Cujo Read online

  He was continually thirsty, but he had already begun to shy away from his water dish some of the time, and when he did drink, the water tasted like steel shavings. The water made his teeth ache. The water sent bolts of pain through his eyes. And now he lay on the grass, not caring about the lightning bugs or anything else. The voices of THE MEN were unimportant rumbles coming from somewhere above him. They meant little to him compared to his own growing misery.

  "Boston!" Gary Pervier said, and cackled. "Boston! What the hell are you going to do in Boston, and what makes you think I could afford to tag along? I don't think I got enough to go down to the Norge until I get my check cashed."

  "Fuck you, you're rolling in it," Joe replied. He was getting pretty drunk. "You might have to dig into what's in your mattress a little, that's all."

  "Nothing in there but bedbugs," Gary said, and cackled again. "Place is crawlin with em, and I don't give a shit. You ready for another blast?"

  Joe held out his glass. Gary had the makings right beside his chair. He mixed in the dark with the practiced, steady, and heavy hand of the chronic drinker.

  "Boston!" He said again, handing Joe his drink. He said slyly, "Kickin up your heels a little, Joey, I guess." Gary was the only man in Castle Rock--perhaps the world--who could have gotten away with calling him Joey. "Kickin up some whoopee, I guess. Never known you to go further than Portsmouth before."

  "I been to Boston once or twice," Joe said. "You better look out, Pervert, or I'll sic my dog on you."

  "You couldn't sic that dog on a yellin nigger with a straight razor in each hand," Gary said. He reached down and ruffled Cujo's fur briefly. "What's your wife say about it?"

  "She don't know we're goin. She don't have to know."

  "Oh, yeah?"

  "She's takin the boy down to Connecticut to see her sister 'n' that freak she's married to. They're gonna be gone a week. She won some money in the lottery. Might as well tell you that right out. They use all the names on the radio, anyway. It's all in the prize form she had to sign."

  "Won some money in the lottery, did she?"

  "Five thousand dollars."

  Gary whistled. Cujo flicked his ears uncomfortably at the sound.

  Joe told Gary what Charity had told him at supper, leaving out the argument and making it appear a straight trade that had been his idea: The boy could go down to Connecticut for a week with her, and up to Moosehead for a week with him in the fall.

  "And you're gonna go down to Boston and spend some of that dividend yourself, you dirty dog," Gary said. He clapped Joe on the shoulder and laughed. "Oh, you're a one, all right."

  "Why shouldn't I? You know when the last time was I had a day off? I don't. Can't remember. I ain't got much on this week. I'd planned to take most of a day and a half pulling the motor on Richie's International, doing a valve job and all, but with that chainfall it won't take four hours. I'll get him to bring it in tomorrow and I can do it tomorrow afternoon. I got a transmission job, but that's just a teacher. From the grammar school. I can put that back. A few other things the same way. I'll just call em up and tell em I'm having a little holiday."

  "What you gonna do down in Beantown?"

  "Well, maybe see the Dead Sox play a couple at Fenway. Go down there to Washington Street--"

  "The combat zone! Hot damn, I knew it!" Gary snorted laughter and slapped his leg. "See some of those dirty shows and try to catch the clap!"

  "Wouldn't be very much fun alone."

  "Well, I guess I could tag along with you if you was willin to put some of that money my way until I get my check cashed."

  "I'd do that," Joe said. Gary was a drunkard, but he took a debt seriously.

  "I ain't been with a woman for about four years, I guess," Gary said reminiscently. "Lost most of the old sperm factory over there in France. What's left, sometimes it works, sometimes it don't. Might be fun to find out if I still got any ram left in my ramrod."

  "Ayuh," Joe said. He was slurring now, and his ears were buzzing. "And don't forget the baseball. You know when the last time was I went to Fenway?"

  "No."

  "Nineteen-six-ty-eight," Joe said, leaning forward and tapping out each syllable on Gary's arm for emphasis. He spilled most of his new drink in the process. "Before my kid was born. They played the Tigers and lost six to four, those suckers. Norm Cash hit a homer in the top of the eighth."

  "When you thinking of going?"

