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THIRTY-SEVEN

‘I knew something like this would happen,’ Irwin Goldman said. That was how the trouble started. ‘I knew it when she married you. “You’ll have all the grief you can stand, and more,” I said. And look at this. Look at this … this mess.’ Louis looked slowly around at his father-in-law, who had appeared before him like some malign jack-in-the-box in a skullcap, and then, instinctively, he looked around at where Rachel had been, by the book on the stand – the afternoon shift was hers by default – but Rachel was gone.

The afternoon viewing had been less crowded, and after half an hour or so, Louis had gone down to the front row of seats and sat there on the aisle, aware of very little (only peripherally aware of the cloying stink of the flowers) except the fact that he was very tired and sleepy. It was only partly the beer, he supposed. His mind was finally ready to shut down. Probably a good thing. Perhaps, after twelve or sixteen hours of sleep, he would be able to comfort Rachel a little.

After a while his head had sunk until he was looking at his hands, loosely linked between his knees. The hum of voices near the back was soothing. He had been relieved to see that Irwin and Dory weren’t here when the four of them returned from lunch, but he should have known their continued absence was too good to be true.

‘Where’s Rachel?’ Louis asked now.

‘With her mother. Where she should be.’ Goldman spoke with the studied triumph of a man who has closed a big deal. There was Scotch on his breath. A lot of it. He stood before Louis like a banty little district attorney before a man in the bar of justice, a man who is patently guilty. He was unsteady on his feet.

‘What did you say to her?’ Louis said, feeling the beginnings of anger now. He knew Goldman had said something. It was in the man’s face.

‘Nothing but the truth. I told her this is what it gets you, marrying against your parents’ wishes. I told her—’ ‘Did you say that?’ Louis asked incredulously. ‘You didn’t really say that, did you?’

‘That and more,’ Irwin Goldman said. He spoke with the smugness of a man who has discovered where the blame goes. ‘I always knew it would come to this – this or something like it. I knew what kind of a man you were the first time I saw you.’ He leaned forward, exhaling Scotch fumes. He now spoke with the air of a man imparting a great secret. ‘I saw through you, you prancing little fraud of a doctor. You enticed my daughter into a stupid, feckless marriage and then you turned her into a scullery-maid and then you let her son be run down in the highway like a … a chipmunk.’ Most of this went over Louis’s head. He was still groping with the idea that this stupid little man could have— ‘You said that to her?’ he repeated. ‘You said it?’

‘I hope you rot in hell!’ Goldman said, and heads turned sharply toward the sound of his voice. Tears began to squeeze out of Irwin Goldman’s bloodshot brown eyes. His bald head glowed under the muted fluorescent lights. ‘You made my wonderful daughter into a scullery-maid … destroyed her future … took her away … and let my grandson die a dirty death in a country road.’ His voice rose to a hectoring scream.

‘Where were you? Sitting on your ass while he was playing in the road? Thinking about your stupid medical articles? What were you doing, you shit? You stinking shit! Killer of children! Ki—’ There they were. There they were at the front of the East Room. There they were and Louis saw his arm go out. He saw the sleeve of his suitcoat pull back from the cuff of his white shirt. He saw the mellow gleam of one cufflink – Rachel had given him the set for their third wedding anniversary, never knowing that her husband would someday wear these cufflinks to the funeral ceremonies of their then-unborn son. His fist was just something tied to the end of his arm. It connected with Goldman’s mouth, and he felt the old man’s lips squash and splay back. It was a sickening feeling, really; squashing a slug with your fist might feel something like that. There was no satisfaction in it. Beneath the flesh of his father-in-law’s lips he could feel the stern, unyielding regularity of his dentures.

Goldman went stumbling backward. His arm came down against Gage’s coffin, knocking it aslant. One of the vases, top heavy with flowers, fell over with a crash. Someone screamed.

It was Rachel, struggling with her mother, who was trying to hold her back. The people who were there – ten or fifteen in all – seemed frozen between fright and embarrassment. Steve had taken Jud back to Ludlow, and Louis was dimly grateful for that. This was not a scene he would have wished Jud to witness. It was unseemly.

‘Don’t hurt him!’ Rachel screamed. ‘Louis, don’t hurt my father!’

‘You like to hit old men, do you?’ Irwin Goldman of the overflowing checkbook cried out shrilly. He was grinning through a mouthful of blood the color of rubies. ‘You like to hit old men? I am not surprised, you stinking bastard. That does not surprise me at all.’ Louis turned toward him and Goldman struck him in the neck. It was a clumsy, side-handed, chopping blow, but Louis was unprepared for it. A paralyzing pain that would make it hard for him to swallow for the next two hours exploded in his throat. His head rocked back and he fell to one knee in the aisle.

