Cujo (27 page)

Tad was tugging desperately at the sleeve of her shirt.

“Mommy, I have to go
bad!
”

She looked at him helplessly.

•  •  •

Brett Camber put the phone down slowly. “No one answered. He's not home, I guess.”

Charity nodded, not terribly surprised. She was glad that Jim had suggested they make the call from his office, which was downstairs and off the “family room.” The family room was soundproofed. There were shelves of board games in there, a Panasonic large-screen TV with a video recorder and an Atari video-games setup attached to it. And standing in one corner was a lovely old Wurlitzer jukebox that really worked.

“Down at Gary's, I guess,” Brett added disconsolately.

“Yes, I imagine he's with Gary,” she agreed, which wasn't exactly the same as saying they were together at Gary's house. She had seen the faraway look that had come into Joe's eyes when she had finally struck the deal with him, the deal that had gotten her and her son down here. She hoped Brett wouldn't think of calling directory assistance for Gary Pervier's number, because she doubted if there would be any answer there either. She suspected that there were two old dogs out somewhere tonight howling at the moon.

“Do you think Cuje is okay, Mom?”

“Why, I don't think your father would go off and leave him if he wasn't,” she said, and that was true—she didn't believe he would. “Why don't we leave it for tonight and you call him in the morning? You ought to be getting to bed anyway. It's past ten. You've had a big day.”

“I'm not tired.”

“Well, it's not good to go too long on nervous excitement. I put your toothbrush out, and your Aunt Holly put out a washcloth and a towel for you. Do you remember which bedroom—?”

“Yeah, sure. You going to bed, Mom?”

“Soon. I'm going to sit up with Holly for a while. We've got a lot of history to catch up on, she and I.”

Shyly, Brett said, “She looks like you. Y'know that?”

Charity looked at him, surprised. “Does she? Yes, I suppose she does. A little.”

“And that little kid, Jimmy. He's got a real right hook. Pow!” Brett burst out laughing.

“Did he hurt your stomach?”

“Heck, no.” Brett was looking around Jim's study carefully, noting the Underwood typewriter on the desk, the Rolodex, the neat open file of folders with the names on the tabs in alphabetical order. There was a careful, measuring look in
his eyes that she couldn't understand or evaluate. He seemed to come back from far away. “Nah, he didn't hurt me. He's just a little kid.” He cocked his head at her. “My cousin, right?”

“Right.”

“Blood relation.” He seemed to muse over it.

“Brett, do you like your Uncle Jim and Aunt Holly?”

“I like her. I can't tell about him yet. That jukebox. That's really neat. But . . .” He shook his head in a kind of impatience.

“What about it, Brett?”

“He takes so much
pride
in it!” Brett said. “It was the first thing he showed me, like a kid with a toy, isn't this neat, you know—”

“Well, he's only had it for a little while,” Charity said. An unformed dread had begun to swirl around inside of her, connected somehow with Joe—what had he told Brett when he took him out on the sidewalk? “Anyone's partial to something new. Holly wrote me when they finally got it, said Jim had wanted one of those things since he was a young man. People . . . honey, different people buy different things to . . . to show themselves that they're successful, I suppose. There's no accounting for it. But usually it's something they couldn't have when they were poor.”

“Was Uncle Jim poor?”

“I really don't know,” she said. “But they're not poor now.”

“All I meant was that he didn't have anything to
do
with it. You get what I mean?” He looked at her closely. “He bought it with money and hired some people to fix it and hired some
more
people to bring it here, and he says it's his, but he didn't . . . you know, he didn't . . . aw, I don't know.”

“He didn't make it with his own hands?” Although her fear was greater now, more coalesced, her voice was gentle.

