II. Lisey and The Madman


(Darkness Loves Him)


1


The next morning Lisey sat tailor-fashion on the floor of Scott's memory nook, looking across at the heaps and stacks and piles of magazines, alumni reports, English Department bulletins, and University "journals" that ran along the study's south wall. It had occurred to her that maybe looking would be enough to dispel the stealthy hold all those as-yetunseen pictures had taken on her imagination. Now that she was actually here, she knew that had been a vain hope. Nor would she need Manda's limp little notebook with all the numbers in it. That was lying discarded on the floor nearby, and Lisey put it in the back pocket of her jeans. She didn't like the look of it, the treasured artifact of a not-quite-right mind.




She once again measured that long stack of books and magazines against the south wall, a dusty booksnake four feet high and easily thirty feet long. If not for Amanda, she probably would have packed every last one of them away in liquor-store boxes without ever looking at them or wondering what Scott meant by keeping so many of them.




My mind just doesn't run that way, she told herself. I'm really not much of a thinker at all.




Maybe not, but you always remembered like a champ.




That was Scott at his most teasing, charming, and hard to resist, but the truth was she'd been better at forgetting. As had he, and both of them had had their reasons. And yet, as if to prove his point, she heard a ghostly snatch of


conversation. One speaker—Scott—was familiar. The other voice had a little southern glide to it. A pretentious little southern glide, maybe.




—Tony here will be writing it up for the [thingummy, rum-tumtummy, whatever]. Would you like to see a copy, Mr. Landon? —Hmmmm? Sure, you bet!



Muttering voices all around them. Scott barely hearing the thing about Tony writing it up, he'd had what was almost a politician's knack for turning himself outward to those who'd come to see him when he was in public, Scott was listening to the voices of the swelling crowd and already thinking about finding the plug-in point, that pleasurable moment when the electricity flowed from him to them and then back to him again doubled or even tripled, he loved the current but Lisey was convinced he had loved that instant of plugging in even more. Still, he'd taken time to respond.




—You can send photos, campus newspaper articles or reviews, departmental write-ups, anything like that. Please. I like to see everything. The Study, RFD #2, Sugar Top Hill Road, Castle Rock, Maine. Lisey knows the zip. I always forget.




Nothing else about her, just Lisey knows the zip. How Manda would have howled to hear it! But she had wanted to be forgotten on those trips, both there and not there. She liked to watch.




Like the fellow in the porno movie? Scott had asked her once, and she'd returned the thin moon-smile that told him he was treading near the edge. If you say so, dear, she had replied.




He always introduced her when they arrived and again here and there, to other people, when it became necessary, but it rarely did. Outside of their own fields, academics were oddly lacking in curiosity. Most of them were just delighted to have the author of The Coaster's Daughter (National Book Award) and Relics (the Pulitzer) among them. Also, there had been a period of about ten years when Scott had somehow gotten larger than life—to others, and sometimes to himself. (Not to Lisey; she was the one who had to fetch him a fresh roll of toilet paper if he ran out while he was on the john.) Nobody exactly charged the stage when he stood there with the microphone in his hand, but even Lisey felt the connection he made with his audience. Those volts. It was hardwired, and it had little to do with his work as a writer. Maybe nothing. It had to do with the Scottness of him, somehow. That sounded crazy, but it was true. And it never seemed to change him much, or hurt him, at least until—



Her eyes stopped moving, fixed on a hardcover spine and gold leaf letters reading U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review.




1988, the year of the rockabilly novel. The one he'd never written.




1988, the year of the madman.




—Tony here will be writing it up




"No," Lisey said. "Wrong. He didn't say Tony, he said—"




—Toneh




Yes, that was right, he said Toneh, he said




—Toneh heah well be rahtin it up




"—writin it up for the U-Tenn '88 Year in Review," Lisey said. "He said…"




—Ah could Express Mail it




Only she was damned if the little Tennessee Williams wannabe hadn't almost said Spress Mail it. That was the voice, all right, that was the southern-fried chickenshit. Dashmore? Dashman? The man had dashed, all right, had dashed like a smucking track-star, but that wasn't it. It had been— "Dashmiel!" Lisey murmured to the empty rooms, and clenched her fists. She stared at the book with the gold-stamped spine as if it might disappear the second she took her eyes away. "Little prig-southerner's name was Dashmiel, and HE RAN LIKE A RABBIT!"



Scott would have turned down the offer of Express Mail or Federal Express; believed such things to be a needless expense. About correspondence there was never any hurry—when it came floating downstream, he plucked it out. When it came to reviews of his novels he had been a lot less Come Back To De Raft, Huck Honey and a lot more What Makes Scotty Run, but for write-ups following public appearances, regular mail did him just fine. Since The Study had its own address, Lisey realized she would have been very unlikely to see these things when they came in. And once they were here…well, these airy, well-lighted rooms had been Scott's creative playground, not hers, a mostly benign one-boy clubhouse where he'd written his stories and listened to his music as loud as he wanted in the soundproofed area he called My Padded Cell. There'd never been a KEEP OUT sign on the door, she'd been up here lots of times when he was alive and Scott was always glad to see her, but it had taken Amanda to see what was in the belly of the booksnake sleeping against the south wall. Quick-to-offense Amanda, suspicious Amanda, OCD Amanda who had somehow become convinced that her house would burn flat if she didn't load the kitchen stove with exactly three maple chunks at a time, no more or less. Amanda whose unalterable habit was to turn around three times on her stoop if she had to go back into the house for something she'd forgotten. Look at stuff like that (or listen to her counting strokes as she brushed her teeth) and you could easily write Manda off as just another gonzo-bonkie old maid, somebody write that lady a prescription for Zoloft or Prozac. But without Manda, does little Lisey ever realize there are hundreds of pictures of her dead husband up here, just waiting for her to look at them? Hundreds of memories waiting to be called forth? And most of them surely more pleasant than the memory of Dashmiel, that southern-fried chickenshit coward…



"Stop it," she murmured. "Just stop it now. Lisa Debusher Landon, you open your hand and let that go."




But she was apparently not ready to do that, because she got up, crossed the room, and knelt before the books. Her right hand floated out ahead of her like a magician's trick and grasped the volume marked U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review. Her heart was pounding hard, not with excitement but with fear. The head could tell the heart all that was eighteen years over, but in matters of emotion the heart had its own brilliant vocabulary. The madman's hair had been so blond it was almost white. He had been a graduate student madman, spouting what was not quite gibberish. A day after the shooting—when Scott's condition was upgraded from critical to fair—she had asked Scott if the madman grad student had had it strapped on, and Scott had whispered that he didn't know if a crazy person could strap anything on. Strapping it on was a heroic act, an act of will, and crazy people didn't have much in the way of will…or did she think otherwise?




—I don't know, Scott. I'll think about it.




Not meaning to. Wanting to never think about it again, if she could help it. As far as Lisey was concerned, the smucking looneytune with the little gun could join the other things she'd successfully forgotten since meeting Scott.




—Hot, wasn't it?


Lying in bed. Still pale, far too pale, but starting to get a little of his color back. Casual, no special look, just making conversation. And Lisey Now, Lisey Alone, the widow Landon, shivered.




"He didn't remember," she murmured.




She was almost positive he didn't. Nothing about when he'd been down on the pavement and they'd both been sure he would never get back up. That he was dying and whatever passed between them then was all there would ever be, they who had found so much to say to each other. The neurologist she plucked up courage enough to speak to said that forgetting around the time of a traumatic event was par for the course, that people recovering from such events often discovered that a spot had been burned black in the film of their memories. That spot might stretch over five minutes, five hours, or five days. Sometimes disconnected fragments and images would surface years or even decades later. The neurologist called it a defense mechanism.




It made sense to Lisey.




From the hospital she'd gone back to the motel where she was staying. It wasn't a very good room—in back, with nothing to look at but a board fence and nothing to listen to except a hundred or so barking dogs—but she was far past caring about such things. Certainly she wanted nothing to do with the campus where her husband had been shot. And as she kicked off her shoes and lay down on the hard double bed, she thought: Darkness loves him.




Was that true?




How could she say, when she didn't even know what it meant?


You know. Daddy's prize was a kiss.




Lisey had turned her head so swiftly on the pillow she might have been slapped by an invisible hand. Shut up about that!




No answer…no answer…and then, slyly: Darkness loves him. He dances with it like a lover and the moon comes up over the purple hill and what was sweet smells sour. Smells like poison.




She had turned her head back the other way. And outside the motel room the dogs—every smucking dog in Nashville, it sounded like—had barked as the sun went down in orange August smoke, making a hole for the night. As a child she had been told by her mother there was nothing to fear in the dark, and she had believed it to be true. She had been downright gleeful in the dark, even when it was lit by lightning and ripped by thunder. While her years-older sister Manda cowered under her covers, little Lisey sat atop her own bed, sucking her thumb and demanding that someone bring the flashlight and read her a story. She had told this to Scott once and he had taken her hands and said, "You be my light, then. Be my light, Lisey." And she had tried, but—




"I was in a dark place," Lisey murmured as she sat in his deserted study with the U-Tenn Nashville Review in her hands. "Did you say that, Scott? You did, didn't you?"




—I was in a dark place and you found me. You saved me.




Maybe in Nashville that had been true. Not in the end.




—You were always saving me, Lisey. Do you remember the first night I stayed at your apartment?




Sitting here now with the book in her lap, Lisey smiled. Of course she did. Her strongest memory was of too much peppermint schnapps, it had given her an acidy stomach. And he'd had trouble first getting and then maintaining an erection, although in the end everything went all right. She'd assumed then it was the booze. It wasn't until later that he'd told her he'd never been successful until her: she'd been his first, she'd been his only, and every story he'd ever told her or anyone else about his crazy life of adolescent sex, both gay and straight, had been a lie. And Lisey? Lisey had seen him as an unfinished project, a thing to do before going to sleep. Coax the dishwasher through the noisy part of her cycle; set the Pyrex casserole dish to soak; blow the hotshot young writer until he gets some decent wood.



—When it was done and you went to sleep, I lay awake and listened to the clock on your nightstand and the wind outside and understood that I was really home, that in bed with you was home, and something that had been getting close in the dark was suddenly gone. It could not stay. It had been banished. It knew how to come back, I was sure of that, but it could not stay, and I could really go to sleep. My heart cracked with gratitude. I think it was the first gratitude I've ever really known. I lay there beside you and the tears rolled down the sides of my face and onto the pillow. I loved you then and I love you now and I have loved you every second in between. I don't care if you understand me. Understanding is vastly overrated, but nobody ever gets enough safety. I've never forgotten how safe I felt with that thing gone out of the darkness.




