by Stephen King
—I see ’im, Daddy says, and the only thing grimmer than his voice is his face.
—Why doesn’t he look like before, Daddy? Why—
—Because the bad-gunky’s gone, you numbskull. And here’s an irony even a badly shaken ten-year-old can appreciate, at least a bright one like Scott: now that Paul lies dead, chained to a post in the cellar with his brains blown out, Daddy has never looked or sounded saner. And if anyone else sees him like this, I’ll be for either the state prison in Waynesburg or locked in that smucking nutbarn up Reedville. That’s if they don’t lynch me first. We’ll have to bury him, although aint it gonna be a bitch-kitty with the ground like it is, hard as arn.
Scott says,—I’ll take him, Daddy.
—How you gonna take him? You couldn’t take him when he was alive!
He doesn’t have the language to explain that now it will be no more than going there dressed in his clothes, which he always does. That anvil-weight, bank-vault weight, piano-weight, is gone from the thing chained to the post; the thing chained to the post is now no more than the green husk you strip off an ear of corn. Scott just says,—I can do it now.
—You’re a little bag of boast and wind, Daddy says, but he leans the deer-gun against the table with the printing-press on it. He runs a hand through his hair and sighs. For the first time he looks to Scott like a man who could get old.
—Go on, Scott, might as well give her a try. Can’t hurt.
But now that there’s no actual danger, Scott is bashful.
—Turn around, Daddy.
—WHAT the FUCK you say?
There’s a potential beating in Daddy’s voice, but for once Scott doesn’t back down. It isn’t the going part that bothers him; he doesn’t care if Daddy sees that. What he’s bashful about is Daddy seeing him take his dead brother in his arms. He’s going to cry. He feels it coming on already, like rain on a late spring afternoon, when the day has been hot with a foretaste of summer.
—Please, he says in his most placating voice. Please, Daddy.
For a moment Scott is quite sure that his father is going to rush across the cellar to where his surviving son stands, with his tripled shadow racing beside him on the rock walls, and backhand him—perhaps knock him spang into his big brother’s dead lap. He’s been backhanded plenty of times and usually even the thought of it makes him cringe, but now he stands straight between Paul’s splayed legs, looking into his father’s eyes. It’s hard to do that, but he manages. Because they have survived a terrible passage together, and will have to keep it between themselves forever: Shhhhhh. So he deserves to ask, and he deserves to look in Daddy’s eyes while he waits for his answer.
Daddy doesn’t come at him. Instead he takes a deep breath, blows it out, and turns around.—You’ll be tellin me when to warsh the floors and scrub out the tawlit next, I guess, he grumbles. I’ll give you a count of thirty, Scoot
21
“I’ll give you a count of thirty and then I’m turning around again,” Scott tells her. “I’m pretty sure that’s how he finished it, but I never heard because by then I was gone off the face of the earth. Paul too, right out of his chains. I took him with me as easy as ever once he was dead; maybe easier. I bet Daddy never finished counting to thirty. Hell, I bet he never even got started before he heard the clink of chains or maybe the sound of air rushing in to fill the place where we’d been and he turned around and he saw he had the cellar all to himself.” Scott has relaxed against her; the sweat on his face and arms and body is drying. He has told it, gotten the worst of it out of him, sicked it up.
“The sound,” she says. “I wondered about that, you know. If there was a sound under the willow tree when we…you know…came back out.”
“When we boomed.”
“Yes, when we…that.”
“When we boomed, Lisey. Say it.”
“When we boomed.” Wondering if she’s crazy. Wondering if he is, and if it’s catching.
Now he does light another cigarette, and in the matchglow his face is honestly curious. “What did you see, Lisey? Do you remember?”
Doubtfully, she says: “There was a lot of purple, slanting down a hill…and I had a sense of shade, like there were trees right behind us, but it was all so quick…no more than a second or two…”
He laughs and gives her a one-armed hug. “That’s Sweetheart Hill you’re talking about.”
“Sweetheart—?”
