Cujo Read online

  "Cujo likes kids," Camber agreed. "You want to drive your car into the barn, Mr. Trenton?"

  The doctor will see you now, Vic thought, amused, and drove the Jag in. As it turned out, the job only took an hour and a half and Camber's price was so reasonable it was startling.

  And Tad ran through that cool, overcast afternoon, calling the dog's name over and over again: "Cujo . . . Coojo . . . heeere, Cujo. . . ." Just before they left, Camber's boy, whose name was Brett, actually lifted Tad onto Cujo's back and held him around the waist while Cujo padded obediently up and down the gravel dooryard twice. As it passed Vic, the dog caught his eye . . . and Vic would have sworn it was laughing.

  Just three days after George Meara's bellowed conversation with Aunt Evvie Chalmers, a little girl who was exactly Tad Trenton's age stood up from her place at the breakfast table--said breakfast table being in the breakfast nook of a tidy little house in Iowa City, Iowa--and announced: "Oh, Mamma, I don't feel so good. I feel like I'm going to be sick."

  Her mother looked around, not exactly surprised. Two days before, Marcy's bigger brother had been sent from school with a raging case of stomach flu. Brock was all right now, but he had spent a lousy twenty-four hours, his body enthusiastically throwing off ballast from both ends.

  "Are you sure, honey?" Marcy's mother said.

  "Oh, I--" Marcy moaned loudly and lurched toward the downstairs hall, her hands laced over her stomach. Her mother followed her, saw Marcy buttonhook into the bathroom, and thought, Oh, boy, here we go again. If I don't catch this It'll be a miracle.

  She heard the retching sounds begin and turned into the bathroom her mind already occupied with the details: clear liquids, bed rest, the chamber-pot, some books; Brock could take the portable TV up to her room when he got back from school and--

  She looked, and these thoughts were driven from her mind with the force of a roundhouse slap.

  The toilet bowl where her four-year-old daughter had vomited was full of blood; blood splattered the white procelain lip of the bowl; blood beaded the tiles.

  "Oh, Mommy, I don't feel good--"

  Her daughter turned, her daughter turned, turned, and there was blood all over her mouth, it was down her chin, it was matting her blue sailor dress, blood, oh dear God dear Jesus Joseph and Mary so much blood--

  "Mommy--"

  And her daughter did it again, a huge bloody mess flying from her mouth to patter down everywhere like sinister rain, and then Marcy's mother gathered her up and ran with her, ran for the phone in the kitchen to dial the emergency unit.

  Cujo knew he was too old to chase rabbits.

  He wasn't old; no, not even for a dog. But at five, he was well past his puppyhood, when even a butterfly had been enough to set off an arduous chase through the woods and meadows behind the house and barn. He was five, and if he had been a human, he would have been entering the youngest stage of middle age.

  But it was the sixteenth of June, a beautiful early morning, the dew still on the grass. The heat Aunt Evvie had predicted to George Meara had indeed arrived--it was the warmest early June in years--and by two that afternoon Cujo would be lying in the dusty dooryard (or in the barn, if THE MAN would let him in, which he sometimes did when he was drinking, which was most of the time these days), panting under the hot sun. But that was later.

  And the rabbit, which was large, brown, and plump, didn't have the slightest idea Cujo was there, down near the end of the north field, a mile from the house. The wind was blowing the wrong way for Br'er Rabbit.

  Cujo worked toward the rabbit, out for sport rather than meat. The rabbit munched happily away at new clover that would be baked and brown under the relentless sun a month later. If he had only covered half the original distance between himself and the rabbit when the rabbit saw him and bolted, Cujo would have let it go. But he had actually got to within fifteen yards of it when the rabbit's head and cars came up. For a moment the rabbit did not move at all; it was a frozen rabbit sculpture with black walleyes bulging comically. Then it was off.

  Barking furiously, Cujo gave chase. The rabbit was very small and Cujo was very big, but the possibility of the thing put an extra ration of energy in Cujo's legs. He actually got close enough to paw at the rabbit. The rabbit zigged. Cujo came around more ponderously, his claws digging black meadow dirt, losing some ground at first, making it up quickly. Birds took wing at his heavy, chopping bark; if it is possible for a dog to grin, Cujo was grinning then. The rabbit zagged, then made straight across the north field. Cujo pelted after it, already suspecting this was one race he wasn't going to win.

