much oatmeal and strawberry jam!
Eight running steps.
Sure. Dig on it awhile.
And what if that door giving on the porch was locked?
Her heart thudded heavily in her breast as she weighed the chances. If she had been alone, that would have been one thing. But suppose the door was locked? She could beat the dog to the door, but not to the door and then back to the car. Not if it came running, not if it charged her as it had done before. And what would Tad do? What if Tad saw his mother being savaged by a two-hundred-pound mad dog, being ripped and bitten, being pulled open
No. They were safe here.
She reached for the ignition, and part of her mind clamored that it would he safer to wait longer, until the engine was perfectly cool
Perfectly cool? They had been here three hours or more already.
She grasped the key and turned it.
The engine cranked briefly once, twice, three times - and then caught with a roar.
'Oh, thank God!' she cried.
'Mommy?' Tad asked shrilly. 'Are we going? Are we going?'
'We're going,' she said grimly, and threw the transmission into reverse. Cujo lunged out of the barn ... and then just stood there, watching.
She touched the gas pedal. The Pinto rolled back perhaps two feet - and stalled.
'No!' she screamed as the red idiot lights came on again. Cujo had taken another two steps when the engine cut out, but now he only stood there silent, his head down.
Donna fumbled for the ignition switch and turned it from ON to START. The motor began to rum over again, but this time it didn't catch. She could hear a harsh panting sound in her own ears and didn't realize for several seconds that she was making the sound herself - in some vauge way she had the idea that it must be the dog. She ground the starter, grimacing horribly, ;wearing at it, oblivious of Tad, using words she had hardly known she knew. And A the time Cujo stood there, trailing his shadow from his heels like some surreal funeral drape, watching.
At last he lay down in the driveway, as if deciding there was no chance for them to escape. She hated it more than she had when it had tried to force its way in through Tad's window.
From far away. Unimportant. What was important now was this goddamned sonofabitching little car. It was going to start. She was going to
She had no idea how long, in real time, she sat hunched over the wheel with her hair hanging in her eyes, futilely grinding the starter. What at last broke through to her was not Tad's cries - they had trailed off to whimpers - but the sound of the engine. It would crank briskly for five seconds, then lag off, then crank briskly for another five, then lag off again. A longer lag each time, it seemed.
She was killing the battery.
She stopped.
She came out of it a little at a time, like a woman coming out of a faint. She remembered a bout of gastroenteritis she'd had in college - everything inside her had either come up by the elevator or dropped down the chute - and near the end of it she had grayed out in one of the dorm toilet stalls. Coming back had been like this, as if you were the same but some invisible painter was adding color to the world, bringing it first up to full and then to overfull. Colors shrieked at you. Everything looked plastic and phony, like a display in a department store window - SWING INTO SPRING, perhaps, or READY FOR THE FIRST KICKOFF.
Tad was cringing away from her, his eyes squeezed shut, the thumb of one hand in his mouth. The other hand was pressed against his hip pocket, where the Monster Words were. His respiration was shallow and rapid.
'Tad,' she said. 'Honey, don't worry.'
'Mommy, are you all right?' His voice was little more than a husky whisper.
'Yeah. So are you. At least we're safe. This old car will go. just wait and see.'
'I thought you were mad at me.'
She took him in her arms and hugged him tight. She could smell sweat in his hair and the lingering undertone of Johnson's No More Tears shampoo. She thought of that bottle sitting safely and sanely on the second shelf of the medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom. If only she could touch it! But all that was here was that faint, dying perfume.
'No, honey, not at you,' she said. 'Never at you.'
Tad hugged her back. 'He can't get us in here, can he?'
'No.'
'He can't ... he can't eat his way in, can he?'
'No.'
'I hate him,' Tad said reflectively. 'I wish he'd die.'
'Yes. Me too.'
She looked out the window and saw that the sun was getting ready to go down. A superstitious dread settled into her at the thought. She remembered the childhood games of hide-and-seek that had always ended when the shadows joined each other and grew into purple lagoons, that mystic call drifting through the suburban streets of her childhood, talismanic and distant, the high voice of a child announcing suppers that were ready, doors ready to be shut against the night:
The dog was watching her. It was crazy, but she could no longer doubt it. Its mad, senseless eyes were fixed unhesitatingly on hers.
She told herself that. A few minutes later she told herself that Cujo's eyes were like the eyes of some portraits which seem to follow you wherever you move in the room where they are hung.
But the dog was looking at her. And ... and there was something familiar about it.