“Paul named it that. There’s dirt all around those trees—soft, deep, I don’t think it’s ever winter there—and that’s where I buried him. That’s where I buried my brother.” He looks at her solemnly and says, “Do you want to go see, Lisey?”
22
Lisey had been asleep on the study floor in spite of the pain—
No. She hadn’t been asleep, because you couldn’t sleep with pain like this. Not without medical help. So what had she been?
Mesmerized.
She tried the word on for size and decided it fit just about perfectly. She had slid into a kind of doubled (maybe even trebled) recall. Total recall. But beyond this point her memories of the cold guest bedroom where she’d found him catatonic and those of the two of them in the creaky second-floor bed at The Antlers (these memories seventeen years older but even clearer) were blotted out. Do you want to go see, Lisey? he had asked her—yes, yes—but whatever had come next was drowned in brilliant purple light, hidden behind that curtain, and when she tried to reach for it, authority-voices from childhood (Good Ma’s, Dandy’s, all her big sisters’) clamored in alarm. No, Lisey! That’s far enough, Lisey! Stop there, Lisey!
Her breath caught. (Had it caught as she lay there with her love?)
Her eyes opened. (They had been wide as he took her in his arms, of that she was sure.)
Bright morning Junelight—twenty-first-century Junelight—replaced the staring, glaring purple of a billion lupin. The pain of her lacerated breast flooded back in with the light. But before Lisey could react to either the light or the panicky voices commanding her to go no farther, someone called to her from the barn below, startling her so badly that she came within a thread of screaming. If the voice had stopped short at Missus, she would have.
“Mrs. Landon?” A brief pause. “Are you up there?”
No trace of border South in that voice, only a flat Yankee drawl that turned the words into Aaa you up theah, and Lisey knew who was down theah: Deputy Alston. He’d told her he’d keep checking back, and here he was, as promised. This was her chance to tell him hell yes, she was up here, she was lying on the floor bleeding because the Black Prince of the Incunks had hurt her, Alston had to take her to No Soapa with the flashers and the siren going, she needed stitches in her breast, a lot of them, and she needed protection, needed it around the clock—
No, Lisey.
It was her own mind that sent the thought up (of this she was positive) like a flare into a dark sky (well…almost positive), but it came to her in Scott’s voice. As if it would gain authority that way.
And it must have worked, because “Yes, I’m here, Deputy!” was all she called back.
“Everything fi’-by? Okay, I mean?”
“Five-by, that’s affirmative,” she said, amazed to find she actually sounded five-by-five. Especially for a woman whose blouse was soaked in blood and whose left breast was throbbing like a…well, there was really no accurate simile. It was just throbbing.
Down below—at the very foot of the stairs, Lisey calculated—Deputy Alston laughed appreciatively. “I just stopped on my way over to Cash Corners. They got a little house-fire over there.” House-fiah. “Arson suspected.” Aaason. “You be all right on your own for a couple-three hours?”
“Fine.”
“Got your cell phone?”
She did indeed have her cell phone and wished she were on it right now. If she had to keep shouting down to him, she was probably going to pass out. “Rah-cheer!” she called back.
“Ayuh?” A little dubious. God, what if he
came up and saw her? He’d be plenty dubious then, dubious to the nth power. But when he spoke again the voice was moving away. She could hardly believe she was glad, but she was. Now that this was begun, she wanted to finish it. “Well, you call if you need anything. And I’ll be checking back later on. If you go out, leave a note so I’ll know you’re all right and when to expect you back, okay?”
And Lisey, who now began to see—vaguely—a course of events ahead of her, called back “Check!” She’d have to begin by returning to the house. But first, before anything else, a drink of water. If she didn’t get some more water, and soon, her throat might catch fiah like that house over to Cash Corners.
“I’ll be coming by Patel’s on my way back, Mrs. Landon, would you like me to pick anything up?”
Yes! A six-pack of ice-cold Coke and a carton of Salem Lights!
“No thanks, Deputy.” If she had to talk much more, her voice would give out. Even if it didn’t, he’d hear something wrong in it.
“Not even doughnuts? They have great doughnuts.” A smile in his voice.
