those legs are the only things that still look the same) have a queerly turned-in look, as if the bones in his ankles are warping. Boards left out in the rain, Scott thinks; it's not quite nonsense.

  Then his eyes return to the thing's face--to its eyes. The lids are still mostly fallen, and there's still no sign of irises, only bloody whites. The breathing is likewise unchanged; the dirty hands continue to lie limp, the palms up as if in surrender. Yet Scott knows he has entered the red zone. It will not do to hesitate now. The thing will scent him and come awake at any second. This will happen in spite of "the stuff" Daddy put in the hamburger, and so if he can do it, if he can take the thing that has stolen his brother--

  Scott continues forward, walking on legs he can now barely feel. Part of his mind is absolutely convinced that he's going to his death. He won't even be able to boom away, not once the Paul-thing takes hold of him. Nevertheless, he steps within range of its grasp, into the most intimate concentration of its wild stench, and puts his hands on its naked, clammy sides. He thinks

  (Paul come with me now)

  and

  (Bool Boo'ya Boo'ya Moon sweet water the pool)

  and for just one heartbreaking heartbroken moment it almost happens. There's the familiar sense of things starting to rush away; up comes the hum of insects and the delicious daytime perfume of the trees on Sweetheart Hill. Then the thing's long-nailed hands are around Scott's neck. It opens its mouth and roars the sounds and smells of Boo'ya Moon away on a draft of carrion breath. To Scott it feels like someone has just shot a flaming boulder onto the delicate forming grid of his . . . his what? It's not his mind that takes him to that other place, not precisely his mind . . . and there's no time to think about it further because the thing has got him, it's got him. Everything Daddy was afraid of has come to pass. Its mouth has come unhinged in some nightmarish fashion that confounds sanity, seeming to drop its lower jaw all the way to its

  (beastbone)

  breastbone, contorting the dirty face into something from which every last vestige of Paul--and humanity itself--has disappeared. This is the badgunky with its mask off. Scott has time to think It's going to take my whole head in a single bite, like a lollipop. That monstrous mouth yawns, the red eyes sparkle in the naked glow of the hanging lightbulbs, and Scott is going nowhere except to his death. The thing's head draws back far enough to bang the post, then lashes forward.

  But Scott has once again forgotten about Daddy. Daddy's hand comes out of the dim, seizes the Paul-thing by the hair, and somehow wrenches the head backward. Then Daddy's other hand appears, thumb curled around the stock of his deer-gun where the stock is thinnest, fore-finger hugging the trigger. He socks the gun's muzzle into the shelf of the thing's upslanted chin.

  --Daddy, no! Scott shrieks.

  Andrew Landon pays no attention, can afford to pay no attention. Although he's gotten a huge handful of the thing's hair, it's ripping free of his fist just the same. Now it's bellowing, and its bellows sound dreadfully like one word.

  Like Daddy.

  --Say hello to hell, you badgunky motherfucker, Sparky Landon says, and pulls the trigger. The .30-06's discharge is deafening in the enclosed space of the cellar; it will ring in Scott's ears for two hours or more. The thing's shaggy backhair flies up, as in a sudden gust of breeze, and a large splash of crimson paints the leaning center-post. The thing's legs give a single crazy cartoon kick and go still. The hands around Scott's neck twitch momentarily tighter and then fall palms-up, flump, onto the dirt. Daddy's arm encircles Scott and lifts him up.

  --Are you all right, Scoot? Can you breathe?

  --I'm okay, Daddy. Did you have to kill him?

  --Are you brainless?

  Scott hangs limp in the circle of his father's arm, unable to believe it's happened even though he knew it might. He wishes he could faint. Wishes--a little, anyway--that he could die himself.

  Daddy gives him a shake.--He was gonna kill you, wasn't he?

  --Y-Y-Yeah.

  --You're fucking-A he was. Christ, Scotty, he was rippin his own sweetmother hair out by the roots to get at you. To get at your smoggin throat!

  Scott knows this is true, but he knows something else as well.--Lookit 'im, Daddy--lookit 'im now!

  For a moment or two longer he hangs from the circle of his father's arm like a ragdoll or a puppet whose strings have been cut, then Landon slowly lowers him down and Scott knows his father is seeing what Scott wanted him to see: just a boy. Just an innocent boy who has been chained in the cellar by his lunatic father and dogsbody younger brother, then starved until he's rack-thin and covered with sores; a boy who has struggled so pitifully hard for his freedom that he actually moved the steel post and the cruelly heavy table to which he has been chained. A boy who has lived three nightmare weeks as a prisoner down here before finally being shot in the head.

