Pet Sematary(113)

Louis thought about Hanratty, the bull. Hanratty, Jud said, had turned mean. So, in his way, had Timmy Baterman. Hanratty had later been "put down" by the same man who had somehow dragged the bull's body up to the Micmac burying ground on a sledge. Timmy Baterman had been "put down" by his father.

But because Hanratty had gone bad, did that mean that all animals went bad? No.

Hanratty the bull did not prove the general case; Hanratty was in fact an exception to the general case. Look back at the other animals-Jud's dog Spot, the old woman's parakeet, Church himself. They had all come back changed, and the change had been noticeable in all cases, but in the case of Spot, at least, the change hadn't been so great that Jud had forborne to recommend the process of... of...

(resurrection) Yes, of resurrection to a friend years later. Of course, farther down the line he had tried to justify and hem and haw, and had spouted a lot of ominous, confused bullshit that could not even rightly be called philosophy.

How could he refuse to take the chance available to him-this one, unbelievable chance-on the basis of the Timmy Baterman story? One swallow did not a summer make.

You're slanting all the evidence in favor 'of the conclusion you want to produce, his mind protested. At least tell yourself the goddamned truth about the change in Church. Even if you want to disqualify the animals-the mice and the birds-what about the way he is? Muddled... that's the best word of all, that sums it up. The day we were out with the kite. You remember how Gage was that day? How vibrant and alive he was, reacting to everything? Wouldn't it be better to remember him that way? Do you want to resurrect a zombie from a grade-B horror picture? Or even something so prosaic as a retarded little boy? A boy who eats with his fingers and stares blankly at images on the TV screen and who will never learn to write his own name? What did Jud say about his dog? "It was like washing a piece of meat." Is that what you want? A piece of breathing meat? And even if you're able to be satisfied with that, how do you explain the return of your son from the dead to your wife? To your daughter? To Steve Masterton? To the world? What happens the first time Missy Dandridge pulls into the driveway and sees Gage riding his trike in the yard? Can't you hear her screams, Louis? Can't you see her harrowing her face with her fingernails? What do you say to the reporters? What do you say when a film crew from "Real People"

turns up on your doorstep, wanting to shoot film of your resurrected son?

Did any of this really matter, or was it only the voice of cowardice? Did he believe these things could not be dealt With? That Rachel would greet her dead son with anything but tears of joy?

Yes, he supposed there was a real possibility that Gage might return... well... diminished. But would that change the quality of his love? Parents loved children who were born blind, children born as Siamese twins, children who were born with their guts abysmally rearranged. Parents pled for judicial mercy or executive clemency on behalf of children who had grown up to commit rape and murder and the torture of the innocent.

Did he believe it would be impossible for him to love Gage even if Gage had to go on wearing diapers until he was eight? If he did not master the first-grade primer until he was twelve? If he never mastered it at all? Could he simply dismiss his son as a.

a sort of divine abortion, when there was another recourse?

But, Louis, my God, you don't live in a vacuum! People will say-He cut that thought off with rude, angry force. Of all the things not to consider now, public notice was probably the greatest of them.

Louis glanced down at the raked dirt of Gage's grave and felt a wave of awe and horror course through him. Unknowing, moving by themselves, his fingers had drawn a pattern in the dirt-he had drawn a spiral.

He swept the fingers of both hands through the dirt, rubbing the pattern out.

Then he left Pleasantview, hurrying, feeling very much a trespasser now, believing that he would be seen, stopped, questioned at every turn of the path.

He was late collecting his pizza, and although it had been left on top of one of the big ovens, it was semicold and greasy and every bit as tasty as cooked clay.

Louis ate one piece and then tossed the rest out the window, box and all, as he headed back to Ludlow. He wasn't a litterbug by nature, but he did not want Rachel to see a mostly uneaten pizza at home in the wastebasket. It might raise a surmise in her mind-that a pizza wasn't really what he'd had in mind when he went to Bangor.

Louis now began to think about the time and circumstance.

Time. Time might be of extreme, even crucial, importance. Timmy Baterman had been dead a good while before his father could get him up to the Micmac burying ground. Timmy was shot the nineteenth... Timmy was buried-don't hold me to this, but I think it was July twenty-second. It was four or five days later that Marjorie Washburn... saw Timmy walking up the road.

All right, say that Bill Baterman had done it four days after his son's original interral... no. If he was going to err, let him err on the side of conservatism. Say three days. For the sake of argument, assume that Timmy Baterman returned from the dead on July twenty-fifth. That made six days between the boy's death and his return, and that was a conservative estimate. It might have been as long as ten days. For Gage, it had now been four days. Time had already gotten away from him to a degree, but it was still possible to cut Bifi Baterman's best time considerably. If If he could bring about circumstances similar to those which had made the resurrection of Church possible. Because Church had died at the best possible time, hadn't he? His family had been away when Church was struck and killed. No one was the wiser, except for him and Jud.