Cujo (16 page)

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 check-in 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 was 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.

“Will you be able to get all of your stuff and all of Roger's into the Jag?”

“Sure,” he said. “We'll have to. Althea needs their car, and you've got—oh,
shit,
I completely forgot to call Joe Camber about your Pinto.”

“You had a few other things on your mind,” she said. There was faint irony in her voice. “That's all right. I'm not going to send Tad to the playground today. He has the sniffles. I may keep him home the rest of the summer, if that suits you. I get into trouble when he's gone.”

There were tears choking her voice, squeezing it and blurring it, and he didn't know what to say or how to respond. He watched helplessly as she found a Kleenex, blew her nose, wiped her eyes.

“Whatever,” he said, shaken. “Whatever seems best.” He rushed on: “Just give Camber a call. He's always there, and I don't think it would take him twenty minutes to fix it. Even if he has to put in another carb—”

“Will you think about it while you're gone?” she asked. “About what we're going to do? The two of us?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Good. I will too. Another waffle?”

“No. Thanks.” The whole conversation was turning surreal. Suddenly he wanted to be out and gone. Suddenly the trip felt very necessary and very attractive. The idea of getting away from the whole mess. Putting miles between him and it. He felt a sudden jab of anticipation. In his mind he could see the Delta jet cutting through the unraveling fog and into the blue.