“I bet you got down those stairs in one hell of a hurry,” Louis said. “Have you got another beer, Jud?” He was already two past his usual limit, but tonight that seemed okay. Tonight that seemed almost mandatory.
“I do, and you know where they’re kept,” Jud said and lit a fresh smoke. He waited until Louis was seated again. “No, I wouldn’t have dared to try the stairs. They went past my parents’ bedroom. I went down the ivy trellis, hand over hand, just as quick as I could. I was some scared, I can tell you, but I think I was more scared of my dad just then than I was of going up to the Pet Sematary with Stanny B.”
He crushed out his smoke.
“We went up there, the two of us, and I guess Stanny B. must have fallen down half a dozen times if he fell down once. He was really far gone; smelled like he’d fallen into a vat of corn. One time he damn near put a stick through his throat. But he had a pick and shovel with him. When we got to the Pet Sematary, I
kind of expected he’d sling me the pick and shovel and just pass out while I dug the hole.
“Instead he seemed to sober up a little. He told me we was goin on, up over the deadfall and deeper into the woods, where there was another burial place. I looked at Stanny, who was so drunk he could barely keep his feet, and I looked at that deadfall, and I said, ‘You can’t climb that, Stanny B., you’ll break your neck. ’ “And he said, ‘I ain’t gonna break my neck, me, and neither are you. I can walk and you can lug your dog. ’ And he was right. He sailed up over that deadfall just as smooth as silk, never even looking down, and I lugged Spot all the way up there, although he must have weighed thirty-five pounds or so and I only went about ninety myself. I want to tell you, though, Louis, I was some sore and sprung the next day. How do you feel today?”
Louis didn’t answer, only nodded.
“We walked and we walked,” Jud said. “It seemed to me we was gonna walk forever.
The woods were spookier in those days. More birds calling from the trees, and you didn’t know what any of em was. Animals moving around out there. Deer, most likely, but back then there were moose too and bears and catamounts. I dragged Spot. After a while I started to get the funny idea that old Stanny B. was gone and I was following an Indian. Following an Indian and somewhere farther along he’d turn around, all grinning and black-eyed, his face streaked up with that stinking paint they made from bearfat; that he’d have a tommyhawk made out of a wedge of slate and a hake of ashwood all tied together with rawhide, and he’d grab me by the back of the neck and whack off my hair-along with the top of my skull. Stanny wasn’t staggerin or fallin anymore; he just walked straight and easy, with his head up, and that sort of helped to feed the idea. But when we got to the edge of the Little God Swamp and he turned around to talk to me, I seen it was Stanny, all right, and the reason he wasn’t staggerin or fallin anymore was because he was scared. Scairt himself sober, he did.
“He told me the same things I told you last night-about the loons, and the St.
Elmo’s fire, and how I wasn’t to take any notice of anything I saw or heard.
Most of all, he said, don’t speak to anything if it should speak to you. Then we started across the swamp. And I did see something. I ain’t going to tell you what, only that I’ve been up there maybe five times since that time when I was ten, and I’ve never seen anything like it again. Nor will I, Louis, because my trip to the Micmac burial place last night was my last trip.”
I’m not sitting here believing all of this, am I? Louis asked himself almost conversationally-the three beers helped him to sound conversational, at least to his own mind’s ear. I am not sitting here believing this story of old Frenchmen and Indian burying grounds and something called the Wendigo and pets that come back to life, am I? For Christ’s sake, the cat was stunned, that’s all, a car hit it and stunned it-no big deal. This is a senile old man’s maunderings.
Except that it wasn’t, and Louis knew it wasn’t, and three beers wasn’t going to cure that knowing, and thirty-three beers wouldn’t.
Church had been dead, that was one thing; he was alive now and that was another; there was something fundamentally different, fundamentally wrong about him, and that was a third. Something had happened. Jud had repaid what he saw as a favor but the medicine available at the Micmac burying ground was perhaps not such good medicine, and Louis now saw something in Jud’s eyes that told him the old man knew it. Louis thought of what he had seen-or thought he had seen-in Jud’s eyes the night before. That capering, gleeful thing. He remembered thinking that Jud’s decision to take Louis and Ellie’s cat on that particular night journey had not entirely been Jud’s own.
If not his, then whose? his mind asked. And because he had no answer, Louis swept the uncomfortable question away.
“I buried Spot and built the cairn,” Jud went on flatly, “and by the time I was done, Stanny B. was fast asleep. I had to shake the hell out of him to get him going again, but by the time we got down those forty-four stairs-”
“Forty-five,” Louis murmured.
Jud nodded. “Yeah, that’s right, ain’t it? Forty-five. By the time we got down those forty-five stairs, he was walking as steady as if he was sober again. We went back through the swamp and the woods and over the deadfall, and finally we crossed the road and we was at my house again. It seemed to me like ten hours must have gone past, but it was still full dark.
“What happens now?’ I ask Stanny B. ‘Now you wait and see what may happen,’ Stanny says, and off he walks, staggering and lurching again.
I imagine he slept out in back of the livery that night, and as things turned out, my dog Spot outlived Stanny B. by two years. His liver went bad and poisoned him, and two little kids found him in the road on July 4, 1912, stiff as a poker.
“But me, that night, I just climbed back up the ivy and got into bed and fell asleep almost as soon as my head touched the pillow.
“Next morning 1 didn’t get up until almost nine o’clock, and then my mother was calling me. My dad worked on the railroad, and he would have been gone since six.” Jud paused, thinking. “My mother wasn’t just calling me, Louis. She was screaming for me.”
Jud went to the fridge, got himself a Miller’s, and opened it on the drawer handle below the breadhox and toaster. His face looked yellow in the overhead light, the color of nicotine. He drained half his beer, uttered a belch like a gunshot, and then glanced down the hail toward the room where Norma slept. He looked back at Louis.
“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.”