I drag myself out from under my bed on my elbows and my knees, conscious that a sickly five o'clock light is soaking in through the window. It's sleeting harder than ever, by the sound, but I hardly notice. I swivel my head from my floor-level position, peering stupidly around at the shambles that used to be my bedroom. The closet door has been pulled off the top hinge and leans drunkenly into the room from the lower one. My clothes have been scattered and many of them - most of them, it looks like - have been torn apart, as if the thing inside of Daddy has taken out on them what it couldn't take out on the boy who should have been inside them. Far worse, it has torn my few treasured paperback books - sports biographies and science fiction novels, mostly - to shreds. Their flimsy covers lie in pieces everywhere. My bureau has been overturned, the drawers slung to the corners of the room. The hole where the pickaxe went through my bed looks as big as a moon crater, and I think: That's where my belly would have been, if I'd been lying there. And there's a faint sour smell. It reminds me of how Boo'ya Moon smelled at night, but it's more familiar. I try to put a name on it and can't. All I can think of is bad fruit, and although that's not quite right, it turns out to be very close. I don't want to leave the room, but I know I can't stay there because eventually he'll be back. I find a pair of jeans that aren't ripped and put them on. My sneakers are gone, I don't know where, but maybe my boots will still be in the mudroom. And my coat. I'll put them on and run out into the sleet. Down the driveway, following Mr. Halsey's half-frozen slushy car-tracks, to the road. Then down the road to Mulie's Store. I'll run for my life, into some future I can't even imagine. Unless, that is, he catches me first and kills me.
I have to climb over the bureau, which is blocking the door, to get into the hall. Once I'm out there I see the thing has knocked down all the pictures and knocked holes in the walls, and I know I'm looking at more of its anger at not being able to get at me.
Out here the sour fruit smell is strong enough to recognize. There was a Christmas party at U.S. Gyppum last year. Daddy went because he said it would "look funny"
if he didn't. The man who drew his name gave him a jug of homemade blackberry wine for a present. Now, Andrew Landon has got a lot of problems (and he'd probably be the first to admit it, if caught in an honest moment), but alcohol isn't one of them. He poured himself a jelly-glass of that wine before dinner one night -
between Christmas and New Year's, this was, with Paul chained in the cellar - took one sip, grimaced, started to pour it down the sink, then saw me looking and held it out.
You want to try this, Scott? he asked. See what all the shouting's about? Hey, if you like it, you can have the whole sweetmother gallon.
I'm as curious about booze as any kid, I guess, but that smell was too fruity- rancid. Maybe the stuff makes you happy like I've seen on TV, but I could never lick that gone-dead fruit smell. I shook my head.
You're a wise child, Scooter ole Scoot, he said, and poured the stuff in the jelly- glass down the sink. But he must have saved the rest of the jug (or just forgot about it) because that's what I smell now, sure as God made little fishes, and strong. By the time I get to the foot of the stairs it's a stench, and now I hear something besides the steady rattle of the sleet on the boards and the tinny tick-tock of it on the windows: George Jones. It's Daddy's radio, tuned to WWVA like always, playing very soft. And I also hear snoring. The relief is so great that tears go spilling down my cheeks. The thing I've been most afraid of is that he's laid up, waiting for me to show myself. Now, listening to those long, ragged snores, I know that he's not. Nevertheless, I'm careful. I detour through the dining room so I can come into the living room from behind the sofa. The dining room is also a shambles. Nana's breakfront has been overturned, and it looks to me like he made a pretty good effort to turn it into kindling. All the dishes are broken. So's the blue pitcher, and the money inside it has been torn to pieces. Green shreds have been flung every whichever. Some even hang from the central light fixture like New Year's Eve confetti. Apparently the thing inside Daddy has no more use for money than it does for books.
In spite of those snores, in spite of being on the couch's blind side, I peer into the living room like a soldier peering over the lip of a foxhole after an artillery barrage. It's a needless precaution. His head's hanging off one end of the couch and his hair, which he hasn't taken the scissors to since before Paul went bad, is so long it's almost touching the rug. I could have marched through there crashing a pair of cymbals and he wouldn't have stirred. Daddy isn't just asleep in the jumbled wreckage of that room; he is un-smucking-conscious.
A little further in and I see there's a cut running up one cheek, and his closed eyes have a purplish, exhausted look. His lips have slid back from his teeth, making him look like an old dog that fell asleep trying to snarl. He covers the couch with an old Navajo blanket to keep off grease and spilled food, and he's wrapped part of it over him. He must have been tired of busting things up by the time he got in here, because he's poked out the eye of the television and smashed the glass over his dead wife's studio portrait and called it good. The radio's in its usual place on the end- table and that gallon jug is on the floor beside it. I look at the jug and can't hardly believe what I'm seeing: there's not but an inch or so left. It's almost impossible for me to believe he's drunk so much - he who isn't used to drinking at all - but the stink hanging around him, so thick I can almost see it, is very persuasive. The pickaxe leans against the head of the sofa, and there's a piece of paper stuck on the end that came down through my bed. I know it's a note he's left for me, and I don't want to read it, but I have to. He's written on three lines, but there are only eight words. Too few to ever forget.
KILL ME THEN PUT ME WITH PAUL PLEASE
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