But tonight while the wind booms down from Yellowknife and the sky blooms with wild colors, her luck has run out.

7.

Lying on her back in her dead husband's study, holding the b.l.o.o.d.y delight against her breast, Lisey said: "I sat down beside him and worked his hand out from under the african so I could hold it." She swallowed. There was a click in her throat. She wanted more water but didn't trust herself to get up, not just yet. "His hand was warm but the floor 8.

The floor is cold even through the flannel of her nightgown and the flannel of her longjohns and the silk panties beneath the longies. This room, like all of them upstairs, has baseboard heat that she can feel if she stretches out the hand that isn't holding Scott's, but it's small comfort. The endlessly laboring furnace sends it up, the baseboard heaters send it out, it creeps about six inches across the floorboards...and then, poof! Gone. Like the stripes on the barber's pole. Like cigarette smoke when it rises. Like husbands, sometimes.

Never mind the cold floor. Never mind if your a.s.s turns blue. If you can do something for him, do it.

But what is that something? How is she supposed to start?

The answer seems to come on the next gust of wind. Start with the tea-cure.

"He-never-told-me-about-that-because-I-never-asked." This comes out of her so rapidly it could almost be one long exotic word.

If so, it's an exotic one-word lie. He answered her question about the tea-cure that night at The Antlers. In bed, after love. She asked him two or three questions, but the one that mattered, the key question, turned out to be that first one. Simple, too. He could have answered with a plain old yes or no, but when had Scott Landon ever answered anything with a plain old yes or no? And it turned out to be the cork in the neck of the bottle. Why? Because it returned them to Paul. And the story of Paul was, essentially, the story of his death. And the death of Paul led to- "No, please," she whispers, and realizes she's squeezing his hand far too tight. Scott, of course, makes no protest. In the parlance of the Landon family, he has gone gomer. Sounded funny when you put it that way, almost like a joke on Hee-Haw. Say, Buck, where's Roy?

Well, I tell yew, Minnie-Roy's gone gomer!

[Audience howls with laughter.]

But Lisey isn't laughing, and she doesn't need any of her interior voices to tell her Scott has gone to gomerland. If she wants to fetch him back, first she must follow him.

"Oh G.o.d no," she moans, because what that means is already looming in the back of her mind, a large shape wrapped in many sheets. "Oh G.o.d, oh G.o.d, do I have to?"

G.o.d doesn't answer. Nor does she need Him to. She knows what she needs to do, or at least how she needs to start: she must remember their second night at The Antlers, after love. They had been drowsing toward sleep, and she had thought What's the harm, it's Saintly Big Brother you want to know about, not Old Devil Daddy. Go ahead and ask him. So she did. Sitting on the floor with his hand (it's cooling now) folded into hers and the wind booming outside and the sky filled with crazy color, she peers around the curtain she's put up to hide her worst, most perplexing memories and sees herself asking him about the tea-cure. Asking him 9.

"After that thing on the bench, did Paul soak his cuts in tea, the way you soaked your hand that night in my apartment?"

He's lying in bed next to her, the sheet pulled up to his hips, so she can see the beginning curl of his pubic hair. He's smoking what he calls the always fabulous post-coital cigarette, and the only light in the room is cast down on them by the lamp on his side of the bed. In the rose-dusty glow of that lamp the smoke rises and disappears into the dark, making her wonder briefly (was there a sound, a clap of collapsing air under the yum-yum tree when we went, when we left) about something she's already working to put out of her mind.

Meanwhile, the silence is stretching out. She has just about decided he won't answer when he does. And his tone makes her believe it was careful thought and not reluctance that made him pause. "I'm pretty sure the tea-cure came later, Lisey." He thinks a little more, nods. "Yeah, I know it did, because by then I was doing fractions. One-third plus one-fourth equals seven-twelfths, stuff like-a dat." He grins...but Lisey, who is coming to know his repertoire of expressions well, thinks it is a nervous grin.

"In school?" she asks.

"No, Lisey." His tone says she should know better than this, and when he speaks again, she can hear that somehow chilling childishness (I trite and I trite) creeping into his voice. "Me n Paul, we 'us home-schooled. Daddy called public school the Donkey Corral." On the nighttable beside the lamp is an ashtray sitting on top of his copy of Slaughterhouse-Five (Scott takes a book with him everywhere he goes, there are absolutely no exceptions), and he flicks his cigarette into it. Outside, the wind gusts and the old inn creaks.

