Cujo Read online

  Gary was, on this swelteringly hot late-June day, as drunk as a coot. This was not an uncommon state of affairs with him. He did not know Roger Breakstone from shit. He did not know Vic Trenton from shit. He didn't know Donna Trenton from shit, and if he had known her, he wouldn't have given a shit if the visiting team was throwing line drives into her catcher's mitt. He did know the Cambers and their dog Cujo; the family lived up the hill, at the end of Town Road No. 3. He and Joe Camber did a good deal of drinking together, and in a rather foggy fashion Gary realized that Joe Camber was already a goodly way down the road to alcoholism. It was a road Gary himself had toured extensively.

  "Just a good-for-nothing drunk and I don't give a shit!" Gary told the birds and the shingles in the diseased elm. He tipped his glass. He farted. He swatted a bug. Sunlight and shadow dappled his face. Behind the house, a number of disemboweled cars had almost disappeared in the tall weeds. The ivy which grew on the west side of his house had gone absolutely apeshit, almost covering it. One window peeked out--barely--and on sunny days it glittered like a dirty diamond. Two years ago, in a drunken frenzy, Gary had uprooted a bureau from one of the upstairs rooms and had thrown it out a window--he could not remember why now. He had reglazed the window himself because it had let in one crotch of a draft come winter, but the bureau rested exactly where it had fallen. One drawer was popped out like a tongue.

  In 1944, when Gary Pervier had been twenty, he had singlehandedly taken a German pillbox in France and, following that exploit, had led the remains of his squad ten miles farther before collapsing with the six bullet wounds he had suffered in his charge of the machine-gun emplacement. For this he had been awarded one of his grateful country's highest honors, the Distinguished Service Cross. In 1968 he had gotten Buddy Torgeson down in Castle Falls to turn the medal into an ashtray. Buddy had been shocked. Gary told Buddy he would have gotten him to make it into a toilet bowl so he could shit in it, but it wasn't big enough. Buddy spread the story, and maybe that had been Gary's intention, or maybe it hadn't.

  Either way, it had driven the local hippies crazy with admiration. In the summer of '68 most of these hippies were on vacation in the Lakes Region with their wealthy parents before returning to their colleges in September, where they were apparently studying up on Protest, Pot, and Pussy.

  After Gary had his DSC turned into an ashtray by Buddy Torgeson, who did custom welding in his spare time and who worked days down to the Castle Falls Esso (they were all Exxon stations now, and Gary Pervier didn't give a shit), a version of the story found its way into the Castle Rock Call. The story was written by a local-yokel reporter who construed the act as an antiwar gesture. That was when the hippies started to show up at Gary's place on Town Road No. 3. Most of them wanted to tell Gary he was "far out." Some of them wanted to tell him he was "some kind of heavy." A few wanted to tell him he was "too fucking much."

  Gary showed them all the same thing, which was his Winchester .30-.06. He told them to get off his property. As far as he was concerned they were all a bunch of long-haired muff-diving crab-crawling asshole pinko fucksticks. He told them he didn't give a shit if he blew their guts from Castle Rock to Fryeburg. After a while they stopped coming, and that was the end of the DSC affair.

  One of those German bullets had taken Gary Pervier's right testicle off; a medic had found most of it splattered across the seat of his GI-issue underwear. Most of the other one survived, and sometimes he could still get a pretty re-spectacle bone-on. Not, he had frequently told Joe Camber, that he gave much of a shit one way or the other. His grateful country had given him the Distinguished Service Cross. A grateful hospital staff in Paris had discharged him in February 1945 with an 80-percent disability pension and a gold-plated monkey on his back. A grateful hometown gave him a parade on the Fourth of July 1945 (by then he was twenty-one instead of twenty, able to vote, his hair graying around the temples, and he felt all of seven hundred, thank you very much). The grateful town selectmen had remanded the property taxes on the Pervier place in perpetuity. That was good, because he would have lost it twenty years ago otherwise. He had replaced the morphine he could no longer obtain with high-tension booze and had then proceeded to get about his life's work, which was killing himself as slowly and as pleasantly as he could.