"Daddy's prize was a kiss."




Lisey said it out loud this time, and although it was warm in the empty study, she shivered. She still didn't know what it meant, but she was pretty sure she remembered when Scott had told her that Daddy's prize was a kiss, that she had been his first, and nobody ever got enough safety: just before they were married. She had given him all the safety she knew how to give, but it hadn't been enough. In the end Scott's thing had come back for him, anyway—that thing he had sometimes glimpsed in mirrors and waterglasses, the thing with the vast piebald side. The long boy.



Lisey looked around the study fearfully for just a moment, and wondered if it was watching her now.




2




She opened the U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review. The spine's crack was like a pistol-shot. It made her cry out in surprise and drop the book. Then she laughed (a little shakily, it was true). "Lisey, you nit."




This time a folded piece of newsprint fell out, yellowing and brittle to the touch. What she unfolded was a grainy photograph, caption included, starring a fellow of perhaps twenty-three who looked much younger thanks to his expression of dazed shock. In his right hand he held a short-handled shovel with a silver scoop. Said scoop had been engraved with words that were unreadable in the photo, but Lisey remembered what they were: COMMENCEMENT, SHIPMAN LIBRARY.




The young man was sort of…well…peering at this shovel, and Lisey knew not just by his face but by the whole awkward thisway-n-that jut of his lanky body that he didn't have any idea what he was seeing. It could have been an artillery shell, a bonsai tree, a radiation detector, or a china pig with a slot in its back for spare silver; it could have been a whang-dangdoodle, a phylactery testifying to the pompetus of love, or a cloche hat made out of coyote skin. It could have been the penis of the poet Pindar. This guy was too far gone to know. Nor, she was willing to bet, was he aware that grasping his left hand, also frozen forever in swarms of black photodots, was a man in what looked like a costume-ball Motor Highway Patrolman's uniform: no gun, but a Sam Browne belt running across the chest and what Scott, laughing and making big eyes, might have called "a puffickly huh-yooge batch of orifice." He also had a puffickly huh-yooge grin on his face, the kind of relieved oh-thank-you-God grin that said Son, you'll never have to buy yourself another drink in another bar where I happen to be, as long as I've got one dollar to rub against another 'un. In the background she could see Dashmiel, the little prig-southerner who had run away. Roger C. Dashmiel, it came to her, the big C stands for chickenshit.



Had she, little Lisey Landon, seen the happy campus security cop shaking the dazed young man's hand? No, but…say…




Saa-aaaay, chillums…looky-here…do you want a true-life image to equal such fairy-tale visions as Alice falling down her rabbit-hole or a toad in a top-hat driving a motor-car? Then check this out, over on the right side of the picture.




Lisey bent down until her nose was almost touching the yellowed photo from the Nashville American. There was a magnifying glass in the wide center drawer of Scott's main desk. She had seen it on many occasions, its place preserved between the world's oldest unopened package of Herbert Tareyton cigarettes and the world's oldest book of unredeemed S&H Green Stamps. She could have gotten it but didn't bother. Didn't need any magnification to confirm what she was seeing: half a brown loafer. Half a cordovan loafer, actually, with a slightly built-up heel. She remembered those loafers very well. How comfortable they'd been. And she'd certainly moved in them that day, hadn't she? She hadn't seen the happy cop, or the dazed young man (Tony, she was sure, of Toneh heah well be rahtin it up fame), nor had she noticed Dashmiel, the southern-fried chickenshit, once the cheese hit the grater. All of them had ceased to matter to her, the whole smucking bunch of them. By then she had only one thing on her mind, and that had been Scott. He was surely no more than ten feet away, but she had known that if she didn't get to him at once, the crowd around him would keep her out…and if she were kept out, the crowd might kill him. Kill him with its dangerous love and voracious concern. And what the smuck, Violet, he might have been dying, anyway. If he was, she'd meant to be there when he stepped out. When he Went, as the folks of her mother and father's generation would have said.



"I was sure he'd die," Lisey said to the silent sunwashed room, to the dusty winding bulk of the booksnake.




So she'd run to her fallen husband, and the news photographer— who'd been there only to snap the obligatory picture of college dignitaries and a famous visiting author gathered for the groundbreaking with the silver spade, the ritual First Shovelful of Earth where the new library would eventually stand—had ended up snapping a much more dynamic photograph, hadn't he? This was a front-page photo, maybe even a hall of fame photo, the kind that made you pause with a spoonful of breakfast cereal halfway between the bowl and your mouth, dripping on the classifieds, like the photo of Oswald with his hands to his belly and his mouth open in a final dying yawp, the kind of frozen image you never forgot. Only Lisey herself would ever realize that the writer's wife was also in the photo. Exactly one built-up heel of her.




The caption running along the bottom of the photo read:




Captain S. Heffernan of U-Tenn Campus Security congratulates Tony Eddington , who saved the life of famous visiting author Scott Landon only seconds before this photo was taken. "He's an authentic hero," said Capt. Heffernan . "No one else was close enough to take a hand." (Additional coverage)



Running up the lefthand side was a fairly lengthy message in handwriting she didn't recognize. Running up the righthand side were two lines of Scott's sprawly handwriting, the first line slightly larger than the second…and a little arrow, by God, pointing to the shoe! She knew what the arrow meant; he had recognized it for what it was. Coupled with his wife's story—call it Lisey and the Madman, a thrilling tale of true adventure—he had understood everything. And was he furious? No. Because he had known his wife would not be furious. He had known she'd think it was funny, and it was funny, a smucking riot, so why was she on the verge of crying? Never in her whole life had she been so surprised, tricked, and overtrumped by her emotions as in these last few days.




Lisey dropped the news clipping on top of the book, afraid a sudden flood of tears might actually dissolve it the way saliva dissolves a mouthful of cotton candy. She cupped her palms over her eyes and waited. When she was sure the tears weren't going to overflow, she picked up the clipping and read what Scott had written:





Must show to Lisey! How she will LAUGH


But will she understand? (Our survey says YES)




He had turned the big exclamation point into a sunny seventies-style smiley-face, as if telling her to have a nice day. And Lisey did understand. Eighteen years late, but so what? Memory was relative.




Very zen, grasshoppah, Scott might have said.


"Zen, schmen. I wonder how Tony's doing these days, that's what I wonder. Savior of the famous Scott Landon." She laughed, and the tears that had still been standing in her eyes spilled down her cheeks.




Now she turned the photo widdershins and read the other, longer note.




8–18–88




Dear Scott (If I may): I thought you would want this photograph of C. Anthony ("Tony") Eddington III, the young grad student who saved your life. U-Tenn will be honoring him, of course; we felt you might also want to be in touch. His address is 748 Coldview Avenue, Nashville North, Nashville, Tennessee 37235. Mr. Eddington, "Poor but Proud," comes from a fine Southern Tennessee family and is an excellent student poet. You will of course want to thank (and perhaps reward) him in your own way.




Respectfully, sir, I remain, Roger C. Dashmiel




Assoc. Prof., English Dept.




University of Tennessee, Nashville




Lisey read this over once, twice ("three times a laaaa-dy," Scott would have sung at this point), still smiling, but now with a sour combination of amazement and final comprehension. Roger Dashmiel was probably as ignorant of what had actually happened as the campus cop. Which meant there were only two people in the whole round world who knew the truth about that afternoon: Lisey Landon and Tony Eddington, the fellow who would be rahtin it up for the year-end review. It was possible that even "Toneh" himself didn't realize what had happened after the ceremonial first spadeful of earth had been turned. Maybe he'd been in a fear-injected blackout. Dig it: he might really believe he had saved Scott Landon from death.



No. She didn't think so. What she thought was that this clipping and the jotted, fulsome note were Dashmiel's petty revenge on Scott for…for what?




For just being polite?




For looking at Monsieur de Litérature Dashmiel and not seeing him?




For being a rich creative snotbucket who was going to make a fifteen-thousand-dollar payday for saying a few uplifting words and turning a single spadeful of earth? Pre-loosened earth at that?




All those things. And more. Lisey thought Dashmiel had somehow believed their positions would have been reversed in a truer, fairer world; that he, Roger Dashmiel, would have been the focus of the intellectual interest and student adulation, while Scott Landon—not to mention his mousy little wouldn'tfart-if-her-life-depended-on-it-wife—


would be the ones toiling in the campus vineyards, always currying favor, testing the winds of departmental politics, and scurrying to make that next pay-grade.




"Whatever it was, he didn't like Scott and this was his revenge," she marveled to the empty, sunny rooms above the long barn. "This…poison-pen clipping."




She considered the idea for a moment, then burst out into gales of merry laughter, clapping her hands on the flat part of her chest above her breasts.




When she recovered a little, she paged through the Review until she found the article she was looking for: AMERICA'S MOST FAMOUS NOVELIST INAUGURATES LONG-HELD LIBRARY DREAM. The byline was Anthony Eddington, sometimes known as Toneh. And, as Lisey skimmed it, she found she was capable of anger, after all. Even rage. For there was no mention of how that day's festivities had ended, or the Review author's own putative heroism, for that matter. The only suggestion that something had gone crazily wrong was in the concluding lines: "Mr. Landon's speech following the groundbreaking and his reading in the student lounge that evening were cancelled due to unexpected developments, but we hope to see this giant of American literature back on our campus soon. Perhaps for the ceremonial ribbon-cutting when the Shipman opens its doors in 1991!"



Reminding herself this was the school Review, for God's sake, a glossy, expensive hardcover book mailed out to presumably loaded alumni, went some distance toward defusing her anger; did she really think the U-Tenn Review was going to let their hired hack rehash that day's bloody bit of slapstick? How many alumni dollars would that add to the coffers? Reminding herself that Scott would also have found this amusing helped…but not all that much. Scott, after all, wasn't here to put his arm around her, to kiss her cheek, to distract her by gently tweaking the tip of one breast and telling her that to everything there was a season—a time to sow, a time to reap, a time to strap and likewise one to unstrap, yea, verily.




Scott, damn him, was gone. And—




"And he bled for you people," she murmured in a resentful voice that sounded spookily like Manda's. "He almost died for you people. It's sort of a blue-eyed miracle he didn't."




