father, Louis’s uncle, was an undertaker, he couldn’t imagine that Uncle Carl would possibly be the one to do it. In his confusion and mounting fear, he had seized upon this as the most important question. It was a genuine conundrum, like who cut the town barber’s hair.
I imagine that Donny Donahue will do it, his mother replied. Her eyes were red-rimmed; most of all she had looked tired. His mother had looked almost ill with weariness.
He’s your uncle’s best pal in the business. Oh, but Louis.
Sweet little Ruthie… I can’t stand to think she suffered.
pray with me. will you, Louis? Pray with me for Ruthie. I need you to help me.
So they had gotten down on their knees in the kitchen, he and his mother, and they prayed, and it was the praying that finally brought it home to him; if his mother was praying for Ruthie Creed’s soul, then it meant that her body was gone. Before his closed eyes rose a terrible image of Ruthie coming to his thirteenth birthday party with her decaying eyeballs hanging on her cheeks and blue mould growing in her red hair, and this image provoked not just sickening horror but an awful doomed love.
He cried out in the greatest mental agony of his life, “She can’t be dead!
MOMMA, SHE CAN’T BE DEAD-I LOVE HER!”
And his mother’s reply, her voice flat and yet full of images: dead fields under a November sky, scattered rose petals brown and turning up at the edges, empty pools scummed with algae, rot, decomposition, dust: She is, my darling. I’m sorry, but she is. Ruthie is gone.
Louis shuddered, thinking, Dead is dead-what else do you need?
Suddenly Louis knew what it was he had forgotten to do, why he was still awake on this night before the first day of his new job, hashing over old griefs.
He got up, headed for the stairs, and suddenly detoured down the hall to Ellie’s room. She was sleeping peacefully, mouth open, wearing her blue baby-doll pajamas that she had really outgrown. My God, Ellie, he thought, you’re sprouting like corn. Church lay between her splayed ankles, also dead to the world. You should pardon the pun.
Downstairs there was a bulletin board on the wall by the phone with various messages, memos, and bills tacked to it. Written across the top in Rachel’s neat caps was THINGS TO PUT OFF AS LONG AS POSSIBLE. Louis got the telephone book, looked up a number, and jotted it on a blank memo sheet. Below the number he wrote: Quentin L. Jolander, D. V. M.-call for appointment re Church--if Jolander doesn’t neuter animals, he will refer.
He looked at the note, wondering if it was time, knowing that it was. Something concrete had to come out of all this bad feeling, and he had decided sometime between this morning and tonight- without even knowing he was deciding-that he didn’t want Church crossing the road anymore if he could help it.
His old feelings on the subject rose up in him, the idea that neutering would lessen the cat, would turn him into a fat old torn before his time, content to just sleep on the radiator until someone put something into his dish. He didn’t want Church like that. He liked Church the way he was, lean and mean.
Outside in the dark, a big semi droned by on Route 15, and that decided him. He tacked the memo up and went to bed.
11
The next morning at breakfast, Ellie saw the new memo on the bulletin board and asked him what it meant.
“It means he’s going to have a very small operation,” Louis said. “He’ll probably have to stay over at the vet’s for one night afterward. And when he comes home, he’ll stay in our yard and not want to roam around so much.”
“Or cross the road?” Ellie asked.
She may be only five, Louis thought, but she’s sure no slouch. “Or cross the road,” he agreed.
“Yay!” Ellie said, and that was the end of the subject.
Louis, who had been prepared for a bitter and perhaps hysterical argument about Church being out of the house for even one night, was mildly stunned by the ease with which she had acquiesced. And he realized how worried she must have been.
Perhaps Rachel had not been entirely wrong about the effect the Pet Sematary had had on her.
Rachel herself, who was feeding Gage his breakfast egg, shot him a grateful approving look, and Louis felt something loosen in his chest. The look told him that the chill was over; this particular hatchet had been buried. Forever, he hoped.
Later, after the big yellow school bus had gobbled Ellie up for the morning, Rachel came to him, put her arms around his neck, and kissed his mouth gently.
“You were very sweet to do that,” she said, “and I’m sorry I was such a bitch.”
Louis returned her kiss, feeling a little uncomfortable nonetheless. It occurred to him that the I’m sorry! was such a bitch statement, while by no means a standard, was not exactly something he’d never heard before either. It usually came after Rachel had gotten her way.
Gage, meanwhile, had toddled unsteadily over to the front door and was looking out the lowest pane of glass at the empty road. “Bus,” he said, hitching nonchalantly at his sagging diapers. “Ellie- bus.”
“He’s growing up fast,” Louis said.
