فصل بیست و چهار

TWENTY-FOUR

Steve Masterton called around nine-thirty and asked if Louis would like to come up to the University and play some racquetball – 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 wait-list for a racquetball 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 makes 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 harnstrings in the 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 racquetball 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.

Louis,

The good wife and me are off to Bucksport to do some shopping and to look at a Welsh dresser at the Emporium Galorium that Norma’s had her eye on for about a hundred years, it seems like. Probably we’ll have a spot of lunch at McLeod’s while we’re there and come back in the late afternoon. Come on over for a beer or two tonight, if you want.

Your family is your family, I don’t want to be no ‘buttinsky’, but if Ellie were my daughter, I wouldn’t rush to tell her that her cat got killed on the highway – why not let her enjoy her holiday?

By the way, Louis, I wouldn’t talk about what we did last night, either, not around North Ludlow. There are other people who know about that old Micmac burying ground, and there are other people in town who have buried their animals there … you might say it’s another part of the ‘Pet Sematary’. Believe it or not, there is even a bull buried up there! Old Zack McGovern, who used to live out on the Stackpole Road, buried his prize bull Hanratty in the Micmac burying ground back in 1967 or ‘68. Ha, ha! He told me that he and his two boys had taken that bull out there and I laughed until I thought I would rupture myself! But people around here don’t like to talk about it, and they don’t like people they consider to be ‘outsiders’ to know about it, not because some of these old superstitions go back three hundred years or more (although they do), but because they sort of believe in those superstitions, and they think any ‘outsider’ who knows that they do must be laughing at them. Does that make any sense? I suspect it doesn’t, but nevertheless that’s how it is. So just do me a favor and keep shut on the subject, will you?

We will talk more about this, probably tonight, and by then you will understand more, but in the meantime I want to tell you that you did yourself proud. I knew you would.

Jud

PS Norma doesn’t know what this note says – I told her something different – and I would just as soon keep it that way if it’s all the same to you. I’ve told Norma more than one lie in the fifty-eight years we’ve been married, and I’d guess that most men tell their wives a smart of lies, but you know, most of them could stand before God and confess them without dropping their eyes from His.

Well, drop over tonight and we’ll do a little boozing.

J.

Louis stood on the top step leading to Jud and Norma’s porch – now bare, its comfortable rattan furniture stored to wait for another spring – frowning over this note. Don’t tell Ellie the cat had been killed – he hadn’t. Other animals buried there? Superstitions going back three hundred years?

… and by then you will understand more.

He touched this line lightly with his finger, and for the first time allowed his mind to deliberately turn back to what they had done the night before. It was blurred in his memory, it had the melting, cotton-candy texture of dreams, or of waking actions performed under a light haze of drugs. He could recall climbing the deadfall, and the odd, brighter quality of light in the bog – that and the way it had felt ten or twenty degrees warmer there – but all of it was like the conversation you had with the anesthetist just before he or she put you out like a light.

and I’d guess most men tell their wives a smart of lies …

Wives and daughters as well, Louis thought – but it was eerie in the way Jud seemed almost to know what had transpired this morning, both on the telephone and in his own head.

Slowly, he refolded the note, which had been written on a sheet of lined paper like that in a schoolboy’s Blue Horse tablet, and put it back into the envelope. He put the envelope into his hip pocket and crossed the road again.