And Scott spoke to her again, as he had a way of doing. She knew it was only the ventriloquist inside her, making his voice—who had loved it more or remembered it better?—but it didn't feel that way. It felt like him.



You were my miracle, Scott said. You were my blue-eyed miracle. Not just that day, but always. You were the one who kept the dark away, Lisey. You shone.




"I suppose there were times when you thought so," she said absently.




—Hot, wasn't it?




Yes. It had been hot. But not just hot. It was—




"Humid," Lisey said. "Muggy. And I had a bad feeling about it from the get-go."




Sitting in front of the booksnake, with the U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review lying open in her lap, Lisey had a momentary but brilliant glimpse of Granny D, feeding the chickens way back when, on the home place. "It was in the bathroom that I started to feel really bad. Because I broke




3




She keeps thinking about the glass, that smucking broken glass. When, that is, she's not thinking of how much she'd like to get out of this heat.




Lisey stands behind and slightly to Scott's right with her hands clasped demurely before her, watching him balance on one foot, the other on the shoulder of the silly little shovel half-buried in loose earth that has clearly been brought in for the occasion. The day is maddeningly hot, maddeningly humid, maddeningly muggy, and the considerable crowd that has gathered only makes it worse. Unlike the dignitaries, the lookie-loos aren't dressed in anything approaching their best, and while their jeans and shorts and pedal-pushers may not exactly make them comfortable in the wet-blanket air, Lisey envies them just the same as she stands here at the crowd's forefront, basting in the suck-oven heat of the Tennessee afternoon. Just standing pat, dressed up in her hot-weather best, is stressful, worrying that she'll soon be sweating dark circles in the light brown linen top she's wearing over the blue rayon shell beneath. She's got on a great bra for hot weather, and still it's biting into the undersides of her boobs like nobody's business. Happy days, babyluv.



Scott, meanwhile, continues balancing on one foot while his hair, too long in back—he needs it cut badly, she knows he looks in the mirror and sees a rock star but she looks at him and sees a smucking hobo out of a Woody Guthrie song—blows in the occasional puff of hot breeze. He's being a good sport while the photographer circles. Damn good sport. He's flanked on the left by a guy named Tony Eddington, who's going to write up all this happy crappy for some campus outlet or another, and on the right by their stand-in host, an English Department stalwart named Roger Dashmiel. Dashmiel is one of those men who seem older than they are not only because they have lost so much hair and gained so much belly but because they insist upon drawing an almost stifling gravitas around themselves. Even their witticisms felt to Lisey like oral readings of insurance policy clauses. Making matters worse is the fact that Dashmiel doesn't like her husband. Lisey has sensed this at once (it's easy, because most men do like him), and it has given her something upon which to focus her unease. For she is uneasy, profoundly so. She has tried to tell herself that it's no more than the humidity and the gathering clouds in the west presaging strong afternoon thunderstorms or maybe even tornadoes: a low-barometer kind of thing. But the barometer wasn't low in Maine when she got out of bed this morning at quarter to seven; it had been a beautiful summer morning already, with the newly risen sun sparkling on a trillion points of dew in the grass between the house and Scott's study. Not a cloud in the sky, what old Dandy Dave Debusher would have called "a real ham-n-egger of a day." Yet the instant her feet touched the oak boards of the bedroom floor and her thoughts turned to the trip to Nashville—leave for the Portland Jetport at eight, fly out on Delta at nineforty—her heart dipped with dread and her morning-empty stomach, usually sweet, foamed with unmotivated fear. She had greeted these sensations with surprised dismay, because she ordinarily liked to travel, especially with Scott: the two of them sitting companionably side by side, he with his book open, she with hers. Sometimes he'd read her a bit of his and sometimes she'd vice him a little versa. Sometimes she'd feel him and look up and find his eyes. His solemn regard. As though she were a mystery to him still. Yes, and sometimes there would be turbulence, and she liked that, too. It was like the rides at the Topsham Fair when she and her sisters had been young, the Krazy Kups and the Wild Mouse. Scott never minded the turbulent interludes, either. She remembered one particularly mad approach into Denver—strong winds,


thunderheads, little prop-job commuter plane from Death's Head Airlines all over the smucking sky—and how she'd seen him actually pogo-ing in his seat like a little kid who needs to go to the bathroom, this crazy grin on his face. No, the rides that scared Scott were the smooth downbound ones he sometimes took in the middle of the night. Once in a while he talked— lucidly; smiling, even—about the things you could see in the screen of a dead TV set. Or a shot-glass, if you held it tilted just the right way. It scared her badly to hear him talk like that. Because it was crazy, and because she sort of knew what he meant, even if she didn't want to.


So it isn't low barometer that's bothering her and it certainly hadn't been the prospect of getting on one more airplane. But in the bathroom, reaching for the light over the sink, something she had done without incident or accident day in and day out for the entire eight years they'd lived on Sugar Top Hill—which came to approximately three thousand days, less time spent on the road—the back of her hand whacked the waterglass with their toothbrushes in it and sent it tumbling to the tiles where it shattered into approximately three thousand stupid pieces.




"Shit fire, save the smuckin matches!" she cried, frightened and irritated to find herself so…for she did not believe in omens, not Lisey Landon the writer's wife, not little Lisey Debusher from the Sabbatus Road in Lisbon Falls, either. Omens were for the shanty Irish.




Scott, who had just come back into the bedroom with two cups of coffee and a plate of buttered toast, stopped dead. "Whadja break, babyluv?"




"Nothing that came out of the dog's ass," Lisey said savagely, and was then sort of astonished. That was one of Granny Debusher's sayings, and Granny D certainly had believed in omens, but that old colleen had been on the cooling board when Lisey was barely four. Was it possible Lisey could even remember her? It seemed so, for as she stood there, looking down at the shards of toothglass, the actual articulation of that omen came to her, came in Granny D's tobacco-broken voice…and returns now, as she stands watching her husband be a good sport in his lightest-weight summer sportcoat (which he'll soon be sweating through under the arms nevertheless).




—Broken glass in the morning, broken hearts at night.


That was Granny D's scripture, all right, remembered by at least one little girl, stored up before the day Granny D pitched over dying in the chickenyard with a snarl in her throat, an apron filled with Blue Bird feed tied around her waist, and a sack of Beechnut scrap slid up her sleeve.




So.




Not the heat, the trip, or that fellow Dashmiel, who only ended up doing the meet-and-greet because the head of the English Department is in the hospital following an emergency gall-bladder removal the day before. It's a


broken…smucking…toothglass combined with the saying of a longdead Irish granny. And the joke of it is (as Scott will later point out), that is just enough to put her on edge. Just enough to get her at least semi-strapped.




Sometimes, he will tell her not long hence, speaking from a hospital bed (ah, but he could so easily have been on a cooling board himself, all his wakeful, thoughtful nights over), speaking in his new whispering, effortful voice, sometimes just enough is just enough. As the saying is.




And she will know exactly what he's talking about.




4




Roger Dashmiel has his share of headaches today, Lisey knows that, though it doesn't make her like him any better. If there was ever an actual script for the ceremony, Professor Hegstrom (he of the emergency gall-bladder attack) was too post-op muddled to tell Dashmiel or anyone else what or where it is. Dashmiel has consequently been left with little more than a time of day and a cast of characters featuring a writer to whom he has taken an instant dislike. When the little party of dignitaries left Inman Hall for the short but exceedingly warm walk to the site of the forthcoming Shipman Library, Dashmiel told Scott they'd have to more or less play it by ear. Scott had shrugged good-naturedly. He was absolutely comfortable with that. For Scott Landon, ear was a way of life.



"Ah'll introduce you," said the man Lisey would in later years come to think of as the southern-fried chickenshit. This as they walked toward the baked and shimmering plot of land where the new library would stand (the word is pronounced LAH-bree in Dashmiel-ese). The photographer in charge of immortalizing all this danced restlessly back and forth, snapping and snapping, busy as a gnat. Lisey could see a rectangle of fresh brown earth not far ahead, about nine by five, she judged, and trucked in that morning, by the just-starting-to-fade look of it. No one had thought to put up an awning, and already the surface of the fresh dirt had acquired a grayish glaze.




"Somebody better do it," Scott said.




He spoke cheerfully, but Dashmiel had frowned as if wounded by some undeserved canard. Then, with a meaty sigh, he'd pressed on. "Applause follows introduction—"




"As day follows night," Scott murmured.




"—and yew'll say a woid or tieu," Dashmiel finished. Beyond the baked wasteland awaiting the library, a freshly paved parking lot shimmered in the sunlight, all smooth tar and staring yellow lines. Lisey saw fantastic ripples of nonexistent water on its far side.




"It will be my pleasure," Scott said.




The unvarying good nature of his responses seemed to worry Dashmiel. "Ah hope you won't want to say tieu much at the groun'breakin," he told Scott as they approached the roped-off area. This had been kept clear, but there was a crowd big enough to stretch almost to the parking lot waiting beyond it. An even larger one had trailed Dashmiel and the Landons from Inman Hall. Soon the two would merge, and Lisey—who ordinarily didn't mind crowds any more than she minded turbulence at twenty thousand feet—didn't like this, either. It occurred to her that so many people on a day this hot might suck all the air out of the air. Stupid idea, but—



"It's mighty hot, even fo' Nashville in August, wouldn't you say so, Toneh?"




Tony Eddington nodded obligingly but said nothing. His only comment so far had been to identify the tirelessly dancing photographer as Stefan Queensland of the Nashville American— also of U-Tenn Nashville, class of '85. "Hope y'all will help him out if y'can," Tony Eddington had said to Scott as they began their walk over here.




"Yew'll finish yoah remarks," Dashmiel said, "and there'll be anothuh round of applause. Then, Mistuh Landon—"




"Scott."




Dashmiel had flashed a rictus grin, there for just a moment. "Then, Scott, yew'll go on and toin that all impawtant foist shovelful of oith." Toin? Foist? Oith? Lisey mused, and it came to her that Dashmiel was very likely saying turn that all-important first shovelful of earth in his only semibelievable Louisiana drawl.




"All that sounds fine to me," Scott replied, and that was all he had time for, because they had arrived.




