Lisey's Story Part 37

She did a walk-through and discovered all but two of the mirrors on the ground floor had been sheeted, toweled, or (in one case) taken down and turned to the wall; the last two survivors she now covered as well, in the spirit of in for a penny, in for a pound. As she did them, Lisey wondered exactly what the young librarian in the fas.h.i.+onable pink Red Sox baseball cap had thought. That the famous writer's widow was either Jewish or had adopted the Jewish custom of mourning, and that her mourning still continued? That she had decided Kurt Vonnegut was right, that mirrors weren't reflective surfaces but leaks, portholes to another dimension? And really, wasn't that what she did think?

Not portholes, windows. And do I have to care what some librarian from Moo U thinks?

Oh, probably not. But there were so many reflective surfaces in a life, weren't there? Not just mirrors. There were juice gla.s.ses to avoid glancing in first thing in the morning and winegla.s.ses not to peer into at sundown. There were so many times when you sat behind the wheel of your car and saw your own face looking back at you from the dashboard instruments. So many long nights when the mind of something...other...might turn to a person, if that person could not keep her mind from turning to it. And how, exactly, did you keep from doing that? How did you not think of something? The mind was a highkicking, kilt-wearing rebel, to quote the late Scott Landon. It could get up to...well, s.h.i.+t fire and save your matches, why not say it? It could get up to such bad-gunky.

And there was something else, too. Something even more frightening. Maybe even if it didn't come to you, you wouldn't be able to help going to it. Because once you stretched those smucking tendons...once your life in the real world started to feel like a loose tooth in a sick socket- She'd be walking downstairs, or getting into the car, or turning on the shower, or reading a book, or opening a crossword magazine, and there would be a feeling absurdly like an oncoming sneeze or (mein gott, babyluv, mein gott, leedle Leezy-!) an approaching o.r.g.a.s.m and she would think, Oh smuck, I'm not coming, I'm going, I'm going over. The world would seem to waver and there would be that sense of a whole other world waiting to be born, one where the sweetness curdled and turned to poison after dark. A world that was just a sidestep away, no more than the flick of a hand or the turn of a hip. For a moment she would feel Castle View drop away on every side and she would be Lisey on a tightrope, Lisey walking a knife-edge. Then she'd be back again, a solid (if middle-aged and a little too thin) woman in a solid world, walking down a flight of stairs, slamming a car door, adjusting the hot water, turning the page of a book, or solving eight across: Old-style gift, four-letter word, starts with B, ends with N.

9.

Two days after the dismantled booksnake went north, on what the Portland branch of the National Weather Service would record as the hottest day of the year in Maine and New Hamps.h.i.+re, Lisey went up to the empty study with a boombox and a compact disc t.i.tled Hank Williams' Greatest Hits. There would be no problem playing the CD, just as there had been no problem running the fans on the day the Minions of Partridge had been up here; all Dooley had done, it turned out, was open the electrical box downstairs and flip off the three breakers that controlled the study's power.

Lisey had no idea how hot it actually was in the study, but knew it had to be a triple-digit number. She could feel her blouse begin sticking to her body and her face dampening as soon as she was at the top of the stairs. Somewhere she had read that women don't sweat, they glow, and what a crock of s.h.i.+t that was. If she stayed up here long, she'd probably pa.s.s out with heatstroke, but she didn't intend to stay up here for long. There was a country song she sometimes heard on the radio called "Ain't Livin' Long Like This." She didn't know who had written that song or sang it (not Ole Hank), but she could relate to it. She couldn't spend the rest of her life afraid of her own reflection-or what she might see peeking out from behind it-and she couldn't live it afraid that she might at any moment lose her hold on reality and find herself in Boo'ya Moon.

This s.h.i.+te had to end.

She plugged in the boombox, then sat cross-legged on the floor before it and put in the disc. Sweat ran into her eye, stinging, and she knuckled it away. Scott had played a lot of music up here, really blasting it out. When you had a twelvethousand-dollar stereo system and soundproofing in the alcove where most of the speakers were, you could really let it rip. The first time he played "Rockaway Beach" for her, she'd thought the very roof over their heads might lift off. What she was about to play would sound tinny and small by comparison, but she thought it would be enough.

Old-style gift, four letters, begins with B, ends with N.

Amanda, sitting on one of those benches, looking out at Southwind Harbor, sitting above the child-murdering woman in the caftan, Amanda saying "It was something about a story. Your story, Lisey's story. And the afghan. Only he called it the african. Did he say it was a boop? A beep? A boon?" No, Manda, not a boon, although that is a four-letter word, now rather old-fas.h.i.+oned, beginning with B and ending with N, that means gift. But the word Scott used- That word had been bool, of course. The sweat ran down Lisey's face like tears. She let it. "As in Bool, The End. And at the end you get a prize. Sometimes a candybar. Sometimes an RC from Mulie's. Sometimes a kiss. And sometimes...sometimes a story. Right, honey?"

Talking to him felt all right. Because he was still here. Even with the computers gone, and the furniture, and the fancy Swedish stereo system, and the file-cabinets full of ma.n.u.scripts, and the stacks of galleys (his own and those sent to him by friends and admirers), and the booksnake...even with those things gone, she still felt Scott. Of course she did. Because he hadn't finished having his say. He had one more story to tell.

Lisey's story.

She thought she knew which one, because there was only one he had never finished.

She touched one of the dried bloodstains on the carpet and thought about the arguments against insanity, the ones that fell through with a soft s.h.i.+rring sound. She thought how it had been under the yum-yum tree: like being in another world, one of their own. She thought about the Bad-Gunky Folks, the b.l.o.o.d.y Bool Folks. She thought about how, when Jim Dooley had seen the long boy, he had stopped screaming and his hands had fallen to his sides. Because the strength had run out of his arms. That was what looking at the bad-gunky did, when the bad-gunky was looking back at you.

