Cujo (18 page)

“Hot damn, there he is,” the pump jockey said. He had dropped the adjustable wrench he was holding and had rushed into the cluttered, dingy little office which adjoined the station's garage bay. He had come out with a .30-.30 clutched in his greasy, big-knuckled hands. He went out onto the tarmac, dropped to one knee, and started shooting. His first shot had been low, shearing away one of the dog's back legs in a cloud of blood. That yellow dog never even moved, Gary remembered as he stared at Cujo now. Just looked around blankly as if it didn't have the slightest idea what was happening to it. The pump jockey's second try had cut the dog almost in half. Cuts hit the station's one pump in a black and red splash. A moment later three more guys had pulled in, three of Washington County's finest crammed shoulder to shoulders in the cab of a 1940 Dodge pickup. They were all armed. They piled out and pumped another eight or nine rounds into the dead dog. An hour after that, as the pump jockey was finishing up putting a new headlamp on the front of Gary's Indian cycle, the County Dog Officer arrived in a Studebaker with no door on the passenger side. She donned long rubber gloves and cut off what was left of the yellow dog's head to send to State Health and Welfare.

Cujo looked a hell of a lot spryer than that long-ago yellow dog, but the other symptoms were exactly the same.
Not too far gone,
he thought.
More dangerous. Holy Jesus, got to get my gun
—

He started to back away. “Hi, Cujo . . . nice dog, nice boy, nice doggy—” Cujo stood at the edge of the lawn, his great head lowered, his eyes reddish and filmy, growling.

“Nice boy—”

To Cujo, the words coming from
THE MAN
meant nothing. They were meaningless sounds, like the wind. What mattered was the
smell
coming from
THE MAN
. It was hot, rank, and pungent. It was the smell of fear. It was maddening and unbearable. He suddenly understood
THE MAN
had made him sick. He lunged forward, the growl in his chest mounting into a heavy roar of rage.

•  •  •

Gary saw the dog coming for him. He turned and ran. One bite, one scratch, could mean death. He ran for the porch and the safety of the house beyond the porch. But there had been too many drinks, too many long winter days by the stove, and too many long summer nights in the lawn chair. He could hear Cujo closing in behind him, and then there was the terrible split second when he could hear nothing and understood that Cujo had leaped.

As he reached the first splintery step of his porch, two hundred pounds of Saint Bernard hit him like a locomotive, knocking him flat and driving the wind from him. The dog went for the back of his neck. Gary tried to scramble up. The dog was over him, the thick fur of its underbelly nearly suffocating him, and it knocked him back down easily. Gary screamed.

Cujo bit him high on the shoulder, his powerful jaws closing and crunching through the bare skin, pulling tendons like wires. He continued to growl. Blood flew. Gary felt it running warmly down his skinny upper arm. He turned over and battered at the dog with his fists. It gave back a little and Gary was able to scramble up three more steps on his feet and hands. Then Cujo came again.

Gary kicked at the dog. Cujo feinted the other way and then came boring in, snapping and growling. Foam flew from his jaws, and Gary could smell his breath. It smelled rotten—rank and yellow. Gary balled his right fist and swung in a roundhouse, connecting with the bony shelf of Cujo's lower jaw. It was mostly luck. The jolt of the impact ran all the way up to his shoulder, which was on fire from the deep bite.

Cujo backed off again.

Gary looked at the dog, his thin, hairless chest moving rapidly up and down. His face was ashy gray. The laceration on his shoulder welled blood that splattered on the peeling porch steps. “Come for me, you sonofawhore,” he said. “Come on,
come on, I don't give a shit.” He screamed,
“You hear me? I don't give a shit!”

But Cujo backed off another pace.

•  •  •

The words still had no meaning, but the smell of fear had left
THE MAN
. Cujo was no longer sure if he wanted to attack or not. He hurt, he hurt so miserably, and the world was such a crazyquilt of sense and impression—

•  •  •

Gary got shakily to his feet. He backed up the last two steps of the porch. He backed across the porch's width and felt behind him for the handle of the screen door. His shoulder felt as if raw gasoline had been poured under the skin. His mind raved at him,
Rabies! I got the rabies!

