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 Machiss 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 fast 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 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.”
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.