"Scott," she said. "Honey, I'm listening."

There was no reply...except Lisey replied to herself. The name of the town was Anarene. Sam the Lion owned the pool-hall. Owned the picture show. And the restaurant, where every tune on the juke seemed to be a Hank Williams tune.

Somewhere something in the empty study seemed to sigh in agreement. Possibly it was just her imagination. In any case, it was time. Lisey still didn't know exactly what she was looking for, but she thought she'd know it when she saw it- surely she'd know it when she saw it, if Scott had left it for her-and it was time to go looking. Because she wasn't living long like this. She couldn't.

She pushed PLAY and Hank Williams's tired, jolly voice began to sing.

"Goodbye Joe, me gotta go, Me-oh-my-oh, Me gotta go pole the pirogue Down the bayou..."

SOWISA, babyluv, she thought, and closed her eyes. For a moment the music was still there but hollow and oh so distant, like music coming down a long corridor, or from the throat of a deep cave. Then suns.h.i.+ne bloomed red on the inside of her eyelids and the temperature dropped twenty or even twenty-five degrees all at a go. A cool breeze, delicious with the smell of flowers, caressed her sweaty skin and blew her sticky hair back from her temples.

Lisey opened her eyes in Boo'ya Moon.

10.She was still sitting cross-legged, but now she was on the edge of the path leading down the purple hill in one direction and under the sweetheart trees in the other. She'd been here before; it was to this exact spot that her husband had brought her before he was her husband, saying there was something he wanted to show her.

Lisey got to her feet, pus.h.i.+ng her sweat-dampened hair away from her face, relis.h.i.+ng the breeze. The sweetness of the mixed aromas it carried-yes, of course-but even more, the coolness of it. She guessed it was mid-afternoon, the temperature a perfect seventy-five degrees. She could hear birds singing, perfectly ordinary ones by the sound-chickadees and robins for sure, probably finches and maybe a lark for good measure-but no awful laughing things in the woods. It was too early for them, she supposed. No sense of the long boy, either, and that was the best news of all.

She faced the trees and turned on her heels in a slow halfcircle. She wasn't looking for the cross, because Dooley had gotten that stuck in his arm and then thrown it aside. It was the tree she was looking for, the one that stood just a little forward of the two others on the left side of the path- "No, that's wrong," she murmured. "They were on either side of the path. Like soldiers guarding the way into the woods."

Just like that she saw them. And a third standing a little in front of the one on the left. The third was the biggest, its trunk covered with moss so dense it looked like fur. At its base the ground still looked a little sunken. That was where Scott had buried the brother he had tried so hard to save. And on one side of that sunken place, she saw something with huge hollow eyes staring at her from the high gra.s.s.

For a moment she thought it was Dooley, or Dooley's corpse, somehow reanimated and come back to stalk her, but then she remembered how, after clubbing Amanda aside, he'd stripped off the useless, lensless night-vision goggles and thrown them aside. And there they were, lying beside the good brother's grave.

It's another bool hunt, she thought as she walked toward them. From the path to the tree; from the tree to the grave; from the grave to the goggles. Where next? Where now, babyluv?

The next station turned out to be the grave-marker, with the horizontal crosspiece turned askew so it was like clock-hands pointing to five past seven. The top of the vertical was stained to a depth of three inches with Dooley's blood, now dried to the maroon, not-quite-varnish color of the stains on the rug in Scott's study. She could still see PAUL printed on the crosspiece, and as she lifted it (with real reverence) out of the gra.s.s for a closer look, she saw something else as well: the length of matted yellow yarn that had been looped repeatedly around the vertical slat of the cross, then tied firmly. Tied, Lisey had absolutely no doubt, with the same sort of knot as the one that had secured Chuckie G.'s bell to the tree in the woods. The yellow yarn-which had once come spinning off Good Ma's knitting needles as she sat watching television at the farm in Lisbon-was wrapped around the vertical just above the place where the wood was stained dark with earth. And looking at it, she remembered seeing it running into the dark just before Dooley pulled the cross out of his arm and flung it away.

It's the african, the one we dropped by the big rock above the pool. He came back later, some time later, got it, and brought it here. Unraveled some of it, tied it to the cross, then paid out more. And expected me to find the rest at the end of it all.

Heart pounding hard and slow in her breast, Lisey dropped the cross and began following the yellow thread away from the path and along the edge of the Fairy Forest, paying it through her hands as the high gra.s.s whispered against her thighs and the gra.s.shoppers jumped and the lupin gave up its sweet scent. Somewhere a locust sang its hot summer song and in the woods a crow-was it a crow? it sounded like one, a perfectly ordinary crow-called a rusty h.e.l.lo, but there were no cars, no airplanes, no human voices near or far. She walked through the gra.s.s, following the line of unknitted afghan, the one in which her sleepless, frightened, failing husband had swaddled on so many cold nights ten years before. Ahead of her, one sweetheart tree stood out a bit from its fellows, spreading its branches, making a pool of inviting shade. Beneath it she saw a tall metal wastebasket and a much larger pool of yellow. The color was dull now, the wool matted and shapeless, like a large yellow wig that has been left out in the rain, or perhaps the corpse of a big old tomcat, but Lisey knew it for what it was as soon as she saw it, and her chest began to hitch. In her mind she could hear The Swinging Johnsons playing "Too Late to Turn Back Now" and feel Scott's hand as he led her out onto the floor. She followed the line of unraveled yellow yarn under the sweetheart tree and knelt beside what little remained of her mother's wedding present to her youngest daughter and her youngest daughter's husband. She picked it up-it, and whatever lay inside it. She put her face against it. It smelled damp and moldy, an old thing, a forgotten thing, a thing that smelled now more of funerals than of weddings. That was all right. That was just as it should have been. She smelled all the years it had been here, tied to Paul's grave-marker and waiting for her, something like an anchor.

