Roger Dashmiel, maybe remembering that he's supposed to be the master of ceremonies and not a big old bunnyrabbit, turns back toward Eddington, his protege, and Landon, his troublesome guest of honour, 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 award-winning 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 air-conditioned. 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-paperbag sounds as gunshots? The hole in Scott's coat could be a smudge of dirt from his shovelling 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, f**k them, and f**k Dashmiel, and f**k the day-late and dollarshort 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 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.