by Stephen King
“No,” Lisey admitted. “Guess not. Sorry.”
“That’s you, always was. Off in your own…” Amanda’s voice trailed away, and she made a business of looking out the window.
“Always off in my own little world?” Lisey asked, smiling.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” They came around a curve and Lisey swerved to avoid a large fir branch lying in the road. She considered stopping and tossing it onto the shoulder, and decided to leave it for the next person to come along. The next person to come along would probably not have a psychopath to deal with. “If it’s Boo’ya Moon you’re thinking of, it’s not really my world, anyway. It seems to me that everyone who goes there has his or her own version. What were you saying?”
“Just that I have something else you might want. Unless you’re already strapped, that is.”
Lisey was startled. She took her eyes off the road for a moment to look at her sister. “What? What did you say?”
“Just a figure of speech,” Amanda said. “I mean I have a gun.”
11
There was a long white envelope propped on the sill of Amanda’s screen door, well under the porch overhang and thus safe from the rain. Lisey’s first alarmed thought on seeing it was Dooley’s been here already. But the envelope Lisey had found after discovering the dead cat in her mailbox had been blank on both sides. This one had Amanda’s name printed on the front. She handed it over. Amanda looked at the printing, turned the card over to read the embossing on the back—Hallmark—and then spoke a single disdainful word: “Charles.”
For a moment the name meant nothing to Lisey. Then she remembered that once upon a time, before this current craziness had begun, Amanda had had a boyfriend.
Shootin’ Beans, she thought, and made a strangled noise in her throat.
“Lisey?” Amanda asked. Her eyebrows went up.
“Just thinking about Canty and Miss Buggy, charging up to Derry,” Lisey said. “I know it’s not funny, but—”
“Oh, it has its humorous elements,” Amanda said. “Probably this does, too.” She opened the envelope and removed the card. Scanned it. “Oh. My. God. Look. What just fell out of. The dog’s ass.”
“Can I see?”
Amanda passed it over. On the front was a gap-toothed little boy, Hallmark’s idea of tough but endearing (too-big sweater, patched jeans), holding out a single droopy flower. Gee, I’m Sorry! read the message below the scamp’s battered sneakers. Lisey flipped it open and read this:
I know I hurt your feelin’s, and I guess you’re feelin’ bad,
This is just a note to say you ain’t the only one who’s sad!
I thought I’d send a card an’ apologize to you,
’Cuz to think of you down in the dumps has made me feel so blue!
So get out an’ smell the roses! Be happy for a while!
Get that spring back in your step! Put on that cheery smile!
Today I guess I made you feel a tiny bit o’ sorrow,
But I hope we’ll still be friends when the sun comes out tomorrow!
It was signed Yours in friendship (4-Ever! Remember the Good Times!!) Charles “Charlie” Corriveau.
Lisey tried mightily to keep a solemn face, but couldn’t. She burst out laughing. And Amanda joined her. They stood on the porch together, laughing. When it began to wind down a little, Amanda stood up straight and declaimed to her rain-soaked front yard, with the card held out before her like a choir-book.
“My darling Charles, I cannot let another moment pass, without asking you to come over here and kiss my fuckin ass.”
Lisey fell against the side of the house hard enough to rattle the nearest window, screaming with laughter, her hands against her chest. Amanda gave her a haughty smile and marched down the porch stairs. She squelched two or three steps into the yard, upended the little lawn-pixie that stood guard over the rose bushes, and fished out the spare latchkey she kept stashed beneath. But while she was bent over, she took the opportunity to rub Charlie Corriveau’s card briskly over her green-clad fanny.
No longer caring if Jim Dooley might be watching from the woods, no longer thinking of Jim Dooley at all, Lisey collapsed to a sitting position on the porch, now wheezing with laughter because she had almost no breath left. She might have laughed so hard once or twice with Scott, but maybe not. Maybe not even then.
12
There was a single message on Amanda’s answering machine, and it was from Darla, not Dooley. “Lisey!” she said exuberantly. “I don’t know what you did, but wow! We’re on our way to Derry! Lisey, I love you! You’re a champ!”
