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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmboth of us that she was going to shoot that dog for a stranger before she got much older.“But that day Spot just sat in the tub and let me wash him. He never moved at all. I didn’t like it. It waslike. . . like washing meat. I got an old piece of towel after I gave him his bath and dried him all off. Icould see the places where the barbed wire had hooked him—there was no fur in any of those places,and the flesh looked dimpled in. It is the way an old wound looks after it’s been healed five years andmore.”Louis nodded. In his line of work, he had seen such things from time to time. The wound never seemedto fill in completely, and that made him think of graves and his days as an undertaker's apprentice, andhow there was never enough dirt to fill them in again.“Then I saw his head. There was another of those dimples there, but the fur had grown back white in alittle circle. It was near his ear.”“Where your father shot him,” Louis said.Jud nodded.“Shooting a man or an animal in the head isn’t as sure-fire as it sounds, Jud. There are would-be suicidesin vegetable wards or even walking around right as rain who didn’t know that a bullet can strike theskull plate and travel right around it in a semicircle, exiting the other side without ever penetrating thebrain. I personally saw one case where a fellow shot himself above the right ear and died because thebullet went around his head and tore open his jugular vein on the other side of his head. That bullet pathlooked like a county roadmap.”Jud smiled and nodded. “I remember reading somethin like that in one of Norma’s newspapers, the Staror the Enquirer—one of those. But if my pop said Spot was gone, Louis, he was gone.”“All right,” Louis said. “If you say that’s how it was, that is how it was.”“Was your daughter’s cat gone?”“I sure thought it was,” Louis said.“You got to do better than that. You’re a doctor.”“You make it sound like ‘You got to do better than that, Louis, you’re God.’ I’m not God. It was dark—”“Sure, it was dark, and his head swiveled on his neck like it was full of ball bearings, and when youmoved him, he pulled outfile:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (128 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM