Lisey’s Story (44 page)

He sees his younger son looking up at him and nods.

—
Oh yeah. He's like a wild animal now. A maneater. And if we can't find a way to hold him we'll have to kill him. Do you understand?

Scott nods, then voices one loud sob that sounds like the bray of a donkey. With that same terrible tenderness, Daddy reaches out, wipes snot from his nose, and flicks it on the floor.

—
Then stop your whingeing and help me with these chains. We'll use that central support-pole and the table with the printing-press on it. That damn press has got to weight four, five hunnert pounds.

—
What if those things aren't enough to hold 'im?

Sparky Landon shakes his head slowly.

—
Then I dunno.

Lying in bed with his wife, listening to The Antlers creak in the wind, Scott says: “It
was
enough. For three weeks, at least, it was enough.
That's where my brother Paul had his last Christmas, his last New Year's Day, the last three weeks of his life—that stinking cellar.” He shakes his head slowly. She feels the movement of his hair against her skin, feels how damp it is. It's sweat. It's on his face, too, so mixed with tears she can't tell which is which.

“You can't imagine what those three weeks were like, Lisey, especially when Daddy went to work and it was just him and me,
it
and me—”

“Your father went to
work?
”

“We had to eat, didn't we? And we had to pay for the Number Two, because we couldn't heat the whole
house
with wood, although God knows we tried. Most of all, we couldn't afford to make people suspicious. Daddy explained it all to me.”

I bet he did
, Lisey thinks grimly, but says nothing.

“I tole Daddy to cut him and let the poison out like he always did before and Daddy said it wouldn't do any good, cutting wouldn't help a mite because the bad-gunky had gone to his brain. And I knew it had. That thing could still think, though, at least a little. When Daddy was gone, it would call my name. It would say it had made me a bool, a
good
bool, and the end was a candybar
and
an RC. Sometimes it even sounded enough like Paul so I'd go to the cellar door and put my head to the wood and listen, even though I knew it was dangerous. Daddy
said
it was dangerous, said not to listen and always stay away from the cellar when I was alone, and to stick my fingers in my ears and say prayers real loud or yell ‘
Smuck you mother, smuck you mother-fucker, smuck you and the horse you rode in on,'
because that and prayers both came to the same and at least they'd shut him out, but not to listen, because he said Paul was gone and there wasn't nothing in the cellar but a bool-devil from the Land of the Blood-Bools, and he said ‘The Devil can fascinate, Scoot, no one knows better than the Landons how the devil can fascinate. And the Landreaus before em. First he fascinates the mind and then he drinks up the heart.' Mostly I did what he said but sometimes I went close and listened . . . and pretended it was Paul . . . because I loved him and wanted him back, not because I really believed . . . and I never pulled the bolt . . .”

Here there falls a long pause. His heavy hair slips restlessly against her
neck and chest and at last he says in a small, reluctant child's voice: “Well,
once
I did . . . and I dint open the door . . . I never opened that cellar door unless Daddy was home, and when Daddy was home he only screamed and made the chains rattle and sometimes hooted like a owl. And when he did that sometimes Daddy, he'd hoot back . . . it was like a joke, you know, how they hooted at each other . . . Daddy in the kitchen and the . . . you know . . . chained up in the cellar . . . and I'd be ascairt even though I knew it was a joke because it was like they were both crazy . . . crazy and talking winter-owl talk to each other . . . and I'd think, ‘Only one left, and that's me. Only one who ain't bad-gunky and that one not even eleven and what would they think if I went to Mulie's and told?' But it didn't do no good thinkin about Mulie's because if he 'us home he'd just chase after me and drag me back. And if he wasn't . . . if they believed me and came up to t'house with me, they'd kill my brother . . . if my brother was still in 'ere somewhere . . . and take me away . . . and put me in the Poor Home. Daddy said without him to take care of me an Paul, we'd have to go to the Poor Home where they put a clo'pin on your dink if you pee in your bed . . . and the big kids . . . you have to give the big kids blowjobs all night long . . .”

