Pet Sematary(89)

Louis listened to the early spring wind gust around the house, sending big blinkers of light and shadow across Mrs. Vinton's field next door, and he suddenly thought of the Vulture he had bought on a whim five or six weeks before, while on his way home from the university. Had he bought twine as well? He had, by God!

"Gage!" he said. Gage had found a green Crayola under the couch and was currently scribbling in one of Ellie's favorite books-something else to feed the fires of sibling rivalry, Louis thought and grinned. If Ellie got really pissy about the scribbles Gage had managed to put in Where the Wild Things Are before Louis could get it away from him, Louis would simply mention the unique treasure he had uncovered in Gage's Pampers.

"What!" Gage responded smartly. He was talking pretty well now; Louis had decided the kid might actually be half-bright.

"You wanna go out?"

"Wanna go out!" Gage agreed excitedly. "Wanna go out. Where my neeks, Daddy?"

This sentence, if reproduced phonetically, would have looked something like this: Weh ma neeks, Dah-dee? The translation was Where are my sneakers, Father?

Louis was often struck by Gage's speech, not because it was cute, but because he thought that small children all sounded like immigrants learning a foreign language in some helter-skelter but fairly amiable way. He knew that babies make all the sounds the human voice box is capable of... the liquid trill that proves so difficult for first-year French students, the glottal grunts and clicks of the Australian bush people, the thickened, abrupt consonants of German. They lose the capability as they learn English, and Louis wondered now (and not for the first time) if childhood was not more a period of forgetting than of learning.

Gage's neeks were finally found... they were also under the couch. One of Louis's other beliefs was that in families with small children, the area under living room couches begins after a while to develop a strong and mysterious electromagnetic force that eventually sucks in all sorts of litter-everything from bottles and diaper pins to green Crayolas and old issues of Sesame Street magazine with food mouldering between the pages.

Gage's jacket, however, wasn't under the couch-it was halfway down the stairs.

His Red Sox cap, without which Gage refused to leave the house, was the most difficult of all to find because it was where it belonged-in the closet. That was, naturally, the last place they looked.

"Where goin, Daddy?" Gage asked companionably, giving his father his hand.

"Going over in Mrs. Vinton's field," he said. "Gonna go fly a kite, my man."

"Kiiiyte?" Gage asked doubtfully.

"You'll like it," Louis said. "Wait a minute, kiddo."

They were in the garage now. Louis found his keyring, unlocked the little storage closet, and turned on the light. He rummaged through the closet and found the Vulture, still in its store bag with the sales slip stapled to it. He had bought it in the depths of mid-February, when his soul had cried out for some hope.

"Lat?" Gage asked. This was Gage-ese for "Whatever in the world might you have there, Father?"

"It's the kite," Louis said and pulled it out of the bag. Gage watched, interested, as Louis unfurled the Vulture, which spread its wings over perhaps five feet of tough plastic. Its bulgy, bloodshot eyes stared out at them from its small head atop its scrawny, pinkly naked neck.

"Birt!" Gage yelled. "Birt, Daddy! Got a birt!"

"Yeah, it's a bird," Louis agreed, slipping the sticks into the pockets at the back of the kite and rummaging again for the five hundred feet of kite twine that he had bought the same day. He looked back over his shoulder and repeated to Gage: "You're gonna like it, big guy."

Gage liked it.

They took the kite over into Mrs. Vinton's field and Louis got it up into the blowy late-March sky first shot, although he had not flown a kite since he was.

... what? Twelve? Nineteen years ago? God, that was horrible.

Mrs. Vinton was a woman of almost Jud's age but immeasurably more frail. She lived in a brick house at the head of her field, but now she came out only rarely. Behind the house, the field ended and the woods began-the woods that led first to the Pet Sematary and then to the Micmac burying ground beyond it.

"Kite's flyne, Daddy!" Gage screamed.

"Yeah, look at it go!" Louis bellowed back, laughing and excited. He payed out kite twine so fast that the string grew hot and branded thin fire across his palm. "Look at that Vulture, Gage! She's goin to beat shit!"

"Beat-shit!" Gage cried and laughed, high and joyously. The sun sailed out from behind a fat gray spring cloud, and the temperature seemed to go up five degrees almost at once. They stood in the bright, unreliable warmth of March straining to be April in the high dead grass of Mrs. Vinton's field; above them the Vulture soared up toward the blue, higher, its plastic wings spread taut against that steady current of air, still higher, and as he had done as a child, Louis felt himself going up to it, going into it, staring down as the world took on its actual shape, the one cartographers must see in their dreams; Mrs. Vinton's field, as white and still as cobwebs following the retreat of the snow, not just a field now but a large parallelogram bounded by rock walls on two of its sides, and then the road at the bottom, a straight black seam, and the river valley-the Vulture saw it all with its soaring, bloodshot eyes. It saw the river like a cool gray band of steel, chunks of ice still floating in it; on the other side it saw Hampden, Newburgh, Winterport, with a ship at dock; perhaps it saw the St. Regis Mill at Bucksport below its steaming fume of cloud, or even land's end itself, where the Atlantic pounded the naked rock.