Lisey's Story(101)

"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."

Chapter 16

17

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.

- Aint really surprised, Scott. Bad-gunky likes it right where it is.

- Daddy, is Paul in there at all anymore?

- Dunno. Now he's got Scott between his open spread legs so that there are green Dickies on either side of the boy.

Daddy's hands are locked loosely around Scott's chest and his chin is on Scott's shoulder. Together they look at the sleeping thing curled at the foot of the post. They look at the chains. They look at the arc of turds that mark the border of its basement world. - What do you think, Scott? What do you feel?

He considers lying to Daddy, but only for a moment. He won't do that when the man's arms are around him, not when he feels Daddy's love coming through in the clear, like WWVA at night. Daddy's love is every bit as true as his anger and madness, if less frequently seen and even less frequently demonstrated. Scott feels nothing, and reluctantly says so.

- Little buddy, we can't go on this way.

- Why not? He's eatin, at least...

- Sooner or later someone'll come and hear him down here. A smucking door-to-door salesman, one lousy Fuller Brush man, that's all it'd take.

- He'll be quiet. Bad-gunky'll make him be quiet.

- Maybe, maybe not. There's no telling what bad-gunky'll do, not really. And there's the smell. I can sprinkle lime until I'm blue in the face and that shit-stink is still gonna come up through the kitchen floor. But most of all...Scooter, can't you see what he's doin to that motherless table with the printin-press on it? And the post? The sweetmother post?

Scott looks. At first he can barely credit what he's seeing, and of course he doesn't want to credit what he's seeing. That big table, even with five hundred pounds of ancient hand-crank Stratton printing-press on it, has been pulled at least three feet from its original position. He can see the square marks in the hardpacked earth where it used to be. Worse still is the steel post, which butts against a flat metal flange at its top end. The white-painted flange presses in turn against the beam running directly beneath their kitchen table. Scott can see a dark right-angle tattooed on that white piece of metal and knows it's where the support post used to rest. Scott measures the post itself with his eye, trying to pick up a lean. He can't, not yet. But if the thing continues to yank on it with all its inhuman strength...day in and day out...

-  Daddy, can I try again?

Daddy sighs. Scott cranes around to look into his hated, feared, loved face.

-  Daddy?

-  Have on 'til your cheeks crack, Daddy says. Have on and good luck to you. 18

Silence in the study over the barn, where it was hot and she was hurt and her husband was dead.