still down, still holding the .30-06. He puts it on the icy ground only long enough to push the cover off the dry well. He needs both hands to do that because the sleet has bound the cover to the brick. Then he picks the gun up again, looks at it for a second—almost like he's saying goodbye—and slides it into the gap he's made. After that he comes back to the house with his head still down and ice-drops darkening the shoulders of his shirt. It's only then that I notice his feet are bare. I don't think he ever realizes at all.
He doesn't seem surprised to see me in the kitchen. He takes out the two dollar bills Mr. Halsey gave me, looks at them, then looks at me. 'You sure you don't want these?' he asks.
I shake my head. 'Not if they were the last two dollar bills on earth.'
I can see he likes that answer. 'Good,' he says. 'But now let me tell you something, Scott. You know your nana's china breakfront in the dining room?'
'Sure.'
'If you look in the blue pitcher on the top shelf, you're going to find a roll of money. My money, not Halsey's—do you understand the difference?'
'Yes,' I say.
'Yeah, I bet you do. You're a lot of things, but dumb hasn't ever been one of them. If I were you, Scotty, I'd take that roll of bills—it's around seven hundred dollars—and put my act on the road. Stick five in my pocket and the rest in my boot. Ten's too young to be on the road, even for a little while, and I think the chances are probably ninety- five in a hundred somebody'll rob you of your roll even before you make it over the bridge into Pittsburgh, but if you stay here, something bad's going to happen. Do you know what I'm talking about?'
'Yes, but I can't go,' I say.
'There's a lot of things people think they can't do and then discover they can when they find themselves tight-wired,' Daddy says. He looks down at his feet, which are all pink and raw-looking. 'If you were to make it to the Burg, I believe a boy bright enough to get rid of Mr. Halsey with a story about Lou Gehrig's Disease and a sister I don't have might be bright enough to look under the C's in the telephone book and find Child Welfare. Or you might could knock around a little bit and maybe find an even better situation, if you wasn't to get separated from that roll of cash. Seven hundred parceled out five or ten bucks at a time will last a kid awhile, if he's smart enough not to get picked up by the cops and lucky enough not to get robbed of any more of it than what happens to be in his pocket.'
I tell him again: 'I can't go.'
'Why not?'
But I can't explain. Some of it is having lived almost my whole life in that farmhouse, with almost no one for company but Daddy and Paul. What I know of other places I have gotten mostly from three sources: the television, the radio, and my imagination. Yes, I've been to the movies, and I've been to the Burg half a dozen times, but always with my father and big brother. The thought of going out into that roaring
strangeness alone scares the living Jesus out of me. And, more to the point, I love him. Not in the simple and uncomplicated (until the last few weeks, at least) way I loved Paul, but yes, I love him. He has cut me and hit me and called me smuckhead and nummie and gluefoot mothersmucker, he has terrorized many of my childhood days and sent me to bed on many nights feeling small and stupid and worthless, but those bad times have yielded their own perverse treasures; they have turned each kiss to gold, each of his compliments, even the most offhand, into things to be treasured. And even at ten— because I'm his son, his blood? maybe—I understand that his kisses and compliments are always sincere; they are always true things. He is a monster, but the monster is not incapable of love. That was the horror of my father, little Lisey: he loved his boys.
'I just can't,' I say.
He thinks about this—about whether or not to press me, I suppose—and then just nods again. 'All right. But listen to me, Scott. What I did to your brother I did to save your life. Do you know that?'
'Yes, Daddy.'
'But if I were to do something to you, it would be different. It would be so bad I might go to hell for it, even if there was something else inside making me do it.' His eyes shift away from mine then, and I know he's seeing them again, them, and that pretty soon it won't be him I'm talking to anymore. Then he looks back at me and I see him clearly for the last time. 'You won't let me go to hell, will you?' he asks me. 'You wouldn't let your Daddy go to hell and burn there forever, mean as I've been to you some of the time?' 'No, Daddy,' I say, and I can hardly talk.