It suddenly seems to Lisey that perhaps this isn't such a good idea after all, that the good idea would be to just roll over and go to sleep, but she is two-hearted and her curiosity drives her on. "And Paul's cuts that day-the day you jumped from the bench-were bad? Not just nicks? I mean, you know the way kids see things...any busted pipe looks like a flood..."

She trails off. There's a very long pause while he watches the smoke from his cigarette rise out of the lamp's beam and disappear. When he speaks again, his voice is dry and flat and certain. "Daddy cut deep."

She opens her mouth to say something conventional that will put an end to this discussion (all kinds of warning bells are going off in her head, now; whole banks of red lights are flashing), but before she can, he goes on.

"Anyway, that's not what you want to ask. Ask what you want, Lisey. Go ahead. I'll tell you. I'm not going to keep secrets from you-not after what happened this afternoon-but you have to ask."

What did happen this afternoon? That would seem to be the logical question, but Lisey understands this cannot be a logical discussion because it's madness they're circling, madness, and now she's a part of it, too. Because Scott took her somewhere, she knows it, that was not her imagination. If she asks what happened, he'll tell her, he's as much as said so...but it's not the right way in. Her post-coital drowse has departed and she's never felt more awake in her life.

"After you jumped off the bench, Scott..."

"Daddy gave me a kiss, a kiss 'us Daddy's prize. To show the blood-bool was over."

"Yes, I know, you told me. After you jumped off the bench and the cutting was done, did Paul...did he go away somewhere to heal? Is that how come he could go to the store for bottles of dope and then run around the house making a bool hunt so soon after?"

"No." He crushes his cigarette out in the ashtray sitting on top of the book.

She feels the oddest mixture of emotions at that simple negative: sweet relief and deep disappointment. It's like having a thunderhead in her chest. She doesn't know exactly what she was thinking, but that no means she doesn't have to think it any mo- "He couldn't." Scott speaks in that same dry, flat tone of voice. With that same certainty. "Paul couldn't. He couldn't go." The emphasis on the last word is slight but unmistakable. "I had to take him."

Scott rolls toward her and takes her...but only into his arms. His face against her neck is hot with suppressed emotion.

"There's a place. We called it Boo'ya Moon, I forget why. It's mostly pretty." Purdy. "I took him when he was hurt and I took him when he was dead, but I couldn't take him when he was badgunky. After Daddy kilt him I took him there, to Boo'ya Moon, and burrit him away." The dam gives way and he begins sobbing. He's able to m.u.f.fle the sounds a little by closing his lips, but the force of those sobs shakes the bed, and for a little while all she can do is hold him. At some point he asks her to turn the lamp out and when she asks him why he tells her, "Because this is the rest of it, Lisey. I think I can tell it, as long as you're holding me. But not with the light on."

And although she is more frightened than ever-even more frightened than on the night when he came out of the dark with his hand in b.l.o.o.d.y ruins-she frees an arm long enough to turn out the bedside light, brushing his face with the breast that will later suffer Jim Dooley's madness. At first the room is dark and then the furniture reappears dimly as her eyes adjust; it even takes on a faint and hallucinatory glow that announces the moon's approach through the thinning clouds.

"You think Daddy murdered Paul, don't you? You think that's how this part of the story ends."

"Scott, you said he did it with his rifle-"

"But it wasn't murder. They would have called it that if he'd ever been tried for it in court, but I was there and I know it wasn't." He pauses. She thinks he'll light a fresh cigarette, but he doesn't. Outside the wind gusts and the old building groans. For a moment the furniture brightens, just a little, and then the gloom returns. "Daddy could have murdered him, sure. Lots of times. I know that. There were times he would have, if I hadn't been there to help, but in the end that isn't how it was. You know what euthanasia means, Lisey?"

"Mercy-killing."

"Yeah. That's what my Daddy did to Paul."

In the room beyond the bed, the furniture once more shivers toward visibility, then once more retreats into shadow.

"It was the bad-gunky, don't you see? Paul got it just like Daddy. Only Paul got too much for Daddy to cut and let out."