Rachel nodded. “Too fast to suit me, I think.”
“Wait until he’s out of diapers,” Louis said. “Then he can stop. ’, She laughed, and it was all right between them again-completely all right. She stood back, made a minute adjustment to his tie, and looked him up and down critically.
“Do I pass muster, Sarge?” he asked.
“You look very nice.”
“Yeah, I know. But do I look like a heart surgeon? A two-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year man?”
“No, just old Lou Creed,” she said and giggled. “The rock-and-roll animal.”
Louis glanced at his watch. “The rock-and-roll animal has got to put on his boogie shoes and go,” he said.
“Are you nervous?”
“Yeah, a little.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “It’s sixty-seven thousand dollars a year for putting on Ace bandages, prescribing for the flu and for hangovers, giving girls the pill-”
“Don’t forget the crab-and-louse lotion,” Louis said, smiling again. One of the things that had surprised him on his first tour of the infirmary had been the supplies of Quell, which seemed to him enormous-more fitted to an army base infirmary than to one on a middle-sized university campus.
Miss Charlton, the head nurse, had smiled cynically. “Off campus apartments in the area are pretty tacky. You’ll see. “ He supposed he would.
“Have a good day,” she said and kissed him again, lingeringly. But when she pulled away, she was mock-stem. “And for Christ’s sake remember that you’re an administrator, not an intern or a second-year resident!”
“Yes, Doctor,” Louis said humbly, and they both laughed again. For a moment he thought of asking: Was it Zelda, babe? is that what’s got under your skin? Is that the zone of low pressure?
Zelda and how she died? But he wasn’t going to ask her that, not now. As a doctor he knew a lot of things, and while the fact that death was just as natural as childbirth might be the greatest of them, the fact that you don’t monkey with a wound that has finally started to heal was far from the least of them.
So instead of asking, he only kissed her again and went out.
It was a good start, a good day. Maine was putting on a late-summer show, the sky was blue and cloudless, the temperature pegged at an utterly perfect seventy-two degrees. Rolling to the end of the driveway and checking for traffic, Louis mused that so far he hadn’t seen so much as a trace of the fall foliage that was supposed to be so spectacular. But he could wait.
He pointed the Honda Civic they had picked up as a second car toward the university and let it roll. Rachel would call the vet this morning, they would get Church fixed, and that would put this whole nonsense of Pet Semataries (it was funny how that misspelling got into your head and began to seem right) and death fears behind them. There was no need to be thinking about death on a beautiful September morning like this one.
Louis turned on the radio and dialed until he found the Ramones belting out “Rockaway Beach.” He turned it up and sang along-not well but with lusty enjoyment.
12
The first thing he noticed turning into the university grounds was how suddenly and spectacularly the traffic swelled. There was car traffic, bike traffic, there were joggers by the score. He had to stop quickly to avoid two of the latter coming from the direction of Dunn Hall. Louis braked hard enough to lock his shoulder belt and honked. He was always annoyed at the way joggers (bicyclers had the same irritating habit) seemed to automatically assumed that their responsibility lapsed completely at the moment they began to run. They were, after all, exercising. One of them gave Louis the finger without ever looking around. Louis sighed and drove on.
The second thing was that the ambulance was gone from its slot in the small infirmary parking lot, and that gave him a nasty start. The infirmary was equipped to treat almost any illness or accident on a short-term basis; there were three well-equipped examination-and-treatment rooms opening off the big foyer, and beyond this were two wards with fifteen beds each. But there was no operating theater, nor anything even resembling one. In case of serious accidents, there was the ambulance, which would rush an injured or seriously ill person to the Eastern Maine Medical Center. Steve Masterton, the physician’s assistant who had given Louis his first tour of the facility, had shown Louis the log from the previous two academic years with justifiable pride; there had only been thirty-eight ambulance runs in that time… not bad when you considered that the student population here was over ten thousand and the total university population was almost seventeen thousand.
And here he was, on his first real day of work, with the ambulance gone.
He parked in the slot headed with a freshly painted sign reading RESERVED FOR DR. CREED and hurried in.
He found Charlton, a graying but lithe woman of about fifty, in the first examining room, taking the temperature of a girl who was wearing jeans and a halter top. The girl had gotten a bad sunburn not too long ago, Louis observed; the peeling was well advanced.
“Good morning, Joan,” he said. “Where’s the ambulance?”
“Oh, we had a real tragedy, all right,” Charlton said, taking the thermometer out of the student’s mouth and reading it. “Steve Masterton came in this morning at seven and saw a great big puddle under the engine and the front wheels.
Radiator let go. They hauled it away.”