He stops, struggling, caught somewhere between where he is and where he was. Outside The Antlers, the wind gusts and the building groans. She wants to believe that what he's telling her cannot be true—that it is some rich and dreadful childhood hallucination—but she knows it is true. Every awful word. When he resumes she can hear him trying to regain his adult voice, his adult
self.

“There are people in mental institutions, often people who've suffered catastrophic frontal-lobe traumas, who regress to animal states. I've read about it. But it's a process that usually occurs over a course of years. This happened to my brother
all at once.
And once it had, once he'd crossed that line . . .”

Scott swallows. The click in his throat is as loud as a turning light-switch.

“When I came down the cellar stairs with his food—meat and vegetables on a pie-plate, the way you'd bring food to a big dog like a Great Dane or a German Shepherd—he'd rush to the end of the chains that
held him to the post, one around his neck and one around his waist, with drool flying from the corners of his mouth and then the whole works would snub up and he'd go flying, still howling and barking like a bool-devil, only sort of strangled until he got his breath back, you know?”

“Yes,” she says faintly.

“You had to put the plate on the floor—I still remember the smell of that sour dirt when I bent over, I'll never forget it—and then push it to where he could get it. We had a bust' rake handle for that. It didn't do to get too close. He'd claw you, maybe pull you in. I didn't need Daddy to tell me that if he caught me, he'd eat as much of me as he could, alive and screaming. And this was the brother who made the bools. The one who loved me. Without him I never would have made it. Without him Daddy would have killed me before I made five, not because he meant to but because he was in his own bad-gunky. Me and Paul made it together. Buddy system. You know?”

Lisey nods. She knows.

“Only that January my buddy was cross-chained in the cellar—to the post and to the table with the printing-press on it—and you could measure the boundary of his world by this arc . . . this arc of turds . . . where he went to the end of his chains . . . and squatted . . . and shat.”

For a moment he puts the heels of his hands to his eyes. The cords stand out on his neck. He breathes through his mouth—long harsh shaking breaths. She doesn't think she has to ask him where he learned the trick of keeping his grief silent; that she now knows. When he's still again, she asks: “How did your father get the chains on him in the first place? Do you remember?”

“I remember everything, Lisey, but that doesn't mean I
know
everything. Half a dozen times he put stuff in Paul's food, of that I'm positive. I think it was some kind of animal tranquilizer, but how he got it I have no idea. Paul gobbled down everything we gave him except for greens, and usually food energized him. He'd yowl and bark and leap around; he'd run to the end of his chains—trying to break them, I guess—or jump up and pound his fists on the ceiling until his knuckles bled. Maybe he was trying to break through, or maybe it was just for the joy of it. Sometimes he'd lie down in the dirt and masturbate.

“But once in awhile he'd only be active for ten or fifteen minutes and then stop. Those were the times Daddy must have give him the stuff. He'd squat down, muttering, then fall over on his side and put his hands between his legs and go to sleep. The first time he did that, Daddy put on these two leather belts he made, except I guess you'd call the one that went around Paul's neck a choker, right? They had big metal claps at the back. He loop the chains through em, the tractor-chain through the waist-belt clap, the lighter chain through the choker-belt clap at the nape of his neck. Then he used a little hand-torch to weld them claps shut. And that was how Paul was trussed. When he woke up he was wild to find himself that way. Like to shook the house down.” The flattened, nasal accents of rural Pennsylvania have crept so far into his voice that
house
becomes almost Germanic, almost
haus.
“We stood at the top of the stairs watchin 'im, and I beg Daddy to let 'im out before he broke 'is neck or choke 'imself, but Daddy, he said he wun't choke and Daddy was right. What happen after three weeks was he started to pull table and even center-pos'—the steel center-pos' that held up the kitchen floor—but he never broke his neck and he never choke 'imself.

“The other times Daddy knock him out was to see if I could take him to Boo'ya Moon—did I tell you that's what me n Paul called it, the other place?”