“Yeah! That's right! He bought it with money, but he didn't really have nothing to do—”

“Anything—”

“Okay, yeah,
anything
to do with it, but now he's, like, takin credit for it—”

“He said a jukebox is a delicate, complicated machine—”

“Dad could have gotten it running,” Brett said flatly, and Charity thought she heard a door bang shut suddenly, closing
with a loud, toneless, frightening bang. It wasn't in the house. It was in her heart. “Dad would have tinkered it up and it would have been
his.
”

“Brett,” she said (and her voice sounded weak and justifying to her own ears), “not everybody is good at tinkering and fixing like your father is.”

“I know that,” he said, still looking around the office. “Yeah. But Uncle Jim shouldn't take credit for it just because he had the money. See? It's him taking the credit that I don't li—that bothers me.”

She was suddenly furious with him. She wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him back and forth; to raise her voice until it was loud enough to shout the truth into his brain. That money did not come by accident; that it almost always resulted from some sustained act of will, and that will was the core of character. She would tell him that while his father was perfecting his skills as a tinkerer and swilling down Black Label with the rest of the boys in the back of Emerson's Sunoco, sitting in piles of dead bald tires and telling frenchman jokes, Jim Brooks had been in law school, knocking his brains out to make grades, because when you made the grades you got the diploma, and the diploma was your ticket, you got to ride the merry-go-round. Getting on didn't mean you'd catch the brass ring, no, but it guaranteed you the chance to at least
try.

“You go on up now and get ready for bed,” she said quietly. “What you think of your Uncle Jim is between you and you. But . . . give him a chance, Brett. Don't just judge him on that.” They had gone through into the family room now, and she jerked a thumb at the jukebox.

“No, I won't,” he said.

She followed him up into the kitchen, where Holly was making cocoa for the four of them. Jim Junior and Gretchen had gone to bed long before.

“You get your man?” Holly asked.

“No, he's probably down chewing the fat with that friend of his,” Charity said. “We'll try tomorrow.”

“Want some cocoa, Brett?” Holly asked.

“Yes, please.”

Charity watched him sit down at the table. She saw him put his elbow on it and then take it off again quickly,
remembering that it was impolite. Her heart was so full of love and hope and fear that it seemed to stagger in her chest.

Time,
she thought.
Time and perspective. Give him that. If you force him, you'll lose him for sure.

But how much time was there? Only a week, and then he would be back under Joe's influence. And even as she sat down next to her son and thanked Holly for her cup of hot cocoa, her thoughts had turned speculatively to the idea of divorce again.

•  •  •

In her dream, Vic had come.

He simply walked down the driveway to the Pinto and opened her door. He was dressed in his best suit, the three-piece charcoal-gray one (when he put it on she always teased him that he looked like Jerry Ford with hair).
Come on, you two,
he said, and that quirky little grin on his face.
Time to go home before the vampires come out.

She tried to warn him, to tell him the dog was rabid, but no words came. And suddenly Cujo was advancing out of the dark, his head down, a steady low growl rumbling in his chest.
Watch out!
she tried to cry.
His bite is death!
But no sound came out.

But just before Cujo launched himself at Vic, he turned and pointed his finger at the dog. Cujo's fur went dead white instantly. His red, rheumy eyes dropped back into his head like marbles into a cup. His muzzle fell off and shattered against the crushed gravel of the driveway like black glass. A moment later all that was left in front of the garage was a blowing fur coat.

Don't you worry,
Vic said in the dream.
Don't you worry about that old dog, it's nothing but a fur coat. Did you get the mail yet? Never mind the dog, the mail's coming. The mail's the important thing. Right? The mail—

His voice was disappearing down a long tunnel, growing echoey and faint. And suddenly it was not a dream of Vic's voice but a memory of a dream—she was awake and her cheeks were wet with tears. She had cried in her sleep. She looked at her watch and could just make out the time: quarter past one. She looked over at Tad and saw he was sleeping soundly, his thumb hooked into his mouth.

Never mind the dog, the mail's coming. The mail's the important thing.

