Cujo

'I'm telling you why! I'm telling you that I got so I was spending enough time in front of the mirror to see how my face was changing, how no one was ever going to mistake me for a teenager again or ask to see my driver's license when I ordered a drink in a bar. I started to be afraid because I grew up after all. Tad's going to preschool and that means he's going to go to school, then high school -'

'Are you saying you took a lover because you felt old?' He was looking at her, surprised, and she loved him for that, because she supposed that was a part of it; Steve Kemp had found her attractive and of course that was flattering, that was what had made the flirtation fun in the first place. But it was in no way the greatest part of it.

She took his hands and spoke earnestly into his face, thinking - knowing that she might never speak so earnestly (or honestly) to any man again. 'It's more. It's knowing you can't wait any longer to be a grownup, or wait any longer to make your peace with what you have. It's knowing that your choices are being narrowed almost daily. For a woman - no, for me - that's a brutal thing to have to face. Wife, that's fine. But you're gone at work, even when you're home you're gone at work so much. Mother, that's fine, too. But there's a little less of it every year, because every year the world gets another little slice of him.

'Men. . . they know what they are. They have an image of what they are. They never five up to the ideal, and it breaks them, and maybe that's why so many men die unhappy and before their time, but they know what being a grownup is supposed to mean. They have some kind of handle on thirty, forty, fifty. They don't hear that wind, or if they do, they find a lance and tilt at it, thinking it must be a windmill or some fucking thing that needs knocking down.

'What a woman does - what I did - was to run from becoming. I got scared of the way the house sounded when Tad was gone. Once, do you know - this is crazy - I was in his room, changing the sheets, and I got thinking about these girlfriends I had in high school. Wondering what happened to them, where they went. I was almost in a daze. And Tad's closet door swung open and ... I screamed and ran out of the room. I don't know why ... except I guess I do. I thought for just a second there that Joan Brady would come out of Tad's closet, and her head would be gone and there would be blood all over her clothes and she would say, 'I died in a car crash when I was nineteen coming back from Sammy's Pizza and I don't give a damn.''

'Christ, Donna,' Vic said.

'I got scared, that's all. I got scared when I'd start looking at knickknacks or thinking about taking a pottery course or yoga or something like that. And the only place to run from the future is into the past. So. ... so I started flirting with him.'

She looked down and then suddenly buried her face in her hands. Her words were muffled but still understandable.

'It was fun. It was like being in college again. It was like a dream. A stupid dream. It was like he was white noise. He blotted out that wind sound. The flirting part was fun. The sex ... it was no good. I had orgasms, but it was no good. I can't explain why not, except that I still loved you through all of it, and understood that I was running away. . . .' She looked up at him again, crying now. 'He's running too. He's made a career of it. He's a poet ... at least that's what he calls himself. I couldn't make head or tail of the things he showed me. He's a roadrunner, dreaming he's still in college and protesting the war in Vietnam. That's why it was him, I guess. And now I think you know everything I can tell you. An ugly little tale, but mine own.'

'I'd like to beat him up,' Vic said. 'If I could make his nose bleed, I guess that would make me feel better.'

She smiled wanly. 'He's gone. Tad and I went for a Dairy Queen after we finished supper and you still weren't home. There's a FOR RENT sign in the window of his shop. I told you he was a roadrunner.'

'There was no poetry in that note,' Vic said. He looked at her briefly, then down again. She touched his face and he winced back a little. That hurt more than anything else, hurt more than she would have believed. The guilt and fear came again, in a glassy, crushing wave. But she wasn't crying any more. She thought there would be no more tears for a very long time. The wound and the attendant shock trauma were too great.

'Vic,' she said. 'I'm sorry. You're hurt and I'm sorry.'

'When did you break it off?'

She told him about the day she had come back and found him there, omitting the fear she'd had that Steve might actually rape her.

'Then the note was his way of getting back at you.'

She brushed hair away from her forehead and nodded. Her face was pale and wan. There were purplish patches of skin under her eyes. 'I guess so.'

'Let's go upstairs, he said. 'It's late. We're both tired.'

'Will you make love to me?'

He shook his head slowly. 'Not tonight.'

'All right.'

They went to the stairs together. At the foot of them, Donna asked, 'So what comes next, Vic?'

He shook his head. 'I just don't know.'

'Do I write 'I promise never to do it again' five hundred times on the blackboard and miss recess? Do we get a divorce? Do we never mention it again? What?' She didn't feel hysterical, only tired, but her voice was rising in a way she didn't like and hadn't intended. The shame was the worst, the shame of being found out and seeing how it had punched his face in. And she hated him as well as herself for making her feel so badly ashamed, because she didn't believe she was responsible for the factors leading up to the final decision - if there really had been a decision.

'We ought to be able to get it together,' he said, but she did not mistake him; he wasn't talking to her. 'This thing --? He looked at her pleadingly. 'He was the only one, wasn't he?'

It was the one unforgivable question, the one he had no right to ask. She left him, almost ran up the stairs, before everything could spill out, the stupid recriminations and accusations that would not solve anything but only muddy up whatever poor honesty they had been able to manage.

There was little sleep for either of them that night. And the fact that he had forgotten to call Joe Camber and ask him if he could work on his wife's ailing Pinto Runabout was the furthest thing from Vic's mind.

As for Joe Camber himself, he was sitting with Gary Pervier in one of the decaying lawn chairs which dotted Gary's run-to-riot side yard. They were drinking vodka martinis out of McDonald's glasses under the stars. Lightning bugs flickered across the dark, and the masses of honeysuckle clinging to Gary's fence filled the hot night with its cloying, heavy scent.

Cujo would ordinarily have been chasing after the fireflies, sometimes barking, and tickling both men no end. But tonight he only lay between them with his nose on his paws. They thought he was sleeping, but he wasn't. He simply lay there, feeling the aches that filled his bones and buzzed back and forth in his head. It had gotten hard for him to think what came next in his simple dog's life; something had gotten in the way of ordinary instinct. When he slept, he had dreams of uncommon, unpleasant vividity. In one of these he had savaged THE Boy, had ripped his throat open and then pulled his guts out of his body in steaming bundles. He had awakened from this dream twitching and whining.

He was continually thirsty, but he had already begun to shy away from his water dish some of the time, and when he did drink, the water tasted like steel shavings. The water made his teeth ache. The water sent bolts of pain through his eyes. And now he lay on the grass, not caring about the lightning bugs or anything else. The voices Of THE MEN were unimportant rumbles coming from somewhere above him. They meant little to him compared to his own growing misery.