First the flowers, now me, he thought. What is it the Ramones say? Hey-ho, let’s go! He thought he wanted to laugh, but there was no laugh in him. What came out of his hurt throat was a little groan.

Rachel screamed again.

Irwin Goldman, his mouth dripping blood, kicked Louis in the kidneys. The pain was a bright flare of agony. He put his hands down on the rug-runner to keep from going flop on his belly.

‘You don’t do so good even against old men, sonny!’ Goldman cried with cracked excitement. He kicked out at Louis again, missing the kidney this time, getting Louis on the high part of the left buttock with one black old man’s shoe. Louis grunted in pain and this time he did go down on the carpet. His chin hit with an audible crack. He bit his tongue.

‘There!’ Goldman cried. ‘There’s the kick in the ass I should have given you the first time you came sucking around, you bastard. There!’ He kicked Louis in the ass again, this time connecting with the other buttock. He was weeping and grinning. Louis saw for the first time that Goldman was unshaven – a sign of mourning. The funeral director raced toward them. Rachel had broken Mrs Goldman’s hold and was also racing toward them, screaming.

Louis rolled clumsily over on his side and sat up. His father-in-law kicked out at him again and Louis caught his shoe in both hands – it thwapped solidly into his palms like a well-caught football – and shoved backwards, as hard as he could.

Bellowing, Goldman flew backwards at an angle, pin-wheeling his arms for balance. He fell on Gage’s Eternal Rest casket, which had been manufactured in the town of Storyville, Ohio, and which had not come cheap.

Oz the Gweat and Tewwible has just fallen on top of my son’s coffin, Louis thought dazedly. The casket fell from the trestle with a huge crash. The left end fell first, then the right. The latch snapped. Even over the screams and the crying, even over the bellows of Goldman, who after all was only an old child playing a children’s party-game of Pin the Blame on the Donkey, Louis heard the lock snap.

The coffin did not actually open and spill Gage’s sad, hurt remains out on to the floor for all of them to gawp at, but Louis was sickly aware that they had only been spared that by the way the coffin had fallen – on its bottom instead of its side. It easily could have fallen that other way. Nonetheless, in that split instant before the lid slammed shut on its broken latch again, he saw a flash of gray – the suit they had bought to put in the ground around Gage’s body – and a bit of pink. Gage’s hand.

Sitting there on the floor, Louis put his face in his hands and began to weep. He had lost all interest in his father-in-law, in the MX missile, in permanent versus dissolving sutures, in the heat-death of the universe. At that moment, Louis Creed wished he were dead. And suddenly, weirdly, an image rose in his mind: Gage in Mickey Mouse ears, Gage laughing and shaking hands with a great big Goofy on Main Street, in Disney World. He saw this with utter clarity.

One of the trestle supports had fallen over; the other leaned with drunken casualness against the low dais where a minister might stand to offer a eulogy. Sprawled in the flowers was Goldman, also weeping. Water from the overturned vases trickled. The flowers, some of them crushed and mangled, gave off their turgid scent even more strongly.

Rachel was screaming and screaming.

Louis could not respond to her screams. The image of Gage in Mickey Mouse ears was fading, but not before he heard a voice announcing there would be fireworks later that evening. He sat with his face in his hands, not wanting them to see him any more, his tear-stained face, his loss, his guilt, his pain, his shame, most of all his cowardly wish to be dead and out of this blackness.

The funeral director and Dory Goldman led Rachel out. She was still screaming. Later on, in another room (one Louis assumed was reserved especially for those overcome with grief – the Hysterics’ Parlor, perhaps) she became very silent. Louis himself, dazed but sane and in control, sedated her this time, after insisting that the two of them be left alone.

At home, he led her up to bed and gave her another shot. Then he pulled the covers up to her chin and regarded her waxy, pallid face.

‘Rachel, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’d give anything in the world to take that back.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said in a strange, flat voice, and then rolled over on her side, turning away from him.

He heard the tired old question Are you all right? rising to his lips and pushed it back. It wasn’t a true question; it wasn’t what he really wanted to know.

‘How bad are you?’ he asked finally.

‘Pretty bad, Louis,’ she said, and then uttered a sound that could have been a laugh. ‘I am fucking terrible, in fact.’ Something more seemed required, but Louis could not supply it. He felt suddenly resentful of her, of Steve Masterton, of Missy Dandridge and her husband with his arrowhead-shaped adam’s apple, of the whole damned crew. Why should he have to be the eternal supplier? What sort of shit was that?

He turned off the light and left. He found that he could not give much more to his daughter.

