Pet Sematary - Stephen King [106]
Thank God he didnt suffer, Louis. At least it was quick.
Yes, it was quick, all right, he thought about saying to her-ah, how that would shatter her face all over again, and he felt a vicious urge to do it, to simply spray the words into her face. It was quick, no doubt about that, thats why the coffins closed, nothing could have been done about Gage even if Rachel and I approved of dressing up dead relatives in their best like department store mannequins and rouging and powdering and painting their faces. It was quick, Missy-my-dear, one minute he was there on the road and the next minute he was lying in it, but way down by the Ringers house. It hit him and killed him and then it dragged him and you better believe it was quick. A hundred yards or more all told, the length of a football field. I ran after him, Missy, I was screaming his name over and over again, almost as if I expected he would still be alive, me, a doctor. I ran ten yards and there was his baseball cap and I ran twenty yards and there was one of his Star Wars sneakers, I ran forty yards and by then the truck had run off the road and the box had jackknifed in that field beyond the Ringers barn. People were coming out of their houses and I went on screaming his name, Missy, and at the fifty-yard line there was his jumper, it was turned inside-out, and on the seventy-yard line there was the other sneaker, and then there was Gage.
Abruptly the world went dove gray. Everything passed out of his view. Dimly he could feel the corner of the stand which held the book digging into his palm, but that was all.
Louis? Missys voice. Distant. The mystery sound of pigeons in his ears.
Louis? Closer now. Alarmed.
The world swam back into focus.
You all right?
He smiled. Fine, he said. Im okay, Missy.
She signed for herself and her husband-Mr. and Mrs. David Dandridge-in round Palmer-method script; to this she added their address-Rural Box 67, Old Bucksport Road-and then raised her eyes to Louiss and quickly dropped them, as if her
very address on the road where Gage had died constituted a crime.
Be well, Louis, she whispered.
David Dandridge shook his hand and muttered something inarticulate, his prominent, arrowhead-shaped adams apple bobbing up and down. Then he followed his wife hurriedly down the aisle for the ritual examination of a coffin which had been made in Storyville, Ohio, a place where Gage had never been and where he was not known.
Following the Dandridges they all came, moving in a shuffling line, and Louis received them, their handshakes, their hugs, their tears. His collar and the upper sleeve of his dark gray suit coat soon became quite damp. The smell of the flowers began to reach even the back of the room and to permeate the place with the smell of funeral. It was a smell he remembered from his childhood-that sweet, thick, mortuary smell of flowers. Louis was told how merciful it was that Gage hadnt suffered thirty-two times by his own inner count. He was told that God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform twenty-five times. Bringing up the rear was hes with the angels now, a total of twelve times.
It began to get to him. Instead of losing what marginal sense these little aphorisms had (the way your own name will lose its sense and identity if you repeat it over and over again), they seemed to punch deeper each time, angling in toward the vitals. By the time his mother-in-law and father-in-law put in their inevitable appearance, he had begun to feel like a hard-tagged fighter.
His first thought was that Rachel had been right-and how. Irwin Goldman had indeed aged. He was-what? Fifty-eight, fifty-nine? Today he looked a graven and composed seventy. He looked almost absurdly like Israels Prime Minister Menachem Begin with his bald head and Coke-bottle glasses. Rachel had told Louis Goldman had aged when she