Lisey's Story(89)
Christmas itself is a happy day, with lots of presents exchanged and an energetic midday tumble in the sack. Christmas dinner is at Canty and Rich's, and over dessert Rich asks Scott when he's going to produce one of the movies made from his novels.
"That's where the big money is," Rich says, seemingly ignorant of the fact that of four film adaptations so far, three have bombed. Only the movie version of Empty Devils (which Lisey has never seen) made money.
On the way home, Scott's sense of humor swoops back in like a big old B-1 bomber and he does a killer imitation of Rich that has Lisey laughing until her belly cramps up. And when they arrive back at Sugar Top Hill, they proceed upstairs for a second tumble in the sack. In the afterglow Lisey finds herself thinking that if Scott is sick, maybe more people should catch what he has, the world would be a better place. She wakes around two AM on Boxing Day, needing to use the bathroom, and - talk about dejà vu all over again - he's not in bed. But this time not gone. She has come to know the difference without even letting herself know what she means when she thinks ( gone) about that thing he sometimes does, that place he sometimes goes. She urinates with her eyes shut, listening to the wind outside the house. It sounds cold, that wind, but she doesn't know what cold is. Not yet. Let another couple of weeks pass and she will. Let another couple of weeks pass and she'll know all sorts of things. When she's done with the toilet, she peeks out the bathroom window. This looks toward the barn and Scott's study in the converted hayloft. If he was up there - and when he gets restless in the middle of the night, that is where he usually goes - she'd see the lights, perhaps even hear the happy carnival sounds of his rock-and-roll music, very faint. Tonight the barn is dark, and the only music she hears is the pitchpipe of the wind. This makes her a little uneasy; hatches thoughts in the back of her brain ( heart attack stroke) that are too unpleasant to completely consider, yet a little too strong, given how...how off he's been lately...to completely dismiss. So instead of sleepwalking back to the bedroom, she goes to the bathroom's other door, the one that gives on the upstairs hall. She calls his name and gets no answer, but she sees a slim gold bar of light shining beneath the closed door at the far end. And now, very faint, she hears the sound of music coming from down there. Not rock and roll but country. It's Hank Williams. Ole Hank is singing "Kaw-Liga."
"Scott?" she calls again, and when there's no answer she goes down there brushing the hair out of her eyes, bare feet whispering on a carpet that will later wind up in the attic, frightened for no reason she can articulate, except it has something to do with ( gone) things that are either finished or should be. All done and buttoned up, Dad Debusher might have said; that was one old Dandy caught from the pool, the one where we all go down to drink, the one where we cast our nets.
"Scott?"
She stands before the guest-room door for a moment and a horrible premonition comes to her: he's sitting dead in the rocking chair in front of the television, dead by his own hand, why has she not seen this coming, haven't all the symptoms been on display for a month or more? He has held out until Christmas, held out for her sake, but now -
"Scott?"
She turns the knob and pushes the door open and he's in the rocking chair just as she has imagined him, but very much alive, swaddled in his favorite Good Ma african, the yellow one. On the television, the sound turned low, is his favorite movie: The Last Picture Show. His eyes don't move from it to her.
"Scott? Are you okay?"
His eyes don't move, don't blink. She begins to be very afraid then, and in the back of her mind one of Scott's strange words ( gomer) pops off a haunted assembly line, and she swats it back into her subconscious with a barely articulated ( Smuck it! ) curse. She steps into the room and speaks his name again. This time he does blink - thank God - and turns his head to look at her, and smiles. It's the Scott Landon smile she fell in love with the first time she saw it. Mostly the way it makes his eyes turn up at the corners.
"Hey, Lisey," he says. "What're you doing up?"
"I could ask you the same question," she says. She looks for booze - a can of beer, maybe a half-finished bottle of Beam - and doesn't see any. That's good. "It's late, don't you know, late."
There is a long pause during which he seems to think this over very carefully. Then he says, "The wind woke me. It was rattling one of the gutters against the side of the house and I couldn't go back to sleep."
She starts to speak, then doesn't. When you've been married a long time - she supposes how long varies from marriage to marriage, with them it took about fifteen years - a kind of telepathy sets in. Right now it's telling her he has something more to say. So she stays quiet, waiting to see if she's right. At first it seems she is. He opens his mouth. Then the wind gusts outside and she hears it - a low quick rattling like the chatter of metal teeth. He cocks his head toward it...smiles a little...not a nice smile...the smile of someone who has a secret...and closes his mouth again. Instead of saying whatever it was he meant to say, he looks back at the TV screen, where Jeff Bridges - a very young Jeff Bridges - and his best friend are now driving to Mexico. When they get back, Sam the Lion will be dead.
"Do you think you could go to sleep now?" she asks him, and when he doesn't respond, she begins to feel afraid again. "Scott!" she says, a little more sharply than she intended, and when he returns his eyes to her (reluctantly, Lisey fancies, although he has seen this movie at least two dozen times), she repeats her question more quietly. "Do you think you could go back to sleep now?"