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FORTY-SEVEN

While Jud Crandall was sitting in the ladderbacked rocker and watching for him out of his bay window, Louis was eating a big tasteless dinner in the Howard Johnson’s dining room.

The food was plentiful and dull; exactly what his body seemed to want. Outside it had grown dark. The headlights of the passing cars probed like fingers. He shoveled the food in. A steak. A baked potato. A side-dish of beans which were a bright green nature had never intended. A wedge of apple pie with a scoop of ice cream on top of it melting into a soft drool. He ate at a corner table, watching people come and go, wondering if he might not see someone he knew. In a vague way, he rather hoped that would happen. It would lead to questions – where’s Rachel, what are you doing here, how’s it going? – and perhaps the questions would lead to complications, and maybe complications were what he really wanted. A way out.

And as a matter of fact, a couple whom he did know came in just as he was finishing his apple pie and his second cup of coffee. Rob Grinnell, a Bangor doctor, and his pretty wife Barbara. He waited for them to see him, sitting here in the corner at his table for one, but the hostess led them to the booths on the far side of the room and Louis lost sight of them entirely, except for an occasional glimpse of Grinnell’s prematurely graying hair.

The waitress brought Louis his check. He signed for it, jotting his room number under his signature, and left by the side door.

Outside, the wind had risen to near gale force. It was a steady droning presence, making the electrical wires hum oddly. He could see no stars, but had a sense of clouds rushing past overhead at high speed. Louis stood on the walk for a moment, hands in pockets, face tilted into that wind. Then he turned back and went up to his room and turned on the television. It was too early to do anything serious, and that nightwind was too full of possibilities. It made him nervous.

He watched four hours of TV, eight back-to-back half-hour comedy programs. He realized it had been a very long time since he had watched so much TV in a steady, uninterrupted stream. He thought that all the female leads on the sitcoms were what he and his friends had called ‘cockteasers’ back in high school.

In Chicago, Dory Goldman was wailing, ‘Fly back? Honey, why do you want to fly back? You just got here!’

In Ludlow, Jud Crandall sat by his bay window, smoking and drinking beer, motionless, examining the mental scrapbook of his own past and waiting for Louis to come home. Sooner or later Louis would come home, just like Lassie in that old movie. There were other ways up to the Pet Sematary, but Louis didn’t know them. If he intended to do it, he would have to begin from his own dooryard.

Unaware of these other happenings, like slow-moving projectiles aimed not at where he was, but rather in the best ballistics tradition at the place where he would be, Louis sat and watched the HoJo color television set. He had never seen any of these programs before, but he had heard vague rumors of them: a black family, a white family, a little kid who was smarter than the rich grown-ups he lived with, a woman who was single, a woman who was married, a woman who was divorced. He watched it all, sitting in the HoJo chair and glancing out every now and then at the blowy night.

When the eleven o’clock news came on, he turned the television set off and went out to do what he had decided to do perhaps at the very moment he had seen Gage’s baseball cap lying in the road, full of blood. The coldness was on him again, stronger than ever; but there was something beneath it – an ember of eagerness, or passion, or perhaps lust. It did not matter. It warmed him against the cold and kept him together in the wind. As he started the Honda’s engine, he thought that perhaps Jud was right about the growing power of that place; for surely he felt it around him now, leading (or pushing) him on, and he wondered: Could I stop? Could I stop even if I wanted to?