“Dieting!” It was all she dared.
“Oh-oh, I heard that,” he said. “You have a nice day, Mrs. Landon.”
Please God no more, she prayed, and called back, “You too, Deputy!”
Clump-clump-clumpety-clump, and away he went.
Lisey listened for the sound of an engine and after awhile thought she heard one starting up, but very faint. He must have parked by her mailbox and then walked the length of the driveway.
Lisey lay where she was a moment longer, gathering herself, then rose to a sitting position. Dooley had sliced diagonally across her breast and up toward the hollow of her armpit. The ragged, wandering gash had stiffened and closed up a little, but her movement tore it open again. The pain was enormous. Lisey cried out and that made matters even worse. She felt fresh blood run down her ribcage. Those dark wings began to steal over her vision again and she willed them away, repeating the same mantra over and over again until the world grew solid: I have to finish this, I have to get behind the purple. I have to finish this, I have to get behind the purple. I have to finish this and get behind the purple.
Yes, behind the purple. On the hillside it had been lupin; in her mind it was the heavy curtain she had constructed herself—maybe with Scott’s help, certainly with his tacit approval.
I’ve gotten behind it before.
Had she? Yes.
And I can do it again. Get behind it or rip the goddam thing down if I have to.
Question: Had she and Scott ever spoken of Boo’ya Moon again after that night at The Antlers? Lisey thought not. They had their code words, of course, and God knew those words had floated out of the purple on occasion when she’d been unable to find him in malls and grocery stores…not to mention the time that nurse misplaced him in his smucking hospital bed…and there was the muttering reference to his long boy when he’d been lying in the parking lot after Gerd Allen Cole had shot him…and Kentucky…Bowling Green, as he lay dying…
Stop, Lisey! the voices chorused. You mustn’t, little Lisey! they cried. Mein gott, you don’t darenzee!
She had tried to put Boo’ya Moon behind her, even after the winter of ’96, when—
“When I went there again.” Her voice was dry but clear in her dead husband’s study. “In the winter of 1996 I went again. I went to bring him back.”
There it was, and the world did not end. Men in white coats did not materialize out of the walls to carry her away. In fact she thought she even felt a little better, and maybe that wasn’t so surprising. Maybe when you got right down to where the short hairs grew, truth was a bool, and all it wanted was to come out.
“Okay, it’s out now—some of it, the Paul part—so can I get a smucking drink of water?”
Nothing told her no, and using the edge of Dumbo’s Big Jumbo as a support, Lisey managed to pull herself to her feet. The dark wings came again, but she hung her head over, trying to keep as much blood in her miserable excuse for a brain as possible, and this time the faintness passed more quickly. She set sail for the bar alcove, walking her own backtrail of blood, taking slow steps with her feet wide apart, thinking she must look like an old lady whose walker had been stolen.
She made it, sparing only a brief look for the glass lying on the carpet. She wanted nothing more to do with that one. She got another out of the cabinet, once again using her right hand—the left was still clutching the bloody square of knitting—and drew cold water. Now the water was running again and the pipes barely chugged at all. She swung out the glass mirror over the basin, and inside was what she had been hoping for: a bottle of Scott’s Excedrin. No childproof cap to slow her down, either. She winced at the vinegary smell that wafted from the bottle after she popped the cap, and checked the expiration date: JUL 05. Oh well, she thought, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.
“I think Shakespeare said that,” she croaked, and swallowed three of the Excedrin. She didn’t know how much good they would do her, but the water was heavenly and she drank until her belly cramped. Lisey stood clutching the lip of her dead husband’s bar sink, waiting for the cramp to pass. Finally it did. That left only the pain in her beaten-up face and the much deeper throbbing in her lacerated breast. In the house she had something much stronger than Scott’s head-bonkers (although certainly no fresher), Vicodin from Amanda’s previous adventure in self-mutilation. Darla also had some, and Canty had Manda-Bunny’s bottle of Percocet. They had all agreed without ever really even discussing it that Amanda herself couldn’t be allowed access to the hard stuff; she might get feeling yucky and decide to take everything at once. Call it a Tequila Sunset.
