Pet Sematary (21 page)

“You actually mean to tell me you're not enjoying your vacation from this sideshow?”

“Oh, I like the quiet,” he admitted, “sure. But it gets strange after the first twenty-four hours or so.”

“Can I talk to Daddy?” It was Ellie in the background.

“Louis? Ellie's here.”

“Okay, put her on.”

He talked to Ellie for almost five minutes. She prattled on about the doll Grandma had gotten her, about the trip she and Grandda had taken to the stockyards (“Boy, do they
stink,
Daddy,” Ellie said, and Louis thought,
Your grandda's no rose, either, sweetie
), about how she had helped make bread, and about how Gage had gotten away from Rachel while she was changing him. Gage had run down the hallway and pooped right in the doorway leading into Grandda's study (
Atta boy, Gage!
Louis thought, a big grin spreading over his face).

He actually thought he was going to get away—at least for this morning—and was getting ready to ask Ellie for her mother again so he could say goodbye to her when Ellie asked, “How's Church, Daddy? Does he miss me?”

The grin faded from Louis's mouth, but he answered readily and with the perfect note of offhanded casualness: “He's fine, I guess. I gave him the leftover beef stew last night and then put him out. Haven't seen him this morning, but I just woke up.”

Oh boy, you would
have made a great murderer—cool as a cucumber, Dr. Creed, when did you last see the deceased? He came in for supper. Had a plate of beef stew, in fact. I haven't seen him since then.

“Well, give him a kiss for me.”

“Yuck, kiss your own cat,” Louis said, and Ellie giggled.

“You want to talk to Mommy again, Daddy?”

“Sure. Put her on.”

Then it was over. He talked to Rachel for another couple of minutes; the subject of Church was not touched upon. He and his wife exchanged love-you's, and Louis hung up.

“That's that,” he said to the empty, sunny room, and maybe the worst thing about it was that he didn't feel bad, didn't feel guilty at all.

Steve Masterton called around nine-thirty and asked if Louis would like to come up to the university and play some racket ball—the place was deserted, he said gleefully, and they could play the whole goddamn day if they wanted to.

Louis could understand the glee—when the university was in session, the waiting list for a racket ball court was sometimes two days long—but he declined all the same, telling
Steve he wanted to work on an article he was writing for
The Magazine of College Medicine.

“You sure?” Steve asked. “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy, you know.”

“Check me later,” Louis said. “Maybe I'll be up for it.”

Steve said he would and hung up. Louis had told only a half-lie this time; he did plan to work on his article, which concerned itself with treating contagious ailments such as chicken-pox and mononucleosis in the infirmary environment, but the main reason he had turned down Steve's offer was that he was a mass of aches and pains. He had discovered this as soon as he finished talking to Rachel and went into the bathroom to brush his teeth. His back muscles creaked and groaned, his shoulders were sore from lugging the cat in that damned garbage bag, and the hamstrings in back of his knees, felt like guitar strings tuned three octaves past their normal pitch.
Christ,
he thought,
and you had the stupid idea you were in some kind of shape.
He would have looked cute trying to play racket ball with Steve, lumbering around like an arthritic old man.

And speaking of old men, he hadn't made that hike into the woods the night before by himself; he had gone with a guy who was closing in on eighty-five. He wondered if Jud was hurting as badly as he was this morning.

He spent an hour and a half working on his article, but it did not march very well. The emptiness and the silence began to get on his nerves, and at last he stacked his yellow
legal pads and the offprints he had ordered from Johns Hopkins on the shelf above his typewriter, put on his parka, and crossed the road.

Jud and Norma weren't there, but there was an envelope tacked to the porch with his name written across the front of it. He took it down and opened the flap with his thumb.

Louis,

The good wife and me are off to Bucksport to do some shopping and to look at a welsh dresser at the Emporium Galorium that Norma's had her eye on for about a hundred years, it seems like. Probably we'll have a spot of lunch at McLeod's while we're there and come back in the late afternoon. Come on over for a beer or two tonight, if you want.

