Lisey’sStory Page 5

  “But if every book is a little light in that darkness—and so I believe, so I must believe, corny or not, for I write the damned things, don’t I?—then every library is a grand old ever-burning bonfire around which ten thousand people come to stand and warm themselves every day and night. Fahrenheit four-fifty-one ain’t in it. Try Fahrenheit four thousand, folks, because we’re not talking kitchen ovens here, we’re talking big old blast-furnaces of the brain, red-hot smelters of the intellect. We celebrate the laying of such a grand fire this afternoon, and I’m honored to be a part of it. Here is where we spit in the eye of forgetfulness and kick ignorance in his wrinkled old cojones. Hey photographer!”

  Stefan Queensland snaps to, smiling.

  Scott, also smiling, says: “Get one of this. The top brass may not want to use it, but you’ll like it in your portfolio, I’ll bet.”

  Scott holds the ornamental tool out as if he intends to twirl it again. The crowd gives a hopeful little gasp, but this time he’s only teasing. He slides his left hand down to the spade’s collar, digs in, and drives the spade-blade deep, dousing its hot glitter in earth. He tosses its load of dirt aside and cries: “I declare the Shipman Library construction site OPEN FOR BUSINESS!”

  The applause that greets this makes the previous bursts sound like the sort of polite patter you might hear at a prep-school tennis match. Lisey doesn’t know if young Mr. Queensland caught the ceremonial first scoop, but when Scott pumps the silly little silver spade at the sky like an Olympic hero, Queensland documents that one for sure, laughing behind his camera as he snaps it. Scott holds the pose for a moment (Lisey happens to glance at Dashmiel and catches that gentleman in the act of rolling his eyes at Mr. Eddington—Toneh). Then he lowers the spade to port arms and holds it that way, grinning. Sweat has popped on his cheeks and forehead in fine beads. The applause begins to taper off. The crowd thinks he’s done. Lisey thinks he’s only hit second gear.

  When he knows they can hear him again, Scott digs in for an encore scoop. “This one’s for Wild Bill Yeats!” he calls. “The bull-goose loony! And this one’s for Poe, also known as Baltimore Eddie! This one’s for Alfie Bester, and if you haven’t read him, you ought to be ashamed!” He’s sounding out of breath, and Lisey is starting to feel a bit alarmed. It’s so hot. She’s trying to remember what he had for lunch—was it something heavy or light?

  “And this one…” He dives the spade into what’s now a respectable little divot and holds up the final dip of earth. The front of his shirt has darkened with sweat. “Tell you what, why don’t you think of whoever wrote your first good book? I’m talking about the one that got under you like a magic carpet and lifted you right off the ground. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  They know. It’s on every face that faces his.

  “The one that, in a perfect world, you’d check out first when the Shipman Library finally opens its doors. This one’s for the one who wrote that.” He gives the spade a final valedictory shake, then turns to Dashmiel, who should be pleased with Scott’s showmanship—asked to play by ear, Scott has played brilliantly—and who instead only looks hot and pissed off. “I think we’re done here,” he says, and tries to hand Dashmiel the spade.

  “No, that’s yoahs,” Dashmiel says. “As a keepsake, and a token of ouah thanks. Along with yoah check, of co’se.” His rictus smile comes and goes in a fitful cramp. “Shall we go and grab ourse’fs a little air-conditionin?”

  “By all means,” Scott says, looking bemused, and then hands the spade to Lisey, as he has handed her so many unwanted mementos over the past twelve years of his celebrity: everything from ceremonial oars and Boston Red Sox hats encased in Lucite cubes to the masks of Comedy and Tragedy…but mostly pen-and-pencil sets. So many pen-and-pencil sets. Waterman, Scripto, Schaeffer, Mont Blanc, you name it. She looks at the spade’s glittering silver scoop, as bemused as her beloved (he is still her beloved). There are a few flecks of dirt in the incised letters reading COMMENCEMENT, SHIPMAN LIBRARY, and Lisey blows them off. Where will such an unlikely artifact end up? In this summer of 1988 Scott’s study is still under construction, although the address works and he’s already begun storing stuff in the stalls and cubbies of the barn below. Across many of the cardboard boxes he’s scrawled SCOTT! THE EARLY YEARS! in big strokes of a black felt-tip pen. Most likely the silver spade will wind up with this stuff, wasting its gleams in the gloom. Maybe she’ll put it there herself, then tag it SCOTT! THE MIDDLE YEARS! as a kind of joke…or a prize. The kind of goofy, unexpected gift Scott calls a—