11.

A little time later, when her tears had stopped, she put the package (for surely that was what it was) down where it had been and looked at it, touching the place where the yellow yarn unraveled from the shrunken body of the afghan. She marveled that the line hadn't broken, either when Dooley fell on the cross, or when he tore it out of his arm, or when he flung it away-when he slang it forth. Of course it helped that Scott had tied his string to the bottom, but it was still pretty amazing, especially when you considered how long this d.a.m.ned thing had been out here, exposed to the elements. It was a blue-eyed miracle, so to speak.

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 ma.n.u.script box," she murmured. "One of his hard cardboard ma.n.u.script 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 ma.n.u.script 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 t.i.tle 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 12.

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 b.l.o.o.d.y s.h.i.+rts 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 badgunky. "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 b.a.l.l.s 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 da.s.sn't ever cross Daddy when he's not right."Don't you tell me you didn't go nowhere you lying little motherf.u.c.ker, 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 da.s.sn'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 n.a.z.is at work, Scooter, did I tell you? I must've. They wors.h.i.+p Hitler in the bas.e.m.e.nt. They have a little ceramic statue of the b.a.s.t.a.r.d. 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 n.o.body from U.S. Gyppum is wors.h.i.+pping even a statue of him in the bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 c.o.c.ks his finger and makes shooting motions. "Every smucking one, Scooter. Every sweetmother n.a.z.i 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 beardstubble all over his face. Lying there in an old fisherman's sweater and a pair of d.i.c.kies 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 motherf.u.c.ker?" 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 a.s.s 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 s.h.i.+t! 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 f.u.c.kin 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, 13.

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 ma.n.u.script 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.

14.

I've thought about that a lot, Lisey, and I've come to two conclusions. First, that whatever got Paul was real, and that it was a kind of possessing being that might have had some perfectly mundane basis, maybe even viral or bacteriological. Second, it was not the long boy. Because that thing isn't like anything we can understand. It's its own thing, and better not thought of at all. Ever.

In any case, our hero, little Scott Landon, finally goes back to sleep, and in that farmhouse out in the Pennsylvania countryside, things go on as they had been for yet a few days longer, with Daddy lying on the couch like a ripe and smelly cheese and Scott cooking the meals and was.h.i.+ng the dishes (only he says "wars.h.i.+ng the dishees") and the sleet ticking off the windows and the country sounds of WWVA filling the house-Donna Fargo, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, "Country" Charlie Pride, and-of course-Ole Hank. Then one afternoon around three o'clock a brown Chevrolet sedan with U.S. GYPSUM printed on the sides comes up the long driveway, sending out fans of slush on either side. Andrew Landon spends most of his time on the living room couch now, sleeps on it at night and has been lying on it all day, and Scott would never have guessed the old man could still move as fast as he does when he hears that car, which is clearly not the postman's old Ford truck or the meter-reader's van. Daddy is up in a flash and at the window that looks out on the left side of the front porch. He's bending over with the dirty white curtain twitched a little to one side. His hair is standing up in the back and Scott, who is standing in the kitchen doorway with a plate in one hand and a dishtowel over his shoulder, can see the big puffy purple place on the side of Daddy's face where he fell down the stairs that time, and he can see how one leg of Daddy's d.i.c.kies is hoicked up almost to the knee. He can hear d.i.c.k Curless on the radio singing "Tombstone Every Mile" and he can see the murder in Daddy's eyes and in the way his lips are pulled down so his lower teeth show. Daddy whirls from the window and the leg of his pants falls back down into place and he strides across to the closet like a crazy scissors and opens it just as the engine of the Chevrolet stops and Scott hears the car door open out there, somebody coming to death's door and not knowing it, not having the slightest sweetmother idea, and Daddy takes the .30-06 out of the closet, the very one he used to end Paul's life. Or the life of the thing inside of him. Shoes clomp up the porch steps. There are three steps, and the middle one squeaks as it has forever, world without end, amen."Daddy, no," I say in a low, pleading voice as Andrew "Sparky" Landon goes toward the closed door in his new and oddly graceful scissors walk, the rifle held up to high port in front of him. I'm still holding the plate but now my fingers feel numb and I think, I'm going to drop it. Mothersmuck'll fall to the floor and break, and that man out there, the last sounds he's ever going to hear in his life are a breaking plate and d.i.c.k Curless on the radio singing about the Hainesville Woods in this stinking forgotten farmhouse. "Daddy, no," I say again, pleading with all my heart and trying to put that plea into my eyes.

