Louis left the room and stood for a moment at the head of the stairs, thinking—not seriously—about going to bed.
He knew what he needed and went downstairs to get it.
Louis Albert Creed set methodically about getting drunk.
Downstairs in the cellar were five cases of Schlitz Light beer.
Louis drank beer, Jud drank it, Steve Masterton drank it, Missy Dandridge would occasionally have a beer or two while watching the kids (kid, Louis reminded himself, going down the cellar stairs). Even Chariton, on the few occasions she had come over to the house, preferred a beer—as long as it was a light beer—to a glass of wine. So one day last winter Rachel had gone out and bought a staggering ten cases when Schlitz Light went on sale at the Brewer A & P. Stop you running down to Julio’s in Orrington every time somebody drops in, she had said. And you’re always quoting Robert Parker to me, love—any beer that’s in the refrigerator after the stores close is good beer, right? So drink this and think about the dough you’re saving. Last winter. When things had been okay. When things had been okay. It was funny, how quickly and easily your mind made that crucial division.
Louis brought up a case of beer and shoved the cans into the fridge. Then he took one can, closed the fridge door, and opened the beer. Church came oiling slowly and rustily out of the pantry at the sound of the refrigerator door and stared inquiringly up at Louis. The cat did not come too close; Louis had perhaps kicked it too many times.
“Nothing for you,” he told the cat. “You had your can of Calo today. If you want something else, go kill a bird.”
Church stood there, looking up at him. Louis drank off half the can of beer and felt it go to his head almost at once.
“You don’t even eat them, do you?” he asked. “Just killing them is enough for you.”
Church strolled into the living room, apparently deciding there was going to be no food, and after a moment Louis followed it.
He thought again randomly, Hey-ho, let’s go.
Louis sat down in his chair and looked at Church again. The cat was reclining on the rug by the TV stand, watching Louis carefully, probably ready to run if Louis should suddenly become aggressive and decide to put his kicking-foot in gear.
Instead Louis raised his beer. “To Gage,” he said. “To my son, who might have been an artist or an Olympic swimmer or the motherfucking President of the United States. What do you say, asshole?”
Church regarded him with those dull, strange eyes.
Louis drank off the rest of his beer in big gulps that hurt his tender throat, arose, went to the fridge, and got a second one.
By the time Louis had finished three beers, he felt that he had some sort of equilibrium for the first time that day. By the time he had gotten through the first six-pack, he felt that sleep might actually
be possible in another hour or so. He came back from the fridge with his eighth or ninth (he had really lost count by then and was walking on a slant), and his eyes fell on Church; the cat was dozing—or pretending to—on the rug now. The thought came so naturally that it surely must have been there all along, simply waiting its time to come forward from the back of his mind: When are you going to do it? When are you going to bury Gage in the annex to the Pet Sematary?
And on the heels of that:
Lazarus, come forth.
Ellie’s sleepy, dazed voice:
The teacher said if he’d just said “Come forth,” probably everybody in that graveyard would have come out.
A chill of such elemental force struck him that Louis clutched himself as the shudder twisted through his body. He suddenly found himself remembering Ellie’s first day of school, how Gage had gone to sleep on his lap while he and Rachel were listening to Ellie prattle on about “Old MacDonald” and Mrs. Berryman; he had said Just let me put the baby to bed, and when he took Gage upstairs a horrible premonition had struck him, and now he understood: Back in September part of him had known Gage was going to die soon. Part of him had known that Oz the Gweat and Tewwible was at hand. It was nonsense, it was rot, it was superstitious bullshit of the purest ray serene . . . and it was true.
He had known. Louis spilled some of his beer on his shirt, and Church looked up wearily to see if this was a signal that the evening’s cat-kicking festivities were about to commence.
Louis suddenly remembered the question he had asked Jud; he remembered the way Jud’s arm had jerked, knocking two empty
beer bottles off the table. One of them had shattered. You don’t even want to talk about such things, Louis!
But he did want to talk about them—or at least think about them.
The Pet Sematary. What was beyond the Pet Sematary. The idea had a deadly attraction. It made a balance of logic which was impossible to deny. Church had been killed in the road; Gage had been killed in the road. Here was Church— changed of course, distasteful in some ways—but here. Ellie, Gage, and Rachel all had a working relationship with him. He killed birds, true, and had turned a few mice inside out, but killing small animals was a cat thing to do. Church had by no means turned into Frankencat. He was, in many ways, as good as ever.
You’re rationalizing, a voice whispered. He’s not as good as ever.
He’s spooky. The crow, Louis. . . remember the crow?
“Good God,” Louis said aloud in a shaky, distracted voice he was barely able to recognize as his own.
God, oh yes, fine, sure. If there had ever been a time to invoke the name of God outside of a novel about ghosts or vampires, this was it. So just what—what in the name of God—was he thinking about? He was thinking about a dark blasphemy which he was even now not wholly able to credit. Worse, he was telling himself lies. Not just rationalizing, but outright lying.
So what’s the truth? You want the truth so fucking bad, what’s the truth?
That Church wasn’t really a cat anymore at all—start with that. He looked like a cat, and he acted like a cat, but he was really only a poor imitation. People couldn’t actually see through that imitation, but they could feel through it. He remembered a night when Chariton had been at the house. The occasion had been a small pre-Christmas dinner party. They’d been sitting in here, talking after the meal, and Church had jumped up in her lap. Chariton had
pushed the cat off immediately, a quick and instinctive moue of distaste puckering her mouth.
It had been no big deal. No one had even commented on it. But . . .
it was there. Chariton had felt what the cat wasn’t. Louis killed his beer and went back for another. If Gage came back changed in such a way, that would be an obscenity.
He popped the top and drank deeply. He was drunk now, drunk for fair, and there would be a big head for him to deal with tomorrow.
How I Went to My Son’s Funeral with a Han gover by Louis Creed, author of How I Just Missed Him at the Crucial Moment and numerous other works.
Drunk. Sure. And he suspected now that the reason he had gotten drunk was so he could consider this crazy idea soberly.
In spite of everything, the idea had that deadly attraction, that sick luster, that glamour. Yes, that above all else—it had glamour.
Jud was back, speaking in his mind:
You do it because it gets hold of you. You do it because that burial place is a secret place, and you want to share the secret you make up reasons. . . they seem like good reasons.
but mostly you do it because you want to. Or because you have to.
Jud’s voice, low and drawling with Yankee intonation, Jud’s voice chilling his flesh, bringing out the goosebumps, making the hackles on the back of his neck rise.
These are secret things, Louis . . . the soil of a man’s heart is stonier. . . like the soil up in the old Micmac burying ground. A man grows what he can. . . and he tends it.
Louis began to go over the other things Jud had told him about the Micmac burying ground. He began to collate the data, to sort
through it, to compress it—he proceeded in exactly the same way he had once readied himself for big exams.