Cujo (30 page)

She closed her eyes and tried to dismiss the whole train of thought, uneasy at the vivid emotions that memory called up. SPCA, greenhouse effect, garbage disposals, what next? How I Lost My Virginity? Six Well-Loved Vacations? The
mailman,
that was the thing to think about, the goddam
mailman.

“Mommy, maybe the car will start now.”

“Honey, I'm scared to try it because the battery is so low.”

“But we're just
sitting
here,” he said, sounding petulant and
tired and cross. “What does it matter if the battery's low or not if we're just
sitting
here? Try it!”

“Don't you go giving me orders, kiddo, or I'll whack your ass for you!”

He cringed away from her hoarse, angry voice and she cursed herself again. He was scratchy . . . so, who could blame him? Besides, he was right. That was what had really made her angry. But Tad didn't understand; the real reason she didn't want to try the engine again was because she was afraid it would bring the dog. She was afraid it would bring Cujo, and more than anything else she didn't want that.

Grimly, she turned the key in the ignition. The Pinto's engine cranked very slowly now, with a draggy, protesting sound. It coughed twice but did not fire. She turned the key off and tapped the horn. It gave a foggy, low honk that probably didn't carry fifty yards, let alone to that house at the bottom of the hill.

“There,” she said briskly and cruelly. “Are you happy? Good.”

Tad began to cry. He began the way she always remembered it beginning when he was a baby: his mouth drawing into a trembling bow, the tears spilling down his cheeks even before the first sobs came. She pulled him to her then, saying she was sorry, saying she didn't mean to be mean, it was just that she was upset too, telling him that it would be over as soon as the mailman got there, that she would take him home and wash his hair. And thought:
A fighting chance to be a better woman than your mother. Sure. Sure. kid. You're just like her. That's just the kind of thing she would have said in a situation like this. When you're feeling bad, what you do is spread the misery, share the wealth. Well, like mother like daughter, right? And maybe when Tad grows up, he'll feel the same way about you as you feel about—

“Why is it so hot, Mommy?” Tad asked dully.

“The greenhouse effect,” she answered, without even thinking about it. She wasn't up to this, and she knew it now. If this was, in any sense, a final examination on motherhood—or on adulthood itself—then she was flagging the test. How long had they been stuck in this driveway? Fifteen hours at the very most. And she was cracking up, falling apart.

“Can I have a Dr Pepper when we get home, Mommy?”
The Monster Words, sweaty and wrinkled, lay limply on his lap.

“All you can drink,” she said, and hugged him tight. But the feel of his body was frighteningly wooden. I shouldn't have shouted at him, she thought distractedly. If only I hadn't shouted.

But she would do better, she promised herself. Because the mailman would be along soon.

“I think the muh—I think the doggy's going to eat us,” Tad said.

She started to reply and then didn't. Cujo still wasn't around. The sound of the Pinto's engine turning over hadn't brought him. Maybe he was asleep. Maybe he had had a convulsion and died. That would be wonderful . . . especially if it had been a
slow
convulsion. A painful one. She looked at the back door again. It was so temptingly near. It was locked. She was sure of that now. When people went away, they locked up. It would be foolhardy to try for the door, especially with the mailman due so soon. Play it as though it were real, Vic sometimes said. She would have to, because it
was
real. Better to assume the dog was still alive, and lying just inside those half-open garage doors. Lying in the shade.

The thought of shade made her mouth water.

It was almost eleven o'clock then. It was about forty-five minutes later when she spotted something in the grass beyond the edge of the driveway on Tad's side of the car. Another fifteen minutes of examination convinced her that it was an old baseball bat with a friction-taped handle, half obscured by witch grass and timothy.

A few minutes after that, just before noon, Cujo stumbled out of the barn, blinking his red, rheumy eyes stupidly in the hot sun.

When they come to take you down,

When they bring that wagon 'round,

When they come to call on you

And drag your poor body down . . .

