Pet Sematary(106)

"Well, we got there, and Alan knocked, but nobody answered, so we went around to the back and there the two of them were. Bill Baterman was sitting there on his back stoop with a pitcher of beer, and Timmy was at the back of the yard, just staring up at that red, bloody sun as it went down. His whole face was orange with it, like he'd been flayed alive. And Bill... he looked like the devil had gotten him after his seven years of highfalutin. He was floatin in his clothes, and I judged he'd lost forty pounds. His eyes had gone back in their sockets until they were like little animals in a pair of caves... and his mouth kep goin tick-tick-tick on the left side."

Jud paused, seemed to consider, and then nodded imperceptibly. "Louis, he looked damned.

"Timmy looked around at us and grinned. Just seeing him grin made you want to scream. Then he turned and went back to looking at the sun go down. Bill says, 'I didn't hear you boys knock,' which was a bald-faced lie, of course, since Alan laid on that door loud enough to wake the... to wake up a deaf man.

"No one seemed like they was going to say anything, so I says, 'Bill, I heard your boy was killed over in Italy. ' "That was a mistake,' he says, looking right at me.

"Was it?' I says.

"You see him standin right there, don't you?' he says.

"So who do you reckon was in that coffin you had buried out at Pleasantview?' Alan Purinton asks him.

"'Be damned if I know,' Bill says, 'and be damned if I care. ' He goes to get a cigarette and spills them all over the back porch, then breaks two or three trying to pick them up.

"Probably have to be an exhumation,' Hannibal says. 'You know that, don't you? I had a call from the goddam War Department, Bill. They are going to want to know if they buried some other mother's son under Timmy's name. ' "Well, what in the hell of it?' Bill says in a loud voice. 'That's nothing to me, is it? I got my boy. Timmy come home the other day. He's been shell-shocked or something. He's a little strange now, but he'll come around. ' "Let's quit this, Bill,' I says, and all at once I was pretty mad at him. 'If and when they dig up that army coffin, they're gonna find it dead empty, unless you went to the trouble of filling it up with rocks after you took your boy out of it, and I don't think you did. I know what happened, Hannibal and George and Alan here know what happened, and you know what happened too. You been foolin around up in the woods, Bill, and you have caused yourself and this town a lot of trouble. ' "You fellas know your way out, I guess,' he says. 'I don't have to explain myself to you, or justify myself to you, or nothing. When I got that telegram, the life ran right out of me. I felt her go, just like piss down the inside of my leg. Well, I got my boy back. They had no right to take my boy. He was only seventeen. He was all I had left of his dear mother, and it was illf*ckinlegal.

So f**k the army, and f**k the War Department, and f**k the United States of America, and f**k you boys too. I got him back. He'll come around. And that's all I got to say. Now you all just march your boots back where you came from. ' "And his mouth is tick-tick-tickin, and there's sweat all over his forehead in big drops, and that was when I saw he was crazy. It would have driven me crazy too. Living with that... that thing."

Louis was feeling sick to his stomach. He had drunk too much beer too fast.

Pretty soon it was all going to come up on him. The heavy, loaded feeling in his stomach told him it would be coming up soon.

"Well, there wasn't much else we could do. We got ready to go. Hannibal says, 'Bill, God help you. ' "Bill says, 'God never helped me. I helped myself. ' "That was when Timmy walked over to us. He even walked wrong, Louis. He walked like an old, old man. He'd put one foot high up and then bring it down and then kind of shuffle and then lift the other one. It was like watchin a crab walk. His hands dangled down by his legs. And when he got close enough, you could see red marks across his face on the slant, like pimples or little burns. I reckon that's where the Kraut machine gun got him. Must have damn near blowed his head off.

"And he stank of the grave. It was a black smell, like everything inside him was just lying there, spoiled. I saw Alan Purinton put a hand up to cover his nose and mouth. The stench was just awful. You almost expected to see grave maggots squirming around in his hair-"

"Stop," Louis said hoarsely. "I've heard enough."

"You ain't," Jud said. He spoke with haggard earnestness. "That's it, you ain't.

And I can't even make it as bad as it was. Nobody could understand how bad it was unless they was there. He was dead, Louis. But he was alive too. And he...

he... he knew things."

"Knew things?" Louis sat forward.

"Aynh. He looked at Alan for a long time, kind of grinning-you could see his teeth, anyway-and then he spoke in this low voice; you felt like you had to strain forward to hear it. It sounded like he had gravel down in his tubes.

'Your wife is f**king that man she works with down at the drugstore, Purinton.

What do you think of that? She screams when she comes. What do you think of that?' "Alan, he kind of gasped, and you could see it had hit him. Alan's in a nursing home up in Gardener now, or was the last I heard-he must be pushing ninety. Back when all this happened, he was forty or so, and there had been some talk around about his second wife. She was his second cousin, and she had come to live with Alan and Alan's first wife, Lucy, just before the war. Well, Lucy died, and a year and a half later Alan up and married this girl. Laurine, her name was. She was no more than twenty-four when they married. And there had been some talk about her, you know. If you were a man, you might have called her ways sort of free and easy and let it go at that. But the women thought she might be loose.