“Yes, Scott.” Crying herself now. Letting the tears flow, not wanting him to see her wiping her eyes, not wanting to let him see her pitying that boy in that farmhouse.

“Daddy want to see if I could take him and make him better like the times when Daddy cut him, or like that one time Daddy poke his eye with the pliers and make it come a little way out and Paul crite and crite because he couldn't hardly see good, or once Daddy yell at
me
and say ‘Scoot, you little whoredog, you mother-killing mother!' for trackin in the spring muddy and push me down and crack my tailbone so I couldn't walk so well. Only after I went and had a bool . . . you know, a prize . . . my tailbone was okay again.” He nods against her. “And Daddy, he see and give me a kiss and say, ‘Scott, you're one in a million. I love you, you little motherfucker.' And I kiss him and say ‘Daddy,
you
one in a million. I love you, you big motherfucker.' And he laughed.”
Scott pulls back from her and even in the gloom she can see that his face has almost become a child's face. And she can see the goonybird wonder there. “He laughed so hard he almos' fell out of his chair—I made my father
laugh!
”

She has a thousand questions and doesn't dare ask a single one. Isn't sure she
could
ask a single one.

Scott puts a hand to his face, rubs it, looks at her again. And he's back. Just like that. “Christ, Lisey,” he says. “I've never talked about this stuff, never, not to anyone. Are you okay with this?”

“Yes, Scott.”

“You're one hell of a brave woman, then. Have you started telling yourself it's all bullshit yet?” He's even grinning a little. It's an uncertain grin, but it's genuine enough, and she finds it dear enough to kiss: first one corner, then the other, just for balance.

“Oh, I tried,” she says. “It didn't work.”

“Because of how we boomed out from under the yum-yum tree?”

“Is that what you call it?”

“That was Paul's name for a quick trip. Just a quick trip that got you from here to there. That was a boom.”

“Like a bool, only with an
m.
”

“That's right,” he says. “Or like a book. A book's a bool, only with a
k.
”

I guess it depends on you, Scoot.

These are his father's words. They linger and do not leave.

I guess it depends on you.

But he is only ten years old and the responsibility of saving his brother's life and sanity—maybe even his soul—weighs on him and steals his sleep as Christmas and New Year's pass and cold snowy January begins.

You've made him better a lot of times, you've made him better of a lot of things.

It's true, but there's never been anything like this and Scott finds he
can no longer eat unless Daddy stands beside him, hectoring him into each bite. The lowest, snuffling cry from the thing in the cellar unzips his thin sleep, but most generally that's okay, because most generally what he's leaving behind are lurid, red-painted nightmares. In many of these he finds himself alone in Boo'ya Moon after dark, sometimes in a certain graveyard near a certain pool, a wilderness of stone markers and wooden crosses, listening as the laughers cackle and smelling as the formerly sweet breeze begins to smell dirty down low, where it combs through the tangles of brush. You can come to Boo'ya Moon after dark, but it's not a good idea, and if you find yourself there once the moon has fully risen, you want to be quiet. Just as quiet as a sweetmother. But in his nightmares, Scott always forgets and is appalled to find himself singing “Jambalaya” at the top of his voice.

Maybe you can make him better of this.

But the first time Scott tries he knows it's probably impossible. He knows as soon as he puts a tentative arm around the snoring, stinking, beshitted thing curled at the foot of the steel support post. He might as well try to strap a grand piano on his back and then do the cha-cha with it. Before, he and Paul have gone easily to that other world (which is really only
this
world turned inside-out like a pocket, he will later tell Lisey). But the snoring thing in the cellar is an anvil, a bank-safe . . . a grand piano strapped to a ten-year-old's back.

He retreats to Daddy, sure he'll be paddled and not sorry. He feels that he deserves to be paddled. Or worse. But Daddy, who sat at the foot of the stairs with a stovelength in one hand watching the whole thing, doesn't paddle or strike with his fist. What he does is brush Scott's dirty, clumpy hair away from the nape of his neck and plant a kiss there with a tenderness that makes the boy quake.