Lisey's Story Part 21

He won't be able to, he thinks as his father goes one way (to get his gun out of the front closet) and Scott goes another (to yank on his boots). He'll kill himself if he goes on like that. But then he thinks of the roar he heard bursting out of his brother's chest-that impossible catmurder roar-and doesn't really believe it.

And as he runs coatless into the cold, he thinks he might even know what's happened to Paul. There's a place where he can go when Daddy has hurt him, and he has taken Paul there when Daddy has hurt Paul. Yes, plenty of times. There are good things in that place, beautiful trees and healing water, but there are also bad things. Scott tries not to go there at night, and when he does he's quiet and comes back quick, because the deep intuition of his child's heart tells him night is when the bad things mostly come out. Night is when they hunt.

If he can go there, is it so hard to believe that something-a bad-gunky something-could get inside Paul and then come over here? Something that saw him and marked him, or maybe just a dumb germ that crawled up his nose and stuck in his brain?

And if so, whose fault is that? Who took Paul in the first place?

In the shed, Scott throws the light chain in the wheelbarrow. That's easy, the work of only seconds. Getting the tractorchain in there is a lot harder. The tractor-chain is puffickly huh-yooge, talking all the while in its clanky language, which is all steel vowels. Twice heavy loops slip through his trembling arms, the second time pinching his skin and dragging it open, bringing blood in bright rosettes. The third time he almost has it in the wheelbarrow when a twenty-pound armload of links lands crooked, on the side of the barrowbed instead of on the square, and the entire load of chainlink topples over on Scott's foot, burying it in steel and making him scream a perfect soprano choircry of pain.

-Scooter, you comin before the turn of two thousand? Daddy bawls from the house. If you're comin, you better d.a.m.n well motherf.u.c.kin come!

Scott looks that way, eyes wide and terrified, then sets the wheelbarrow up again and bends over the big greasy heap of chain. His foot will still be bruise-gaudy a month later and he'll feel pain there all the way to the end of his life (that's one problem traveling to that other place is never able to fix), but at the time he feels nothing after the initial flare. He again begins the job of loading the links into the wheelbarrow, feeling the hot sweat go rolling down his sides and back, smelling the wild stink of it, knowing that if he hears a gunshot it will mean Paul's brains are out on the cellar floor and it's his fault. Time becomes a physical thing with weight, like dirt. Like chain. He keeps expecting Daddy to yell at him again from the house and when he still hasn't by the time Scott begins trundling the wheelbarrow back toward the yellow gleam of the kitchen lights, Scott begins to have a different fear: that Paul has gotten a-loose after all. It isn't Paul's brains lying down there on the sour-smelling dirt, it's Daddy's guts, pulled from his living stomach by the thing that was Scott's brother just this afternoon. Paul's up the stairs and hiding in the house and as soon as Scott goes inside the bool hunt will start. Only this time he will be the prize.

All that's his imagination, of course, his d.a.m.ned old imagination that runs like a wildeyed nighthorse, but when his father leaps out onto the porch it has done enough work so that for a moment Scott sees not Andrew Landon but Paul, grinning like a goblin, and he shrieks. When he raises his hands to guard his face the wheelbarrow almost tips over again. Would have, if Daddy hadn't reached out to steady it. Then he raises one of those hands to swat his son but lowers it almost at once. Later there may be swatting, but not now. Now he needs him. So instead of hitting Daddy only spits into his right hand and rubs it against his left. Then he bends, oblivious of the cold out here on the back stoop in his underwear shirt and grabs hold of the wheelbarrow's front end.

-I'm gonna yank it up, Scooter. You hang on those handles and steer and don't let the mother tip. I gave him another tonk-I had to-but it won't keep him out long. If we spill this load of chain, I don't think he's gonna live through the night. I won't be able to let him. You understand?

Scott understands that his brother's life is now riding in a seriously overloaded wheelbarrow filled with chain that weighs three times what he does. For one wild moment he seriously considers simply running away into the windy dark, and as fast as he can go. Then he grabs the handles. He is unaware of the tears spilling from his eyes. He nods at his Daddy and his Daddy nods back. What pa.s.ses between them is nothing but life and death.