  "Monday afternoon around three, I thought The wife and the boy will want to go out that morning, I guess. I'll take them in to the Greyhound station in Portland. That gives me the rest of the morning and half the afternoon to catch up whatever I have to catch up."

  "You takin the car or the truck?"

  "Car."

  Gary's eyes went soft and dreamy in the dark. "Booze, baseball, and broads," he said. He sat up straighter. "I don't give a shit if I do."

  "You want to go?"

  "Ayuh."

  Joe let out a little whoop and they both got laughing. Neither noticed that Cujo's head had come off his paws at the sound and that he was growling very softly.

  Monday morning dawned in shades of pearl and dark gray; the fog was so thick that Brett Camber couldn't see the oak in the side yard from his window, and that oak wasn't but thirty yards away.

  The house still slept around him, but there was no more sleep left in him. He was going on a trip, and every part of his being vibrated with that news. Just he and his mother. It would be a good trip, he felt that, and deep down inside, beyond any conscious thought, he was glad his father wasn't coming. He would be free to be himself; he would not have to try to live up to some mysterious ideal of masculinity that he knew his father had achieved but which he himself couldn't yet even begin to comprehend. He felt good--incredibly good and incredibly alive. He felt sorry for anyone in the world who was not going on a trip this fine, foggy morning, which would be another scorcher as soon as the fog burned off. He planned to sit in a window seat of the bus and watch every mile of the journey from the Greyhound terminal on Spring Street all the way to Stratford. It had been a long time before he had been able to get to sleep last night and here it was, not yet five o'clock . . . but if he stayed in bed any longer, he would explode, or something.

  Moving as quietly as he could, he put on jeans and his Castle Rock Cougars T-shirt, a pair of white athletic socks, and his Keds. He went downstairs and fixed himself a bowl of Cocoa Bears. He tried to eat quietly but was sure that the crunch of the cereal that he heard in his head must be audible all over the house. Upstairs he heard his dad grunt and turn over in the double bed he and his mom shared. The springs rasped. Brett's jaws froze. After a moment's debate he took his second bowl of Cocoa Bears out on the back porch, being careful not to let the screen door slam.

  The summer smells of everything were greatly clarified in the heavy fog, and the air was already warm. In the east, just above the faint fuzz that marked a belt of pines at the end of the east pasture, he could see the sun. It was as small and silver-bright as the full moon when it has risen well up in the sky. Even now the humidity was a dense thing, heavy and quiet. The fog would be gone by eight or nine, but the humidity would remain.

  But for now what Brett saw was a white, secret world, and he was filled with the secret joys of it: the husky smell of hay that would be ready for its first cutting in a week, of manure, of his mother's roses. He could even faintly make out the aroma of Gary Pervier's triumphant honeysuckle which was slowly burying the fence which marked the edge of his property--burying it in a drift of cloying, grasping vines.

  He put his cereal bowl aside and walked toward where he knew the barn to be. Halfway across the dooryard he looked over his shoulder and saw that the house had receded to nothing but a misty outline. A few steps farther and it was swallowed. He was alone in the white with only the tiny silver sun looking down on him. He could smell dust, damp, honeysuckle, roses.

  And then the growling began.

  His heart leaped
into his throat and he fell back a step, all his muscles tensing into bundles of wire. His first panicky thought, like a child who has suddenly tumbled into a fairy tale. was wolf. and he looked around wildly. There was nothing to see but white.

  Cujo came out of the fog.

  Brett began to make a whining noise in his throat. The dog he had grown up with, the dog who had pulled a yelling, gleeful, five-year-old Brett patiently around and around the dooryard on his Flexible Flyer, buckled into a harness Joe had made in the shop, the dog who had been waiting calmly by the mailbox every afternoon during school for the bus, come shine or shower . . . that dog bore only the slightest resemblance to the muddy, matted apparition slowly materializing from the morning mist. The Saint Bernard's big, sad eyes were now reddish and stupid and lowering: more pig's eyes than dog's eyes. His coat was plated with brownish-green mud, as if he had been rolling around in the boggy place at the bottom of the meadow. His muzzle was wrinkled back in a terrible mock grin that froze Brett with horror. Brett felt his heart slugging away in his throat.

