Lisey’sStory Read online

  A coed in the kind of shell top where the straps tie at the shoulders in big floppy bows threatens to block her narrowing path to Scott, but Lisey ducks beneath her and hits the hottop. She won’t be aware of her scraped and blistered knees until much later—until the hospital, in fact, where a kindly paramedic will notice and put lotion on them, something so cool and soothing it will make her cry with relief. But that is for later. Now it might as well be just her and Scott alone on the edge of this hot parking lot, this terrible black-and-yellow ballroom floor which must be a hundred and thirty degrees at least, maybe a hundred and fifty. Her mind tries to present her with the image of an egg frying sunnyside up in Good Ma’s old black iron spider and Lisey blocks it out.

  Scott is looking at her.

  He gazes up and now his face is waxy pale except for the sooty smudges forming beneath his hazel eyes and the fat string of blood which has begun to flow from the right side of his mouth and down along his jaw. “Lisey!” That thin, whooping high-altitude-chamber voice. “Did that guy really shoot me?”

  “Don’t try to talk.” She puts a hand on his chest. His shirt, oh dear God, is soaked with blood, and beneath it she can feel his heart running along so fast and light; it is not the heartbeat of a human being but of a bird. Pigeon-pulse, she thinks, and that’s when the girl with the floppy bows tied on her shoulders falls on top of her. She would land on Scott but Lisey instinctively shields him, taking the brunt of the girl’s weight (“Hey! Shit! FUCK!” the startled girl cries out) with her back; that weight is there for only a second, and then gone. Lisey sees the girl shoot her hands out to break her fall—oh, the divine reflexes of the young, she thinks, as though she herself were ancient instead of just thirty-one—and the girl is successful, but then she is yipping “Ow, ow, OW!” as the asphalt heats her skin.

  “Lisey,” Scott whispers, and oh Christ how his breath screams when he pulls it in, like wind in a chimney.

  “Who pushed me?” the girl with the bows on her shoulders is demanding. She’s a-hunker, hair from a busted ponytail in her eyes, crying in shock, pain, and embarrassment.

  Lisey leans close to Scott. The heat of him terrifies her and fills her with pity deeper than any she thought it was possible to feel. He is actually shivering in the heat. Awkwardly, using only one arm, she strips off her jacket. “Yes, you’ve been shot. So just be quiet and don’t try to—”

  “I’m so hot,” he says, and begins to shiver harder. What comes next, convulsions? His hazel eyes stare up into her blue ones. Blood runs from the corner of his mouth. She can smell it. Even the collar of his shirt is soaking in red. His tea-cure wouldn’t be any good here, she thinks, not even sure what it is she’s thinking about. Too much blood this time. Too smucking much. “I’m so hot, Lisey, please give me ice.”

  “I will,” she says, and puts her jacket under his head. “I will, Scott.” Thank God he’s wearing his sportcoat, she thinks, and then has an idea. She grabs the hunkering, crying girl by the arm. “What’s your name?”

  The girl stares as if she were mad, but answers the question. “Lisa Lemke.”

  Another Lisa, small world, Lisey thinks but does not say. What she says is, “My husband’s been shot, Lisa. Can you go over there to…” She cannot remember the name of the building, only its function. “…to the English Department and call an ambulance? Dial 911—”

  “Ma’am? Mrs. Landon?” This is the campus security cop with the puffickly huh-yooge batch, making his way through the crowd with a lot of help from his meaty elbows. He squats beside her and his knees pop. Louder than Blondie’s pistol, Lisey thinks. He’s got a walkie-talkie in one hand. He speaks slowly and carefully, as though to a distressed child. “I’ve called the campus infirmary, Mrs. Landon. They are rolling their ambulance, which will take your husband to Nashville Memorial. Do you understand me?”

  She does, and her gratitude (the cop has made up the dollar short he owed and a few more, in Lisey’s opinion) is almost as deep as the pity she feels for her husband, lying on the simmering pavement and trembling like a distempered dog. She nods, weeping the first of what will be many tears before she gets Scott back to Maine—not on a Delta flight but in a private plane and with a private nurse on board, and with another ambulance and another private nurse to meet them at the Portland Jetport’s Civil Aviation terminal. Now she turns back to the Lemke girl and says, “He’s burning up—is there ice, honey? Can you think of anywhere that there might be ice? Anywhere at all?”

