Cujo Page 19

  "All I'm saying is that getting the Sharp Cereal Professor to do another spot seems about as shrewd to me as having Richard Nixon do an encore State of the Union address. He's compromised, Vic, he's totally blown!" He paused, looking at Vie. Vie looked back at him gravely. "What do you want him to say?"

  "That he's sorry."

  Roger blinked at him glassily for a moment. Then he threw back his head and cackled. "That he's sorry. Sorry? Oh, dear, that's wonderful. Was that your great idea?"

  "Hold on, Rog. You're not even giving me a chance. That's not like you."

  "No," Roger said. "I guess it's not. Tell me what you mean. But I can't believe you're--"

  "Serious? I'm serious, all right. You took the courses. What's the basis of all successful advertising? Why bother to advertise at all?"

  "The basis of all successful advertising is that people want to believe. That people sell themselves."

  "Yeah. When the Maytag Repairman says he's the loneliest guy in town, people want to believe that there really is such a guy someplace, not doing anything but listening to the radio and maybe jacking off once in a while. People want to believe that their Maytags will never need repairs. When Joe DiMaggio comes on and says Mr. Coffee saves coffee, saves money, people want to believe that. If--"

  "But isn't that why we've got our asses in a crack? They wanted to believe the Sharp Cereal Professor and he let them down. Just like they wanted to believe in Nixon, and he--"

  "Nixon, Nixon, Nixon!" Vie said, surprised by his own angry vehemence. "You're getting blinded by that particular comparison, I've heard you make it two hundred times since this thing blew, and it doesn't fit!"

  Roger was looking at him, stunned.

  "Nixon was a crook, he knew he was a crook, and he said he wasn't a crook. The Sharp Cereal Professor said there was nothing wrong with Red Razberry Zingers and there was something wrong, but he didn't know it." Vie leaned forward and pushed his finger gently against Roger's arm, emphasizing. "There was no breach of faith. He has to say that, Rog. He has to get up in front of the American people and tell them there was no breach of faith. What there was, there was a mistake made by a company which manufactures food dye. The mistake was not made by the Sharp Company. He has to say that. And most important of all, he has to say that he's sorry that mistake happened and that, although no one was hurt, he's sorry people were frightened."

  Roger nodded, then shrugged. "Yes, I see the thrust of it. But neither the old man or the kid will go for it, Vic. They want to bury the b--"

  "Yes, yes, yes!" Vic cried, actually making Roger flinch. He jumped to his feet and began to walk jerkily up and down the screening room's short aisle. "Sure they do, and they're right, he's dead and he has to be buried, the Sharp Cereal Professor has to be buried, Zingers has already been buried. But the thing we've got to make them see is that it can't be a midnight burial. That's the exact point! Their impulse is to go at this thing like a Mafia button man . . . or a scared relative burying a cholera victim."

  He leaned over Roger, so close that their noses were almost touching.

  "Our job is to make them understand that the Cereal Professor will never rest easy unless he's interred in broad daylight. And I'd like to make the whole country mourners at his burial."

  "You're cr--" Roger began . . . then closed his mouth with a snap.

  At long last Vic saw that scared, vague expression go out of his partner's eyes. A sudden sharpening happened in Roger's face, and the scared expression was replaced by a slightly mad one. Roger began to grin. Vic was so relieved to see that grin that he forgot about Donna and what had happened with her for the first time since he had gotten Kemp's note. The job took over completely, and it was only later that he would wonder, slightly dumbfounded, how long it had been since he had felt that pure, trippy, wonderful feeling of being fully involved with something he was good at.

  "On the surface, we just want him to repeat the things Sharp has been saying since it happened," Vic went on. "But when the Cereal Professor himself says them--"

  "It comes full circle," Roger murmured. He lit another cigarette.