  Thick white foam dripped slowly from between Cujo's teeth.

  "Cujo?" Brett whispered. "Cuje?"

  Cujo looked at THE BOY, not recognizing him any more, not his looks, not the shadings of his clothes (he could not precisely see colors, at least as human beings understand them), not his scent What he saw was a monster on two legs. Cujo was sick, and all things appeared monstrous to him now. His head clanged dully with murder. He wanted to bite and rip and tear. Part of him saw a cloudy image of him springing at THE BOY, bringing him down, parting flesh with bone, drinking blood as it still pulsed, driven by a dying heart.

  Then the monstrous figure spoke, and Cujo recognized his voice. It was THE BOY, THE BOY, and THE BOY had never done him any harm. Once he had loved THE BOY and would have died for him had that been called for. There was enough of that feeling left to hold the image of murder at bay until it grew as murky as the fog around them. It broke up and rejoined the buzzing, clamorous river of his sickness.

  "Cujo? What's wrong. boy?"

  The last of the dog that had been before the bat scratched its nose turned away, and the sick and dangerous dog, subverted for the last time, was forced to turn with it. Cujo stumbled away and moved deeper into the fog. Foam splattered from his muzzle onto the dirt. He broke into a lumbering run, hoping to outrun the sickness, but it ran with him. buzzing and yammering, making him ache with hatred and murder. He began to roll over and over in the high timothy grass, snapping at it, his eyes rolling.

  The world was a crazy sea of smells. He would track each to its source and dismember it.

  Cujo began to growl again. He found his feet. He slipped deeper into the fog that was even now beginning to thin, a big dog who weighed just under two hundred pounds.

  Brett stood in the dooryard for more than fifteen minutes after Cujo had melted back into the fog, not knowing what to do. Cujo had been sick. He might have eaten a poison bait or something. Brett knew about rabies, and if he had ever seen a woodchuck or a fox or a porcupine exhibiting the same symptoms, he would have guessed rabies. But it never crossed his mind that his dog could have that awful disease of the brain and the nervous system. A poison bait, that seemed the most likely.

  He should tell his father. His father could call the vet. Or maybe Dad could do something himself, like that time two years ago, when he had pulled the porcupine needles out of Cujo's muzzle with his pliers, working each quill first up, then down, then out, being careful not to break them off because they would fester in there. Yes, he would have to tell Dad. Dad would do something, like that time Cuje got into it with Mr. Porky Pine.

  But what about the trip?

  He didn't need to be told that his mother had won them the trip through some desperate stratagem, or luck, or a combination of the two. Like most children, he could sense the vibrations between his parents, and he knew the way the emotional currents ran from one day to the next the way a veteran guide knows the twists and turns of an upcountry river. It had been a near thing, and even though his dad had agreed, Brett sensed that this agreement had been grudging and unpleasant. The trip was not on for sure until he had dropped them off and driven away. If he told Dad Cujo was sick, might he not seize on that as an excuse to keep them home?

  He stood motionless in the dooryard. He was, for the first time in his life, in a total mental and emotional quandary. After a little while he began to hunt for Cujo behind the barn. He called him in a low voice. His parents were still sleeping, and he knew how sound carried in the morning fog. He didn't find Cujo anywhere . . . which was just as well for him.

  The alarm burred Vic awake at quarter to five. He got up, shut it off, and blundered down to the bathroom, mentally cursing Roger Breakstone, who could never get to the Portland Jetport twenty minutes before checkin like any normal air traveler. Not Roger. Roger was a contingency man. There might always be a flat tire or a roadblock or a washout or an earthquake. Aliens from outer space might decide to touch down on runway 22.

  He showered, shaved, gobbled vitamins, and went back to the bedroom to dress. The big double bed was empty and he sighed a little. The weekend he and Donna had just passed hadn't been very pleasant . . . in fact, he could honestly say he never wanted to go through such a weekend again in his life. They had kept their normal, pleasant faces on--for Tad--but Vic had felt like a participant at a masquerade ball. He didn't like to be aware of the muscles in his face at work when he smiled.

