Lisey’s Story (38 page)

“Shut up.” Pointing a finger at her. The smile all gone by now. “Why, if I was to go away and then come back, you'd have a dozen State Police graybacks here waitin for me, I reckon. They'd take me in and Missus, I tell you what, I'd deserve another ten years inside just for believin such a thing.”

“But—”

“And besides, that wadnt—
wasn't
—the deal we made. The deal was that you'd call the Prof, ole Woodsmucky—girl, I
like
that—and he'd send me a e-mail the special way we have, and then
he'd
arrange about the papers. Right?”

Some part of him actually believed this.
Had
to believe it, or why would he keep on with it when it was just the two of them?

“Ma'am?” Dooley asked her. He sounded solicitous. “Missus?”

If there was a part of him that had to go on telling lies when it was just the two of them, maybe it was because there was a part of him that needed lying to. If so,
that
was the part of Jim Dooley she needed to reach. The part that might still be sane.

“Mr. Dooley, listen to me.” She pitched her voice low and kept her delivery slow. It had been the way she talked to Scott when Scott was ready to go off half-cocked over anything from a bad review to a shoddy piece of plumbing. “Professor Woodbody has no way of getting in touch with you, and down inside somewhere, you know that. But
I
can get in touch with him. I already have. I called him last night.”

“You're lyin,” he said, but this time she wasn't and he
knew
she wasn't, and for some reason it upset him. That reaction ran exactly counter to the one she wanted to provoke—she wanted to soothe him—but she thought she had to go on, hoping the sane part of Jim Dooley was in there somewhere, listening.

“I'm not,” she said. “You left me his number and I called him.” Holding Dooley's eyes with hers. Mustering every bit of sincerity she could manage as she headed back into the Land of Fabrication. “I promised him the manuscripts and told him to call you off and he said he
couldn't
call you off because he had no way of getting in touch with you anymore, he said his first two e-mails went through, but after that they just bounced ba—”

“One lies and the other swears to it,” Jim Dooley said, and after that things happened with a speed and a ferocity Lisey could hardly credit, although every moment of the beating and mutilation that followed remained vivid in her mind for the rest of her life, right down to the sound of his dry and rapid breathing, right down to the way his khaki shirt strained at the buttons, showing little winks of the white tee-shirt he wore beneath as he slapped her across the face, backhand and then forehand, backhand and then forehand, backhand and then forehand, backhand and then forehand again. Eight blows in all,
eight-eight-lay-them-straight
they chanted as children skip-roping in the dooryard dust, and the sound of his skin on her skin was like dry kindling snapped over a knee, and although the hand he used was ringless—there was that much to be grateful for—the fourth and fifth blows beat the blood from her lips, the sixth and seventh sent it spraying, and the last rode high enough to smash into her nose and set that gushing, as well. By then she was crying in fear and pain. Her head thumped repeatedly against the underside of the bar sink, making her ears ring. She heard herself crying out for him to stop, that he could have whatever he wanted if he would only stop. Then he
did
stop and she heard herself saying, “I can give you the manuscript of a new novel, his last novel, it's all done, he finished it a month before he died and never got a chance to revise it, it's a real treasure, Woodsmucky'll love it.” She had time to think
That's pretty inventive, what are you going to do if he takes you up on it
, but Jim Dooley wasn't taking her up on anything. He was on his knees in front of her, panting harshly—it was hot up here already, if she'd known she was going to be taking a beating in Scott's study today she certainly would have turned on the air-conditioning first thing—and rummaging in his lunch-sack again. There were big sweat-rings spreading out from under his arms.

“Missus, I'm sorry as hell to do this, but at least it ain't your pussy,” he said, and she had time to register two things before he swept his left hand down the front of her, tearing open her blouse and popping the catch at the front of her bra so that her small breasts tumbled free. The first was that he wasn't sorry a bit. The second was that the object in his right hand had almost certainly come from her very own Things Drawer. Scott had called it
Lisey's yuppie church key.
It was her Oxo can opener, the one with the heavy-duty rubber handgrips.

The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound.

This line kept going through Lisey's head as she crawled from the memory nook and then slowly across the center space of her dead husband's long and rambling office, leaving an ugly trail behind her: splotches of blood from her nose, mouth, and mutilated breast.

The blood will never come out of this carpet
, she thought, and the line recurred, as if in answer:
The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound.

There was insanity in this story, all right, but the only sound she remembered just lately wasn't whirring, purring,
or
shirring; it was the sound of her screams when Jim Dooley had attached her can opener to her left breast like a mechanical leech. She had screamed, and then she had fainted, and then he had slapped her awake to tell her one more thing. After that he'd let her go back under again, but he had pinned a note to her shirt—after considerately pulling off her ruined bra and buttoning the shirt back up, that was—to make sure she wouldn't forget. She hadn't needed the note. She remembered what he'd said perfectly.

“I'd better hear from the Prof by eight tonight, or next time the hurtin will be a lot worse. And tend yourself
by
yourself, Missus, you hear me, now? Tell anyone I was here and I'll kill you.” That was what Dooley had said. To this the note pinned to her shirt had added:
Let's get this business finish, we will both be happier when it is. Signed, your good freind, “Zack”!

Lisey had no idea how long she was out the second time. All she knew was that when she came to, the mangled bra was in the wastebasket and the note was pinned to the right side of her shirt. The left side was soaked with blood. She had unbuttoned enough to take one quick peek, then moaned and averted her eyes. It looked worse than anything Amanda had ever done to herself, including the thing with the navel. As to the pain . . . all she could remember was something enormous and obliterating.