'You promise? On your brother's name?'
'On Paul's name.'
He looks away, back into the corner. 'I'm going to lie down,' he says. 'Fix yourself something to eat if you want, but don't leave this smucking kitchen all beshitted.'
That night I wake up—or something wakes me up—and I hear the sleet coming down on the house harder than ever. I hear a crash out back and know it's a tree falling over from the weight of ice on it. Maybe it was another tree falling over that woke me up, but I don't think so. I think I heard him on the stairs, even though he's trying to be quiet. There's no time to do anything but slide out of bed and hide underneath it, so that's what I do even though I know it's hopeless, under the bed is where kids always hide, and it'll be the first place he looks.
I see his feet come in the door. They're still bare. He never says a word, just walks over to the bed and stands beside it. I think he'll stand beside it like he did before, then maybe sit down on it, but he never. Instead I hear him make a kind of grunting sound, like he does when he's lifting something heavy, a box or something, and he goes up on the balls of his feet, and there's a whistling in the air, and then a terrific SPUH-RUNNGGG noise, and the mattress and the box-spring both bow down in the middle, and dust puffs along the floor, and the point of the pickaxe from out in the shed comes shooting through the bottom of my bed. It stops in front of my face, not an inch from my mouth. It seems like I can see every flake of rust on it, and the shiny place where it scraped on one of the bedsprings. It stays still for a second or two, then there's more grunting and a terrific pig-squealing as he tries to pull it out. He tries hard, but it's good and stuck. The point wiggles and waggles back and forth in front of my face, and then he leaves off. I see his fingers appear below the edge of the bed then, and know that he's rested his palms on the balls of his knees. He's bending down, means to look under the bed and make sure I'm there before working that pickaxe free.
I don't think. I just close my eyes and go. It's the first time since I buried Paul and it's the first time from the second floor. I have just a second to think I'll fall, but I don't care, anything's better than hiding under the bed and seeing the stranger wearing my Daddy's face look under and see me looking back, cornered; anything's better than seeing the bad-gunky stranger who owns him now.
And I do fall, but only a little, only a couple of feet, and only, I think, because I believed I would. So much about Boo'ya Moon is about simple belief; there, seeing really is believing, at least some of the time…and as long as you don't wander too far into the woods and get lost.
It was night there, Lisey, and I remember it well because it was the only time I went there at night on purpose.
15
'Oh, Scott,' Lisey said, wiping at her cheeks. Each time he broke from the present tense and spoke to her directly was like a blow, but sweet. 'Oh, I'm so sorry.' She checked to see how many pages were left—not many. Eight? No, ten. She bent to them again, turning each into the growing pile in her lap as she read it.
16
I leave a cold room where a thing wearing my father's skin is trying to kill me and sit up beside my brother's grave on a summer night softer than velvet. The moon rides the sky like a tarnished silver dollar, and the laughers are having a party deep in the Fairy Forest. Every now and then something else— something deeper in, I think—lets out a roar. Then the laughers are quiet for awhile, but I guess whatever amuses them is eventually more than they can bear in silence, because up they start all over again—first one, then two, then half a dozen, then the whole damn Institute of Risibility. Something too big to be a hawk or an owl sails voicelessly across the moon, some kind of night-hunting bird special to this place, I guess, special to Boo'ya Moon. I can smell all the perfumes that Paul and I loved so much, but now they smell sour and curdled and somehow bed-pissy; like if you breathed too deep of them they'd sprout claws way up in your nose and dig in there. Down Purple Hill I see drifting jellyfish globes of light. I don't know what they are, but I don't like them. I think that if they touch me, they might latch on, or maybe burst and leave a itchy-sore place that would spread like poison ivy if you touched it.
It's creepy by Paul's grave. I don't want to be afraid of him, and I'm not, not really, but I keep thinking of the thing inside him, and wondering if maybe it's in him still. And if things over here that are nice in daylight turn to poison at