Your family is your family. I don't want to be no “buttinsky,” but if Ellie were my daughter, I wouldn't rush to tell her that her cat got killed on the highway—why not let her enjoy her holiday?

By the way, Louis, I wouldn't talk about what we did last night either, not around North Ludlow. There are other people who know about that old Micmac burying ground, and there are other people in town who have buried their animals there . . . you might say it's another part of the “Pet Sematary.” Believe it or not, there is even a bull buried up there! Old Zack McGovern, who used to live out on Stackpole Road, buried his prize bull Hanratty in the Micmac burying ground back in 1967 or '68. Ha, ha! He told me that he and his two boys had taken that bull out there and I laughed until I
thought I would rupture myself! But people around here don't like to talk about it, and they don't like people they consider to be “outsiders” to know about it, not because some of these old superstitions go back three hundred years or more (although they do), but because they sort of believe in those superstitions, and they think any “outsider” who knows that they do must be laughing at them. Does that make any sense? I suspect it doesn't, but nevertheless that's how it is. So just do me a favor and keep shut on the subject, will you?

We will talk more about this, probably tonight, and by then you will understand more, but in the meantime I want to tell you that you did yourself proud. I knew you would.

Jud

PS—Norma doesn't know what this note says—I told her something different—and I would just as soon keep it that way if it's all the same to you. I've told Norma more than one lie in the fifty-eight years we've been married, and I'd guess that most men tell their wives a smart of lies, but you know, most of them could stand before God and confess them without dropping their eyes from His.

Well, drop over tonight and we'll do a little boozing.

J.

Louis stood on the top step leading to Jud and Norma's porch—now bare, its comfortable rattan furniture stored to wait for another spring—frowning over this note.
Don't tell Ellie the cat had been killed—he hadn't. Other animals buried there? Superstitions going back three hundred years?

. . . and by then you will understand more.

He touched this line lightly with his finger, and for the first time allowed his mind to deliberately turn back to what they had done the night before. It was blurred in his memory, it had the melting, cotton-candy texture of dreams or of waking actions performed under a light haze of drugs. He could recall climbing the deadfall and the odd, brighter quality of light in the bog—that and the way it had felt ten or twenty degrees warmer there—but all of it was like the conversation you had with the anesthetist just before he or she put you out like a light.

. . . and I'd guess most men tell their wives a smart of lies . . .

Wives and daughters as well,
Louis thought—but it was eerie, the way Jud seemed almost to know what had transpired this morning, both on the telephone and in his own head.

Slowly he refolded the note, which had been written on a sheet of lined paper like that in a schoolboy's Blue Horse tablet, and put it back into the envelope. He put the envelope into his hip pocket and crossed the road again.

It was around one o'clock that afternoon when Church came back like the cat in the nursery rhyme. Louis was in the garage, where he had been working off and on for the last six weeks on a fairly ambitious set of shelves; he wanted to put all of the dangerous garage stuff such as bottles of windshield wiper fluid, antifreeze, and sharp tools on these shelves, where they would be out of Gage's reach. He was hammering in a nail when Church strolled in, his tail high. Louis did not drop the hammer or even slam his thumb—his heart jogged in his chest but did not leap; a hot wire seemed to glow momentarily in his stomach and then cool immediately, like the filament of a light bulb that glows overbrightly for a moment and then burns out. It was as if, he told himself later, he had spent that entire sunny post-Thanksgiving Friday morning waiting for Church to come back; as if he had known in some deeper, more primitive part of his mind what their night hike up to the Micmac burying ground had meant all along.

He put the hammer down carefully, spat the nails he had been holding in his mouth back into his palm, and then dumped them into the pockets of his workman's apron. He went to Church and picked the cat up.

Live weight,
he thought with a kind of sick excitement.
He weighs what he did before he was hit. This is live weight. He was heavier
in the bag. He was heavier when he was dead.

His heart took a bigger jog this time—almost a leap—and for a moment the garage seemed to swim in front of his eyes.

Church laid his ears back and allowed himself to be held. Louis carried him out into the sunlight and sat down on the back steps. The cat tried to get down then, but Louis stroked him and held him on his lap. His heart seemed to be taking regular jogs now.

He probed gently into the heavy ruff of fur at Church's neck, remembering the sick, boneless way Church's head had swiveled on his broken neck the night before. He felt nothing now but good muscle and tendon. He held Church up and looked at the cat's muzzle closely. What he saw there caused him to drop the cat onto the grass quickly and to cover his face with one hand, his eyes shut. The whole world was swimming now, and his head was full of a tottery, sick vertigo—it was the sort of feeling he could remember from the bitter end of long drunks, just before the puking started.

There was dried blood caked on Church's muzzle, and caught in his long whiskers were two tiny shreds of green plastic. Bits of Hefty Bag.

We will talk more about this and by then you will understand more . . .

Oh, Christ, he understood more than he wanted to right now.

Give me a chance,
Louis thought,
and I'll understand myself right into the nearest mental asylum.

*  *  *

He let Church into
the house, got his blue dish, and opened a tuna-and-liver cat dinner. As he spooned the gray-brown mess out of the can, Church purred unevenly and rubbed back and forth along Louis's ankles. The feel of the cat caused Louis to break out in gooseflesh, and he had to clench his teeth grimly to keep from kicking him away. His furry sides felt somehow too slick, too thick—in a word, loathsome. Louis found he didn't care if he never touched Church again.

When he bent and put the dish on the floor, Church streaked past him to get it, and Louis could have sworn he smelled sour earth—as if it had been ground into the cat's fur.

He stood back, watching the cat eat. He could hear him smacking—had Church smacked over his food that way before? Perhaps he had, and Louis had just never noticed. Either way, it was a disgusting sound.
Gross,
Ellie would have said.

Abruptly Louis turned and went upstairs. He started at a walk, but by the time he got to the upper hallway, he was almost running. He undressed, tossing all of his clothes in the laundry hamper although he had put them on fresh from the underwear out that morning. He drew himself a hot bath, as hot as he could take it, and plopped in.

The steam rose around him, and he could feel the hot water working on his muscles, loosening them. The bath was also working on his head, loosening that. By the time the water had begun to cool, he was feeling dozy and pretty much all right again.

The cat came back, just like the cat in the nursery rhyme, all right, so what, big deal.

It had been all a mistake. Hadn't he thought to himself yesterday evening that Church looked remarkably whole and unmarked for an animal that had been struck by a car?

Think of all the woodchucks and cats and dogs you've seen strewn all over the highway,
he thought,
their bodies burst, their guts everywhere. Tech-ni-color, as Loudon Wainwright says on that record about the dead skunk.

It was obvious now. Church had been struck hard and stunned. The cat he had carried up to Jud's old Micmac burying ground had been unconscious, not dead. Didn't they say cats had nine lives? Thank God he hadn't said anything to Ellie! She wouldn't ever have to know how close Church had come.

The blood on his mouth and ruff . . . the way his neck turned . . .

But he was a doctor, not a vet. He had made a misdiagnosis—that was all. It had hardly been under the best circumstances for close examination, squatting on Jud's lawn in twenty-degree temperatures, the light almost gone from the sky. And he had been wearing gloves. That could have—

A bloated, misshapen shadow rose on the tiled bathroom wall, like the head of a small dragon or of some monstrous snake; something touched his bare shoulder lightly and skidded. Louis jerked upward galvanically, splashing water out of the tub and soaking the bathmat. He turned, cringing back at the same time, and stared into the muddy yellow-green eyes of his daughter's
cat, who was perched on the lowered seat of the toilet.