Cujo

'You want to just shut the craphouse door now, Charity,' he said, looking at her hard. A flush had crept up his cheeks and across his forehead. 'Mind me, now.'

'No,' she said. 'That's not the end.'

He dropped his fork, astounded. 'What? What did you say?'

She walked towards him, allowing herself the luxury of total anger for the first time in her marriage. But it was all inside, burning and sloshing like acid. She could feel it eating. She daren't shout. To shout would be the end for sure. She kept her voice low.

'Yes, you'd think that about my sister and her husband. Sure you would. Look at you, sitting there and eating with your dirty hands and your hat still on. You don't want him down there seeing how other people live. Just the same way I don't want him seeing how you and your friends live when you're off to yourselves. That's why I wouldn't let him go on that hunting trip with you last November.'

She paused and he only sat there, a half-eaten slice of Wonder Bread in one hand, steak juice on his chin. She thought that the only thing keeping him from springing at her was his total amazement that she should be saying these things at all.

'So I'll trade with you,' she said. 'I've got you that chainfall and I'm willing to hand over the rest of the money to you - lots wouldn't - but if you're going to be so ungrateful, I'll go you one more. You let him go down with me to Connecticut, and I'll let him go up to Moosehead with you come deerhunting season.' She felt cold and prickly all over, as if she had just offered to strike a bargain with the devil.

'I ought to strap you,' he said wonderingly. He spoke to her as if she were a child who had misunderstood some very simple case of cause and effect. 'I'll take him hunting with me if I want, when I want. Don't you know that? He's my son. God's sake. If I want, when I want.' He smiled a little, pleased with the sound it made. 'Now - you got that?'

She locked her eyes with his. 'No,' she said. 'You won't.'

He got up in a hurry then. His chair fell over.

'I'll put a stop to it,' she said. She wanted to step back from him, but that would end it too. One false move, one sign of giving, and he would be on her.

He was unbuckling his belt. 'I'm going to strap you, Charity,' he said regretfully.

'I'll put a stop to it any way I can. I'll go up to the school and report him truant. Go to Sheriff Bannerman and report him kidnapped. But most of all ... I'll see to it that Brett doesn't want to go.'

He pulled his belt from the loops of his pants and held it with the buckle end penduluming back and forth by the floor.

'The only way you'll get him up there with the rest of those drunks and animals before he's fifteen is if I let him go,' she said. 'You sling your belt on me if you want, Joe Camber. Nothing is going to change that.'

'Is that so?'

'I'm standing here and telling you it is.'

But suddenly he didn't seem to he in the room with her any more. His eyes had gone far away, musing. She had seen him do this other times. Something had just crossed his mind, a new fact to be laboriously added into the equation. She prayed that whatever it was would be on her side of the equals sign. She had never gone so much against him before, and she was scared.

Camber suddenly smiled. 'Regular little spitfire, ain't you?'

She said nothing.

He began to slip his belt back into the loops of his pants again. He was still smiling, his eyes still far away. 'You suppose you can screw like one of those spitfires? Like one of those little Mexican spitfires?'

She still said nothing, wary.

'If I say you and him can go, what about then? You suppose we could shoot for the moon?'

'What do you mean?'

'It means okay,' he said. 'You and him.'

He crossed the room in his quick, agile way, and it made her cold to think of how quick he could have crossed it a minute before, how quick he could have had his belt on her. And who would there have been to stop him? What a man did with - or to - his wife, that was their own affair. She could have done nothing, said nothing. Because of Brett. Because of her pride.

He put his hand on her shoulder. He dropped it to one of her breasts. He squeezed it. 'Come on,' he said. 'I'm horny.'

'Brett -'

'He won't be in until nine. Come on. Told you, you can go. You can at least say thanks, can't you?'

A kind of cosmic absurdity rose to her lips and had passed through them before she could stop it: 'Take off your hat.'

He sailed it heedlessly across the kitchen. He was smiling. His teeth were quite yellow. The two top ones in front were dentures. 'If we had the money now, we could screw on a bedful of greenbacks,' he said. 'I saw that in a movie once.'

He took her upstairs and she kept expecting him to turn vicious, but he didn't. His lovemaking was as it usually was, quick and hard, but he was not vicious. He did not hurt her intentionally, and tonight, for perhaps the tenth or eleventh time since they had been married, she had a climax. She let herself go to him, eyes closed, feeling the shelf of his chin dig into the top of her head. She stifled the cry that rose to her lips. It would have made him suspicious if she had cried out.

She was not sure he really knew that what always happened at the end for men sometimes happened for women too.

Not long after (and still an hour before Brett came home from the Bergerons) he left her, not telling her where he was going. She surmised it was down to Gary Pervier's, where the drinking would start. She lay in bed and wondered if what she had done and what she had promised could ever be worth it. Tears tried to come and she drove them back. She lay hot-eyed and straight in bed, and just before Brett came in, his arrival announced by Cujo's barks and the slam of the back-door screen, the moon rose in all its silvery, detached glory. Moon doesn't care, Charity thought, but the thought brought her no comfort.

'What is it?' Donna asked.

Her voice was dull, almost defeated. The two of them were sitting in the living room. Vic had not gotten home until nearly Tad's bedtime, and that was now half an hour past. He was sleeping in his room upstairs, the Monster Words tacked by his bed, the closet door firmly shut.

Vic got up and crossed to the window, which now looked out only on darkness. She knows, he thought glumly. Not the fine tuning, maybe, but she's getting a pretty clear picture. All the way home he had tried to decide if he should confront her with it, lance the boil, try living with the laudable pus ... or if he should just deep-six it. After leaving Deering Oaks he had torn the letter up, and on his way home up 302 he had fed the scraps out the window. Litterbug Trenton, he thought. And now the choice had been taken out of his hands. He could see her pale reflection in the dark glass, her face a white circle in yellow lamplight.

He turned toward her, having absolutely no idea what he was going to say.

He knows, Donna was thinking.

It was not a new thought, not by now, because the last three hours had been the longest three of her whole life. She had heard the knowledge in his voice when he called to say he would he home late. At first there had been