Lisey's Story(104)
But Scott has once again forgotten about Daddy. Daddy's hand comes out of the dim, seizes the Paul-thing by the hair, and somehow wrenches the head backward. Then Daddy's other hand appears, thumb curled around the stock of his deer-gun where the stock is thinnest, forefinger hugging the trigger. He socks the gun's muzzle into the shelf of the thing's upslanted chin.
- Daddy, no! Scott shrieks.
Andrew Landon pays no attention, can afford to pay no attention. Although he's gotten a huge handful of the thing's hair, it's ripping free of his fist just the same. Now it's bellowing, and its bellows sound dreadfully like one word.
Like Daddy.
- Say hello to hell, you bad-gunky motherf*cker, Sparky Landon says, and pulls the trigger. The .30-06's discharge is deafening in the enclosed space of the cellar; it will ring in Scott's ears for two hours or more. The thing's shaggy backhair flies up, as in a sudden gust of breeze, and a large splash of crimson paints the leaning center-post. The thing's legs give a single crazy cartoon kick and go still. The hands around Scott's neck twitch momentarily tighter and then fall palms-up, flump, onto the dirt. Daddy's arm encircles Scott and lifts him up.
- Are you all right, Scoot? Can you breathe?
- I'm okay, Daddy. Did you have to kill him?
- Are you brainless?
Scott hangs limp in the circle of his father's arm, unable to believe it's happened even though he knew it might. He wishes he could faint. Wishes - a little, anyway - that he could die himself.
Daddy gives him a shake. - He was gonna kill you, wasn't he?
- Y-Y-Yeah.
- You're f**king-A he was. Christ, Scotty, he was rippin his own sweetmother hair out by the roots to get at you. To get at your smoggin throat!
Scott knows this is true, but he knows something else as well. - Lookit 'im, Daddy -
lookit 'im now!
For a moment or two longer he hangs from the circle of his father's arm like a ragdoll or a puppet whose strings have been cut, then Landon slowly lowers him down and Scott knows his father is seeing what Scott wanted him to see: just a boy. Just an innocent boy who has been chained in the cellar by his lunatic father and dogsbody younger brother, then starved until he's rack-thin and covered with sores; a boy who has struggled so pitifully hard for his freedom that he actually moved the steel post and the cruelly heavy table to which he has been chained. A boy who has lived three nightmare weeks as a prisoner down here before finally being shot in the head.
- I see 'im, Daddy says, and the only thing grimmer than his voice is his face.
- Why doesn't he look like before, Daddy? Why -
- Because the bad-gunky's gone, you numbskull. And here's an irony even a badly shaken ten-year-old can appreciate, at least a bright one like Scott: now that Paul lies dead, chained to a post in the cellar with his brains blown out, Daddy has never looked or sounded saner. And if anyone else sees him like this, I'll be for either the state prison in Waynesburg or locked in that smucking nutbarn up Reedville. That's if they don't lynch me first. We'll have to bury him, although aint it gonna be a bitch-kitty with the ground like it is, hard as arn.
Scott says, - I'll take him, Daddy.
- How you gonna take him? You couldn't take him when he was alive!
He doesn't have the language to explain that now it will be no more than going there dressed in his clothes, which he always does. That anvil-weight, bank-vault weight, piano-weight, is gone from the thing chained to the post; the thing chained to the post is now no more than the green husk you strip off an ear of corn. Scott just says, - I can do it now.
- You're a little bag of boast and wind, Daddy says, but he leans the deer-gun against the table with the printing-press on it. He runs a hand through his hair and sighs. For the first time he looks to Scott like a man who could get old.
- Go on, Scott, might as well give her a try. Can't hurt.
But now that there's no actual danger, Scott is bashful.
- Turn around, Daddy.
- WHAT the FUCK you say?
There's a potential beating in Daddy's voice, but for once Scott doesn't back down. It isn't the going part that bothers him; he doesn't care if Daddy sees that. What he's bashful about is Daddy seeing him take his dead brother in his arms. He's going to cry. He feels it coming on already, like rain on a late spring afternoon, when the day has been hot with a foretaste of summer.
- Please, he says in his most placating voice. Please, Daddy. For a moment Scott is quite sure that his father is going to rush across the cellar to where his surviving son stands, with his tripled shadow racing beside him on the rock walls, and backhand him - perhaps knock him spang into his big brother's dead lap. He's been backhanded plenty of times and usually even the thought of it makes him cringe, but now he stands straight between Paul's splayed legs, looking into his father's eyes. It's hard to do that, but he manages. Because they have survived a terrible passage together, and will have to keep it between themselves forever: Shhhhhh. So he deserves to ask, and he deserves to look in Daddy's eyes while he waits for his answer. Daddy doesn't come at him. Instead he takes a deep breath, blows it out, and turns around. - You'll be tellin me when to warsh the floors and scrub out the tawlit next, I guess, he grumbles. I'll give you a count of thirty, Scoot 21
"I'll give you a count of thirty and then I'm turning around again," Scott tells her. "I'm pretty sure that's how he finished it, but I never heard because by then I was gone off the face of the earth. Paul too, right out of his chains. I took him with me as easy as ever once he was dead; maybe easier. I bet Daddy never finished counting to thirty. Hell, I bet he never even got started before he heard the clink of chains or maybe the sound of air rushing in to fill the place where we'd been and he turned around and he saw he had the cellar all to himself." Scott has relaxed against her; the sweat on his face and arms and body is drying. He has told it, gotten the worst of it out of him, sicked it up.