Cujo (33 page)

We're going to get out of it. No dog is going to do this to my son.

“When, Mommy?” He looked up to her, his eyes wet, his face as pale as cheese.

“Soon,” she said grimly. “Very soon.” She brushed his hair back and held him against her. She looked out Tad's window and again her eyes fixed on that thing lying in the high grass, that old friction-taped baseball bat.

I'd like to bash your head in with it.

Inside the house, the phone began to ring.

She jerked her head around, suddenly wild with hope.

“Is it for us, Mommy? Is the phone for us?”

She didn't answer him. She didn't know who it was for. But if they were lucky—and their luck was due to change soon, wasn't it?—it would be from someone with cause to be suspicious that no one was answering the phone at the Cambers'. Someone who would come out and check around.

Cujo's head had come up. His head cocked to one side, and for a moment he bore an insane resemblance to Nipper, the RCA dog with his ear to the gramophone horn. He got shakily to his feet and started toward the house and the sound of the ringing telephone.

“Maybe the doggy's going to answer the telephone,” Tad said. “Maybe—”

With a speed and agility that was terrifying, the big dog changed direction and came at the car. The awkward stagger was gone now, as if it had been nothing but a sly act all along. It was roaring and bellowing rather than barking. Its red eyes burned. It struck the car with a hard, dull crunch and rebounded—with stunned eyes. Donna saw that the side of her door was actually bowed in a bit.
It must be dead,
she thought hysterically,
bashed its sick brains in spinal fusion deep concussion must have must have MUST HAVE—

Cujo got back up. His muzzle was bloody. His eyes seemed wandering, vacuous again. Inside the house the phone rang on and on. The dog made as if to walk away, suddenly snapped viciously at its own flank as if stung, whirled, and sprang at Donna's window. It struck right in front of Donna's face with another tremendous dull thud. Blood sprayed across the glass, and a long silver crack appeared. Tad shrieked and
clapped his hands to his face, pulling his cheeks down, harrowing them with his fingernails.

The dog leaped again. Ropes of foam runnered back from his bleeding muzzle. She could see his teeth, heavy as old yellow ivory. His claws clicked on the glass. A cut between his eyes was streaming blood. His eyes were fixed on hers; dumb, dull eyes, but not without—she would have sworn it—not without some knowledge. Some malign knowledge.

“Get out of here!”
she screamed at it.

Cujo threw himself against the side of the car below her window again. And again. And again. Now her door was badly dented inward. Each time the dog's two-hundred-pound bulk struck the Pinto, it rocked on its springs. Each time she heard that heavy, toneless thud, she felt sure it must have killed itself, at least knocked itself unconscious. And each time it trotted back toward the house, whirled, and charged the car again. Cujo's face was a mask of blood and matted fur from which his eyes, once a kind, mild brown, peered with stupid fury.

She looked at Tad and saw that he had gone into a shock reaction, curling himself up into a tight, fetal ball in his bucket seat, his hands laced together at the nape of his neck, his chest hitching.

Maybe that's best. Maybe—

Inside the house the phone stopped ringing. Cujo, in the act of whirling around for another charge, paused. He cocked his head again in that curious, evocative gesture. Donna held her breath. The silence seemed very big. Cujo sat down, raised his horribly mangled nose toward the sky, and howled once—such a dark and lonesome sound that she shivered, no longer hot but as cold as a crypt. In that instant she knew—she did not feel or just think—she
knew
that the dog was something more than just a dog.

The moment passed. Cujo got to his feet, very slowly and wearily, and walked around to the front of the Pinto. She supposed he had lain down there—she could no longer see his tail. Nevertheless she held herself tensed for a few moments longer, mentally ready in case the dog should spring up onto the hood as it had done before. It didn't. There was nothing but silence.

She gathered Tad into her arms and began to croon to him.

•  •  •

When Brett had at last given up and come out of the telephone booth, Charity took his hand and led him into Caldor's coffee shop. They had come to Caldor's to look at matching tablecloths and curtains.

Holly was waiting for them, sipping the last of an ice-cream soda. “Nothing wrong, is there?” she asked.

“Nothing too serious,” Charity said, and ruffled his hair. “He's worried about his dog. Aren't you, Brett?”

Brett shrugged—then nodded miserably.

“You go on ahead, if you want,” Charity said to her. “We'll catch up.”

“All right. I'll be downstairs.”

Holly finished her soda and said, “I bet your pooch is just fine, Brett.”

Brett smiled at her as best he could but didn't reply. They watched Holly walk away, smart in her dark burgundy dress and cork-soled sandals, smart in a way Charity knew she would never be able to duplicate. Maybe once, but not now. Holly had left her two with a sitter, and they had come into Bridgeport around noon. Holly had bought them a nice lunch—paying with a Diners Club card—and since then they had been shopping. But Brett had been quiet and withdrawn, worrying about Cujo. Charity didn't feel much like shopping herself; it was hot, and she was still a little unnerved by Brett's sleepwalking that morning. Finally she had suggested that he try calling home from one of the booths around the corner from the snack bar . . . but the results had been precisely those of which she had been afraid.

The waitress came. Charity ordered coffee, milk, and two Danish pastries.

“Brett,” she said, “when I told your father I wanted us to go on this trip, he was against it—”

“Yeah, I figured that.”

“—and then he changed his mind. He changed it all at once. I think that maybe . . . maybe he saw it as a chance for a little vacation of his own. Sometimes men like to go off by themselves, you know, and do things—”

“Like hunting?”

(and whoring and drinking and God alone knows what else or why)

“Yes, like that.”

“And movies,” Brett said. Their snacks came, and he began munching his Danish.

(yes the X-rated kind on Washington Street they call it the Combat Zone)

“Could be. Anyway, your father might have taken a couple of days to go to Boston—”

“Oh, I don't think so,” Brett said earnestly. “He had a lot of work. A
lot
of work. He told me so.”

“There might not have been as much as he thought,” she said, hoping that the cynicism she felt hadn't rubbed through into her voice. “Anyway, that's what I think he did, and that's why he didn't answer the phone yesterday or today. Drink your milk, Brett. It builds up your bones.”

He drank half his milk and grew an old man's mustache. He set the glass down. “Maybe he did. He could have got Gary to go with him, maybe. He likes Gary a lot.”

“Yes, maybe he did get Gary to go with him,” Charity said. She spoke as if this idea had never occurred to her, but in fact she had called Gary's house this morning while Brett had been out in the back yard, playing with Jim Junior. There had been no answer. She hadn't a doubt in the world that they were together, wherever they were. “You haven't eaten much of that Danish.”

He picked it up, took a token bite, and put it down again. “Mom, I think Cujo was sick. He looked sick when I saw him yesterday morning. Honest to God.”

“Brett—”

“He
did,
Mom. You didn't see him. He looked . . . well, gross.”

“If you knew Cujo was all right, would it set your mind at rest?”

Brett nodded.

“Then we'll call Alva Thornton down on the Maple Sugar tonight,” she said. “Have him go up and check, okay? My guess is your father already called him and asked him to feed Cujo while he's gone.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Yes, I do.” Alva or someone like Alva; not really Joe's friends, because to the best of her knowledge Gary was the only real friend Joe had, but men who would do a favor for a favor in return at some future time.

Brett's expression cleared magically. Once again the
grown-up had produced the right answer, like a rabbit from a hat. Instead of cheering her, it turned her momentarily glum. What was she going to tell him if she called Alva and he said he hadn't seen Joe since mud season? Well, she would cross that bridge if she came to it, but she continued to believe that Joe wouldn't have just left Cujo to shift for himself. It wasn't like him.

“Want to go find your aunt now?”

“Sure. Just lemme finish this.”

She watched, half amused and half appalled, as he gobbled the rest of the Danish in three great bites and chased it with the rest of the milk. Then he pushed his chair back.

Charity paid the check and they went out to the down escalator.

“Jeez, this sure is a big store,” Brett said wonderingly. “It's a big city, isn't it, Mom?”

“New York makes this look like Castle Rock,” she said. “And don't say jeez, Brett, it's the same as swearing.”

“Okay.” He held the moving railing, looking around. To the right of them was a maze of twittering chirruping parakeets. To the left was the housewares department, with chrome glittering everywhere and a dishwasher that had a front made entirely of glass so you could check out its sudsing action. He looked up at his mother as they got off the escalator. “You two grew up together, huh?”

“Hope to tell you,” Charity said, smiling.

“She's real nice,” Brett said.

“Well, I'm glad you think so. I was always partial to her myself.”

“How did she get so rich?”

Charity stepped. “Is that what you think Holly and Jim are?
Rich?
”

“That house they live in didn't come cheap,” he said, and again she could see his father peeking around the corners of his unformed face, Joe Camber with his shapeless green hat tipped far back on his head, his eyes, too wise, shifted off to one side. “And that jukebox. That was dear, too. She's got a whole wallet of those credit cards and all we've got is the Texaco—”

She rounded on him. “You think it's smart to go peeking into people's wallets when they've just bought you a nice lunch?”

His face looked hurt and surprised, then it closed up and became smooth. That was a Joe Camber trick too. “I just noticed. Would have been hard not to, the way she was showing them off—”

“She was
not
showing them off!” Charity said, shocked. She stopped again. They had reached the edge of the drapery department.

“Yeah, she was,” Brett said. “If they'd been an accordion, she would have been playing ‘Lady of Spain.' ”

She was suddenly furious with him—partly because she suspected he might be right.

“She wanted you to see all of them,” Brett said. “That's what
I
think.”

“I'm not particularly interested in what you think on the subject, Brett Chamber.” Her face felt hot. Her hands itched to strike him. A few moments ago, in the cafeteria, she had been loving him . . . just as important, she had felt like his friend. Where had those good feelings gone?

“I just wondered how she got so much dough.”

“That's sort of a crude word to use for it, don't you think?”

He shrugged, openly antagonistic now, provoking her purposely, she suspected. It went back to his perception of what had happened at lunch, but it went further back than that. He was contrasting his own way of life and his father's way of life with another one. Had she thought he would automatically embrace the way that her sister and her husband lived, just because Charity wanted him to embrace it—a life-style that she herself had been denied, either by bad luck, her own stupidity, or both? Had he no right to criticize . . . or analyze?

Yes, she acknowledged that he did, but she hadn't expected that his observation would be so unsettling (if intuitively) sophisticated, so accurate, or so depressingly negative.

“I suppose it was Jim who made the money,” she said. “You know what he does—”

“Yeah, he's a pencil-pusher.”

But this time she refused to be drawn.

“If you want to see it that way. Holly married him when he was in college at the University of Maine in Portland, studying pre-law. While he was in law school in Denver, she worked a lot of crummy jobs to see that he got through. It's
often done that way. Wives work so their husbands can go to school and learn some special skill. . . .”

She was searching for Holly with her eyes, and finally thought she saw the top of her younger sister's head several aisles to the left.

“Anyway, when Jim finally got out of school, he and Holly came east and he went to work in Bridgeport with a big firm of lawyers. He didn't make much money then. They lived in a third-floor apartment with no air conditioning in the summer and not much heat in the winter. But he's worked his way up, and now he's what's called a junior partner. And I suppose he does make a lot of money, by our standards.”

“Maybe she shows her credit cards around because sometimes she still feels poor inside,” Brett said.

She was struck by the almost eerie perceptiveness of that, as well. She ruffled his hair gently, no longer angry at him. “You did say you liked her.”

“Yeah, I do. There she is, right over there.”

“I see her.”

They went over and joined Holly, who already had an armload of curtains and was now prospecting for tablecloths.