She heard Scott saying Lisey, you’re a champ at this! and her laughter began to dry up.
Amanda’s gun turned out to be a Pathfinder .22 revolver, and when Amanda passed it over, it felt absolutely correct in Lisey’s hand, as if it had been manufactured with her in mind. Amanda had been keeping it in a shoebox on the top shelf of her bedroom closet. With only minimal fiddling, Lisey was able to swing out the cylinder.
“Jesus-please-us, Manda, this thing is loaded!”
As if Someone Up There was displeased with Lisey’s profanity, the skies opened and more rain poured down. A moment later, the windows and gutters were rattling and pinging with hail.
“What’s a woman on her own supposed to do if a raper comes in?” Amanda asked. “Point an unloaded gun at him and shout bang? Lisey, hook this for me, would you?” Amanda had put on a pair of jeans. Now she presented her bony back and the hooks of her bra. “Every time I try, my hands just about kill me. You should have taken me down for a little dip in that pool of yours.”
“I was having enough trouble getting you away from it without baptizing you in it, please and thank you,” Lisey said, doing the hooks. “Wear the red shirt with the yellow flowers, would you? I love that one on you.”
“It shows my gut.”
“Amanda, you don’t have a gut.”
“I do s—Why in the name of Jesus, Mary, and JoJo the Carpenter are you taking the bullets out?”
“So I don’t shoot my own kneecap off.” Lisey put the bullets in the pocket of her jeans. “I’ll re-load it later.” Although whether she could point it at Jim Dooley and actually pull the trigger…she just didn’t know. Maybe. If she summoned up the memory of her can opener.
But you do mean to get rid of him. Don’t you?
She certainly did. He had hurt her. That was strike one. He was dangerous. That was strike two. She could trust no one else to do it, strike three and you’re out. Still, she continued to look at the Pathfinder with fascination. Scott had researched gunshot wounds for one of his novels—Relics, she was quite sure—and she’d made the mistake of looking into a folder filled with very ugly photographs. Until then she hadn’t realized how lucky Scott himself had been that day in Nashville. If Cole’s bullet had hit a rib and splintered—
“Why not take it in the shoebox?” Amanda asked, pulling on a rude tee-shirt (KISS ME WHERE IT STINKS—MEET ME IN MOTTON) instead of the button-up one Lisey liked. “There are some extra shells in it, too. You can tape it shut while I’m getting the meat out of the freezer.”
“Where did you get it, Manda?”
“Charles gave it to me,” Amanda said. She turned away, seized a brush from her not-so-vain vanity, peered into the mirror, and went at her hair furiously. “Last year.”
Lisey put the gun, so much like the one Gerd Allen Cole had used on her husband, back in the shoebox and watched Amanda in the mirror.
“I slept with him two and sometimes three times a week for four years,” Amanda said. “Which is intimate. Wouldn’t you agree that’s intimate?”
“Yes.”
“I also washed his undershorts for four years, and scraped the scaly stuff off his scalp once a week so it wouldn’t fall on the shoulders of his dark suits and embarrass him, and I think those things are a hell of a lot more intimate than fucking. What do you think?”
“I think you’ve got a
point.”
“Yeah,” Amanda said. “Four years of that and I get a Hallmark card as severance pay. That woman he found up there in the Sin-Jin is welcome to him.”
Lisey felt like cheering. No, she didn’t think Manda needed a dip in the pool.
“Let’s get the meat out of the freezer and go to your house,” Amanda said. “I’m starving.”
13
The sun came out as they approached Patel’s Market, putting a rainbow like a fairy-gate over the road ahead. “You know what I’d like for supper?” Amanda asked.
“No, what?”
“A big, nasty mess of Hamburger Helper. I don’t suppose you’ve got anything like that at your house, do you?”
“I did,” Lisey said, smiling guiltily, “but I ate it.”
“Pull in to Patel’s,” Amanda said. “I’ll spring for a box.”
Lisey pulled in. Amanda had insisted on bringing her house-money from the blue pitcher where she kept it stashed in the kitchen, and she now extracted a crumpled five-spot. “What kind do you want, Little?”
“Anything but Cheeseburger Pie,” Lisey said.