  They had slept in the same bed together, but for the first time the king-sized double seemed too small to Vic. They slept each on one side, the space between them a crisply sheeted no-man's-land. He had lain awake both Friday and Saturday nights, morbidly aware of each shift in Donna's weight as she moved, the sound of her nightdress against her body. He found himself wondering if she was awake, too, on her side of the emptiness that lay between them.

  Last night, Sunday night, they had tried to do something about that empty space in the middle of the bed. The sex part had been moderately successful, if a little tentative (at least neither of them had cried when it was over; for some reason he had been morbidly sure that one of them would do that). But Vic was not sure you could call what they had done making love.

  He dressed in his summerweight gray suit--as gray as the early light outside--and picked up his two suitcases. One of them was much heavier than the other. That one contained most of the Sharp Cereals file. Roger had all the graphic layouts.

  Donna was making waffles in the kitchen. The teapot was on, just beginning to huff and puff. She was wearing his old blue flannel robe. Her face was puffy, as if instead of resting her, sleep had punched her unconscious.

  "Will the planes fly when it's like that?" she asked.

  "It's going to burn off. You can see the sun already." He pointed at it and then kissed her lightly on the nape of the neck. "You shouldn't have gotten up."

  "No problem." She lifted the waffle iron's lid and deftly turned a waffle out on a plate. She handed it to him. "I wish you weren't going away." Her voice was low. "Not now. After last night."

  "It wasn't that bad, was it?"

  "Not like before," Donna said. A bitter, almost secret smile touched her lips and was gone. She beat the waffle mixture with a wire whisk and then poured a ladleful into the waffle iron and dropped its heavy lid. Sssss. She poured boiling water over a couple of Red Rose bags and took the cups--one said VIC, the other DONNA--over to the table. "Eat your waffle. There's strawberry preserves, if you want them."

  He got the preserves and sat down. He spread some oleo across the top of the waffle and watched it melt into the little squares, just as he had when he was a child. The preserves were Smucker's. He liked Smucker's preserves. He spread the waffle liberally with them. It looked great. But he wasn't hungry.

  "Will you get laid in Boston or New York?" she asked, turning her back on him. "Even it out? Tit for tat?"

  He jumped a little--perhaps even flushed. He was glad her back wa
s turned because he felt that at that precise moment there was more of him on his face than he wanted her to see. Not that he was angry; the thought of giving the bellman a ten instead of the usual buck and then asking the fellow a few questions had certainly crossed his mind. He knew that Roger had done it on occasion.

  "I'm going to be too busy for anything like that."

  "What does the ad say? There's Always Room for Jell-O."

  "Are you trying to make me mad, Donna? Or what?"

  "No. Go on and eat. You got to feed the machine."

  She sat down with a waffle of her own. No oleo for her. A dash of Vermont Maid Syrup, that was all. How well we know each other, he thought.

  "What time are you picking Roger up?" she asked him.

  "After some hot negotiations, we've settled on six."

  She smiled again, but this time the smile was warm and fond. "He really took that early-bird business to heart at some point, didn't he?"

  "Yeah. I'm surprised he hasn't called yet to make sure I'm up."

  The phone rang.

  They looked at each other across the table, and after a silent, considering pause they both burst out laughing. It was a rare moment, certainly more rare than the careful lovemaking in the dark the night before. He saw how fine her eyes were, how lucent. They were as gray as the morning mist outside.

  "Get it quick before it wakes the Tadder up," she said.

  He did. It was Roger. He assured Roger that he was up, dressed, and in a fighting frame of mind. He would pick Roger up on the dot of six. He hung up wondering if he would end up telling Roger about Donna and Steve Kemp. Probably not. Not because Roger's advice would be bad; it wouldn't be. But, even though Roger would promise not to tell Althea, he most certainly would. And he had a suspicion that Althea would find it difficult to resist sharing out such a juicy bit of bridge-table gossip. Such careful consideration of the question made him feel depressed all over again. It was as if, by trying to work out the problem between them, he and Donna were burying their own body by moonlight.

  "Good old Roger," he said, sitting down again. He tried on a smile but it felt wrong. The moment of spontaneity was gone.