Lisey’s Story (72 page)

But of course sometimes lost dogs came home; sometimes old strings held and led you to the prize at the end of the bool hunt. She started to unwrap the faded, matted remains of the afghan, then looked into the wastebasket, instead. What she saw made her laugh ruefully. It was nearly full of liquor bottles. One or two looked relatively new, and she was
sure
the one on the very top was, because there had been no such thing as Mike's Hard Lemonade ten years ago. But most of the bottles were old. This was where he'd come to do his drinking in '96, but even blind drunk he'd had too much respect for Boo'ya Moon to litter it up with empty bottles. And would she find other caches if she took the time to look? Maybe. Probably. But this was the only cache that mattered to her. It told her that this was where he'd come to do the last of his life's work.

She thought she had all the answers now except for the big ones, the ones she'd actually come for—how she was supposed to live with the long boy, and how she was supposed to keep from slipping over here to where it lived, especially when it was thinking of her. Perhaps Scott had left her some answers. Even if he hadn't, he'd left her
something
 . . . and it was very beautiful under this tree.

Lisey picked up the african again and felt it the way she'd once felt her Christmas presents as a girl. There was a box inside, but it didn't feel a bit like Good Ma's cedar box; it was softer than that, almost mushy, as if, even wrapped in the african and left under the tree, moisture had seeped in over the years . . . and for the first time she wondered how many years they were talking about here. The bottle of Hard Lemonade suggested not very many. And the feel of the thing suggested—

“It's a manuscript box,” she murmured. “One of his hard cardboard manuscript boxes.” Yes. She was sure of it. Only after two years under this tree . . . or three . . . or four . . . it had turned into a
soft
cardboard box.

Lisey began to unwrap the afghan. Two turns were enough to do the job; that was all that was left. And it
was
a manuscript box, its light gray color darkened to slate by seeping moisture. Scott always put a sticker
on the front of his boxes and wrote the title there. The sticker on this one had pulled loose on both sides and curled upward. She pushed it back with her fingers and saw a single word in Scott's strong, dark printing:
LISEY
. She opened the box. The pages inside were lined sheets torn from a notebook. There were perhaps thirty in all, packed tight with quick, dark strokes from one of his felt-tip pens. She wasn't surprised to see that Scott had written in the present tense, that what he had written seemed couched in occasionally childish prose, and that the story seemed to start in the middle. The last was true, she reflected, only if you didn't know how two brothers had survived their crazy father and what happened to one of them and how the other couldn't save him. The story only seemed to start in the middle if you didn't know about gomers and goners and the bad-gunky. It only started in the middle if you didn't know that

In February he starts looking at me funny, out of the corners of his eyes. I keep expecting him to yell at me or even whip out his old pocketknife and carve on me. He hasn't done anything like that in a long time but I think it would almost be a relief. It wouldn't let the bad-gunky out of me because there
isn't
any—I saw the real bad-gunky when Paul was chained up in the cellar, not Daddy's fantasies of it—and there's
nothing
like that in me. But there's something bad in
him,
and cutting doesn't let it out. Not this time, although he's tried plenty. I know. I've seen the bloody shirts and underpants in the wash. In the trash, too. If cutting me would help
him,
I'd let him, because I still love him. More than ever since it's just the two of us. More than ever since what we went through with Paul. That kind of love is a kind of doom, like the bad-gunky. “Bad-gunky's
strong
,” he said.

But he won't cut.

One day I'm coming back from the shed where I sat for a little while to think about Paul—to think about all the good times we had rolling around this old place—and Daddy grabs me and he shakes. “
You went over there!
” he shouts in my face. And I can see that however sick I thought he was, it's worse. He's never been

as bad as this. “Why do you go over there? What do you do over there? Who do you talk to?
What are you planning?
”

All the time shaking me and shaking me, the world tipping up and down. Then my head hits the side of the door and I see stars and I fall down there in the doorway with the heat of the kitchen on my front and the cold of the dooryard on my back.