-On three. One...two...keep it straight now, you little wh.o.r.edog...three!

Sparky Landon lifts the wheelbarrow from the ground to the stoop with a cry of effort that escapes in white vapor. His underwear shirt splits open beneath one arm and a tuft of crazy ginger hair springs free. While the overloaded barrow is in the air the d.a.m.ned thing yaws first left and then right and the boy thinks stay up you mother, you wh.o.r.edog mothersmuck. He corrects each tilt, crying at himself not to push too hard, not to overdo it you stupid mother, you stupid wh.o.r.edog badgunky mother. And it works, but Sparky Landon wastes no time in congratulations. What Sparky Landon does is to back his way into the house, rolling the wheelbarrow after him. Scott limps behind on his ballooning foot.

In the kitchen, Daddy turns the wheelbarrow around and trundles it straight for the cellar door, which he has closed and bolted. The wheel makes a track through the spilled sugar. Scott never forgets that.

-Get the door, Scott.

-Daddy, what if he's...there?

-Then I'll knock him galley-west with this thing. If you want a shot at saving him, quit running your nonsense and open that smogging door!

Scott pulls back the bolt and opens the door. Paul isn't there. Scott can see Paul's bloated shadow still attached to the pole, and something that has been strung up high and tight inside him relaxes a little.

-Stand aside, son.

Scott does. His father runs the wheelbarrow to the top of the cellar stairs. Then, with another grunt, he tips it up, braking the barrow's wheel with one foot when it tries to backroll. The chain hits the stairs with a mighty unmusical clang, splintering two of the risers and then crashing most of the way down. Daddy slings the wheelbarrow to one side and starts down himself, reaching the come-to-rest chain at the halfway mark and kicking it ahead of him the rest of the way. Scott follows and has just stepped over the first broken riser when he sees Paul lolling sideways from the post, the left side of his face now covered with blood. The corner of his mouth is twitching senselessly. One of his teeth lies on the shoulder of his shirt.

-Wha'd you do to him? Scott nearly screams.

-Whacked him with a board, I had to, his father replies, sounding oddly defensive. He was coming around and you were still out there playin fiddly-f.u.c.k in the shed. He'll be all right. You can't hurt em much when they're bad-gunky.

Scott barely hears him. Seeing Paul covered with blood that way has swept what happened in the kitchen from his mind. He tries to dart around Daddy and get to his brother, but Daddy grabs him.

-Not unless you don't want to go on living, Sparky Landon says, and what stops Scott isn't so much the hand on his shoulder as the terrible tenderness he hears in his father's voice. Because he'll smell you if you get right up close. Even unconscious. Smell you and come back.

He sees his younger son looking up at him and nods.

-Oh yeah. He's like a wild animal now. A maneater. And if we can't find a way to hold him we'll have to kill him. Do you understand?

Scott nods, then voices one loud sob that sounds like the bray of a donkey. With that same terrible tenderness, Daddy reaches out, wipes snot from his nose, and flicks it on the floor.

-Then stop your whingeing and help me with these chains. We'll use that central support-pole and the table with the printingpress on it. That d.a.m.n press has got to weight four, five hunnert pounds.

-What if those things aren't enough to hold 'im?

Sparky Landon shakes his head slowly.

-Then I dunno.

16.Lying in bed with his wife, listening to The Antlers creak in the wind, Scott says: "It was enough. For three weeks, at least, it was enough. That's where my brother Paul had his last Christmas, his last New Year's Day, the last three weeks of his life-that stinking cellar." He shakes his head slowly. She feels the movement of his hair against her skin, feels how damp it is. It's sweat. It's on his face, too, so mixed with tears she can't tell which is which.

"You can't imagine what those three weeks were like, Lisey, especially when Daddy went to work and it was just him and me, it and me-"

"Your father went to work?"

"We had to eat, didn't we? And we had to pay for the Number Two, because we couldn't heat the whole house with wood, although G.o.d knows we tried. Most of all, we couldn't afford to make people suspicious. Daddy explained it all to me."

I bet he did, Lisey thinks grimly, but says nothing.

