But he wasn't tucking anymore. That was supposed to keep him alive.
"Church?" he called, but there was only the furnace, muttering and muttering, burning up dollars. The couch in the living room, where Church had recently spent most of his time, was empty. He was not lying on any of the radiators.
Louis rattled the cat's dish, the one thing absolutely guaranteed to bring Church running if he was in earshot, but no cat came running this time.
and never would again, he was afraid.
He put on his coat and hat and started for the door. Then he came back. Giving in to what his heart told him, he opened the cupboard under the sink and squatted down. There were two kinds of plastic bags in there-small white ones for the household trash baskets and big green garbage-can liners. Louis took one of the latter. Church had put on weight since he had been fixed.
He poked the bag into one of the side pockets of his jacket, not liking the slick, cool way the plastic felt under his fingers. Then he let himself out the front door and crossed the street to Jud's house.
It was about five-thirty. Twilight was ending. The landscape had a dead look.
The remainder of sunset was a strange orange line on the horizon across the river. The wind bowled straight down Route 15, numbing Louis's cheeks and whipping away the white plume of his breath. He shuddered, but not from the cold. It was a feeling of aloneness that made him shudder. It was strong and persuasive. There seemed no way to concretize it with a metaphor. It was faceless. He just felt by himself, untouched and untouching.
He saw Jud across the road, bundled up in his big green dufile coat, his face lost in the shadow cast by the fur-fringed hood. Standing on his frozen lawn, he looked like a piece of statuary, just another dead thing in this twilight landscape where no bird sang.
Louis started across, and then Jud moved-waved him back. Shouted something Louis could not make out over the pervasive whine of the wind. Louis stepped back, realizing suddenly that the wind's whine had deepened and sharpened. A moment later an air-horn blatted and an Orinco truck roared past close enough to make his pants and jacket flap. Damned if he hadn't almost walked right out in front of the thing.
This time he checked both ways before crossing. There was only the tanker's taillights, dwindling into the twilight.
"Thought that 'Rinco truck was gonna get you," Jud said. "Have a care, Louis."
Even this close, Louis couldn't see Jud's face, and the uncomfortable feeling persisted that this could have been anyone... anyone at all.
"Where's Norma?" he asked, still not looking down at the sprawled bundle of fur by Jud's foot.
"Went to the Thanksgiving church service," he said. "She'll stay to the supper, I guess, although I don't think she'll eat nothing. She's gotten peckish." The wind gusted, shifting the hood back momentarily, and Louis saw that it was indeed Jud-who else would it have been? "It's mostly an excuse for a hen paaaty," Jud said. "They don't eat much but sanwidges after the big meal at noon. She'll be back around eight."
Louis knelt down to look at the cat. Don't let it be Church, he wished fervently, as he turned its head gently on its neck with gloved fingers. Let it be someone else's cat, let Jud be wrong.
But of course it was Church. He was in no way mangled or disfigured; he had not been run over by one of the big tankers or semis that cruised Route 15 (just what was that Orinco truck doing out on Thanksgiving? he wondered randomly).
Church's eyes were half-open, as glazed as green marbles. A small flow of blood had come from his mouth, which was also open. Not a great deal of blood; just enough to stain the white bib on his chest.
"Yours, Louis?"
"Mine," he agreed and sighed.
He was aware for the first time that he had loved Church-maybe not as fervently as Ellie but in his own absent way. In the weeks following his castration, Church had changed, had gotten fat and slow, had established a-routine that took him between Ellie's bed, the couch, and his dish but rarely out of the house.
Now, in death, he looked to Louis like the old Church. The mouth so small and bloody, filled with needle-sharp cat's teeth, was frozen in a shooter's snarl.
The dead eyes seemed furious. It was as if after the short and placid stupidity of his life as a neuter, Church had rediscovered his real nature in dying.
"Yeah, it's Church," he said. "I'll be damned if I know how I'm going to tell Ellie about it."
Suddenly he had an idea. He would bury Church up in the Pet Sematary with no marker or any of that foolishness. He would say nothing to Ellie on the phone tonight about Church; tomorrow he would mention casually that he hadn't seen Church around; the day after he would suggest that perhaps Church had wandered off. Cats did that sometimes. Ellie would be upset, sure, but there would be none of the finality... no reprise of Rachel's upsetting refusal to deal with death... just a withering away.
Coward, part of his mind pronounced.