Pet Sematary(20)

So instead of asking, he only kissed her again and went out.

It was a good start, a good day. Maine was putting on a late-summer show, the sky was blue and cloudless, the temperature pegged at an utterly perfect seventy-two degrees. Rolling to the end of the driveway and checking for traffic, Louis mused that so far he hadn't seen so much as a trace of the fall foliage that was supposed to be so spectacular. But he could wait.

He pointed the Honda Civic they had picked up as a second car toward the university and let it roll. Rachel would call the vet this morning, they would get Church fixed, and that would put this whole nonsense of Pet Semataries (it was funny how that misspelling got into your head and began to seem right) and death fears behind them. There was no need to be thinking about death on a beautiful September morning like this one.

Louis turned on the radio and dialed until he found the Ramones belting out "Rockaway Beach." He turned it up and sang along-not well but with lusty enjoyment.

12

The first thing he noticed turning into the university grounds was how suddenly and spectacularly the traffic swelled. There was car traffic, bike traffic, there were joggers by the score. He had to stop quickly to avoid two of the latter coming from the direction of Dunn Hall. Louis braked hard enough to lock his shoulder belt and honked. He was always annoyed at the way joggers (bicyclers had the same irritating habit) seemed to automatically assumed that their responsibility lapsed completely at the moment they began to run. They were, after all, exercising. One of them gave Louis the finger without ever looking around. Louis sighed and drove on.

The second thing was that the ambulance was gone from its slot in the small infirmary parking lot, and that gave him a nasty start. The infirmary was equipped to treat almost any illness or accident on a short-term basis; there were three well-equipped examination-and-treatment rooms opening off the big foyer, and beyond this were two wards with fifteen beds each. But there was no operating theater, nor anything even resembling one. In case of serious accidents, there was the ambulance, which would rush an injured or seriously ill person to the Eastern Maine Medical Center. Steve Masterton, the physician's assistant who had given Louis his first tour of the facility, had shown Louis the log from the previous two academic years with justifiable pride; there had only been thirty-eight ambulance runs in that time... not bad when you considered that the student population here was over ten thousand and the total university population was almost seventeen thousand.

And here he was, on his first real day of work, with the ambulance gone.

He parked in the slot headed with a freshly painted sign reading RESERVED FOR DR. CREED and hurried in.

He found Charlton, a graying but lithe woman of about fifty, in the first examining room, taking the temperature of a girl who was wearing jeans and a halter top. The girl had gotten a bad sunburn not too long ago, Louis observed; the peeling was well advanced.

"Good morning, Joan," he said. "Where's the ambulance?"

"Oh, we had a real tragedy, all right," Charlton said, taking the thermometer out of the student's mouth and reading it. "Steve Masterton came in this morning at seven and saw a great big puddle under the engine and the front wheels.

Radiator let go. They hauled it away."

"Great," Louis said, but he felt relieved nonetheless. At least it wasn't out on a run, which was what he had first feared; "When do we get it back?"

Joan Chariton laughed. "Knowing the University Motor Pool," she said, "it'll come back around December fifteenth wrapped in Christmas ribbon." She glanced at the student. "You've got half a degree of fever," she said. "Take two aspirins and stay out of bars and dark alleys."

The girl got down. She gave Louis a quick appraising glance and then went out.

"Our first customer of the new semester," Charlton said sourly. She began to shake the thermometer down with brisk snaps.

"You don't seem too pleased about it."

"I know the type," she said. "Oh, we get the other type too-athletes who go on playing with bone chips and tendonitis and everything else because they don't want to be benched, they got to be macho men, not let the ream down, even if they're jeopardizing pro careers later on. Then you've got little Miss Half-Degree of Fever-" She jerked her head toward the window, where Louis could see the girl with the peeling sunburn walking in the direction of the Gannett Cumberland-Androscoggin complex of dorms. In the examining room the girl had given the impression of being someone who did not feel well at all but was trying not to let on. Now she was walking briskly, her hips swinging prettily, noticing and being noticed.
Chapter 5

"Your basic college hypochondriac." Charlton dropped the thermometer into a sterilizer. "We'll see her two dozen times this year. Her visits will be more frequent before each round of prelims. A week or so before finals, she'll be convinced she has either mono or pneumonia. Bronchitis is the fall-back position. She'll get out of four or five tests-the ones where the instructors are wimps, to use the word they use-and get easier makeups. They always get sicker if they know the prelim or final is going to be an objective test rather than an essay exam."

"My, aren't we cynical this morning," Louis said. He was, in fact, a little nonplussed.

She tipped him a wink that made him grin. 'I don't take it to heart. Doctor.

Neither should you"