  --I see 'im, Daddy says, and the only thing grimmer than his voice is his face.

  --Why doesn't he look like before, Daddy? Why--

  --Because the badgunky's gone, you numbskull. And here's an irony even a badly shaken ten-year-old can appreciate, at least a bright one like Scott: now that Paul lies dead, chained to a post in the cellar with his brains blown out, Daddy has never looked or sounded saner. And if anyone else sees him like this, I'll be for either the state prison in Waynesburg or locked in that smucking nutbarn up Reedville. That's if they don't lynch me first. We'll have to bury him, although aint it gonna be a bitch-kitty with the ground like it is, hard as arn.

  Scott says,--I'll take him, Daddy.

  --How you gonna take him? You couldn't take him when he was alive!

  He doesn't have the language to explain that now it will be no more than going there dressed in his clothes, which he always does. That anvil-weight, bank-vault weight, piano-weight, is gone from the thing chained to the post; the thing chained to the post is now no more than the green husk you strip off an ear of corn. Scott just says,--I can do it now.

  --You're a little bag of boast and wind, Daddy says, but he leans the deer-gun against the table with the printing-press on it. He runs a hand through his hair and sighs. For the first time he looks to Scott like a man who could get old.

  --Go on, Scott, might as well give her a try. Can't hurt.

  But now that there's no actual danger, Scott is bashful.

  --Turn around, Daddy.

  --
WHAT the FUCK you say?

  There's a potential beating in Daddy's voice, but for once Scott doesn't back down. It isn't the going part that bothers him; he doesn't care if Daddy sees that. What he's bashful about is Daddy seeing him take his dead brother in his arms. He's going to cry. He feels it coming on already, like rain on a late spring afternoon, when the day has been hot with a foretaste of summer.

  --Please, he says in his most placating voice. Please, Daddy.

  For a moment Scott is quite sure that his father is going to rush across the cellar to where his surviving son stands, with his tripled shadow racing beside him on the rock walls, and backhand him--perhaps knock him spang into his big brother's dead lap. He's been backhanded plenty of times and usually even the thought of it makes him cringe, but now he stands straight between Paul's splayed legs, looking into his father's eyes. It's hard to do that, but he manages. Because they have survived a terrible passage together, and will have to keep it between themselves forever: Shhhhhh. So he deserves to ask, and he deserves to look in Daddy's eyes while he waits for his answer.

  Daddy doesn't come at him. Instead he takes a deep breath, blows it out, and turns around.--You'll be tellin me when to warsh the floors and scrub out the tawlit next, I guess, he grumbles. I'll give you a count of thirty, Scoot

  21

  "I'll give you a count of thirty and then I'm turning around again," Scott tells her. "I'm pretty sure that's how he finished it, but I never heard because by then I was gone off the face of the earth. Paul too, right out of his chains. I took him with me as easy as ever once he was dead; maybe easier. I bet Daddy never finished counting to thirty. Hell, I bet he never even got started before he heard the clink of chains or maybe the sound of air rushing in to fill the place where we'd been and he turned around and he saw he had the cellar all to himself." Scott has relaxed against her; the sweat on his face and arms and body is drying. He has told it, gotten the worst of it out of him, sicked it up.

  "The sound," she says. "I wondered about that, you know. If there was a sound under the willow tree when we . . . you know . . . came back out."

  "When we boomed."

  "Yes, when we . . . that."

  "When we boomed, Lisey. Say it."

  "When we boomed." Wondering if she's crazy. Wondering if he is, and if it's catching.

  Now he does light another cigarette, and in the matchglow his face is honestly curious. "What did you see, Lisey? Do you remember?"

  Doubtfully, she says: "There was a lot of purple, slanting down a hill . . . and I had a sense of shade, like there were trees right behind us, but it was all so quick . . . no more than a second or two . . ."

  He laughs and gives her a one-armed hug. "That's Sweetheart Hill you're talking about."

  "Sweetheart--?"

  "Paul named it that. There's dirt all around those trees--soft, deep, I don't think it's ever winter there--and that's where I buried him. That's where I buried my brother." He looks at her solemnly and says, "Do you want to go see, Lisey?"

  22

  Lisey had been asleep on the study floor in spite of the pain--

  No. She hadn't been asleep, because you couldn't sleep with pain like this. Not without medical help. So what had she been?

  Mesmerized.

