"No, Daddy," I say, "I didn't go anywhere, I was just--"
He bends over me, his hands on his knees, his face down in my face, his skin pale except for two balls of color high up on his cheeks and I see the way his eyes are going back and forth, back and forth, and I know that he and right aren't even writing letters to each other anymore. And I remember Paul saying Scott you dassn't ever cross Daddy when he's not right.
"Don't you tell me you didn't go nowhere you lying little motherfucker, I been ALL OVER THIS MOTHER-SMOCKING HOUSE!"
I think to tell him I was in the shed, but I know that will make things worse instead of better. I think of Paul saying you dassn't cross him when he's not right, when he's getting in the bad, and since I know where he thinks I was, I say yes, Daddy, yes, I went to Boo'ya Moon, but only to put flowers on Paul's grave. And it works. For then, at least. He relaxes. He even grabs my hand and pulls me up and then brushes me off, as though he sees snow or dirt or something on me. There isn't any, but maybe he does see it. Who knows.
He says: "Is it all right, Scoot? Is his grave all right? Nothing been at it, or at him?"
"Everything's fine, Daddy," I say.
He says, "There are Nazis at work, Scooter, did I tell you? I must've. They worship Hitler in the basement. They have a little ceramic statue of the bastard. They think I don't know."
I'm only ten, but I know Hitler's been one dead dog since the end of the Second World War. I also know that nobody from U.S. Gyppum is worshipping even a statue of him in the basement. I know a third thing, as well, which is never to cross Daddy when he's in the badgunky, and so I say, "What will you do about it?"
He leans close to me and I think he's going to hit me this time sure, at least start shaking me again. But instead he fixes his eyes on mine (I've never seen them so big or so dark) and then he grabs hold of his ear. "What's this, Scooter? What's it look like to you, old Scoot?"
"Your ear, Daddy," I say.
He nods, still holding his ear and still holding my eyes with his. All these years later I still see those eyes in my dreams sometimes. "I'm going to keep it to the ground," he says. "And when the time comes . . ." He cocks his finger and makes shooting motions. "Every smucking one, Scooter. Every sweetmother Nazi in the place." Maybe he would have done it. My father, out in a blaze of rancid glory. Maybe there would have been one of those news stories--PENNSYLVANIA RECLUSE GOES ON RAMPAGE, KILLS NINE CO-WORKERS, SELF, MOTIVE UNCLEAR--but before he can get around to it, the badgunky takes him a different way.
February has been clear and cold, but when March comes in, the weather changes and Daddy changes with it. As the temperatures rise and the skies cloud over and the first sleety rains start to fall, he grows morose and silent. He stops shaving, then showering, then cooking our meals. There comes a day, maybe a third of the way through the month, when I realize that the three days off work he sometimes gets because of the swing shift have stretched to four . . . then five . . . then six. Finally I ask him when he's going back. I'm scared to ask him, because now he spends most of his days either upstairs in his bedroom or downstairs lying on the sofa listening to country music on WWVA out of Wheeling, West Virginia. He hardly ever says anything to me in either place, and I see his eyes going back and forth all the time now as he looks for them, the BadGunky Folks, the Bloody Bool Folks. So--no, I don't want to ask him but I have to, because if he doesn't go back to work, what will happen to us? Ten is old enough to know that with no money coming in, the world will change.
"You want to know when I'm going back to work," he says in a thoughtful tone of voice. Lying there on the sofa with beard-stubble all over his face. Lying there in an old fisherman's sweater and a pair of Dickies and his bare feet poking out. Lying there while Red Sovine sings "Giddyup-Go" out of the radio.
"Yes, Daddy."
He gets up on one elbow and looks at me, and I see then that he is gone. Worse, that something is hiding inside him, growing, getting stronger, biding its time. "You want to know. When. I'm. Going. Back to work."
"I guess that's your business," I say. "I really just came in to ask if I should put on the coffee."
He grabs my arm, and that night I see dark blue bruises where his fingers dug into me. Four dark blue bruises in the shape of his fingers. "Want to know. When. I'm. Going. There." He lets go and sits up. His eyes are bigger than ever, and they won't stay still. They jitter in their sockets. "I ain't never going there no more, Scott. That place is closed. That place is all blowed up. Don't you know anything, you dumb little gluefoot motherfucker?" He looks down at the dirty living room carpet. On the radio, Red Sovine gives way to Ferlin Husky. Then Daddy looks up again and he is Daddy, and he says something that almost breaks my heart. "You may be dumb, Scooter, but you're brave. You're my brave boy. I'm not gonna let it hurt you."