  But he tried hard, and he was gaining on the rabbit again when it dropped into a small hole in the side of a small and easy hill. The hole was overgrown by long grasses, and Cujo didn't hesitate. He lowered his big tawny body into a kind of furry projectile and let his forward motion carry him in . . . where he promptly stuck like a cork in a bottle.

  Joe Camber had owned Seven Oaks Farm out at the end of Town Road No. 3 for seventeen years, but he had no idea this hole was here. He surely would have discovered it if farming was his business, but it wasn't. There was no livestock in the big red barn; it was his garage and auto-body shop. His son Brett rambled the fields and woods behind the home place frequently, but he had never noticed the hole either, although on several occasions he had nearly put his foot in it, which might have earned him a broken ankle. On clear days the hole could pass for a shadow; on cloudy days, overgrown with grass as it was, it disappeared altogether.

  John Mousam, the farm's previous owner, had known about the hole but had never thought to mention it to Joe Camber when Joe bought the place in 1963. He might have mentioned it, as a caution, when Joe and his wife, Charity, had their son in 1970, but by then the cancer had carried old John off.

  It was just as well Brett had never found it. There's nothing in the world quite so interesting to a boy as a hole in the ground, and this one opened on a small natural limestone cave. It was about twenty feet deep at its deepest, and it would have been quite possible for a small squirty boy to eel his way in, slide to the bottom, and then find it impossible to get out. It had happened to other small animals in the past. The cave's limestone surface made a good slide but a bad climb, and its bottom was littered with bones: a woodchuck, a skunk, a couple of chipmunks, a couple of squirrels, and a housecat. The housecat's name had been Mr. Clean. The Cambers had lost him two years before and assumed he had been hit by a car or had just run off. But here he was, along with the bones of the good-sized fieldmouse he had chased inside.

  Cujo's rabbit had rolled and slid all the way to the bottom and now quivered there, ears up and nose vibrating like a tuning fork, as Cujo's furious barking filled the place. The echoes made it sound as though there was a whole pack of dogs up there.

  The small cave had also attracted bats from time to time--never many, because the cave was only a small one, but its rough ceiling made a perfect place for them to roost upside down and snooze the daylight away. The bats were another good reason that Brett Camber had been lucky, especially this year. This year the brown insectivorous bats inhabiting the small cave were crawling with a particularly virulent strain of rabies.

  Cujo had stuck at the shoulders. He dug furiously with his back legs to no effect at all. He could have reversed and pulled himself back out, but for now he still wanted the rabbit. He sensed it was trapped, his for the taking. His eyes were not particularly keen, his large body blocked out almost all the light anyway, and he had no sense of the drop just beyond his front paws. He could smell damp, and he could smell bat guano, both old and fresh . . . but most important of all, he could smell rabbit. Hot and tasty. Dinner is served.

  His barking roused the bats. They were terrified. Something had invaded their home. They flew en masse toward the exit, squeaking. But their sonar recorded a puzzling and distressing fact: the entrance was no longer there. The predator was where the entrance had been.

  They wheeled and swooped in the darkn
ess, their membranous wings sounding like small pieces of clothing--diapers, perhaps--flapping from a line in a gusty wind. Below them, the rabbit cringed and hoped for the best.

  Cujo felt several of the bats flutter against the third of him that had managed to get into the hole, and he became frightened. He didn't like their scent or their sound; he didn't like the odd heat that seemed to emanate from them. He barked louder and snapped at the things that were wheeling and squeaking around his head. His snapping jaws closed on one brown-black wing. Bones thinner than those in a baby's hand crunched. The bat stashed and bit at him, slicing open the skin of the dog's sensitive muzzle in a long, curving wound that was shaped like a question mark. A moment later it went skittering and cartwheeling down the limestone slope, already dying. But the damage had been done; a bite from a rabid animal is most serious around the head, for rabies is a disease of the central nervous system. Dogs, more susceptible than their human masters, cannot even hope for complete protection from the inactivated-virus vaccine which every veterinarian administers. And Cujo had never had a single rabies shot in his life.