Lisey sort of understands. All those times the father cut the sons-and himself as well, she presumes-he was practicing a kind of wacky preventative medicine.

"Daddy said it mos'ly skip' two generations and then came down twice as hard. 'Come down on you like that tractor-chain on your foot, Scoot,' he said."

She shakes her head. She doesn't know what he's talking about. And part of her doesn't want to.

"It was December," Scott says, "and there come a cold snap. First one of the winter. We lived on that farm way out in the country with open fields all around us and just the one road that went down to Mulie's Store and then to Martensburg. We were pretty much cut off from the world. Pretty much on our own hook, see?"

She does. She does see. She imagines the postman came up that road once in awhile, and of course "Sparky" Landon would drive down it in order to get to (U.S. Gyppum) work, but that would have been pretty much it. No school busses, because me'n Paul, we 'us home-schooled. The school busses went to the Donkey Corral.

"Snow made it worse, and cold made it worse still-the cold kept us inside. Still, that year wasn't so bad at first. We had a Christmas tree, at least. There were years when Daddy would get in the bad-gunky...or just plain broody...and there wouldn't be any tree or any presents." He gives out a short, humorless laugh. "One Christmas he must have kept us up until three in the morning, reading from the Book of Revelation, about jars being opened, and plagues, and riders on horses of various shades, and he finally threw the Bible into the kitchen and roared, 'Who writes this smogging bulls.h.i.t? And who are the morons who believe it?' When he was in a roaring mood, Lisey, he could roar like Ahab during the last days of the Pequod. But this particular Christmas seemed nice enough. Know what we did? We all went up to Pittsburgh together for the shopping, and Daddy even took us to a movie-Clint Eastwood playing a cop and shooting up some city. It gave me a headache, and the popcorn gave me a bellyache, but I thought it was the most wonderful G.o.ddam thing I'd ever seen. I went home and started writing a story just like it and read it to Paul that night. It probably stank to high heaven, but he said it was good."

"He sounds like a great brother," Lisey says carefully.

Her care is wasted. He hasn't even heard her. "What I'm telling you is that we were all getting along, had been for months, almost like a normal family. If there is such a thing, which I doubt. But...but."

He stops, thinking. At last, he begins again.

"Then one day not long before Christmas, I was upstairs in my room. It was cold-colder than a witch's t.i.t-and getting ready to snow. I was on my bed, reading my history lesson, when I looked out my window and saw Daddy coming across the yard with an armload of wood. I went down the back stairs to help him stack it in the woodbox so the stovelengths wouldn't get bark all over the floor-that always made him mad. And Paul was 10.

Paul is sitting at the kitchen table when his kid brother, just ten years old and needing a haircut, comes down the back stairs with the laces of his sneakers flapping. Scott thinks he'll ask if Paul wants to go out sledding on the hill behind the barn once the wood's in. If Daddy doesn't have any more ch.o.r.es, that is.

Paul Landon, slim and tall and already handsome at thirteen, has a book open in front of him. The book is Introduction to Algebra, and Scott has no reason to believe Paul is doing anything other than solving for x until Paul turns his head to look at him. Scott is still three steps from the bottom of the stairs when Paul does that. It is only an instant before Paul lunges at his younger brother, to whom he has never so much as raised a hand in their lives together, but it is long enough to see that no, Paul wasn't just sitting there. No, Paul wasn't just reading. No, Paul wasn't studying.

Paul was lying in wait.

It isn't blankness he sees in his brother's eyes when Paul comes surging out of his chair hard enough to knock it skittering back against the wall, but pure bad-gunky. Those eyes are blue no more. Something has burst in the brain behind them and filled them with blood. Scarlet seeds stand in the corners.

Another child might have frozen to the spot and been killed by the monster who an hour before had been an ordinary brother with nothing on his mind but homework or perhaps what he and Scott could get Daddy for Christmas if they pooled their money. Scott, however, is no more ordinary than Paul. Ordinary children could never have survived Sparky Landon, and it's almost certainly the experience of living with his father's madness that saves Scott now. He knows the bad-gunky when he sees it, and wastes no time on disbelief. He turns instantly and tries to flee back up the stairs. He makes only three steps before Paul grabs him by the legs.