Sparky Landon hesitates, then stands against the wall so that if the door opens (when the door opens), it will hide him. And a series of knuckle-raps comes on that door even as he does so. I have no trouble reading the words that form silently on my father's whisker-framed lips: Then get rid of him, Scoot.I go to the door. I switch the plate I meant to dry from my right hand to my left one and open the door. I see the man standing there with terrible clarity. The U.S. Gypsum man isn't very tall-at five-foot-seven or -eight, he isn't really that much taller than I am-but he looks like the very apotheosis of authority in his black billed cap, his khaki pants with their razor-sharp creases and his khaki s.h.i.+rt showing beneath his heavy black car-coat, which is halfunzipped. He's wearing a black tie and carrying some sort of little case, not quite a briefcase (it will be another few years before I learn the word portfolio). He's kind of fat and clean-shaven, with pink and s.h.i.+ning cheeks. There are galoshes on his feet, the kind that have zippers rather than buckles. I look at the whole picture and think that if ever there was a man who looked meant to be shot on a porch in the country, it's this man. Even the single hair curling from one of his nostrils proclaims that yes, this is the guy, all right, the very one sent to take a bullet from the scissors-man's gun. Even his name, I think, is the kind you read in the paper under a headline screaming MURDERED."h.e.l.lo, son," he says, "you must be one of Sparky's boys. I'm Frank Halsey, from the plant. Head of Personnel." And he holds out his hand.I think I won't be able to take it, but I do. And I think I won't be able to talk, but I can do that, too. And my voice sounds normal. I'm all that stands between this man and a bullet in the heart or the head, so it better. "Yes, sir, I am. I'm Scott.""Good to know you, Scott," he says, looking past me into the living room, and I try to see what he's seeing. I tried to pick it up the day before, but G.o.d knows what kind of job I did; I'm just a smucking kid, after all. "We've kind of been missing your father."Well, I think, you're awful close to missing everything, Mr. Halsey. Your job, your wife; your kids, if you got em."He didn't call you from Philly?" I ask. I have absolutely no idea where this is coming from, or where it's going, but I'm not afraid. Not of this part. I can make s.h.i.+t up all day long. What I'm afraid of is that Daddy will lose control and just start blazing away through the door. Hit Halsey, maybe; hit both of us, probably.

"No, son, he sure didn't." The sleet keeps ticking down on the porch roof, but at least he's under cover, so I don't absolutely have to invite him in, but what if he invites himself in? How can I stop him? I'm just a kid, standing here in my slippers with a plate in my hand and a dishtowel slung over my shoulder."Well, he's been awful worried about his sister," I say, and think of the baseball biography I've been reading. It's on my bed upstairs. I also think of Daddy's car, which is parked around back, under the shed overhang. If Mr. Halsey walked to the far end of the porch, he'd see it. "She's got the disease that killed that famous ballplayer from the Yankees.""Sparky's sister's got Lou Gehrig's? Aw, s.h.i.+t-I mean shoot. I didn't even know he had a sister."Neither did I, I think."Son-Scott-that's a shame. Who's watching out for you boys while he's gone?""Mrs. Cole from down the road." Jackson Cole is the name of the guy who wrote Iron Man of the Yankees. "She comes in every day. And besides, Paul knows four different ways to make meatloaf."Mr. Halsey chuckles. "Four ways, huh? When's Sparky gonna be back?""Well, she can't walk anymore, and she breathes like this." I take a big, whooping gasp of air. It's easy, because all at once my heart is beating like crazy. It was going slow when I was pretty sure Daddy was going to kill Mr. Halsey, but now that I see a chance we might get out of it, it's going six licks to the minute."Aw, sugar," says Mr. Halsey. Now he thinks he understands everything. "Well, that's just about the worst thing I ever heard of." He reaches under his coat and drags out his wallet. He opens it and takes out a one-dollar bill. Then he remembers that I supposedly have a brother and takes out another one. And all at once, Lisey, the strangest thing happened. All at once I wished my father would kill him."Here, son," he says, and also all at once I know, like reading his mind, that he's forgotten my name, and I hate him even more. "Take it. One for you and one for your brother. Treat yourselves at that little store down the road."

I don't want his smucking dollar (and Paul has no more use for his), but I take them and say thank you, sir, and he says you're welcome, son, and he ruffles my hair, and while he's doing that I glance over to my left and see one of my father's eyes peering through the crack in the door. I see the muzzle of the rifle, too. Then Mr. Halsey finally goes back down the steps. I close the door and my father and I watch as he gets into his company car and starts backing down the long driveway. It comes to me that if he gets stuck he'll walk up again and ask to use the phone and end up dying anyway, but he doesn't get stuck and will kiss his wife h.e.l.lo that night after all, and tell her he gave two poor boys a couple of dollars to treat themselves with. I look down and see I'm still holding the two bills and I give them to my father. He tucks them away into his pants pocket without so much as a look."He'll be back," Daddy says. "Him or some other. You did a good job, Scott, but tape will only hold a wet package for so long."I take a hard stare at him and see that he is my Daddy. At some point while I was talking to Mr. Halsey, my Daddy came back. It's the last time I'll ever really see him.He sees me looking at him and kind of nods. Then he looks at the .30-06. "I'm going to get rid of this," he says. "I'm going down, that can't be-""No, Daddy-""-can't be helped, but I'll be sweetf.u.c.ked if I'll take a bunch of people like that Halsey with me, so they can put me on the six o'clock news for the gomers to drool over. They'd put you and Paul there too. Of course they would. Alive or dead, you'd be the lunatic's boys.""Daddy, you'll be okay," I tell him, and try to hug him. "You're okay right now!"He pushes me away, kind of laughing. "Yah, and sometimes people with malaria can quote Shakespeare," he says. "You stay here, Scotty, I got a ch.o.r.e to do. It won't take long." He walks off down the hall, past the bench I finally jumped off of all those years ago, and into the kitchen. Head down, the deer-gun in one hand. Once he's out the kitchen door I follow him and l'm looking out the window over the sink when he crosses the backyard, coatless in the sleet, head still down, still holding the .30-06. He puts it on the icy ground only long enough to push the cover off the dry well. He needs both hands to do that because the sleet has bound the cover to the brick. Then he picks the gun up again, looks at it for a second-almost like he's saying goodbye-and slides it into the gap he's made. After that he comes back to the house with his head still down and ice-drops darkening the shoulders of his s.h.i.+rt. It's only then that I notice his feet are bare. I don't think he ever realizes at all.

He doesn't seem surprised to see me in the kitchen. He takes out the two dollar bills Mr. Halsey gave me, looks at them, then looks at me. "You sure you don't want these?" he asks.I shake my head. "Not if they were the last two dollar bills on earth."I can see he likes that answer. "Good," he says. "But now let me tell you something, Scott. You know your nana's china breakfront in the dining room?""Sure.""If you look in the blue pitcher on the top shelf, you're going to find a roll of money. My money, not Halsey's-do you understand the difference?""Yes," I say."Yeah, I bet you do. You're a lot of things, but dumb hasn't ever been one of them. If I were you, Scotty, I'd take that roll of bills-it's around seven hundred dollars-and put my act on the road. Stick five in my pocket and the rest in my boot. Ten's too young to be on the road, even for a little while, and I think the chances are probably ninety-five in a hundred somebody'll rob you of your roll even before you make it over the bridge into Pittsburgh, but if you stay here, something bad's going to happen. Do you know what I'm talking about?""Yes, but I can't go," I say."There's a lot of things people think they can't do and then discover they can when they find themselves tight-wired," Daddy says. He looks down at his feet, which are all pink and raw-looking. "If you were to make it to the Burg, I believe a boy bright enough to get rid of Mr. Halsey with a story about Lou Gehrig's Disease and a sister I don't have might be bright enough to look under the C's in the telephone book and find Child Welfare. Or you might could knock around a little bit and maybe find an even better situation, if you wasn't to get separated from that roll of cash. Seven hundred parceled out five or ten bucks at a time will last a kid awhile, if he's smart enough not to get picked up by the cops and lucky enough not to get robbed of any more of it than what happens to be in his pocket."

I tell him again: "I can't go.""Why not?"But I can't explain. Some of it is having lived almost my whole life in that farmhouse, with almost no one for company but Daddy and Paul. What I know of other places I have gotten mostly from three sources: the television, the radio, and my imagination. Yes, I've been to the movies, and I've been to the Burg half a dozen times, but always with my father and big brother. The thought of going out into that roaringstrangeness alone scares the living Jesus out of me. And, more to the point, I love him. Not in the simple and uncomplicated (until the last few weeks, at least) way I loved Paul, but yes, I love him. He has cut me and hit me and called me smuckhead and nummie and gluefoot mothersmucker, he has terrorized many of my childhood days and sent me to bed on many nights feeling small and stupid and worthless, but those bad times have yielded their own perverse treasures; they have turned each kiss to gold, each of his compliments, even the most offhand, into things to be treasured. And even at ten- because I'm his son, his blood? maybe-I understand that his kisses and compliments are always sincere; they are always true things. He is a monster, but the monster is not incapable of love. That was the horror of my father, little Lisey: he loved his boys."I just can't," I say.He thinks about this-about whether or not to press me, I suppose-and then just nods again. "All right. But listen to me, Scott. What I did to your brother I did to save your life. Do you know that?""Yes, Daddy.""But if I were to do something to you, it would be different. It would be so bad I might go to h.e.l.l for it, even if there was something else inside making me do it." His eyes s.h.i.+ft away from mine then, and I know he's seeing them again, them, and that pretty soon it won't be him I'm talking to anymore. Then he looks back at me and I see him clearly for the last time. "You won't let me go to h.e.l.l, will you?" he asks me. "You wouldn't let your Daddy go to h.e.l.l and burn there forever, mean as I've been to you some of the time?" "No, Daddy," I say, and I can hardly talk.

"You promise? On your brother's name?""On Paul's name."He looks away, back into the corner. "I'm going to lie down," he says. "Fix yourself something to eat if you want, but don't leave this smucking kitchen all bes.h.i.+tted."That night I wake up-or something wakes me up-and I hear the sleet coming down on the house harder than ever. I hear a crash out back and know it's a tree falling over from the weight of ice on it. Maybe it was another tree falling over that woke me up, but I don't think so. I think I heard him on the stairs, even though he's trying to be quiet. There's no time to do anything but slide out of bed and hide underneath it, so that's what I do even though I know it's hopeless, under the bed is where kids always hide, and it'll be the first place he looks.I see his feet come in the door. They're still bare. He never says a word, just walks over to the bed and stands beside it. I think he'll stand beside it like he did before, then maybe sit down on it, but he never. Instead I hear him make a kind of grunting sound, like he does when he's lifting something heavy, a box or something, and he goes up on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet, and there's a whistling in the air, and then a terrific SPUH-RUNNGGG noise, and the mattress and the box-spring both bow down in the middle, and dust puffs along the floor, and the point of the pickaxe from out in the shed comes shooting through the bottom of my bed. It stops in front of my face, not an inch from my mouth. It seems like I can see every flake of rust on it, and the s.h.i.+ny place where it sc.r.a.ped on one of the bedsprings. It stays still for a second or two, then there's more grunting and a terrific pig-squealing as he tries to pull it out. He tries hard, but it's good and stuck. The point wiggles and waggles back and forth in front of my face, and then he leaves off. I see his fingers appear below the edge of the bed then, and know that he's rested his palms on the b.a.l.l.s of his knees. He's bending down, means to look under the bed and make sure I'm there before working that pickaxe free.I don't think. I just close my eyes and go. It's the first time since I buried Paul and it's the first time from the second floor. I have just a second to think I'll fall, but I don't care, anything's better than hiding under the bed and seeing the stranger wearing my Daddy's face look under and see me looking back, cornered; anything's better than seeing the bad-gunky stranger who owns him now.

