Cujo

by Stephen King

  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 But Brett had been quiet and withdrawn, worrying about Cujo.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 grownup 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 stopped. "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 Camber." 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 h
adn'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.

  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. Idee 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 idee 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--