  But Dashmiel is on the move. Without another word—as if he’s disgusted with this whole business and determined to put paid to it as soon as possible—he tromps across the rectangle of fresh earth, detouring around the divot which Scott’s last big shovelful of earth has almost succeeded in promoting to a hole. The heels of Dashmiel’s shiny black I’m-an-assistant-professor-on-my-way-up-and-don’t—

  you-forget-it shoes sink deep into the earth with each heavy step. Dashmiel has to fight for balance, and Lisey guesses this does nothing to improve his mood. Tony Eddington falls in beside him, looking thoughtful. Scott pauses a moment, as if not quite sure what’s up, then also starts to move, slipping between his host and his temporary biographer. Lisey follows, as is her wont. He delighted her into forgetting her omenish feeling

  (broken glass in the morning)

  for a little while, but now it’s back

  (broken hearts at night)

  and hard. She thinks it must be why all these details look so big to her. She’s sure the world will come back into more normal focus once she reaches the air-conditioning. And once she’s gotten that pesty swatch of cloth out of her butt.

  This is almost over, she reminds herself, and—how funny life can be—it is at this precise moment when the day begins to derail.

  A campus security cop who is older than the others on this detail (eighteen years later she’ll identify him from Queensland’s news photo as Captain S. Heffernan) holds up the rope barrier on the far side of the ceremonial rectangle of earth. All she notices about him is that he’s wearing what her husband might have called a puffickly huh-yooge batch of orifice on his khaki shirt. Her husband and his flanking escorts duck beneath the rope in a move so synchronized it could have been choreographed.

  The crowd is moving toward the parking lot with the principals…with one exception. Blondie isn’t moving toward the parking lot. Blondie is standing still on the parking lot side of the commencement patch. A few people bump him and he’s forced backward after all, back onto the baked dead earth where the Shipman Library will stand come 1991 (if the chief contractor’s promises can be believed, that is). Then he’s actually moving forward against the tide, his hands coming unclasped so he can push a girl out of his way to his left and then a guy out of his way on the right. His mouth is still moving. At first Lisey again thinks he’s mouthing a silent prayer, and then she hears the broken gibberish—like something a bad James Joyce imitator might write—and for the first time she becomes actively alarmed. Blondie’s somehow weird blue eyes are fixed on her husband, there and nowhere else, but Lisey understands that he doesn’t want to discuss leavings or the hidden religious subtexts of Scott’s novels. This is no mere Deep Space Cowboy.

  “The churchbells came down Angel Street,” says Blondie—says Gerd Allen Cole—who, it will turn out, spent most of his seventeenth year in an expensive Virginia mental institution and was released as cured and good to go. Lisey gets every word. They cut through the rising chatter of the crowd, that hum of conversation, like a knife through some light, sweet cake. “That rungut sound, like rain on a tin roof! Dirty flowers, dirty and sweet, that’s how the churchbells sound in my basement as if you didn’t know!”

  A hand that seems all long pale fingers goes to the tails of the white shirt and Lisey understands exactly what’s going on here. It comes to her in shorthand TV images

  (George Wallace Arthur Bremmer)

  from her ch
ildhood. She looks toward Scott but Scott is talking to Dashmiel. Dashmiel is looking at Stefan Queensland, the irritated frown on Dashmiel’s face saying he’s had Quite! Enough! Photographs! For One Day! Thank You! Queensland is looking down at his camera, making some adjustment, and Anthony “Toneh” Eddington is making a note on his pad. She spies the older campus security cop, he of the khaki uniform and the puffickly huh-yooge batch of orifice; he is looking at the crowd, but it’s the wrong smucking part. It’s impossible that she can see all these folks and Blondie too, but she can, she does, she can even see Scott’s lips forming the words think that went pretty well, which is a testing comment he often makes after events like this, and oh God, oh Jesus Mary and JoJo the Carpenter, she tries to scream out Scott’s name and warn him but her throat locks up, becomes a spitless dry socket, she can’t say anything, and Blondie’s got the bottom of his great big white shirt hoicked all the way up, and underneath are empty belt-loops and a flat hairless belly, a trout belly, and lying against that white skin is the butt of a gun which he now lays hold of and she hears him say, closing in on Scott from the right, “If it closes the lips of the bells, it will have done the job. I’m sorry, Papa.”

