Lisey's Story(15)
As if repudiating her, Gerd Allen Cole says, "It never ends until you go down. You're responsible for all these repetitions, old boy. You are hell, you are a monkey, and now you are my monkey!"
This speech is the closest he comes to making sense, and making it gives Lisey just enough time to first wind up with the silver spade - the body knows its business and her hands have already found their position near the top of the thing's forty-inch handle - and then swing it. Still, it's close. If it had been a horse race, the tote-board would undoubtedly have flashed the HOLD TICKETS WAIT FOR PHOTO message. But when the race is between a man with a gun and a woman with a shovel, you don't need a photo. In slowed-down Liseytime she sees the silver scoop strike the gun, driving it upward just as that corsage of fire blooms again (she can see only part of it this time, and the muzzle is completely hidden by the blade of the spade). She sees the businessend of the ceremonial shovel carry on forward and upward as the second shot goes harmlessly into the hot August sky. She sees the gun fly loose, and there's time to think Holy smuck! I really put a charge into this one! before the spade connects with Blondie's face. His hand is still in there (three of those long slim fingers will be broken), but the spade's silver bowl connects solidly just the same, breaking Cole's nose, shattering his right cheekbone and the bony orbit around his staring right eye, shattering nine teeth as well. A Mafia goon with a set of brass knuckles couldn't have done better.
And now - still slow, still in Lisey-time - the elements of Stefan Queensland's award-winning photograph are assembling themselves.
Captain S. Heffernan has seen what's happening only a second or two after Lisey, but he also has to deal with the bystander problem - in his case a fat bepimpled fella wearing baggy Bermuda shorts and a tee-shirt with Scott Landon's smiling face on it. Captain Heffernan shunts this young fella aside with one muscular shoulder.
By then Blondie is sinking to the ground (and out of the forthcoming photo's field) with a dazed expression in one eye and blood pouring from the other. Blood is also gushing from the hole which at some future date may again serve as his mouth. Heffernan completely misses the actual hit.
Roger Dashmiel, maybe remembering that he's supposed to be the master of ceremonies and not a big old bunnyrabbit, turns back toward Eddington, his protege, and Landon, his troublesome guest of honour, just in time to take his place as a staring, slightly blurred face in the forthcoming photo's background.
Scott Landon, meanwhile, shock-walks right out of the award-winning photo. He walks as though unmindful of the heat, striding toward the parking lot and Nelson Hall beyond, which is home of the English Department and mercifully air-conditioned. He walks with surprising briskness, at least to begin with, and a goodly part of the crowd moves with him, unaware for the most part that anything has happened. Lisey is both infuriated and unsurprised. After all, how many of them saw Blondie with that cuntish little pistol in his hand? How many of them recognized the burst-paperbag sounds as gunshots? The hole in Scott's coat could be a smudge of dirt from his shovelling chore, and the blood that has soaked his shirt is as yet invisible to the outside world. He's now making a strange whistling noise each time he inhales, but how many of them hear that? No, it's her they're looking at - some of them, anyway - the crazy chick who just inexplicably hauled off and whacked some guy in the face with the ceremonial silver spade. A lot of them are actually grinning, as if they believe it's all part of a show being put on for their benefit, the Scott Landon Roadshow. Well, f**k them, and f**k Dashmiel, and f**k the day-late and dollarshort campus cop with his puffickly huh-yooge batch of orifice. All she cares about now is Scott. She thrusts the shovel out not quite blindly to her right and Eddington, their rent-a-Boswell, takes it. It's either that or get hit in the nose with it. Then, still in that horrible slo-mo, Lisey runs after her husband, whose briskness evaporates as soon as he reaches the suck-oven heat of the parking lot. Behind her, Tony Eddington is peering at the silver spade as if it might be an artillery shell, a radiation detector, or the leaving of some great departed race, and to him comes Captain S. Heffernan with his mistaken assumption of who today's hero must be. Lisey is unaware of this part, will know none of it until she sees Queensland's photograph eighteen years later, would care about none of it even if she did know; all her attention is fixed on her husband, who has just gone down on his hands and knees in the parking lot. She tries to repudiate Lisey-time, to run faster. And that is when Queensland snaps his picture, catching just one half of one shoe on the far righthand side of the frame, something he will not realize then, or ever.
6
The Pulitzer Prize winner, the enfant terrible who published his first novel at the tender age of twenty-two, goes down.
Scott Landon hits the deck, as the saying is.
Lisey makes a supreme effort to pull out of the maddening time-glue in which she seems to be trapped. She must get free because if she doesn't reach him before the crowd surrounds him and shuts her out, they will very likely kill him with their concern. With smotherlove.
- Heeeeee's hurrrrrt, someone shouts.
She screams at herself in her own head and that finally does it. The glue in which she has been packed is gone. Suddenly she is knifing forward; all the world is noise and heat and sweat and jostling bodies. She blesses the speedy reality of it even as she uses her left hand to grab the left cheek of her ass and pull, raking the goddam underwear out of the crack of her goddam ass, there, at least one thing about this wrong and broken day is now mended.