  "Sure, right. We can maybe pitch it to the old man as the final scene in the Red Razberry Zingers farce. Coming clean. Getting it behind us--"

  "Taking the bitter medicine. Sure, that'd appeal to the old goat. Public penance . . . scourging himself with whips . . . "

  "And instead of going out like a dignified guy that took a pratfall in a mudpuddle, everyone laughing at him, he goes out like Douglas MacArthur, saying old soldiers never die, they just fade away. That's the surface of the thing. But underneath, we're looking for a tone . . . a feeling. . . . " He was crossing the border into Roger's country now. If he could only delineate the shape of what he meant, the idea that had come to him over coffee at Bentley's, Roger would take it from there.

  "MacArthur," Roger said softly. "But that's it, isn't it? The tone is farewell. The feeling is regret. Give people the feeling that he's been unjustly treated, but it's too late now. And--" He looked at Vic, almost startled.

  "What?"

  "Prime time," Roger said.

  "Huh?"

  "The spots. We run em in prime time. These ads are for the parents, not the kids. Right?"

  "Yeah, yeah."

  "If we ever get the damned things made."

  Vic grinned. "We'll get them made." And using one of Roger's terms for good ad copy: "It's a tank, Roger. Well drive it right the fuck over them if we have to. As long as we can get something concrete down before we go to Cleveland. . . ."

  They sat and talked it over in the tiny screening room for another hour, and when they left to go back to the hotel, both of them sweaty and exhausted, it was full dark.

  "Can we go home now, Mommy?" Tad asked apathetically.

  "Pretty soon, honey."

  She looked at the key in the ignition switch. Three other keys on the ring: house key, garage key, and the key that opened the Pinto's hatchback. There was a piece of leather attached to the ring with a mushroom branded on it. She had bought the keyring in Swanson's, a Bridgton department store, back in April. Back in April when she had been so disillusioned and scared, never knowing what real fear was, real fear was trying to crank your kid's window shut while a rabid dog drooled on the back of your hands.

  She reached out. She touched the leather tab. She pulled her hand back again.

  The truth was this: She was afraid to try.

  It was quarter past seven. The day was still bright, although the Pinto's shadow trailed out long, almost to the garage door. Although she did not know it, her husband and his partner were still watching kinescopes of the Sharp Cereal Professor at Image-Eye in Cambridge. She didn't know why no one had answered the SOS she had been beeping out. In a book, someone would have come. It was the heroine's reward for having thought up such a clever idea. But no one had come.

  Surely the sound had carried down to the ramshackle house at the foot of the hill. Maybe they were drunk down there. Or maybe the owners of the two cars in the driveway (dooryard, her mind corrected automatically, up here they call it a dooryard) had both gone off somewhere in a third car. She wished she could see that house from here, but it was out of sight beyond the descending flank of the hill.

  Finally she had given the SOS up. She was afraid that if she kept tooting the horn it would drain the Pinto's battery, which had been in since they got the car. She still believed the Pinto would start when the engine was cool enough. It always had before.

  But you're afraid to try, because if it doesn't start . . . what then?

  She was reaching for the ignition again when the dog stumbled back into view. It had been lying out of sight in front of the Pinto. Now it moved slowly toward the barn, its head down and its tail drooping. It was staggering and weaving like a drunk near the bitter end of a long toot. Without looking back, Cujo slipped into the shadows of the building and disappeared.

  She drew her hand away from the key again.

  "Mo
mmy? Aren't we going?"

  "Let me think, hon," she said.

  She looked to her left, out the driver's side window. Eight running steps would take her to the back door of the Camber house. In high school she had been the star of her high school's girls' track team, and she still jogged regularly. She could beat the dog to the door and inside, she was sure of that. There would be a telephone. One call to Sheriff Bannerman's office and this horror would end. On the other hand, if she tried cranking the engine again, it might not start . . . but it would bring the dog on the run. She knew hardly anything about rabies, but she seemed to remember reading at some time or other that rabid animals were almost supernaturally sensitive to sounds. Loud noises could drive them into a frenzy.

  "Mommy?"

  "Shhh, Tad. Shhh!"

  Eight running steps. Dig it.

  Even if Cujo was lurking and watching inside the garage just out of sight, she felt sure--she knew--she could win a footrace to the back door. The telephone, yes. And . . . a man like Joe Camber surely kept a gun. Maybe a whole rack of them. What pleasure it would give her to blow that fucking dog's head to so much oatmeal and strawberry jam!

