Lisey’sStory Read online

  —Aint really surprised, Scott. Bad-gunky likes it right where it is.

  —Daddy, is Paul in there at all anymore?

  —Dunno. Now he’s got Scott between his open spread legs so that there are green Dickies on either side of the boy. Daddy’s hands are locked loosely around Scott’s chest and his chin is on Scott’s shoulder. Together they look at the sleeping thing curled at the foot of the post. They look at the chains. They look at the arc of turds that mark the border of its basement world.—What do you think, Scott? What do you feel?

  He considers lying to Daddy, but only for a moment. He won’t do that when the man’s arms are around him, not when he feels Daddy’s love coming through in the clear, like WWVA at night. Daddy’s love is every bit as true as his anger and madness, if less frequently seen and even less frequently demonstrated. Scott feels nothing, and reluctantly says so.

  —Little buddy, we can’t go on this way.

  —Why not? He’s eatin, at least…

  —Sooner or later someone’ll come and hear him down here. A smucking door-to-door salesman, one lousy Fuller Brush man, that’s all it’d take.

  —He’ll be quiet. Bad-gunky’ll make him be quiet.

  —Maybe, maybe not. There’s no telling what bad-gunky’ll do, not really. And there’s the smell. I can sprinkle lime until I’m blue in the face and that shit-stink is still gonna come up through the kitchen floor. But most of all…Scooter, can’t you see what he’s doin to that motherless table with the printin-press on it? And the post? The sweetmother post?

  Scott looks. At first he can barely credit what he’s seeing, and of course he doesn’t want to credit what he’s seeing. That big table, even with five hundred pounds of ancient hand-crank Stratton printing-press on it, has been pulled at least three feet from its original position. He can see the square marks in the hardpacked earth where it used to be. Worse still is the steel post, which butts against a flat metal flange at its top end. The white-painted flange presses in turn against the beam running directly beneath their kitchen table. Scott can see a dark right-angle tattooed on that white piece of metal and knows it’s where the support post used to rest. Scott measures the post itself with his eye, trying to pick up a lean. He can’t, not yet. But if the thing continues to yank on it with all its inhuman strength…day in and day out…

  —Daddy, can I try again?

  Daddy sighs. Scott cranes around to look into his hated, feared, loved face.

  —Daddy?

  —Have on ’til your cheeks crack, Daddy says. Have on and good luck to you.

  18

  Silence in the study over the barn, where it was hot and she was hurt and her husband was dead.

  Silence in the guest room, where it’s cold and her husband is gone.

  Silence in the bedroom at The Antlers, where they lie together, Scott and Lisey, Now we are two.

  Then the living Scott speaks for the one that’s dead in 2006 and gone in 1996, and the arguments against insanity do more than fall through; for Lisey Landon, they finally collapse completely: everything the same.

  19

  Outside their bedroom at The Antlers, the wind is blowing and the clouds are thinning. Inside, Scott pauses long enough to get a drink from the glass of water he always keeps by the side of the bed. The interruption breaks the hypnotic regression that has once more begun to grip him. When he resumes, he seems to be telling instead of living, and she finds this an enormous relief.

  “I tried twice more,” he says. Tried, not trite. “I used to think trying that last time was how I got him killed. Right up until tonight I thought that, but talking about it—hearing myself talk about it—has helped more than I ever would have believed. I guess psychoanalysts have got something with that old talking-cure stuff after all, huh?”

  “I don’t know.” Nor does she care. “Did your father blame you?” Thinking, Of course he did.

  But once more she seems to have underestimated the complexity of the little triangle that existed for awhile on an isolated farmyard hill in Martensburg, Pennsylvania. Because, after hesitating a moment, Scott shakes his head.

  “No. It might have helped if he’d taken me in his arms—like he did after the first time I tried—and told me it wasn’t my fault, wasn’t anybody’s fault, that it was just the bad-gunky, like cancer or cerebral palsy or something, but he never did that, either. He just hauled me away with one arm…I hung there like a puppet whose strings had been cut…and afterward we just…” In the brightening dimness, Scott explains all his silence about his past with one terrible gesture. He puts a finger to his lips for a second—it is a pallid exclamation point below his wide eyes—and holds it there: Shhhhh.

  Lisey thinks of how it was after Jodi got pregnant and went away, and nods her understanding. Scott gives her a grateful look.

  “Three tries in all,” he resumes. “The second was only three or four days after my first go. I tried as hard as I could, but it was just like the first time. Only by then you could see a lean in the post he was chained to, and there was a second arc of turds, farther out, because he’d moved the table a little more and gotten a little extra slack in that chain. Daddy was starting to be afraid he might snap one of the table-legs, even though they were metal, too.

  “After my second try, I told Daddy I was pretty sure I knew what was wrong. I couldn’t do it—couldn’t take him—because he was always knocked out when I got close to him. And Daddy said, ‘Well what’s your plan, Scooter, you want to grab him when he’s awake and raving? He’d rip your smockin head off.’ I said I knew it. I knew more than that, Lisey—I knew that if he didn’t rip my head off in the cellar, he’d rip it off on the other side, in Boo’ya Moon. So then I ast Daddy if he couldn’t knock him out just a little—you know, make him woozy. Enough so I could get in close and hold him the way I was holding you, today, under the yum-yum tree.”

