Cujo (22 page)

“But—”

“No, you have to. If you try to drive twenty-two miles over to South Paris, it'll pack up on you for sure. And if you explain the situation in advance, they might be able to get you a loaner. Barring that, they'll lease you a car.”

“Lease . . . Vic, isn't that expensive?”

“Yeah,” he said.

She thought again that it was wrong of her to be dumping all this on him. He was probably thinking that she wasn't capable of anything . . . except maybe screwing the local furniture refinisher. She was fine at that. Hot salt tears, partly anger, partly self-pity, stung her eyes again. “I'll take care of it,” she said, striving desperately to keep her voice normal, light. Her elbow was propped on the wall and one hand was over her eyes. “Not to worry.”

“Well, I—oh, shit, there's Roger. He's dust up to his neck, but they got the kinescopes. Put Tad on for a second, would you?”

Frantic questions backed up in her throat. Was it all right? Did he think it could be all right? Could they get back to go and start again? Too late. No time. She had spent the time gabbing about the car. Dumb broad, stupid quiff.

“Sure,” she said. “He'll say good-bye for both of us. And . . . Vic?”

“What?” He sounded impatient now, pressed for time.

“I love you,” she said, and then before he could reply, she added: “Here's Tad.” She gave the phone to Tad quickly, almost conking him on the head with it, and went through the house to the front porch, stumbling over a hassock and sending it spinning, seeing everything through a prism of tears.

She stood on the porch looking out at 117, clutching her elbows, struggling to get herself under control—control, dammit,
control
—and it was amazing, wasn't it, how bad you could hurt when there was nothing physically wrong.

Behind her she could hear the soft murmur of Tad's voice, telling Vic they had eaten at Mario's, that Mommy had her favorite Fat Pizza and the Pinto had been okay until they were almost home. Then he was telling Vic that he loved him. Then there was the soft sound of the phone being hung up. Contact broken.

Control.

At last she felt as if she had some. She went back into the kitchen and began putting away the groceries.

•  •  •

Charity Camber stepped down from the Greyhound bus at quarter past three that afternoon. Brett was right at her heels. She was clutching the strap of her purse spasmodically. She was suddenly, irrationally afraid that she would not recognize Holly. Her sister's face, held in her mind like a photograph all these years (The Younger Sister Who Had Married Well), had gone suddenly and mysteriously out of her mind, leaving only a fogged blank where the picture should have been.

“You see her?” Brett asked as they alighted. He looked around at the Stratford bus depot with bright interest and no more. There was certainly no fear in his face.

“Give me a chance to look around!” Charity said sharply. “Probably she's in the coffee shop or—”

“Charity?”

She turned and there was Holly. The picture held in her memory came flooding back, but it was now a transparency overlying the real face of the woman standing by the Space Invaders game. Charity's first thought was that Holly was wearing
glasses
—how funny! Her second, shocked, was that Holly had wrinkles—not many, but there could be no question about what they were. Her third thought was not precisely a thought at all. It was an image, as clear, true, and heartbreaking as a sepia-toned photograph: Holly leaping into old man Seltzer's cowpond in her underpants, pigtails standing up against the sky, thumb and forefinger of her left hand pinching her nostrils closed for comic effect.
No glasses then,
Charity thought, and pain came to her then, and it squeezed her heart.

Standing at Holly's sides, looking shyly at her and Brett, were a boy of about five and a girl who was perhaps two and a half. The little girl's bulgy pants spoke of diapers beneath. Her stroller stood off to one side.

“Hi, Holly,” Charity said, and her voice was so thin she could hardly hear it.

The wrinkles were small. They turned upward, the way their mother had always said the good ones did. Her dress was dark blue, moderately expensive. The pendant she wore was either a very good piece of costume jewelry or a very small emerald.

There was a moment then. Some space of time. In it, Charity felt her heart fill with a joy so fierce and complete that she knew there could never be any real question about what this trip had or had not cost her. For now she was
free,
her son was free. This was her sister and those children were her kin, not pictures but real.