  Eight running steps.

  Sure. Dig on it awhile.

  And what if that door giving on the porch was locked?

  Worth the risk?

  Her heart thudded heavily in her breast as she weighed the chances. If she had been alone, that would have been one thing. But suppose the door was locked? She could beat the dog to the door, but not to the door and then back to the car. Not if it came running, not if it charged her as it had done before. And what would Tad do? What if Tad saw his mother being ravaged by a two-hundred-pound mad dog, being ripped and bitten, being pulled open--

  No. They were safe here.

  Try the engine again!

  She reached for the ignition, and part of her mind clamored that it would be safer to wait longer, until the engine was perfectly cool--

  Perfectly cool? They had been here three hours or more already.

  She grasped the key and turned it.

  The engine cranked briefly once, twice, three times--and then caught with a roar.

  "Oh, thank God!" she cried.

  "Mommy?" Tad asked shrilly. "Are we going? Are we going?"

  "We're going," she said grimly, and threw the transmission into reverse. Cujo lunged out of the barn . . . and then just stood there, watching. "Fuck you, dog!" she yelled at it triumphantly.

  She touched the gas pedal The Pinto rolled back perhaps two feet--and stalled.

  "No!" she screamed as the red idiot lights came on again. Cujo had taken another two steps when the engine cut out, but now he only stood there silently, his head down. Watching me, the thought occurred again. His shadow trailed out behind him, as clear as a silhouette cut out of black crepe paper.

  Donna fumbled for the ignition switch and turned it from ON to START. The motor began to turn over again, but this time it didn't catch. She could hear a harsh panting sound in her own ears and didn't realize for several seconds that she was making the sound herself--in some vague way she had the idea that it might be the dog. She ground the starter, grimacing horribly, swearing at it, oblivious of Tad, using words she had hardly known she knew. And all the time Cujo stood there, trailing his shadow from his heels like some surreal funeral drape, watching.

  At last he lay down in the driveway, as if deciding there was no chance for them to escape. She hated it more then than she had when it had tried to force its way in through Tad's window.

  "Mommy . . . Mommy . . . Mommy!"

  From far away. Unimportant. What was important now was this goddamned sonofabitching little car. It was going to start. She was going to make it start by pure . . . force . . . of will!

  She had no idea how long, in real time, she sat hunched over the wheel with her hair hanging in her eyes, futilely grinding the starter. What at last broke through to her was not Tad's cries--they had trailed off to whimpers--but the sound of the engine. It would crank briskly for five seconds, then lag off, then crank briskly for another five, then lag off again. A longer lag each time, it seemed.

  She was killing the battery.

  She stopped.

  She came out of it a little at a time, like a woman coming out of a faint. She remembered a bout of gastroenteritis she'd had in college--everything inside her had either come up by the elevator or dropped down the chute--and near the end of it she had grayed out in one of the dorm toilet stalls. Coming back bad been like this, as if you were the same but some invisible painter was adding color to the world, bringing it first up to full and then to overfull. Colors shrieked at you. Everything looked plastic and phony, like a display in a department store window--SWING INTO SPRING, perhaps, or READY FOR THE FIRST KICKOFF.

  Tad was cringing away from her, his eyes squeezed shut, the thumb of one hand in his mouth. The other hand was pressed against his hip pocket, where the Monster Words were. His respiration was shallow and rapid.

  "Tad," she said. "Honey, don't worry."

  "Mommy, are you all right?" His voice was little more than a husky whisper.

  "Yeah. So are you. At least we're safe. This old car will go. Just wait and see."

  "I thought you were mad at me."

  She took him in her arms and hugged him tight She could smell sweat in his hair and the lingering undertone of Johnson's No More Tears shampoo. She thought of that bottle sitting safely and sanely on the second shelf of the medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom. If only she could touch it! But all that was here was that faint, dying perfume.

  "No, honey, not at you," she said. "Never at you."

  Tad hugged her back. "He can't get us in here, can he?"

  "No."

  "He can't . . . he can't eat his way in, can he?"

  "No."