Then he lies back down on the couch again, and turns his face away, and tells me not to bother him any more, he wants to take a nap.
That night I wake up to the sound of sleet ticking off the window and he's sitting on the side of my bed, smiling down at me. Only it's not him smiling. There's almost nothing in his eyes but the badgunky. "Daddy?" I say, and he says nothing back. I think: He's going to kill me. Going to put his hands around my neck and choke me, and everything we went through, all that with Paul, it will have been for nothing.
But instead he says, in a kind of strangled voice: "Go back slee'," and gets up off the bed, and walks out in this kind of herky-jerky way, with his chin leading and his ass wagging, like he's pretending to be a drill-sergeant in a parade, or something. A few seconds later I hear this terrible meat crash and I know that he's fallen downstairs, or maybe even threw himself down, and I lie there awhile, not able to get out of bed, hoping he's dead, hoping he's not, wondering what I'll do if he is, who'll take care of me, not caring, not knowing what I hope for the most. Part of me even hopes he'll finish the job, come back and kill me, just finish the job, end the horror of living in that house. Finally I call out, "Daddy? Are you all right?"
For a long time there's no answer. I lie there listening to the sleet, thinking He's dead, he is, my Daddy's dead, I'm here alone, and then he bellows out of the dark, from down below: "Yes, all right! Shut up, you little shit! Shut up unless you want the thing in the wall to hear you and come out and eat us both alive! Or do you want it to get in you like it got into Paul?"
I don't say nothing to that, just lay there shaking.
"Answer me!" he bawls. "Answer, nummie, or I'll come up there and make you sorry!"
But I can't, I'm too scared to answer, my tongue is nothing but this tiny huck of dried-up beef jerky lying on the bottom of my mouth. I don't cry, either. I'm even too scared to do that. I just lie there and wait for him to come upstairs and hurt me. Or dead-dog kill me.
Then, after what seems like a very long time--at least an hour, although it couldn't have been more than a minute or two--I hear him mutter something that might have been My fuckin head's bleedin or It won't ever stop sleetin. Whatever it is, it's going away from the stairs and toward the living room, and I know he'll climb on the sofa and go to sleep there. In the morning he'll either wake up or he won't, but either way he's done with me for tonight. But I'm still scared. I'm scared because there is a thing. I don't think it's in the wall, but there is a thing. It got Paul, and it's probably going to get my Daddy and then there's me. I've thought about that a lot, Lisey,
13
From her place under the tree--actually sitting with her back against the tree's trunk--Lisey looked up, almost as startled as she would have been if Scott's ghost had hailed her by name. In a way she supposed that was just what had happened, and really, why should she be surprised? Of course he was talking to her, her and no one else. This was her story, Lisey's story, and even though she was a slow reader, she had already worked her way through a third of the handwritten notebook pages. She thought she'd finish long before dark. That was good. Boo'ya Moon was a sweet place, but only in the daylight.
Sh
e looked back down at his last manuscript and was again amazed that he had lived through his childhood. She noted that Scott had lapsed into the past tense only when addressing her, here in her present. She smiled at that and resumed reading, thinking if she had one wish it would be to fly to that lonely kid on her highly hypothetical flour-sack magic carpet and comfort him, if only by whispering in his ear that in time the nightmare would end. Or at least that part of it.
14
I've thought about that a lot, Lisey, and I've come to two conclusions. First, that whatever got Paul was real, and that it was a kind of possessing being that might have had some perfectly mundane basis, maybe even viral or bacteriological. Second, it was not the long boy. Because that thing isn't like anything we can understand. It's its own thing, and better not thought of at all. Ever.