  She says this without much hope, and is therefore amazed when Lisa Lemke nods at once. “There’s a snack center with a Coke machine right over there.” She points in the direction of Nelson Hall, which Lisey can’t see. All she can see is a crowding forest of bare legs, some hairy, some smooth, some tanned, some sunburned. She realizes they’re completely hemmed in, that she’s tending her fallen husband in a slot the shape of a large vitamin pill or cold capsule, and feels a touch of crowd-panic. Is the word for that agoraphobia? Scott would know.

  “If you can get him some ice, please do,” Lisey says. “And hurry.” She turns to the campus security cop, who appears to be taking Scott’s pulse—a completely useless activity, in Lisey’s opinion. Right now it’s down to either alive or dead. “Can you make them move back?” she asks. Almost pleads. “It’s so hot, and—”

  Before she can finish he’s up like Jack from his box, yelling “Move it back! Let this girl through! Move it back and let this girl through! Let him breathe, folks, what do you say?”

  The crowd shuffles back…very reluctantly, it seems to Lisey. They don’t want to miss any of the blood, it seems to her.

  The heat bakes up from the pavement. She has half-expected to get used to it, the way you get used to a hot shower, but that isn’t happening. She listens for the howl of the approaching ambulance and hears nothing. Then she does. She hears Scott, saying her name. Croaking her name. At the same time he twitches at the side of the sweat-soaked shell top she’s wearing (her bra now stands out against the silk as stark as a swollen tattoo). She looks down and sees something she doesn’t like at all. Scott is smiling. The blood has coated his lips a rich candy red, top to bottom, side to side, and the smile actually looks more like the grin of a clown. No one loves a clown at midnight, she thinks, and wonders where that came from. It will only be at some point during the long and mostly sleepless night ahead of her, listening to what will seem like every dog in Nashville bark at the hot August moon, that she’ll remember it was the epigram of Scott’s third novel, the only one both she and the critics hated, the one that made them rich. Empty Devils.

  Scott continues to twitch at her blue silk top, his eyes still so brilliant and fevery in their blackening sockets. He has something to say, and—reluctantly—she leans down to hear it. He pulls air in a little at a time, in half-gasps. It is a noisy, frightening process. The smell of blood is even stronger up close. Nasty. A mineral smell.

  It’s death. It’s the smell of death.

  As if to ratify this, Scott says: “It’s very close, honey. I can’t see it, but I…” Another long, screaming intake of breath. “I hear it taking its meal. And grunting.” Smiling that bloody clown-smile as he says it.

  “Scott, I don’t know what you’re talk—”

  The hand that has been tugging at her top has some strength left in it, after all. It pinches her side, and cruelly—when she takes the top off much later, in the motel room, she’ll see a bruise, a true lover’s knot.

  “You…” Screamy breath. “Know…” Another screamy breath, deeper. And still grinning, as if they share some horrible secret. A purple secret, the color of bruises. The color of certain flowers that grow on certain

  (hush Lisey oh hush)

  yes, on certain hillsides. “You…know…so don’t…insult my…intelligence.” Another whistling, screaming breath. “Or your own.”

  And she supposes she does know some of it. The long boy, he calls it. Or the thing with the endless piebald side. Once she meant to l
ook up piebald in the dictionary, but she forgot—forgetting is a skill she has had reason to polish during the years she and Scott have been together. But she knows what he’s talking about, yes.

  He lets go, or maybe just loses the strength to hold on. Lisey pulls back a little—not far. His eyes regard her from their deep and blackening sockets. They are as brilliant as ever, but she sees they are also full of terror and (this is what frightens her most) some wretched, inexplicable amusement. Still speaking low—perhaps so only she can hear, maybe because it’s the best he can manage—Scott says, “Listen, little Lisey. I’ll make how it sounds when it looks around.”

  “Scott, no—you have to stop.”

  He pays no attention. He draws in another of those screaming breaths, purses his wet red lips in a tight O, and makes a low, incredibly nasty chuffing noise. It drives a fine spray of blood up his clenched throat and into the sweltering air. A girl sees it and screams. This time the crowd doesn’t need the campus cop to ask them to move back; they do it on their own, leaving Lisey, Scott, and Captain Heffernan a perimeter of at least four feet all the way around.

