It was around one o'clock that afternoon when Church came back like
the cat in the nursery rhyme. Louis was in the garage, where he had been working
off and on for the last six weeks on a fairly ambitious set of shelves; he wanted to
put all of the dangerous garage-stuff like bottles of windshield-wiper fluid, antifreeze, and sharp tools on these shelves, where they would be out of Gage's reach.
He was hammering in a nail when Church strolled in, his tail high. Louis did not
drop the hammer or even slam his thumb—his heart jogged in his chest but did
not leap; a hot wire seemed to glow momentarily in his stomach and then cool
immediately, like the filament of a lightbulb that glows overbrightly for a moment
and then burns out. It was as if, he told himself later, he had spent that entire
sunny post-Thanksgiving Friday morning waiting for Church to come back; as if
he had known in some deeper, more primitive part of his mind what their nighthike up to the Micmac burying ground had meant all along.
He put the hammer down carefully, spat the nails he had been holding in his
mouth back into his palm and then dumped them into the pockets of his
workman's apron. He went to Church and picked the cat up.
Live weight, he thought with a kind of sick excitement. He weighs what he
did before he was hit. This is live weight. He was heavier in the bag. He was
heavier when he was dead.
His heart took a bigger jog this time—almost a leap—and for a moment the
garage seemed to swim in front of his eyes.
Church laid his ears back and allowed himself to be held. Louis carried him out
into the sunlight and sat down on the back steps. The cat tried to get down then,
but Louis stroked him and held him on his lap. His heart seemed to be taking
regular jogs now.
He probed gently into the heavy ruff of fur at Church's neck, remembering the
sick, boneless way Church's head had swivelled on his broken neck the night
before. He felt nothing now but good muscle and tendon. He held the cat up and
looked at its muzzle closely. What he saw there caused him to drop the cat on to
the grass quickly and to cover his face with one hand, his eyes shut. The whole
world was swimming now, and 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 graybrown mess out of its 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 it away. Its furry sides felt some-how 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 it smacking—had Church
smacked over his food that way before? Perhaps he had, and Louis had just never
noticed it. 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 top of the stairs, 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 hot 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
London 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 it, 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 it.
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 adrenalin.
It was Steve Masterton, checking back about racquetball, and Louis agreed to
meet him at the Memorial Gym in an hour. He could not really afford the time, and
racquetball 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 was hurrying now. He tucked in his shirt quickly, stuffed a pair of shorts
and T-shirt and a towel into his zipper bag, and trotted down the stairs.
Church was lying on the fourth riser from the bottom. Louis tripped over the oat
and almost fell. He managed to grab the banister 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
adrenalin 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.