Lisey’s Story (43 page)

“He's stirring already,” Lisey said as she lay on the oyster-white carpet of her dead husband's study. “He's

“Stirring already,” Lisey says as she sits on the cold floor of the guest room, holding her husband's hand—a hand that is warm but dreadfully lax and waxy in her own. “Scott said

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

these are the sounds of dead voices on dead records

floating down the broken shaft of memory.

When I turn to you to ask if you remember
,

When I turn to you in our bed

In bed with him is where she hears these things; in bed with him at The Antlers, after a day when something happened she absolutely cannot explain. He tells her as the clouds thin and the moon nears like an announcement and the furniture swims to the very edge of visibility. She holds him in the dark and listens, not wanting to believe (helpless not to), as the young man who will shortly become her husband says, “Daddy tole me to fetch out that coil of rope from understair. ‘And you want to step to it, you little gluefoot mother-fuck,' he says, ‘because he's not gonna stay out for long. And when he comes to

—
When he comes to he's gonna be one ugly bug.

Ugly bug.
Like
Scooter you old Scoot
and
the bad-gunky, ugly bug
is an interior idiom of his family that will haunt his dreams (and his speech) for the rest of his productive but too-short life.

Scott gets the coil of rope from beneath the stairs and brings it to Daddy. Daddy trusses Paul up with quick, dancing economy, his shadow looming and turning on the cellar's stone walls in the light of three hanging seventy-five-watt bulbs, which are controlled by a turn-switch at the top of the stairs. He ties Paul's arms so stringently behind him that the balls of his shoulders stand out even through his shirt. Scott is moved to speak again, afraid of Daddy though he is.

—
Daddy, that's too tight!

Daddy shoots a glance Scott's way. It's just a quick one, but Scott sees the fear there. It scares him. More than that, it
awes
him. Before today he would have said his Daddy wasn't ascairt of nothing but the School Board and their damned Registered Mails.

—
You don't know, so shut up! I aint having him get a-loose! He might not kill us before it was over if that happen, but I'd most certainly have to kill him. I know what I'm doin!

You don't
, Scott thinks, watching Daddy tie Paul's legs together first at the knees, then at the ankles. Already Paul has begun to stir again, and to mutter deep in his throat.
You're only guessing.
But he understands the truth of Daddy's love for Paul. It may be ugly love, but it's true and strong. If it wasn't, Daddy wouldn't guess at all. He would have just kept hammering Paul with that stovelength until he was dead. For just a moment part of Scott's mind (a cold part) wonders if Daddy would run the same risk for
him
, for Scooter old Scoot who didn't even dare jump off a three-foot bench until his brother stood cut and bleeding before him, and then he swats the thought into darkness. It isn't
him
who got the bad-gunky.

At least, not yet.

Daddy finishes by tying Paul around the middle to one of the
painted steel posts that hold up the cellar's ceiling.—
There
, he says, stepping away, panting like a man who's just roped a steer in a rodeo ring.
That'll hold him awhile. You go on out to the shed, Scott. Get the light chain that's laying just inside the door and the big heavy tractor-chain that's in the bay on the left, with the truck parts. Do you know where I mean?

Paul has been sagging over the rope around his torso. Now he sits up so suddenly he bangs his head on the post with sickening force. It makes Scott grimace. Paul looks at him with eyes that were blue only an hour ago. He grins, and the corners of his mouth stretch up far higher than they should be able to . . . almost to the lobes of his ears, it seems.

—
Scott
, his father says.

For once in his life, Scott pays no attention. He's mesmerized by the Halloween mask that used to be his brother's face. Paul's tongue comes dancing from between his parted teeth and does a jitterbug in the dank cellar air. At the same time his crotch darkens as he pisses his pa—

There's a clout upside his head that sends Scott reeling backward and he hits the printing-press table again.

—
Don't look at him, nummie, look at me! That ugly bug'll hypnotize you like a snake does a bird! You better wake the smuck up, Scooter—that aint your brother anymore.

