Cujo (17 page)

“Can I have a waffle?”

They both looked around, startled. It was Tad, standing in the hallway in his yellow footy pajamas, his stuffed coyote grasped by one ear, his red blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He looked like a small, sleepy Indian.

“I guess I could rustle one up,” Donna said, surprised. Tad was not a notably early riser.

“Was it the phone, Tad?” Vic asked.

Tad shook his head. “I made myself wake up early so I could say good-bye to you, Daddy. Do you really have to go?”

“It's just for a while.”

“It's too long,” Tad said blackly. “I put a circle around the day you're coming home on my calendar. Mom showed me which one. I'm going to mark off every day, and she said she'd tell me the Monster Words every night.”

“Well, that's okay, isn't it?”

“Will you call?”

“Every other night,” Vic said.

“Every night,” Tad insisted. He crawled up into Vic's lap and set his coyote next to Vic's plate. Tad began to crunch up a piece of toast. “Every
night,
Daddy.”

“I can't every night,” Vic said, thinking of the backbreaking schedule Roger had laid out on Friday, before the letter had come.

“Why not?”

“Because—”

“Because your Uncle Roger is a hard taskmaster,” Donna said, putting Tad's waffle on the table. “Come on over here and eat. Bring your coyote. Daddy will call us tomorrow night from Boston and tell us everything that happened to him.”

Tad took his place at the end of the table. He had a large plastic placemat that said
TAD
. “Will you bring me a toy?”

“Maybe. If you're good. And maybe I'll call tonight so you'll know I got to Boston in one piece.”

“Good deal.” Vic watched, fascinated, as Tad poured a small ocean of syrup over his waffle. “What kind of toy?”

“We'll see,” Vic said. He watched Tad eat his waffle. It suddenly occurred to him that Tad liked eggs. Scrambled, fried, poached, or hard-boiled, Tad gobbled them up. “Tad?”

“What, Daddy?”

“If you wanted people to buy eggs, what would you tell them?”

Tad considered. “I'd tell em eggs taste good,” he said.

Vic met his wife's eyes again, and they had a second moment like the one that had occurred when the phone rang. This time they laughed telepathically.

Their good-byes were light. Only Tad, with his imperfect grasp of how short the future really was, cried.

“You'll think about it?” Donna asked him again as he climbed into the Jag.

“Yes.”

But driving into Bridgton to get Roger, what he thought about were those two moments of near-perfect communication. Two in one morning, not bad. All it took was eight or nine years together, roughly a quarter of all the years so far spent on the face of the earth. He got thinking about how ridiculous the whole concept of human communication was—what monstrous, absurd overkill was necessary to achieve
even a little. When you'd invested the time and made it good, you had to be careful. Yes, he'd think about it. It had been good between them, and although some of the channels were now closed, filled with God knew how much muck (and some of that muck might still be squirming), plenty of the others seemed open and in reasonably good working order.

There had to be some careful thought—but perhaps not too much at once. Things had a way of magnifying themselves.

He turned the radio up and began to think about the poor old Sharp Cereal Professor.

•  •  •

Joe Camber pulled up in front of the Greyhound terminal in Portland at ten minutes to eight. The fog had burned off and the digital clock atop the Casco Bank and Trust read 73 degrees already.

He drove with his hat planted squarely on his head, ready to be angry at anyone who pulled out or cut in front of him. He hated to drive in the city. When he and Gary got to Boston he intended to park the car and leave it until they were ready to come home. They could take the subways if they could puzzle them out, walk if they couldn't.

Charity was dressed in her best pants suit—it was a quiet green—and a white cotton blouse with a ruffle at the neck. She was wearing earrings, and this had filled Brett with a mild sense of amazement. He couldn't remember his mother wearing earrings at all, except to church.

Brett had caught her alone when she went upstairs to dress after getting Dad his breakfast oatmeal. Joe had been mostly silent, grunting answers to questions in monosyllables, then shutting off conversation entirely by tuning the radio to WCSH for the ball scores. They were both afraid that the silence might presage a ruinous outburst and a sudden change of mind on their trip.

