Lisey's Story(96)

- Daddy, is he dead?

Daddy slings the stovelength into the woodbox and brushes his long hair back. There's melting snow in the stubble on his cheeks - No he aint. That would be too easy. He tromps to the back door and slams it shut, cutting off the draft. His every movement expresses disgust, but Scott has seen him act so before - when he gets Official Letters about taxes or schooling or things like that - and is pretty sure that what he really is is scared.

Daddy comes back and stands over his floorbound boy. He rocks from one booted foot to the other awhile. Then he looks up at the other one.

- Help me get him down cellar, Scoot.

It isn't wise to question Daddy when he tells you to do a thing, but Scott is frightened. Also, he is next door to naked. He comes down to the kitchen and starts pulling his pants on. - Why, Daddy? What are you going to do with him?

And for a wonder, Daddy doesn't hit him. Doesn't even yell at him.

- I'll be smucked if I know. Truss him up down there for a start while I think about it. Hurry up. He won't be out long.

- Is it really the bad-gunky? Like with the Landreaus? And your Uncle Theo?

- What do you think, Scoot? Get his head, less you want it to bump all the way down. He won't be out long I tell you, and if he starts again, you might not be so lucky. Me either. Badgunky's strong.

Scott does as his father says. It's the nineteen-sixties, it's America, men will soon be walking on the moon, but here they have a boy to deal with who has seemingly gone feral in the turn of a moment. The father simply accepts the fact. After his first shocked questions, the son does, as well. When they reach the bottom of the cellar stairs, Paul begins to stir again and make thick sounds deep in his throat. Sparky Landon puts his hands around his older son's throat and begins to choke him. Scott screams in horror and tries to grab his father.

- Daddy, no!

Sparky Landon releases one hand from what it's been doing long enough to administer an absent backhand blow to his younger son. Scott goes reeling back and strikes the table sitting in the middle of the dirt-floored room. Standing on it is an ancient hand-crank printing press that Paul has somehow coaxed back into working. He has printed some of Scott's stories on it; they are the younger brother's first publications. The crank of this quarter-ton behemoth bites painfully into Scott's back and he crumples up, grimacing, watching as his father resumes choking.

- Daddy, don't kill 'im! PLEASE DON'T KILL 'IM!

- I ain't, Landon says without looking around, I should, but I aint. Not yet, anyway. More fool me, but he's my own boy, my f**kin firstborn, and I won't unless I have to. Which I fear I will. Sweet Mother Machree! But not yet. Mother-fogged if I will. Only it won't do to let him wake up. You aint never seen anything like this, but I have. I got lucky upstairs because I was behind him. Down here I could chase him two hours and never catch him. He'd run up the walls and halfway across the sweetmother ceiling. Then, when he wore me down...

Landon removes his hands from Paul's throat and peers fixedly into the still white face. That little trickle of blood from Paul's ear seems to have stopped.

- There. How you like that, you mother, you mother-f*ck? He's out again. But he not for long. Fetch out that coil of rope from understair. That'll do until we can get some chain out of the shed. Then I dunno. Then it depends.

- Depends on what, Daddy?

Scared. Has he ever been so scared? No. And his father is looking at him in a way that scares him even more. Because it is a knowing way.

- Why, I guess it depends on you, Scoot. You've made him better a lot of times...and why do you want to come over all cow's eyes that way? You think I didn't know? Jayzus, for a smart boy ain't you dumb! He turns his head and spits on the dirt floor.

You've made him better of a lot of things. Maybe you can make him better of this. I never heard of anyone getting better from the bad-gunky...not the real bad-gunky...but I never heard of anybody just like you, either, so maybe you can. Have on 'til your cheeks crack, my old man would've said. But for now just fetch out that coil of rope from understair. And step to it, you little gluefoot mother-f*ck, because he's 11

"He's stirring already," Lisey said as she lay on the oysterwhite carpet of her dead husband's study. "He's

12

"Stirring already," Lisey says as she sits on the cold floor of the guest room, holding her husband's hand - a hand that is warm but dreadfully lax and waxy in her own. "Scott said

13

The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound;

these are the sounds of dead voices on dead records floating down the broken shaft of memory.

When I turn to you to ask if you remember, When I turn to you in our bed

14

In bed with him is where she hears these things; in bed with him at The Antlers, after a day when something happened she absolutely cannot explain. He tells her as the clouds thin and the moon nears like an announcement and the furniture swims to the very edge of visibility. She holds him in the dark and listens, not wanting to believe (helpless not to), as the young man who will shortly become her husband says, "Daddy tole me to fetch out that coil of rope from understair. 'And you want to step to it, you little gluefoot mother-f*ck,' he says, 'because he's not gonna stay out for long. And when he comes to

15

- When he comes to he's gonna be one ugly bug.