Lisey's Story(95)
Paul is sitting at the kitchen table when his kid brother, just ten years old and needing a haircut, comes down the back stairs with the laces of his sneakers flapping. Scott thinks he'll ask if Paul wants to go out sledding on the hill behind the barn once the wood's in. If Daddy doesn't have any more chores, that is.
Paul Landon, slim and tall and already handsome at thirteen, has a book open in front of him. The book is Introduction to Algebra, and Scott has no reason to believe Paul is doing anything other than solving for x until Paul turns his head to look at him. Scott is still three steps from the bottom of the stairs when Paul does that. It is only an instant before Paul lunges at his younger brother, to whom he has never so much as raised a hand in their lives together, but it is long enough to see that no, Paul wasn't just sitting there. No, Paul wasn't just reading. No, Paul wasn't studying.
Paul was lying in wait.
It isn't blankness he sees in his brother's eyes when Paul comes surging out of his chair hard enough to knock it skittering back against the wall, but pure bad-gunky. Those eyes are blue no more. Something has burst in the brain behind them and filled them with blood. Scarlet seeds stand in the corners.
Another child might have frozen to the spot and been killed by the monster who an hour before had been an ordinary brother with nothing on his mind but homework or perhaps what he and Scott could get Daddy for Christmas if they pooled their money. Scott, however, is no more ordinary than Paul. Ordinary children could never have survived Sparky Landon, and it's almost certainly the experience of living with his father's madness that saves Scott now. He knows the bad-gunky when he sees it, and wastes no time on disbelief. He turns instantly and tries to flee back up the stairs. He makes only three steps before Paul grabs him by the legs.
Snarling like a dog whose yard has been invaded, Paul curls his arms around Scott's shins and yanks the younger boy's legs out from under him. Scott grabs the banister and holds on. He gives a single two-word yell - "Daddy, help!" - and then is quiet.
Yelling wastes energy. He needs all of his to hold on.
He doesn't have enough strength to do so, of course. Paul is three years older, fifty pounds heavier, and much stronger. In addition to these things, he has run mad. If Paul pulls him free of the banister then, Scott will be badly hurt or killed in spite of his quick reaction, but instead of getting Scott, what Paul gets are Scott's corduroy pants and both sneakers, which he forgot to tie when he jumped down off his bed.
("If I'd tied my sneakers," he will tell his wife much later as they lie in bed on the second floor of The Antlers in New Hampshire, "we're most likely not here tonight. Sometimes I think that's all my life comes down to, Lisey - a pair of untied Keds, size seven.")
The thing that was Paul roars, stumbles backward with a hug of pants in its arms, and trips over the chair in which a handsome young fellow sat down an hour previous to map Cartesian coordinates. One sneaker falls to the bumpy, hillocky linoleum. Scott, meanwhile, is struggling to get going again, to get up to the second-floor landing while there's still time, but his sock feet spin out from under him on the smooth stair-riser and he goes back down to one knee.
His tattered underwear has been pulled partway down, he can feel a cold draft blowing on the crack of his ass, and there's time to think Please God, I don't want to die this way, with my fanny out to the wind. Then the brother-thing is up, bellowing and casting aside the pants. They skid across the kitchen table, leaving the algebra book but knocking the sugar-bowl to the floor - knocking it galley-west, their father might have said. The thing that was Paul leaps for him and Scott is bracing for its hands and the feel of its nails biting into his skin when there's a terrific wooden thonk! and a hoarse, furious shout: - Leave 'im alone, you smuckin bastard!
You bad-gunky f**k!
He forgot all about Daddy. The draft on his ass was Daddy coming in with the wood. Then Paul's hands do grab him, the fingernails do bite in, and he's pulled backward, his grip on the banister broken as easily as if it were a baby's. In a moment he will feel Paul's teeth. He knows it, this is the real bad-gunky, the deep bad-gunky, not what happens to Daddy when Daddy sees people who aren't there or makes a blood-bool on himself or one of them (a thing he does less and less to Scott as Scott grows older), but the real deal, what Daddy meant all the times he'd just laugh and shake his head when they asked him why the Landreaus left France even though it meant leaving all their money and land behind, and they were rich, the Landreaus were rich, and he's going to bite now, he's going to bite me right now, RAH-CHEER -
He never feels Paul's teeth. He feels hot breath on the unprotected meat of his left side just above the hip, and then there's another heavy wooden thonk! as Daddy brings the stovelength down on Paul's head again - two-handed, with all his strength. The sound is followed by a number of loose sliding sounds as Paul's body goes slithering down to the kitchen linoleum.
Scott turns over. He's lying splayed out on the lower stairs, dressed in nothing but an old flannel shirt, his underpants, and white athletic socks with holes in the heels. One foot is almost touching the floor. He's too stunned to cry. His mouth tastes like the inside of a piggybank. That last whack sounded awful, and for an instant his powerful imagination paints the kitchen with Paul's blood. He tries to cry out, but his shocked, flattened lungs can produce only a single dismayed squawk. He blinks and sees that there's no blood, only Paul lying facedown in the sugar from the now defunct bowl, which lies bust in four big and change. That one'll never dance the tango again, Daddy sometimes says when something breaks, a glass or a plate, but he doesn't say it now, just stands over his unconscious son in his yellow work coat. There's snow on his shoulders and in his shaggy hair, which is starting to go gray. In one gloved hand he holds the stovelength. Behind him, scattered in the entry like pickup sticks, is the rest of his armload. The door is still open and the cold draft is still blowing in. And now Scott sees there is blood, just a little, trickling from Paul's left ear and down the side of his face.