Stephen King - Pet Sematary

“‘Be damned if I know,’ Bill says, ‘and be damned if I care. ’ He goes to get a cigarette and spills them all over the back porch, then breaks two or three trying to pick them up.

“Probably have to be an exhumation,’ Hannibal says. ‘You know that, don’t you? I had a call from the goddam War Department, Bill. They are going to want to know if they buried some other mother’s son under Timmy’s name. ’ “Well, what in the hell of it?’ Bill says in a loud voice. ‘That’s nothing to me, is it? I got my boy. Timmy come home the other day. He’s been shell-shocked or something. He’s a little strange now, but he’ll come around. ’ “Let’s quit this, Bill,’ I says, and all at once I was pretty mad at him. ‘If and when they dig up that army coffin, they’re gonna find it dead empty, unless you went to the trouble of filling it up with rocks after you took your boy out of it, and I don’t think you did. I know what happened, Hannibal and George and Alan here know what happened, and you know what happened too. You been foolin around up in the woods, Bill, and you have caused yourself and this town a lot of trouble. ’ “You fellas know your way out, I guess,’ he says. ‘I don’t have to explain myself to you, or justify myself to you, or nothing. When I got that telegram, the life ran right out of me. I felt her go, just like piss down the inside of my leg. Well, I got my boy back. They had no right to take my boy. He was only seventeen. He was all I had left of his dear mother, and it was illfuckinlegal.

So fuck the army, and fuck the War Department, and fuck the United States of America, and fuck you boys too. I got him back. He’ll come around. And that’s all I got to say. Now you all just march your boots back where you came from. ’ “And his mouth is tick-tick-tickin, and there’s sweat all over his forehead in big drops, and that was when I saw he was crazy. It would have driven me crazy too. Living with that… that thing.”

Louis was feeling sick to his stomach. He had drunk too much beer too fast.

Pretty soon it was all going to come up on him. The heavy, loaded feeling in his stomach told him it would be coming up soon.

“Well, there wasn’t much else we could do. We got ready to go. Hannibal says, ‘Bill, God help you. ’ “Bill says, ‘God never helped me. I helped myself. ’ “That was when Timmy walked over to us. He even walked wrong, Louis. He walked like an old, old man. He’d put one foot high up and then bring it down and then kind of shuffle and then lift the other one. It was like watchin a crab walk. His hands dangled down by his legs. And when he got close enough, you could see red marks across his face on the slant, like pimples or little burns. I reckon that’s where the Kraut machine gun got him. Must have damn near blowed his head off.

“And he stank of the grave. It was a black smell, like everything inside him was just lying there, spoiled. I saw Alan Purinton put a hand up to cover his nose and mouth. The stench was just awful. You almost expected to see grave maggots squirming around in his hair-”

“Stop,” Louis said hoarsely. “I’ve heard enough.”

“You ain’t,” Jud said. He spoke with haggard earnestness. “That’s it, you ain’t.

And I can’t even make it as bad as it was. Nobody could understand how bad it was unless they was there. He was dead, Louis. But he was alive too. And he…

he… he knew things.”

“Knew things?” Louis sat forward.

“Aynh. He looked at Alan for a long time, kind of grinning-you could see his teeth, anyway-and then he spoke in this low voice; you felt like you had to strain forward to hear it. It sounded like he had gravel down in his tubes.

‘Your wife is fucking that man she works with down at the drugstore, Purinton.

What do you think of that? She screams when she comes. What do you think of that?’ “Alan, he kind of gasped, and you could see it had hit him. Alan’s in a nursing home up in Gardener now, or was the last I heard-he must be pushing ninety. Back when all this happened, he was forty or so, and there had been some talk around about his second wife. She was his second cousin, and she had come to live with Alan and Alan’s first wife, Lucy, just before the war. Well, Lucy died, and a year and a half later Alan up and married this girl. Laurine, her name was. She was no more than twenty-four when they married. And there had been some talk about her, you know. If you were a man, you might have called her ways sort of free and easy and let it go at that. But the women thought she might be loose.

And maybe Alan had had a few thoughts in that direction too because he says, ‘Shut up! Shut up or I’ll knock you down, whatever you are!’ “Shush now, Timmy,’ Bill says, and he looks worse than ever, you know, like maybe he’s going to puke or faint dead away, or do both. ‘You shush, Timmy. ’ “But Timmy didn’t take no notice. He looks around at George Anderson and he says, ‘That grandson you set such a store by is just waiting for you to die, old man. The money is all he wants, the money he thinks you got socked away in your lockbox at the Bangor Eastern Bank. That’s why he makes up to you, but behind your back he makes fun of you, him and his sister. Old wooden-leg, that’s what they call you,’ Timmy says, and Louis, his voice-it changed. It got mean. It sounded like the way that grandson of George’s would have sounded if… you know, if the things Timmy was saying was true.

“Old wooden-leg,’ Timmy says, ‘and won’t they shit when they find out you’re poor as a church mouse because you lost it all in 1938? Won’t they shit, George?

Won’t they just shit?'

“George, he backed away then, and his wooden leg buckled under him, and he fell back on Bill’s porch and upsat his pitcher of beer, and he was as white as your undershirt, Louis.

“Bill, he gets him back on his feet somehow, and he’s roarin at his boy, ‘Timmy, you stop it! You stop it!’ But Timmy wouldn’t. He said somethin bad about Hannibal, and then he said something bad about me too, and by then he was…

ravin, I’d say. Yeah, he was ravin, all right. Screamin. And we started to back away, and then we started to run, draggin George along the best we could by the arms because he’d gotten the straps and harnesses on that fake leg twisted somehow, and it was all off to one side with the shoe turned around backward and draggin on the grass.

“The last I seen of Timmy Baterman, he was on the back lawn by the clothesline, his face all red in the settin sun, those marks standin out on his face, his hair all crazy and dusty somehow.

and he was laughin and screechin over and over again ‘Old wooden-leg! Old wooden-leg! And the cuckold! And the whoremaster! Goodbye, gentlemen! Goodbye!

Goodbye!’ And then he laughed, but it was screaming, really… something inside him screaming… and screaming… and screaming.”

Jud stopped. His chest moved up and down rapidly.

“Jud,” Louis said. “The thing this Timmy Baterman told you was it truer’ “It was true,” Jud muttered. “Christ! It was true. I used to go to a whorehouse in Bangor betimes. Nothing many a man hasn’t done, although I s’pose there are plenty that walk the straight and narrow. I just would get the urge-the compulsion, maybe-to sink it into strange flesh now and then. Or pay some woman to do the things a man can’t bring himself to ask his wife to do. Men keep their gardens too, Louis. It wasn’t a terrible thing, what I done, and all of that has been behind me for the last eight or nine years, and Norma would not have left me if she had known. But something in her would have died forever. Something dear and sweet.”

Jud’s eyes were red and swollen and bleary. The tears of the old are singularly unlovely, Louis thought. But when Jud groped across the table for Louis’s hand, Louis took it firmly.