"Last night?"
"Yes, but he took a drink of water and it stopped." He's opening the door to another quiet hospital hall and Lisey puts a hand on his arm to stop him. "Listen--things like this reading he did last night? There was a time when Scott would have soldiered through half a dozen of those pups even with a temperature of a hundred and four. He would have cooked up on the applause and mainlined it to keep going. But those days ended five, maybe even seven years ago. If he'd been really sick, I'm sure he would have called Professor Meade--he's head of the English Department--and canceled the smuh--the damn thing."
"Mrs. Landon, by the time we admitted him, your husband was running a fever of a hundred and six."
Now she can only look at Dr. Jantzen, he of the untrustworthy adolescent face, with silent horror and what is not quite disbelief. In time, however, a picture will begin to form. There's enough testimony, combined with certain memories that will not stay completely buried, to show her all she needs to see.
Scott took a charter flight from Portland to Boston, then flew United from Boston to Kentucky. A stew on the United flight who got his autograph later told a reporter that Mr. Landon had been coughing "almost constantly" and his skin was flushed. "When I asked if he was all right," she told the reporter, "he said it was just a summer cold, he'd taken a couple of aspirin and would be fine."
Frederic Borent, the grad student who met his plane, also reported the cough, and said Scott had gotten him to swing into a Nite Owl to pick up a bottle of Nyquil. "I think I might be getting the flu," he told Borent. Borent said he'd really been looking forward to the reading and wondered if Scott would be able to do it. Scott said, "You might be surprised."
Borent was. And delighted. So was most of Scott's audience that night. According to the Bowling Green Daily News, he gave a reading that was "little short of mesmerizing," only stopping a few times for the politest of small coughs, which seemed easily quelled by a sip of water from the glass beside him on the podium. Speaking to Lisey hours later, Jantzen remained amazed by Scott's vitality. And it was his amazement, coupled with a message relayed by the head of the English Department during his phone call, that caused a rift in Lisey's carefully maintained curtain of repression, at least for awhile. The last thing Scott said to Meade, after the reading and just before the reception began, was "Call my wife, would you? Tell her she may have to fly out here. Tell her I may have eaten the wrong thing after sunset. It's kind of a joke between us."
6
Lisey blurts out her worst fear to young Dr. Jantzen without even thinking about it. "Scott is going to die of this, isn't he?"
Jantzen hesitates, and all at once she can see that he may be young but he's no kid. "I want you to see him," he says after a moment that seems very long. "And I want him to see you. He's conscious, but that may not last long. Will you come with me?"
Jantzen walks very fast. He stops at the nurses' station and the male nurse on duty looks up from the journal he's been reading--Modern Geriatrics. Jantzen speaks to him. The conversation is low-pitched, but the floor is very quiet, and Lisey hears the male nurse say four words very clearly. They terrify her.
"He's waiting for her," the male nurse says.
At the far end of the corridor are two closed doors with this message written on them in bright orange:
ALTON ISOLATION UNIT
SEE NURSE BEFORE ENTERING
OBSERVE ALL PRECAUTIONS
FOR YOUR SAKE
FOR THEIR SAKE
MASK AND GLOVES MAY BE REQUIRED
To the left of the door is a sink where Jantzen washes his hands and instructs Lisey to do the same. On a gurney to the right are gauze masks, latex gloves in sealed packets, stretchy yellow shoe covers in a cardboard box with FITS ALL SIZES stamped on the side, and a neat stack of surgical greengowns.
"Isolation," she says. "Oh Jesus, you think my husband's got the smucking Andromeda Strain."
Jantzen hedges. "We think he may have some exotic pneumonia, possibly even the Bird Flu, but whatever it is, we haven't been able to identify it, and it's . . ."
He doesn't finish, doesn't seem to know how, so Lisey helps him. "It's really doing a number on him. As the saying is."
"Just a mask should be enough, Mrs. Landon, unless you have cuts. I didn't notice while you were--"
"I don't think I have to worry about cuts and I won't need a mask." She pushes open the lefthand door before he can object. "If it was communicable, I'd already have it."