  "I hate him," Tad said reflectively. "I wish he'd die."

  "Yes. Me too."

  She looked out the window and saw that the sun was getting ready to go down. A superstitious dread settled into her at the thought. She remembered the childhood games of hide-and-seek that had always ended when the shadows joined each other and grew into purple lagoons, that mystic call drifting through the suburban streets of her childhood, talismanic and distant, the high voice of a child announcing suppers that were ready, doors ready to be shut against the night:

  "Alleee-alleee-infree! Alleee-alleee-infree!"

  The dog was watching her. It was crazy, but she could no longer doubt it. Its mad, senseless eyes were fixed unhesitatingly on hers.

  No, you're imagining it. It's only a dog, and a sick dog at that. Things are bad enough without you seeing something in that dog's eyes that can't be there.

  She told herself that. A few minutes later she told herself that Cujo's eyes were like the eyes of some portraits which seem to follow you wherever you move in the room where they are hung.

  But the dog was looking at her. And . . . and there was something familiar about it.

  No, she told herself, and tried to dismiss the thought, but it was too late.

  You've seen him before, haven't you? The morning after Tad had the first of his bad dreams, the morning that the blankets and sheets were back on the chair, his Teddy on top of them, and for a moment when you opened the closet door you only saw a slumped shape with red eyes, something in Tad's closet ready to spring, it was him, it was Cujo, Tad was right all along, only the monster wasn't in his closet . . . it was out here. It was

  (stop it)

  out here just waiting to

  (! YOU STOP IT DONNA !)

  She stared at the dog and imagined she could hear its thoughts. Simple thoughts. The same simple pattern, repeated over and over in spite of the whirling boil of its sickness and delirium.

  Kill THE WOMAN. Kill THE BOY. Kill THE WOMAN. Kill--

  Stop it, she commanded herself roughly. It doesn't think and it's not some goddamned boogeyman out of a child's closet. It's a sick dog and that's all it is. Next you'll believe
the dog is God's punishment for committing--

  Cujo suddenly got up--almost as if she had called him--and disappeared into the barn again.

  (almost as if I called it)

  She uttered a shaky, semi-hysterical laugh.

  Tad looked up. "Mommy?"

  "Nothing, hon."

  She looked at the dark maw of the garage-barn, then at the back door of the house. Locked? Unlocked? Locked? Unlocked? She thought of a coin rising in the air, flipping over and over. She thought of whirling the chamber drum of a pistol, five holes empty, one full. Locked? Unlocked?

  The sun went down, and what was left of the day was a white line painted on the western horizon. It looked no thicker than the white stripe painted down the center of the highway. That would be gone soon enough. Crickets sang in the high grass to the right of the driveway, making a mindlessly cheerful rickety-rickety sound.

  Cujo was still in the barn. Sleeping? she wondered. Eating?

  That made her remember that she had packed them some food. She crawled between the two front buckets and got the Snoopy lunchbox and her own brown bag. Her Thermos had rolled all the way to the back, probably when the car had started to buck and jerk coming up the road. She had to stretch, her blouse coming untucked, before she could hook it with her fingers. Tad, who had been in a half doze, stirred awake. His voice was immediately filled with a sharp fright that made her hate the damned dog even more.

  "Mommy? Mommy? What are you--"

  "Just getting the food," she soothed him. "And my Thermos--see?"

  "Okay." He settled back into his seat and put his thumb in his mouth again.

  She shook the big Thermos gently beside her ear, listening for the grating sound of broken glass. She only heard milk swishing around inside. That was something, anyhow.

  "Tad? You want to eat?"

  "I want to take a nap," he said around his thumb, not opening his eyes.

  "You gotta feed the machine, chum," she said.

  He didn't even smile "Not hungry. Sleepy."

  She looked at him, troubled, and decided it would be wrong to force the issue any further. Sleep was Tad's natural weapon--maybe his only one--and it was already half an hour past his regular bedtime. Of course, if they had been home, he would have had a glass of milk and a couple of cookies before brushing his teeth . . . and a story, one of his Mercer Mayer books, maybe . . . and . . .