  Now, in 1980, he was fifty-six years old, totally gray, and meaner than a bull with a jackhandle up its ass. About the only three living creatures he could stand were Joe Camber, his boy Brett, and Brett's big Saint Bernard, Cujo.

  He tilted back in the decaying lawn chair, almost went over on his back, and used up some more of his screwdriver. The screwdriver was in a glass he had gotten free from a McDonald's restaurant. There was some sort of purple animal on the glass. Something called a Grimace. Gary ate a lot of his meals at the Castle Rock McDonald's, where you could still get a cheap hamburger. Hamburgers were good. But as for the Grimace . . . and Mayor McCheese . . . and Monsieur Ronald Fucking McDonald . . . Gary Pervier didn't give a shit for any of them.

  A broad, tawny shape was moving through the high grass to his left, and a moment later Cujo, on one of his rambles, emerged into Gary's tattered front yard. He saw Gary and barked once, politely. Then he came over, wagging his tail.

  "Cuje, you old sonofawhore," Gary said. He put his screwdriver down and began digging methodically through his pockets for dog biscuits. He always kept a few on hand for Cujo, who was one of your old-fashioned, dyed-in-the-wool good dogs.

  He found a couple in his shirt pocket and held them up.

  "Sit, boy. Sit up."

  No matter how low or how mean he was feeling, the sight of that two-hundred-pound dog sitting up like a rabbit never failed to tickle him.

  Cujo sat up, and Gary saw a short but ugly-looking scratch healing on the dog's muzzle. Gary tossed him the biscuits, which were shaped like bones, and Cujo snapped them effortlessly out of the air. He dropped one between his forepaws and began to gnaw the other one.

  "Good dog," Gary said, reaching out to pat Cujo's head. "Good--"

  Cujo began to growl. Deep in his throat. It was a rumbling, almost reflective sound. He looked up at Gary, and there was something cold and speculative in the dog's eyes that gave Gary a chill. He took his hand back to himself quickly. A dog as big as Cujo was nothing to get screwing around with. Not unless you wanted to spend the rest of your life wiping your ass with a hook.

  "What's got into you, boy?" Gary asked. He had never heard Cujo growl, not in all the years the Cambers had had him. To tell the truth, he wouldn't have believed ole Cuje had a growl in him.

  Cujo wagged his tail a little bit and came over to Gary to be patted, as if ashamed of his momentary lapse.

  "Hey, that's more like it," Gary said, ruffling the big dog's fur. It had been one scorcher of a week, and more coming, according to George Meara, who had heard it from Aunt Evvie Chalmers. He supposed that was it. Dogs felt the heat even more than people did, and he guessed there was no rule against a mutt getting testy once in a while. But it sure had been funny, hearing Cujo growl like that. If Joe Camber had told him, Gary wouldn't have believed it.

  "Go get your other biscuit," Gary said, and pointed.

  Cujo turned around, went to the biscuit, picked it up, mouthed it--a long string of saliva depending from his mouth--and then dropped it. He looked at Gary apologetically.

  "You, turnin down chow?" Gary said unbelievingly. "You?"

  Cujo picked up the dog biscuit again and ate it.

  "That's better," Gary said. "A little heat ain't gonna killya. Ain't gonna kill me either, but it bitches the shit outta my hemorrhoids. Well, I don't give a shit if they get as big as fucking golfballs. You know it?" He swatted a mosquito.

  Cujo lay down beside Gary's chair as Gary picked up his screwdriver again. It was almost time to go in and freshen it up, as the country-club cunts said.

  "Freshen up my ass," Gary said. He gestured at the roof of his house, and a sticky mixture of orange juice and vodka trickled down his sunburned
, scrawny arm. "Look at that chimbly, Cuje ole guy. Fallin right the fuck down. And you know what? I don't give a shit. The whole place could fall flat and I wouldn't fart sideways to a dime. You know that?"

  Cujo thumped his tail a little. He didn't know what this MAN was saying, but the rhythms were familiar and the patterns were soothing. These polemics had gone on a dozen times a week since . . . well, as far as Cujo was concerned, since forever. Cujo liked this MAN, who always had food. Just lately Cujo didn't seem to want food, but if THE MAN wanted him to eat, he would. Then he could lie here--as he was now--and listen to the soothing talk. All in all, Cujo didn't feel very well. He hadn't growled at THE MAN because he was hot but simply because he didn't feel good. For a moment there--just a moment--he had felt like biting THE MAN.

