Pet Sematary - Stephen King [126]
I guess this caps everything, he said huskily and turned to embrace his wife. But she was looking at him with dawning horror, her face seeming to age before his eyes as if whipped by days and months and years of evil time; the sound of the national anthem faded and when Louis looked back at the TV he saw a different boy there, a black boy with a head of tight curls in which gems of water still gleamed.
This caps everything.
His cap.
His cap is
oh dear God, his cap is full of blood.
Louis woke up in the cold dead light of a rainy seven oclock, clutching his pillow in his arms. His head thumped monstrously with his heartbeat; the ache swelled and faded, swelled and faded. He burped acid that tasted like old beer, and his stomach heaved miserably. He had been weeping; the pillow was wet with his tears, as if he had somehow stumbled in and then out of one of those hokey country-and-western laments in his sleep. Even in the dream, he thought, some part of him had known the truth and had cried for it.
He got up and stumbled to the bathroom, heart racing threadily in his chest, consciousness itself fragmented by the fierceness
of his hangover. He reached the toilet bowl barely in time and threw up a glut of last nights beer.
He kneeled on the floor, eyes closed, until he felt capable of actually making it to his feet. He groped for the handle and flushed the john. He went to the mirror to see how badly bloodshot his eyes were, but the glass had been covered with a square of sheeting. Then he recalled. Drawing almost randomly on a past she professed to barely remember, Rachel had covered all the mirrors in the house, and she took off her shoes before entering through the door.
No Olympic swimming team, Louis thought dully as he walked back to his bed and sat down on it. The sour taste of beer coated his mouth and throat, and he swore to himself (not for the first time or the last) that he would never touch that poison again. No Olympic swimming team, no 3.0 in college, no little Catholic girlfriend or conversion, no Camp Agawam, no nothing. His sneakers had been torn off; his jumper turned inside out; his sweet little boys body, so tough and sturdy, nearly dismembered. His cap had been full of blood.
Now, sitting on his bed in the grip of this numbing hangover, rainwater spilling its lazy courses down the window beside him, his grief came for him fully, like some gray matron from Ward Nine in purgatory. It came and dissolved him, unmanned him, took away whatever defenses remained, and he put his face in his hands and cried, rocking back and forth on his bed, thinking he would do anything to have a second chance, anything at all.
41
Gage was buried at two oclock that afternoon. By then the rain had stopped. Tattered clouds still moved overhead, and most of the mourners arrived carrying black umbrellas provided by the undertaker.
At Rachels request, the funeral director, who officiated at the short, nonsectarian graveside service, read the passage from Matthew which begins Suffer the little children to come unto Me. Louis, standing on one side of the grave, looked across at his father-in-law. For a moment Goldman looked back at him,
and then he dropped his eyes. There was no fight left in him today. The pouches under his eyes now resembled mailbags, and around his black silk skullcap, hair as fine and white as tattered spiderwebs flew randomly in the breeze. With his grayish-black beard scragging his cheeks, he looked more like a wino than ever. He gave Louis the impression of a man who did not really know where he was. Louis tried but could still find no pity in his heart for him.