  Not knowing this, but knowing that the unseen thing he had bitten had tasted foul and horrible, Cujo decided the game was not worth the candle. With a tremendous yank of his shoulders he pulled himself out of the hole, causing a little avalanche of dirt. He shook himself, and more dirt and smelly crumbled limestone flew from his pelt. Blood dripped from his muzzle. He sat down, tilted his head skyward, and uttered a single low howl.

  The bats exited their hole in a small brown cloud, whirled confusedly in the bright June sunshine for a couple of seconds, and then went back in to roost. They were brainless things, and within the course of two or three minutes they had forgotten all about the barking interloper and were sleeping again, hung from their heels with their wings wrapped around their ratty little bodies like the shawls of old women.

  Cujo trotted away. He shook himself again. He pawed helplessly at his muzzle. The blood was already clotting, drying to a cake, but it hurt. Dogs have a sense of self-consciousness that is far out of proportion to their intelligence, and Cujo was disgusted with himself. He didn't want to go home. If he went home, one of his trinity--THE MAN, THE WOMAN, or THE BOY--would see that he had done something to himself. It was possible that one of them might call him BADDOG. And at this particular moment he certainly considered himself to be a BADDOG.

  So instead of going home, Cujo went down to the stream that separated Camber land from the property of Gary Pervier, the Cambers' nearest neighbor. He waded upstream; he drank deeply; he rolled over in the water, trying to get rid of the nasty taste in his mouth, trying to get rid of the dirt and the watery green stink of limestone, trying to get rid of that BADDOG feeling.

  Little by little, he began to feel better. He came out of the stream and shook himself, the spray of water forming a momentary rainbow of breathless clarity in the air.

  The BADDOG feeling was fading, and so was the pain in his nose. He started up toward the house to see if THE BOY might be around. He had gotten used to the big yellow schoolbus that came to pick THE BOY up every morning and which dropped him back off again in midafternoon, but this last week the schoolbus had not shown up with its flashing eyes and its yelling cargo of children. THE BOY was always at home. Usually he was out in the barn, doing things with THE MAN. Maybe the yellow schoolbus had come again today. Maybe not. He would see. He had forgotten about the hole and the nasty taste of the batwing. His nose hardly hurt at all now.

  Cujo breasted his way easily through the high grass of the north field, driving up an occasional bird but not bothering to give chase. He had had his chase for the day, and his body remembered even if his brain did not. He was a Saint Bernard in his prime, five years old, nearly two hundred pounds in weight, and now, on the morning of June 16, 1980, he was pre-rabid.

  Seven days later and thirty miles from Seven Oaks Farm in Castle Rock, two men met in a downtown Portland restaurant called the Yellow Submarine. The Sub featured a large selection of hero sandwiches, pizzas, and Dagwoods in Lebanese pouches. There was a pinball machine in the back. There was a sign over the counter saying that if you could eat two Yellow Sub Nightmares, you ate free; below that, in parentheses, the codicil IF YOU PUKE YOU PAY had been added.

  Ordinarily there was nothing Vic Trenton would have liked better than one of the Yellow Sub's meatball heroes, but he suspected he would get nothing from today's but a really good case of acid burn.

  "Looks like we're going to lose the ball, doesn't it?" Vic said to the other man, who was regarding a Danish ham with a marked lack of enthusiasm. The other man was Roger Breakstone, and when he looked at food without enthusiasm, you knew that some sort of cataclysm was at hand. Roger weighed two hundred and seventy pounds and had no lap when he sat down. Once, when the two of them had been in bed with a kids-at-camp case of the giggles, Donna had told Vic she thought Roger's lap had been shot off in Vietnam.

  "It looks piss-poor," Roger admitted. "It looks so fucking piss-poor you wouldn't believe it, Victor old buddy."

  "You really think making this trip will solve anything?"

  "Maybe not," Roger said, "but we're going to lose the Sharp account for sure if we don't go. Maybe we can salvage something. Work our way back in." He bit into his sandwich.

  "Closing up for ten days is going to hurt us."

  "You think we're not hurting now?"

  "Sure, we're hurting. But we've got those Book Folks spots to shoot down at Kennebunk Beach--"

  "Lisa can handle that."