  "Got your nose in the brambles, looks like," Gary said. "What was you after? Woodchuck? Rabbit?"

  Cujo thumped his tail a little. Crickets sang in the rampant bushes. Behind the house, honeysuckle grew in a wild drift, calling the somnolent bees of a summer afternoon. Everything in Cujo's life should have been right, but somehow it wasn't. He just didn't feel good at all.

  "I don't even give a shit if all that Georgia redneck's teeth fall out, and all of Ray-Gun's teeth too," Gary said, and stood up unsteadily. The lawn chair fell over and collapsed itself. If you had guessed that Gary Pervier didn't give a shit, you would have been right. "Scuse me, boy." He went inside and built himself another screwdriver. The kitchen was a buzzing, fly-blown horror of split-open green garbage bags, empty cans, and empty liquor bottles.

  When Gary came back out again, fresh drink in hand, Cujo had left.

  On the last day of June, Donna Trenton came back from downtown Castle Rock (the locals called it "downstreet," but at least she hadn't picked up that particular Maine-ism yet), where she had dropped Tad off at his afternoon daycamp and picked up a few groceries at the Agway Market. She was hot and tired, and the sight of Steve Kemp's battered Ford Econoline van with the gaudy desert murals painted on the sides suddenly turned her furious.

  Anger had simmered all day. Vic had told her about the impending trip at breakfast, and when she had protested being left alone with Tad for what might be ten days or two weeks or God only knew, he made it clear to her exactly what the stakes were. He had thrown a scare into her, and she didn't like to be frightened. Up until this morning she had treated the Red Razberry Zingers affair as a joke--a rather good one at Vic and Roger's expense. She had never dreamed that such an absurd thing could have such serious consequences.

  Then Tad had been scratchy about going off to the daycamp, complaining that a bigger boy had pushed him down last Friday. The bigger boy's name was Stanley Dobson, and Tad was afraid that Stanley Dobson might push him down again today. He had cried and clutched onto her when she got him to the American Legion field where the camp was held, and she'd had to pry his fingers loose from her blouse finger by finger, making her feel more like a Nazi than a mom: You vill go to daykemp, ja? Ja, mein Mamma! Sometimes Tad seemed so young for his age, so vulnerable. Weren't only children supposed to be precocious and resourceful? His fingers had been chocolatey and had left fingerprints on her blouse. They reminded her of the bloodstained handprints you sometimes saw in cheap detective magazines.

  To add to the fun, her Pinto had started to act funny on the way home from the market, jerking and hitching, as if it had an automotive case of hiccups. It had smoothed out after a bit, but what could happen once could happen again, and--

  --and, just to put a little icing on the cake, here was Steve Kemp.

  "Well, no bullshit," she muttered, grabbed her bag of groceries, and got out, a pretty, dark-haired woman of twenty-nine, tall, gray-eyed. She somehow managed to look tolerably fresh in spite of the relentless heat, her Tad-printed blouse, and academy-gray shorts that felt pasted to her hips and fanny.

  She went up the steps quickly and into the house by the porch door. Steve was sitting in Vic's living-room chair. He was drinking one of Vic's beers. He was smoking a cigarette--presumably one of his own. The TV was on, and the agonies of General Hospital played out there, in living color.

  "The princess arrives," Steve said with the lopsided grin she had once found so charming and interestingly dangerous. "I thought you were never going to--"

  "I want you out of here, you son of a bitch," she said tonelessly, and went through into the kitchen. She put the grocery bag down on the counter and started putting things away. She could not remember when she had last been so angry, so furious that her stomach had tied itself in a gripping, groaning knot. One of the endless arguments with her mother, maybe. One of the real horrorshows before she had gone away to school. When Steve came up behind her and slipped his tanned arms around her bare midriff, she acted with no thought at all; she brought her elbow back into his lower chest. Her temper was not cooled by the obvious fact that he had anticipated her. He played a lot of tennis, and her elbow felt as if it had struck a stone wall coated with a layer of hard rubber.

  She turned around and looked into his grinning, bearded face. She stood five-eleven and was an inch taller than Vic when she wore heels, but Steve was nearly six-five.