  She’s running forward, or trying to, but she’s got such a puffickly huh-yooge case of gluefoot and someone shoulders in front of her, a strapping coed with her hair tied up in a wide white silk ribbon with NASHVILLE printed on it in blue letters outlined in red (see how she sees everything?), and Lisey pushes her with the hand holding the silver spade, and the coed caws “Hey!” except it sounds slower and draggier than that, like Hey recorded at 45 rpm and then played back at 331/3 or maybe even 16. The whole world has gone to hot tar and for an eternity the strapping coed with NASHVILLE in her hair blocks Scott from her view; all she can see is Dashmiel’s shoulder. And Tony Eddington, leafing back through the pages of his damn notebook.

  Then the coed finally clears Lisey’s field of vision, and as Dashmiel and her husband come into full view again, Lisey sees the English teacher’s head snap up and his body go on red alert. It happens in an instant. Lisey sees what Dashmiel sees. She sees Blondie with the gun (it will prove to be a Ladysmith .22 made in Korea and bought at a garage sale in South Nashville for thirty-seven dollars) pointed at her husband, who has at last seen the danger and stopped. In Lisey-time, all this happens very, very slowly. She does not actually see the bullet fly out of the .22’s muzzle—not quite—but she hears Scott say, very mildly, seeming to drawl the words over the course of ten or even fifteen seconds: “Let’s talk about it, son, right?” And then she sees fire bloom from the gun’s nickel-plated muzzle in an uneven yellow-white corsage. She hears a pop—stupid, insignificant, the sound of someone breaking a paper lunchsack with the palm of his hand. She sees Dashmiel, that southern-fried chickenshit, go jackrabbitting off to his immediate left. She sees Scott buck backward on his heels. At the same time his chin thrusts forward. The combination is weird and graceful, like a dance-floor move. A black hole blinks open on the right side of his summer sportcoat. “Son, you honest-to-God don’t want to do that,” he says in his drawling Lisey-time voice, and even in Lisey-time she can hear how his voice grows thinner on every word until he sounds like a test pilot in a high-altitude chamber. Yet Lisey thinks he still doesn’t know he’s been shot. She’s almost positive. His sportcoat swings open like a gate as he puts his hand out in a commanding stop-this gesture, and she realizes two things simultaneously. The first is that the shirt inside his coat is turning red. The second is that she has at last broken into some semblance of a run.

  “I got to end all this ding-dong,” says Gerd Allen Cole with perfect fretful clarity. “I got to end all this ding-dong for the freesias.” And Lisey is suddenly sure that once Scott is dead, once the damage is done, Blondie will either kill himself or pretend to try. For the time being, however, he has this business to finish. The business of the writer. Blondie turns his wrist slightly so that the smoking barrel of the Ladysmith .22 points at the left side of Scott’s chest; in Lisey-time the move is smooth and slow. He has done the lung; now he’ll do the heart. Lisey knows she can’t allow that to happen. If her husband is to have any chance at all, this lethal goofball mustn’t be allowed to put any more lead into him.

  As if repudiating her, Gerd Allen Cole says, “It never ends until you go down. You’re responsible for all these repetitions, old boy. You are hell, you are a monkey, and now you are my monkey!”

  This speech is the closest he comes to making sense, and making it gives Lisey just enough time to first wind up with the silver spade—the body knows its business and her hands have already found their position near the top of the thing’s forty-inch handle—and then swing it. Still, it’s close. If it had been a horse race, the tote-board would undoubtedly have flashed the HOLD TICKETS WAIT FOR PHOTO message. But when the race is between a man with a gun and a woman with a shovel, you don’t need a photo. In slowed-down Lisey-time she sees the silver scoop strike the gun, driving it upward just as that corsage of fire blooms again (she can see only part of it this time, and the muzzle is completely hidden by the blade of the spade). She sees the business-end of the ceremonial shovel carry on forward and upward as the second shot goes harmlessly into the hot August sky. She sees the gun fly loose, and there’s time to think Holy smuck! I really put a charge into this one! before the spade connects with Blondie’s face. His hand is still in there (three of those long slim fingers will be broken), but the spade’s silver bowl connects solidly just the same, breaking Cole’s nose, shattering his right cheekbone and the bony orbit around his staring right eye, shattering nine teeth as well. A Mafia goon with a set of brass knuckles couldn’t have done better.

