فصل سی و پنج

THIRTY-FIVE

Louis Creed came to believe that the last really happy day of his life was March 24th, 1984. The things that were to come, poised above them like a killing sashweight, were still over six weeks in the future, but looking over those six weeks he found nothing which stood out with the same color, the same impact. He supposed that, even if none of those terrible things had happened, he would have remembered the day for ever. Days which seem genuinely good – good all the way through – are rare enough, anyway, he thought. It might be that there was less than a month of really good ones in any natural man’s life in the best of circumstances. It came to seem to Louis that God, in His infinite wisdom, appeared much more generous when it came to doling out pain.

That day was a Saturday, and he was home minding Gage in the afternoon while Rachel and Ellie went after groceries. They had gone with Jud in his old and rattling ‘59 IH pickup not because the Civic wasn’t running but because the old man genuinely liked their company. Rachel asked Louis if he would be okay with Gage, and he told her that of course he would. He was glad to see her get out; after a winter in Maine, most of it in Ludlow, he thought that she needed all the out she could get. She had been an unremittingly good sport about it, but she did seem to him to be getting a little stir-crazy.

Gage got up from his nap around two o’clock, scratchy and out-of-sorts. He had discovered the Terrible Twos and made them his own. Louis had tried several ineffectual gambits to amuse the kid and Gage turned them all down. To make matters worse, the rotten kid had an enormous bowel movement, the artistic quality of which was not improved for Louis when he saw a blue marble sitting in the middle of it. It was one of Ellie’s marbles. The kid could have choked. He decided the marbles were going to go – everything Gage got hold of went right to his mouth – but that decision, while undoubtedly laudable, didn’t do a goddam thing about keeping the kid amused until his mother got back.

Louis listened to the early spring wind gust around the house, sending big blinkers of light and shadow across Mrs Vinton’s field next door, and he suddenly thought of the Vulture he had bought on a whim five or six weeks before, while on his way home from the University. Had he bought twine as well? He had, by God!

‘Gage!’ he said. Gage had found a green Crayola exactly the color of fresh snot under the couch and was currently scribbling in one of Ellie’s favorite books – something else to feed the fires of sibling rivalry, Louis thought, and grinned. If Ellie got really pissy about the scribbles Gage had managed to put in Where the Wild Things Are before Louis could get it away from him, Louis would simply mention the unique treasure he had uncovered in Gage’s Pampers.

‘What!’ Gage responded smartly. He was talking pretty well now; Louis had decided the kid might actually be half-bright.

‘You wanna go out?’

‘Wanna go out!’ Gage agreed excitedly. ‘Wanna go out. Where my neeks, Daddy?’

This sentence, if reproduced phonetically in its entirety, would have looked something like this: Weh ma neeks, Dah-dee? The translation was Where are my sneakers, Father? Louis was often struck by Gage’s speech, not because it was cute, but because he thought that small children all sounded like immigrants learning a foreign language in some helter-skelter but fairly amiable way. He knew that babies make all the sounds the human voice-box is capable of … the liquid trill that proves so difficult for first-year French students, the glottal grunts and clicks of the Australian bush people, the thickened, abrupt consonants of German. They lose the capability as they learn English, and Louis wondered now (and not for the first time) if childhood was not more a period of forgetting than of learning.

Gage’s neeks were finally found … they were also under the couch. One of Louis’s other beliefs was that, in families with small children, the area under living-room couches began after a while to develop a strong and mysterious electromagnetic force that eventually sucked in all sorts of litter – everything from bottles and diaper pins to snot-colored Crayolas and old issues of Sesame Street magazines with food mouldering between the pages.

Gage’s jacket, however, wasn’t under the couch – it was halfway down the stairs. His Red Sox cap, without which Gage refused to leave the house, was the most difficult of all to find, because it was where it belonged – in the closet. That was, naturally, the last place they looked.

‘Where goin’, Daddy?’ Gage asked companionably, giving his father his hand.

‘Going over in Mrs Vinton’s field,’ he said. ‘Gonna go fly a kite, my man.’

‘Kiiiyte?’ Gage said doubtfully.

‘You’ll like it,’ Louis said. ‘Wait a minute, kiddo.’

They were in the garage now. Louis found his keyring, unlocked the little storage closet and turned on the light. He rummaged through it and found the Vulture, still in its store bag with the sales slip stapled to it. He had bought it in the depths of mid-February, when his soul had cried out for some sort of hope.

‘Dat?’ Gage asked. This was Gage-ese for Whatever in the world might you have there, Father?