5


Perhaps it's a holdover from the broken toothglass—that omenish feeling—but the plot of trucked-in dirt looks like a grave to Lisey: XL size, as if for a giant. The two crowds collapse into one around it and create that breathless suckoven feel at the center. A campus security guard now stands at each corner of the ornamental velvet-rope barrier, beneath which Dashmiel, Scott, and "Toneh" Eddington have ducked. Queensland, the photographer, dances relentlessly with his big Nikon held up in front of his face. Paging Weegee, Lisey thinks, and realizes she envies him. He is so free, flitting gnatlike in the heat; he is twenty-five and all his shit still works. Dashmiel, however, is looking at him with growing impatience which Queensland affects not to see until he has exactly the shot he wants. Lisey has an idea it's the one of Scott alone, his foot on the silly silver spade, his hair blowing back in the breeze. In any case, Weegee Junior at last lowers his big camera and steps back to the edge of the crowd. And it's while following Queensland's progress with her somewhat wistful regard that Lisey first sees the madman. He has the look, one local reporter will later write, "of John Lennon in the last days of his romance with heroin—hollow, watchful eyes at odd and disquieting contrast to his otherwise childishly wistful face."




At the moment, Lisey notes little more than the guy's tumbled blond hair. She has little interest in people-watching today. She just wants this to be over so she can find a bathroom in the English Department over there across the parking lot and pull her rebellious underwear out of the crack of her ass. She has to make water, too, but right now that's pretty much secondary.




"Ladies and gentlemen!" Dashmiel says in a carrying voice. "It is mah distinct pleasure to introduce Mr. Scott Landon, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winnin Relics and the National Book Award–winnin The Coster's Daughter. He's come all the way from Maine with his lovely wife Lisa to inaugurate construction— that's right, it's finally happ'nin—on our very own Shipman LAH-bree. Scott Landon, folks, let's hear y'all give him a good Nashveel welcome!"



The crowd applauds at once, con brio. The lovely wife joins in, patting her palms together, looking at Dashmiel and thinking, He won the NBA for The Coaster's Daughter. That's Coaster, not Coster. And I think you know it. I think you smucked it up on purpose. Why don't you like him, you petty man?




Then she happens to glance beyond him and this time she really does notice Gerd Allen Cole, just standing there with all that fabulous blond hair tumbled down to his eyebrows and the sleeves of a white shirt far too big for him rolled up to his substandard biceps. The tail of his shirt is out and dangles almost to the whitened knees of his jeans. On his feet are engineer boots with side-buckles. To Lisey they look dreadfully hot. Instead of applauding, Blondie has clasped his hands rather prissily and there's a spooky-sweet smile on his lips, which are moving slightly, as if in silent prayer. His eyes are fixed on Scott and they never waver. Lisey pegs Blondie at once. There are guys—they are almost always guys— she thinks of as Scott's Deep Space Cowboys. Deep Space Cowboys have a lot to say. They want to grab Scott by the arm and tell him they understand the secret messages in his books; they understand that the books are really guides to God, Satan, or possibly the Gnostic Gospels. Deep Space Cowboys might be on about Scientology or numerology or (in one case) The Cosmic Lies of Brigham Young. Sometimes they want to talk about other worlds. Two years ago a Deep Space Cowboy hitchhiked all the way from Texas to Maine in order to talk to Scott about what he called leavings. These were most commonly found, he said, on uninhabited islands in the southern hemisphere. He knew they were what Scott had been writing about in Relics. He showed Scott the underlined words that proved it. The guy made Lisey very nervous—there was a certain wall-eyed look of absence about him—but Scott talked to him, gave him a beer, discussed the Easter Island monoliths with him for a bit, took a couple of his pamphlets, signed the kid a fresh copy of Relics, and sent him on his way, happy. Happy? Dancing on the smucking atmosphere. When Scott's got it strapped on tight, he's amazing. No other word will do.



The thought of actual violence—that Blondie means to pull a Mark David Chapman on her husband—does not occur to Lisey. My mind doesn't run that way, she might have said. I just didn't like the way his lips were moving.




Scott acknowledges the applause—and a few raucous rebel yells— with the Scott Landon grin that has appeared on millions of book-jackets, all the time resting one foot on the shoulder of the silly shovel while the blade sinks slowly into the imported earth. He lets the applause run for ten or fifteen seconds, guided by his intuition (and his intuition is rarely wrong), then waves it off. And it goes. At once. Foom. Pretty cool, in a slightly scary way.




When he speaks, his voice seems nowhere near as loud as Dashmiel's, but Lisey knows that even with no mike or batterypowered bullhorn (the lack of either here this afternoon is probably someone's oversight), it will carry all the way to the back of the crowd. And the crowd is straining to hear every word. A Famous Man has come among them. A Thinker and a Writer. He will now scatter pearls of wisdom.




Pearls before swine, Lisey thinks. Sweaty swine, at that. But didn't her father tell her once that pigs don't sweat? Across from her, Blondie carefully pushes his tumbled hair back from his fine white brow. His hands are as white as his forehead and Lisey thinks, There's one piggy who keeps to the house a lot. A stay-at-home swine, and why not? He's got all sorts of strange ideas to catch up on.



She shifts from one foot to the other, and the silk of her underwear all but squeaks in the crack of her ass. Oh, maddening! She forgets Blondie again in trying to calculate if she might not…while Scott's making his remarks…very surreptitiously, mind you…




Good Ma speaks up. Dour. Three words. Brooking no argument. No, Lisey. Wait.




"Ain't gonna sermonize, me," Scott says, and she recognizes the patois of Gully Foyle, the main character of Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. His favorite novel. "Too hot for sermons."




"Beam us up, Scotty!" someone in the fifth or sixth row on the parking-lot side of the crowd yells exuberantly. The crowd laughs and cheers.




"Can't do it, brother," Scott says. "Transporters are broken and we're all out of lithium crystals."




The crowd, being new to the riposte as well as the sally (Lisey has heard both at least fifty times), roars its approval and applauds. Across the way Blondie smiles thinly, sweatlessly, and grips his delicate left wrist with his longfingered right hand. Scott takes his foot off the spade, not as if he's grown impatient with it but as if he has—for the moment, at least—found another use for it. And it seems he has. She watches, not without fascination, for this is Scott at his best, just winging it.


"It's nineteen-eighty-eight and the world has grown dark," he says. He slips the ceremonial spade's short wooden handle easily through his loosely curled fist. The scoop winks sun in Lisey's eyes once, then is mostly hidden by the sleeve of Scott's lightweight jacket. With the scoop and blade hidden, he uses the slim wooden handle as a pointer, ticking off trouble and tragedy in the air in front of him.




"In March, Oliver North and Vice Admiral John Poindexter are indicted on conspiracy charges—it's the wonderful world of Iran-Contra, where guns rule politics and money rules the world.




"On Gibraltar, members of Britain's Special Air Service kill three unarmed IRA members. Maybe they should change the SAS motto from 'Who dares, wins' to 'Shoot first, ask questions later.'"




There's a ripple of laughter from the crowd. Roger Dashmiel looks hot and put out with this unexpected current-events lesson, but Tony Eddington is finally taking notes.




"Or make it ours. In July we goof and shoot down an Iranian airliner with two hundred and ninety civilians on board. Sixty-six of them are children.




"The AIDS epidemic kills thousands, sickens…well, we don't know, do we? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?




"The world grows dark. Mr. Yeats's blood-tide is at the flood. It rises. It rises."




He looks down at nil but graying earth, and Lisey is suddenly terrified that he's seeing it, the thing with the endless patchy piebald side, that he is going to go off, perhaps even come to the break she knows he is afraid of (in truth she's as afraid of it as he is). Before her heart can do more than begin to speed up, he raises his head, grins like a kid at a county fair, and shoots the handle of the spade through his fist to the halfway point. It's a showy poolshark move, and the folks at the front of the crowd go oooh. But Scott's not done. Holding the spade out before him, he rotates the handle nimbly between his fingers, accelerating it into an unlikely spin. It's as dazzling as a baton-twirler's maneuver—because of the silver scoop swinging in the sun—and sweetly


unexpected. She's been married to him since 1979 and had no idea he had such a sublimely cool move in his repertoire. (How many years does it take, she'll wonder two nights later, lying in bed alone in her substandard motel room and listening to dogs bark beneath a hot orange moon, before the simple stupid weight of accumulating days finally sucks all the wow out of a marriage? How lucky do you have to be for your love to outrace your time?) The silver bowl of the rapidly swinging spade sends a Wake up! Wake up! sunflash across the heat-dazed, sweat-sticky surface of the crowd. Lisey's husband is suddenly Scott the Pitchman, and she has never been so relieved to see that totally untrustworthy honey, I'm hip huckster's grin on his face. He has bummed them out; now he will try to sell them a throat-ful of dubious get-well medicine, the stuff with which he hopes to send them home. And she thinks they will buy, hot August afternoon or not. When he's like this, Scott could sell Frigidaires to Inuits, as the saying is…and God bless the language pool where we all go down to drink, as Scott himself would no doubt add (and has).




"But if every book is a little light in that darkness—and so I believe, so I must believe, corny or not, for I write the damned things, don't I?—then every library is a grand old ever-burning bonfire around which ten thousand people come to stand and warm themselves every day and night. Fahrenheit four-fifty-one ain't in it. Try Fahrenheit four thousand, folks, because we're not talking kitchen ovens here, we're talking big old blast-furnaces of the brain, red-hot smelters of the intellect. We celebrate the laying of such a grand fire this afternoon, and I'm honored to be a part of it. Here is where we spit in the eye of forgetfulness and kick ignorance in his wrinkled old cojones. Hey photographer!"



Stefan Queensland snaps to, smiling.




Scott, also smiling, says: "Get one of this. The top brass may not want to use it, but you'll like it in your portfolio, I'll bet."




Scott holds the ornamental tool out as if he intends to twirl it again. The crowd gives a hopeful little gasp, but this time he's only teasing. He slides his left hand down to the spade's collar, digs in, and drives the spade-blade deep, dousing its hot glitter in earth. He tosses its load of dirt aside and cries: "I declare the Shipman Library construction site OPEN FOR BUSINESS!"




The applause that greets this makes the previous bursts sound like the sort of polite patter you might hear at a prep-school tennis match. Lisey doesn't know if young Mr. Queensland caught the ceremonial first scoop, but when Scott pumps the silly little silver spade at the sky like an Olympic hero, Queensland documents that one for sure, laughing behind his camera as he snaps it. Scott holds the pose for a moment (Lisey happens to glance at Dashmiel and catches that gentleman in the act of rolling his eyes at Mr. Eddington— Toneh). Then he lowers the spade to port arms and holds it that way, grinning. Sweat has popped on his cheeks and forehead in fine beads. The applause begins to taper off. The crowd thinks he's done. Lisey thinks he's only hit second gear.