Jerry Garcia's voice, easy but somehow weary, came floating down the hall, magnified and distorted by someone's transistor radio until it sounded as if the vocal were floating down a long steel tube. Closer by, someone was moaning.
That morning, when he went down to the smelly industrial bathroom to shave and shower, there had been a puddle of vomit in one of the urinals and a large quantity of dried blood in one of the washbasins.

“Shake it, shake it, Sugaree,”
Jerry Garcia sang,
“just don't tell 'em you know me.”

Steve Kemp stood at the window of his room on the fifth floor of the Portland YMCA, looking down at Spring Street, feeling bad and not knowing why. His head was bad. He kept thinking about Donna Trenton and how he had fucked her over—fucked her over and then hung around. Hung around for what? What the fuck had happened?

He wished he were in Idaho. Idaho had been much on his mind lately. So why didn't he stop honking his donk and just go? He didn't know. He didn't like not knowing. He didn't like all these questions screwing up his head. Questions were counterproductive to a state of serenity, and serenity was necessary to the development of the artist. He had looked at himself this morning in one of the toothpaste-spotted mirrors and had thought he looked old. Really old. When he came back to his room he had seen a cockroach zigzagging busily across the floor. The omens were bad.

She didn't give me the brush because I'm old, he thought. I'm not old. She did it because her itch was scratched, because she's a bitch, and because I gave her a spoonful of her own medicine. How did Handsome Hubby like his little love note, Donna? Did Handsome Hubby dig it?

Did hubby
get
his little love note?

Steve crushed his cigarette out in the jar top that served the room as an ashtray. That was really the central question, wasn't it? With that one answered, the answers to the other questions would drop into place. The hateful hold she had gotten over him by telling him to get lost before he was ready to end the affair (she had
humiliated
him, goddammit), for one thing—for one very
big
thing.

Suddenly he knew what to do, and his heart began to thud heavily with anticipation. He put a hand into his pocket and jingled the change there. He went out. It was just past noon, and in Castle Rock, the mailman for whom Donna hoped had begun that part of his rounds which covered the Maple Sugar Road and Town Road No. 3.

•  •  •

Vic, Roger, and Rob Martin spent Tuesday morning at Image-Eye and then went out for beers and burgers. A few burgers and a great many beers later, Vic suddenly realized that he was drunker than he had ever been at a business luncheon in his life. Usually he had a single cocktail or a glass of white wine; he had seen too many good New York admen drown themselves slowly in those dark places just off Madison Avenue, talking to their friends about campaigns they would never mount . . . or, if they became drunk enough, to the barmen in those places about novels which they would assuredly never write.

It was a strange occasion, half victory celebration, half wake. Rob had greeted their idea of a final Sharp Cereal Professor ad with tempered enthusiasm, saying that he could knock it a mile . . . always assuming he was given the chance. That was the wake half. Without the approval of old man Sharp and his fabled kid, the greatest spot in the world would do them no good. They would all be out on their asses.

Under the circumstances, Vic supposed it was all-right to get loaded.

Now, as the main rush of the restaurant's lunchtime clientele came in, the three of them sat in their shirtsleeves at a corner booth, the remains of their burgers on waxed paper, beer bottles scattered around the table, the ashtray overflowing. Vic was reminded of the day he and Roger had sat in the Yellow Sub back in Portland, discussing this little safari. Back when everything that had been wrong had been wrong with the business. Incredibly, he felt a wave of nostalgia for that day and wondered what Tad and Donna were doing.
Going to call them tonight,
he thought.
If I can stay sober enough to remember, that is.

“So what now?” Rob asked. “You hanging out in Boston or going on to New York? I can get you guys tickets to the Boston–Kansas City series, if you want them. Might cheer you up to watch George Brett knock a few holes in the left-field wall.”

Vic looked at Roger, who shrugged and said, “On to New York, I guess. Thanks are in order, Rob, but I don't think either of us are in the mood for baseball.”

“There's nothing more we can do here,” Vic agreed. “We had a lot of time scheduled on this trip for brainstorming, but I guess we're all agreed to go with the final spot idea.”

