Pet Sematary - Stephen King [16]
Carefully gluing on a mudguard, he told her. Look at this, he said, carefully banding her a hubcap. See those linked Rs? Thats a nice detail, huh? If we fly back to Shytown for Thanksgiving and we get on an L-10l 1, you look Out at the jet engines and youll see those same Rs.
Hubcap, big deal. She handed it back.
Please, he said. If you own a Rolls-Royce, you call that a wheel covering. If youre rich enough to own a Rolls, you can strut a little. When I make my second million, Im going to buy myself one. Rolls-Royce Comiche. Then when Gage gets carsick, he can throw up into real leather. And just by the way, Ellie, whats on your mind? But it didnt work that way with Ellie. You didnt ask things right out. She was wary of giving too much of herself away. It was a trait Louis admired.
Are we rich, Daddy?
No, he said, but were not going away to starve either.
Michael Burns at school says all doctors are rich.
Well, you tell Michael Burns at school that lots of doctors get rich, but it takes twenty years.. and you dont get rich running a university infirmary. You get rich being a specialist. A gynecologist or an orthopedist or a neurologist. They get rich quicker. For utility infielders like me, it takes longer.
Then why dont you be a specialist, Daddy?
Louis thought of his models again and of-the way he had one day just not wanted to build any more warplanes, the way
he had likewise gotten tired of Tiger tanks and gun emplacements, the way he had come to believe (almost overnight, it seemed in retrospect) that building boats in bottles was pretty dumb; and then he thought of what it would be like to spend your whole life inspecting childrens feet for hammertoe or putting on the thin Latex gloves so you could grope along some womans vaginal canal with one educated finger, feeling for bumps or lesions.
I just wouldnt like it, he said.
Church came into the office, paused, inspected the situation with his bright green eyes. He leaped silently onto the windowsill and appeared to go to sleep.
Ellie glanced at him and frowned, which struck Louis as exceedingly odd. Usually Ellie looked at Church with an expression of love so sappy it was almost painful. She began to walk around the office, looking at various models, and in a voice that was nearly casual, she said, Boy, there were a lot of graves up in the Pet Sematary, werent there?
Ah, heres the nub, Louis thought but did not look around; after examining his instructions, he began putting the carriage lamps on the Rolls.
There were, he said. Better than a hundred, Id say.
Daddy, why dont pets live as long as people?
Well, some animals do live about as long, he said, and some live much longer. Elephants live a very long time, and there are some sea turtles so old that people really dont know how old they are or maybe they do, and they just cant believe it.
Ellie dismissed these simply enough. Elephants and sea turtles arent pets. Pets dont live very long at all. Michael Burns says that every year a dog lives, its like nine of our years.
Seven, Louis corrected automatically. I see what youre getting at, honey, and there& some truth to it. A dog who lives to be twelve is an old dog. See, theres this thing called metabolism, and what metabolism seems to do is tell time. Oh, it does other stuff too-some people can eat a lot and stay thin because of their metabolism, like your mother. Other people-me, for instance-just cant eat as much without getting fat. Our metabolisms are different, thats all. But
what metabolism seems to do most of all is to serve living things as a body clock. Dogs have a fairly rapid metabolism. The metabolism of human beings is much slower. We live to be about seventy-two, most of us. And believe me, seventy-two years is a very long time.
Because Ellie looked really worried, he hoped he sounded more sincere than he actually felt. He