When he knows they can hear him again, Scott digs in for an encore scoop. "This one's for Wild Bill Yeats!" he calls. "The bull-goose loony! And this one's for Poe, also known as Baltimore Eddie! This one's for Alfie Bester, and if you haven't read him, you ought to be ashamed!" He's sounding out of breath, and Lisey is starting to feel a bit alarmed. It's so hot. She's trying to remember what he had for lunch—was it something heavy or light?




"And this one…" He dives the spade into what's now a respectable little divot and holds up the final dip of earth. The front of his shirt has darkened with sweat. "Tell you what, why don't you think of whoever wrote your first good book? I'm talking about the one that got under you like a magic carpet and lifted you right off the ground. Do you know what I'm talking about?"




They know. It's on every face that faces his.




"The one that, in a perfect world, you'd check out first when the Shipman Library finally opens its doors. This one's for the one who wrote that." He gives the spade a final valedictory shake, then turns to Dashmiel, who should be pleased with Scott's showmanship—asked to play by ear, Scott has played brilliantly—and who instead only looks hot and pissed off. "I think we're done here," he says, and tries to hand Dashmiel the spade.




"No, that's yoahs," Dashmiel says. "As a keepsake, and a token of ouah thanks. Along with yoah check, of co'se." His rictus smile comes and goes in a fitful cramp. "Shall we go and grab ourse'fs a little air-conditionin?"


"By all means," Scott says, looking bemused, and then hands the spade to Lisey, as he has handed her so many unwanted mementos over the past twelve years of his celebrity: everything from ceremonial oars and Boston Red Sox hats encased in Lucite cubes to the masks of Comedy and Tragedy…but mostly pen-and-pencil sets. So many pen-and-pencil sets. Waterman, Scripto, Schaeffer, Mont Blanc, you name it. She looks at the spade's glittering silver scoop, as bemused as her beloved (he is still her beloved). There are a few flecks of dirt in the incised letters reading COMMENCEMENT, SHIPMAN LIBRARY, and Lisey blows them off. Where will such an unlikely artifact end up? In this summer of 1988 Scott's study is still under construction, although the address works and he's already begun storing stuff in the stalls and cubbies of the barn below. Across many of the cardboard boxes he's scrawled SCOTT! THE EARLY YEARS! in big strokes of a black felt-tip pen. Most likely the silver spade will wind up with this stuff, wasting its gleams in the gloom. Maybe she'll put it there herself, then tag it SCOTT! THE MIDDLE YEARS! as a kind of joke…or a prize. The kind of goofy, unexpected gift Scott calls a—




But Dashmiel is on the move. Without another word—as if he's disgusted with this whole business and determined to put paid to it as soon as possible—he tromps across the rectangle of fresh earth, detouring around the divot which Scott's last big shovelful of earth has almost succeeded in promoting to a hole. The heels of Dashmiel's shiny black I'm-an-assistantprofessor-on-my-way-up-and-don't-


you-forget-it shoes sink deep into the earth with each heavy step. Dashmiel has to fight for balance, and Lisey guesses this does nothing to improve his mood. Tony Eddington falls in beside him, looking thoughtful. Scott pauses a moment, as if not quite sure what's up, then also starts to move, slipping between his host and his temporary biographer. Lisey follows, as is her wont. He delighted her into forgetting her omenish feeling




(broken glass in the morning)




for a little while, but now it's back




(broken hearts at night)




and hard. She thinks it must be why all these details look so big to her. She's sure the world will come back into more normal focus once she reaches the air-conditioning. And once she's gotten that pesty swatch of cloth out of her butt.




This is almost over, she reminds herself, and—how funny life can be—it is at this precise moment when the day begins to derail.




A campus security cop who is older than the others on this detail (eighteen years later she'll identify him from Queensland's news photo as Captain S. Heffernan) holds up the rope barrier on the far side of the ceremonial rectangle of earth. All she notices about him is that he's wearing what her husband might have called a puffickly huh-yooge batch of orifice on his khaki shirt. Her husband and his flanking escorts duck beneath the rope in a move so synchronized it could have been choreographed.




The crowd is moving toward the parking lot with the


principals…with one exception. Blondie isn't moving toward the parking lot. Blondie is standing still on the parking lot side of the commencement patch. A few people bump him and he's forced backward after all, back onto the baked dead earth where the Shipman Library will stand come 1991 (if the chief contractor's promises can be believed, that is). Then he's actually moving forward against the tide, his hands coming unclasped so he can push a girl out of his way to his left and then a guy out of his way on the right. His mouth is still moving. At first Lisey again thinks he's mouthing a silent prayer, and then she hears the broken gibberish—like something a bad James Joyce imitator might write—and for the first time she becomes actively alarmed. Blondie's somehow weird blue eyes are fixed on her husband, there and nowhere else, but Lisey understands that he doesn't want to discuss leavings or the hidden religious subtexts of Scott's novels. This is no mere Deep Space Cowboy.




"The churchbells came down Angel Street," says Blondie—says Gerd Allen Cole—who, it will turn out, spent most of his seventeenth year in an expensive Virginia mental institution and was released as cured and good to go. Lisey gets every word. They cut through the rising chatter of the crowd, that hum of conversation, like a knife through some light, sweet cake. "That rungut sound, like rain on a tin roof! Dirty flowers, dirty and sweet, that's how the churchbells sound in my basement as if you didn't know!"




A hand that seems all long pale fingers goes to the tails of the white shirt and Lisey understands exactly what's going on here. It comes to her in shorthand TV images




(George Wallace Arthur Bremmer)




from her childhood. She looks toward Scott but Scott is talking to Dashmiel. Dashmiel is looking at Stefan Queensland, the irritated frown on Dashmiel's face saying he's had Quite! Enough! Photographs! For One Day! Thank You! Queensland is looking down at his camera, making some adjustment, and Anthony "Toneh" Eddington is making a note on his pad. She spies the older campus security cop, he of the khaki uniform and the puffickly huh-yooge batch of orifice; he is looking at the crowd, but it's the wrong smucking part. It's impossible that she can see all these folks and Blondie too, but she can, she does, she can even see Scott's lips forming the words think that went pretty well, which is a testing comment he often makes after events like this, and oh God, oh Jesus Mary and JoJo the Carpenter, she tries to scream out Scott's name and warn him but her throat locks up, becomes a spitless dry socket, she can't say anything, and Blondie's got the bottom of his great big white shirt hoicked all the way up, and underneath are empty belt-loops and a flat hairless belly, a trout belly, and lying against that white skin is the butt of a gun which he now lays hold of and she hears him say, closing in on Scott from the right, "If it closes the lips of the bells, it will have done the job. I'm sorry, Papa."



She's running forward, or trying to, but she's got such a puffickly huh-yooge case of gluefoot and someone shoulders in front of her, a strapping coed with her hair tied up in a wide white silk ribbon with NASHVILLE printed on it in blue letters outlined in red (see how she sees everything?), and Lisey pushes her with the hand holding the silver spade, and the coed caws "Hey!" except it sounds slower and draggier than that, like Hey recorded at 45 rpm and then played back at 331/3 or maybe even 16. The whole world has gone to hot tar and for an eternity the strapping coed with NASHVILLE in her hair blocks Scott from her view; all she can see is Dashmiel's shoulder. And Tony Eddington, leafing back through the pages of his damn notebook.




Then the coed finally clears Lisey's field of vision, and as Dashmiel and her husband come into full view again, Lisey sees the English teacher's head snap up and his body go on red alert. It happens in an instant. Lisey sees what Dashmiel sees. She sees Blondie with the gun (it will prove to be a Ladysmith .22 made in Korea and bought at a garage sale in South Nashville for thirty-seven dollars) pointed at her husband, who has at last seen the danger and stopped. In Lisey-time, all this happens very, very slowly. She does not actually see the bullet fly out of the .22's muzzle—not quite— but she hears Scott say, very mildly, seeming to drawl the words over the course of ten or even fifteen seconds: "Let's talk about it, son, right?" And then she sees fire bloom from the gun's nickel-plated muzzle in an uneven yellow-white corsage. She hears a pop—stupid, insignificant, the sound of someone breaking a paper lunchsack with the palm of his hand. She sees Dashmiel, that southern-fried chickenshit, go jackrabbitting off to his immediate left. She sees Scott buck backward on his heels. At the same time his chin thrusts forward. The combination is weird and graceful, like a dancefloor move. A black hole blinks open on the right side of his summer sportcoat. "Son, you honest-to-God don't want to do that," he says in his drawling Lisey-time voice, and even in Lisey-time she can hear how his voice grows thinner on every word until he sounds like a test pilot in a high-altitude chamber. Yet Lisey thinks he still doesn't know he's been shot. She's almost positive. His sportcoat swings open like a gate as he puts his hand out in a commanding stop-this gesture, and she realizes two things simultaneously. The first is that the shirt inside his coat is turning red. The second is that she has at last broken into some semblance of a run.



"I got to end all this ding-dong," says Gerd Allen Cole with perfect fretful clarity. "I got to end all this ding-dong for the freesias." And Lisey is suddenly sure that once Scott is dead, once the damage is done, Blondie will either kill himself or pretend to try. For the time being, however, he has this business to finish. The business of the writer. Blondie turns his wrist slightly so that the smoking barrel of the Ladysmith .22 points at the left side of Scott's chest; in Lisey-time the move is smooth and slow. He has done the lung; now he'll do the heart. Lisey knows she can't allow that to happen. If her husband is to have any chance at all, this lethal goofball mustn't be allowed to put any more lead into him.



As if repudiating her, Gerd Allen Cole says, "It never ends until you go down. You're responsible for all these repetitions, old boy. You are hell, you are a monkey, and now you are my monkey!"