XIV. Lisey and Scott
(Babyluv)
1
At seven-fifteen that evening, Lisey had a premonition. It wasn’t the first of her life; she’d had at least two others. One in Bowling Green, shortly after entering the hospital where her husband had been taken after collapsing at an English Department reception. And certainly she’d had one on the morning of their flight to Nashville, the morning of the shattered toothglass. The third one came as the thunderstorms were clearing out and a gorgeous gold light began to shine through the breaking clouds. She and Amanda were in Scott’s study over the barn. Lisey was going through the papers in Scott’s main desk, aka Dumbo’s Big Jumbo. So far the most interesting thing she’d found was a packet of mildly risqué French postcards with a sticky-note on top, reading, in Scott’s scrawl, Who sent me THESE THINGS??? Sitting beside the blankeyed computer was the shoebox with the revolver inside. The lid was still on, but Lisey had slit the tape with her fingernail. Amanda was across the way, in the alcove that held Scott’s TV and component sound-system. Every now and then Amanda heard her grumbling about the haphazard way things had been shelved. Once Lisey heard her wonder aloud how Scott had ever found anything.
That was when the premonition came. Lisey shut the drawer she had been investigating and sat down in the high-backed office chair. She closed her eyes and just waited, as something rolled toward her. It turned out to be a song. A mental jukebox lit up and the nasal but undeniably jolly voice of Hank Williams began to sing. “Goodbye Joe, we gotta go, me-oh-my-oh; we gotta go, pole the pirogue down the bayou…”
“Lisey!” Amanda called from the alcove where Scott used to sit and listen to his music or watch movies on his VCR. When he wasn’t watching them in the guest room in the middle of the night, that was. And Lisey heard the voice of the professor from the Pratt College English Department—in Bowling Green, this was, only sixty miles from Nashville. Not much more’n a long spit, Missus.
I think it would be wise if you got here as soon as possible, Professor Meade had told her over the phone. Your husband has been taken ill. Very ill indeed, I’m afraid.
“My Yvonne, sweetest one, me-oh-my-oh…”
“Lisey!” Amanda sounded just as bright as a new-minted penny. Would anyone believe she’d been totally zonked only eight hours ago? Nay, madam. Nay, good sir.
The spirits have done it all in one night, Lisey thought. Yay, spirits.
Dr. Jantzen feels that surgery is warranted. Something called a thoracotomy.
And Lisey thought, The boys came back from Mexico. They came back to Anarene. Because Anarene was home.
Which boys, pray tell? The black-and-white boys. Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms. The boys from The Last Picture Show.
In that movie it’s always now and they are always young, she thought. They are always young and Sam the Lion is always dead.
“Lisey?”
She opened her eyes and there was big sissa standing in the alcove doorway, her eyes as bright as her voice, and of course in her hand she was holding the VCR box containing The Last Picture Show and the feeling was…well, coming home. The feeling was coming home, me-oh-my-oh.
And why would that be? Because drinking from the pool had its little perks and privileges? Because you sometimes brought back to this world what you picked up in that world? Picked up or swallowed? Yes, yes, and yes.
“Lisey, honey, are you all right?”
Such warm concern, such smucking motherliness, was so foreign to Amanda’s usual nature that it made Lisey feel unreal. “Fine,” she said. “I was just resting my eyes.”
“Would it be all right if I watched some of this? I found it with the rest of Scott’s tapes. Most of them look pretty junky, but I always meant to see this one and never got around to it. Maybe it’ll take my mind off things.”
“Fine by me,” Lisey said, “but I should warn you, I’m pretty sure there’s a blank spot in the middle of it. It’s an old tape.”
Amanda was studying the back of the box. “Jeff Bridges looks like such a kid.”
“He does, doesn’t he?” Lisey said wanly.
“And Ben Johnson’s dead, of course…” She stopped. “Maybe I better not. We might not hear your boyf…we might not hear Dooley, if he comes.”
Lisey pushed the top off the shoebox, took out the Pathfinder, and pointed it at the stairs leading down to the barn. “I locked the door to the outside stairs,” she said, “so that’s the only way up here. And I’m watching it.”