For one wild moment, regarding her in her shadowy room, he thought she was Gage – the thought that the whole thing had been a hideous nightmare, like his dream of Pascow leading him into the woods, came to him, and for a moment his tired mind grasped at it. The shadows helped – there was only the shifting light of the portable TV that Jud had taken up for her to pass the hours. The long, long hours.

But it wasn’t Gage, of course; it was Ellie, who was now not only grasping the picture in which she was pulling Gage on the sled, but sitting in Gage’s chair. She had taken it out of his room and brought it into hers. It was a small director’s chair with a canvas seat and a canvas strip across the back. Stencilled across that strip was GAGE. Rachel had mail-ordered four of these chairs. Each member of the family had one with his or her name stencilled on the back.

Ellie was too big for Gage’s chair. She was crammed into it, and the canvas bottom bulged downward dangerously. She held the Polaroid picture to her chest and stared at the TV, where some movie was showing.

‘Ellie,’ he said, snapping off the TV, ‘bedtime.’

She worked her way out of the chair, then folded it up. She apparently meant to take the chair into bed with her.

Louis hesitated, wanting to say something about the chair, and finally settled for, ‘Do you want me to tuck you in?’ ‘Yes, please,’ she said.

‘Do you … would you want to sleep with Mommy tonight?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘You sure?’

She smiled a little. ‘Yes. She steals the covers.’

Louis smiled back. ‘Come on, then.’

Instead of trying to put the chair in bed with her, Ellie unfolded it by the head of the bed, and an absurd image came to Louis – here was the consulting room of the world’s smallest psychiatrist.

She undressed, putting the picture of her and Gage on her pillow to do it, put on her baby-doll pajamas, picked up the picture, went into the bathroom, put it down to wash up, brush, floss, and to take her fluoride tablet. Then she picked it up again and got into bed with it.

Louis sat down beside her and said, ‘I want you to know, Ellie, that if we keep on loving each other, we can get through this.’ Each word was like moving a handcar loaded with wet bales, and the total effort left Louis feeling exhausted.

‘I’m going to wish really hard,’ Ellie said calmly, ‘and pray to God for Gage to come back.’

‘Ellie—’

‘God can take it back if he wants to,’ Ellie said. ‘He can do anything He wants to.’

‘Ellie, God doesn’t do things like that,’ Louis said uneasily, and in his mind’s eye he saw Church squatting on the closed lid of the toilet, staring at him with those muddy eyes as Louis lay in the tub.

‘He does so,’ she said. ‘In Sunday School the teacher told us about this guy Lazarus. He was dead and Jesus brought him back to life. He said, “Lazarus, come forth,” and the teacher said if he’d just said “Come forth,” probably everybody in that graveyard would have come out, and Jesus only wanted Lazarus.’ An absurdity popped out of his mouth (but the day had sung and gibbered with absurdity): ‘That was a long time ago, Ellie.’ ‘I’m going to keep things ready for him,’ she said. ‘I’ve got his picture and I’m going to sit in his chair—’ ‘Ellie, you’re too big for Gage’s chair,’ Louis said, taking her hot, feverish hand. ‘You’ll break it.’ ‘God will help it not to break,’ Ellie said. Her voice was serene, but Louis observed the brown half-moons under her eyes. Looking at her made his heart ache so badly that he turned away from her. Maybe when Gage’s chair broke, she would begin to understand what had happened a little better.

‘I’m going to carry the picture and sit in his chair,’ she said. ‘I’m going to eat his breakfast, too.’ Gage and Ellie had each had their own breakfast cereals; Gage’s, Ellie had once claimed, tasted like dead boogers. If Cocoa Bears was the only cereal in the house, Ellie would sometimes eat a boiled egg … or nothing at all. ‘I’ll eat lima beans even though I hate them, and I’ll read all of Gage’s picture books and I’ll … I’ll … you know … get things ready … in case …’ She was crying now. Louis did not try to comfort her, but only brushed her hair back from her forehead. What she was talking about made a certain crazed sense. Keeping the lines open. Keeping things current. Keeping Gage in the present, in the Hot One Hundred, refusing to let him recede; remember when Gage did this … or that … Yeah, that was great … good old Gage, wotta kid. When it started not to hurt, it started not to matter. She understood, perhaps, Louis thought, how easy it would be to let Gage become dead.

‘Ellie, don’t cry any more,’ he said, ‘this isn’t for ever.’

She cried for ever … for fifteen minutes. She actually fell asleep before her tears stopped. But eventually she slept, and downstairs the clock struck ten in the quiet house.