  And now—still slow, still in Lisey-time—the elements of Stefan Queensland’s award-winning photograph are assembling themselves.

  Captain S. Heffernan has seen what’s happening only a second or two after Lisey, but he also has to deal with the bystander problem—in his case a fat bepimpled fella wearing baggy Bermuda shorts and a tee-shirt with Scott Landon’s smiling face on it. Captain Heffernan shunts this young fella aside with one muscular shoulder.

  By then Blondie is sinking to the ground (and out of the forthcoming photo’s field) with a dazed expression in one eye and blood pouring from the other. Blood is also gushing from the hole which at some future date may again serve as his mouth. Heffernan completely misses the actual hit.

  Roger Dashmiel, maybe remembering that he’s supposed to be the master of ceremonies and not a big old bunny-rabbit, turns back toward Eddington, his protégé, and Landon, his troublesome guest of honor, just in time to take his place as a staring, slightly blurred face in the forthcoming photo’s background.

  Scott Landon, meanwhile, shock-walks right out of the award-winning photo. He walks as though unmindful of the heat, striding toward the parking lot and Nelson Hall beyond, which is home of the English Department and mercifully air-conditioned. He walks with surprising briskness, at least to begin with, and a goodly part of the crowd moves with him, unaware for the most part that anything has happened. Lisey is both infuriated and unsurprised. After all, how many of them saw Blondie with that cuntish little pistol in his hand? How many of them recognized the burst-paper-bag sounds as gunshots? The hole in Scott’s coat could be a smudge of dirt from his shoveling chore, and the blood that has soaked his shirt is as yet invisible to the outside world. He’s now making a strange whistling noise each time he inhales, but how many of them hear that? No, it’s her they’re looking at—some of them, anyway—the crazy chick who just inexplicably hauled off and whacked some guy in the face with the ceremonial silver spade. A lot of them are actually grinning, as if they believe it’s all part of a show being put on for their benefit, the Scott Landon Roadshow. Well, fuck them, and fuck Dashmiel, and fuck the day-late and dollar-short campus cop with his puffickly huh-yooge batch of orifice. All she cares about now is Scott. She thrusts the shovel out not quite blindly to her right and Eddington, their rent-a
-Boswell, takes it. It’s either that or get hit in the nose with it. Then, still in that horrible slo-mo, Lisey runs after her husband, whose briskness evaporates as soon as he reaches the suck-oven heat of the parking lot. Behind her, Tony Eddington is peering at the silver spade as if it might be an artillery shell, a radiation detector, or the leaving of some great departed race, and to him comes Captain S. Heffernan with his mistaken assumption of who today’s hero must be. Lisey is unaware of this part, will know none of it until she sees Queensland’s photograph eighteen years later, would care about none of it even if she did know; all her attention is fixed on her husband, who has just gone down on his hands and knees in the parking lot. She tries to repudiate Lisey-time, to run faster. And that is when Queensland snaps his picture, catching just one half of one shoe on the far righthand side of the frame, something he will not realize then, or ever.

  6

  The Pulitzer Prize winner, the enfant terrible who published his first novel at the tender age of twenty-two, goes down. Scott Landon hits the deck, as the saying is.

  Lisey makes a supreme effort to pull out of the maddening time-glue in which she seems to be trapped. She must get free because if she doesn’t reach him before the crowd surrounds him and shuts her out, they will very likely kill him with their concern. With smotherlove.

  —Heeeeee’s hurrrrrt, someone shouts.

  She screams at herself in her own head

  (strap it on STRAP IT ON RIGHT NOW)

  and that finally does it. The glue in which she has been packed is gone. Suddenly she is knifing forward; all the world is noise and heat and sweat and jostling bodies. She blesses the speedy reality of it even as she uses her left hand to grab the left cheek of her ass and pull, raking the goddam underwear out of the crack of her goddam ass, there, at least one thing about this wrong and broken day is now mended.