Jantzen follows her into the Alton IU, slipping one of the green cloth masks over his own mouth and nose.
7
There are only four rooms at the end of the fifth-floor hallway, and only one of the TV monitors is lit; only one of the rooms is producing the beeping sounds of hospital machinery and the soft, steady rush of flowing oxygen. The name on the monitor beneath the dreadfully fast pulse--178--and the dreadfully low blood-pressure--79 over 44--is LANDON-SCOTT.
The door stands half-open. On it is a sign that shows an orange flame-shape with an X drawn across it. Below, in bright red letters, is this message: NO LIGHT, NO SPARK. She's no writer, certainly no poet, but in those words she reads all she needs to know about how things end; it is the line drawn under her marriage the way you draw a line under numbers that need adding up. No light, no spark.
Scott, who left her with his usual impudent cry of "Seeya later, Lisey-gator!" and a blast of Flamin' Groovies retro-rock from the CD player of his old Ford, now lies looking at her from a face as pale as milk-water. Only his eyes are fully alive, and they're too hot. They burn like the eyes of an owl trapped in a chimney. He's on his side. The ventilator has been pushed away from the bed, but she can see the slime of phlegm on its tube and knows
(hush little Lisey)
that there are germs or microbes or both in that green crap that no one will ever be able to identify, not even with the world's best electron microscope and every database under the eye of heaven.
"Hey, Lisey . . ."
There's almost nothing to that whisper--No more'n a puff of wind under the door, old Dandy might have said--but she hears him and goes to him. A plastic oxygen mask hangs around his neck, hissing air. Two plastic tubes sprout from his chest, where a couple of freshly stapled incisions look like a child's drawing of a bird. The tubes jutting from his back seem almost grotesquely large in comparison to the ones in front. To Lisey's dismayed eye they look as big as radiator hoses. They're transparent, and she can see cloudy fluid and bloody bits of tissue coursing down them to some sort of suitcase-thing that stands on the bed behind him. This isn't Nashville; this is no .22 bullet; although her heart clamors against it, one look is enough to convince her mind that Scott will be dead by the time the sun comes up.
"Scott," she says, going onto her knees beside the bed and taking his hot hand in her cold ones. "What the smuck have you done to yourself now?"
"Lisey." He manages to squeeze her hand a little. His breathing is a loose and screamy wheeze that she remembers all too well from the parking lot that day. She knows exactly what he will say next, and Scott doesn't disappoint. "I'm so hot, Lisey. Ice? . . . Please?"
She glances at his table but there's nothing on it. She looks over her shoulder at the doctor who's brought her up here, now the Masked Redhaired Avenger. "Doctor . . ." she begins, and realizes she's drawing a complete blank. "I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name."
"Jantzen, Mrs. Landon. And that's perfectly all right."
"Can my husband have some ice? He says he's--"
"Yes, of course. I'll get it myself." He's gone at once. Lisey realizes he's only wanted a reason to leave them alone.
Scott squeezes her hand again. "Going," he says in that same barely there whisper. "Sorry. Love you."
"Scott, no!" And absurdly: "The ice! The ice is coming!"
With what must be a tremendous effort--his breath screams louder than ever--he raises his hand and strokes her cheek with one hot finger. Lisey's tears begin to fall then. She know
s what she must ask him. The panicky voice that never calls her Lisey but always little Lisey, the secret-keeper down below, clamors again that she must not, but she thrusts it aside. Every long marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark. Here again is the dark heart of theirs.
She leans closer, into the dying heat of him. She can smell the last palest ghost of the Foamy he shaved with yesterday morning and the Tea Tree he shampooed with. She leans in until her lips touch the burning cup of his ear. She whispers: "Go, Scott. Drag yourself to that smucking pool, if that's what it takes. If the doctor comes back and finds the bed empty I'll make something up, it doesn't matter, but get to the pool and make yourself better, do it, do it for me, goddam you!"
"Can't," he whispers, and commences a papery coughing that makes her draw back a little. She thinks it will kill him, just tear him apart, but somehow he manages to get it under control. And why? Because he means to have his say. Even here, on his deathbed, in a deserted isolation unit at one o'clock in the morning in a backwater Kentucky town, he means to have his say. "Won't . . . work."