“No, Daddy,” I say, “I didn't go anywhere, I was just—”

He bends over me, his hands on his knees, his face down in my face, his skin pale except for two balls of color high up on his cheeks and I see the way his eyes are going back and forth, back and forth, and I know that he and right aren't even writing letters to each other anymore. And I remember Paul saying
Scott you dassn't ever cross Daddy when he's not right
.

“
Don't you tell me you didn't go nowhere you lying little motherfucker, I been ALL OVER THIS MOTHER-SMOCKING HOUSE!
”

I think to tell him I was in the shed, but I know that will make things worse instead of better. I think of Paul saying you dassn't cross him when he's not right, when he's getting in the bad, and since I know where he thinks I was, I say yes, Daddy, yes, I went to Boo'ya Moon, but only to put flowers on Paul's grave. And it works. For then, at least. He relaxes. He even grabs my hand and pulls me up and then brushes me off, as though he sees snow or dirt or something on me. There isn't any, but maybe he does see it. Who knows.

He says: “Is it all right, Scoot? Is his grave all right? Nothing been at it, or at him?”

“Everything's fine, Daddy,” I say.

He says, “There are Nazis at work, Scooter, did I tell you? I must've. They worship Hitler in the basement. They have a little ceramic statue of the bastard. They think I don't know.”

I'm only ten, but I know Hitler's been one dead dog since the end of the Second World War. I also know that nobody from U.S. Gyppum is worshipping even a statue of him in the basement. I know a third thing, as well, which is never to cross Daddy when he's in the bad-gunky, and so I say, “What will you do about it?”

He leans close to me and I think he's going to hit me this time sure, at least start shaking me again. But instead he fixes his eyes on mine (I've never seen them so big or so dark) and then he grabs hold of his ear. “What's this, Scooter? What's it look like to you, old Scoot?”

“Your ear, Daddy,” I say.

He nods, still holding his ear and still holding my eyes with his. All these years later I still see those eyes in my dreams sometimes. “I'm going to keep it to the ground,” he says. “And when the time comes . . .” He cocks his finger and makes shooting motions. “Every smucking one, Scooter. Every sweetmother Nazi in the place.” Maybe he would have done it. My father, out in a blaze of rancid glory. Maybe there would have been one of those news stories—PENNSYLVANIA RECLUSE GOES ON RAMPAGE, KILLS NINE CO-WORKERS, SELF, MOTIVE UNCLEAR—but before he can get around to it, the bad-gunky takes him a different way.

February has been clear and cold, but when March comes in, the weather changes and Daddy changes with it. As the temperatures rise and the skies cloud over and the first sleety rains start to fall, he grows morose and silent. He stops shaving, then showering, then cooking our meals. There comes a day, maybe a third of the way through the month, when I realize that the three days off work he sometimes gets because of the swing shift have stretched to four . . . then five . . . then six. Finally I ask him when he's going back. I'm scared to ask him, because now he spends most of his days either upstairs in his bedroom or downstairs lying on the sofa listening to country music on WWVA out of Wheeling, West Virginia. He hardly ever says anything to me in either place, and I see his eyes going back and forth all the time now as he looks for
them,
the Bad-Gunky Folks, the Bloody Bool Folks. So—
no,
I don't want to ask him but I have to, because if he doesn't go back to work, what will happen to us? Ten is old enough to know that with no money coming in, the world will change.

“You want to know when I'm going back to work,” he says in a thoughtful tone of voice. Lying there on the sofa with beard-stubble all over his face. Lying there in an old fisherman's sweater and a pair of Dickies and his bare feet poking out. Lying there while Red Sovine sings “Giddyup-Go” out of the radio.

“Yes, Daddy.”

He gets up on one elbow and looks at me, and I see then that he is
gone
. Worse, that something is hiding inside him, growing, getting stronger, biding its time. “You want to
know
.
When
. I'm. Going.
Back
to
work
.”

“I guess that's your business,” I say. “I really just came in to ask if I should put on the coffee.”

