The whole world was swimming now, and his head was full of a tottery, sick vertigo-it was the sort of feeling he could remember from the bitter end of long drunks, just before the puking started.

There was dried blood caked on Church’s muzzle, and caught in his long whiskers were two tiny shreds of green plastic. Bits of Hefty Bag.

We will talk more about this and by then you will understand more.

Oh Christ, he understood more than he wanted to right now. Give me a chance, Louis thought, and I’ll understand myself right into the nearest mental asylum.

He let Church into the house, got his blue dish, and opened a tuna-and-liver cat dinner. As he spooned the gray-brown mess out of the can, Church purred unevenly and rubbed back and forth along Louis’s ankles. The feel of the cat caused Louis to break out in gooseflesh, and he had to clench his teeth grimly to keep from kicking him away. His furry sides felt somehow too slick, too thick-in a word, loathsome. Louis found he didn’t care if he never touched Church again.

When he bent and put the dish on the floor, Church streaked past him to get it, and Louis could have sworn he smelled sour earth-as if it had been ground into the cat’s fur.

He stood back, watching the cat eat. He could hear him smacking-had Church smacked over his food that way before? Perhaps he had, and Louis had just never noticed. Either way, it was a disgusting sound. Gross, Ellie would have said.

Abruptly Louis turned and went upstairs. He started at a walk, but by the time he got to the upper hallway, he was almost running. He undressed, tossing all of his clothes in the laundry hamper although he had put them on fresh from the underwear out that morning. He drew himself a hot. bath, as hot as he could take it, and plopped in.

The steam rose around him, and he could feel the hot water working on his muscles, loosening them. The bath was also working on his head, loosening that.

By the time the water had begun to cool, he was feeling dozy and pretty much all right again.

The cat came back, just like the cat in the nursery rhyme, all right, so what, big deal.

It had all been a mistake. Hadn’t he thought to himself yesterday evening that Church looked remarkably whole and unmarked for an animal that had been struck by a car?

Think of all the woodchucks and cats and dogs you’ve seen strewn all over the highway, he thought, their bodies burst, their guts everywhere. Tech-ni-color, as Loudon Wainwright says on that record about the dead skunk.

It was obvious now. Church had been struck hard and stunned. The cat he had carried up to Jud’s old Micmac burying ground had been unconscious, not dead.

Didn’t they say cats had nine lives? Thank God he hadn’t said anything to Ellie!

She wouldn’t ever have to know how close Church had come.

The blood on his mouth and ruff… the way his neck turned.

But he was a doctor, not a vet. He had made a misdiagnosis-that was all. It had hardly been under the best circumstances for close examination, squatting on Jud’s lawn in twenty-degree temperatures, the light almost gone from the sky.

And he had been wearing gloves. That could have-A bloated, misshapen shadow rose on the tiled bathroom wall, like the head of a small dragon or of some monstrous snake; something touched his bare shoulder lightly and skidded. Louis jerked upward galvanically, splashing water out of the tub and soaking the bathmat. He turned, cringing back at the same time, and stared into the muddy yellow-green eyes of his daughter’s cat, who was perched on the lowered seat of the toilet.

Church was swaying slowly back and forth as if drunk. Louis watched, his body crawling with revulsion, a scream barely held back in his mouth by his clamped teeth. Church had never looked like this-had never swayed, like a snake trying to hypnotize its prey-not before he was fixed and not afterward. For the first and last time he played with the idea that this was a different cat, one that just looked like Ellie’s, a cat that had just wandered into his garage while he was putting up those shelves, and that the real Church was still buried under that cairn on the bluff in the woods. But the markings were the same… and the one ragged, ear… and the paw that had that funny chewed look. Ellie had slammed that paw in the back door of their little suburban house when Church was little more than a kitten.

It was Church, all right.

“Get out of here,” Louis whispered hoarsely at him.

Church stared at him a moment longer-God, his eyes were different, somehow they were different-and then leaped down from the toilet seat. He landed with none of the uncanny grace cats usually display. He staggered awkwardly, haunches thudding against the tub, and then he was gone.

It, Louis thought. Not he; it. Remember, it’s been spayed.

He got out of the tub and dried off quickly, jerkily. He was shaved and mostly dressed when the phone rang, shrill in the empty house. When it sounded, Louis whirled, eyes wide, hands going up. He lowered them slowly. His heart was racing. His muscles felt full of adrenaline.

It was Steve Masterton, checking back about racket ball, and Louis agreed to meet him at the Memorial Gym in an hour. He could not really afford the time, and racket ball was the last thing in the world he felt like right now, but he had to get out. He wanted to get away from the cat, that weird cat which had no business being here at all.

He hurried, tucking in his shirt quickly, stuffing a pair of shorts, a t-shirt, and a towel into his zipper bag, and trotting down the stairs.

Church was lying on the fourth riser from the bottom. Louis tripped over the cat and almost fell. He managed to grab the bannister and barely save himself from what could have been a nasty fall.

He stood at the bottom of the stairs, breathing in snatches, his heart racing, the adrenaline whipping unpleasantly through his body.

Church stood up, stretched… and seemed to grin at him.

Louis left. He should have put the cat out, he knew that, but he didn’t. At that particular moment he didn’t think he could bring himself to touch it.

26

Jud lit a cigarette with a wooden kitchen match, shook it out, and tossed the stub into a tin ashtray with a barely readable Jim Beam advertisement painted on its bottom.

“Ayuh, it was Stanley Bouchard who told me about the place.” He paused, thinking.

Barely touched glasses of beer stood before them on the checked oilcloth that covered the kitchen table. Behind them, the barrel of range oil clamped to the wall gurgled three times, deliberately, and was still. Louis had caught a pick-up supper with Steve-submarine sandwiches in the mostly deserted Bear’s Den. He had found out early that if you asked for a hoagie or a grinder or a gyro in Maine, they didn’t know what you were talking about. Ask for a sub or a Wop-burger, and you were in business. With some food in him, Louis began to feel better about Church’s return, felt that he had things more in perspective, but he was still not anxious to return to his dark, empty house where the cat could be-let’s face it, gang-anywhere at all.

Norma sat with them for quite a while, watching TV and working on a sampler that showed the sun going down behind a small county meeting house. The cross on the roof tree was silhouetted black against the setting sun. Something to sell, she said, at the church sale the week before Christmas. Always a big event. Her fingers moved well, pushing the needle through the cloth, pulling it up through the steel circle. Her arthritis was barely noticeable tonight. Louis supposed it might be the weather, which had been cold but very dry. She had recovered nicely from her heart attack, and on that evening less than ten weeks before a cerebral accident would kill her, he thought that she looked less haggard and actually younger. On that evening he could see the girl she had been.