"Then I'll go! Just help me!"
But he shakes his head. "Lying across the path . . . to the pool. It."
She knows what he's talking about at once. She glances helplessly toward one of the waterglasses, where the piebald thing can sometimes be glimpsed. There, or in a mirror, or the corner of your eye. Always late at night. Always when one is lost, or in pain, or both. Scott's old boy. Scott's long boy.
"Slee . . . ping." A weird noise arises from Scott's decomposing lungs. She thinks he's choking and reaches for the call-bell, then observes the mordant shine in his feverish eyes and realizes he's either laughing or trying to. "Sleeping on . . . the path. Side . . . high . . . sky . . ." His eyes roll up to the ceiling and she's sure he's trying to say that its side is as high as the sky.
Scott plucks at the oxygen mask on his chest but can't lift it. She does it for him, placing it over his mouth and nose. Scott takes several deep breaths, then signals for her to take the mask off again. She does, and for a little while--perhaps as long as a minute--his voice is stronger.
"Went to Boo'ya Moon from the airplane," he says with a kind of wonder. "Never tried anything like that. Thought I might fall, but I came out on Sweetheart Hill, like always. Went again from a stall . . . airport bathroom. Last time . . . greenroom, just before the reading. Still there. Ole Freddy. Still right there."
Christ, he even has a name for the smucking thing.
"Couldn't get to the pool, so I ate some berries . . . they're usually all right, but . . ."
He can't finish. She gives him the mask again.
"It was too late," she says as he breathes. "It was too late, wasn't it? You ate them after sundown."
He nods.
"But it was all you could think of to do."
He nods again. Motions for her to pull the mask down again.
"But you were all right at the reading!" she says. "That Professor Meade said you were smucking great!"
He's smiling. It just may be the saddest smile she's ever seen. "Dew," he says. "Licked it off the leaves. The last time, when I went . . . from the greenroom. Thought it might . . ."
"You thought it might be healing. Like the pool."
He says yes with his eyes. His eyes never leave her.
"And that made you better. For a little while?"
"Yeah. Little while. Now . . ." He gives a sorry little shrug and turns his head aside. This time the coughing is worse, and she observes with horror that the flow into the tubes is a thicker, richer red. He gropes out and takes her hand again. "I was lost in the dark," he whispers. "You found me."
"Scott, no--"
He nods. Yes.
"You saw me whole. Everything . . ." He uses his free hand to make a weak circling gesture: Everything the same. He is smiling a little now as he looks at her.
"Hang on, Scott! Just hang on!"
He nods as if she finally gets it. "Hang on . . . wait for the wind to change."
"No, Scott, the ice!" It's all she can think of to say. "Wait for the ice!"
He says baby. He calls her babyluv. And then the only sound is the steady hiss of oxygen from the mask around his neck. Lisey puts her hands to her face
8
and took them away dry. She was both surprised and not surprised. Certainly she was relieved; it seemed that she might finally be finished with her grieving. She guessed she still had a lot of work to do up here in Scott's office--she and Amanda had barely made a dent--but she thought she'd made some unexpected progress in cleaning up her own shit over these last two or three days. She touched her wounded breast and felt almost no pain at all. This is taking self-healing to a new level, she thought, and smiled.
In the other room Amanda cried indignantly to the TV, "Oh, you dumbass! Leave that bitch alone, can't you see she's no good?" Lisey cocked an ear in that direction and deduced that Jacy was about to wheedle Sonny into marrying her. The movie was almost over.
She must have fast-forwarded through some of it, Lisey thought, but when she looked at the dark pressing against the skylight above her, she knew that wasn't so. She'd been sitting at Dumbo's Big Jumbo and reliving the past for over an hour and a half. Doing a little work on herself, as the New Agers liked to say. And what conclusions had she drawn? That her husband was dead, that was all. Dead and gone on. He wasn't waiting for her along the path in Boo'ya Moon, or sitting on one of those stone benches as she had once found him; he wasn't wrapped in one of those creepy shroud-things, either. Scott had left Boo'ya Moon behind. Like Huck, he'd lit out for the Territories.