Never mind. One thing at a time. His shotgun was in the hall closet. Thank Christ Charity and Brett Camber were gone from up on the hill. That was God's mercy at work.

He found the screen door's handle and pulled the door open. He kept his eyes locked on Cujo's until he had backed in and pulled the screen door shut behind him. Then a great relief swept through him. His legs went rubbery. For a moment the world swam away, and he pulled himself back by sticking his tongue out and biting down on it. This was no time to swoon like a girl. He could do that after the dog was dead, if he wanted. Christ, but it had been close out there; he had thought he was going to punch out for sure.

He turned and headed down the darkened hallway to the closet, and that was when Cujo smashed through the lower half of the screen door, muzzle wrinkled back from his teeth in a kind of sneer, a dry volley of barking sounds coming from his chest.

Gary screamed again and whirled just in time to catch Cujo in both arms as the dog leaped again, driving him back down the hall, bouncing from side to side and trying to keep his feet. For a moment they almost seemed to waltz. Then Gary, who was fifty pounds lighter, went down. He was dimly aware of Cujo's muzzle burrowing in under his chin, was dimly aware that Cujo's nose was almost sickeningly hot and dry. He tried getting his hands up and was thinking that he would have to go for Cujo's eyes with his thumbs when Cujo seized his throat and tore it open. Gary screamed and the dog savaged him again. Gary felt warm blood sheet
across his face and thought,
Dear God, that's mine!
His hands beat weakly and ineffectually at Cujo's upper body, doing no damage. At last they fell away.

Faintly, sick and cloying, he smelled honeysuckle.

•  •  •

“What do you see out there?”

Brett turned a little toward the sound of his mother's voice. Not all the way—he did not want to lose sight of the steadily unrolling view even for a little while. The bus had been on the road for almost an hour. They had crossed the Million Dollar Bridge into South Portland (Brett had stared with fascinated, wondering eyes at the two scum-caked, rustbucket freighters in the harbor), joined the Turnpike going south, and were now approaching the New Hampshire border.

“Everything,” Brett said. “What do you see, Mom?”

She thought:
Your reflection in the glass—very faint. That's what I see.

Instead she answered. “Why, the world, I guess. I see the world unrolling in front of us.”

“Mom? I wish we could ride all the way to California on this bus. See everything there is in the geography books at school.”

She laughed and ruffled his hair. “You'd get damn tired of scenery, Brett.”

“No. No, I wouldn't.”

And he probably wouldn't, she thought. Suddenly she felt both sad and old. When she had called Holly Saturday morning to ask her if they could come, Holly had been delighted, and her delight had made Charity feel young. It was strange that her own son's delight, his almost palpable euphoria, would make her feel old. Nevertheless . . .

What exactly is there going to be for him? she asked herself, studying his ghostlike face, which was superimposed over the moving scenery like a camera trick. He was bright, brighter than she was and much brighter than Joe. He ought to go to college, but she knew that when he got to high school Joe would press him to sign up for the shop and automotive maintenance courses so he could be more help around the place. Ten years ago he wouldn't have been able to get away with it, the guidance counselors wouldn't have
allowed
a bright boy like Brett to opt for all manual trades courses,
but in these days of phase electives and do your own thing, she was terribly afraid it might happen.

It made her afraid. Once she had been able to tell herself that school was far away, so very far away—high school,
real
school. Grammar school was nothing but play to a boy who slipped through his lessons as easily as Brett did. But in high school the business of irrevocable choices began. Doors slipped shut with a faint locking click that was only heard clearly in the dreams of later years.

She gripped her elbows and shivered, not even kidding herself that it was because the Hound's air conditioning was turned up too high.

For Brett, high school was now just four years away.