Laughing and crying a little, the two women stepped toward each other, hesitantly at first, then quickly. They embraced. Brett stood where he was. The little girl, maybe scared, went to her mother and wrapped a hand firmly around the hem of her dress, perhaps to keep her mother and this strange lady from flying off together.

The little boy stared at Brett, then advanced. He was wearing Tuffskin jeans and a T-shirt with the words
HERE COMES TROUBLE
printed on it.

“You're my cousin Brett,” the kid said.

“Yeah.”

“My name's Jim. Just like my dad.”

“Yeah.”

“You're from Maine,” Jim said. Behind him, Charity and Holly were talking rapidly, interrupting each other and laughing at their hurry to tell everything right here in this grimy bus station south of Milford and north of Bridgeport.

“Yeah, I'm from Maine,” Brett said.

“You're ten.”

“Right.”

“I'm five.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. But I can beat you up.
Ka-whud!
” He hit Brett in the belly, doubling him up.

Brett uttered a large and surprised “Oof!” Both women gasped.

“Jimmy!”
Holly cried in a kind of resigned horror.

Brett straightened up slowly and saw his mother watching him, her face in a kind of suspension.

“Yeah, you can beat me up anytime,” Brett said, and smiled.

And it was all right. He saw from his mother's face that it was all right, and he was glad.

•  •  •

By three thirty Donna had decided to leave Tad with a baby-sitter and try taking the Pinto up to Camber's. She had
tried the number again and there had still been no response, but she had reasoned that even if Camber wasn't in his garage, he would be back soon, maybe even by the time she arrived there . . . always assuming she
did
arrive there. Vic told her last week that Camber would probably have some old junker to loan her if it looked like her Pinto was going to be an overnight job. That had really been the deciding factor. But she thought that taking Tad would be wrong. If the Pinto seized up on that back road and she had to take a hike, well, okay. But Tad shouldn't have to do it.

Tad, however, had other ideas.

Shortly after talking to his dad, he had gone up to his room and had stretched out on his bed with a stack of Little Golden Books. Fifteen minutes later he had dozed off, and a dream had come to him, a dream which seemed utterly ordinary but which had a strange, nearly terrifying power. In this dream he saw a big boy throwing a friction-taped baseball up and trying to hit it. He missed twice, three times, four. On the fifth swing he hit the ball . . . and the bat, which had also been taped, shattered at the handle. The boy held the handle for a moment (black tape flapped from it), then bent and picked up the fat of the bat. He looked at it for a moment, shook his head disgustedly, and tossed it into the high grass at the side of the driveway. Then he turned, and Tad saw with a sudden shock that was half dread, half delight, that the boy was himself at ten or eleven. Yes, it was him. He was sure of it.

Then the boy was gone, and there was a grayness. In it he could hear two sounds: creaking swing chains . . . and the faint quacking of ducks. With these sounds and the grayness came a sudden scary feeling that he could not breathe, he was suffocating.
And a man was walking out of the mist . . . a man who wore a black shiny raincoat and held a stop sign on a stick in one hand. He grinned, and his eyes were shiny silver coins. He raised one hand to point at Tad, and he saw with horror it wasn't a hand at all, it was
bones,
and the face inside the shiny vinyl hood of the raincoat wasn't a face at all. It was a skull. It was—

He jerked awake, his body bathed in sweat that was only in part due to the room's explosive heat. He sat up, propped on his elbows, breathing in harsh gasps.

Snick.

The closet door was swinging open. And as it swung open he saw something inside, only for a second and then he was flying for the door which gave on the hall as fast as he could. He saw it only for a second, long enough to tell it wasn't the man in the shiny black raincoat, Frank Dodd, the man who had killed the ladies. Not him. Something else. Something with red eyes like bloody sunsets.

But he could not speak of these things to his mother. So he concentrated on Debbie, the sitter, instead.