  The sound—dear God, it really is a kind of grunting—is mercifully short. Scott coughs, his chest heaving, the wound spilling more blood in rhythmic pulses, then beckons her back down with one finger. She comes, leaning on her simmering hands. His socketed eyes compel her; so does his mortal grin.

  He turns his head to the side, spits a wad of half-congealed blood onto the hot tar, then turns back to her. “I could…call it that way,” he whispers. “It would come. You’d be…rid of my…everlasting…quack.”

  She understands that he means it, and for a moment (surely it is the power of his eyes) she believes it’s true. He will make the sound again, only a little louder, and in some other world the long boy, that lord of sleepless nights, will turn its unspeakable hungry head. A moment later in this world, Scott Landon will simply shiver on the pavement and die. The death certificate will say something sane, but she’ll know: his dark thing finally saw him and came for him and ate him alive.

  So now come the things they will never speak of later, not to others or between themselves. Too awful. Each marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark. This is the dark heart of theirs, the one mad true secret. She leans close to him on the baking pavement, sure he is dying, nevertheless determined to hold onto him if she can. If it means fighting the long boy for him—with nothing but her fingernails, if it comes to that—she will.

  “Well…Lisey?” Smiling that repulsive, knowing, terrible smile. “What…do…you…say?”

  Leaning even closer. Into the shivering sweat-and-blood stink of him. Leaning in until she can smell the last palest ghost of the Prell he shampooed with that morning and the Foamy he shaved with. Leaning in until her lips touch his ear. She whispers, “Be quiet, Scott. For once in your life, just be quiet.”

  When she looks at him again, his eyes are different. The fierceness is gone. He’s fading, but maybe that’s all right, because he looks sane again. “Lisey…?”

  Still whispering. Looking directly into his eyes. “Leave that smucking thing alone and it will go away.” For a moment she almost adds, You can take care of the rest of this mess later, but the idea is senseless—for awhile, the only thing Scott can do for himself is not die. What she says is, “Don’t you ever make that noise again.”

  He licks at his lips. She sees the blood on his tongue and it turns her stomach, but she doesn’t pull away from him. She supposes she’s in this now until the ambulance hauls him away or he quits breathing right here on this hot pavement a hundred yards or so from his latest triumph; if she can stick through that last, she guesses she can stick through anything.

  “I’m so hot,” he says. “If only I had a piece of ice to suck…”

  “Soon,” Lisey says, not knowing if she’s promising rashly and not caring. “I’m getting it for you.” At least she can hear the ambulance howling its way toward them. That’s something.

  And then, a kind of miracle. The girl with the bows on her shoulders and the new scrapes on her palms fights her way to the front of the crowd. She’s gasping like someone who has just run a race and sweat is running down her cheeks and neck, but she’s holding two big waxed paper cups in her hands. “I spilled half the fucking Coke getting back here,” she says, throwing a brief, baleful glance over her shoulder at the crowd, “but I got the ice okay. Ice is ni—” Then her eyes roll up almost to the whites and she reels backward, all loosey-goosey in her sneakers. The campus cop—oh bless him with many blessings, huh-yooge batch of orifice and all—grabs her, steadies her, and takes one of the cups. He hands it to Lisey, then urges the other Lisa to drink from the remaining cup. Lisey Landon pays no attention. Later, replaying all this, she’ll be a little in awe of her own single-mindedness. Now she only thinks Just keep her from falling on top of me again if she faints, Officer Friendly, and turns back to Scott.

  He’s shivering worse than ever and his eyes are dulling out, losing their grasp on her. And still, he tries. “Lisey…so hot…ice…”

  “I have it, Scott. Now will you for once just shut your everlasting mouth?”

  “One went north, one went south,” he croaks, and then he does what she asks. Maybe he’s all talked out, which would be a Scott Landon first.

  Lisey drives her hand deep into the cup, sending Coke all the way to the top and splooshing over the edge. The cold is shocking and utterly wonderful. She clutches a good handful of ice-chips, thinking how ironic this is: whenever she and Scott stop at a turnpike rest area and she uses a machine that dispenses cups of soda instead of cans or bottles, she always hammers on the NO ICE button, feeling righteous—others may allow the evil soft drink companies to shortchange them by dispensing half a cup of soda and half a cup of ice, but not Dave Debusher’s baby girl Lisa. What was old Dandy’s saying? I didn’t fall off a hayrick yesterday! And now here she is, wishing for even more ice and less Coke…not that she thinks it will make much difference. But on that one she’s in for a surprise.