This speech is the closest he comes to making sense, and making it gives Lisey just enough time to first wind up with the silver spade—the body knows its business and her hands have already found their position near the top of the thing's forty-inch handle—and then swing it. Still, it's close. If it had been a horse race, the tote-board would undoubtedly have flashed the HOLD TICKETS WAIT FOR PHOTO message. But when the race is between a man with a gun and a woman with a shovel, you don't need a photo. In slowed-down Lisey-time she sees the silver scoop strike the gun, driving it upward just as that corsage of fire blooms again (she can see only part of it this time, and the muzzle is completely hidden by the blade of the spade). She sees the business-end of the ceremonial shovel carry on forward and upward as the second shot goes harmlessly into the hot August sky. She sees the gun fly loose, and there's time to think Holy smuck! I really put a charge into this one! before the spade connects with Blondie's face. His hand is still in there (three of those long slim fingers will be broken), but the spade's silver bowl connects solidly just the same, breaking Cole's nose, shattering his right cheekbone and the bony orbit around his staring right eye, shattering nine teeth as well. A Mafia goon with a set of brass knuckles couldn't have done better.


And now—still slow, still in Lisey-time—the elements of Stefan Queensland's award-winning photograph are assembling themselves.




Captain S. Heffernan has seen what's happening only a second or two after Lisey, but he also has to deal with the bystander problem—in his case a fat bepimpled fella wearing baggy Bermuda shorts and a tee-shirt with Scott Landon's smiling face on it. Captain Heffernan shunts this young fella aside with one muscular shoulder.




By then Blondie is sinking to the ground (and out of the forthcoming photo's field) with a dazed expression in one eye and blood pouring from the other. Blood is also gushing from the hole which at some future date may again serve as his mouth. Heffernan completely misses the actual hit.




Roger Dashmiel, maybe remembering that he's supposed to be the master of ceremonies and not a big old bunny-rabbit, turns back toward Eddington, his protégé, and Landon, his


troublesome guest of honor, just in time to take his place as a staring, slightly blurred face in the forthcoming photo's background.




Scott Landon, meanwhile, shock-walks right out of the awardwinning photo. He walks as though unmindful of the heat, striding toward the parking lot and Nelson Hall beyond, which is home of the English Department and mercifully airconditioned. He walks with surprising briskness, at least to begin with, and a goodly part of the crowd moves with him, unaware for the most part that anything has happened. Lisey is both infuriated and unsurprised. After all, how many of them saw Blondie with that cuntish little pistol in his hand? How many of them recognized the burst-paper-bag sounds as gunshots? The hole in Scott's coat could be a smudge of dirt from his shoveling chore, and the blood that has soaked his shirt is as yet invisible to the outside world. He's now making a strange whistling noise each time he inhales, but how many of them hear that? No, it's her they're looking at—some of them, anyway—the crazy chick who just inexplicably hauled off and whacked some guy in the face with the ceremonial silver spade. A lot of them are actually grinning, as if they believe it's all part of a show being put on for their benefit, the Scott Landon Roadshow. Well, fuck them, and fuck Dashmiel, and fuck the day-late and dollar-short campus cop with his puffickly huh-yooge batch of orifice. All she cares about now is Scott. She thrusts the shovel out not quite blindly to her right and Eddington, their rent-a-Boswell, takes it. It's either that or get hit in the nose with it. Then, still in that horrible slo-mo, Lisey runs after her husband, whose briskness evaporates as soon as he reaches the suck-oven heat of the parking lot. Behind her, Tony Eddington is peering at the silver spade as if it might be an artillery shell, a radiation detector, or the leaving of some great departed race, and to him comes Captain S. Heffernan with his mistaken assumption of who today's hero must be. Lisey is unaware of this part, will know none of it until she sees Queensland's photograph eighteen years later, would care about none of it even if she did know; all her attention is fixed on her husband, who has just gone down on his hands and knees in the parking lot. She tries to repudiate Lisey-time, to run faster. And that is when Queensland snaps his picture, catching just one half of one shoe on the far righthand side of the frame, something he will not realize then, or ever.



6




The Pulitzer Prize winner, the enfant terrible who published his first novel at the tender age of twenty-two, goes down. Scott Landon hits the deck, as the saying is.


Lisey makes a supreme effort to pull out of the maddening time-glue in which she seems to be trapped. She must get free because if she doesn't reach him before the crowd surrounds him and shuts her out, they will very likely kill him with their concern. With smotherlove.




—Heeeeee's hurrrrrt, someone shouts.




She screams at herself in her own head




(strap it on STRAP IT ON RIGHT NOW)




and that finally does it. The glue in which she has been packed is gone. Suddenly she is knifing forward; all the world is noise and heat and sweat and jostling bodies. She blesses the speedy reality of it even as she uses her left hand to grab the left cheek of her ass and pull, raking the goddam underwear out of the crack of her goddam ass, there, at least one thing about this wrong and broken day is now mended.




A coed in the kind of shell top where the straps tie at the shoulders in big floppy bows threatens to block her narrowing path to Scott, but Lisey ducks beneath her and hits the hottop. She won't be aware of her scraped and blistered knees until much later—until the hospital, in fact, where a kindly paramedic will notice and put lotion on them, something so cool and soothing it will make her cry with relief. But that is for later. Now it might as well be just her and Scott alone on the edge of this hot parking lot, this terrible black-andyellow ballroom floor which must be a hundred and thirty degrees at least, maybe a hundred and fifty. Her mind tries to present her with the image of an egg frying sunnyside up in Good Ma's old black iron spider and Lisey blocks it out.




Scott is looking at her.


He gazes up and now his face is waxy pale except for the sooty smudges forming beneath his hazel eyes and the fat string of blood which has begun to flow from the right side of his mouth and down along his jaw. "Lisey!" That thin, whooping highaltitude-chamber voice. "Did that guy really shoot me?"




"Don't try to talk." She puts a hand on his chest. His shirt, oh dear God, is soaked with blood, and beneath it she can feel his heart running along so fast and light; it is not the heartbeat of a human being but of a bird. Pigeon-pulse, she thinks, and that's when the girl with the floppy bows tied on her shoulders falls on top of her. She would land on Scott but Lisey instinctively shields him, taking the brunt of the girl's weight ("Hey! Shit! FUCK!" the startled girl cries out) with her back; that weight is there for only a second, and then gone. Lisey sees the girl shoot her hands out to break her fall—oh, the divine reflexes of the young, she thinks, as though she herself were ancient instead of just thirty-one—and the girl is successful, but then she is yipping "Ow, ow, OW!" as the asphalt heats her skin.




"Lisey," Scott whispers, and oh Christ how his breath screams when he pulls it in, like wind in a chimney.




"Who pushed me?" the girl with the bows on her shoulders is demanding. She's a-hunker, hair from a busted ponytail in her eyes, crying in shock, pain, and embarrassment.




Lisey leans close to Scott. The heat of him terrifies her and fills her with pity deeper than any she thought it was possible to feel. He is actually shivering in the heat. Awkwardly, using only one arm, she strips off her jacket. "Yes, you've been shot. So just be quiet and don't try to—"




"I'm so hot," he says, and begins to shiver harder. What comes next, convulsions? His hazel eyes stare up into her blue ones. Blood runs from the corner of his mouth. She can smell it. Even the collar of his shirt is soaking in red. His tea-cure wouldn't be any good here, she thinks, not even sure what it is she's thinking about. Too much blood this time. Too smucking much. "I'm so hot, Lisey, please give me ice."



"I will," she says, and puts her jacket under his head. "I will, Scott." Thank God he's wearing his sportcoat, she thinks, and then has an idea. She grabs the hunkering, crying girl by the arm. "What's your name?"




The girl stares as if she were mad, but answers the question. "Lisa Lemke."




Another Lisa, small world, Lisey thinks but does not say. What she says is, "My husband's been shot, Lisa. Can you go over there to…" She cannot remember the name of the building, only its function. "…to the English Department and call an ambulance? Dial 911—"




"Ma'am? Mrs. Landon?" This is the campus security cop with the puffickly huh-yooge batch, making his way through the crowd with a lot of help from his meaty elbows. He squats beside her and his knees pop. Louder than Blondie's pistol, Lisey thinks. He's got a walkie-talkie in one hand. He speaks slowly and carefully, as though to a distressed child. "I've called the campus infirmary, Mrs. Landon. They are rolling their ambulance, which will take your husband to Nashville Memorial. Do you understand me?"




She does, and her gratitude (the cop has made up the dollar short he owed and a few more, in Lisey's opinion) is almost as deep as the pity she feels for her husband, lying on the simmering pavement and trembling like a distempered dog. She nods, weeping the first of what will be many tears before she gets Scott back to Maine—not on a Delta flight but in a private plane and with a private nurse on board, and with another ambulance and another private nurse to meet them at the Portland Jetport's Civil Aviation terminal. Now she turns back to the Lemke girl and says, "He's burning up—is there ice, honey? Can you think of anywhere that there might be ice? Anywhere at all?"



She says this without much hope, and is therefore amazed when Lisa Lemke nods at once. "There's a snack center with a Coke machine right over there." She points in the direction of Nelson Hall, which Lisey can't see. All she can see is a crowding forest of bare legs, some hairy, some smooth, some tanned, some sunburned. She realizes they're completely hemmed in, that she's tending her fallen husband in a slot the shape of a large vitamin pill or cold capsule, and feels a touch of crowd-panic. Is the word for that agoraphobia? Scott would know.




"If you can get him some ice, please do," Lisey says. "And hurry." She turns to the campus security cop, who appears to be taking Scott's pulse—a completely useless activity, in Lisey's opinion. Right now it's down to either alive or dead. "Can you make them move back?" she asks. Almost pleads. "It's so hot, and—"




Before she can finish he's up like Jack from his box, yelling "Move it back! Let this girl through! Move it back and let this girl through! Let him breathe, folks, what do you say?"




The crowd shuffles back…very reluctantly, it seems to Lisey. They don't want to miss any of the blood, it seems to her.




The heat bakes up from the pavement. She has half-expected to get used to it, the way you get used to a hot shower, but that isn't happening. She listens for the howl of the approaching ambulance and hears nothing. Then she does. She hears Scott, saying her name. Croaking her name. At the same time he twitches at the side of the sweat-soaked shell top she's wearing (her bra now stands out against the silk as stark as a swollen tattoo). She looks down and sees something she doesn't like at all. Scott is smiling. The blood has coated his lips a rich candy red, top to bottom, side to side, and the smile actually looks more like the grin of a clown. No one loves a clown at midnight, she thinks, and wonders where that came from. It will only be at some point during the long and mostly sleepless night ahead of her, listening to what will seem like every dog in Nashville bark at the hot August moon, that she'll remember it was the epigram of Scott's third novel, the only one both she and the critics hated, the one that made them rich. Empty Devils.



