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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm“Louis? Fraid maybe you’ve got a little spot of trouble.”He swung out of bed, still trying to scrub the sleep out of his mind. “Jud? What trouble?”“Well, there’s a dead cat over here on our lawn,” Jud said. “I think it might be your daughter’s.”“Church?” Louis asked. There was a sudden sinking in his belly. “Are you sure, Jud?"“No, I ain’t one hundred percent sure,” Jud said, “but it sure looks like him.”“Oh. Oh shit. I’ll be right over, Jud.”“All right, Louis.”He hung up and just sat there for a minute longer. Then he went in and used the bathroom, put his shoeson, and went downstairs.Well, maybe it isn’t Church. Jud himself said he wasn’t one hundred percent sure. Christ, the cat doesn’teven want to go upstairs anymore unless someone carries him . . . why would he cross the road?But in his heart he felt sure that it was Church . . . and if Rachel called this evening as she almostcertainly would, what was he going to say to Ellie?Crazily, he heard himself saying to Rachel: I know that anything, literally anything, can happen tophysical beings. As a doctor I know that. . . do you want to be the one to explain to her what happened ifhe gets run over in the road? But he hadn’t really believed anything was going to happen to Church, hadhe?He remembered one of the guys he played poker with, Wickes Sullivan, asking him once how he couldget horny for his wife and not get horny for the naked women he saw day in and day out. Louis had triedto explain to him that it wasn’t the way people imagined in their fantasies—a woman coming in to get aPap smear or to learn how to give herself a breast self-examination didn’t suddenly drop a sheet andstand there like Venus on the half-shell. You saw a breast, a vulva, a thigh. The rest was draped in asheet, and there was a nurse in attendance, more to protect the doctor’s reputation than anything else.Wicky wasn’t buying it. A tit is a tit, was Wicky’s thesis, and a twat is a twat. You should either behorny all the time or none of the time. All Louis could respond was that your wife’s tit was different.Just like your family’s supposed to be different, he thought now. Church wasn’t supposed to get killedbecause he was inside the magic circle of the family. What he hadn’t been able to make Wickyunderstand was that doctors compartmentalized just as cheerfully and blindly as anyone else. A titwasn’t a tit unless it was your wife’s tit. In the office, a tit was a case. You could stand up in front of amedical colloquium and cite leukemia figures in children until you were blue in the face and still notfile:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Ste...%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (91 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM