Pet Sematary(38)

"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 f**king cat, why did we ever have to get a f**king cat, anyway?

But he wasn't tucking 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 dufile 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."