Pet Sematary(13)

"Are we rich, Daddy?"

"No," he said, "but we're 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 don't 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 don't 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 children's feet for hammertoe or putting on the thin Latex gloves so you could grope along some woman's vaginal canal with one educated finger, feeling for bumps or lesions.

"I just wouldn't 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, weren't there?"

Ah, here's 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, I'd say."

"Daddy, why don't 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 don't know how old they are... or maybe they do, and they just can't believe it."

Ellie dismissed these simply enough. "Elephants and sea turtles aren't pets.

Pets don't live very long at all. Michael Burns says that every year a dog lives, it's like nine of our years."

"Seven," Louis corrected automatically. "I see what you're getting at, honey, and there' amp; some truth to it. A dog who lives to be twelve is an old dog. See, there's 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 can't eat as much without getting fat. Our metabolisms are different, that's 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 was thirty-five, and it seemed to him that those years had passed as quickly and ephemerally as a momentary draft under a door. "Sea turtles, now, have an even slower metabo-"

"What about cats?" Ellie asked and looked at Church again.

"Well, cats live as long as dogs," he said, "mostly, anyway." This was a lie, and he knew it. Cats lived violent lives and often died bloody deaths, always just below the usual range of human sight. Here was Church, dozing in the sun (or appearing to), Church who slept peacefully on his daughter's bed every night, Church who had been so cute as a kitten, all tangled up in a ball of string. And yet Louis had seen him stalk a bird with a broken wing, his green eyes sparkling with curiosity and-yes, Louis would have sworn it-cold delight.

He rarely killed what he stalked, but there had been one notable exception-a large rat, probably caught in the alley between their apartment house and the next. Church had really put the blocks to that baby. It had been so bloody and gore-flecked that Rachel, then in her sixth month with Gage, had had to run into the bathroom and vomit. Violent lives, violent deaths. A dog got them and ripped them open instead of just chasing them like the bumbling, easily fooled dogs in the TV cartoons, or another torn got them, or a poisoned bait, or a passing car.

Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.

But those were maybe not things to tell your five-year-old daughter, who was for the first time examining the facts of death.

"I mean," he said, "Church is only three now, and you're five. He might still be alive when you're fifteen, a sophomore in high school. And that's a long time away."

"It doesn't seem long to me," Ellie said, and now her voice trembled. "Not long at all."-Louis gave up the pretense of working on his model and gestured for her to come.

She sat on his lap, and he was again struck by her beauty, which was emphasized now by her emotional upset. She was dark-skinned, almost Levantine. Tony Benton, one of the doctors he had worked with in Chicago, used to call her the Indian Princess.

"Honey," he said, "if it was up to me, I'd let Church live to be a hundred. But I don't make the rules."