'Boston!' Gary Pervier said, and cackled.
'Fuck you, you're rolling in it,' joe replied. He was getting pretty drunk. 'You might have to dig into what's in your mattress a little, that's all.'
'Nothing in there but bedbugs,' Gary said, and cackled again. 'Place is crawlin with em, and I don't give a shit. You ready for another blast?'
Joe held out his glass. Gary had the makings right beside his chair. He mixed in the dark with the practiced, steady, and heavy hand of the chronic drinker.
'Boston!' He said again, handing Joe his drink. He said slyly, 'Kickin up your heels a little, Joey, I guess.' Gary was the only man in Castle Rock - perhaps in the world - who could have gotten away with calling him Joey. 'Kicking up some whoopee, I guess. Never known you to go further than Portsmouth before.'
'I been to Boston once or twice,' joe said. 'You better look out, Pervert, or I'll sic my dog on you.'
'You couldn't sic that dog on a yellin nigger with a straight razor in each hand,' Gary said. He reached down and ruffled Cujo's fur briefly. 'What's your wife say about it?'
'She don't know we're goin. She don't have to know.'
'Oh, yeah?'
'She's takin the boy down to Connecticut to see her sister 'n' that freak she's married to. They're gonna be gone a week. She won some money in the lottery. Might as well tell you that right out. They use all the names on the radio, anyway. It's all in the prize form she had to sign.'
'Won some money in the lottery, did she?'
'Five thousand dollars.'
Gary whistled. Cujo flicked his ears uncomfortably at the sound.
Joe told Gary what Charity had told him at supper, leaving out the argument and making it appear a straight trade that had been his idea: The boy could go down to Connecticut for a week with her, and up to Moosehead for a week with him in the fall.
'And you're gonna go down to Boston and spend some of that dividend yourself, you dirty dog,' Gary said. He clapped Joe on the shoulder and laughed. 'Oh, you're a one, all right.'
'Why shouldn't I? You know when the last time was I had a day off? I don't. Can't remember. I ain't got much on this week. I'd planned to take most of a day and a half pulling the motor on Richie's International, doing a valve job and all, but with that chainfall it won't take four hours. I'll get him to bring it in tomorrow and I can do it tomorrow afternoon. I got a transmission job, but that's just a teacher. From the grammar school. I can put that back. A few other things the same way. I'll just call em up and tell em I'm having a little holiday.'
'What you gonna do down in Beantown?'
'Well, maybe see the Dead Sox play a couple at Fenway. Go down there to Washington Street --'
'The combat zone! Hot damn, I knew it!' Gary snorted laughter and slapped his leg. 'See some of those dirty shows and try to catch the clap!'
'Wouldn't be much fun alone.'
'Well, I guess I could tag along with you if you was willin to put some of that money my way until I get my check cashed.'
'I'd do that,' Joe said. Gary was a drunkard, but he took a debt seriously.
'I ain't been with a woman for about four years, I guess,' Gary said reminiscently. 'Lost most of the old sperm factory over there in France. What's left, sometimes it works, sometimes it don't. Might be fun to find out if I still got any ram left in my ramrod.'
'Ayuh,' Joe said. He was slurring now, and his cars were buzzing. 'And don't forget the baseball. You know when the last time was I went to Fenway?'
'No.'
'Nine-teen-sixty-eight,' Joe said, leaning forward and tapping out each syllable on Gary's arm for emphasis. He spilled most of his new drink in the process. 'Before my kid was born. They played the Tigers and lost six to four, those suckers. Norm Cash hit a homer in the top of the eighth.'
'When you thinking of going>'
'Monday afternoon around three , I thought. The wife and the boy will want to go out that morning, I guess. I'll take them in to the Greyhound station in Portland. That gives me the rest of the morning and half the afternoon to catch up whatever I have to catch up.'
'You takin the car or the truck?'
'Car.'
Gary's eyes went soft and dreamy in the dark. 'Booze,. baseball, and broads,' he said. He sat up straighter. 'I don't give a shit if I do.'
'You want to go?'
'Ayuh.'
Joe let out a little whoop and they both got laughing. Neither noticed that Cujo's head had come off his paws at the sound and that he was growling very softly.
Monday morning dawned in shades of pearl and dark gray; the fog was so thick that Brett Camber couldn't see the oak in the side yard from his window, and that oak wasn't but thirty yards away.
The house still slept around him, but there was no more sleep left in him. He was going on a trip, and every part of his being vibrated with the news. just he and his mother. It would be a good trip, he felt that, and deep down inside, beyond any conscious thought, he was glad his father wasn't coming. He would be free to be himself; he would not have to try to live up to some mysterious ideal of masculinity that he knew his father had achieved but which he himself couldn't yet even begin to comprehend. He felt good - incredibly good and incredibly alive. He felt sorry for anyone in the world who was not going on a trip this fine, foggy morning, which would be another scorcher as soon as the fog burned off . He planned to sit in a window seat of the bus and watch every mile of the journey from the Greyhound terminal on Spring Street all the way to Stratford. It had been a long time before he had been able to get to sleep last night and here it was, not yet five o'clock but if he stayed in bed any longer, he would explode, or something.
Moving as quietly as he could, he put on jeans and his Castle Rock Cougars T-shirt, a pair of white athletic socks, and his Keds. He went downstairs and fixed himself a bowl of Cocoa Bears. He tried to eat quietly but was sure that the crunch of the cereal that he heard in his head must be audible all over the house. Upstairs he heard his dad grunt and rum over in the double bed he and his mom shared. The springs rasped. Brett's jaws froze. After a moment's debate he took his second bowl of Cocoa Bears out on the back porch, being careful not to let the screen door slam. The summer smells of everything were greatly clarified in the heavy fog, and the air was already warm. In the east, just above the faint fuzz that marked a belt of pines at the end of the east pasture, he could see the sun. It was as small and silver-bright as the full moon when it has risen well up in the sky. Even now the humidity was a dense thing, heavy and quiet. The fog would be gone by eight or nine, but the humidity would remain.
But for now what Brett saw was a white, secret world, and he was filled with the secret joys of it: the husky smell of hay that would he ready for its first cutting in a week, of manure, of his mother's roses. He could even faintly make out the aroma of Gary Pervier's triumphant honeysuckle which was slowly burying the fence which marked the edge of his property -burying it in a drift of cloying, grasping vines.
He put his cereal bowl aside and walked toward where he knew the barn to be. Halfway across the dooryard he looked over his shoulder and saw that the house had receded to nothing but a misty outline. A few steps farther and it was swallowed. He was alone in the white with only the tiny silver sun looking down on him. He could smell dust, damp, honeysuckle, roses.
And then the growling began.
