"This is hard for me to talk about," he said. "I have turned it over in my mind, years and years, but I've never told anyone about it. Others knew what had happened, but they never talked to me about it. The way it is about sex, I guess. I'm telling you, Louis, because you've got a different kind of pet now.
Not necessarily a dangerous one, but... different. Do you find that's true?"
Louis thought of Church jumping awkwardly off the toilet seat, his haunches thudding against the side of the tub; he thought of those muddy eyes that were almost but not quite stupid staring into his own.
At last he nodded.
"When I got downstairs, my mother was backed into a corner in the pantry between our icebox and one of the counters. There was a bunch of white stuff on the floor-curtains she'd been meaning to hang. Standing in the doorway of the pantry was Spot, my dog. There was dirt all over him and mud splashed clear up his legs. The fur on his belly was filthy, all knotted and snarled. He was just standing there-not growling or nothing-just standing there, but it was pretty clear that he had backed her into a corner, whether he meant to or not. She was in terror, Louis. I don't know how you felt about your parents, but I know how I felt about mine-I loved them both dearly. Knowing I'd done something to put my own mother in terror took away any joy I might have felt when I saw Spot standing there. I didn't even seem to feel surprised that he was there."
"I know the feeling," Louis said. "When I saw Church this morning, I just...
it seemed like something that was-" He paused a moment. Perfectly natural? Those were the words that came immediately to mind, but they were not the right words.
"Like something that was meant."
"Yes," Jud said. He lit a fresh cigarette. His hands were shaking the smallest bit. "And my mother seen me there, still in my underwear, and she screamed at me, 'Feed your dog, Jud! Your dog needs to be fed, get him out of here before he messes the curtains!' "So I found him some scraps and called him, and at first he didn't come, at first it was like he didn't know his own name, and I almost thought, well, this ain't Spot at all, it's some stray that looks like Spot, that's all-"
"Yes!" Louis exclaimed.
Jud nodded. "But the second or third time I called him, he came. He sort of jerked toward me, and when I led him out onto the porch, damned if he didn't run right into the side of the door and just about fall over. He ate the scraps though, just wolfed them down. By then I was over my first fright and was starting to get an idea of what had happened. I got on my knees and hugged him, I was so glad to see him. Then he licked my face, and... " Jud shuddered and finished his beer.
"Louis, his tongue was cold. Being licked by Spot was like getting rubbed up the side of your face with a dead carp."
For a moment neither of them spoke. Then Louis said, "Go on."
"He ate, and when he was done, I got an old tub we kept for him out from under the back porch, and I gave him a bath. Spot always hated to have a bath; usually it took both me and my dad to do it, and we'd end up with our shirts off and our pants soaked, my dad cussing and Spot looking sort of ashamed-the way dogs do.
And more likely than not he'd roll around in the dirt right after and then go over by my mother's clothesline to shake off and put dirt all over the sheets she had hung and she'd scream at both of us that she was going to shoot that dog for a stranger before she got much older.
"But that day Spot just sat in the tub and let me wash him. He never moved at all. I didn't like it. It was like... like washing meat. I got an old piece of towel after I gave him his bath and dried him all off. I could see the places where the barbed wire had hooked him-there was no fur in any of those places, and the flesh looked dimpled in. It is the way an old wound looks after it's been healed five years and more."
Louis nodded. In his line of work, he had seen such things from time to time.
The wound never seemed to fill in completely, and that made him think of graves and his days as an undertaker's apprentice, and how there was never enough dirt to fill them in again.
"Then I saw his head. There was another of those dimples there, but the fur had grown back white in a little circle. It was near his ear."
"Where your father shot him," Louis said.
Jud nodded.
"Shooting a man or an animal in the head isn't as sure-fire as it sounds, Jud.
There are would-be suicides in vegetable wards or even walking around right as rain who didn't know that a bullet can strike the skull plate and travel right around it in a semicircle, exiting the other side without ever penetrating the brain. I personally saw one case where a fellow shot himself above the right ear and died because the bullet went around his head and tore open his jugular vein on the other side of his head. That bullet path looked like a county roadmap."
Jud smiled and nodded. "I remember reading somethin like that in one of Norma's newspapers, the Star or the Enquirer-one of those. But if my pop said Spot was gone, Louis, he was gone."
"All right," Louis said. "If you say that's how it was, that is how it was."
"Was your daughter's cat gone?"
"I sure thought it was," Louis said.