Snarling like a dog whose yard has been invaded, Paul curls his arms around Scott's shins and yanks the younger boy's legs out from under him. Scott grabs the banister and holds on. He gives a single two-word yell-"Daddy, help!"-and then is quiet. Yelling wastes energy. He needs all of his to hold on.

He doesn't have enough strength to do so, of course. Paul is three years older, fifty pounds heavier, and much stronger. In addition to these things, he has run mad. If Paul pulls him free of the banister then, Scott will be badly hurt or killed in spite of his quick reaction, but instead of getting Scott, what Paul gets are Scott's corduroy pants and both sneakers, which he forgot to tie when he jumped down off his bed.

("If I'd tied my sneakers," he will tell his wife much later as they lie in bed on the second floor of The Antlers in New Hampshire, "we're most likely not here tonight. Sometimes I think that's all my life comes down to, Lisey-a pair of untied Keds, size seven.") The thing that was Paul roars, stumbles backward with a hug of pants in its arms, and trips over the chair in which a handsome young fellow sat down an hour previous to map Cartesian coordinates. One sneaker falls to the b.u.mpy, hillocky linoleum. Scott, meanwhile, is struggling to get going again, to get up to the second-floor landing while there's still time, but his sock feet spin out from under him on the smooth stair-riser and he goes back down to one knee. His tattered underwear has been pulled partway down, he can feel a cold draft blowing on the crack of his a.s.s, and there's time to think Please G.o.d, I don't want to die this way, with my f.a.n.n.y out to the wind. Then the brother-thing is up, bellowing and casting aside the pants. They skid across the kitchen table, leaving the algebra book but knocking the sugar-bowl to the floor-knocking it galley-west, their father might have said. The thing that was Paul leaps for him and Scott is bracing for its hands and the feel of its nails biting into his skin when there's a terrific wooden thonk! and a hoa.r.s.e, furious shout:-Leave 'im alone, you smuckin b.a.s.t.a.r.d! You bad-gunky f.u.c.k!

He forgot all about Daddy. The draft on his a.s.s was Daddy coming in with the wood. Then Paul's hands do grab him, the fingernails do bite in, and he's pulled backward, his grip on the banister broken as easily as if it were a baby's. In a moment he will feel Paul's teeth. He knows it, this is the real bad-gunky, the deep bad-gunky, not what happens to Daddy when Daddy sees people who aren't there or makes a blood-bool on himself or one of them (a thing he does less and less to Scott as Scott grows older), but the real deal, what Daddy meant all the times he'd just laugh and shake his head when they asked him why the Landreaus left France even though it meant leaving all their money and land behind, and they were rich, the Landreaus were rich, and he's going to bite now, he's going to bite me right now, RAH-CHEER- He never feels Paul's teeth. He feels hot breath on the unprotected meat of his left side just above the hip, and then there's another heavy wooden thonk! as Daddy brings the stovelength down on Paul's head again-two-handed, with all his strength. The sound is followed by a number of loose sliding sounds as Paul's body goes slithering down to the kitchen linoleum.

Scott turns over. He's lying splayed out on the lower stairs, dressed in nothing but an old flannel shirt, his underpants, and white athletic socks with holes in the heels. One foot is almost touching the floor. He's too stunned to cry. His mouth tastes like the inside of a piggybank. That last whack sounded awful, and for an instant his powerful imagination paints the kitchen with Paul's blood. He tries to cry out, but his shocked, flattened lungs can produce only a single dismayed squawk. He blinks and sees that there's no blood, only Paul lying facedown in the sugar from the now defunct bowl, which lies bust in four big and change. That one'll never dance the tango again, Daddy sometimes says when something breaks, a gla.s.s or a plate, but he doesn't say it now, just stands over his unconscious son in his yellow work coat. There's snow on his shoulders and in his s.h.a.ggy hair, which is starting to go gray. In one gloved hand he holds the stovelength. Behind him, scattered in the entry like pickup sticks, is the rest of his armload. The door is still open and the cold draft is still blowing in. And now Scott sees there is blood, just a little, trickling from Paul's left ear and down the side of his face.

-Daddy, is he dead?

Daddy slings the stovelength into the woodbox and brushes his long hair back. There's melting snow in the stubble on his cheeks-No he aint. That would be too easy. He tromps to the back door and slams it shut, cutting off the draft. His every movement expresses disgust, but Scott has seen him act so before-when he gets Official Letters about taxes or schooling or things like that-and is pretty sure that what he really is is scared.