‘It’s the kite,’ Louis said, and pulled it out of the bag. Gage watched, interested, as Louis unfurled the Vulture, which spread its wings over perhaps five feet of tough plastic. Its bulgy, bloodshot eyes stared out at them from its small head atop its scrawny, pinkly naked neck.

‘Birt!’ Gage yelled. ‘Birt, Daddy! Got a birt!’

‘Yeah, it’s a bird,’ Louis agreed, slipping the sticks into their pockets at the back of the kite and rummaging again for the five hundred feet of kite-twine that he had bought the same day. He looked back over his shoulder and repeated to Gage: ‘You’re gonna like it, big guy.’ Gage liked it.

They took the kite over into Mrs Vinton’s field and Louis got it up into the blowy late-March sky first shot, although he had not flown a kite since he was … what? Twelve? Twenty-three years ago? God, that was horrible.

Mrs Vinton was a woman of almost Jud’s age, but immeasurably more frail. She lived in a brick house at the head of her field (what had been called Vinton’s Field since time out of mind, Jud had once told Louis), but now she came out only rarely. Behind the house, the field ended and the woods began – the woods that led first to the Pet Sematary and then to the Micmac burying ground beyond it.

‘Kite’s flyne, Daddy!’ Gage screamed.

‘Yeah, look at it go!’ Louis bellowed back, laughing and excited. He paid out kite-twine so fast that the string grew hot and branded thin fire across his palm. ‘Look at that Vulture, Gage! She’s goin’ to beat shit!’ ‘Beat-shit!’ Gage cried, and laughed, high and joyously. The sun sailed out from behind a fat gray spring cloud and the temperature seemed to go up five degrees almost at once. They stood in the bright, unreliable warmth of Marchstraining-to-be-April in the high dead grass of Mrs Vinton’s field; above them the Vulture soared up toward the blue, higher, its plastic wings spread taut against that steady current of air, higher, and as he had done as a child, Louis felt himself going up to it, going into it, staring down as the world took on its actual shape, the one cartographers must see in their dreams; Mrs Vinton’s field, as white and still as cobwebs following the retreat of the snow, not just a field now but a large parallelogram bounded by rock walls on two of its sides, and then the road at the bottom, a straight black seam, and the river valley – the Vulture saw it all with its soaring, bloodshot eyes. It saw the river like a cool gray band of steel, chunks of ice still floating in it; on the other side it saw Hampden, Newburgh, Winterport, with a ship at dock; perhaps it saw the St Regis Mill at Bucksport below its steaming fume of cloud, or even land’s end itself, where the Atlantic pounded the naked rock.

‘Look at her go, Gage!’ Louis yelled, laughing.

Gage was leaning so far back he was in danger of toppling over. A huge grin covered his face. He was waving to the kite.

Louis got some slack and told Gage to hold out one of his hands. Gage did, not even looking around. He couldn’t take his eyes from the kite, which swung and danced in the wind and raced its shadow back and forth across the field.

Louis wound kite-string twice around Gage’s hand and now he did look down, comically amazed at the strong tug and pull.

‘What!’ he said.

‘You’re flying it,’ Louis said. ‘You got the hammer, my man. It’s your kite.’

‘Gage flyne it?’ Gage said, as if asking not his father but himself for confirmation. He pulled the string experimentally; the kite nodded in the windy sky. Gage pulled the string harder; the kite swooped. Louis and his son laughed together. Gage reached out his free hand, groping, and Louis took it in his own. They stood together that way in the middle of Mrs Vinton’s field, looking up at the Vulture.

It was a moment with his son that Louis never forgot. As he had gone up and into the kite as a child himself, he now found himself going into Gage, his son. He felt himself shrink until he was within Gage’s tiny house, looking out of the windows that were his eyes – looking out at a world that was so huge and bright, a world where Mrs Vinton’s field was nearly as big as the Bonneville Salt Flats, where the kite soared miles above him, the string drumming in his fist like a live thing as the wind blew around him, tumbling his hair.

‘Kite flyne!’ Gage cried out to his father, and Louis put his arm around Gage’s shoulders and kissed the boy’s cheek, in which the wind had bloomed a wild rose.

‘I love you, Gage,’ he said – it was between the two of them, and that was all right.

And Gage, who now had less than two months to live, laughed shrilly and joyously. ‘Kite flyne! Kite flyne, Daddy!’ They were still flying the kite when Rachel and Ellie came home. They had gotten it so high that they had nearly run out the string and the face of the Vulture had been lost; it was only a small black silhouette in the sky.