In any case, our hero, little Scott Landon, finally goes back to sleep, and in that farmhouse out in the Pennsylvania countryside, things go on as they had been for yet a few days longer, with Daddy lying on the couch like a ripe and smelly cheese and Scott cooking the meals and washing the dishes (only he says "warshing the dishees") and the sleet ticking off the windows and the country sounds of WWVA filling the house--Donna Fargo, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, "Country" Charlie Pride, and--of course--Ole Hank. Then one afternoon around three o'clock a brown Chevrolet sedan with U.S. GYPSUM printed on the sides comes up the long driveway, sending out fans of slush on either side. Andrew Landon spends most of his time on the living room couch now, sleeps on it at night and has been lying on it all day, and Scott would never have guessed the old man could still move as fast as he does when he hears that car, which is clearly not the postman's old Ford truck or the meter-reader's van. Daddy is up in a flash and at the window that looks out on the left side of the front porch. He's bending over with the dirty white curtain twitched a little to one side. His hair is standing up in the back and Scott, who is standing in the kitchen doorway with a plate in one hand and a dishtowel over his shoulder, can see the big puffy purple place on the side of Daddy's face where he fell down the stairs that time, and he can see how one leg of Daddy's Dickies is hoicked up almost to the knee. He can hear Dick Curless on the radio singing "Tombstone Every Mile" and he can see the murder in Daddy's eyes and in the way his lips are pulled down so his lower teeth show. Daddy whirls from the window and the leg of his pants falls back down into place and he strides across to the closet like a crazy scissors and opens it just as the engine of the Chevrolet stops and Scott hears the car door open out there, somebody coming to death's door and not knowing it, not having the slightest sweetmother idea, and Daddy takes the .30-06 out of the closet, the very one he used to end Paul's life. Or the life of the thing inside of him. Shoes clomp up the porch steps. There are three steps, and the middle one squeaks as it has forever, world without end, amen.
"Daddy, no," I say in a low, pleading voice as Andrew "Sparky" Landon goes toward the closed door in his new and oddly graceful scissors walk, the rifle held up to high port in front of him. I'm still holding the plate but now my fingers feel numb and I think, I'm going to drop it. Mothersmuck'll fall to the floor and break, and that man out there, the last sounds he's ever going to hear in his life are a breaking plate and Dick Curless on the radio singing about the Hainesville Woods in this stinking forgotten farmhouse. "Daddy, no," I say again, pleading with all my heart and trying to put that plea into my eyes.
Sparky Landon hesitates, then stands against the wall so that if the door opens (when the door opens), it will hide him. And a series of knuckle-raps comes on that door even as he does so. I have no trouble reading the words that form silently on my father's whisker-framed lips: Then get rid of him, Scoot.
I go to the door. I switch the plate I meant to dry from my right hand to my left one and open the door. I see the man standing there with terrible clarity. The U.S. Gypsum man isn't very tall--at five-foot-seven or -eight, he isn't really that much taller than I am--but he looks like the very apotheosis of authority in his black billed cap, his khaki pants with their razor-sharp creases and his khaki shirt showing beneath his heavy black car-coat, which is half-unzipped. He's wearing a black tie and carrying some sort of little case, not quite a briefcase (it will be another few years before I learn the word portfolio). He's kind of fat and cleanshaven, with pink and shining cheeks. There are galoshes on his feet, the kind that have zippers rather than buckles. I look at the whole picture and think that if ever there was a man who looked meant to be shot on a porch in the country, it's this man. Even the single hair curling from one of his nostrils proclaims that yes, this is the guy, all right, the very one sent to take a bullet from the scissors-man's gun. Even his name, I think, is the kind you read in the paper under a headline screaming MURDERED.
"Hello, son," he says, "you must be one of Sparky's boys. I'm Frank Halsey, from the plant. Head of Personnel." And he holds out his hand.
I think I won't be able to take it, but I do. And I think I won't be able to talk, but I can do that, too. And my voice sounds normal. I'm all that stands between this man and a bullet in the heart or the head, so it better. "Yes, sir, I am. I'm Scott."
"Good to know you, Scott," he says, looking past me into the living room, and I try to see what he's seeing. I tried to pick it up the day before, but God knows what kind of job I did; I'm just a smucking kid, after all. "We've kind of been missing your father."
Well, I think, you're awful close to missing everything, Mr. Halsey. Your job, your wife; your kids, if you got em.
"He didn't call you from Philly?" I ask. I have absolutely no idea where this is coming from, or where it's going, but I'm not afraid. Not of this part. I can make shit up all day long. What I'm afraid of is that Daddy will lose control and just start blazing away through the door. Hit Halsey, maybe; hit both of us, probably.
