فصل بیست و پنج

TWENTY-FIVE

It was around one o’clock that afternoon when Church came back like the cat in the nursery rhyme. Louis was in the garage, where he had been working off and on for the last six weeks on a fairly ambitious set of shelves; he wanted to put all of the dangerous garage-stuff like bottles of windshield-wiper fluid, anti-freeze, and sharp tools on these shelves, where they would be out of Gage’s reach. He was hammering in a nail when Church strolled in, his tail high. Louis did not drop the hammer or even slam his thumb – his heart jogged in his chest but did not leap; a hot wire seemed to glow momentarily in his stomach and then cool immediately, like the filament of a lightbulb that glows overbrightly for a moment and then burns out. It was as if, he told himself later, he had spent that entire sunny post-Thanksgiving Friday morning waiting for Church to come back; as if he had known in some deeper, more primitive part of his mind what their night-hike up to the Micmac burying ground had meant all along.

He put the hammer down carefully, spat the nails he had been holding in his mouth back into his palm and then dumped them into the pockets of his workman’s apron. He went to Church and picked the cat up.

Live weight, he thought with a kind of sick excitement. He weighs what he did before he was hit. This is live weight. He was heavier in the bag. He was heavier when he was dead.

His heart took a bigger jog this time – almost a leap – and for a moment the garage seemed to swim in front of his eyes.

Church laid his ears back and allowed himself to be held. Louis carried him out into the sunlight and sat down on the back steps. The cat tried to get down then, but Louis stroked him and held him on his lap. His heart seemed to be taking regular jogs now.

He probed gently into the heavy ruff of fur at Church’s neck, remembering the sick, boneless way Church’s head had swivelled on his broken neck the night before. He felt nothing now but good muscle and tendon. He held the cat up and looked at its muzzle closely. What he saw there caused him to drop the cat on to the grass quickly and to cover his face with one hand, his eyes shut. The whole world was swimming now, and tottery, sick vertigo – it was the sort of feeling he could remember from the bitter end of long drunks, just before the puking started.

There was dried blood caked on Church’s muzzle, and caught in his long whiskers were two tiny shreds of green plastic. Bits of Hefty Bag.

We will talk more about this and by then you will understand more …

Oh Christ, he understood more than he wanted to right now.

Give me a chance, Louis thought, and I’ll understand myself right into the nearest mental asylum.

He let Church into the house, got his blue dish, and opened a Tuna and Liver Cat Dinner. As he spooned the graybrown mess out of its can, Church purred unevenly and rubbed back and forth along Louis’s ankles. The feel of the cat caused Louis to break out in gooseflesh, and he had to clench his teeth grimly to keep from kicking it away. Its furry sides felt some-how too slick, too thick – in a word, loathsome. Louis found he didn’t care if he never touched Church again.

When he bent and put the dish on the floor, Church streaked past him to get it, and Louis could have sworn he smelled sour earth – as if it had been ground into the cat’s fur.

He stood back, watching the cat eat. He could hear it smacking – had Church smacked over his food that way before? Perhaps he had, and Louis had just never noticed it. Either way, it was a disgusting sound. Gross, Ellie would have said.

Abruptly Louis turned and went upstairs. He started at a walk, but by the time he got to the top of the stairs, he was almost running. He undressed, tossing all of his clothes in the laundry hamper although he had put them on fresh from the underwear out that morning. He drew himself a hot bath, as hot as he could take it, and plopped in.

The steam rose around him, and he could feel the hot water working on his muscles, loosening them. The hot bath was also working on his head, loosening that. By the time the water had begun to cool, he was feeling dozy and pretty much all right again.

The cat came back, just like the cat in the nursery rhyme, all right, so what, big deal.

It had all been a mistake. Hadn’t he thought to himself yesterday evening that Church looked remarkably whole and unmarked for an animal that had been struck by a car?

Think of all the woodchucks and cats and dogs you’ve seen strewn all over the highway, he thought, their bodies burst, their guts everywhere. Tech-ni-color, as London Wainwright says on that record about the dead skunk.

It was obvious now. Church had been struck hard and stunned. The cat he had carried up to Jud’s old Micmac burying ground had been unconscious, not dead. Didn’t they say cats had nine lives? Thank God he hadn’t said anything to Ellie! She wouldn’t ever have to know how close Church had come.

The blood on his mouth and ruff … the way his neck turned …

But he was a doctor, not a vet. He had made a misdiagnosis, that was all. It had hardly been under the best circumstances for close examination, squatting on Jud’s lawn in twenty-degree temperatures, the light almost gone from the sky. And he had been wearing gloves. That could have— A bloated, misshapen shadow rose on the tiled bathroom wall, like the head of a small dragon or of some monstrous snake; something touched his bare shoulder lightly and skidded. Louis jerked upward galvanically, splashing water out of the tub and soaking the bathmat. He turned, cringing back at the same time, and stared into the muddy yellow-green eyes of his daughter’s cat, who was perched on the lowered seat of the toilet.

Church was swaying slowly back and forth as if drunk. Louis watched it, his body crawling with revulsion, a scream barely held back in his mouth by his clamped teeth. Church had never looked like this – had never swayed, like a snake trying to hypnotize its prey – not before he was fixed, and not afterward. For the first and last time he played with the idea that this was a different cat, one that just looked like Ellie’s, a cat that had just wandered into his garage while he was putting up those shelves, and that the real Church was still buried under that cairn on the bluff in the woods. But the markings were the same … and the one ragged ear … and the paw that had that funny chewed look. Ellie had slammed that paw in the back door of their little suburban house when Church was little more than a kitten.

It was Church, all right.

‘Get out of here,’ Louis whispered hoarsely at it.

Church stared at him a moment longer – God, his eyes were different, somehow they were different – and then leaped down from the toilet seat. He landed with none of the uncanny grace cats usually display. He staggered awkwardly, haunches thudding against the tub, and then he was gone.

It, Louis thought. Not he; it. Remember, it’s been spayed.

He got out of the tub and dried off quickly, jerkily. He was shaved and mostly dressed when the phone rang, shrill in the empty house. When it sounded, Louis whirled, eyes wide, hands going up. He lowered them slowly. His heart was racing. His muscles felt full of adrenalin.

It was Steve Masterton, checking back about racquetball, and Louis agreed to meet him at the Memorial Gym in an hour. He could not really afford the time, and racquetball was the last thing in the world he felt like right now, but he had to get out. He wanted to get away from the cat, that weird cat which had no business being here at all.

He was hurrying now. He tucked in his shirt quickly, stuffed a pair of shorts and T-shirt and a towel into his zipper bag, and trotted down the stairs.

Church was lying on the fourth riser from the bottom. Louis tripped over the oat and almost fell. He managed to grab the banister and barely save himself from what could have been a nasty fall.

He stood at the bottom of the stairs, breathing in snatches, his heart racing, the adrenalin whipping unpleasantly through his body.

Church stood up, stretched … and seemed to grin at him.

Louis left. He should have put the cat out, he knew that, but he didn’t. At that particular moment he didn’t think he could bring himself to touch it.