And what had caused his final illness? His death certificate claimed pneumonia, and she had no problem with that. They could have put Nibbled to death by ducks on it and he'd have been just as dead--but she couldn't help wondering. Had his death been on a flower that he had picked up and smelled, or a bug that had slipped its sipper under his skin as the sun went down red in its house of thunder? Did he get it on a quick visit to Boo'ya Moon a week or a month before his final reading in Kentucky, or had it been waiting for decades, ticking like a clock? It might have been in a single grain of dirt that got under one fingernail while he was digging his brother's grave. Just a single bad bug that lay asleep as the years passed, finally waking up at his computer one day when a reluctant word finally came to him and he snapped his fingers in satisfaction. Maybe--terrible thought, but who knew?--she had even brought it back herself from one of her own visits, a lethal mite in a tiny dot of pollen he had kissed from the tip of her nose.
Oh shit, now she was crying.
She had seen a packet of unopened Kleenex in the top lefthand drawer of the desk. She took it out, opened it, removed a couple, and began to blot her eyes with them. In the other room, she heard Timothy Bottoms shout, "He was sweepin, you sonsabitches!" and knew that time had taken another of those ungainly crow-hops forward. There was only one more scene in the movie. Sonny goes back to the coach's wife. His middle-aged lover. Then the credits roll.
On the desk, the telephone gave a brief ting. Lisey knew what it meant as surely as she had known what Scott meant when he made that weak twirling gesture at the end of his life, the one that meant everything the same.
The phone was dead, the lines either cut or torn out. Dooley was here. The Black Prince of the Incunks had come for her.
XV. Lisey and The Long Boy (Pafko at the Wall)
1
"Amanda, come here!"
"In a minute, Lisey, the movie's almost--"
"Amanda, right now!"
She picked up the telephone, confirmed the nothing inside it, put it back down. She knew everything. It seemed to have been there all along, like the sweet taste in her mouth. The lights would be next, and if Amanda didn't come before he doused them--
But there she was, standing between the entertainment alcove and the long main room, looking suddenly afraid and old. On the VHS tape the coach's wife would soon be throwing the coffee pot at the wall, angry
because her hands were too unsteady to pour. Lisey wasn't surprised to see her own hands were trembling. She picked up the .22. Amanda saw her do it and looked more frightened than ever. Like a lady who would have preferred to be in Philadelphia, all things considered. Or catatonic. Too late, Manda, Lisey thought.
"Lisey, is he here?"
"Yes."
In the distance thunder rumbled, seeming to agree.
"Lisey, how do you kn--"
"Because he's cut the phone."
"The cell--"
"Still in the car. The lights will go next." She reached the end of the big redwood desk--Dumbo's Big Jumbo indeed, she thought, you could almost put a jet fighter down on the smucking thing--and now it was a straight shot to where her sister was standing, maybe eight steps across the rug with the maroon smears of her own blood on it.
When she reached Amanda the lights were still on, and Lisey had a moment's doubt. Wasn't it possible, after all, that a tree-branch knocked loose by the afternoon storms had finally fallen, taking down a telephone line?
Sure, but that's not what's happening.
She tried to give Amanda the gun. Amanda didn't want to take it. It thumped to the carpet and Lisey tensed for the explosion, which would be followed by either Amanda's scream of pain or her own as one of them took a bullet in the ankle. The gun didn't go off, just stared into the distance with its single idiot eye. As Lisey bent down to get it, she heard a thud from below, as if someone had walked into something down there and knocked it over. A cardboard box filled with mostly blank pages, say--one of a stack.
When Lisey looked up at her sister again, Amanda's hands were pressed, left over right, on the scant shelf of her bosom. Her face had gone pale; her eyes were dark pools of dismay.
"I can't hold that gun," she whispered. "My hands . . . see?" She turned them palms out, displaying the cuts.
"Take the smucking thing," Lisey said. "You won't have to shoot him."
This time Amanda closed her fingers reluctantly around the Pathfinder's rubber grip. "Do you promise?"