Cujo

new set of balland-sockets ... and he could use a new welder's helmet since the old one got a crack in the faceplate

'No, I mean anything big. Expensive.'

Brett thought awhile, then smiled. 'Well, what he'd really like to have is a new Jorgen chainfall, I guess. Rip that old motor out of Richie Simms's International just as slick as sh -well, slick.' He blushed and hurried on. 'But you couldn't get him nothing like that, Mom. That's really dear.'

Dear. Joe's word for expensive. She hated it.

'How much?'

'Well, the one in the catalogue says seventeen hundred dollars, but Dad could probably get it from Mr. Belasco at Portland Machine for wholesale. Dad says Mr. Belasco's scared of him.'

'Do you think there's something smart about that?' she asked sharply.

Brett sat back in his chair, a little frightened by her fierceness. He couldn't remember his mother ever acting quite like this. Even Cujo, out on the porch, pricked his ears a little.

'Well? Do you?'

'No, Mom,' he said, but Charity knew in a despairing way that he was lying. If you could scare somebody into giving you wholesale, you were trading a right smart. She had heard the admiration in Brett's voice, even if the boy himself had not. Wants to be just like him. Thinks his daddy is just standing tall when he scares someone. Oh my God.

'There's nothing smart about being able to scare people,'

Charity said. 'All it takes is a big voice and a mean disposition. There's no smart to it.' She lowered her voice and flapped a hand at him. 'Go on and cat your eggs. I'm not going to shout at you. I guess it's the heat.'

He ate, but quietly and carefully, looking at her now and then. There were hidden mines around this morning.

'What would wholesale be, I wonder? Thirteen hundred dollars? A thousand?'

'I don't know, Mamma.'

'Would this Belasco deliver? On a big order like that?'

'Ayuh, I guess he would. If we had that kind of money.'

Her hand went to the pocket of her- housedress. The lottery ticket was there. The green number on her ticket, 76, and the red number, 434, matched the numbers drawn by the State Lottery Commission two weeks before. She had checked it dozens of times, unable to believe it. She had invested fifty cents that week, as she had done every week since the lottery began in 1975, and this time she had 'won five thousand dollars. She hadn't cashed the ticket in yet, but neither had she let it out of her sight or her reach since she found out.

'We do have that kind of money,' she said. Brett goggled at her.

At quarter past ten, Vic slipped out of his Ad Worx office and went around to Bentley's for his morning coffee, unable to face the bitch's brew that was available at the office. He had spent the morning writing ads for Decoster Egg Farms. It was hard going. He had hated eggs since his boyhood, when his mother grimly forced one down his throat four days a week. The best he had been able to come up with so far was EGGS SAY LOVE ... SEAMLESSLY. Not very good. Seamlessly had given him the idea of a trick photo which would show an egg with a zipper running around it's middle. It was a good image, but where did it lead? Noplace that he had been able to discover. Ought to ask the Tadder, he thought, as the waitress brought him coffee and a blueberry muffin. Tad liked eggs.

It wasn't really the egg ad that was bringing him down, of course. It has having to take off for twelve days. Well, it had to be. Roger had convinced him of that. They would have to get in there and pitch like hell.

Good old garrulous Roger, whom Vic loved almost like a brother. Roger would have been more than glad to cruise down here to Bentley's with him, to have a coffee with him, and to talk his ear off. But this one time, Vic needed to be alone. To think. The two of them would be spending most of two weeks together starting Monday, sweating it out, and that was quite enough, even for soul brothers.

His mind turned toward the Red Razberry Zingers fiasco again, and he let it, knowing that sometimes a no- pressure, almost idle review of a bad situation could~ for him, at least -result in some new insight, a fresh angle.

What had happened was bad enough, and Zingers had been withdrawn from the market. Bad enough, but not terrible. It wasn't like that canned mushroom thing; no one had gotten sick or died, and even consumers realized that a company could take a pratfall now and then. Look at that -McDonald's glass giveaway a couple three years ago. The paint on the glasses had been found to contain an unacceptably high lead content. The glasses had been withdrawn quickly, consigned to that promotional limbo inhabited by creatures such as Speedy AlkaSeltzer and Vic's own personal favorite, Big Dick Chewing Gum.

The glasses had been bad for the McDonald's Corporation, but no one had accused Ronald McDonald of trying to poison his pre-teen constituency. And no one had actually accused the Sharp Cereal Professor either, although comedians from Bob Hope to Steve Martin had taken potshots at him, and johnny Carson had run off an entire monologue - couched in careful double entendre - about the Red Razberry Zingers affair one evening during his opening spot on The Tonight Show. Needless to say, the Sharp

Cereal Professor ads had been jerked from the tube. Also needless to say, the character actor who played the Professor was wild at the way events had turned on him.

I could imagine a worse situation, Roger had said after the first shock waves had subsided a bit and the thrice-daily long-distance calls between Portland and Cleveland were no longer flying.

What? Vic had asked.

Well, Roger had answered, straight-faced, we could be working on the Bon Vivant Vichysoisse account.

'More coffee, sir?'

Vic glanced up at the waitress. He started to say no, then nodded. 'Half a cup, please,' he said.

She poured it and left. Vic stirred it randomly, not drinking it.

There had been a mercifully brief health scare before a number of doctors spoke up on TV and in the papers, all of them saying the coloration was harmless. There had been something like it once before; the stews on a commercial airline had been struck down with weird orange skin discolorations which finally proved to he nothing more serious than a rub-off of the orange dye on the life jackets they demonstrated for their passengers before takeoff. Years before that, the food dye in a certain brand of frankfurters had produced an internal effect similar to that of Red Razberry Zingers.

Old man Sharp's lawyers had lodged a multimilliondollar damage suit against the dye manufacturer, a case that would probably drag on for three years and then be settled out of court. No matter; the suit provided a forum from which to make the public aware that the fault - the totally temporary fault, the completely harmless fault - had not been that of the Sharp Company.

Nonetheless, Sharp stock had tumbled sharply on the Big Board. It had since made up less than half the original drop. The cereals themselves had shown a sudden dip in sales but had since made up most of the ground that had been lost after Zingers showed its treacherous red face. Sharp's

All-Grain Blend, in fact, was doing better than ever before.

So there was nothing wrong here, right?

Wrong. So wrong.

The Sharp Cereal Professor was what was wrong. The poor guy would never be able to make a comeback. After