"You look very nice."
"Yeah, I know. But do I look like a heart surgeon? A two-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year man?"
"No, just old Lou Creed," she said and giggled. "The rock-and-roll animal."
Louis glanced at his watch. "The rock-and-roll animal has got to put on his boogie shoes and go," he said.
"Are you nervous?"
"Yeah, a little."
"Don't be," she said. "It's sixty-seven thousand dollars a year for putting on Ace bandages, prescribing for the flu and for hangovers, giving girls the pill-"
"Don't forget the crab-and-louse lotion," Louis said, smiling again. One of the things that had surprised him on his first tour of the infirmary had been the supplies of Quell, which seemed to him enormous-more fitted to an army base infirmary than to one on a middle-sized university campus.
Miss Charlton, the head nurse, had smiled cynically. "Off campus apartments in the area are pretty tacky. You'll see. " He supposed he would.
"Have a good day," she said and kissed him again, lingeringly. But when she pulled away, she was mock-stem. "And for Christ's sake remember that you're an administrator, not an intern or a second-year resident!"
"Yes, Doctor," Louis said humbly, and they both laughed again. For a moment he thought of asking: Was it Zelda, babe? is that what's got under your skin? Is that the zone of low pressure?
Zelda and how she died? But he wasn't going to ask her that, not now. As a doctor he knew a lot of things, and while the fact that death was just as natural as childbirth might be the greatest of them, the fact that you don't monkey with a wound that has finally started to heal was far from the least of them.
So instead of asking, he only kissed her again and went out.
It was a good start, a good day. Maine was putting on a late-summer show, the sky was blue and cloudless, the temperature pegged at an utterly perfect seventy-two degrees. Rolling to the end of the driveway and checking for traffic, Louis mused that so far he hadn't seen so much as a trace of the fall foliage that was supposed to be so spectacular. But he could wait.
He pointed the Honda Civic they had picked up as a second car toward the university and let it roll. Rachel would call the vet this morning, they would get Church fixed, and that would put this whole nonsense of Pet Semataries (it was funny how that misspelling got into your head and began to seem right) and death fears behind them. There was no need to be thinking about death on a beautiful September morning like this one.
Louis turned on the radio and dialed until he found the Ramones belting out "Rockaway Beach." He turned it up and sang along-not well but with lusty enjoyment.
12
The first thing he noticed turning into the university grounds was how suddenly and spectacularly the traffic swelled. There was car traffic, bike traffic, there were joggers by the score. He had to stop quickly to avoid two of the latter coming from the direction of Dunn Hall. Louis braked hard enough to lock his shoulder belt and honked. He was always annoyed at the way joggers (bicyclers had the same irritating habit) seemed to automatically assumed that their responsibility lapsed completely at the moment they began to run. They were, after all, exercising. One of them gave Louis the finger without ever looking around. Louis sighed and drove on.
The second thing was that the ambulance was gone from its slot in the small infirmary parking lot, and that gave him a nasty start. The infirmary was equipped to treat almost any illness or accident on a short-term basis; there were three well-equipped examination-and-treatment rooms opening off the big foyer, and beyond this were two wards with fifteen beds each. But there was no operating theater, nor anything even resembling one. In case of serious accidents, there was the ambulance, which would rush an injured or seriously ill person to the Eastern Maine Medical Center. Steve Masterton, the physician's assistant who had given Louis his first tour of the facility, had shown Louis the log from the previous two academic years with justifiable pride; there had only been thirty-eight ambulance runs in that time... not bad when you considered that the student population here was over ten thousand and the total university population was almost seventeen thousand.
And here he was, on his first real day of work, with the ambulance gone.
He parked in the slot headed with a freshly painted sign reading RESERVED FOR DR. CREED and hurried in.
He found Charlton, a graying but lithe woman of about fifty, in the first examining room, taking the temperature of a girl who was wearing jeans and a halter top. The girl had gotten a bad sunburn not too long ago, Louis observed; the peeling was well advanced.
"Good morning, Joan," he said. "Where's the ambulance?"
"Oh, we had a real tragedy, all right," Charlton said, taking the thermometer out of the student's mouth and reading it. "Steve Masterton came in this morning at seven and saw a great big puddle under the engine and the front wheels.