“Are you sure it’s a virus?”
“Well, if you want a second opinion,” Louis snapped, “be my guest.”
“You don’t have to shout at me!” Rachel shouted.
“I wasn’t shouting!” Louis shouted back.
“You were,” Rachel began, “you were shuh-shuh-shouting—” And then her mouth began to quiver and she put a hand up to her face.
Louis saw there were deep gray-brown pockets under her eyes and felt badly ashamed of himself.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and sat down beside her. “Christ, I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I apologize, Rachel.”
“Never complain, never explain,” she said, smiling wanly. “Isn’t that what you told me once? The trip was a bitch. And I’ve been afraid you’d hit the roof when you looked in Gage’s dresser drawers. I guess maybe I ought to tell you now, while you’re feeling sorry for me.”
“What’s to hit the roof about?”
She smiled wanly. “My mother and father bought him ten new outfits. He was wearing one of them today.”
“I noticed he had on something new,” he said shortly.
“I noticed you noticing,” she replied and pulled a comic scowl that made him laugh, although he didn’t feel much like laughing. “And six new dresses for Ellie.”
“Six dresses!” he said, strangling the urge to yell. He was suddenly furious—sickly furious and hurt in a way he couldn’t explain.
“Rachel, why? Why did you let him do that? We don’t need. . . we can buy. . .“
He ceased. His rage had made him inarticulate, and for a moment he saw himself carrying Ellie’s dead cat through the woods, shifting the plastic bag from one hand to the other. . . and all the while Irwin Goldman, that dirty old fuck from Lake Forest, had been busy trying to buy his daughter’s affection by unlimbering the world-famous checkbook and the world-famous fountain pen.
For one moment he felt himself on the verge of shouting He bought her six dresses and I brought her goddam cat back from the dead, so who loves her more?
He clamped down on the words. He would never say anything like that. Never.
She touched his neck gently. “Louis,” she said. “It was both of them together. Please try to see. Please. They love the children, and they don’t see them much. And they’re getting old. Louis, you’d hardly recognize my father. Really.”
“I’d recognize him,” Louis muttered.
“Please, honey. Try to see. Try to be kind. It doesn’t hurt you.” He looked at her for a long time. “It does though,” he said finally.
“Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does.”
She opened her mouth to reply, and then Ellie called out from her room: “Daddy! Mommy! Somebody!”
Rachel started to get up, and Louis pulled her back down. “Stay with Gage. I’ll go.” He thought he knew what the trouble was. But he had put the cat out, damn it; after Ellie had gone to bed, he had caught it in the kitchen sniffing around its dish and had put it out.
He didn’t want the cat sleeping with her. Not anymore. Odd
thoughts of disease, mingled with memories of Uncle Carl’s funeral parlor, had come to him when he thought of Church sleeping on Ellie’s bed.
She’s going to know that something’s wrong and Church was better before.
He had put the cat out, but when be went in, Ellie was sitting up in bed, more asleep than awake, and Church was spread out on the counterpane, a batlike shadow. The cat’s eyes were open and stupidly gleaming in the light from the hail.
“Daddy, put him out,” Ellie almost groaned. “He stinks so bad.”
“Shhh, Ellie, go to sleep,” Louis said, astounded by the calmness of his own voice. It made him think of the morning after his sleepwalking incident, the day after Pascow had died. Getting to the infirmary and ducking into the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror, convinced that he must look like hell. But he had looked pretty much all right. It was enough to make you wonder how many people were going around with dreadful secrets bottled up inside.
It’s not a secret, goddammit! It’s just the cat!
But Ellie was right. It stank to high heaven.
He took the cat out of her room and carried it downstairs, trying to breathe through his mouth. There were worse smells; shit was worse, if you wanted to be perfectly blunt. A month ago they’d had a go-round with the septic tank, and as Jud had said when he came over to watch Puffer and Sons pump the tank, “That ain’t Chanel Number Five, is it, Louis?” The smell of a gangrenous wound—
what old Doctor Bracermunn at med school had called “hot flesh”—was worse too. Even the smell which came from the Civic’s catalytic converter when it had been idling in the garage for a while was worse.
But this smell was pretty damn bad. And how had the cat gotten in, anyway? He had put it out earlier, sweeping it out with the broom while all three of them—his people—were upstairs. This was the first time he had actually held the cat since the day it had come back, almost a week ago. It lay hotly in his arms, like a quiescent disease, and Louis wondered, What bolthole did you find, you bastard?
He thought suddenly of his dream that other night—Pascow simply passing through the door between the kitchen and the garage.
Maybe there was no bolthole. Maybe it had just passed through the door, like a ghost.
“Bag that,” he whispered aloud, and his voice was slightly hoarse.
Louis became suddenly sure that the cat would begin to struggle in his arms, that it would scratch him. But Church lay totally still, radiating that stupid heat and that dirty stink, looking at Louis’s face as if it could read the thoughts going on behind Louis’s eyes.
He opened the door and tossed the cat out into the garage, maybe a little too hard. “Go on,” he said. “Kill another mouse or something.”
Church landed awkwardly, its hindquarters bunching beneath it and momentarily collapsing. It seemed to shoot Louis a look of green, ugly hate. Then it strolled drunkenly off and was gone.
Christ, Jud, he thought, but I wish you’d kept your mouth shut. He went to the sink and washed his hands and forearms vigorously, as if scrubbing for an operation. You do it because it gets hold of you.
. . you make up reasons. . . they seem like good reasons . . . but mostly you do it because once you’ve been up there, it’s your place, and you belong to it. . . and you make up the sweetest-smelling reasons in the world.
No, he couldn’t blame Jud. He had gone of his own free will and he couldn’t blame Jud.
He turned off the water and began to dry his hands and arms.
Suddenly the towel stopped moving and he stared straight ahead, looking out into the little piece of night framed in the window over the sink.
Does that mean it’s my place now? That it’s mine too?
No. Not if I don’t want it to be.
He slung the towel over the rack and went upstairs.
Rachel was in bed, the covers pulled up to her chin, and Gage was tucked in neatly beside her. She looked at Louis apologetically.
“Would you mind, hon? Just for tonight? I’d feel better having him with me. He’s so hot.”
“No,” Louis said. “That’s fine. I’ll pull out the hide-a-bed downstairs.”
“You really don’t mind?”
“No. It won’t hurt Cage, and it’ll make you feel better.” He paused, then smiled. “You’re going to pick up his virus, though. That comes almost guaranteed. I don’t suppose that changes your mind, does it?”
She smiled back and shook her head. “What was Ellie fussing about?”
“Church. She wanted me to take Church away.”
“Ellie wanted Church taken away? That’s a switch.”
“Yeah, it is,” Louis agreed and then added, “She said he smelled bad, and I did think he was a little fragrant. Maybe he rolled in a pile of someone’s mulch, or something.”
“That’s too bad,” Rachel said, rolling over on her side. “I really think Ellie missed Church as much as she missed you.”
“Uh-huh,” Louis said. He bent and kissed her mouth softly. ‘Go to sleep, Rachel.”
“I love you, Lou. I’m glad to be home. And I’m sorry about the couch.”
“It’s okay,” Louis said, and turned out the light.
Downstairs, he stacked the couch cushions, pulled out the hide-abed, and tried to prepare himself mentally for a night of having the rod under the thin mattress dig into the small of his back. The bed was sheeted, at least; he wouldn’t have to make it up from scratch.
Louis got two blankets from the top shelf in the front hail closet and spread them on the bed. He began to undress, then paused.