Lisey's Story(171)
You want to try this, Scott? he asked. See what all the shouting's about? Hey, if you like it, you can have the whole sweetmother gallon.
I'm as curious about booze as any kid, I guess, but that smell was too fruity- rancid. Maybe the stuff makes you happy like I've seen on TV, but I could never lick that gone-dead fruit smell. I shook my head.
You're a wise child, Scooter ole Scoot, he said, and poured the stuff in the jelly- glass down the sink. But he must have saved the rest of the jug (or just forgot about it) because that's what I smell now, sure as God made little fishes, and strong. By the time I get to the foot of the stairs it's a stench, and now I hear something besides the steady rattle of the sleet on the boards and the tinny tick-tock of it on the windows: George Jones. It's Daddy's radio, tuned to WWVA like always, playing very soft. And I also hear snoring. The relief is so great that tears go spilling down my cheeks. The thing I've been most afraid of is that he's laid up, waiting for me to show myself. Now, listening to those long, ragged snores, I know that he's not. Nevertheless, I'm careful. I detour through the dining room so I can come into the living room from behind the sofa. The dining room is also a shambles. Nana's breakfront has been overturned, and it looks to me like he made a pretty good effort to turn it into kindling. All the dishes are broken. So's the blue pitcher, and the money inside it has been torn to pieces. Green shreds have been flung every whichever. Some even hang from the central light fixture like New Year's Eve confetti. Apparently the thing inside Daddy has no more use for money than it does for books.
In spite of those snores, in spite of being on the couch's blind side, I peer into the living room like a soldier peering over the lip of a foxhole after an artillery barrage. It's a needless precaution. His head's hanging off one end of the couch and his hair, which he hasn't taken the scissors to since before Paul went bad, is so long it's almost touching the rug. I could have marched through there crashing a pair of cymbals and he wouldn't have stirred. Daddy isn't just asleep in the jumbled wreckage of that room; he is un-smucking-conscious.
A little further in and I see there's a cut running up one cheek, and his closed eyes have a purplish, exhausted look. His lips have slid back from his teeth, making him look like an old dog that fell asleep trying to snarl. He covers the couch with an old Navajo blanket to keep off grease and spilled food, and he's wrapped part of it over him. He must have been tired of busting things up by the time he got in here, because he's poked out the eye of the television and smashed the glass over his dead wife's studio portrait and called it good. The radio's in its usual place on the end- table and that gallon jug is on the floor beside it. I look at the jug and can't hardly believe what I'm seeing: there's not but an inch or so left. It's almost impossible for me to believe he's drunk so much - he who isn't used to drinking at all - but the stink hanging around him, so thick I can almost see it, is very persuasive. The pickaxe leans against the head of the sofa, and there's a piece of paper stuck on the end that came down through my bed. I know it's a note he's left for me, and I don't want to read it, but I have to. He's written on three lines, but there are only eight words. Too few to ever forget.
KILL ME THEN PUT ME WITH PAUL PLEASE
19
Lisey, crying harder than ever, turned this page into her lap along with the others. Now there were only two left. The printing had grown loose, a little wandering, not always sticking to the lines, quite clearly tired. She knew what came next - I put a pickaxe in his head while he was a-sleepun, he had told her under the yum-yum tree - and did she have to read the details here? Was there anything in the marriage vows about having to subject yourself to your dead husband's confession of patricide?
And yet those pages called to her, cried to her like some lonely thing that has lost everything but its voice. She dropped her eyes to the final pages, determined that if she must finish, she would do so as quickly as she could.
20
I don't want to, but I take up the pickaxe anyway and stand there with it in my hands, looking at him, the lord of my life, the tyrant of all my days. I have hated him often and he has never given me cause to love him enough, I know that now, but he has given me some, especially during those nightmare weeks after Paul went bad. And in that five o'clock living room with the day's first gray light creeping in and the sleet ticking like a clock and the sound of his wheezing snores below me and an ad on the radio for some discount furniture store in Wheeling, West Virginia, I will never visit, I know it comes down to a bald choice between those two, love and hate. Now I'll find out which one rules my child's heart. I can let him live and run down the road to Mulie's, run into some unknown new life, and that will condemn him to the hell he fears and in many ways deserves. Richly deserves. First hell on earth, the hell of a cell in some looneybin, and then maybe hell forever after, which is what he really fears. Or I can kill him and set him free. This choice is mine to make, and there is no God to help me make it, for I believe in none.
Instead I pray to my brother, who loved me until the bad-gunky stole his heart and mind. I ask him to tell me what to do, if he's there. And I get an answer - although whether it is really from Paul or just from my own imagination masquerading as Paul I suppose I'll never know. In the end, I don't see that it matters; I need an answer and I get one. In my ear, just as clearly as he ever spoke when he was alive, Paul says: "Daddy's prize is a kiss."