And I do fall, but only a little, only a couple of feet, and only, I think, because I believed I would. So much about Boo'ya Moon is about simple belief; there, seeing really is believing, at least some of the time...and as long as you don't wander too far into the woods and get lost.It was night there, Lisey, and I remember it well because it was the only time I went there at night on purpose.

15.

"Oh, Scott," Lisey said, wiping at her cheeks. Each time he broke from the present tense and spoke to her directly was like a blow, but sweet. "Oh, I'm so sorry." She checked to see how many pages were left-not many. Eight? No, ten. She bent to them again, turning each into the growing pile in her lap as she read it.

16.

I leave a cold room where a thing wearing my father's skin is trying to kill me and sit up beside my brother's grave on a summer night softer than velvet. The moon rides the sky like a tarnished silver dollar, and the laughers are having a party deep in the Fairy Forest. Every now and then something else- something deeper in, I think-lets out a roar. Then the laughers are quiet for awhile, but I guess whatever amuses them is eventually more than they can bear in silence, because up they start all over again-first one, then two, then half a dozen, then the whole d.a.m.n Inst.i.tute of Risibility. Something too big to be a hawk or an owl sails voicelessly across the moon, some kind of night-hunting bird special to this place, I guess, special to Boo'ya Moon. I can smell all the perfumes that Paul and I loved so much, but now they smell sour and curdled and somehow bed-p.i.s.sy; like if you breathed too deep of them they'd sprout claws way up in your nose and dig in there. Down Purple Hill I see drifting jellyfish globes of light. I don't know what they are, but I don't like them. I think that if they touch me, they might latch on, or maybe burst and leave a itchy-sore place that would spread like poison ivy if you touched it.It's creepy by Paul's grave. I don't want to be afraid of him, and I'm not, not really, but I keep thinking of the thing inside him, and wondering if maybe it's in him still. And if things over here that are nice in daylight turn to poison at night, maybe a sleeping bad thing, even one hibernating way down in dead and rotting flesh, could come back to life. What if it shot Paul's arms out of the ground? What if it made his dirty dead hands grab me? What if his grinning face came rising up to my own, with dirt running from the corners of his eyes like tears?

I don't want to cry, ten is too old to cry (especially if you've been through the things I have), but I'm starting to blubber, I can't help it. Then I see one sweetheart tree standing a little bit apart from all the others, with its branches spread out in what looks like a low cloud.And to me, Lisey, that tree looked...kind. I didn't know why then, but I think that now, all these years later, I do. Writing this has brought it back. The night-lights, those scary cold balloons drifting just above the ground, wouldn't go under it. And as I got closer to it, I realized that this one tree, at least, smelled as sweet-or almost as sweet-at night as it did in the daytime. That's the tree you're sitting under now, little Lisey, if you're reading this last story. And I'm very tired. I don't think I can do the rest of it the justice it deserves, although I know I must try. It's my last chance to talk to you, after all.Let us say that there's a little boy who sits in the shelter of that tree for-well, who knows, really? Not all that long night, but until the moon (which always seems to be full here, have you noticed?) is down and he has dozed in and out of half a dozen strange and sometimes lovely dreams, at least one of which will later become the basis of a novel. Long enough for him to name that wonderful shelter the Story Tree.And long enough for him to know that something awful-something far worse than the paltry evil which has seized his father-has turned its casual gaze toward him...and marked him for later notice (perhaps)...and then turned its obscene and unknowable mind once more away. That was the first time I sensed the fellow who has lurked behind so much of my life, Lisey, the thing that has been the darkness to your light, and who also feels-as I know you always have-that everything is the same. That is a wonderful concept, but it has its dark side. I wonder if you know? I wonder if you ever will?

17."I know," Lisey said. "I do now. G.o.d help me, I do."She looked at the pages again. Six left. Only six, and that was good. Afternoons in Boo'ya Moon were long, but she thought that this one had finally begun to fade. It was really time to be getting back. Back to her house. Her sisters. Her life.She had begun to understand how it was to be done.

18.There comes a time when I hear the laughers beginning to draw closer to the edge of the Fairy Forest, and I think their amus.e.m.e.nt has taken on a sardonic, perhaps stealthy undertone. I peer around the trunk of my sheltering tree and think I see dark shapes slipping from the darker ma.s.s of the trees at the edge of the woods. This may only be my overactive imagination, but I don't think so. I think my imagination, febrile as it is, has been exhausted by the many shocks of the long day and longer night, and that I have been reduced to seeing exactly what is there. As if to confirm this, there comes a s...o...b..ring chuckle from the high gra.s.s not twenty yards from where I am crouching. Once more I don't think about what I'm doing; I simply close my eyes and feel the chill of my bedroom fold itself around me once more. A moment later I'm sneezing from the disturbed dust under my bed. I rear up, face contorted in a nearly gruesome effort to sneeze as quietly as possible, and I thump my forehead on the broken box-spring. If the pick had still been sticking through I might have gashed myself badly or even put out one of my eyes, but it's gone.I drag myself out from under my bed on my elbows and my knees, conscious that a sickly five o'clock light is soaking in through the window. It's sleeting harder than ever, by the sound, but I hardly notice. I swivel my head from my floorlevel position, peering stupidly around at the shambles that used to be my bedroom. The closet door has been pulled off the top hinge and leans drunkenly into the room from the lower one. My clothes have been scattered and many of them-most of them, it looks like-have been torn apart, as if the thing inside of Daddy has taken out on them what it couldn't take out on the boy who should have been inside them. Far worse, it has torn my few treasured paperback books-sports biographies and science fiction novels, mostly-to shreds. Their flimsy covers lie in pieces everywhere. My bureau has beenoverturned, the drawers slung to the corners of the room. The hole where the pickaxe went through my bed looks as big as a moon crater, and I think: That's where my belly would have been, if I'd been lying there. And there's a faint sour smell. It reminds me of how Boo'ya Moon smelled at night, but it's more familiar. I try to put a name on it and can't. All I can think of is bad fruit, and although that's not quite right, it turns out to be very close.I don't want to leave the room, but I know I can't stay there because eventually he'll be back. I find a pair of jeans that aren't ripped and put them on. My sneakers are gone, I don't know where, but maybe my boots will still be in the mudroom. And my coat. I'll put them on and run out into the sleet. Down the driveway, following Mr. Halsey's half-frozen slushy car tracks, to the road. Then down the road to Mulie's Store. I'll run for my life, into some future I can't even imagine. Unless, that is, he catches me first and kills me.

