Cujo (23 page)

Tad clapped his hands. “Great! Great! Can I take my Snoopy lunchbox?”

“Sure,” Donna said, giving in completely.

She found a box of Keebler figbars and a couple of Slim Jims (Donna thought they were hideous things, but they were Tad's all-time favorite snack). She wrapped some green olives and cucumber slices in foil. She filled Tad's Thermos with milk and half-filled Vic's big Thermos, the one he took on camping trips.

For some reason, looking at the food made her uneasy.

She looked at the phone and thought about trying Joe Camber's number again. Then she decided there was no sense in it, since they would be going out there either way. Then she thought of asking Tad again if he wouldn't rather she called Debbie Gehringer, and then wondered what was wrong with her—Tad had made himself perfectly clear on
that
point.

It was just that suddenly she didn't feel good. Not good at all. It was nothing she could put her finger on. She looked around the kitchen as if expecting the source of her unease to announce itself. It didn't.

“We going, Mom?”

“Yes,” she said absently. There was a noteminder on the wall by the fridge, and on this she scrawled:
Tad & I have gone out to J. Camber's garage w/ Pinto. Back soon.

“Ready, Tad?”

“Sure.” He grinned. “Who's the note for, Mom?”

“Oh, Joanie might drop by with those raspberries,” she said
vaguely. “Or maybe Alison MacKenzie. She was going to show me some Amway and Avon stuff.”

“Oh.”

Donna ruffled his hair and they went out together. The heat hit them like a hammer wrapped in pillows. Buggardly car probably won't even start, she thought.

But it did.

It was 3:45
P.M.

•  •  •

They drove southeast along Route 117 toward the Maple Sugar Road, which was about five miles out of town. The Pinto behaved in exemplary fashion, and if it hadn't been for the bout of snaps and jerks coming from the shopping trip, Donna would have wondered what she had bothered making such a fuss about. But there
had
been that bout of the shakes, and so she drove sitting bolt upright again, going no faster than forty, pulling as far to the right as she could when a car came up behind her. And there was a lot of traffic on the road. The summer influx of tourists and vacationers had begun. The Pinto had no air conditioning, so they rode with both windows open.

A Continental with New York plates towing a gigantic trailer with two mopeds on the back swung around them on a blind curve, the driver bleating his horn. The driver's wife, a fat woman wearing mirror sunglasses, looked at Donna and Tad with imperious contempt.

“Get stuffed!” Donna yelled, and popped her middle finger up at the fat lady. The fat lady turned away quickly. Tad was looking at his mother just a little nervously, and Donna smiled at him. “No hassle, big guy. We're going good. Just out-of-state fools.”

“Oh,” Tad said cautiously.

Listen to me,
she thought.
The big Yankee. Vic would be proud.

She had to grin at herself, because everyone in Maine understood that if you moved here from another place, you would be an out-of-stater until you were sent down in your grave. And on your tombstone they would write something like
HARRY JONES, CASTLE CORNERS, MAINE
(Originally from Omaha, Nebraska).

Most of the tourists were headed toward 302, where they would turn east to Naples or west toward Bridgton, Fryeburg,
and North Conway, New Hampshire, with its alpine slides, cut-rate amusement parks, and tax-free restaurants. Donna and Tad were not going up to the 302 junction.

Although their home overlooked downtown Castle Rock and its picturebook Town Common, woods had closed in on both sides of the road before they were five miles from their own front door. These woods drew back occasionally—a little—to show a lot with a house or a trailer in it, and as they went farther out, the houses were more often of the type that her father had called “shanty Irish.” The sun still shone brightly down and there was a good four hours of daylight left, but the emptiness made her feel uneasy again. It was not so bad here, on 117, but once they left the main road—

Their turnoff was marked with a sign saying
MAPLE SUGAR ROAD
in faded, almost unreadable letters. It had been splintered considerably by kids banging away with .22s and bird-shot. This road was two-lane blacktop, bumpy and frost-heaved. It wound past two or three nice houses, two or three not-so-nice houses, and one old and shabby RoadKing trailer sitting on a crumbling concrete foundation. There was a yardful of weeds in front of the trailer. Donna could see cheap-looking plastic toys in the weeds. A sign nailed askew to a tree at the head of the driveway read
FREE KITTEN'S
. A potbellied kid of maybe two stood in the driveway, his sopping Pamper hanging below his tiny penis. His mouth hung open and he was picking his nose with one finger and his navel with another. Looking at him, Donna felt a helpless chill of gooseflesh.