  "I'm not entirely convinced that Lisa can handle her own love-life, let alone the Book Folks spots," Vic said. "But even supposing she can handle it, the Yor Choice Blueberries series Is still hanging fire . . . Casco Bank and Trust . . . and you're supposed to meet with the head honcho from the Maine Realtors' Association--"

  "Huh-uh, that's yours."

  "Fuck you it's mine," Vic said. "I break up every time I think of those red pants and white shoes. I kept wanting to look in the closet to see if I could find the guy a sandwich board."

  "It doesn't matter, and you know it doesn't. None of them bills a tenth of what Sharp bills. What else can I say? You know Sharp and the kid are going to want to talk to both of us. Do I book you a seat or not?"

  The thought of ten days, five in Boston and five in New York, gave Vic a mild case of the cold sweats. He and Roger had both worked for the Ellison Agency in New York for six years. Vic now had a home in Castle Rock. Roger and Althea Breakstone lived in neighboring Bridgton, about fifteen miles away.

  For Vic, it had been a case of never even wanting to look back. He felt he had never come fully alive, had never really known what he was for, until he and Donna moved to Maine. And now he had a morbid sense that New York had only been waiting these last three years to get him in its clutches again. The plane would skid off the runway coming in and be engulfed in a roaring firecloud of hi-test jet fuel. Or there would be a crash on the Triborough Bridge, their Checker crushed into a bleeding yellow accordion. A mugger would use his gun instead of just waving it. A gas main would explode and he would be decapitated by a manhole cover flying through the air like a deadly ninety-pound Frisbee. Something. If he went back, the city would kill him.

  "Rog," he said, putting down his meatball sandwich after one small bite, "have you ever thought that it might not be the end of the world if we did lose the Sharp account?"

  "The world will go on," Roger said, pouring a Busch down the side of a pilsner glass, "but will we? Me, I've got seventeen years left on a twenty-year mortgage and twin girls who have their hearts set on Bridgton Academy. You've got your own mortgage, your own kid, plus that old Jag sportster that's going to half-buck you to death."

  "Yes, but the local economy--"

  "The local economy sucks!" Roger exclaimed violently, and set his pilsner glass down with a bang.

  A party of four at the next table, three in UMP tennis shirts and one wearing a faded T-shirt with the legend
DARTH VADER IS GAY written across the front, began to applaud.

  Roger waved a hand at them impatiently and leaned toward Vic. "We're not going to make it happen doing campaigns for Yor Choice Blueberries and the Maine Realtors, and you know it. If we lose the Sharp account, we're going to go under without a ripple. On the other hand, if we can keep even a piece of Sharp over the next two years, we'll be in line for some of the Department of Tourism budget, maybe even a crack at the state lottery if they don't mismanage it into oblivion by then. Juicy pies, Vic. We can wave so long to Sharp and their crappy cereals and there's happy endings all around. The big bad wolf has to go somewhere else to get his dinner; these little piggies are home free."

  "All contingent on us being able to save something," Vic said, "which is about as likely as the Cleveland Indians winning the World Series this fall."

  "I think we better try, buddy."

  Vic sat silent, looking at his congealing sandwich and thinking. It was totally unfair, but he could live with unfairness. What really hurt was the whole situation's crazed absurdity. It had blown up out of a clear sky like a killer tornado that lays a zigzagging trail of destruction and then disappears. He and Roger and Ad Worx itself were apt to be numbered among the fatalities no matter what they did; he could read it on Roger's round face, which had not looked so pallidly serious since he and Althea had lost their boy, Timothy, to the crib-death syndrome when the infant was only nine days old. Three weeks after that happened, Roger had broken down and wept, his hands plastered to his fat face in a kind of terrible hopeless sorrow that had squeezed Vic's heart into his throat. That had been bad. But the incipient panic he saw in Roger's eyes now was bad, too.

  Tornadoes blew out of nowhere in the advertising business from time to time. A big outfit like the Ellison Agency, which billed in the millions, could withstand them. A little one like Ad Worx just couldn't. They had been carrying one basket with a lot of little eggs in it and another basket with one big egg--the Sharp account--and it now remained to be seen whether the big egg had been lost entirely or if it could at least be scrambled. None of it had been their fault, but ad agencies make lovely whipping boys.