The handcuffs had been removed, and Dooley had even left her a glass of water. Lisey drank it greedily. When she tried to get to her feet, however, her legs were trembling too badly to hold her. So she had crawled out of the alcove on all fours, dripping blood and bloody sweat on Scott's carpet as she went (ah, but she'd never cared for that oyster-white anyway, it showed every speck of dirt), hair plastered to her forehead, tears drying on her cheeks, blood drying to a crust on her nose, lips, and chin.

At first she thought she was headed for the phone, probably to call Deputy Buttercluck in spite of Dooley's admonitions and the failure of the Castle County Sheriff's Department to protect her on its first try. Then that line of poetry

(
the arguments against insanity
)

started to go through her head and she saw Good Ma's cedar box lying overturned on the carpet between the stairs going down to the barn and the desk Scott had called Dumbo's Big Jumbo. The cedar box's contents were spilled on the carpet in an untidy litter. She understood that the box and its spilled contents had been her destination all along. She especially wanted the yellow thing she could see draped over the bent purple shape of The Antlers menu.

The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound.

From one of Scott's poems. He didn't write many, and those he
did
he almost never published—he said they weren't good, and he wrote them just for himself. But she had thought that one
very
good, even though she hadn't been entirely sure what it meant, or even what it was about. She had particularly liked that first line, because sometimes you just heard things
going
, didn't you? They fell down, level after level, leaving a hole you could look through. Or fall into, if you weren't careful.

SOWISA, babyluv. You're bound for the rabbit-hole, so strap on nice and tight.

Dooley must have brought Good Ma's box up to the study because he thought it had to do with what he wanted. Guys like Dooley and Gerd Allen Cole, aka Blondie, aka Monsieur Ding-Dong for the Freesias, thought
everything
had to do with what they wanted, didn't they? Their nightmares, their phobias, their midnight inspirations. What had Dooley thought was in the cedar box? A secret list of Scott's manuscripts (perhaps in code)? God knew. In any case he'd dumped it out, seen nothing but a jumble of uninteresting rickrack (uninteresting to him, at least), and then dragged the widow Landon deeper into the study, looking for a place where he could cuff her up before she regained consciousness. The pipes under the bar sink had done quite nicely.

Lisey crawled steadily toward the scattered contents of the box, her eyes fixed on the yellow knitted square. She wondered if she would have discovered it on her own. She had an idea the answer was no; she had gotten her fill of memories. Now, however—

The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound.

So it seemed. And if her precious purple curtain finally came down, would it make that same soft, sad sound? She wouldn't be at all surprised. It had never been much more than spun cobwebs to begin with; look at all she'd already remembered.

No more, Lisey, you don't dare, hush.

“Hush yourself,” she croaked. Her outraged breast throbbed and burned. Scott had gotten his chest-wound; now she had hers. She thought of him coming back up her lawn that night, coming out of the shadows while Pluto barked and barked and barked next door. Scott holding up what had been a hand and was now nothing but a clot of blood with things that looked vaguely like fingers sticking out of it. Scott telling her it was a blood-bool, and it was for her. Scott later soaking that sliced-up meat in a basin filled with weak tea, telling her how it was something

(
Paul thought this up
)

his brother had shown him how to do. Telling her all the Landons were fast healers, they had to be. This memory fell through to the one
beneath, the one where she and Scott were sitting under the yum-yum tree four months later.
The blood fell down in a sheet
, Scott told her, and Lisey asked if Paul soaked his cuts in tea afterward and Scott had said no—

Hush, Lisey—he never said that. You never asked and he never said.

But she
had
asked. She had asked him all sorts of things, and Scott had answered. Not then, not under the yum-yum tree, but later on. That night, in bed. Their second night in The Antlers, after making love. How could she have forgotten?

Lisey lay for a moment on the oyster-white carpet, resting. “Never forgot,” she said. “It was in the purple. Behind the curtain. Big difference.” She fixed her eyes on the yellow square and began crawling again.

I'm pretty sure the tea-cure came later, Lisey. Yeah, I know it did.

Scott lying next to her, smoking, watching the smoke from his cigarette go up and up, to that place where it disappeared. The way the stripes on a barber-pole disappear. The way Scott himself sometimes disappeared.

I know, because by then I was doing fractions.

In school?

No, Lisey.
He said this in a tone that said more, that said she should know better. Sparky Landon had never been that kind of Daddy.
Me n Paul, we 'us home-schooled. Daddy called public school the Donkey Corral.

But Paul's cuts that day—the day you jumped from the bench—they were bad? Not just nicks?

A long pause while he watched the smoke rise and stack and disappear, leaving only its trail of sweetish-bitter fragrance behind. At last, flat:
Daddy cut deep.

To that dry certainty there seemed no possible reply, so she had kept silent.

And then he'd said:
Anyway, that's not what you want to ask. Ask what you want, Lisey. Go ahead, I'll tell you. But you have to ask.

She either couldn't remember what had come next or wasn't ready to, but now she remembered how they had left their refuge under the yumyum tree. He had taken her in his arms beneath that white umbrella and
they had been outside in the snow an instant later. And now, crawling on her hands and knees toward the overturned cedar box, memory

(
insanity
)

fell through

(
with a soft shirring sound
)

and Lisey finally allowed her mind to believe what her second heart, her secret hidden heart, had known all along. For a moment they had been neither under the yum-yum tree nor out in the snow but in
another
place. It had been warm and filled with hazy red light. It had been filled with the sound of distant calling birds and tropical smells. Some of these she knew—frangipani, jasmine, bougainvillea, mimosa, the moist breathing earth upon which they knelt like the lovers they most surely were—but the sweetest ones were unknown to her and she ached for their names. She remembered opening her mouth to speak, and Scott putting the side of his hand