Stop it! For Christ's sake, what's wrong with you?

The woods closed in around them again. An old '68 Ford Fairlane with a lot of rust-red primer paint on the hood and around the headlights passed them going the other way. A young kid with a lot of hair was slouched nonchalantly behind the wheel. He wasn't wearing a shirt. The Fairlane was doing maybe eighty. Donna winced. It was the only traffic they saw.

The Maple Sugar Road climbed steadily, and when they passed the occasional field or large garden they were afforded a stunning view of western Maine toward Bridgton and Fryeburg. Long Lake glittered in the farthest distance like the sapphire pendant of a fabulously rich woman.

They were climbing another long slope up one of these
eroded hills (as advertised, the sides of the road were now lined with dusty, heat-drooping maples) when the Pinto began to buck and jolt again. Donna's breath clogged in her throat and she thought,
Oh come on, oh come on, come on, you cruddy little car, come
on!

Tad shifted uneasily in the passenger bucket and held onto his Snoopy lunchbox a little tighter.

She began to tap the accelerator lightly, her mind repeating the same words over and over like an inarticulate prayer: come
on,
come
on,
come
on.

“Mommy? Is it—”

“Hush, Tad.”

The jerking grew worse. She pressed the gas pedal harder in frustration—and the Pinto squirted ahead, the engine smoothing out once more.

“Yay!” Tad said, so suddenly and loudly that she jumped.

“We're not there yet, Tadder.”

A mile farther along they came to an intersection marked with another wooden sign, this one reading
TOWN ROAD NO
. 3. Donna turned in, feeling triumphant. As well as she remembered, Camber's place was less than a mile and a half from here. If the Pinto gave up the ghost now, she and Tad could ankle it.

They passed a ramshackle house with a station wagon and a big old rusty white car in the driveway. In her rearview mirror, Donna noticed that the honeysuckle had really gone crazy on the side of the house that would catch most of the sun. A field opened up on their left after they passed the house, and the Pinto began to climb a long, steep hill.

Halfway up, the little car began to labor again. This time it was jerking harder than it ever had before.

“Will it get up, Mommy?”

“Yes,” she said grimly.

The Pinto's speedometer needle dropped from forty to thirty. She dropped the transmission selector lever from drive into the lower range, thinking vaguely that it might help compression or something. Instead, the Pinto began to buck worse than ever. A fusillade of backfires roared through the exhaust pipe, making Tad cry out. Now they were down to fast running speed, but she could see the Camber house and the red barn that served as his garage.

Flooring the accelerator had helped before. She tried it
again, and for a moment the engine smoothed out. The speedometer needle crept up from fifteen to twenty. Then it began to shake and shudder once more. Donna tried flooring the gas yet again, but this time, instead of smoothing out, the engine began to fail. The
AMP
idiot light on the dashboard began to flicker dully, signaling the fact that the Pinto was now on the edge of a stall.

But it didn't matter because the Pinto was now laboring past the Camber mailbox. They were here. There was a package hung over the mailbox lid, and she saw the return address clearly as they passed it: J. C. Whitney & Co.

The information went directly to the back of her mind without stopping. Her immediate attention was focused on getting the car into the driveway.
Let it stall then,
she thought.
He'll have to fix it before he can get in or out.

The driveway was a little beyond the house. If it had been an uphill driveway all the way, as the Trentons' own was, the Pinto would not have made it. But after a small initial rise, the Cambers' driveway ran either dead level or slightly downhill toward the big converted barn.