  She tried the word on for size and decided it fit just about perfectly. She had slid into a kind of doubled (maybe even trebled) recall. Total recall. But beyond this point her memories of the cold guest bedroom where she'd found him catatonic and those of the two of them in the creaky second-floor bed at The Antlers (these memories seventeen years older but even clearer) were blotted out. Do you want to go see, Lisey? he had asked her--yes, yes--but whatever had come next was drowned in brilliant purple light, hidden behind that curtain, and when she tried to reach for it, authority-voices from childhood (Good Ma's, Dandy's, all her big sisters') clamored in alarm. No, Lisey! That's far enough, Lisey! Stop there, Lisey!

  Her breath caught. (Had it caught as she lay there with her love?)

  Her eyes opened. (They had been wide as he took her in his arms, of that she was sure.)

  Bright morning Junelight--twenty-first-century Junelight--replaced the staring, glaring purple of a billion lupin. The pain of her lacerated breast flooded back in with the light. But before Lisey could react to either the light or the panicky voices commanding her to go no farther, someone called to her from the barn below, startling her so badly that she came within a thread of screaming. If the voice had stopped short at Missus, she would have.

  "Mrs. Landon?" A brief pause. "Are you up there?"

  No trace of border South in that voice, only a flat Yankee drawl that turned the words into Aaa you up theah, and Lisey knew who was down theah: Deputy Alston. He'd told her he'd keep checking back, and here he was, as promised. This was her chance to tell him hell yes, she was up here, she was lying on the floor bleeding because the Black Prince of the Incunks had hurt her, Alston had to take her to No Soapa with the flashers and the siren going, she needed stitches in her breast, a lot of them, and she needed protection, needed it around the clock--

  No, Lisey.

  It was her own mind that sent the thought up (of this she was positive) like a flare into a dark sky (well . . . almost positive), but it came to her in Scott's voice. As if it would gain authority that way.

  And it must have worked, because "Yes, I'm here, Deputy!" was all she called back.

  "Everything fi'-by? Okay, I mean?"

  "Five-by, that's affirmative," she said, amazed to find she actually sounded five-by-five. Especially for a woman whose blouse was soaked in blood and whose left breast was throbbing like a . . . well, there was really no accurate simile. It was just throbbing.

  Down below--at the very foot of the stairs, Lisey calculated--Deputy Alston laughed appreciatively. "I just stopped on my way over to Cash Corners. They got a little house-fire over there." House-fiah."Arson suspected." Aaason. "You be all right on your own for a couple-three hours?"

  "Fine."

  "Got your cell phone?"

  She did indeed have her cell phone and wished she were on it right now. If she had to keep shouting down to him, she was probably going to pass out. "Rah-cheer!" she called back.

  "Ayuh?" A little dubious. God, what if he came up and saw her? He'd be plenty dubious then, dubious to the n th power. But when he spoke again the voice was moving away. She could hardly believe she was glad, but she was. Now that this was begun, she wanted to finish it. "Well, you call if you need anything. And I'll be checking back later on. If you go out, leave a note so I'll know you're all right and when to expect you back, okay?"

  And Lisey, who now began to see--vaguely--a course of events ahead of her, called back "Check!" She'd have to begin by returning to the house. But first, before anything else, a drink of water. If she didn't get some more water, and soon, her throat might catch fiah like that house over to Cash Corners.

  "I'll be coming by Patel's on my way back, Mrs. Landon, would you like me to pick anything up?"

  Yes! A six-pack of ice-cold Coke and a carton of Salem Lights!

  "No thanks, Deputy." If she had to talk much more, her voice would give out. Even if it didn't, he'd hear something wrong in it.

  "Not even doughnuts? They have great doughnuts." A smile in his voice.

  "Dieting!" It was all she dared.

  "Oh-oh, I heard that," he said. "You have a nice day, Mrs. Landon."

  Please God no more, she prayed, and called back, "You too, Deputy!"

  Clump-clump-clumpety-clump, and away he went.

  Lisey listened for the sound of an engine and after awhile thought she heard one starting up, but very faint. He must have parked by her mailbox and then walked the length of the driveway.

  Lisey lay where she was a moment longer, gathering herself, then rose to a sitting position. Dooley had sliced diagonally across her breast and up toward the hollow of her armpit. The ragged, wandering gash had stiffened and closed up a little, but her movement tore
it open again. The pain was enormous. Lisey cried out and that made matters even worse. She felt fresh blood run down her ribcage. Those dark wings began to steal over her vision again and she willed them away, repeating the same mantra over and over again until the world grew solid: I have to finish this, I have to get behind the purple. I have to finish this, I have to get behind the purple. I have to finish this and get behind the purple.

  Yes, behind the purple. On the hillside it had been lupin; in her mind it was the heavy curtain she had constructed herself--maybe with Scott's help, certainly with his tacit approval.