Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

We examined the dead cat for maggots, turning it from one side to the other-using a stick, of course; no telling what germs you might get from a dead cat. There were no maggots that we could see.

"Maybe there's maggots in its brain ," Charlie's brother Nicky said, his eyes glowing. "Maybe there's maggots inside it, eating up its braiiiin .” "That's impossible," I said. "Your brains are, like, airtight. Nothin' can get inside there.” They absorbed this.

We stood around the dead cat in a circle.

Then Nicky said suddenly: "If we drop a brick on its heinie, will it shit?” This question of postmortem biology was absorbed and discussed. It was finally agreed that the test should be made. A brick was found. There was a discussion of who should get to bombs-away the brick on the dead cat. The problem was solved in time-honored fashion: we put our feet in. The rites of eenie-meenie-miney-moe were invoked. Foot after foot left the circle until only Nicky's was left.

The brick was dropped.

The dead cat did not shit.

Deduction number two: After you're dead, you won't shit if someone drops a brick on your ass.

Soon after, a baseball game started up, and the dead cat was left.

As the days passed, an ongoing investigation of the cat continued, and it is always the dead cat in the gutter out in front of Burrets' Building Materials that I think of when I read Richard Wilbur's fine poem "The Groundhog." The maggots put in their appearance a couple of days later, and we watched their fever-boil with horrified, revolted interest. "They're eatin 'his eyes,” Tommy Erbter from up the street pointed out hoarsely. "Look at that, you guys, they're even eatin' his eyes .” Eventually the maggots moved out, leaving the dead cat looking considerably thinner, its fur now faded to a dull, uninteresting color, sparse and knotted. We came less frequently. The cat's decay had entered a less gaudy stage. Still, it was my habit to check the cat on my mile's walk to school each morning; it was just another stop on the way, part of the morning's ritual- like running a stick over the picket fence in front of the empty house or skipping a couple of stones across the pond in the park.

In late September the tag-end of a hurricane hit Stratford. There was a minor flood, and when the waters went down a couple of days later, the dead cat was gone-it had been washed away. I remember it well now, and I suppose I will all my life, as my first intimate experience with death. That cat may be gone from the charts, but not from my heart.