She shivered again and suddenly found herself wishing viciously that she had never won the money, or that she had lost the ticket. They had only been away from Joe for an hour, but it was the first time she had really been separated from him since they had married in late 1966. She hadn't realized that perspective would be so sudden, so dizzying, and so bitter. Picture this: Woman and boy are let free from brooding castle keep . . . but there's a catch. Stapled to their backs are large hooks, and slipped over the ends of the hooks are heavy-duty invisible rubber bands. And before you can get too far, presto-whizzo! You're snapped back inside for another fourteen years!

She made a little croaking sound in her throat.

“Did you say something, Mom?”

“No. Just clearing my throat.”

She shivered a third time, and this time her arms broke out in gooseflesh. She had recalled a line of poetry from one of her own high school English classes (she had wanted to take the college courses, but her father had been furious at the idea—did she think they were
rich?
—and her mother had laughed the idea to death gently and pityingly). It was from a poem by Dylan Thomas, and she couldn't remember the whole thing, but it had been something about moving through dooms of love.

That line had seemed funny and perplexing to her then, but she thought she understood it now. What else did you call that heavy-duty invisible rubber band, if not love? Was she going to kid herself and say that she did not, even now, in some way love the man she had married? That she stayed
with him only out of duty, or for the sake of the child (
that
was a bitter laugh; if she ever left him it would be for the sake of the child)? That he had never pleasured her in bed? That he could not, sometimes at the most unexpected moments (like the one back at the bus station), be tender?

And yet . . . and yet . . .

Brett was looking out the window, enrapt. Without turning from the view, he said, “You think Cujo's all right, Mom?”

“I'm sure he's fine,” she said absently.

For the first time she found herself thinking about divorce in a concrete way—what she could do to support herself and her son, how they would get along in such an unthinkable (
almost
unthinkable) situation. If she and Brett didn't come home from this trip, would he come after them, as he had vaguely threatened back in Portland? Would he decide to let Charity go to the bad but try to get Brett back by fair means . . . or foul?

She began to tick the various possibilities over in her mind, weighing them, suddenly thinking that maybe a little perspective wasn't such a bad thing after all. Painful, maybe. Maybe useful, too.

The Greyhound slipped across the state line into New Hampshire and rolled on south.

•  •  •

The Delta 727 rose steeply, buttonhooked over Castle Rock—Vic always looked for his house near Castle Lake and 117, always fruitlessly—and then headed back toward the coast. It was a twenty-minute run to Logan Airport.

Donna was down there, some eighteen thousand feet below. And the Tadder. He felt a sudden depression mixed with a black premonition that it wasn't going to work, that they were crazy to even think it might. When your house blew down, you had to build a new house. You couldn't put the old one back together again with Elmer's Glue.

The stewardess came by. He and Roger were riding in first class (“Might as well enjoy it while we can, buddy,” Roger had said last Wednesday when he made the reservations; “not everyone can go to the poorfarm in such impeccable style”), and there were only four or five other passengers, most of them reading the morning paper—as was Roger.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked Roger with that professional twinkly smile that seemed to say she had been over
joyed to get up this morning at five thirty to make the upsy-downsy run from Bangor to Portland to Boston to New York to Atlanta.

Roger shook his head absently, and she turned that unearthly smile on Vic. “Anything for you, sir? Sweet roll? Orange juice?”

“Could you rustle up a screwdriver?” Vic asked, and Roger's head came out of his paper with a snap.

The stew's smile didn't falter; a request for a drink before nine in the morning was no news to her. “I can rustle one up,” she said, “but you'll have to hustle to get it all down. It's really only a hop to Boston.”

“I'll hustle,” Vic promised solemnly, and she passed on her way back up to the galley, resplendent in her powder-blue slacks uniform and her smile.

“What's with you?” Roger asked.

“What do you mean, what's with me?”

“You know what I mean. I never even saw you drink a beer before noon before. Usually not before five.”

“I'm launching the boat,” Vic said.

“What boat?”

“The R.M.S.
Titanic,
” Vic said.

Roger frowned. “That's sort of poor taste, don't you think?”