"No, son, he sure didn't." The sleet keeps ticking down on the porch roof, but at least he's under cover, so I don't absolutely have to invite him in, but what if he invites himself in? How can I stop him? I'm just a kid, standing here in my slippers with a plate in my hand and a dishtowel slung over my shoulder.
"Well, he's been awful worried about his sister," I say, and think of the baseball biography I've been reading. It's on my bed upstairs. I also think of Daddy's car, which is parked around back, under the shed overhang. If Mr. Halsey walked to the far end of the porch, he'd see it. "She's got the disease that killed that famous ballplayer from the Yankees."
"Sparky's sister's got Lou Gehrig's? Aw, shit--I mean shoot. I didn't even know he had a sister."
Neither did I, I think.
"Son--Scott--that's a shame. Who's watching out for you boys while he's gone?"
"Mrs. Cole from down the road." Jackson Cole is the name of the guy who wrote Iron Man of the Yankees. "She comes in every day. And besides, Paul knows four different ways to make meatloaf."
Mr. Halsey chuckles. "Four ways, huh? When's Sparky gonna be back?"
"Well, she can't walk anymore, and she breathes like this." I take a big, whooping gasp of air. It's easy, because all at once my heart is beating like crazy. It was going slow when I was pretty sure Daddy was going to kill Mr. Halsey, but now that I see a chance we might get out of it, it's going six licks to the minute.
"Aw, sugar," says Mr. Halsey. Now he thinks he understands everything. "Well, that's just about the worst thing I ever heard of." He reaches under his coat and drags out his wallet. He opens it and takes out a one-dollar bill. Then he remembers that I supposedly have a brother and takes out another one. And all at once, Lisey, the strangest thing happened. All at once I wished my father would kill him.
"Here, son," he says, and also all at once I know, like reading his mind, that he's forgotten my name, and I hate him even more. "Take it. One for you and one for your brother. Treat yourselves at that little store down the road."
I don't want his smucking dollar (and Paul has no more use for his), but I take them and say thank you, sir, and he says you're welc
ome, son, and he ruffles my hair, and while he's doing that I glance over to my left and see one of my father's eyes peering through the crack in the door. I see the muzzle of the rifle, too. Then Mr. Halsey finally goes back down the steps. I close the door and my father and I watch as he gets into his company car and starts backing down the long driveway. It comes to me that if he gets stuck he'll walk up again and ask to use the phone and end up dying anyway, but he doesn't get stuck and will kiss his wife hello that night after all, and tell her he gave two poor boys a couple of dollars to treat themselves with. I look down and see I'm still holding the two bills and I give them to my father. He tucks them away into his pants pocket without so much as a look.
"He'll be back," Daddy says. "Him or some other. You did a good job, Scott, but tape will only hold a wet package for so long."
I take a hard stare at him and see that he is my Daddy. At some point while I was talking to Mr. Halsey, my Daddy came back. It's the last time I'll ever really see him.
He sees me looking at him and kind of nods. Then he looks at the .30-06. "I'm going to get rid of this," he says. "I'm going down, that can't be--"
"No, Daddy--"
"--can't be helped, but I'll be sweetfucked if I'll take a bunch of people like that Halsey with me, so they can put me on the six o'clock news for the gomers to drool over. They'd put you and Paul there too. Of course they would. Alive or dead, you'd be the lunatic's boys."
"Daddy, you'll be okay," I tell him, and try to hug him. "You're okay right now!"
He pushes me away, kind of laughing. "Yah, and sometimes people with malaria can quote Shakespeare," he says. "You stay here, Scotty, I got a chore to do. It won't take long." He walks off down the hall, past the bench I finally jumped off of all those years ago, and into the kitchen. Head down, the deer-gun in one hand. Once he's out the kitchen door I follow him and l'm looking out the window over the sink when he crosses the backyard, coatless in the sleet, head still down, still holding the .30-06. He puts it on the icy ground only long enough to push the cover off the dry well. He needs both hands to do that because the sleet has bound the cover to the brick. Then he picks the gun up again, looks at it for a second--almost like he's saying good-bye--and slides it into the gap he's made. After that he comes back to the house with his head still down and ice-drops darkening the shoulders of his shirt. It's only then that I notice his feet are bare. I don't think he ever realizes at all.