And suddenly the significance of the package hung over the mailbox door came to her, hit her like an arrow fired up from her subconscious mind, an idea she had not quite been able to get hold of before. Perhaps because it was so big, so simple, so elementary-my-dear-Watson. Yesterday was Monday and the mail had come. The J. C. Whitney package for Joe Camber was ample proof of that.

Today was Tuesday and the mail would come again.

Tears of relief began to roll down her not-yet-dry cheeks. She actually had to restrain herself from shaking Tad awake and telling him it was going to be all right, that by two o'clock this afternoon at the latest—and more probably by ten or eleven in the morning, if the mail delivery out here was as prompt as it was most other places in town—this nightmare would end.

The mailman would come even if he had no mail for the Cambers, that was the beauty of it. It would be his job to see if the flag was up, signifying outgoing mail. He would have to come up here, to his last stop on Town Road No. 3, to check that out, and today he was going to be greeted by a woman who was semi-hysterical with relief.

She eyed Tad's lunchbox and thought of the food inside. She thought of herself carefully saving some of it aside, in case . . . well, in case. Now it didn't matter so much, although Tad was likely to be hungry in the morning. She ate the rest of the cucumber slices. Tad didn't care for cucumbers much anyway. It would be an odd breakfast for him, she thought, smiling. Figbars, olives, and a Slim Jim or two.

Munching the last two or three cucumber slices, she realized it was the coincidences that had scared her the most. That series of coincidences, utterly random but mimicking a kind of sentient fate, had been what seemed to make the dog so horribly purposeful, so . . . so out to get her personally. Vic being gone for ten days, that was coincidence number one. Vic calling early today, that was coincidence number two. If he hadn't got them then, he would have tried later, kept trying, and begun to wonder where they were. The fact that all three of the Cambers were gone, at least for overnight, the way it looked now. That was number three. Mother, son, and father. All gone. But they had left their dog. Oh yes. They had—

A sudden horrible thought occurred to her, freezing her
jaws on the last bite of cucumber. She tried to thrust it away, but it came back. It wouldn't go away because it had its own gargoyle-like logic.

What if they were all dead in the barn?

The image rose behind her eyes in an instant. It had the unhealthy vividness of those waking visions which sometimes come in the morning's small hours. The three bodies tumbled about like badly made toys on the floor in there, the sawdust around them stained red, their dusty eyes staring up into the blackness where barnswallows cooed and fluttered, their clothing ripped and chewed, parts of them—

Oh that's crazy, that's
—

Maybe he had gotten the boy first. The other two are in the kitchen, or maybe upstairs having a quickie, they hear screams, they rush out—

(stop it won't you stop it)

—they rush out but the boy is already dead, the dog has torn his throat out, and while they're still stunned by the death of their son, the Saint Bernard comes lurching out of the shadows, old and terrible engine of destruction, yes, the old monster comes from the shadows, rabid and snarling. He goes for the woman first and the man tries to save her—

(no, he would have gotten his gun or brained it with a wrench or something and where's the car? There was a car here before they all went off on a family trip—do you hear me FAMILY TRIP—took the car left the truck)

Then why had no one come to feed the dog?

That was the logic of the thing, part of what frightened her. Why hadn't anyone come to feed the dog? Because if you were going to be away for a day or for a couple of days, you made an arrangement with somebody. They fed your dog for you, and then when they were gone, you feed their cat for them, or their fish, or their parakeet, or whatever. So where—

And the dog kept going back into the barn.

Was it eating in there?

That's the answer,
her mind told her, relieved.
He didn't have anyone to feed the dog, so he poured it a tray of food. Gaines Meal, or something.

But then she stuck upon what Joe Camber himself had stuck upon earlier on that long, long day. A big dog would gobble it all at once and then go hungry. Surely it would be
better to get a friend to feed the dog if you were going to be gone. On the other hand, maybe they had been held up. Maybe there really had been a family reunion, and Camber had gotten drunk and passed out. Maybe this, maybe that, maybe anything.

Is the dog eating in the barn?