  “Scott, here. Ice.”

  His eyes are half-closed now, but he opens his mouth and when she first rubs his lips with her handful of ice and then pops one of the melting shards onto his bloody tongue, his shivering suddenly stops. God, it’s magic. Emboldened, she rubs her freezing, leaking hand along his right cheek, his left cheek, and then across his forehead, where drops of Coke-colored water drip into his eyebrows and then run down the sides of his nose.

  “Oh Lisey, that’s heaven,” he says, and although still screamy, his voice sounds more with-it to her…more there. The ambulance has pulled up on the left side of the crowd with a dying growl of its siren and a few seconds later she can hear an impatient male voice shouting, “Paramedics! Let us through! Paramedics, c’mon, people, let us through so we can do our jobs, whaddaya say?”

  Dashmiel, the southern-fried asshole, chooses this moment to speak in Lisey’s ear. The solicitude in his voice, given the speed with which he jackrabbitted, makes her want to grind her teeth. “How is he, darlin?”

  Without looking around, she replies: “Trying to live.”

  7

  “Trying to live,” she murmured, running her palm over the glossy page in the U-Tenn Nashville Review. Over the picture of Scott with his foot poised on that dopey silver shovel. She closed the book with a snap and tossed it onto the dusty back of the booksnake. Her appetite for pictures—for memories—was more than sated for one day. There was a nasty throb starting up behind her right eye. She wanted to take something for it, not that sissy Tylenol but what her late husband had called head-bonkers. A couple of his Excedrin would be just the ticket, if they weren’t too far off the shelf-date. Then a little lie-down in their bedroom until the incipient headache passed. She might even sleep awhile.

  I’m still thinking of it as our bedroom, she mused, going to the stairs that lead down to the barn, which was now not really a barn at all but just a series of storage cubbies…though still redol
ent of hay and rope and tractor-oil, the old sweet-stubborn farm smells. Still as ours, even after two years.

  And so what? What of that?

  She shrugged. “Nothing, I suppose.”

  She was a little shocked at the mumbly, half-drunk sound of the words. She supposed all that vivid remembering had worn her out. All that relived stress. There was one thing to be grateful for: no other picture of Scott in the belly of the booksnake could call up such violent memories, he’d only been shot once and none of those colleges would have sent him photos of his fa—

  (shut up about that just hush)

  “That’s right,” she agreed as she reached the bottom of the stairs, and with no real idea of what she’d been on the edge

  (Scoot you old Scoot)

  of thinking about. Her head was hanging and she felt sweaty all over, like someone who has just missed being in an accident. “Shut-upsky, enough is enough.”

  And, as if her voice had activated it, a telephone began to ring behind the closed wooden door on her right. Lisey came to a stop in the barn’s main downstairs passage. Once that door had opened upon a stabling area large enough for three horses. Now the sign on it simply said HIGH VOLTAGE! This had been Lisey’s idea of a joke. She had intended to put a small office in there, a place where she could keep records and pay the monthly bills (they had—and she still had—a full-time money-manager, but he was in New York and could not be expected to see to such minutiae as her monthly tab at Hilltop Grocery). She’d gotten as far as putting in the desk, the phone, the fax, and a few filing cabinets…and then Scott died. Had she even been in there since then? Once, she remembered. Early this spring. Late March, a few stale stoles of snow still on the ground, her mission just to empty the answering machine attached to the phone. The number 21 had been in the gadget’s window. Messages one through seventeen and nineteen through twenty-one had been from the sort of hucksters Scott had called “phone-lice.” The eighteenth (this didn’t surprise Lisey at all) had been from Amanda. “Just wanted to know if you ever hooked this damn thing up,” she’d said. “You gave me and Darla and Canty the number before Scott died.” Pause. “I guess you did.” Pause. “Hook it up, I mean.” Pause. Then, in a rush: “But there was a very long time between the message and the bleep, sheesh, you must have a lot of messages on there, little Lisey, you ought to check the damn things in case somebody wants to give you a set of Spode or something.” Pause. “Well…g’bye.”