Charity had the slacks of her pants suit on and was slipping into her blouse. Brett noted she was wearing a peach-colored bra, and that had also amazed him. He hadn't known his mother had underclothes in any color other than white.

“Ma,” he said urgently.

She turned to him—it seemed almost that she was turning
on
him. “Did he say something to you?”

“No . . . no. It's Cujo.”

“Cujo? What about Cujo?”

“He's sick.”

“What do you mean, sick?”

Brett told her about having his second bowl of Cocoa Bears out on the back steps, about walking into the fog, and how Cujo had suddenly appeared, his eyes red and wild, his muzzle dripping foam.

“And he wasn't walking right,” Brett finished. “He was kind of, you know, staggering. I think I better tell Daddy.”

“No,”
his mother said fiercely, and grasped him by the shoulders hard enough to hurt. “You do no such a thing!”

He looked at her, surprised and frightened. She relaxed her grip a little and spoke more quietly.

“He just scared you, coming out of the fog like that. There's probably nothing wrong with him at all. Right?”

Brett groped for the right words to make her understand how terrible Cujo had looked, and how for a moment he had thought the dog was going to turn on him. He couldn't find the words. Maybe he didn't want to find them.

“If there is something wrong,” Charity continued, “it's probably just some little thing. He might have gotten a dose of skunk—”

“I didn't smell any sk—”

“—or he might have been running a woodchuck or a rabbit. Might even have jumped a moose down there in that bog. Or he might have eaten some nettles.”

“I guess he could have,” Brett said doubtfully.

“Your father would just jump on something like that,” she said. “I can hear him now. ‘Sick, is he? Well, he's your dog, Brett. You see to him. I got too much work to do to be messing around with your mutt.' ”

Brett nodded unhappily. It was his own thought exactly, magnified by the brooding way his father had been eating breakfast while the sports blared around the kitchen.

“If you just leave him, he'll come mooching around your dad, and your dad will take care of him,” Charity said. “He loves Cujo almost as much as you do, although he'd never say it. If he sees something's wrong, he'll fetch him over to the vet's in South Paris.”

“Yeah, I guess he would.” His mother's words rang true to him, but he was still unhappy about it.

She bent and kissed his cheek. “I'll tell you! We can call
your father tonight, if you want. How would that be? And when you talk to him, you just say, sort of casually, ‘You feeding my dog, Daddy?' And then you'll know.”

“Yeah,” Brett said. He smiled gratefully at his mother, and she smiled back, relieved, the trouble averted. But, perversely, it had given them something else to worry about during the seemingly interminable period before Joe backed the car up to the porch steps and silently began to load their four pieces of luggage into the wagon (into one of them Charity had surreptitiously placed all six of her snapshot albums). This new worry was that Cujo would lurch into the yard before they could drive away and stick Joe Camber with the problem.

But Cujo hadn't shown up.

Now Joe lowered the tailgate of the Country Squire, handed Brett the two small bags, and took the two large ones for himself.

“Woman, you got so much luggage I wonder if you ain't leavin on one of those Reno divorce cruises instead of going down to Connecticut.”

Charity and Brett smiled uneasily. It sounded like an attempt at humor, but with Joe Camber you were never really sure.

“That would be a day,” she said.

“I guess I'd just have to chase you down and drag you back with my new chainfall,” he said, unsmiling. His green hat was cocked squarely on the back of his head. “Boy, you gonna take care of your mom?”

Brett nodded.

“Yeah, you better.” He measured the boy. “You're getting pretty damn big. Probably you ain't got a kiss to give your old man.”

“I guess I do, Daddy,” Brett said. He hugged his father tight and kissed his stubbly cheek, smelling sour sweat and a phantom of last night's vodka. He was surprised and overwhelmed by his love for his father, a feeling that sometimes still came, always when it was least expected (but less and less often over the last two or three years, something his mother did not know and would not have believed if told). It was a love that had nothing to do with Joe Camber's day-to-day behavior toward him or his mother; it was a brute, biological thing that he would never be free of, a phenomenon
with many illusory referents of the sort which haunt for a lifetime: the smell of cigarette smoke, the look of a double-edged razor reflected in a mirror, pants hung over a chair, certain curse words.