Scott gapes at his father. Behind them, as if to underline Daddy's point, the thing tied to the post lets out a roar much too loud to have come from a human chest. But that's all right, because it isn't a human sound. Not even close.

—
Go get those chains, Scotty. Both of em. And be quick. That tie-job aint gonna hold him. I'm gonna go upstairs and get my .30-06. If he gets a-loose before you get back with those chains
—

—
Daddy, please don't shoot him! Don't shoot Paul!

—
Bring the chains. Then we'll see what we can figger out.

—
That tractor-chain's too long! Too heavy!

—
Use the wheelbarra, nummie. The big barra. Go on, now, step to it.

Scott looks over his shoulder once and sees his father backing to the foot of the stairs. He does it slowly, like a lion-tamer leaving the cage after the act is over. Below him, spotlighted in the glare of one hanging
bulb, is Paul. He's whamming the back of his head so rapidly against the post that Scott thinks of a jackhammer. At the same time he's jerking from side to side. Scott can't believe Paul isn't bleeding or knocking himself unconscious, but he's not. And he sees his father is right. The ropes won't hold him. Not if he keeps up that constant assault.

He won't be able to
, he thinks as his father goes one way (to get his gun out of the front closet) and Scott goes another (to yank on his boots).
He'll kill himself if he goes on like that.
But then he thinks of the roar he heard bursting out of his brother's chest—that impossible catmurder roar—and doesn't really believe it.

And as he runs coatless into the cold, he thinks he might even know what's happened to Paul. There's a place where he can go when Daddy has hurt him, and he has taken Paul there when Daddy has hurt
Paul.
Yes, plenty of times. There are good things in that place, beautiful trees and healing water, but there are also bad things. Scott tries not to go there at night, and when he does he's quiet and comes back
quick
, because the deep intuition of his child's heart tells him night is when the bad things mostly come out. Night is when they hunt.

If he can go
there
, is it so hard to believe that something—a badgunky something—could get inside Paul and then come over
here
? Something that saw him and marked him, or maybe just a dumb germ that crawled up his nose and stuck in his brain?

And if so, whose fault is that? Who took Paul in the first place?

In the shed, Scott throws the light chain in the wheelbarrow. That's easy, the work of only seconds. Getting the tractor-chain in there is a lot harder. The tractor-chain is puffickly
huh-yooge
, talking all the while in its clanky language, which is all steel vowels. Twice heavy loops slip through his trembling arms, the second time pinching his skin and dragging it open, bringing blood in bright rosettes. The third time he almost has it in the wheelbarrow when a twenty-pound armload of links lands crooked, on the side of the barrowbed instead of on the square, and the entire load of chainlink topples over on Scott's foot, burying it in steel and making him scream a perfect soprano choir–cry of pain.

—
Scooter, you comin before the turn of two thousand?
Daddy bawls from the house.
If you're comin, you better damn well motherfuckin
come!

Scott looks that way, eyes wide and terrified, then sets the wheelbarrow up again and bends over the big greasy heap of chain. His foot will still be bruise-gaudy a month later and he'll feel pain there all the way to the end of his life (that's one problem traveling to that other place is never able to fix), but at the time he feels nothing after the initial flare. He again begins the job of loading the links into the wheelbarrow, feeling the hot sweat go rolling down his sides and back, smelling the wild stink of it, knowing that if he hears a gunshot it will mean Paul's brains are out on the cellar floor and it's his fault. Time becomes a physical thing with weight, like dirt. Like chain. He keeps expecting Daddy to yell at him again from the house and when he still hasn't by the time Scott begins trundling the wheelbarrow back toward the yellow gleam of the kitchen lights, Scott begins to have a different fear: that Paul has gotten a-loose after all. It isn't Paul's brains lying down there on the sour-smelling dirt, it's Daddy's guts, pulled from his living stomach by the thing that was Scott's brother just this afternoon. Paul's up the stairs and hiding in the house and as soon as Scott goes inside the bool hunt will start. Only this time
he
will be the prize.