I have to climb over the bureau, which is blocking the door, to get into the hall. Once I'm out there I see the thing has knocked down all the pictures and knocked holes in the walls, and I know I'm looking at more of its anger at not being able to get at me.Out here the sour fruit smell is strong enough to recognize. There was a Christmas party at U.S. Gyppum last year. Daddy went because he said it would "look funny" if he didn't. The man who drew his name gave him a jug of homemade blackberry wine for a present. Now, Andrew Landon has got a lot of problems (and he'd probably be the first to admit it, if caught in an honest moment), but alcohol isn't one of them. He poured himself a jelly-gla.s.s of that wine before dinner one night-between Christmas and New Year's, this was, with Paul chained in the cellar-took one sip, grimaced, started to pour it down the sink, then saw me looking and held it out.You want to try this, Scott? he asked. See what all the shouting's about? Hey, if you like it, you can have the whole sweetmother gallon.I'm as curious about booze as any kid, I guess, but that smell was too fruity-rancid. Maybe the stuff makes you happy like I've seen on TV, but I could never lick that gone-dead fruit smell. I shook my head.You're a wise child, Scooter ole Scoot, he said, and poured the stuff in the jelly-gla.s.s down the sink. But he must have saved the rest of the jug (or just forgot about it) because that's what I smell now, sure as G.o.d made little fishes, and strong. By the time I get to the foot of the stairs it's a stench, and now I hear something besides the steady rattle of the sleet on the boards and the tinny tick-tock of it on the windows: George Jones. It's Daddy's radio, tuned to WWVA like always, playing very soft. And I also hear snoring. The relief is so great that tears go spilling down my cheeks. The thing I've been most afraid of is that he's laid up, waiting for me to show myself. Now, listening to those long, ragged snores, I know that he's not.Nevertheless, I'm careful. I detour through the dining room so I can come into the living room from behind the sofa. The dining room is also a shambles. Nana's breakfront has been overturned, and it looks to me like he made a pretty good effort to turn it into kindling. All the dishes are broken. So's the blue pitcher, and the money inside it has been torn to pieces. Green shreds have been flung every whichever. Some even hang from the central light fixture like New Year's Eve confetti. Apparently the thing inside Daddy has no more use for money than it does for books.

In spite of those snores, in spite of being on the couch's blind side, I peer into the living room like a soldier peering over the lip of a foxhole after an artillery barrage. It's a needless precaution. His head's hanging off one end of the couch and his hair, which he hasn't taken the scissors to since before Paul went bad, is so long it's almost touching the rug. I could have marched through there cras.h.i.+ng a pair of cymbals and he wouldn't have stirred. Daddy isn't just asleep in the jumbled wreckage of that room; he is un-smuckingconscious.A little further in and I see there's a cut running up one cheek, and his closed eyes have a purplish, exhausted look. His lips have slid back from his teeth, making him look like an old dog that fell asleep trying to snarl. He covers the couch with an old Navajo blanket to keep off grease and spilled food, and he's wrapped part of it over him. He must have been tired of busting things up by the time he got in here, because he's poked out the eye of the television and smashed the gla.s.s over his dead wife's studio portrait and called it good. The radio's in its usual place on the endtable and that gallon jug is on the floor beside it. I look at the jug and can't hardly believe what I'm seeing: there's not but an inch or so left. It's almost impossible for me to believe he's drunk so much-he who isn't used to drinking at all-but the stink hanging around him, so thick I can almost see it, is very persuasive.The pickaxe leans against the head of the sofa, and there's a piece of paper stuck on the end that came down through my bed. I know it's a note he's left for me, and I don't want to read it, but I have to. He's written on three lines, but there are only eight words. Too few to ever forget.KILL ME.THEN PUT ME WITH PAUL.PLEASE.

19.Lisey, crying harder than ever, turned this page into her lap along with the others. Now there were only two left. The printing had grown loose, a little wandering, not always sticking to the lines, quite clearly tired. She knew what came next-I put a pickaxe in his head while he was a-sleepun, he had told her under the yum-yum tree-and did she have to read the details here? Was there anything in the marriage vows about having to subject yourself to your dead husband's confession of patricide?

And yet those pages called to her, cried to her like some lonely thing that has lost everything but its voice. She dropped her eyes to the final pages, determined that if she must finish, she would do so as quickly as she could.

20.