"I tole Daddy to cut him and let the poison out like he always did before and Daddy said it wouldn't do any good, cutting wouldn't help a mite because the bad-gunky had gone to his brain. And I knew it had. That thing could still think, though, at least a little. When Daddy was gone, it would call my name. It would say it had made me a bool, a good bool, and the end was a candybar and an RC. Sometimes it even sounded enough like Paul so I'd go to the cellar door and put my head to the wood and listen, even though I knew it was dangerous. Daddy said it was dangerous, said not to listen and always stay away from the cellar when I was alone, and to stick my fingers in my ears and say prayers real loud or yell 'Smuck you mother, smuck you mother-f.u.c.ker, smuck you and the horse you rode in on,' because that and prayers both came to the same and at least they'd shut him out, but not to listen, because he said Paul was gone and there wasn't nothing in the cellar but a bool-devil from the Land of the Blood-Bools, and he said 'The Devil can fascinate, Scoot, no one knows better than the Landons how the devil can fascinate. And the Landreaus before em. First he fascinates the mind and then he drinks up the heart.' Mostly I did what he said but sometimes I went close and listened...and pretended it was Paul...because I loved him and wanted him back, not because I really believed...and I never pulled the bolt..."

Here there falls a long pause. His heavy hair slips restlessly against her neck and chest and at last he says in a small, reluctant child's voice: "Well, once I did...and I dint open the door...I never opened that cellar door unless Daddy was home, and when Daddy was home he only screamed and made the chains rattle and sometimes hooted like a owl. And when he did that sometimes Daddy, he'd hoot back...it was like a joke, you know, how they hooted at each other...Daddy in the kitchen and the...you know...chained up in the cellar...and I'd be ascairt even though I knew it was a joke because it was like they were both crazy...crazy and talking winter-owl talk to each other...and I'd think, 'Only one left, and that's me. Only one who ain't badgunky and that one not even eleven and what would they think if I went to Mulie's and told?' But it didn't do no good thinkin about Mulie's because if he 'us home he'd just chase after me and drag me back. And if he wasn't...if they believed me and came up to t'house with me, they'd kill my brother...if my brother was still in 'ere somewhere...and take me away...and put me in the Poor Home. Daddy said without him to take care of me an Paul, we'd have to go to the Poor Home where they put a clo'pin on your d.i.n.k if you pee in your bed...and the big kids...you have to give the big kids b.l.o.w.j.o.bs all night long..." He stops, struggling, caught somewhere between where he is and where he was. Outside The Antlers, the wind gusts and the building groans. She wants to believe that what he's telling her cannot be true-that it is some rich and dreadful childhood hallucination-but she knows it is true. Every awful word. When he resumes she can hear him trying to regain his adult voice, his adult self.

"There are people in mental inst.i.tutions, often people who've suffered catastrophic frontal-lobe traumas, who regress to animal states. I've read about it. But it's a process that usually occurs over a course of years. This happened to my brother all at once. And once it had, once he'd crossed that line..."

Scott swallows. The click in his throat is as loud as a turning light-switch.

"When I came down the cellar stairs with his food-meat and vegetables on a pie-plate, the way you'd bring food to a big dog like a Great Dane or a German Shepherd-he'd rush to the end of the chains that held him to the post, one around his neck and one around his waist, with drool flying from the corners of his mouth and then the whole works would snub up and he'd go flying, still howling and barking like a booldevil, only sort of strangled until he got his breath back, you know?"

"Yes," she says faintly.

"You had to put the plate on the floor-I still remember the smell of that sour dirt when I bent over, I'll never forget it-and then push it to where he could get it. We had a bust' rake handle for that. It didn't do to get too close. He'd claw you, maybe pull you in. I didn't need Daddy to tell me that if he caught me, he'd eat as much of me as he could, alive and screaming. And this was the brother who made the bools. The one who loved me. Without him I never would have made it. Without him Daddy would have killed me before I made five, not because he meant to but because he was in his own bad-gunky. Me and Paul made it together. Buddy system. You know?"

Lisey nods. She knows.

