Cujo

notice of him. A kid on roller skates zipped past him and shouted 'HW Steve hi'd him right back.

He got in the van and started it up. He drove up 117 to 302 and followed that road to its intersection with Interstate 95 in Portland. He took an Interstate time-and-toll ticket and rolled south. He had begun having uneasy thoughts about what he had done - the red rage of destruction he had gone into when he saw that no one was home. Had the retribution been too heavy for the offense? So she didn't want to make it with him any more, so what? He had trashed most of the goddamn house. Did that, maybe, say something unpleasant about where his head was at?

He began to work on these questions a Iittle at a time, the way most people do, running an objective set of facts through a bath of various chemicals which, when taken together, make up the complex human perceptual mechanism known as subjectivity. Like a schoolchild who works carefully first with the pencil, then with the eraser, then with the pencil again, he tore down what had happened and then carefully rebuilt it -redrew it in his mind - until both the facts and his perception of the facts jibed in a way he could five with.

When he reached Route 495, he turned west toward New York and the country that sprawled beyond, all the way to the silent reaches of Idaho, the place that Papa Hemingway had gone to when he was old and mortally hurt. He felt the familiar lift in his feelings that came with cutting old ties and moving on - that magical thing that Huck had called 'fighting out for the territory.' At such times he felt almost newborn, felt strongly that he was in possession of the greatest freedom of all, the freedom to recreate himself. He would have been unable to understand the significance if someone had pointed out the fact that, whether in Maine or in Idaho, he would still be apt to throw his racket down in angry frustration if he lost a game of tennis; that he would refuse to shake the hand of his opponent over the net, as he always had when he lost. He only shook over the net when he won.

He stopped for the night in a small town called Twickenham. His sleep was easy. He had convinced himself that trashing the Trentons' house had not been an act of half-mad jealous pique but a piece of revolutionary anarchy - offing a couple of fat middleclass pigs, the sort who made it easy for the fascist overlords to remain in power by blindly paying their taxes and their telephone bills. It had been an act of courage and of clean, justified fury. It was his way of saying 'power to the people', an idea he tried to incorporate in all his poems.

Still, he mused, as he turned toward sleep in the narrow motel bed, he wondered what Donna had thought of it when

she and the kid got home. That sent him to sleep with a slight smile on his lips.

By three thirty that Tuesday afternoon, Donna had given up on the mailman.

She sat with one arm lightly around Tad, who was in a dazed half sleep, his lips cruelly puffed from the heat, his face hectic and flushed. There was a tiny bit of milk left, and soon she would give it to him. During the last three and a half hours -since what would have been lunchtime at home - the sun had been monstrous and unremitting. Even with her window and Tad's window open a quarter of the way, the temperature inside must have reached 100 degrees, maybe more. It was the way your car got when you left it in the sun, that was all. Except, under normal circumstances, what you did when your car got like that was you unrolled all the windows, pulled the knobs that opened the air-ducts, and got rolling. Let's get rolling - what a sweet sound those words had!

She licked her lips.

For short periods she had unrolled the windows A the way, creating a mild draft, but she was afraid to leave them that way. She might doze off. The heat scared her - it scared her for herself and even more for Tad, what it might he taking out of him - but it didn't scare her as badly as the face of that dog, slavering foam and staring at her with its sullen red eyes.

The last time she had unrolled the windows all the way was when Cujo had disappeared into the shadows of the barn-garage. But now Cujo was back.

He sat in the lengthening shadow of the big barn, his head lowered, staring at the blue Pinto. The ground between his front paws was muddy from his slaver. Every now and then he would grow] and snap at empty air, as if he might be hallucinating.

How long? How long before he dies?

She was a rational woman. She did not believe in monsters from closets; she believed in things she could see and touch. There was nothing supernatural about the slobbering wreck of a Saint Bernard sitting in the shade of a barn; he was merely a sick animal that had been bitten by a rabid fox or skunk or something. He wasn't out to get her personally. He wasn't the Reverend Dimmesdale or Moby Dog. He was not four-footed Fate.

But. . . she had just about decided to make a run for the back door of the enclosed Camber porch when Cujo had come rolling and staggering out of the darkness of the barn.

Tad. Tad was the thing. She had to get him out of this. No more fucking around. He wasn't answering very coherently any more. He seemed to he in touch only with the peaks of reality. The glazed way his eyes rolled toward her when she spoke to him, like the eyes of a fighter who has been struck and struck and struck, a fighter who has lost his coherence along with his mouthguard and is waiting only for the final flurry of punches to drop him insensible to the canvas - those things terrified her and roused all her motherhood. Tad was the thing. If she had been alone, she would have gone for that door long ago. It was Tad who had held her back, because her mind kept circling back to the thought of the dog pulling her down, and of Tad in the car alone.

Still, until Cujo had returned fifteen minutes ago, she had been preparing herself to go for the door. She played it over and over in her mind like a home movie, did it until it seemed to one part of her mind as if it had already happened. She would shake Tad fully awake, slap him awake if she had to. Tell him he was not to leave the car and follow her - under no circumstances, no matter what happens. She would run from the car to the porch door. Try the knob. If it was unlocked, well and fine. But she was prepared for the very real possibility that it was locked. She had taken off her shirt and now sat behind the wheel in her white cotton bra, the shirt in her lap. When she went, she would go with the shirt wrapped around her hand. Far from perfect protection, but better than none at all. She would smash in the pane of glass nearest the doorknob, reach through, and let herself onto the little back porch. And if the inner door was locked, she would cope with that too. Somehow.

But Cujo had come back out, and that took away her edge.

Never mind. He'II go back in. He has before.

But will be? her mind chattered. It's all too perfect, isn't it? The Cambers are gone, and they remembered to shut off their mail like good citizens; Vic is gone, and the chances are slim that he'll call before tomorrow night, because we just Can't afford long distance every night. And if be does call, he'll call early. When he doesn't get any answer he'll assume we went out to catch some chow at Mario's or maybe a couple of ice creams at the Tastee Freeze. And he won't call later because he'll think we're asleep. He'll call tomorrow instead. Considerate Vic. Yes, it's all just too perfect Wasn't there a dog in the front of the boat in that story about the boatman on the River Charon? The boatman's dog. just call me Cujo. All out for the Valley of Death.

Go in, she silently willed the dog. Go back in the barn, damn you.

Cujo didn't move.

She licked her lips, which felt almost as puffy as Tad's looked.

She brushed his hair off his forehead and said softly, 'How you going, Tadder?'

'Shhh,' Tad muttered distractedly. 'The ducks . .