Louis flushed the toilet, turned out the light, and went back to bed.
Something else was wrong, as well—and in a moment he had it.
Jud had been born with the century, and that day at the Pet Sematary he had told Louis his dog had died during the first year of the Great War. That would have been when Jud was fourteen, if he had meant when the war actually started in Europe. When he was seventeen, if he had meant when America entered the war.
But tonight he had said that Spot died when he, Jud, was ten. Well, he’s an old man, and old men get confused in their memories, he thought uneasily. He’s said himself that he’s noticed signs of increasing forgetfulness—groping for names and addresses that used to come to him easily, sometimes getting up in the morning and having no memory of the chores he planned to do just the night before. For a man of his age, he’s getting off pretty goddamned light. . . senility’s probably too strong a word for it in Jud’s case; forgetfulness is actually better, more accurate. Nothing too surprising about a man forgetting when a dog died some seventy years ago. Or the circumstances in which it died, for that matter. Forget it, Louis.
But he wasn’t able to fall asleep again right away; for a long while he lay awake, too conscious of the empty house and the wind that whined around the eaves outside it.
At some point he slept without even being aware that he had gone over the edge; it must have been so, because as he slipped away, it seemed to him that he heard bare feet slowly climbing the stairs and that he thought, Let me alone, Pascow, let me alone, what’s done is done and what’s dead is dead—and the steps faded away.
And although a great many other inexplicable things happened as that year darkened, Louis was never bothered by the specter of Victor Pascow again, either waking or dreaming.
23
He awoke at nine the next morning. Bright sunshine streamed in the bedroom’s east windows. The telephone was ringing. Louis reached up and snared it. “Hello?”
“Hi!” Rachel said. “Did I wake you up? Hope so.”
“You woke me up, you bitch,” he said, smiling.
“Ooooh, such nasty language, you bad old bear,” she said. “I tried to call you last night. Were you over at Jud’s?”
He hesitated for only the tiniest fraction of a moment. “Yes,” he said. “Had a few beers. Norma was up at some sort of Thanksgiving supper. I thought about giving you a ring, but you know.”
They chatted awhile. Rachel updated him on her family, something he could have done without, although he took a small, mean satisfaction in the news that her father’s bald spot seemed to be expanding at a faster rate.
“You want to talk to Gage?” Rachel asked.
Louis grinned. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “Don’t let him hang up the phone like he did the other time.”
Much rattling at the other end. Dimly he heard Rachel cajoling the kid to say hi, Daddy.
At last Gage said, “Hi, Dayee.”
“Hi, Gage,” Louis said cheerfully. “How you doing? How’s your life? Did you pull over your grandda’s pipe rack again? I certainly hope so. Maybe this time you can trash his stamp collection as well.”
Gage babbled on happily for thirty seconds or so, interspersing his gobbles and grunts with a few recognizable words from his growing vocabulary—mommy, Ellie, grandda, grandma, car (pronounced in the best Yankee tradition as kaaa, Louis was amused to note), twuck, and shit.
At last Rachel pried the phone away from him to Gage’s wail of indignation and Louis’s measured relief—he loved his son and missed him like mad, but holding a conversation with a not-quite-two-year-old was a little bit like trying to play cribbage with a lunatic; the cards kept going everywhere and sometimes you found yourself pegging backwards.
“So how’s everything there?” Rachel asked.
“Okay,” Louis said, with no hesitation at all this time—but he was aware he had crossed a line, back when Rachel had asked him if he had gone over to Jud’s last night and he told her he had. In his mind he suddenly heard Jud Crandall saying, The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis. . . a man grows what he can and he tends ft. “Well. . . a little dull, if you want to know the God’s honest. Miss you.”
“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.
24
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 goddam 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 door with his name written across the front of it. He took it down and opened the flap with his thumb.