Lisey's Story(28)

"Missus? Do you understand what I just told you?"

She knew what she wanted to say to him, but he might not understand. So Lisey decided to settle for the more common usage.

"Zack?" Speaking very low.

"Yes, Missus." He immediately fell into the same low tone.

What he perhaps took for one of mutual conspiracy.

"Can you hear me?"

"You're a bit low-pitch, but...yes, Missus."

She pulled air deep into her lungs. Held it for a moment, imagining this man who said Missus and husbun and dutn't for doesn't. Imagined him with the telephone screwed tightly against his ear, straining toward the sound of her voice. When she had the picture clearly in the forefront of her mind, she screamed into that ear with all her force. "THEN GO FUCK YOURSELF!"

Lisey slammed the phone back into the cradle hard enough to make dust fly up from the handset.

5

The telephone began to ring again almost immediately, but Lisey had no interest in further conversation with "Zack McCool." She suspected that any chance of having what the TV talking heads called a dialogue was gone. Not that she wanted one. Nor did she want to listen to him on the answering machine and find out if he'd lost that tone of weary good nature and now wanted to call her a bitch, a cunt, or a cooze. She traced the telephone cord back to the wall - the plate was close to that stack of liquor-store boxes - and yanked the jack.

The phone fell silent halfway through the third ring. So much for "Zack McCool," at least for the time being. She might have doings with him later, she supposed - or about him - but right now there was Manda to deal with. Not to mention Darla, waiting for her and counting on her. She'd just go back to the kitchen, grab her car-keys off the peg...and she'd take two minutes to lock the house up, as well, a thing she didn't always bother with in the daytime.

The house and the barn and the study.

Yes, especially the study, although she was damned if she'd capitalize it the way Scott had done, like it was some extraspecial big deal. But speaking of extra-special big deals...

She found herself looking into the top box again. She hadn't closed the flaps, so looking in was easy to do.

IKE COMES HOME

By Scott Landon

Curious - and this would, after all, take only a second - Lisey leaned the silver spade against the wall, lifted the titlepage, and looked beneath. On the second sheet was this:

Ike came home with a boom, and everything was fine.

BOOL! THE END!

Nothing else.

Lisey looked at it for nearly a minute, although God knew she had things to do and places to go. Her skin was prickling again, but this time the feeling was almost pleasant...and hell, there was really no almost about it, was there? A small, bemused smile was playing around her mouth. Ever since she'd begun the work of cleaning out his study - ever since she'd lost it and trashed what Scott had been pleased to call his "memory nook," if you wanted to be exact - she had felt his presence...but never as close as this. Never as actual. She reached into the box and thumbed through a deep thickness of the pages stacked there, pretty sure of what she would find. And did. All the pages were blank. She riffled a bunch of the ones crammed in sideways, and they were, too. In Scott's childhood lexicon, a boom had been a short trip and a bool...well, that was a little more complicated, but in this context it almost certainly meant a joke or harmless prank. This giant bogus novel was Scott Landon's idea of a knee-slapper.

Were the other two boxes in the stack also bools? And the ones in the bins and cubbies across the way? Was the joke that elaborate? And if so, whom was it supposed to be on? Her? Incunks like Woodbody? That made a certain amount of sense, Scott liked to poke fun at the folks he'd called "textcrazies," but that idea pointed toward a rather terrible possibility: that he might have intuited his own (Died Young) coming collapse (Before His Time) and said nothing to her. And it led to a question: would she have believed him if he'd told her? Her first impulse was to say no - to say, if only to herself, I was the practical one, the one who checked his luggage to see if he had enough underwear and called ahead to make sure the flights were running on time. But she remembered the way the blood on his lips had turned his smile into a clown's grin; she remembered how he had once explained to her - with what had seemed like perfect lucidity - that it was unsafe to eat any kind of fresh fruit after sunset, and that food of all kinds should be avoided between midnight and six. According to Scott, "nightfood" was often poisonous, and when he said it, it sounded logical. Because -  (hush)

"I would have believed him, leave it at that," she whispered, and put her head down, and closed her eyes against tears that did not come. Eyes that had wept at "Zack McCool"'s set speech were now dry as stones. Silly smucking eyes!

The manuscripts in the crammed drawers of his desks and the main filing cabinet upstairs were most certainly not bools; this Lisey knew. Some were copies of published short stories, some were alternate versions of those stories. In the desk Scott had called Dumbo's Big Jumbo she had marked at least three unfinished novels and what appeared to be a finished novella - and wouldn't Woodbody just drool. There were also half a dozen finished short stories Scott had apparently never cared enough to send out for publication, most of them years old from the look of the typefaces. She wasn't qualified to say what was trash and what was treasure, although she was sure it would all be of interest to Landon scholars. This, however...this bool, to use Scott's word...