Pet Sematary

that horses must feel much the same free-floating anxiety when they smell the first smoke of a prairie fire. He began expecting Goldman to reveal at any moment that he knew Louis had been sleeping with his daughter.
When Goldman instead made his incredible offer-even going so far as to take his checkbook from the pocket of his smoking jacket like a rake in a Noel Coward farce-Louis had blown up. He accused Goldman of trying to keep his daughter like an exhibit in a museum, of having no regard for anyone but himself, and of being an overbearing, thoughtless bastard. It would be a long time before he would admit to himself that part of his rage had been relief.
All of these little insights into Irwin Goldman’s character, though perhaps true, had no redeeming touch of diplomacy in them. Any semblance of Noel Coward departed; if there was humor in the rest of the conversation, it was of a much more vulgar sort. Goldman told him to get out and that if he ever saw Louis on his doorstep again, he would shoot him like a yellow dog. Louis told Goldman to take his checkbook and plug up his ass with it. Goldman said he had seen bums in the gutter who had more potential than Louis Creed. Louis told Goldman he could also shove his goddam BankAmericard and his American Express Gold Card right up there beside his checkbook.
None of this had been a promising first step toward good relations with the future in-laws.
In the end Rachel had brought them around (after each man had had a chance to repent of the things he had said, although neither of them had ever changed his mind in the slightest about the other). There was no more melodrama, certainly no dismally theatrical from-this-day-forward-I-have-no-daughter scene. Goldman would have probably suffered through Rachel’s marriage to the Creature from the Black Lagoon before denying her. Nevertheless the face rising above the collar of Irwin Goldman’s morning coat on the day Louis married Rachel had greatly resembled the faces sometimes seen carved on Egyptian sarcophagi. Their wedding present had been a six-place setting of Spode china and a microwave oven. No money. For most of Louis’s harum-scarum med school days, Rachel had worked as a clerk in a women’s apparel store. And from that day to this day, Rachel only knew that things had been and continued to be “tense” between her husband and her parents… particularly between Louis and her father.
Louis could have gone to Chicago with his family, although the university schedule would have meant flying back three days earlier than Rachel and the kids. That was no great hardship. On the other hand, four days with Im-Ho-Tep and his wife the Sphinx would have been.
The children had melted his in-laws a good deal, as children often do. Louis suspected that he himself could have completed the rapprochement simply by pretending he had forgotten that evening in Goldman’s study. It wouldn’t even matter that Goldman knew he was pretending. But the fact was (and he at least had the guts to be up front about it with himself) that he did not quite want to make the rapprochement. Ten years was a long time, but it was not quite long enough to take away the slimy taste that had come into his mouth when, in Goldman’s study over glasses of brandy, the old man had opened one side of that idiotic smoking jacket and removed the checkbook residing within. Yes, he had felt relief that the nights-five of them in all-that he and Rachel had spent in his narrow, sagging apartment bed had not been discovered, but that surprised disgust had been quite its own thing, and the years between then and now had not changed it.
He could have come, but he preferred to send his father-in-law his grandchildren, his daughter, and a message.
The Delta 727 pulled away from the rampway, turned… and he saw Ellie at one of the front windows, waving frantically. Louis waved back, smiling, and then someone-Ellie or Rachel-hiked Gage into the window. Louis waved, and Gage waved back-perhaps seeing him, perhaps only imitating Ellie.
“Fly my people safe,” he muttered, then zipped his coat and went out to the parking lot. Here the wind whined and zoomed with force enough to almost tear his hunter’s cap off his head, and he clapped a hand to it. He fumbled with his keys to unlock the driver’s side door of his car and then turned as the jet rose beyond the terminal building, its nose tilted upward into the hard blue, its turbos thundering.
Feeling very lonely indeed now-ridiculously close to tears-Louis waved again.
He was still feeling blue that evening when he recrossed Route 15 after a couple of beers with Jud and Norma-Norma had drunk a glass of wine, something she was allowed, even encouraged to have, by Dr. Weybridge. They had moved into the kitchen