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 protege, 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