Daddy comes back and stands over his floorbound boy. He rocks from one booted foot to the other awhile. Then he looks up at the other one.

-Help me get him down cellar, Scoot.

It isn't wise to question Daddy when he tells you to do a thing, but Scott is frightened. Also, he is next door to naked. He comes down to the kitchen and starts pulling his pants on.-Why, Daddy? What are you going to do with him?

And for a wonder, Daddy doesn't hit him. Doesn't even yell at him.

-I'll be smucked if I know. Truss him up down there for a start while I think about it. Hurry up. He won't be out long.

-Is it really the bad-gunky? Like with the Landreaus? And your Uncle Theo?

-What do you think, Scoot? Get his head, less you want it to b.u.mp all the way down. He won't be out long I tell you, and if he starts again, you might not be so lucky. Me either. Badgunky's strong.

Scott does as his father says. It's the nineteen-sixties, it's America, men will soon be walking on the moon, but here they have a boy to deal with who has seemingly gone feral in the turn of a moment. The father simply accepts the fact. After his first shocked questions, the son does, as well. When they reach the bottom of the cellar stairs, Paul begins to stir again and make thick sounds deep in his throat. Sparky Landon puts his hands around his older son's throat and begins to choke him. Scott screams in horror and tries to grab his father.

-Daddy, no!

Sparky Landon releases one hand from what it's been doing long enough to administer an absent backhand blow to his younger son. Scott goes reeling back and strikes the table sitting in the middle of the dirt-floored room. Standing on it is an ancient hand-crank printing press that Paul has somehow coaxed back into working. He has printed some of Scott's stories on it; they are the younger brother's first publications. The crank of this quarter-ton behemoth bites painfully into Scott's back and he crumples up, grimacing, watching as his father resumes choking.

-Daddy, don't kill 'im! PLEASE DON'T KILL 'IM!

-I ain't, Landon says without looking around, I should, but I aint. Not yet, anyway. More fool me, but he's my own boy, my f.u.c.kin firstborn, and I won't unless I have to. Which I fear I will. Sweet Mother Machree! But not yet. Mother-fogged if I will. Only it won't do to let him wake up. You aint never seen anything like this, but I have. I got lucky upstairs because I was behind him. Down here I could chase him two hours and never catch him. He'd run up the walls and halfway across the sweetmother ceiling. Then, when he wore me down...

Landon removes his hands from Paul's throat and peers fixedly into the still white face. That little trickle of blood from Paul's ear seems to have stopped.

-There. How you like that, you mother, you mother-f.u.c.k? He's out again. But he not for long. Fetch out that coil of rope from understair. That'll do until we can get some chain out of the shed. Then I dunno. Then it depends.

-Depends on what, Daddy?

Scared. Has he ever been so scared? No. And his father is looking at him in a way that scares him even more. Because it is a knowing way.

-Why, I guess it depends on you, Scoot. You've made him better a lot of times...and why do you want to come over all cow's eyes that way? You think I didn't know? Jayzus, for a smart boy ain't you dumb! He turns his head and spits on the dirt floor. You've made him better of a lot of things. Maybe you can make him better of this. I never heard of anyone getting better from the bad-gunky...not the real bad-gunky...but I never heard of anybody just like you, either, so maybe you can. Have on 'til your cheeks crack, my old man would've said. But for now just fetch out that coil of rope from understair. And step to it, you little gluefoot mother-f.u.c.k, because he's 11.

"He's stirring already," Lisey said as she lay on the oysterwhite carpet of her dead husband's study. "He's 12."Stirring already," Lisey says as she sits on the cold floor of the guest room, holding her husband's hand-a hand that is warm but dreadfully lax and waxy in her own. "Scott said 13.

The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound; these are the sounds of dead voices on dead records floating down the broken shaft of memory.

When I turn to you to ask if you remember, When I turn to you in our bed 14.

In bed with him is where she hears these things; in bed with him at The Antlers, after a day when something happened she absolutely cannot explain. He tells her as the clouds thin and the moon nears like an announcement and the furniture swims to the very edge of visibility. She holds him in the dark and listens, not wanting to believe (helpless not to), as the young man who will shortly become her husband says, "Daddy tole me to fetch out that coil of rope from understair. 'And you want to step to it, you little gluefoot mother-f.u.c.k,' he says, 'because he's not gonna stay out for long. And when he comes to 15.