Louis was glad to see the two of them, and he roared with laughter when Ellie dropped the string momentarily and chased it through the grass, catching it just before the tumbling, unravelling core-tube gave up the last of its twine. But having them around also changed things a little, and he was not terribly sorry to go in when, twenty minutes later, Rachel said she believed Gage had had enough of the wind. She was afraid he would get a chill.

So the kite was pulled back in, fighting for the sky at every turn of the twine, at last surrendering. Louis tucked it, black wings, buggy bloodshot eyes and all, under his arm and imprisoned it in the storage closet again. That night Gage ate an enormous supper of hot dogs and beans, and while Rachel was dressing him in his Dr Dentons for bed, Louis took Ellie aside and had a heart-to-heart talk with her about leaving her marbles around. Under other circumstances he might have ended up shouting at her, because Ellie could turn quite haughty – insulting, even – when accused of some mistake. It was only her way of dealing with criticism, but that did not keep it from infuriating Louis when she laid it on too thick or when he was particularly tired. But this night the kite-flying had left him in a fine mood, and Ellie was inclined to be reasonable. She agreed to be more careful and then went downstairs to watch TV until 8:30, a Saturday indulgence she treasured. Okay, that’s out of the way, and it might even do some good, Louis thought, not knowing that marbles were really not the problem, and chills were not really the problem, that a large Orinco truck was going to be the problem, that the road was going to be the problem … as Jud Crandall had warned them it might be on their first day here last August.

He went upstairs that night about fifteen minutes after Gage had been put to bed. He found his son quiet but still awake, drinking the last of a bottle of milk and looking contemplatively up at the ceiling.

Louis took one of Gage’s feet in one hand and raised it up. He kissed it, lowered it. ‘Goodnight, Gage,’ he said.

‘Kite flyne, Daddy,’ Gage said.

‘It really did fly, didn’t it?’ Louis said, and for no reason at all he felt tears behind his eyes. ‘Right up to the sky, my man.’ ‘Kite flyne,’ Gage said. ‘Up to the kye.’

He rolled over on his side, closed his eyes, and slept. Just like that.

Louis was stepping into the hall when he glanced back and saw green, disembodied eyes staring out at him from Gage’s closet. The closet door was open … just a crack. His heart took a lurch into his throat, and his mouth pulled back and down in a grimace.

He opened the closet door, thinking

(Zelda it’s Zelda in the closet her black tongue puffing out between her lips)

he wasn’t sure what, but of course it was only Church, the cat was in the closet, and when it saw Louis it arched its back like a cat on a Halloween card. It hissed at him, its mouth partly open, revealing its needle-sharp teeth.

‘Get out of there,’ Louis muttered.

Church hissed again. It did not move.

‘Get out, I said.’ He picked up the first thing that came to hand in the litter of Gage’s toys, a bright plastic Chuggy-Chuggy-Choo-Choo which in this dim light was the maroon color of dried blood. He brandished it at Church, who not only stood his ground but hissed again.

And suddenly, without even thinking, Louis threw the toy at the cat, not playing, not goofing around; he pegged the toy at the cat as hard as he could, furious at it, and scared of it, too, that it should hide here in the darkened closet of his son’s room and refuse to leave, as if it had a right to be there.

The toy locomotive struck the cat dead center. Church uttered a squawk and fled, displaying its usual grace by slamming into the door and almost falling over on its way out.

Gage stirred, muttered something, shifted position, and was still again. Louis felt a little sick. There was sweat standing out in beads on his forehead.

‘Louis?’ Rachel, from downstairs, sounding alarmed. ‘Did Gage fall out of his crib?’

‘He’s fine, honey. Church knocked over a couple of his toys.’

‘Oh, all right.’

He felt – irrationally or otherwise – the way he might have felt if he had looked in on his son and found a snake crawling over him or a big rat perched on the bookshelf over Gage’s crib. Of course it was irrational. But when it had hissed at him from the closet like that … (Zelda did you think it was Zelda did you think it was Oz the Gweat and Tewwible)

He closed Gage’s closet door, sweeping a number of toys back in with its moving foot. He listened to the tiny click of the latch. After a moment’s further hesitation, he turned the closet’s thumb-bolt.

He went back to Gage’s crib. In shifting around, the kid had kicked his two blankets down around his knees. Louis disentangled him, pulled the blankets up, and then merely stood there, watching his son, for a long time.