Donna shifted into neutral and let what was left of the Pinto's forward motion carry them toward the big barn doors, which stood half open on their tracks. As soon as her foot left the accelerator pedal to tap the brake and stop them, the motor began to hitch again . . . but feebly this time. The
AMP
light pulsed like a slow heartbeat, then brightened. The Pinto stalled.

Tad looked at Donna.

She grinned at him. “Tad, ole buddy,” she said, “we have arrived.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But is anybody home?”

There was a dark green pickup truck parked beside the barn. That was Camber's truck, all right, not someone else's waiting to be fixed. She remembered it from last time. But the lights were off inside. She craned her neck to the left and saw they were off in the house too. And there had been a package hung over the mailbox lid.

The return address on the package had been J. C. Whitney & Co. She knew what that was; her brother had gotten their catalogue in the mail when he was a teenager. They sold auto parts, accessories, customizing equipment. A package for Joe Camber from J. C. Whitney was the most natural thing in the
world. But if he was here, he surely would have gotten his mail by now.

Nobody home,
she thought dispiritedly, and felt a weary sort of anger at Vic.
He's always home, sure he is, the guy would put down roots in his garage if he could, sure he would, except when I need him.

“Well, let's go see, anyhow,” she said, opening her door.

“I can't get my seatbelt unhooked,” Tad said, scratching futilely at the buckle release.

“Okay, don't have a hemorrhage, Tad. I'll come around and let you out.”

She got out, slammed her door, and took two steps toward the front of the car, intending to cross in front of the hood to the passenger side and let Tad out of his harness. It would give Camber a chance to come out and see who his company was, if he was here. She somehow didn't relish poking her head in on him unannounced. It was probably foolish, but since that ugly and frightening scene with Steve Kemp in her kitchen, she had become more aware of what it was to be an unprotected woman than she had since she was sixteen and her mother and father had let her begin dating.

The quiet struck her at once. It was hot and so quiet that it was somehow unnerving. There were sounds, of course, but even after several years in Castle Rock, the most she could say about her ears was that they had slowly adapted from “city ears” to “town ears.” They were by no means “country ears”. . . and this was the real country.

She heard birdsong, and the harsher music of a crow somewhere in the long field which stretched down the flank of the hill they had just climbed. There was the sigh of a light breeze, and the oaks that lined the driveway made moving patterns of shadow around her feet. But she could not hear a single car engine, not even the faraway burp of a tractor or a baling machine. City ears and town ears are more closely attuned to man-made sounds; those that nature makes tend to fall outside the tightly drawn net of selective perception. A total lack of such sounds makes for unease.

I'd hear him if he was working in the barn,
Donna thought. But the only sounds that registered were her own crunching footfalls on the crushed gravel of the driveway and a low humming sound, barely audible—with no conscious
thought at all, her mind placed it as the hum of a power transformer on one of the poles back by the road.

She reached the front of the hood and started to cross in front of the Pinto, and that was when she heard a new sound. A low, thick growling.

She stopped, her head coming up at once, trying to pinpoint the source of that sound. For a moment she couldn't, and she was suddenly terrified, not by the sound itself but by its seeming directionlessness. It was nowhere. It was everywhere. And then some internal radar—survival equipment, perhaps—turned on all the way, and she understood that the growling was coming from inside the garage.

“Mommy?” Tad poked his head out his open window as far as the seatbelt harness would allow. “I can't get this damn old—”

“Shhh!”

(growling)

She took a tentative step backward, her right hand resting lightly on the Pinto's low hood, her nerves on tripwires as thin as filaments, not panicked but in a state of heightened alertness, thinking:
It didn't growl before.

Cujo came out of Joe Camber's garage. Donna stared at him, feeling her breath come to a painless and yet complete stop in her throat. It was the same dog. It was Cujo. But—

But oh my

(oh my God)

The dog's eyes settled on hers. They were red and rheumy. They were leaking some viscous substance. The dog seemed to be weeping gummy tears. His tawny coat was caked and matted with mud and—