  "Didn't you hear me? I want you out of here!"

  "Now, what for?" he asked. "The little one is off making beaded loincloths or shooting apples off the head of counselors with his little bow and arrow . . . or whatever they do . . . and hubby is busting heavies at the office . . . and now is the time for Castle Rock's prettiest hausfrau and Castle Rock's resident poet and tennis bum to make all the bells of sexual congress chime in lovely harmony."

  "I see you parked out in the driveway," Donna said. "Why not just tape a big sign to the side of your van? I'M FUCKING DONNA TRENTON, or something witty like that?"

  "I've got every reason to park in the driveway," Steve said, still grinning. "I've got that dresser in the back. Stripped clean. Even as I wish you were yourself, my dear."

  "You can put it on the porch. I'll take care of it. While you're doing that, I'll write you a check."

  His smile faded a little. For the first time since she had come in, the surface charm slipped a little and she could see the real person underneath. It was a person she didn't like at all, a person that dismayed her when she thought of him in connection with herself. She had lied to Vic, gone behind his back, in order to go to bed with Steve Kemp. She wished that what she felt now could be something as simple as rediscovering herself, as after a nasty bout of fever. Or rediscovering herself as Vic's mate. But when you took the bark off it, the simple fact was that Steve Kemp--publishing poet, itinerant furniture stripper and refinisher, chair caner, fair amateur tennis player, excellent afternoon lover--was a turd.

  "Be serious," he said.

  "Yeah, no one could reject handsome, sensitive Steven Kemp," she said. "It's got to be a joke. Only it's not. So what you do, handsome, sensitive Steven Kemp, is put the dresser on the porch, get your check, and blow."

  "Don't talk to me like that, Donna." His hand moved to her breast and squeezed. It hurt. She began to feel a little scared as well as angry. (But hadn't she been a little scared all along? Hadn't that been part of the nasty, scuzzy little thrill of it?)

  She slapped his hand away.

  "Don't you get on my case, Donna." He wasn't smiling now. "It's too goddam hot."

  "Me? On your case? You were here when I came in." Being frightened of him had made her angrier than ever. He wore a heavy black beard that climbed high on his cheekbones, and it occurred to her suddenly that although she had seen his penis close up--had had it in her mouth--she had never really seen what his face looked like.

  "What you mean," he said, "is that you had a little itch and now it's scratched, so fuck off. Right? Who gives a crap about how I feel?"

  "You're breathing on me," she said, and pushed him away to take the milk to the refrigerator.

  He was not expecting it this time. Her shove caught him off balance, and he actually stumbled back a step. His forehead wa
s suddenly divided by lines, and a dark flush flared high on his cheekbones. She had seen him look this way on the tennis courts behind the Bridgton Academy buildings, sometimes. When he blew an easy point She had watched him play several times--including two sets during which he had mopped up her panting, puffing husband with ease--and on the few occasions she had seen him lose, his reaction had made her extremely uneasy about what she had gotten into with him. He had published poems in over two dozen little magazines, and a book, Chasing Sundown, had been published by an outfit in Baton Rouge called The Press over the Garage. He had graduated from Drew, in New Jersey; he held strong opinions on modern art, the upcoming nuclear referendum question in Maine, the films of Andy Warhol, and he took a double fault the way Tad took the news it was bedtime.

  Now he came after her, grabbed her shoulder, and spun her around to face him. The carton of milk fell from her hand and split open on the floor.

  "There, look at that," Donna said. "Nice going, hotshot."

  "Listen, I'm not going to be pushed around. Do you--"

  "You get out of here!" she screamed into his face. Her spittle sprayed his cheeks and his forehead. "What do I have to do to convince you? Do you need a picture? You're not welcome here! Go be God's gift to some other woman!"

  "You cheap, cockteasing little bitch," he said. His voice was sullen, his face ugly. He didn't let go of her arm.

  "And take the bureau with you. Pitch it in the dump."

  She pulled free of him and got the washrag from its place, hung over the sink faucet. Her hands were trembling, her stomach was upset, and she was starting to get a headache. She thought that soon she would vomit.

  She got down on her hands and knees and began wiping up the spilt milk.