His father hugged him back and then turned to Charity. He put a finger under her chin and turned her face up a little. From the loading bays behind the squat brick building they heard a bus warming up. Its engine was a low and guttural diesel rumble. “Have a good time,” he said.

Her eyes filled with tears and she wiped them away quickly. The gesture was nearly one of anger. “Okay,” she said.

Abruptly the tight, closed, noncommittal expression descended over his face. It came down like the clap of a knight's visor. He was the perfect country man again. “Let's get these cases in, boy! Feels like there's lead in this one. . . . Jesus-please-us!”

He stayed with them until all four bags had been checked, looking closely at each tag, oblivious of the baggage handler's condescending expression of amusement. He watched the handler trundle the bags out on a dolly and load them into the guts of the bus. Then he turned to Brett again.

“Come on out on the sidewalk with me,” he said.

Charity watched them go. She sat down on one of the hard benches, opened her purse, took out a handkerchief, and began fretting at it. It would just be like him to wish her a good time and then try to talk the boy into going back to the home place with him.

On the sidewalk, Joe said: “Lemme give you two pieces of advice, boy. You probably won't take neither of them, boys seldom do, but I guess that never stopped a father from giving em. First piece of advice is this: That fella you're going to see, that Jim, he's nothing but a piece of shit. One of the reasons I'm letting you go on this jaunt is that you're ten now, and ten's old enough to tell the difference between a turd and a tearose. You watch him and you'll see. He don't do nothing but sit in an office and push papers. People like him is half the trouble with this world, because their brains have got unplugged from their hands.” Thin, hectic color had risen in Joe's cheeks. “He's a piece of shit. You watch him and see if you don't agree.”

“All right,” Brett said. His voice was low but composed.

Joe Camber smiled a little. “The second piece of advice is to keep your hand on your pocketbook.”

“I haven't got any mo—”

Camber held out a rumpled five-dollar bill. “Yeah, you got this. Don't spend it all in one place. The fool and his money soon parted.”

“All right. Thank you!”

“So long,” Camber said. He didn't ask for another kiss.

“Good-bye, Daddy.” Brett stood on the sidewalk and watched his father climb into the car and drive away. He never saw his father alive again.

•  •  •

At quarter past eight that morning, Gary Pervier staggered out of his house in his pee-stained underwear shorts and urinated into the honeysuckle. In a perverse sort of way he hoped that someday his piss would become so rancid with booze that it would blight the honeysuckle. That day hadn't come yet.

“Arrrrouggh, my head!”
he screamed, holding it with his free hand as he watered the honeysuckle which had buried his fence. His eyes were threaded with bright snaps of scarlet. His heart clattered and roared like an old water pump that was drawing more air than water just lately. A terrible stomach cramp seized him as he finished voiding himself—they had been getting more common lately—and as he doubled up a large and foul-smelling flatulence purred out from between his skinny shanks.

He turned to go back in, and that was when he heard the growling begin. It was a low, powerful sound coming from just beyond the point where his overgrown side yard merged with the hayfield beyond it.

He turned toward the sound quickly, his headache forgotten, the clatter and roar of his heart forgotten, the cramp forgotten. It had been a long time since he'd had a flashback to his war in France, but he had one now. Suddenly his mind was screaming,
Germans! Germans! Squad down!

But it wasn't the Germans. When the grass parted it was Cujo who appeared.

“Hey boy, what are you growling f—” Gary said, and then faltered.

It had been twenty years since he had seen a rabid dog, but you didn't forget the look. He had been in an Amoco station east of Machias, headed back from a camping trip down Eastport way. He had been driving the old Indian motorcycle he'd had for a while in the mid-fifties. A panting, slat-sided yellow dog had drifted by outside that Amoco station like a ghost. Its sides had been moving in and out in rapid, shallow sprints of respiration. Foam was dripping from its mouth in a steady watery stream. It eyes were rolling wildly. Its hindquarters were caked with shit. It had been reeling rather than walking, as if some unkind soul had opened its jaws an hour before and filled it full of cheap whiskey.