Pet Sematary (17 page)

Feeling very lonely indeed now—ridiculously close to tears—Louis waved again.

He was still feeling blue that evening when he recrossed Route 15 after a couple of beers with Jud and Norma—Norma had drunk a glass of wine, something she was allowed, even encouraged to have, by Dr. Weybridge. They had moved into the kitchen tonight in deference to the season.

Jud had stoked up the small Marek stove, and they had sat around it, the beer cold, the heat good, and Jud had talked about how the Micmac Indians had staved off a British landing at Machias two hundred years ago. In those days the Micmacs had been pretty fearsome, he said, and then added that he guessed there were a few state and federal land lawyers who thought they still were.

It should have been a fine evening, but Louis was aware of the empty house waiting for him. Crossing the lawn and feeling the frost crunching under his shoes, he heard the telephone begin to ring in the house. He broke into a run, got through the front door, sprinted through the living room (knocking over a magazine stand), and then slid most of the way across the kitchen, his frosty shoes skidding over the linoleum. He snared the phone.

“Hello?”

“Louis?” Rachel's voice, a little distant but absolutely fine. “We're here. We made it. No problems.”

“Great!” he said and sat down to talk to her, thinking:
I wish to God you were here.

The Thanksgiving dinner Jud and Norma put on was a fine one. When it was over, Louis went home feeling full and sleepy. He went upstairs to the bedroom, relishing the quiet a little, flipped off his loafers, and lay down. It was just after three o'clock; the day outside was lit with thin, wintry sunshine.

I'll just doze a little,
he thought and fell asleep.

It was the bedroom extension that woke him up. He groped for it, trying to pull himself together, disoriented by the fact that it was almost dark outside. He could hear the wind whining around the corners of the house and the faint, husky mutter of the furnace.

“Hello,” he said. It would be Rachel, calling from Chicago again to wish him a happy Thanksgiving. She would put Ellie on and Ellie would talk and then Gage would get on and Gage would babble—and how the hell had he managed to sleep all afternoon when he had meant to watch the football game . . . ?

But it wasn't Rachel. It was Jud.

“Louis? Fraid maybe you've got a little spot of trouble.”

He swung out of bed, still trying to scrub the sleep out of his mind. “Jud? What trouble?”

“Well, there's a dead cat over here on our lawn,” Jud said. “I think it might be your daughter's.”

“Church?” Louis asked. There was a sudden sinking in his belly. “Are you sure, Jud?”

“No, I ain't one hundred percent sure,” Jud said, “but it sure looks like him.”

“Oh. Oh shit. I'll be right over, Jud.”

“All right, Louis.”

He hung up and just sat there for a minute longer. Then he went in and used the bathroom, put his shoes on, and went downstairs.

Well, maybe it isn't Church. Jud himself said he wasn't one hundred percent sure. Christ, the cat doesn't even want to go upstairs anymore unless someone carries him . . . why would he cross the road?

But in his heart he felt sure that it
was
Church . . . and if Rachel called this evening as she almost certainly would, what was he going to say to Ellie?

Crazily, he heard himself saying to Rachel:
I know that anything, literally
anything,
can happen to physical beings. As a doctor I know that . . . do you want to be the one to explain to her what happened if he gets run over in the road?
But he hadn't really believed anything was going to happen to Church, had he?

He remembered one of the guys he played poker with, Wickes Sullivan, asking him once how he could get horny for his wife and not get horny for the naked women he saw day in and day out. Louis had tried to explain to him that it wasn't the way people imagined in their fantasies—a woman coming in to get a Pap smear or to learn how to give herself a breast self-examination didn't suddenly drop a sheet and stand there like Venus on the half-shell. You saw a breast, a vulva, a thigh. The rest was draped in a sheet, and there was a nurse in attendance, more to protect the doctor's
reputation than anything else. Wicky wasn't buying it. A tit is a tit, was Wicky's thesis, and a twat is a twat. You should either be horny all the time or none of the time. All Louis could respond was that your wife's tit was
different.

Just like your family's supposed to be different,
he thought now. Church wasn't supposed to get killed because he was inside the magic circle of the family. What he hadn't been able to make Wicky understand was that doctors compartmentalized just as cheerfully and blindly as anyone else. A tit wasn't a tit unless it was your wife's tit. In the office, a tit was a case. You could stand up in front of a medical colloquium and cite leukemia figures in children until you were blue in the face and still not believe it if one of your own kids got a call on the Bone-Phone. My kid? My kid's cat, even? Doctor, you must be joking.

Never mind. Take this one step at a time.

But that was hard when he remembered how hysterical Ellie had gotten at the prospect of Church someday dying.

Stupid fucking cat, why did we ever have to get a fucking cat, anyway?

But he wasn't fucking anymore. That was supposed to keep him alive.

“Church?” he called, but there was only the furnace, muttering and muttering, burning up dollars. The couch in the living room, where Church had recently spent most of his time, was empty. He was not lying on any of the radiators. Louis rattled the cat's dish, the one thing absolutely guaranteed to bring Church running
if he was in earshot, but no cat came running this time . . . and never would again, he was afraid.

He put on his coat and hat and started for the door. Then he came back. Giving in to what his heart told him, he opened the cupboard under the sink and squatted down. There were two kinds of plastic bags in there—small white ones for the household trash baskets and big green garbage-can liners. Louis took one of the latter. Church had put on weight since he had been fixed.

He poked the bag into one of the side pockets of his jacket, not liking the slick, cool way the plastic felt under his fingers. Then he let himself out the front door and crossed the street to Jud's house.

It was about five-thirty. Twilight was ending. The landscape had a dead look. The remainder of sunset was a strange orange line on the horizon across the river. The wind bowled straight down Route 15, numbing Louis's cheeks and whipping away the white plume of his breath. He shuddered, but not from the cold. It was a feeling of aloneness that made him shudder. It was strong and persuasive. There seemed no way to concretize it with a metaphor. It was faceless. He just felt by himself, untouched and untouching.

He saw Jud across the road, bundled up in his big green duffle coat, his face lost in the shadow cast by the fur-fringed hood. Standing on his frozen lawn, he looked like a piece of statuary, just another dead thing in this twilight landscape where no bird sang.

Louis started across, and then Jud moved—waved him back. Shouted something Louis could not make
out over the pervasive whine of the wind. Louis stepped back, realizing suddenly that the wind's whine had deepened and sharpened. A moment later an air horn blatted and an Orinco truck roared past close enough to make his pants and jacket flap. Damned if he hadn't almost walked right out in front of the thing.

This time he checked both ways before crossing. There was only the tanker's taillights, dwindling into the twilight.

“Thought that 'Rinco truck was gonna get you,” Jud said. “Have a care, Louis.” Even this close, Louis couldn't see Jud's face, and the uncomfortable feeling persisted that this could have been anyone . . . anyone at all.

“Where's Norma?” he asked, still not looking down at the sprawled bundle of fur by Jud's foot.

“Went to the Thanksgiving church service,” he said. “She'll stay to the supper, I guess, although I don't think she'll eat nothing. She's gotten peckish.” The wind gusted, shifting the hood back momentarily, and Louis saw that it was indeed Jud—who else would it have been? “It's mostly an excuse for a hen paaaty,” Jud said. “They don't eat much but sanwidges after the big meal at noon. She'll be back around eight.”

Louis knelt down to look at the cat.
Don't let it be Church,
he wished fervently, as he turned its head gently on its neck with gloved fingers.
Let it be someone else's cat, let Jud be wrong.

But of course it was Church. He was in no way mangled or disfigured; he had not been run over by
one of the big tankers or semis that cruised Route 15 (
just what was that Orinco truck doing out on Thanksgiving?
he wondered randomly). Church's eyes were half-open, as glazed as green marbles. A small flow of blood had come from his mouth, which was also open. Not a great deal of blood; just enough to stain the white bib on his chest.

“Yours, Louis?”

“Mine,” he agreed and sighed.

He was aware for the first time that he had loved Church—maybe not as fervently as Ellie but in his own absent way. In the weeks following his castration, Church had changed, had gotten fat and slow, had established a routine that took him between Ellie's bed, the couch, and his dish but rarely out of the house. Now, in death, he looked to Louis like the old Church. The mouth so small and bloody, filled with needle-sharp cat's teeth, was frozen in a shooter's snarl. The dead eyes seemed furious. It was as if after the short and placid stupidity of his life as a neuter, Church had rediscovered his real nature in dying.

“Yeah, it's Church,” he said. “I'll be damned if I know how I'm going to tell Ellie about it.”

Suddenly he had an idea. He would bury Church up in the Pet Sematary with no marker or any of that foolishness. He would say nothing to Ellie on the phone tonight about Church; tomorrow he would mention casually that he hadn't seen Church around; the day after he would suggest that perhaps Church had wandered off. Cats did that sometimes. Ellie would be upset, sure, but there would be none of the finality . . .
no reprise of Rachel's upsetting refusal to deal with death . . . just a withering away . . .

Coward,
part of his mind pronounced.

Yes . . . no argument. But who needs this hassle?

“Loves that cat pretty well, doesn't she?” Jud asked.

“Yes,” Louis said absently. He moved Church's head again. The cat had begun to stiffen, but the head still moved much more easily than it should have. Broken neck. Yeah. Given that, he thought he could reconstruct what had happened. Church had been crossing the road—for what reason God alone knew—and a car or truck had hit him, breaking his neck and throwing him aside onto Jud Crandall's lawn. Or perhaps the cat's neck had been broken when he struck the frozen ground. It didn't matter. Either way the remains remained the same. Church was dead.

He glanced up at Jud, about to tell him his conclusions, but Jud was looking away toward that fading orange line of light at the horizon. His hood had fallen back halfway, and his face seemed thoughtful and stern . . . harsh, even.

Louis pulled the green garbage bag out of his pocket and unfolded it, holding it tightly to keep the wind from whipping it away. The brisk crackling sound of the bag seemed to bring Jud back to this here and now.

“Yes, I guess she loves it pretty well,” Jud said. His use of the present tense felt slightly eerie . . . the whole setting, with the fading light, the cold, and the wind, struck him as eerie and gothic.

Here's Heathcliff out on the desolate moors,
Louis thought, grimacing against the cold.
Getting ready to pop the family cat into a Hefty Bag. Yowza.

He grabbed Church's tail, spread the mouth of the bag, and lifted the cat. He pulled a disgusted, unhappy face at the sound the cat's body made coming up—
rrrriiippp
as he pulled it out of the frost it had set into. The cat seemed almost unbelievably heavy, as if death had settled onto it like a physical weight.
Christ, he feels like a bucket of sand.

Jud held the other side of the bag, and Louis dropped Church in, glad to be rid of that strange, unpleasant weight.

“What are you going to do with it now?” Jud asked.

“Put him in the garage, I guess,” Louis said. “Bury him in the morning.”

“In the Pet Sematary?”

Louis shrugged. “Suppose so.”

“Going to tell Ellie?”

“I . . . I'll have to mull that one over awhile.”

Jud was quiet a moment longer, and then he seemed to reach a decision. “Wait here a minute or two, Louis.”

Jud moved away, with no apparent thought that Louis might not want to wait just a minute on this bitter night. He moved away with assurance and that lithe ease which was so strange in a man of his age. And Louis found he had nothing to say anyway. He didn't feel much like himself. He watched Jud go, quite content to stand here.

He raised his face into the wind after the door had
clicked closed, the garbage bag with Church's body in it riffling between his feet.

Content.

Yes, he was. For the first time since they had moved to Maine, he felt that he was in his place, that he was home. Standing here by himself in the afterglow of the day, standing on the rim of winter, he felt unhappy and yet oddly exhilarated and strangely whole—whole in a way he had not been, or could not remember feeling that he had been, since childhood.

Something gonna happen here, Bubba. Something pretty weird, I think.