Keep him alive, Ellie, if that’s what you want, he thought, and kissed her. The shrinks would probably say it’s as unhealthy as hell, but I’m for it. Because I know the day will come – maybe as soon as this Friday – when you forget to carry the picture and I’ll see it lying on your bed in this empty room while you ride your bike around the driveway or walk in the field behind the house or go over to Kathy McGown’s house to make clothes with her Sew Perfect. Gage won’t be with you, and that’s when Gage drops off whatever Hot One Hundred there is that exists in little girls’ hearts and starts to become Something That Happened In 1984. A blast from the past.

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. He went downstairs to get it.

Louis Albert Creed methodically set 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 Charlton, 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 it. Church came oiling slowly and rustily out of the pantry at the sound of the refrigerator door and stared inquiringly up at Louis. He did not come too close; Louis had perhaps kicked him 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 him.

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 mother-fucking 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, who 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 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 warily 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 spook 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; 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 any more 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 Charlton 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. Charlton 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. Charlton 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 Hangover, 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 glamor. Yes, that above all else – it had glamor.

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.

The dog. Spot.

I could see all the places where the barbed wire had hooked him – there was no fur in any of those places, and the flesh looked dimpled in.

The bull. Another file turned over in Louis’s mind.

Lester Morgan buried his prize bull up there. Black Angus bull, named Hanratty … Lester dragged him all the way up there on a sledge … shot him dead two weeks later. That bull turned mean, really mean. But he’s the only animal I ever heard of that did.

He turned mean.

The soil of a man’s heart is stonier.

He turned really mean.

He’s the only animal I heard of that did.

Mostly you do it because once you’ve been up there, it’s your place.

The flesh looked dimpled in.

Hanratty, ain’t that a silly name for a bull?

A man grows what he can … and tends it.

They’re my rats. And my birds. I bought the fuckers.

It’s your place, a secret place, and it belongs to you, and you belong to it.

He turned mean, but he’s the only animal I heard of that did.

What do you want to buy next, Louis, when the wind blows hard at night and the moon lays a white path through the woods to that place? Want to climb those stairs again? When they’re watching a horror movie, everyone in the audience knows the hero or the heroine is stupid to go up those stairs, but in real life they always do – they smoke, they don’t wear seat-belts, they move their family in beside a busy highway where the big rigs drone back and forth all day and all night. So, Louis, what do you say? Want to climb the stairs? Would you like to keep your dead son or go for what’s behind Door Number One, Door Number Two, or Door Number Three?

Hey-ho, let’s go.

Turned mean … only animal … the flesh looked … a man … yours … his …

Louis dumped the rest of the beer down the sink, feeling suddenly that he was going to vomit. The room was moving around in great swinging motions.

There was a knock at the door.

For a long time – it seemed like a long time, anyway – he believed it was only in his head, a hallucination. But the knocking just went on and on, patient, implacable. And suddenly Louis found himself thinking of the story of the monkey’s paw, and a cold terror slipped into him. He seemed to feel it with total physical reality – it was like a dead hand that had been kept in a refrigerator, a dead hand which had suddenly taken on its own disembodied life and slipped inside his shirt to clutch the flesh over his heart. It was a silly image, fulsome and silly, but oh, it didn’t feel silly. No.

Louis went to the door on feet he could not feel and lifted the latch with nerveless fingers. And as he swung it open he thought: It’ll be Pascow. Like they said about Jim Morrison, back from the dead and bigger than ever. Pascow standing there in his jogging shorts, big as life and as mouldy as month-old bread, Pascow with his horribly ruined head, Pascow bringing the warning again: Don’t go up there. What was that old song by The Animals? Baby, please don’t go, baby PLEASE don’t go, you know I love you so, baby please don’t go … The door swung open and standing there on his front step in the blowing dark of this midnight, between the day of the funeral parlor visitation and the day of his son’s burial, was Jud Crandall. His thin white hair blew randomly in the chilly dark.

‘Think of the devil, and he stands on your doorstep,’ Louis said thickly. He tried to laugh. Time seemed to have turned cleverly back on itself. It was Thanksgiving again. Soon they would put the stiff, unnaturally thickened body of Ellie’s cat Winston Churchill into a plastic garbage bag, and start off. Oh do not ask what is it, let us go and make our visit.

‘Can I come in, Louis?’ Jud asked. He took a pack of Chesterfields from his shirt pocket and poked one into his mouth.

‘Tell you what,’ Louis said. ‘It’s late and I’ve been drinking a pile of beer.’

‘Ayuh, I could smell it,’ Jud said. He struck a match. The wind snuffed it. He struck another around cupped hands, but the hands trembled and betrayed the match to the wind again. He got a third match, prepared to strike it, then looked up at Louis standing in the doorway. ‘I can’t get this thing lit,’ Jud said. ‘Gonna let me in or not, Louis?’ Louis stepped aside and let Jud walk in.