“There's still plenty of rough edges,” Rob said. “Don't get too proud.”

“We can mill off the rough edges,” Roger said. “One day with the marketing people ought to do it, I think. You agree, Vic?”

“It might take two,” Vic said. “Still, there's no reason why we can't tie things up a lot earlier than we'd expected.”

“Then what?”

Vic grinned bleakly. “Then we call old man Sharp and make an appointment to see him. I imagine we'll end up going straight on to Cleveland from New York. The Magical Mystery Tour.”

“See Cleveland and die,” Roger said gloomily, and poured the remainder of his beer into his glass. “I just can't wait to see that old fart.”

“Don't forget the young fart,” Vic said, grinning a little.

“How could I forget that little prick?” Roger replied. “Gentlemen, I propose another round.”

Rob looked at his watch. “I really ought to—”

“One last round,” Roger insisted. “Auld Lang Syne, if you want.”

Rob shrugged. “Okay. But I still got a business to run, don't forget that. Although without Sharp Cereals, there's going to be space for a lot of long lunches.” He raised his glass in the air and waggled it until a waiter saw him and nodded back.

“Tell me what you really think,” Vic said to Rob. “No bullshit. You think it's a bust?”

Rob looked at him, seemed about to speak, then shook his head.

Roger said, “No, go ahead. We all set out to sea in the same pea-green boat. Or Red Razberry Zingers carton, or whatever. You think it's no go, don't you?”

“I don't think there's a chance in hell,” Rob said. “You'll work up a good presentation—you always do. You'll get your background work done in New York, and I have a feeling that everything the market-research boys can tell you on such short notice is all going to be in your favor. And Yancey Harrington. . . . I think he'll emote his fucking heart out. His big deathbed scene. He'll be so good he'll make Bette Davis in
Dark Victory
look like Ali MacGraw in
Love Story.
”

“Oh, but it's not like that at all—” Roger began.

Rob shrugged. “Yeah, maybe that's a little unfair. Okay. Call it his curtain call, then. Whatever you want to call it, I've been in this business long enough to believe that there wouldn't be a dry eye in the house after that commercial was shown over a three- or four-week period. It would knock
everybody
on their asses. But—”

The beers came. The waiter said to Rob, “Mr. Johnson asked me to tell you that he has several parties of three waiting, Mr. Martin.”

“Well, you run back and tell Mr. Johnson that the boys are on their last round and to keep his undies dry. Okay, Rocky?”

The waiter smiled, emptied the ashtray, and nodded.

He left. Rob turned back to Vic and Roger. “So what's the bottom line? You're bright boys. You don't need a one-legged cameraman with a snootful of beer to tell you where the bear shat in the buckwheat.”

“Sharp just won't apologize,” Vic said. “That's what you think, isn't it?”

Rob saluted him with his bottle of beer. “Go to the head of the class.”

“It's not an apology,” Roger said plaintively. “It's a fucking
explanation.
”

“You see it that way,” Rob answered, “but will he? Ask yourself that. I've met that old geezer a couple of times. He'd see it in terms of the captain deserting the sinking ship ahead of the women and children, giving up the Alamo, every stereotype you can think of. No, I'll tell you what I think is going to happen, my friends.” He raised his glass and drank slowly. “I think a valuable and all too short relationship is going to come to an end very soon now. Old man Sharp is going to listen to your proposal, he's going to shake his head, he's going to usher you out. Permanently. And the next PR firm will be chosen by his son, who will make his pick based on which one he believes will give him the freest rein to indulge his crackpot ideas.”

“Maybe,” Roger said. “But maybe he'll—”

“Maybe doesn't matter
shit
one way or the other,” Vic said vehemently. “The only difference between a good advertising man and a good snake-oil salesman is that a good advertising man does the best job he can with the materials at hand . . .
without stepping outside the bounds of honesty. That's what this commercial is about. If he turns it down, he's turning down the best we can do. And that's the end. Toot-finny.” He snuffed his cigarette and almost knocked over Roger's half-full bottle of beer. His hands were shaking.