Lisey would try for the house—and the Vicodin—soon, but not quite yet. Walking in the same careful feet-wide-apart way, a half-filled glass of water in one hand and the blood-soaked square of african in the other, Lisey made her way to the dusty booksnake and sat down there, waiting to see what three geriatric Excedrin might do for her pain. And as she waited, her thoughts turned once more to the night she had found him in the guest room—in the guest room but gone.
I kept thinking we were on our own. That wind, that smucking wind
23
She’s listening to that killer wind scream around the house, listening to snowgrit whip against the windows, knowing they’re on their own—that she is on her own. And as she listens, her thoughts turn once more to that night in New Hampshire when the hour was none and the moon kept teasing the shadows with its inconstant light. She remembers how she opened her mouth to ask if he could really do it, could really take her, and then closed it again, knowing it to be the kind of question you only ask when you want to play for time…and don’t you only play for time when you’re not on the same side?
We’re on the same side, she remembers thinking. If we’re going to get married, we better be.
But there was one question that needed asking, maybe because that night at The Antlers it was her turn to jump off the bench. “What if it’s night over there? You said there are bad things over there at night.”
He smiled at her. “It’s not, honey.”
“How do you know?”
He shook his head, still smiling. “I just do. The way a kid’s dog knows it’s time to go sit by the mailbox because the schoolbus will be right along. It’s almost sunset over there. It often is.”
She didn’t understand that, but didn’t ask—one question always led on to another, that had been her experience, and the time for questions was done. If she meant to trust him, the time for questions was done. So she had taken a deep breath and said, “All right. It’s our frontloaded honeymoon. Take me someplace that isn’t New Hampshire. This time I want a good look.”
He crushed his half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray and took her lightly by her upper arms, his eyes dancing with excitement and good humor—how well she remembers the feel of his fingers on her flesh that night. “You’ve got a yard of guts, little Lisey—I’ll tell the w
orld that. Hold on and let’s see what happens.”
And he took me, Lisey thinks as she sits in the guest room, now holding the waxy-cool hand of the breathing man-doll in the rocker. But she feels the smile on her face—little Lisey, big smile—and wonders how long it’s been there. He took me, I know he did. But that was seventeen years ago, when we were both young and brave and he was all present and accounted for. Now he’s gone.
Except his body is still here. Does that mean he can no longer go physically, as he did when he was a child? As she knows he has from time to time since she herself has known him? As he did from the hospital in Nashville, for example, when the nurse couldn’t find him?
It is then that Lisey feels the faint tightening of his hand on hers. It’s almost imperceptible, but he is her love and she feels it. His eyes still stare off toward the blank face of the TV from above the folds of the yellow african, but yes, his hand is squeezing hers. It is a kind of long-distance squeeze, and why not? He’s plenty far away, even if his body is here, and where he is, he might be squeezing with all his might.
Lisey has a sudden brilliant intuition: Scott is holding a conduit open for her. God knows what it’s costing him to do it, or how long he can keep it up, but that’s what he’s doing. Lisey lets go of his hand and gets up on her knees, ignoring the tingling burst of pins and needles in her legs, which have almost gone to sleep, likewise ignoring another great cold gust of wind that shakes the house. She tears away enough of the african so she can slide her arms between Scott’s sides and his unresisting arms, so she can clasp her hands at the middle of his back and hug him. She puts her urgent face in the path of his blank stare.
“Pull me,” she whispers to him, and gives his limp body a shake. “Pull me to where you are, Scott.”
There’s nothing, and she raises her voice to a shout.
“Pull me, goddam you! Pull me to where you are so I can bring you home! Do it! IF YOU WANT TO COME HOME, TAKE ME TO WHERE YOU ARE!”
24
“And you did,” Lisey muttered. “You did and I did. I’ll be smucked if I know how this thing is supposed to work now that you’re dead and gone instead of just gomered out in the guest room, but that’s what it’s all been about, hasn’t it? All of this.”