He grabs my arm, and that night I see dark blue bruises where his fingers dug into me. Four dark blue bruises in the shape of his fingers. “Want to
know
.
When
. I'm. Going.
There
.” He lets go and sits up. His eyes are bigger than ever, and they won't stay still. They jitter in their sockets. “I ain't never going
there
no more,
Scott.
That
place is
closed
.
That
place is all blowed up. Don't you know anything, you dumb little gluefoot motherfucker?” He looks down at the dirty living room carpet. On the radio, Red Sovine gives way to Ferlin Husky. Then Daddy looks up again and he
is
Daddy, and he says something that almost breaks my heart. “You may be dumb, Scooter, but you're brave. You're my brave boy. I'm not gonna let it hurt you.”

Then he lies back down on the couch again, and turns his face away, and tells me not to bother him any more, he wants to take a nap.

That night I wake up to the sound of sleet ticking off the window and he's sitting on the side of my bed, smiling down at me. Only it's not him smiling. There's almost nothing in his eyes but the bad-gunky. “Daddy?” I say, and he says nothing back. I think:
He's going to kill me. Going to put his hands around my neck and choke me, and everything we went through, all that with Paul, it will have been for nothing
.

But instead he says, in a kind of strangled voice: “Go back slee',” and gets up off the bed, and walks out in this kind of herky-jerky way, with his chin leading and his ass wagging, like he's pretending to be a drill-sergeant in a parade, or something. A few seconds later I hear this terrible meat crash and I know that he's fallen downstairs, or maybe even threw himself down, and I lie there awhile, not able to get out of bed, hoping he's dead, hoping he's not, wondering what I'll do if he is, who'll take care of me, not caring, not knowing what I hope for the most. Part of me even hopes he'll finish the job, come back and kill me, just finish the job, end the horror of living in that house. Finally I call out, “Daddy? Are you all right?”

For a long time there's no answer. I lie there listening to the sleet, thinking
He's dead, he is, my Daddy's dead, I'm here alone
, and then he bellows out of the dark, from down below: “Yes, all right! Shut up, you little shit! Shut up unless you want the thing in the wall to hear you and come out and eat us both alive! Or do you want it to get in you like it got into Paul?”

I don't say nothing to that, just lay there shaking.

“Answer me!” he bawls. “
Answer, nummie, or I'll come up there and make you sorry!
”

But I can't, I'm too scared to answer, my tongue is nothing but this tiny huck of dried-up beef jerky lying on the bottom of my mouth. I don't cry, either. I'm even too scared to do that. I just lie there and wait for him to come upstairs and hurt me. Or dead-dog kill me.

Then, after what seems like a very long time—at least an hour, although it
couldn't have been more than a minute or two—I hear him mutter something that might have been
My fuckin head's bleedin
or
It won't ever stop sleetin
. Whatever it is, it's going away from the stairs and toward the living room, and I know he'll climb on the sofa and go to sleep there. In the morning he'll either wake up or he won't, but either way he's done with me for tonight. But I'm still scared. I'm scared because there
is
a thing. I don't think it's in the wall, but there
is
a thing. It got Paul, and it's probably going to get my Daddy and then there's me. I've thought about that a lot, Lisey,

From her place under the tree—actually sitting with her back against the tree's trunk—Lisey looked up, almost as startled as she would have been if Scott's ghost had hailed her by name. In a way she supposed that was just what had happened, and really, why should she be surprised? Of course he was talking to her, her and no one else. This was her story, Lisey's story, and even though she was a slow reader, she had already worked her way through a third of the handwritten notebook pages. She thought she'd finish long before dark. That was good. Boo'ya Moon was a sweet place, but only in the daylight.

She looked back down at his last manuscript and was again amazed that he had lived through his childhood. She noted that Scott had lapsed into the past tense only when addressing her, here in her present. She smiled at that and resumed reading, thinking if she had one wish it would be to fly to that lonely kid on her highly hypothetical flour-sack magic carpet and comfort him, if only by whispering in his ear that in time the nightmare would end. Or at least that part of it.