He had turned the big exclamation point into a sunny seventies-style smiley-face, as if telling her to have a nice day. And Lisey did understand. Eighteen years late, but so what? Memory was relative.
Very zen, grasshoppah, Scott might have said.
'Zen, schmen. I wonder how Tony's doing these days, that's what I wonder. Savior of the famous Scott Landon.' She laughed, and the tears that had still been standing in her eyes spilled down her cheeks.
Now she turned the photo widdershins and read the other, longer note.
8–18–88
Dear Scott (If I may): I thought you would want this photograph of C. Anthony ('Tony') Eddington III, the young grad student who saved your life. U-Tenn will be honoring him, of course; we felt you might also want to be in touch. His address is 748 Coldview Avenue, Nashville North, Nashville, Tennessee 37235. Mr. Eddington, 'Poor but Proud,' comes from a fine Southern Tennessee family and is an excellent student poet. You will of course want to thank (and perhaps reward) him in your own way.
Respectfully, sir, I remain, Roger C. Dashmiel
Assoc. Prof., English Dept.
University of Tennessee, Nashville
Lisey read this over once, twice ('three times a laaaa-dy,' Scott would have sung at this point), still smiling, but now with a sour combination of amazement and final comprehension. Roger Dashmiel was probably as ignorant of what had actually happened as the campus cop. Which meant there were only two people in the whole round world who knew the truth about that afternoon: Lisey Landon and Tony Eddington, the fellow who would be rahtin it up for the year-end review. It was possible that even 'Toneh' himself didn't realize what had happened after the ceremonial first spadeful of earth had been turned. Maybe he'd been in a fear-injected blackout. Dig it: he might really believe he had saved Scott Landon from death.
No. She didn't think so. What she thought was that this clipping and the jotted, fulsome note were Dashmiel's petty revenge on Scott for…for what?
For just being polite?
For looking at Monsieur de Literature Dashmiel and not seeing him?
For being a rich creative snotbucket who was going to make a fifteen-thousand-dollar payday for saying a few uplifting words and turning a single spadeful of earth? Pre-loosened earth at that?
All those things. And more. Lisey thought Dashmiel had somehow believed their positions would have been reversed in a truer, fairer world; that he, Roger Dashmiel, would have been the focus of the intellectual interest and student adulation, while Scott Landon—not to mention his mousy little wouldn'tfart-if-her-life-depended-on-it-wife —
would be the ones toiling in the campus vineyards, always currying favor, testing the winds of departmental politics, and scurrying to make that next pay-grade.
'Whatever it was, he didn't like Scott and this was his revenge,' she marveled to the empty, sunny rooms above the long barn. 'This…poison-pen clipping.'
She considered the idea for a moment, then burst out into gales of merry laughter, clapping her hands on the flat part of her chest above her breasts.
When she recovered a little, she paged through the Review until she found the article she was looking for: AMERICA'S MOST FAMOUS NOVELIST INAUGURATES LONG-HELD LIBRARY DREAM. The byline was Anthony Eddington, sometimes known as Toneh. And, as Lisey skimmed it, she found she was capable of anger, after all. Even rage. For there was no mention of how that day's festivities had ended, or the Review author's own putative heroism, for that matter. The only suggestion that something had gone crazily wrong was in the concluding lines: 'Mr. Landon's speech following the groundbreaking and his reading in the student lounge that evening were cancelled due to unexpected developments, but we hope to see this giant of American literature back on our campus soon. Perhaps for the ceremonial ribbon-cutting when the Shipman opens its doors in 1991!'
Reminding herself this was the school Review, for God's sake, a glossy, expensive hardcover book mailed out to presumably loaded alumni, went some distance toward defusing her anger; did she really think the U-Tenn Review was going to let their hired hack rehash that day's bloody bit of slapstick? How many alumni dollars would that add to the coffers? Reminding herself that Scott would also have found this amusing helped…but not all that much. Scott, after all, wasn't here to put his arm around her, to kiss her cheek, to distract her by gently tweaking the tip of one breast and telling her that to everything there was a season—a time to sow, a time to reap, a time to strap and likewise one to unstrap, yea, verily.
Scott, damn him, was gone. And—
'And he bled for you people,' she murmured in a resentful voice that sounded spookily like Manda's. 'He almost died for you people. It's sort of a blue-eyed miracle he didn't.'
And Scott spoke to her again, as he had a way of doing. She knew it was only the ventriloquist inside her, making his voice—who had loved it more or remembered it better?—but it didn't feel that way. It felt like him.
You were my miracle, Scott said. You were my blue-eyed miracle. Not just that day, but always. You were the one who kept the dark away, Lisey. You shone.
'I suppose there were times when you thought so,' she said absently.
—Hot, wasn't it?
Yes. It had been hot. But not just hot. It was—
'Humid,' Lisey said. 'Muggy. And I had a bad feeling about it from the get-go.'
Sitting in front of the booksnake, with the U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review lying open in her lap, Lisey had a momentary but brilliant glimpse of Granny D, feeding the chickens way back when, on the home place. 'It was in the bathroom that I started to feel really bad. Because I broke
3
She keeps thinking about the glass, that smucking broken glass. When, that is, she's not thinking of how much she'd like to get out of this heat.
Lisey stands behind and slightly to Scott's right with her hands clasped demurely before her, watching him balance on one foot, the other on the shoulder of the silly little shovel half-buried in loose earth that has clearly been brought in for the occasion. The day is maddeningly hot, maddeningly humid, maddeningly muggy, and the considerable crowd that has gathered only makes it worse. Unlike the dignitaries, the lookie-loos aren't dressed in anything approaching their best, and while their jeans and shorts and pedal-pushers may not exactly make them comfortable in the wet-blanket air, Lisey envies them just the same as she stands here at the crowd's forefront, basting in the suck-oven heat of the Tennessee afternoon. Just standing pat, dressed up in her hot-weather best, is stressful, worrying that she'll soon be sweating dark circles in the light brown linen top she's wearing over the blue rayon shell beneath. She's got on a great bra for hot weather, and still it's biting into the undersides of her boobs like nobody's business. Happy days, babyluv.
Scott, meanwhile, continues balancing on one foot while his hair, too long in back—he needs it cut badly, she knows he looks in the mirror and sees a rock star but she looks at him and sees a smucking hobo out of a Woody Guthrie song—blows in the occasional puff of hot breeze. He's being a good sport while the photographer circles. Damn good sport. He's flanked on the left by a guy named Tony Eddington, who's going to write up all this happy crappy for some campus outlet or another, and on the right by their stand-in host, an English Department stalwart named Roger Dashmiel. Dashmiel is one of those men who seem older than they are not only because they have lost so much hair and gained so much belly but because they insist upon drawing an almost stifling gravitas around themselves. Even their witticisms felt to Lisey like oral readings of insurance policy clauses. Making matters worse is the fact that Dashmiel doesn't like her husband. Lisey has sensed this at once (it's easy, because most men do like him), and it has given her something upon which to focus her unease. For she is uneasy, profoundly so. She has tried to tell herself that it's no more than the humidity and the gathering clouds in the west presaging strong afternoon thunderstorms or maybe even tornadoes: a low-