  “Oh, Scott,” she says. She is afraid for the ten-year-old boy even though she knows it must have come out all right; knows he lived to father the young man lying beside her.

  “Daddy said it was dangerous. ‘Playin with fire there, Scoot,’ he said. I knew I was, but there wasn’t any other way. We couldn’t keep him in the cellar much longer; even I could see that. And then Daddy—he kind of ruffled my hair and said, ‘What happen to the little pissant ascairt to jump off the hall bench?’ I was surprised he even remembered that, because he was so far in the bad-gunky, and I was proud.”

  Lisey thinks what a dismal life it must have been, where pleasing such a man could make a child proud, and reminds herself he was only ten. Ten, and alone with a monster in the cellar much of the time. The father was also a monster, but at least a rational one some of the time. A monster capable of doling out the occasional kiss.

  “Then…” Scott looks up into the dim. For a moment the moon comes out. It dashes a pale and playful paw across his face before retreating into the clouds once more. When he resumes, she hears the child beginning to take over once more. “Daddy—see, Daddy never ast what I saw or where I went or what I did when I went there and I don’t think he ever ast Paul—I dunno if Paul even remembered too much—but he come close then. He said, ‘And if you take him like that, Scoot. What happens if he wakes up? Is he just gonna be suddenly all better? Because if he ain’t, I won’t be there to help you.’

  “But I thought about that, see? Thought about it and thought about it until it seem like my brains’d bust wide open.” Scott gets up on one elbow and looks at her. “I knew it had to end as well as Daddy, maybe even better. Because of the pos’. And the table. But also because of how he was losin weight, and gettin sores on his face from not eatin the right food—we give him veg’ables, but everything except the taters and onyums he slang away from him and one of his eyes—the one Daddy hurt before—had come over all milky-white on top of the red. Also more of his teeth was fallin out and one of his elbows, it come over all crookit. He was fallin apart from being down ’ere, Lisey, and what wasn’t fallin apar
t from no sunlight and wrong food he was beatin to death. Do you see?”

  She nods.

  “So I had this little idea I tole Daddy. He said, ‘You think you’re pretty motherfucking smart for ten, don’t you?’ And I said no, I wasn’t smart about hardly anything, and if he thought there was some other way that was safer and better, then okay. Only he didn’t. He said, ‘I think you’re pretty motherfucking smart for ten, tell you that. And you turned out to have some guts in you after all. Unless you back out.’

  “ ‘I won’t back out,’ I said.

  “And he said, ‘You won’t need to, Scooter, because I’ll be standing right at the foot of the stairs with my sweetmother deer-gun

  20

  Daddy stands at the foot of the stairs with his deer-gun, his .30-06, in his hands. Scott stands beside him, looking at the thing chained to the metal post and the printing-press table, trying not to tremble. In his righthand pocket is the slim instrument Daddy has given him, a hypodermic with a plastic cap on the needle-tip. Scott doesn’t need his Daddy to tell him it’s a fragile mechanism. If there’s a struggle, it may break. Daddy offered to put it in a little white cardboard box that once held a fountain pen, but getting the hypo out of the box would take an extra couple of seconds—at least—and that might mean the difference between life and death if he succeeds in getting the thing chained to the post over to Boo’ya Moon. In Boo’ya Moon there will be no Daddy with a .30-06 deer-gun. In Boo’ya Moon there will just be him and the thing that slipped into Paul like a hand into a stolen glove. Just the two of them on top of Sweetheart Hill.

  The thing that used to be his brother lies sprawled with its back against the center-post and its legs splayed. It’s naked except for Paul’s undershirt. Its legs and feet are dirty. Its flanks are caked with shit. The pie-plate, licked clean even of grease, lies by one grimy hand. The extra-large hamburger that was on it disappeared down the Paul-thing’s gullet in a matter of seconds, but Andrew Landon agonized over the patty’s creation for almost half an hour, chucking his first effort out into the night after deciding he loaded too much of “the stuff” into it. “The stuff” is white pills that look almost exactly like the Tums and Rolaids Daddy sometimes takes. The one time Scott asked Daddy where they came from, Daddy said—Why don’t you shut your goddam mouth, Curious George, before I shut it for you and when Daddy says something like that you take the hint if you’ve got any sense. Daddy ground the pills up with the bottom of a waterglass. He talked as he worked, maybe to himself, maybe to Scott, while below them the thing chained to the printing-press roared monotonously for its supper.—Easy enough to figure when you want to knock him out, Daddy said, looking from the pile of white powder to the ground meat.—Be easier still if I wanted to kill the troublesome motherfucker, ay? But no, I don’t want to do that, I just want to give him a chance to kill the one that’s still all right, more fool am I. Well smog it and smuck it, God hates a coward. He used the side of his pinky with surprising delicacy to separate a little line of white powder from the pile. He pinched some up, sprinkled it onto the meat like salt, kneaded it in, then pinched up a tiny bit more and kneaded that in, too. He didn’t bother much with what he called hot coozine when it came to the thing downstairs, said it would be happy to eat its dinner raw—still warm and shaking on the bone, for that matter.

  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 bad-gunky 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, forefinger 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 drea
dfully like one word.

  Like Daddy.

  —Say hello to hell, you bad-gunky 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.