Scott continues to twitch at her blue silk top, his eyes still so brilliant and fevery in their blackening sockets. He has something to say, and—reluctantly—she leans down to hear it. He pulls air in a little at a time, in half-gasps. It is a noisy, frightening process. The smell of blood is even stronger up close. Nasty. A mineral smell.




It's death. It's the smell of death.




As if to ratify this, Scott says: "It's very close, honey. I can't see it, but I…" Another long, screaming intake of breath. "I hear it taking its meal. And grunting." Smiling that bloody clown-smile as he says it.




"Scott, I don't know what you're talk—"




The hand that has been tugging at her top has some strength left in it, after all. It pinches her side, and cruelly—when she takes the top off much later, in the motel room, she'll see a bruise, a true lover's knot.


"You…" Screamy breath. "Know…" Another screamy breath, deeper. And still grinning, as if they share some horrible secret. A purple secret, the color of bruises. The color of certain flowers that grow on certain




(hush Lisey oh hush)




yes, on certain hillsides. "You…know…so don't…insult my…intelligence." Another whistling, screaming breath. "Or your own."




And she supposes she does know some of it. The long boy, he calls it. Or the thing with the endless piebald side. Once she meant to look up piebald in the dictionary, but she forgot— forgetting is a skill she has had reason to polish during the years she and Scott have been together. But she knows what he's talking about, yes.




He lets go, or maybe just loses the strength to hold on. Lisey pulls back a little—not far. His eyes regard her from their deep and blackening sockets. They are as brilliant as ever, but she sees they are also full of terror and (this is what frightens her most) some wretched, inexplicable amusement. Still speaking low—perhaps so only she can hear, maybe because it's the best he can manage—Scott says, "Listen, little Lisey. I'll make how it sounds when it looks around."




"Scott, no—you have to stop."




He pays no attention. He draws in another of those screaming breaths, purses his wet red lips in a tight O, and makes a low, incredibly nasty chuffing noise. It drives a fine spray of blood up his clenched throat and into the sweltering air. A girl sees it and screams. This time the crowd doesn't need the campus cop to ask them to move back; they do it on their own, leaving Lisey, Scott, and Captain Heffernan a perimeter of at least four feet all the way around.



The sound—dear God, it really is a kind of grunting—is mercifully short. Scott coughs, his chest heaving, the wound spilling more blood in rhythmic pulses, then beckons her back down with one finger. She comes, leaning on her simmering hands. His socketed eyes compel her; so does his mortal grin.




He turns his head to the side, spits a wad of half-congealed blood onto the hot tar, then turns back to her. "I could…call it that way," he whispers. "It would come. You'd be…rid of my…everlasting…quack."




She understands that he means it, and for a moment (surely it is the power of his eyes) she believes it's true. He will make the sound again, only a little louder, and in some other world the long boy, that lord of sleepless nights, will turn its unspeakable hungry head. A moment later in this world, Scott Landon will simply shiver on the pavement and die. The death certificate will say something sane, but she'll know: his dark thing finally saw him and came for him and ate him alive.




So now come the things they will never speak of later, not to others or between themselves. Too awful. Each marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark. This is the dark heart of theirs, the one mad true secret. She leans close to him on the baking pavement, sure he is dying, nevertheless determined to hold onto him if she can. If it means fighting the long boy for him—with nothing but her fingernails, if it comes to that— she will.




"Well…Lisey?" Smiling that repulsive, knowing, terrible smile. "What…do…you…say?"


Leaning even closer. Into the shivering sweat-and-blood stink of him. Leaning in until she can smell the last palest ghost of the Prell he shampooed with that morning and the Foamy he shaved with. Leaning in until her lips touch his ear. She whispers, "Be quiet, Scott. For once in your life, just be quiet."




When she looks at him again, his eyes are different. The fierceness is gone. He's fading, but maybe that's all right, because he looks sane again. "Lisey…?"




Still whispering. Looking directly into his eyes. "Leave that smucking thing alone and it will go away." For a moment she almost adds, You can take care of the rest of this mess later, but the idea is senseless—for awhile, the only thing Scott can do for himself is not die. What she says is, "Don't you ever make that noise again."




He licks at his lips. She sees the blood on his tongue and it turns her stomach, but she doesn't pull away from him. She supposes she's in this now until the ambulance hauls him away or he quits breathing right here on this hot pavement a hundred yards or so from his latest triumph; if she can stick through that last, she guesses she can stick through anything.




"I'm so hot," he says. "If only I had a piece of ice to suck…"




"Soon," Lisey says, not knowing if she's promising rashly and not caring. "I'm getting it for you." At least she can hear the ambulance howling its way toward them. That's something.




And then, a kind of miracle. The girl with the bows on her shoulders and the new scrapes on her palms fights her way to the front of the crowd. She's gasping like someone who has just run a race and sweat is running down her cheeks and neck, but she's holding two big waxed paper cups in her hands. "I spilled half the fucking Coke getting back here," she says, throwing a brief, baleful glance over her shoulder at the crowd, "but I got the ice okay. Ice is ni—" Then her eyes roll up almost to the whites and she reels backward, all looseygoosey in her sneakers. The campus cop—oh bless him with many blessings, huh-yooge batch of orifice and all—grabs her, steadies her, and takes one of the cups. He hands it to Lisey, then urges the other Lisa to drink from the remaining cup. Lisey Landon pays no attention. Later, replaying all this, she'll be a little in awe of her own single-mindedness. Now she only thinks Just keep her from falling on top of me again if she faints, Officer Friendly, and turns back to Scott.



He's shivering worse than ever and his eyes are dulling out, losing their grasp on her. And still, he tries. "Lisey…so hot…ice…"




"I have it, Scott. Now will you for once just shut your everlasting mouth?"




"One went north, one went south," he croaks, and then he does what she asks. Maybe he's all talked out, which would be a Scott Landon first.




Lisey drives her hand deep into the cup, sending Coke all the way to the top and splooshing over the edge. The cold is shocking and utterly wonderful. She clutches a good handful of ice-chips, thinking how ironic this is: whenever she and Scott stop at a turnpike rest area and she uses a machine that dispenses cups of soda instead of cans or bottles, she always hammers on the NO ICE button, feeling righteous—others may allow the evil soft drink companies to shortchange them by dispensing half a cup of soda and half a cup of ice, but not Dave Debusher's baby girl Lisa. What was old Dandy's saying? I didn't fall off a hayrick yesterday! And now here she is, wishing for even more ice and less Coke…not that she thinks it will make much difference. But on that one she's in for a surprise.



"Scott, here. Ice."




His eyes are half-closed now, but he opens his mouth and when she first rubs his lips with her handful of ice and then pops one of the melting shards onto his bloody tongue, his shivering suddenly stops. God, it's magic. Emboldened, she rubs her freezing, leaking hand along his right cheek, his left cheek, and then across his forehead, where drops of Cokecolored water drip into his eyebrows and then run down the sides of his nose.




"Oh Lisey, that's heaven," he says, and although still screamy, his voice sounds more with-it to her…more there. The ambulance has pulled up on the left side of the crowd with a dying growl of its siren and a few seconds later she can hear an impatient male voice shouting, "Paramedics! Let us through! Paramedics, c'mon, people, let us through so we can do our jobs, whaddaya say?"




Dashmiel, the southern-fried asshole, chooses this moment to speak in Lisey's ear. The solicitude in his voice, given the speed with which he jackrabbitted, makes her want to grind her teeth. "How is he, darlin?"




Without looking around, she replies: "Trying to live."




7




"Trying to live," she murmured, running her palm over the glossy page in the U-Tenn Nashville Review. Over the picture of Scott with his foot poised on that dopey silver shovel. She closed the book with a snap and tossed it onto the dusty back of the booksnake. Her appetite for pictures—for memories—was more than sated for one day. There was a nasty throb starting up behind her right eye. She wanted to take something for it, not that sissy Tylenol but what her late husband had called head-bonkers. A couple of his Excedrin would be just the ticket, if they weren't too far off the shelf-date. Then a little lie-down in their bedroom until the incipient headache passed. She might even sleep awhile.



I'm still thinking of it as our bedroom, she mused, going to the stairs that lead down to the barn, which was now not really a barn at all but just a series of storage


cubbies…though still redolent of hay and rope and tractor-oil, the old sweet-stubborn farm smells. Still as ours, even after two years.




And so what? What of that?




She shrugged. "Nothing, I suppose."




She was a little shocked at the mumbly, half-drunk sound of the words. She supposed all that vivid remembering had worn her out. All that relived stress. There was one thing to be grateful for: no other picture of Scott in the belly of the booksnake could call up such violent memories, he'd only been shot once and none of those colleges would have sent him photos of his fa—




(shut up about that just hush)




"That's right," she agreed as she reached the bottom of the stairs, and with no real idea of what she'd been on the edge




(Scoot you old Scoot)


of thinking about. Her head was hanging and she felt sweaty all over, like someone who has just missed being in an accident. "Shut-upsky, enough is enough."




And, as if her voice had activated it, a telephone began to ring behind the closed wooden door on her right. Lisey came to a stop in the barn's main downstairs passage. Once that door had opened upon a stabling area large enough for three horses. Now the sign on it simply said HIGH VOLTAGE! This had been Lisey's idea of a joke. She had intended to put a small office in there, a place where she could keep records and pay the monthly bills (they had—and she still had—a full-time moneymanager, but he was in New York and could not be expected to see to such minutiae as her monthly tab at Hilltop Grocery). She'd gotten as far as putting in the desk, the phone, the fax, and a few filing cabinets…and then Scott died. Had she even been in there since then? Once, she remembered. Early this spring. Late March, a few stale stoles of snow still on the ground, her mission just to empty the answering machine attached to the phone. The number 21 had been in the gadget's window. Messages one through seventeen and nineteen through twenty-one had been from the sort of hucksters Scott had called "phone-lice." The eighteenth (this didn't surprise Lisey at all) had been from Amanda. "Just wanted to know if you ever hooked this damn thing up," she'd said. "You gave me and Darla and Canty the number before Scott died." Pause. "I guess you did." Pause. "Hook it up, I mean." Pause. Then, in a rush: "But there was a very long time between the message and the bleep, sheesh, you must have a lot of messages on there, little Lisey, you ought to check the damn things in case somebody wants to give you a set of Spode or something." Pause. "Well…g'bye."




