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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmRachel joined them, also weeping, crying out to Gage, “Never run in the road, Gage! Never, never,never! The road is bad! Bad!” And Gage was so astonished at this tearful lecture that he left off cryingand goggled up at his mother.“Louis, your nose is bleeding,” she said and then hugged him so suddenly and strongly that for amoment he could barely breathe.“That isn’t the worst of it,” he said. “I think I’m sterile, Rachel. Oh boy, the pain.”And she laughed so hysterically that for a few moments he was frightened for her, and the thoughtcrossed his mind: If Gage really had been killed, I believe it would have driven her crazy.But Gage was not killed; all of that had only been a hellishly detailed moment of imagination as Louisoutraced his son’s death across a green lawn on a sunshiny May afternoon.Gage went to grammar school, and at the age of seven he began going to camp, where he showed awonderful and surprising aptitude for swimming. He also gave his parents a rather glum surprise byproving himself able to handle a month’s separation with no noticeable psychic trauma. By the time hewas ten, he was spending the entire summer away at Camp Agawam in Raymond, and at eleven he wontwo blue ribbons and a red one at the Four Camps Swimathon that ended the summer’s activities. Hegrew tall, and yet through it all he was the same Gage, sweet and rather surprised at the things the worldheld out .and for Gage, the fruit was somehow never bitter or rotten.He was an honors student in high school and a member of the swimming team at John Bapst, theparochial school he had insisted on attending because of its swimming facilities. Rachel was upset,Louis not particularly surprised when, at seventeen, Gage announced his intention to convert toCatholicism. Rachel believed that all of it was because of the girl Gage was going out with; she sawmarriage in his immediate future (“if that little slut with the St. Christopher’s medal isn’t balling him,I’ll eat your shorts, Louis,” she said), the wreckage of his college plans and his Olympic hopes, and nineor ten little Catholics running around by the time Gage was forty. By then he would be (according toRachel, anyway) a cigar-smoking truck driver with a beer belly, Our-Fathering and Hail-Marying hisway into precardiac oblivion.Louis suspected his son’s motives were rather more pure, and although Gage converted (and on the dayhe actually did the deed, Louis sent an unabashedly nasty postcard to Irwin Goldman; it read, Perhapsyou’ll have a Jesuit grandson yet. Your goy son-in-law, Louis), he did not marry the rather nice (anddecidedly unslutty) girl he had dated through most of his senior year.He went on to Johns Hopkins, made the Olympic swimming team, and on one long, dazzling, andfile:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (221 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM