Cujo (34 page)

•  •  •

The sun had finally gone down behind the house.

Little by little, the oven that was inside the Trentons' Pinto began to cool off. A more-or-less steady breeze sprang up, and Tad turned his face into it gratefully. He felt better, at least for the time being, than he had all day. In fact, all the rest of the day before now seemed like a terribly bad dream, one he could only partly remember. At times he had gone away; had simply left the car and gone away. He could remember that. He had gone on a horse. He and the horse had ridden down a long field, and there were rabbits playing there, just like in that cartoon his mommy and daddy had taken him to see at the Magic Lantern Theater in Bridgton. There was a pond at the end of the field, and ducks in the pond. The ducks were friendly. Tad played with them. It was better there than with Mommy, because the monster was where Mommy was, the monster that had gotten out of his closet. The monster was not in the place where the ducks were. Tad liked it there, although he knew in a vague way that if he stayed in that place too long, he might forget how to get back to the car.

Then the sun had gone behind the house. There were cool shadows, almost thick enough to have a texture, like velvet. The monster had stopped trying to get them. The mailman hadn't come, but at least now he was able to rest comfortably. The worst thing was being so thirsty. Never in his life had he wanted a drink so much. That was what made the place where the ducks were so nice—it was a wet, green place.

“What did you say, honey?” Mommy's face was bending down over him.

“Thirsty,” he said in a frog's croak. “I'm so thirsty, Mommy.” He remembered that he used to say “firsty” instead of “thirsty.” But some of the kids at daycamp had laughed at him and called him a baby, the same way they laughed at Randy Hofnager for saying “brefkust” when he meant “breakfast.” So he began to say it right, scolding himself fiercely inside whenever he forgot.

“Yes, I know. Mommy's thirsty too.”

“I bet there's water in the house.”

“Honey, we can't go into the house. Not just yet. The bad dog's in front of the car.”

“Where?” Tad got up on his knees and was surprised at the lightness that ran lazily through his head, like a slow-breaking wave. He put a hand on the dashboard to support himself, and the hand seemed on the end of an arm that was a mile long. “I don't see him.” Even his voice was distant, echoey.

“Sit back down, Tad. You're . . .”

She was still talking, and he could feel her sitting him back into the seat, but it was all distant. The words were coming to him over a long gray distance; it was foggy between him and her, as it had been foggy this morning . . . or yesterday morning . . . or on whatever morning it had been when his daddy left to go on his trip. But there was a bright place up ahead, so he left his mother to go to it. It was the duck place. Ducks and a pool and lilypads. Mommy's voice became a faraway drone. Her beautiful face, so large, always there, so calm, so like the moon that sometimes looked in his window when he awoke late at night having to go peepee . . . that face became gray and lost definition. It melted into the gray mist. Her voice became the lazy sound of bees which were far too nice to sting, and lapping water.

Tad played with the ducks.

Donna dozed off, and when she woke up again all the shadows had blended with one another and the last of the light in the Camber driveway was the color of ashes. It was dusk. Somehow it had gotten around to dusk again and they were—unbelievably—still here. The sun sat on the horizon, round and scarlet-orange. It looked to her like a basketball that had been dipped in blood. She moved her tongue around in her mouth. Saliva that had clotted into a thick gum broke apart reluctantly and became more or less ordinary spit again. Her throat felt like flannel. She thought how wonderful it would be to lie under the garden faucet at home, turn the spigot on full, open her mouth, and just let the icy water cascade in. The image was powerful enough to make her shiver and break out in a skitter of gooseflesh, powerful enough to make her head ache.

Was the dog still in front of the car?

She looked, but of course there was no real way of telling. All she could see for sure was that it wasn't in front of the barn.

She tapped the horn, but it only produced a rusty hoot and nothing changed. He could be anywhere. She ran her finger along the silver crack in her window and wondered what would happen if the dog hit the glass a few more times. Could it break through? She wouldn't have believed so twenty-four hours before, but now she wasn't so sure.

She looked at the door leading to Cambers' porch again. It seemed farther away than it had before. That made her think of a concept they had discussed in a college psychology course.
Idée fixe,
the instructor, a prissy little man with a toothbrush mustache, had called it.
If you get on a down escalator that isn't moving, you'll suddenly find it very hard to walk.
That had amused her so much that she had eventually found a down escalator in Bloomingdale's that was marked
OUT OF ORDER
and had walked down it. She had found to her further amusement that the prissy little associate professor was right—your legs just didn't want to move. That had led her to try and imagine what would happen to your head if the stairs in your house suddenly started to move as you were walking down them. The very idea had made her laugh out loud.

But it wasn't so funny now. As a matter of fact, it wasn't funny at all.

That porch door definitely looked farther away.

The dog's psyching me out.

She tried to reject the thought as soon as it occurred to her, and then stopped trying. Things had become too desperate now to indulge in the luxury of lying to herself. Knowingly or unknowingly, Cujo was psyching her out. Using, perhaps, her own
idée fixe
of how the world was supposed to be. But things had changed. The smooth escalator ride was over. She could not just continue to stand on the still steps with her son and wait for somebody to start the motor again. The fact was, she and Tad were under siege by dog.

Tad was sleeping. If the dog was in the barn, she could make it now.

But if it's still in front of the car? Or under it?

She remembered something her father used to say sometimes when he was watching the pro football games on TV. Her dad almost always got tanked for these occasions, and usually ate a large plate of cold beans left over from Saturday-night supper. As a result, the TV room was uninhabitable for normal earth life by the fourth quarter; even the dog would slink out, an uneasy deserter's grin on its face.

This saying of her father's was reserved for particularly fine tackles and intercepted passes. “He laid back in the tall bushes on that one!” her father would cry. It drove her mother crazy . . . but by the time Donna was a teenager, almost everything about her father drove her mother crazy.

She now had a vision of Cujo in front of the Pinto, not sleeping at all but crouched on the gravel with his back legs coiled under him, his bloodshot eyes fixed intently on the spot where she would first appear if she left the car on the driver's side. He was waiting for her, hoping she would be foolish enough to get out. He was laying back in the tall bushes for her.

She rubbed both hands over her face in a quick and nervous washing gesture. Overhead, Venus now peeked out of the darkening blue. The sun had made its exit, leaving a still but somehow crazed yellow light over the fields. Somewhere a bird sang, stopped, then sang again.

It came to her that she was nowhere near as anxious to leave the car and run for the door as she had been that afternoon. Part of it was having dozed off and then wakened not knowing exactly where the dog was. Part of it was the simple
fact that the heat was drawing back—the tormenting heat and what it was doing to Tad had been the biggest thing goading her to make a move. It was quite comfortable in the car now, and Tad's half-lidded, half-swooning state had become a real sleep. He was resting comfortably, at least for the time being.

But she was afraid those things were secondary to the main reason she was still here—that, little by little, some psychological point of readiness had been reached and passed. She remembered from her childhood diving lessons at Camp Tapawingo that there came an instant, that first time on the high board, when you either had to try it or retreat ignominiously to let the girl behind you have her crack at it. There came a day during the learning-to-drive experience when you finally had to leave the empty country roads behind and try it in the city. There came a time. Always there came a time. A time to dive, a time to drive, a time to try for the back door.

Sooner or later the dog would show itself. The situation was bad, granted, but not yet desperate. The right time came around in cycles—that was not anything she had been taught in a psychology class; it was something she knew instinctively. If you chickened down from the high board on Monday, there was no law that said you couldn't go right back again on Tuesday. You could—

Reluctantly, her mind told her that was a deadly-false bit of reasoning.

She was not as strong tonight as she had been last night. She would be even weaker and more dehydrated tomorrow morning. And that was not the worst of it. She had been sitting almost all the time for—how long?—it didn't seem possible, but it was now some twenty-eight hours. What if she was too stiff to do it? What if she got halfway to the porch only to be doubled up and then dropped flopping to the ground by charley horses in the big muscles of her thighs?

In matters of life and death,
her mind told her implacably,
the right time only comes around once—once and then it's gone.

Her breathing and heart rate had speeded up. Her body was aware she was going to make the try before her mind was. Then she was wrapping her shirt more firmly about her right hand, her left hand was settling on the doorhandle, and she knew. There had been no conscious decision she was
aware of; suddenly she was simply going. She was going now, while Tad slept deeply and there was no danger he would bolt out after her.

She pulled the doorhandle up, her hand sweat-slick. She was holding her breath, listening for any change in the world.

The bird sang again. That was all.

If he's bashed the door too far out of shape it won't even open,
she thought. That would be a kind of bitter relief. She could sit back then, rethink her options, see if there was anything she had left out of her calculations . . . and get a little thirstier . . . a little weaker . . . a little slower. . . .

She brought pressure to bear against the door, slugging her left shoulder against it, gradually settling more and more of her weight upon it. Her right hand was sweating inside the cotton shirt. Her fist was so tightly clenched that the fingers ached. Dimly, she could feel the crescents of her nails biting into her palm. Over and over in her mind's eye she saw herself punching through the glass beside the knob of the porch door, heard the tinkle of the shards striking the boards inside, saw herself reaching for the handle . . .

But the car door wasn't opening. She shoved as hard as she could, straining, the cords in her neck standing out. But it wasn't opening. It—

Then it did open, all of a sudden. It swung wide with a terrible clunking sound, almost spilling her out on all fours. She grabbed for the doorhandle, missed, and grabbed again. She held the handle, and suddenly a panicky certainty stole into her mind. It was as cold and numbing as a doctor's verdict of inoperable cancer. She had gotten the door open, but it wouldn't close again. The dog was going to leap in and kill them both. Tad would have perhaps one confused moment of waking, one last merciful instant in which to believe it was a dream, before Cujo's teeth ripped his throat open.

Her breath rattled in and out, quick and quick. It felt like hot straw. It seemed that she could see each and every piece of gravel in the driveway, but it was hard to think. Her thoughts tumbled wildly. Scenes out of her past zipped through the foreground of her mind like a film of a parade which had been speeded up until the marching bands and horseback riders and baton twirlers seem to be fleeing the scene of some weird crime.

The garbage disposal regurgitating a nasty green mess all over the kitchen ceiling, backing up through the bar sink.

Falling off the back porch when she was five and breaking her wrist.

Looking down at herself during period 2—algebra—one day when she was a high school freshman and seeing to her utter shame and horror that there were spots of blood on her light blue linen skirt, she had started her period, how was she ever going to get up from her seat when the bell rang without everybody seeing, without everyone knowing that Donna-Rose was having her period?

The first boy she had ever kissed with her mouth open. Dwight Sampson.

Holding Tad in her arms, newborn, then the nurse taking him away; she wanted to tell the nurse not to do that—
Give him back, I'm not done with him,
those were the words that had come to mind—but she was too weak to talk and then the horrible, squelching, gutty sound of the afterbirth coming out of her; she remembered thinking
I'm puking up his life-support systems,
and then she had passed out.

Her father, crying at her wedding and then getting drunk at the reception.

Faces. Voices. Rooms. Scenes. Books. The terror of this moment, thinking
I AM GOING TO DIE
—

With a tremendous effort, she got herself under some kind of control. She got the Pinto's doorhandle in both hands and gave it a tremendous yank. The door flew shut. There was that clunk again as the hinge Cujo had knocked out of true protested. There was a hefty bang when the door slammed closed that made Tad jump and then mutter a bit in his sleep.