Now, standing outside the closed office door, feeling pain pulse in sync with her heartbeat behind her right eye, she listened to the telephone ring a third time, and a fourth. Halfway through the fifth ring there was a click and then her own voice, telling whoever was on the other end that he or she had reached 727-5932. There was no false promise of a callback, not even an invitation to leave a message at the sound of what Amanda called the bleep. Anyway, what would be the point? Who would call here to talk to her? With Scott dead, the motor was out of this place. The one left was really just little Lisey Debusher from Lisbon Falls, now the widow Landon. Little Lisey lived alone in a house far too big for her and wrote grocery lists, not novels.



The pause between the message and the beep was so long that she thought the tape for replies had to be full. Even if it wasn't, the caller would get tired and hang up, all she'd hear through the closed office door would be that most annoying of recorded phone voices, the woman who tells you (scolds you), "If you'd like to make a call…please hang up and dial your operator!" She doesn't add smuckhead or shit-for-brains, but Lisey always sensed it as what Scott would have called "a subtext."




Instead she heard a male voice speak three words. There was no reason for them to chill her, but they did. "I'll try again," it said.




There was a click.




Then there was silence.




8




This is a much nicer present, she thinks, but knows it's neither past nor present; it's just a dream. She was lying on the big double bed in the


(our our our our our)




bedroom, under the slowly paddling fan; in spite of the one hundred and thirty milligrams of caffeine in the two Excedrin (expiration date: OCT 07) she took from the dwindling supply of Scott-meds in the bathroom cabinet, she had fallen asleep. If she has any doubt of it, she only has to look at where she is— the third-floor ICU wing of the Nashville Memorial Hospital— and her unique means of travel: she's once more locomoting upon a large piece of cloth with the words PILLSBURY'S BEST FLOUR printed on it. Once more she's delighted to see that the corners of this homely magic carpet, where she sits with her arms regally folded beneath her bosom, are knotted like hankies. She's floating so close to the ceiling that when PILLSBURY'S BEST FLOUR slips beneath one of the slowly paddling overhead fans (in her dream they look just like the one in their bedroom), she has to lie flat to avoid being whacked and cracked by the blades. These varnished wooden oars say shoop, shoop, shoop over and over as they make their slow and somehow stately revolutions. Below her, nurses come and go on squeaksoled shoes. Some are wearing the colorful smocks that will come to dominate the profession, but most of these still wear white dresses, white hose, and those caps that always make Lisey think of stuffed doves. Two doctors—she supposes they must be doctors, although one doesn't look old enough to shave—chat by the drinking fountain. The tile walls are cool green. The heat of the day cannot seem to take hold in here. She supposes there is air-conditioning as well as the fans, but she can't hear it.




Not in my dream, of course not, she tells herself, and this seems reasonable. Up ahead is room 319, which is where Scott went to recuperate after they took the bullet out of him. She has no trouble reaching the door, but discovers she's too high to get through once she arrives. And she wants to get in there. She never got around to telling him You can take care of the rest of this mess later, but was that even necessary? Scott Landon did not, after all, fall off a hayrick yesterday. The real question, it seems to her, is what's the correct magic word to make a magic PILLSBURY'S BEST carpet go down?



It comes to her. It's not a word she wants to hear emerging from her own mouth (it's a Blondie word), but needs must when the devil drives—as Dandy also said—and so…




"Freesias," Lisey says, and the faded cloth with the knotted corners obediently drops three feet from its hoverpoint below the hospital ceiling. She looks in the open door and sees Scott, now maybe five hours post-op, lying in a narrow but surprisingly pretty bed with a gracefully curved head and foot. Monitors that sound like answering machines queep and bleep. Two bags of something transparent hang on a pole between him and the wall. He appears to be asleep. Across the bed from him, 1988-Lisey sits in a straight-backed chair with her husband's hand folded into one of her own. In 1988-Lisey's other hand is the paperback novel she brought to Tennessee with her—she never expected to get through so much of it. Scott reads people like Borges, Pynchon, Tyler, and Atwood; Lisey reads Maeve Binchy, Colleen McCullough, Jean Auel (although she is growing a bit impatient with Ms. Auel's randy cave people), Joyce Carol Oates, and, just lately, Shirley Conran. What she has in room 319 is Savages, the newest novel by the latter, and Lisey likes it a lot. She has come to the part where the women stranded in the jungle learn to use their bras as slingshots. All that Lycra. Lisey doesn't know if the romance-readers of America are ready for this latest from Ms. Conran, but she herself thinks it's brave and rather beautiful, in its way. Isn't bravery always sort of beautiful? The last light of day pours through the room's window in a flood of red and gold. It's ominous and lovely. 1988-Lisey is very tired: emotionally, physically, and of being in the South. She thinks if one more person calls her y'all she'll scream. The good part? She doesn't think she's going to be here as long as they do, because…well…she has reason to know Scott's a fast healer, leave it at that.



Soon she'll go back to the motel and try to rent the same room they had earlier in the day (Scott almost always rents them a hideout, even if the gig is just what he calls "the old inout"). She has an idea she won't be able to do it—they treat you a lot different when you're with a man, whether he's famous or not—but the place is fairly handy to the hospital as well as to the college, and as long as she gets something there, she doesn't give a smuck. Dr. Sattherwaite, who's in charge of Scott's case, has promised her she can dodge reporters by going out the back tonight and for the next few days. He says Mrs. McKinney in Reception will have a cab waiting back by the cafeteria loading dock "as soon as you give her the high sign." She would have gone already, but Scott has been restless for the last hour. Sattherwaite said he'd be out at least until midnight, but Sattherwaite doesn't know Scott the way she does, and Lisey isn't much surprised when he begins surfacing for brief intervals as sunset approaches. Twice he has recognized her, twice he has asked her what happened, and twice she has told him that a mentally deranged person shot him. The second time he said, "Hi-yosmuckin-Silver" before closing his eyes again, and that actually made her laugh. Now she wants him to come back one more time so she can tell him she's not going back to Maine, only to the motel, and that she'll see him in the morning.




All this 2006-Lisey knows. Remembers. Intuits. Whatever. From where she sits on her PILLSBURY'S BEST magic carpet, she thinks: He opens his eyes. He looks at me. He says, "I was lost in the dark and you found me. I was hot—so hot—and you gave me ice."



But is that really what he said? Is it really what happened? Or was that later? And if she's hiding things—hiding them from herself—why is she hiding them?




In the bed, in the red light, Scott opens his eyes. Looks at his wife as she reads her book. His breath doesn't scream now, but there's still a windy sound as he pulls air in as deeply as he can and half-whispers, half-croaks her name. 1988-Lisey puts down her book and looks at him.




"Hey, you're awake again," she says. "So here's your pop quiz. Do you remember what happened to you?"




"Shot," he whispers. "Kid. Tube. Back. Hurts."




"You can have something for the pain in a little while," she says. "For now, would you like—"




He squeezes her hand, telling her she can stop. Now he'll tell me he was lost in the dark and I gave him ice, 2006-Lisey thinks.




But what he says to his wife—who earlier that day saved his life by braining a madman with a silver shovel—is only this: "Hot, wasn't it?" His tone casual. No special look; just making conversation. Just passing the time while the red light deepens and the machines queep and bleep, and from her hoverpoint in the doorway, 2006-Lisey sees the shudder—subtle but there—run through her younger self; sees the first finger of her younger self's left hand lose its place in her paperback copy of Savages.




I'm thinking "Either he doesn't remember or he's pretending not to remember what he said when he was down—about how he could call it if he wanted to, how he could call the long boy if I wanted to be done with him—and what I said back, about how he should shut up and leave it alone…that if he just shut the smuck up it would go away. I'm wondering if this is a real case of forgetting—the way he forgot that he'd been shot—or if it's more of our special forgetting, which is more like sweeping the bad shit into a box and then locking it up tight. I'm wondering if it even matters, as long as he remembers how to get better."



As she lay on her bed (and as she rides the magic carpet in the eternal present of her dream), Lisey stirred and tried to cry out to her younger self, tried to yell that it did matter, it did. Don't let him get away with it! she tried to yell. You can't forget forever! But another saying from the past occurred to her, this one from their endless games of Hearts and Whist at Sabbath Day Lake in the summertime, always yelled out when some player wanted to look at discards more than a single trick deep: Leave that alone! You can't unbury the dead!




You can't unbury the dead.




Still, she tries one more time. With all her considerable force of mind and will, 2006-Lisey leans forward on her magic carpet and sends He's faking! SCOTT REMEMBERS EVERYTHING! at her younger self.




And for a wild moment she thinks she's getting through…knows she's getting through. 1988-Lisey twitches in her chair and her book actually slides out of her hand and hits the floor with a flat clap. But before that version of herself can look around, Scott Landon stares directly at the woman hovering in the doorway, the version of his wife who will live to be his widow. He purses his lips again, but instead of making the nasty chuffing sound, he blows. It's not much of a puff; how could it be, considering what he's been through? But it's enough to send the PILLSBURY'S BEST magic carpet flying backward, dipping and diving like a milkweed pod in a hurricane. Lisey hangs on for dear life as the hospital walls rock past, but the damned thing tilts and she's falling and



9




Lisey awoke sitting bolt-upright on the bed with sweat drying on her forehead and underneath her arms. It was relatively cool in here, thanks to the overhead fan, but still she was as hot as a…




Well, as hot as a suck-oven.




"Whatever that is," she said, and laughed shakily.




The dream was already fading to rags and tatters—the only thing she could recall with any clarity was the otherworldly red light of some setting sun—but she had awakened with a crazy certainty planted in the forefront of her mind, a crazy imperative: she had to find that smucking shovel. That silver spade.




"Why?" she asked the empty room. She picked the clock off the nightstand and held it close to her face, sure it would tell her an hour had gone by, maybe even two. She was astounded to see she had been asleep for exactly twelve minutes. She put the clock back on the nightstand and wiped her hands on the front of her blouse as if she had picked up something dirty and crawling with germs. "Why that thing?"




Never mind. It was Scott's voice, not her own. She rarely heard it with such clarity these days, but oboy, was she ever hearing it now. Loud and clear. That's none of your business. Just find it and put it where…well, you know.



Of course she did.




"Where I can strap it on," she murmured, and rubbed her face with her hands, and gave a little laugh.




That's right, babyluv, her dead husband agreed. Whenever it seems appropriate.





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