I don't want to, but I take up the pickaxe anyway and stand there with it in my hands, looking at him, the lord of my life, the tyrant of all my days. I have hated him often and he has never given me cause to love him enough, I know that now, but he has given me some, especially during those nightmare weeks after Paul went bad. And in that five o'clock living room with the day's first gray light creeping in and the sleet ticking like a clock and the sound of his wheezing snores below me and an ad on the radio for some discount furniture store in Wheeling, West Virginia, I will never visit, I know it comes down to a bald choice between those two, love and hate. Now I'll find out which one rules my child's heart. I can let him live and run down the road to Mulie's, run into some unknown new life, and that will condemn him to the h.e.l.l he fears and in many ways deserves. Richly deserves. First h.e.l.l on earth, the h.e.l.l of a cell in some looneybin, and then maybe h.e.l.l forever after, which is what he really fears. Or I can kill him and set him free. This choice is mine to make, and there is no G.o.d to help me make it, for I believe in none.Instead I pray to my brother, who loved me until the bad-gunky stole his heart and mind. I ask him to tell me what to do, if he's there. And I get an answer-although whether it is really from Paul or just from my own imagination masquerading as Paul I suppose I'll never know. In the end, I don't see that it matters; I need an answer and I get one. In my ear, just as clearly as he ever spoke when he was alive, Paul says: "Daddy's prize is a kiss."I take hold on the pickaxe then. The ad on the radio finishes and Hank Williams comes on, singing "Why don't you love me like you used to do, How come you treat me like a worn-out shoe?" And 21.

Here three lines were blank before the words took up again, this time in the past tense and addressing her directly. The rest was crammed together with almost no regard for the blueruled notebook lines, and Lisey was sure he had written the final pa.s.sage in a single rush. She read it the same way. Turning over to the last page as she did and continuing on, continually wiping away her tears so she could see clearly enough to get the sense of what he was saying. The mental seeing part, she found, was h.e.l.lishly easy. The little boy, barefooted, wearing perhaps his only pair of untorn jeans, raising the pickaxe over his sleeping father in the gray predawn light while the radio plays, and for a moment it only hangs there in the air that reeks of blackberry wine and everything is the same. Then 22.

I brought it down. Lisey, I brought it down in love-I swear- and I killed my father. I thought I might have to hit him with it again but that single blow was enough and all my life it's been on my mind, all my life it's been the thought inside every thought, I get up thinking I killed my father and go to bed thinking it. It has moved like a ghost behind every line I ever wrote in every novel, any story: I killed my father. I told you that day under the yum-yum tree, and I think that gave me just enough relief to keep me from exploding completely five years or ten or fifteen down the line. But a statement isn't the same as telling.Lisey, if you're reading this, I've gone on. I think my time is short, but such time as I had (and it was very good time) is all down to you. You have given me so much. Just give me this much more-your eye on these last few words, the hardest I've ever written.No tale can tell how ugly such dying is, even if it's instantaneous. Thank G.o.d I didn't hit him a glancing blow and have to do it again; thank G.o.d there was no squealing or crawling. I hit him dead center, right where I meant to, but even mercy is ugly in the living memory; that's a lesson I learned well when I was just ten. His skull exploded. Hair and blood and brains showered up, all over that blanket he'd spread on the back of the couch. Snot flew out of his nose and his tongue fell out of his mouth. His head went over to the side and I heard soft puttering noises as the blood and brains leaked out of his head. Some of it splashed on my feet and it was warm. Hank Williams was still on the radio. One of Daddy's hands made a fist, then opened again. I smelled s.h.i.+t and knew he'd left a load in his pants. And I knew that was the last of him.The pickax was still stick out his head.

I crep away into the corn of the room and curl up and I cried. I cried and cried. I guess maybe I slep some too, I don't kno, but there came a time when it was brighter and the sun was almost out and I think it might have been noonish. If so, I guess 7 hours or so wen by. That was when I first tried to take my Daddy to Boo'ya Moon and couldn't. I thought if I got something to eat, so I did but still I couldn't. Then I thought if I took a bath and got the blut off me, his blood, and clean up some of the mess around wehre he was but still I coulnt. I tried and tried. Off and on quite a bit. Two days, I guess. Sometime I'd look at his wrap in the blanket and make believe he was say You keep on pluggin Scoot you old sumb.i.t.c.h, you'll make it like in a story. I'd try, then I'd clean, try and clean, eet somethig and try summore. I cleen that hole house! Top to bottom! Once I went to Boo'ya by myself prove I still had the nack and I dit but I coulnt take my daddy. I trite so hard Lisey.

23.

Several blank lines here. At the bottom of the last page he had written: Some things are like an ANCHOR Lisey do you remember?"I do, Scott," she murmured. "I do. And your father was one of them, wasn't he?" Wondering how many days and nights in all. How many days and nights alone with the corpse of Andrew "Sparky" Landon before Scott finally gave up plugging and invited the world in. Wondering how in G.o.d's name he had stood up to it without going completely insane.There was a little more on the other side of the sheet. She flipped it over and saw that he had answered one of her questions.Five days I tride. Finaly gave up and warped him in that blanket and put him down the dry well. The next time the sleet stoped I went to Mulie's and said "My Daddy's took my big brother and I guess they up and left me." They took me to the County Sheriff, a fat old man named Gosling and he took me to the Child Welfare and I was "on the County" as they say. So far as I know Gosling was the only cop who ever went up there to the home place, and big deal. My own Daddy once said "Sheriff Gosling couldn't find his own a.s.s after he took a s.h.i.+t."Below this was another s.p.a.ce of three lines, and when the printing resumed-the last four lines of communication from her husband-she could see the effort he had made to get hold of himself, to find his adult self. He had made the effort for her, she thought. No, knew.

Babyluv: If you need an anchor to hold your place in the world-not Boo'ya Moon but the one we shared, use the african. You know how to get it back. Kisses-at least a thousand,ScottP.S. Everything the same. I love you.

24.Lisey could have sat there with his letter for a long time, but the afternoon was fleeting. The su