All that's his imagination, of course, his damned old imagination that runs like a wildeyed nighthorse, but when his father leaps out onto the porch it has done enough work so that for a moment Scott sees not Andrew Landon but Paul, grinning like a goblin, and he shrieks. When he raises his hands to guard his face the wheelbarrow almost tips over again. Would have, if Daddy hadn't reached out to steady it. Then he raises one of those hands to swat his son but lowers it almost at once. Later there may be swatting, but not now. Now he needs him. So instead of hitting Daddy only spits into his right hand and rubs it against his left. Then he bends, oblivious of the cold out here on the back stoop in his underwear shirt and grabs hold of the wheelbarrow's front end.

—
I'm gonna yank it up, Scooter. You hang on those handles and steer and don't let the mother tip. I gave him another tonk—I had to—but it won't keep him out long. If we spill this load of chain, I don't think he's gonna live through the night. I won't be able to let him. You understand?

Scott understands that his brother's life is now riding in a seriously overloaded wheelbarrow filled with chain that weighs three times what
he does. For one wild moment he seriously considers simply running away into the windy dark, and as fast as he can go. Then he grabs the handles. He is unaware of the tears spilling from his eyes. He nods at his Daddy and his Daddy nods back. What passes between them is nothing but life and death.

—
On three. One . . . two . . . keep it straight now, you little whoredog . . . three!

Sparky Landon lifts the wheelbarrow from the ground to the stoop with a cry of effort that escapes in white vapor. His underwear shirt splits open beneath one arm and a tuft of crazy ginger hair springs free. While the overloaded barrow is in the air the damned thing yaws first left and then right and the boy thinks
stay up you mother, you whoredog mothersmuck.
He corrects each tilt, crying at himself not to push too hard, not to overdo it you stupid mother, you stupid whoredog bad-gunky mother. And it works, but Sparky Landon wastes no time in congratulations. What Sparky Landon does is to back his way into the house, rolling the wheelbarrow after him. Scott limps behind on his ballooning foot.

In the kitchen, Daddy turns the wheelbarrow around and trundles it straight for the cellar door, which he has closed and bolted. The wheel makes a track through the spilled sugar. Scott never forgets that.

—
Get the door, Scott.

—
Daddy, what if he's . . . there?

—
Then I'll knock him galley-west with this thing. If you want a shot at saving him, quit running your nonsense and open that smogging door!

Scott pulls back the bolt and opens the door. Paul isn't there. Scott can see Paul's bloated shadow still attached to the pole, and something that has been strung up high and tight inside him relaxes a little.

—
Stand aside, son.

Scott does. His father runs the wheelbarrow to the top of the cellar stairs. Then, with another grunt, he tips it up, braking the barrow's wheel with one foot when it tries to backroll. The chain hits the stairs with a mighty unmusical clang, splintering two of the risers and then crashing most of the way down. Daddy slings the wheelbarrow to one side and starts down himself, reaching the come-to-rest chain at the
halfway mark and kicking it ahead of him the rest of the way. Scott follows and has just stepped over the first broken riser when he sees Paul lolling sideways from the post, the left side of his face now covered with blood. The corner of his mouth is twitching senselessly. One of his teeth lies on the shoulder of his shirt.

—
Wha'd you do to him?
Scott nearly screams.

—
Whacked him with a board, I had to
, his father replies, sounding oddly defensive.
He was coming around and you were still out there playin fiddly-fuck in the shed. He'll be all right. You can't hurt em much when they're bad-gunky.

Scott barely hears him. Seeing Paul covered with blood that way has swept what happened in the kitchen from his mind. He tries to dart around Daddy and get to his brother, but Daddy grabs him.

—
Not unless you don't want to go on living
, Sparky Landon says, and what stops Scott isn't so much the hand on his shoulder as the terrible tenderness he hears in his father's voice.
Because he'll smell you if you get right up close. Even unconscious. Smell you and come back.