He grabs my arm, and that night I see dark blue bruises where his fingers dug into me. Four dark blue bruises in the shape of his fingers. "Want to know. When. I'm. Going. There." He lets go and sits up. His eyes are bigger than ever, and they won't stay still. They jitter in their sockets. "I ain't never going there no more, Scott. That place is closed. That place is all blowed up. Don't you know anything, you dumb little gluefoot motherfucker?" He looks down at the dirty living room carpet. On the radio, Red Sovine gives way to Ferlin Husky. Then Daddy looks up again and he is Daddy, and he says something that almost breaks my heart. "You may be dumb, Scooter, but you're brave. You're my brave boy. I'm not gonna let it hurt you."
Then he lies back down on the couch again, and turns his face away, and tells me not to bother him any more, he wants to take a nap.
That night I wake up to the sound of sleet ticking off the window and he's sitting on the side of my bed, smiling down at me. Only it's not him smiling. There's almost nothing in his eyes but the bad-gunky. "Daddy?" I say, and he says nothing back. I think: He's going to kill me. Going to put his hands around my neck and choke me, and everything we went through, all that with Paul, it will have been for nothing. But instead he says, in a kind of strangled voice: "Go back slee'," and gets up off the bed, and walks out in this kind of herky-jerky way, with his chin leading and his ass wagging, like he's pretending to be a drill-sergeant in a parade, or something. A few seconds later I hear this terrible meat crash and I know that he's fallen downstairs, or maybe even threw himself down, and I lie there awhile, not able to get out of bed, hoping he's dead, hoping he's not, wondering what I'll do if he is, who'll take care of me, not caring, not knowing what I hope for the most. Part of me even hopes he'll finish the job, come back and kill me, just finish the job, end the horror of living in that house. Finally I call out, "Daddy? Are you all right?"
For a long time there's no answer. I lie there listening to the sleet, thinking He's dead, he is, my Daddy's dead, I'm here alone, and then he bellows out of the dark, from down below: "Yes, all right! Shut up, you little shit! Shut up unless you want the thing in the wall to hear you and come out and eat us both alive! Or do you want it to get in you like it got into Paul?"
I don't say nothing to that, just lay there shaking.
"Answer me!" he bawls. "Answer, nummie, or I'll come up there and make you sorry!"
But I can't, I'm too scared to answer, my tongue is nothing but this tiny huck of dried-up beef jerky lying on the bottom of my mouth. I don't cry, either. I'm even too scared to do that. I just lie there and wait for him to come upstairs and hurt me. Or dead-dog kill me.
Then, after what seems like a very long time - at least an hour, although it couldn't have been more than a minute or two - I hear him mutter something that might have been My f**kin head's bleedin or It won't ever stop sleetin. Whatever it is, it's going away from the stairs and toward the living room, and I know he'll climb on the sofa and go to sleep there. In the morning he'll either wake up or he won't, but either way he's done with me for tonight. But I'm still scared. I'm scared because there is a thing. I don't think it's in the wall, but there is a thing. It got Paul, and it's probably going to get my Daddy and then there's me. I've thought about that a lot, Lisey,
13
From her place under the tree - actually sitting with her back against the tree's trunk -
Lisey looked up, almost as startled as she would have been if Scott's ghost had hailed her by name. In a way she supposed that was just what had happened, and really, why should she be surprised? Of course he was talking to her, her and no one else. This was her story, Lisey's story, and even though she was a slow reader, she had already worked her way through a third of the handwritten notebook pages. She thought she'd finish long before dark. That was good. Boo'ya Moon was a sweet place, but only in the daylight. She looked back down at his last manuscript and was again amazed that he had lived through his childhood. She noted that Scott had lapsed into the past tense only when addressing her, here in her present. She smiled at that and resumed reading, thinking if she had one wish it would be to fly to that lonely kid on her highly hypothetical floursack magic carpet and comfort him, if only by whispering in his ear that in time the nightmare would end. Or at least that part of it.
14