-When he comes to he's gonna be one ugly bug.

Ugly bug. Like Scooter you old Scoot and the bad-gunky, ugly bug is an interior idiom of his family that will haunt his dreams (and his speech) for the rest of his productive but too-short life.

Scott gets the coil of rope from beneath the stairs and brings it to Daddy. Daddy trusses Paul up with quick, dancing economy, his shadow looming and turning on the cellar's stone walls in the light of three hanging seventy-five-watt bulbs, which are controlled by a turn-switch at the top of the stairs. He ties Paul's arms so stringently behind him that the b.a.l.l.s of his shoulders stand out even through his shirt. Scott is moved to speak again, afraid of Daddy though he is.

-Daddy, that's too tight!

Daddy shoots a glance Scott's way. It's just a quick one, but Scott sees the fear there. It scares him. More than that, it awes him. Before today he would have said his Daddy wasn't ascairt of nothing but the School Board and their d.a.m.ned Registered Mails.

-You don't know, so shut up! I aint having him get a-loose! He might not kill us before it was over if that happen, but I'd most certainly have to kill him. I know what I'm doin!

You don't, Scott thinks, watching Daddy tie Paul's legs together first at the knees, then at the ankles. Already Paul has begun to stir again, and to mutter deep in his throat. You're only guessing. But he understands the truth of Daddy's love for Paul. It may be ugly love, but it's true and strong. If it wasn't, Daddy wouldn't guess at all. He would have just kept hammering Paul with that stovelength until he was dead. For just a moment part of Scott's mind (a cold part) wonders if Daddy would run the same risk for him, for Scooter old Scoot who didn't even dare jump off a three-foot bench until his brother stood cut and bleeding before him, and then he swats the thought into darkness. It isn't him who got the badgunky.

At least, not yet.

Daddy finishes by tying Paul around the middle to one of the painted steel posts that hold up the cellar's ceiling.-There, he says, stepping away, panting like a man who's just roped a steer in a rodeo ring. That'll hold him awhile. You go on out to the shed, Scott. Get the light chain that's laying just inside the door and the big heavy tractor-chain that's in the bay on the left, with the truck parts. Do you know where I mean?

Paul has been sagging over the rope around his torso. Now he sits up so suddenly he bangs his head on the post with sickening force. It makes Scott grimace. Paul looks at him with eyes that were blue only an hour ago. He grins, and the corners of his mouth stretch up far higher than they should be able to...almost to the lobes of his ears, it seems.

-Scott, his father says.

For once in his life, Scott pays no attention. He's mesmerized by the Halloween mask that used to be his brother's face. Paul's tongue comes dancing from between his parted teeth and does a jitterbug in the dank cellar air. At the same time his crotch darkens as he p.i.s.ses his pa- There's a clout upside his head that sends Scott reeling backward and he hits the printing-press table again.

-Don't look at him, nummie, look at me! That ugly bug'll hypnotize you like a snake does a bird! You better wake the smuck up, Scooter-that aint your brother anymore. Scott gapes at his father. Behind them, as if to underline Daddy's point, the thing tied to the post lets out a roar much too loud to have come from a human chest. But that's all right, because it isn't a human sound. Not even close.

-Go get those chains, Scotty. Both of em. And be quick. That tie-job aint gonna hold him. I'm gonna go upstairs and get my .30-06. If he gets a-loose before you get back with those chains- -Daddy, please don't shoot him! Don't shoot Paul!

-Bring the chains. Then we'll see what we can figger out.

-That tractor-chain's too long! Too heavy!

-Use the wheelbarra, nummie. The big barra. Go on, now, step to it.

Scott looks over his shoulder once and sees his father backing to the foot of the stairs. He does it slowly, like a liontamer leaving the cage after the act is over. Below him, spotlighted in the glare of one hanging bulb, is Paul. He's whamming the back of his head so rapidly against the post that Scott thinks of a jackhammer. At the same time he's jerking from side to side. Scott can't believe Paul isn't bleeding or knocking himself unconscious, but he's not. And he sees his father is right. The ropes won't hold him. Not if he keeps up that constant a.s.sault.