Pet Sematary

scales was that she must not see him this way, his feet muddy and coated with needles, the blankets tossed back onto the floor to reveal the muck-splashed ground sheet.
“I’m awake,” he called cheerfully. His tongue was bleeding from the sudden, involuntary bite he had given it. His mind swirled, and somewhere deep inside, away from the action, he wondered if he had always been within touching distance of such mad irrationalities; if everyone was.
“One egg or two?” She had stopped on the second or third riser. Thank God.
“Two,” he said, barely aware of what he was saying. “Scrambled.”
“Good for you,” she said, and went back downstairs again.
He closed his eyes briefly in relief, but in the darkness he saw Pascow’s silver eyes. His eyes flew open again. Louis began to move rapidly, putting off any further thought. He jerked the bedclothes off the bed. The blankets were okay.
He separated out the two sheets, balled them up, took them into the hallway, and dumped them down the laundry chute.
Almost running, he entered the bathroom, jerked the shower handle on, and stepped under water so hot it was nearly scalding, unmindful. He washed the dirt from his feet and legs.
He began to feel better, more in control. Drying off, it struck him that this was how murderers must feel when they believe they have gotten rid of all the evidence. He began to laugh. He went on drying himself, but he also went on laughing. He couldn’t seem to stop.
“Hey, up there!” Rachel called. “What’s so funny?”
“Private joke,” Louis called back, still laughing. He was frightened, but the fright didn’t stop the laughter. The laughter came, rising from a belly that was as hard as stones mortared into a wall. It occurred to him that shoving the sheets down the laundry chute was absolutely the best thing he could have done.
Missy Dandridge came in five days a week to vacuum, clean… and do the laundry. Rachel would never see those sheets at all until she put them back on the bed… clean. He supposed it was possible that Missy would mention it to Rachel, but he didn’t think so. She would probably whisper to her husband that the Creeds were playing some strange sex game that involved mud and pine needles instead of body paints.
This thought made Louis laugh all the harder.
The last of the giggles and chuckles dried up as he was dressing, and he realized that he felt a little better. How that could be he didn’t know, but he did. The room looked normal now except for the stripped bed. He had gotten rid of the poison. Maybe “evidence” was actually the word he was looking for, but in his mind it felt like poison.
Perhaps this is what people do with the inexplicable, he thought. This is what they do with the irrational that refuses to be broken down into the normal causes and effects that run the Western world. Maybe this was how your mind coped with the flying saucer you saw hovering silently over your back field one morning, casting its own tight little pool of shadow; the rain of frogs; the hand from under the bed that stroked your bare foot in the dead of night. There was a giggling fit or a crying fit… and since it was its own inviolable self and would not break down, you simply passed terror intact, like a kidney stone.
Gage was in his chair, eating Cocoa Bears and decorating the table with it. He was decorating the plastic mat under his high chair with Cocoa Bears and apparently shampooing with it.
Rachel came out of the kitchen with his eggs and a cup of coffee. “What was the big joke, Lou? You were laughing like a loon up there. Scared me a little.”
Louis opened his mouth with no idea of what he was going to say, and what came out was a joke he had heard the week before at the corner market down the road-something about a Jewish tailor who bought a parrot whose only line was “Ariel Sharon jerks off.”
By the time he finished, Rachel was laughing too-so was Cage for that matter.
Fine. Our hero has taken care of all the evidence-to wit: the muddy sheets and the loony laughter in the bathroom. Our hero will now read the morning paper-or at least look at it-putting the seal of normality on the morning.
So thinking, Louis opened the paper.
That’s what you do, all right, he thought with immeasurable relief. You pass it like a stone, and that’s the end of it… unless there comes a campfire some night with friends when the wind is high and the talk turns to inexplicable events. Because on campfire nights when the wind is high, talk is cheap.
He ate his eggs. He kissed Rachel and Gage. He glanced at the square, white-painted laundry cabinet at the foot of the chute only as he left.
Everything was okay. It was another knockout of a morning. Late summer showed every sign of just going on forever,