"Only that January my buddy was cross-chained in the cellar-to the post and to the table with the printing-press on it-and you could measure the boundary of his world by this arc...this arc of t.u.r.ds...where he went to the end of his chains...and squatted...and shat."

For a moment he puts the heels of his hands to his eyes. The cords stand out on his neck. He breathes through his mouth- long harsh shaking breaths. She doesn't think she has to ask him where he learned the trick of keeping his grief silent; that she now knows. When he's still again, she asks: "How did your father get the chains on him in the first place? Do you remember?"

"I remember everything, Lisey, but that doesn't mean I know everything. Half a dozen times he put stuff in Paul's food, of that I'm positive. I think it was some kind of animal tranquilizer, but how he got it I have no idea. Paul gobbled down everything we gave him except for greens, and usually food energized him. He'd yowl and bark and leap around; he'd run to the end of his chains-trying to break them, I guess-or jump up and pound his fists on the ceiling until his knuckles bled. Maybe he was trying to break through, or maybe it was just for the joy of it. Sometimes he'd lie down in the dirt and m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e.

"But once in awhile he'd only be active for ten or fifteen minutes and then stop. Those were the times Daddy must have give him the stuff. He'd squat down, muttering, then fall over on his side and put his hands between his legs and go to sleep. The first time he did that, Daddy put on these two leather belts he made, except I guess you'd call the one that went around Paul's neck a choker, right? They had big metal claps at the back. He loop the chains through em, the tractorchain through the waist-belt clap, the lighter chain through the choker-belt clap at the nape of his neck. Then he used a little hand-torch to weld them claps shut. And that was how Paul was trussed. When he woke up he was wild to find himself that way. Like to shook the house down." The flattened, nasal accents of rural Pennsylvania have crept so far into his voice that house becomes almost Germanic, almost haus. "We stood at the top of the stairs watchin 'im, and I beg Daddy to let 'im out before he broke 'is neck or choke 'imself, but Daddy, he said he wun't choke and Daddy was right. What happen after three weeks was he started to pull table and even center-pos'- the steel center-pos' that held up the kitchen floor-but he never broke his neck and he never choke 'imself.

"The other times Daddy knock him out was to see if I could take him to Boo'ya Moon-did I tell you that's what me n Paul called it, the other place?"

"Yes, Scott." Crying herself now. Letting the tears flow, not wanting him to see her wiping her eyes, not wanting to let him see her pitying that boy in that farmhouse.

"Daddy want to see if I could take him and make him better like the times when Daddy cut him, or like that one time Daddy poke his eye with the pliers and make it come a little way out and Paul crite and crite because he couldn't hardly see good, or once Daddy yell at me and say 'Scoot, you little wh.o.r.edog, you mother-killing mother!' for trackin in the spring muddy and push me down and crack my tailbone so I couldn't walk so well. Only after I went and had a bool...you know, a prize...my tailbone was okay again." He nods against her. "And Daddy, he see and give me a kiss and say, 'Scott, you're one in a million. I love you, you little motherf.u.c.ker.' And I kiss him and say 'Daddy, you one in a million. I love you, you big motherf.u.c.ker.' And he laughed." Scott pulls back from her and even in the gloom she can see that his face has almost become a child's face. And she can see the goonybird wonder there. "He laughed so hard he almos' fell out of his chair-I made my father laugh!"

She has a thousand questions and doesn't dare ask a single one. Isn't sure she could ask a single one.

Scott puts a hand to his face, rubs it, looks at her again. And he's back. Just like that. "Christ, Lisey," he says. "I've never talked about this stuff, never, not to anyone. Are you okay with this?"

"Yes, Scott."

"You're one h.e.l.l of a brave woman, then. Have you started telling yourself it's all bulls.h.i.t yet?" He's even grinning a little. It's an uncertain grin, but it's genuine enough, and she finds it dear enough to kiss: first one corner, then the other, just for balance.

"Oh, I tried," she says. "It didn't work."

"Because of how we boomed out from under the yum-yum tree?"

"Is that what you call it?"

"That was Paul's name for a quick trip. Just a quick trip that got you from here to there. That was a boom."

"Like a bool, only with an m."

"That's right," he says. "Or like a book. A book's a bool, only with a k."

17.

I guess it depends on you, Scoot.

These are his father's words. They linger and do not leave.

I guess it depends on you.

But he is only ten years old and the responsibility of saving his brother's life and sanity-maybe even his soul-weighs on him and steals his sleep as Christmas and New Year's pa.s.s and cold snowy January begins.

You've made him better a lot of times, you've made him better of a lot of things.

It's true, but there's never been anything like this and Scott finds he can no longer eat unless Daddy stands beside him, hectoring him into each bite. The lowest, snuffling cry from the thing in the cellar unzips his thin sleep, but most generally that's okay, because most generally what he's leaving behind are lurid, red-painted nightmares. In many of these he finds himself alone in Boo'ya Moon after dark, sometimes in a certain graveyard near a certain pool, a wilderness of stone markers and wooden crosses, listening as the laughers cackle and smelling as the formerly sweet breeze begins to smell dirty down low, where it combs through the tangles of brush. You can come to Boo'ya Moon after dark, but it's not a good idea, and if you find yourself there once the moon has fully risen, you want to be quiet. Just as quiet as a sweetmother. But in his nightmares, Scott always forgets and is appalled to find himself singing "Jambalaya" at the top of his voice.

Maybe you can make him better of this.

But the first time Scott tries he knows it's probably impossible. He knows as soon as he puts a tentative arm around the snoring, stinking, bes.h.i.tted thing curled at the foot of the steel support post. He might as well try to strap a grand piano on his back and then do the cha-cha with it. Before, he and Paul have gone easily to that other world (which is really only this world turned inside-out like a pocket, he will later tell Lisey). But the snoring thing in the cellar is an anvil, a bank-safe...a grand piano strapped to a ten-year-old's back.

He retreats to Daddy, sure he'll be paddled and not sorry. He feels that he deserves to be paddled. Or worse. But Daddy, who sat at the foot of the stairs with a stovelength in one hand watching the whole thing, doesn't paddle or strike with his fist. What he does is brush Scott's dirty, clumpy hair away from the nape of his neck and plant a kiss there with a tenderness that makes the boy quake.

-Aint really surprised, Scott. Bad-gunky likes it right where it is.

-Daddy, is Paul in there at all anymore?

-Dunno. Now he's got Scott between his open spread legs so that there are green d.i.c.kies on either side of the boy. Daddy's hands are locked loosely around Scott's chest and his chin is on Scott's shoulder. Together they look at the sleeping thing curled at the foot of the post. They look at the chains. They look at the arc of t.u.r.ds that mark the border of its bas.e.m.e.nt world.-What do you think, Scott? What do you feel?

He considers lying to Daddy, but only for a moment. He won't do that when the man's arms are around him, not when he feels Daddy's love coming through in the clear, like WWVA at night. Daddy's love is every bit as true as his anger and madness, if less frequently seen and even less frequently demonstrated. Scott feels nothing, and reluctantly says so.

-Little buddy, we can't go on this way.

-Why not? He's eatin, at least...

-Sooner or later someone'll come and hear him down here. A smucking door-to-door salesman, one lousy Fuller Brush man, that's all it'd take.

-He'll be quiet. Bad-gunky'll make him be quiet.

-Maybe, maybe not. There's no telling what bad-gunky'll do, not really. And there's the smell. I can sprinkle lime until I'm blue in the face and that s.h.i.t-stink is still gonna come up through the kitchen floor. But most of all...Scooter, can't you see what he's doin to that motherless table with the printin-press on it? And the post? The sweetmother post?

Scott looks. At first he can barely credit what he's seeing, and of course he doesn't want to credit what he's seeing. That big table, even with five hundred pounds of ancient hand-crank Stratton printing-press on it, has been pulled at least three feet from its original position. He can see the square marks in the hardpacked earth where it used to be. Worse still is the steel post, which b.u.t.ts against a flat metal f.l.a.n.g.e at its top end. The white-painted f.l.a.n.g.e presses in turn against the beam running directly beneath their kitchen table. Scott can see a dark right-angle tattooed on that white piece of metal and knows it's where the support post used to rest. Scott measures the post itself with his eye, trying to pick up a lean. He can't, not yet. But if the thing continues to yank on it with all its inhuman strength...day in and day out... -Daddy, can I try again?

Daddy sighs. Scott cranes around to look into his hated, feared, loved face.

-Daddy?

-Have on 'til your cheeks crack, Daddy says. Have on and good luck to you.

18.

Silence in the study over the barn, where it was hot and she was hurt and her husband was dead.

Silence in the guest room, where it's cold and her husband is gone.

Silence in the bedroom at The Antlers, where they lie together, Scott and Lisey, Now we are two.

Then the living Scott speaks for the one that's dead in 2006 and gone in 1996, and the arguments against insanity do more than fall through; for Lisey Landon, they finally collapse completely: everything the same.

19.

Outside their bedroom at The Antlers, the wind is blowing and the clouds are thinning. Inside, Scott pauses long enough to get a drink from the gla.s.s of water he always keeps by the side of the bed. The interruption breaks the hypnotic regression that has once more begun to grip him. When he resumes, he seems to be telling instead of living, and she finds this an enormous relief.

"I tried twice more," he says. Tried, not trite. "I used to think trying that last time was how I got him killed. Right up until tonight I thought that, but talking about it-hearing myself talk about it-has helped more than I ever would have believed. I guess psychoa.n.a.lysts have got something with that old talking-cure stuff after all, huh?"

"I don't know." Nor does she care. "Did your father blame you?" Thinking, Of course he did.

But once more she seems to have underestimated the complexity of the little triangle that existed for awhile on an isolated farmyard hill in Martensburg, Pennsylvania. Because, after hesitating a moment, Scott shakes his head.

"No. It might have helped if he'd taken me in his arms-like he did after the first time I tried-and told me it wasn't my fault, wasn't anybody's fault, that it was just the bad-gunky, like cancer or cerebral palsy or something, but he never did that, either. He just hauled me away with one arm...I hung there like a puppet whose strings had been cut...and afterward we just..." In the brightening dimness, Scott explains all his silence about his past with one terrible gesture. He puts a finger to his lips for a second-it is a pallid exclamation point below his wide eyes-and holds it there: Shhhhh.

Lisey thinks of how it was after Jodi got pregnant and went away, and nods her understanding. Scott gives her a grateful look.

"Three tries in all," he resumes. "The second was only three or four days after my first go. I tried as hard as I could, but it was just like the first time. Only by then you could see a lean in the post he was chained to, and there was a second arc of t.u.r.ds, farther out, because he'd moved the table a little more and gotten a little extra slack in that chain. Daddy was starting to be afraid he might snap one of the table-legs, even though they were metal, too.

"After my second try, I told Daddy I was pretty sure I knew what was wrong. I couldn't do it-couldn't take him-because he was always knocked out when I got close to him. And Daddy said, 'Well what's your plan, Scooter, you want to grab him when he's awake and raving? He'd rip your smockin head off.' I said I knew it. I knew more than that, Lisey-I knew that if he didn't rip my head off in the cellar, he'd rip it off on the other side, in Boo'ya Moon. So then I ast Daddy if he couldn't knock him out just a little-you know, make him woozy. Enough so I could get in close and hold him the way I was holding you, today, under the yum-yum tree."

"Oh, Scott," she says. She is afraid for the ten-year-old boy even though she knows it must have come out all right; knows he lived to father the young man lying beside her.

"Daddy said it was dangerous. 'Playin with fire there, Scoot,' he said. I knew I was, but there wasn't any other way. We couldn't keep him in the cellar much longer; even I could see that. And then Daddy-he kind of ruffled my hair and said, 'What happen to the little p.i.s.sant ascairt to jump off the hall bench?' I was surprised he even remembered that, because he was so far in the bad-gunky, and I was proud."

Lisey thinks what a dismal life it must have been, where pleasing such a man could make a child proud, and reminds herself he was only ten. Ten, and alone with a monster in the cellar much of the time. The father was also a monster, but at least a rational one some of the time. A monster capable of doling out the occasional kiss.