He didn't
want
to be left with Debbie, Debbie was mean to him, she always played the record player loud, et cetera, et cetera. When none of this had much effect on his mother, Tad suggested ominously that Debbie might shoot him. When Donna made the mistake of giggling helplessly at the thought of fifteen-year-old myopic Debbie Gehringer shooting anyone, Tad burst into miserable tears and ran into the living room. He needed to tell her that Debbie Gehringer might not be strong enough to keep the monster in his closet—that if dark fell and his mother was not back, it might come out. It might be the man in the black raincoat, or it might be the beast.

Donna followed him, sorry for her laughter, wondering how she could have been so insensitive. The boy's father was gone, and that was upsetting enough. He didn't want to lose sight of his mother for even an hour. And—

And isn't it possible he senses some of what's gone on between Vic and me? Perhaps even heard . . . ?

No, she didn't think that. She
couldn't
think that. It was just the upset of his routine.

The door to the living room was shut. She reached for the knob, hesitated, then knocked softly instead. There was no answer. She knocked again and when there was still no answer, she went in quietly. Tad was lying face down on the couch with one of the back cushions pulled firmly down over his head. It was behavior reserved only for major upsets.

“Tad?”

No answer.

“I'm sorry I laughed.”

His face looked out at her from beneath one edge of the puffy, dove-gray sofa cushion. There were fresh tears on his face. “Please can't I come?” he asked. “Don't make me stay here with Debbie, Mom.” Great histrionics, she thought. Great histrionics and blatant coercion. She recognized it (or
felt she did) and at the same time found it impossible to be tough . . . partly because her own tears were threatening again. Lately it seemed that there was always a cloudburst just over the horizon.

“Honey, you know the way the Pinto was when we came back from town. It could break down in the middle of East Galoshes Corners and we'd have to walk to a house and use the telephone, maybe a long way—”

“So? I'm a good walker!”

“I know, but you might get scared.”

Thinking of the thing in the closet, Tad suddenly cried out with all his force,
“I will not get scared!”
His hand had gone automatically to the bulge in the hip pocket of his jeans, where the Monster Words were stowed away.

“Don't raise your voice that way, please. It sounds ugly.”

He lowered his voice. “I won't get scared. I just want to go with you.”

She looked at him helplessly, knowing that she really ought to call Debbie Gehringer, feeling that she was being shamelessly manipulated by her four-year-old son. And if she gave in it would be for all the wrong reasons. She thought helplessly,
It's like a chain reaction that doesn't stop anyplace and it's gumming up works I didn't even know existed. O God I wish I was in Tahiti.

She opened her mouth to tell him, quite firmly and once and for all, that she was going to call Debbie and they could make popcorn together if he was good and that he would have to go to bed right after supper if he was bad and that was the
end
of it. Instead, what came out was, “All right, you can come. But our Pinto might not make it, and if it doesn't we'll have to walk to a house and have the Town Taxi come and pick us up. And if we
do
have to walk, I don't want to have to listen to you crabbing at me, Tad Trenton.”

“No, I won't—”

“Let me finish. I don't want you crabbing at me or asking me to carry you, because I won't do it. Do we have an understanding?”

“Yeah! Yeah, sure!” Tad hopped off the sofa, all grief forgotten. “Are we going now?”

“Yes, I guess so. Or . . . I know what. Why don't I make us a snack first? A snack and we'll put some milk in the Thermos bottles, too.”

“In case we have to camp out all
night?
” Tad looked suddenly doubtful again.

“No, honey.” She smiled and gave him a little hug. “But I still haven't been able to get Mr. Camber on the telephone. Your daddy says it's probably just because he doesn't have a phone in his garage so he doesn't know I'm calling. And his wife and little boy might be someplace, so—”

“He should have a phone in his garage,” Tad said. “That's
dumb.
”

“Just don't you tell him that,” Donna said quickly, and Tad shook his head that he wouldn't. “Anyway, if nobody's there, I thought you and I could have a little snack in the car or maybe on his steps and wait for him.”