“He could start a fire down there in the barn,” Amanda said nervously.
“He doesn’t want me cooked—what fun would that be?” Also, Lisey thought, there’s a place I can go. As long as my mouth tastes as sweet as it does right now, there’s a place I can go, and I don’t think I’d have any trouble taking you with me, Manda. Not even two helpings of Hamburger Helper and two glasses of cherry Kool-Aid had taken away that lovely sweet taste in her mouth.
“Well, if you’re sure it won’t be bothering you…”
“Do I look like I’m studying for finals? Go ahead.”
Amanda went back into the alcove. “Sure hope this VCR still works.” She sounded like a woman who has discovered a wind-up gramophone and a stack of ancient acetate records.
Lisey looked at the many drawers of Dumbo’s Big Jumbo, but going through them seemed like make-work now…and probably was. She had an idea that there was very little of actual interest up here. Not in the drawers, not in the filing cabinets, not hiding on the computer hard drives. Oh, maybe a little treasure for the more rabid Incunks, the collectors and the academics who maintained their positions in large part by examining the literary equivalent of navel-lint in each other’s abstruse journals; ambitious, overeducated goofs who had lost touch with what books and reading were actually about and could be content to go on spinning straw into footnoted fool’s gold for decades on end. But all the real horses were out of the barn. The Scott Landon stuff that had pleased regular readers—people stuck on airplanes between L.A. and Sydney, people stuck in hospital waiting rooms, people idling their way through long, rainy summer vacation days, taking turns between the novel of the week and the jigsaw puzzle out on the sun-porch—all that stuff had been published. The Secret Pearl, published a month after his death, had been the last.
No, Lisey, a voice whispered, and at first she thought it was Scott’s, and then—how crazy—she thought it was the voice of Ole Hank. But that was crazy, because it wasn’t a man’s voice at all. Was that Good Ma’s voice, going whisper-whisper-whisper in her head?
I think he wanted me to tell you something. Something about a story.
Not Good Ma’s voice—although Good Ma’s yellow afghan had figured in it somewhere—but Amanda’s. They had been sitting together on those stone benches, looking out at the good ship Hollyhocks, which always rode at anchor but never quite set s
ail. Lisey had never realized how much alike their mother and her oldest sister sounded until this memory of the benches. And—
Something about a story. Your story. Lisey’s story.
Had Amanda actually said that? It was like a dream now and Lisey couldn’t be completely sure, but she thought yes.
And the afghan. Only—
“Only he called it an african,” Lisey said in a low voice. “He called it an african, and he called it a bool. Not a boop, not a beep, a bool.”
“Lisey?” Amanda called from the other room. “Did you say something?”
“Just talking to myself, Manda.”
“Means you’ve got money in the bank,” Amanda said, and then there was only the soundtrack of the movie. Lisey seemed to remember every line of it, every scratchy snatch of music.
If you left me a story, Scott, where is it? Not up here in the study, I’d bet money on it. Not in the barn, either—nothing down there but false bools like Ike Comes Home.
But that wasn’t quite true. There had been at least two true prizes in the barn: the silver spade and Good Ma’s cedar box, tucked away under the Bremen bed. With the delight square in it. Was that what Amanda had been talking about?
Lisey didn’t think so. There was a story in that box, but it was their story—Scott & Lisey: Now We Are Two. So what was her story? And where was it?
And speaking of wheres, where was the Black Prince of the Incunks?
Not on the answering machine at Amanda’s; not on the answering machine here, either. Lisey had found only one message, on the recorder in the house. It had been from Deputy Alston.
“Mrs. Landon, this storm has done quite a lot of damage in town, particularly at the south end. Someone—I hope me or Dan Boeckman—is gonna check back on you as soon as possible, but in the meantime I want to remind you to keep your doors locked and don’t let anyone in you can’t identify. That means gettin em to take off their hats or push back the hoods of their slickers even if it’s pourin down cats n dogs, okay? And keep that cell phone with you at all times. Remember, in an emergency all you have to do is hit SPEED-DIAL and the 1-key. The call will go right through to the Sheriff’s.”