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
(strap it on STRAP IT ON RIGHT NOW)
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.
He gazes up and now his face is waxy pale except for the sooty smudges forming beneath his hazel eyes and the fat string of blood which has begun to flow from the right side of his mouth and down along his jaw. 'Lisey!' That thin, whooping highaltitude-chamber voice. 'Did that guy really shoot me?'
'Don't try to talk.' She puts a hand on his chest. His shirt, oh dear God, is soaked with blood, and beneath it she can feel his heart running along so fast and light; it is not the heartbeat of a human being but of a bird. Pigeon- pulse, she thinks, and that's when the girl with the floppy bows tied on her shoulders falls on top of her. She would land on Scott but Lisey instinctively shields him, taking the brunt of the girl's weight ('Hey! Shit! FUCK!' the startled girl cries out) with her back; that weight is there for only a second, and then gone. Lisey sees the girl shoot her hands out to break her fall—oh, the divine reflexes of the young, she thinks, as though she herself were ancient instead of just thirty-one—and the girl is successful, but then she is yipping 'Ow, ow, OW!' as the asphalt heats her skin.
'Lisey,' Scott whispers, and oh Christ how his breath screams when he pulls it in, like wind in a chimney.
'Who pushed me?' the girl with the bows on her shoulders is demanding. She's a-hunker, hair from a busted ponytail in her eyes, crying in shock, pain, and embarrassment.
Lisey leans close to Scott. The heat of him terrifies her and fills her with pity deeper than any she thought it was possible to feel. He is actually shivering in the heat. Awkwardly, using only one arm, she strips off her jacket. 'Yes, you've been shot. So just be quiet and don't try to—'
'I'm so hot,' he says, and begins to shiver harder. What comes next, convulsions? His hazel eyes stare up into her blue ones. Blood runs from the corner of his mouth. She can smell it. Even the collar of his shirt is soaking in red. His tea-cure wouldn't be any good here, she thinks, not even sure what it is she's thinking about. Too much blood this time. Too smucking much. 'I'm so hot, Lisey, please give me ice.'
'I will,' she says, and puts her jacket under his head. 'I will, Scott.' Thank God he's wearing his sportcoat, she thinks, and then has an idea. She grabs the hunkering, crying girl by the arm. 'What's your name?'
The girl stares as if she were mad, but answers the question. 'Lisa Lemke.'
Another Lisa, small world, Lisey thinks but does not say. What she says is, 'My husband's been shot, Lisa. Can you go over there to…' She cannot remember the name of the building, only its function. '…to the English Department and call an ambulance? Dial 911—'
'Ma'am? Mrs. Landon?' This is the campus security cop with the puffickly huh-yooge batch, making his way through the crowd with a lot of help from his meaty elbows. He squats beside her and his knees pop. Louder than Blondie's pistol, Lisey thinks. He's got a walkie-talkie in one hand. He speaks slowly and carefully, as though to a distressed child. 'I've called the campus infirmary, Mrs. Landon. They are rolling their ambulance, which will take your husband to Nashville Memorial. Do you understand me?'
She does, and her gratitude (the cop has made up the dollar short he owed and a few more, in Lisey's opinion) is almost as deep as the pity she feels for her husband, lying on the simmering pavement and trembling like a distempered dog. She nods, weeping the first of what will be many tears before she gets Scott back to Maine—not on a Delta flight but in a private plane and with a private nurse on board, and with another ambulance and another private nurse to meet them at the Portland Jetport's Civil Aviation terminal. Now she turns back to the Lemke girl and says, 'He's burning up—is there ice, honey? Can you think of anywhere that there might be ice? Anywhere at all?'
She says this without much hope, and is therefore amazed when Lisa Lemke nods at once. 'There's a snack center with a Coke machine right over there.' She points in the direction of Nelson Hall, which Lisey can't see. All she can see is a crowding forest of bare legs, some hairy, some smooth, some tanned, some sunburned. She realizes they're completely hemmed in, that she's tending her fallen husband in a slot the shape of a large vitamin pill or cold capsule, and feels a touch of crowd-panic. Is the word for that agoraphobia? Scott would know.
'If you can get him some ice, please do,' Lisey says. 'And hurry.' She turns to the campus security cop, who appears to be taking Scott's pulse—a completely useless activity, in Lisey's opinion. Right now it's down to either alive or dead. 'Can you make them move back?' she asks. Almost pleads. 'It's so hot, and—'
Before she can finish he's up like Jack from his box, yelling 'Move it back! Let this girl through! Move it back and let this girl through! Let him breathe, folks, what do you say?'
The crowd shuffles back…very reluctantly, it seems to Lisey. They don't want to miss any of the blood, it seems to her.
The heat bakes up from the pavement. She has half- expected to get used to it, the way you get used to a hot shower, but that isn't happening. She listens for the howl of the approaching ambulance and hears nothing. Then she does. She hears Scott, saying her name. Croaking her name. At the same time he twitches at the side of the sweat-soaked shell top she's wearing (her bra now stands out against the silk as stark as a swollen tattoo). She looks down and sees something she doesn't like at all. Scott is smiling. The blood has coated his lips a rich candy red, top to bottom, side to side, and the smile actually looks more like the grin of a clown. No one loves a clown at midnight, she thinks, and wonders where that came from. It will only be at some point during the long and mostly sleepless night ahead of her, listening to what will seem like every dog in Nashville bark at the hot August moon, that she'll remember it was the epigram of Scott's third novel, the only one both she and the critics hated, the one that made them rich. Empty Devils.
Scott continues to twitch at her blue silk top, his eyes still so brilliant and fevery in their blackening sockets. He has something to say, and—reluctantly—she leans down to hear it. He pulls air in a little at a time, in half-gasps. It is a noisy, frightening process. The smell of blood is even stronger up close. Nasty. A mineral smell.
It's death. It's the smell of death.
As if to ratify this, Scott says: 'It's very close, honey. I can't see it, but I…' Another long, screaming intake of breath. 'I hear it taking its meal. And grunting.' Smiling that bloody clown-smile as he says it.
'Scott, I don't know what you're talk—'
The hand that has been tugging at her top has some strength left in it, after all. It pinches her side, and cruelly—when she takes the top off much later, in the motel room, she'll see a bruise, a true lover's knot.
'You…' Screamy breath. 'Know…' Another screamy breath, deeper. And still grinning, as if they share some
