Cujo

several aisles to the left.

'Anyway, when Jim finally got out of school, he and Holly came back east and he went to work in Bridgeport with a big firm of lawyers. He didn't make much money then. They lived in a thirdfloor apartment with no air conditioning in the summer and not much heat in the winter. But he's worked his way up. and now he's what's called a junior partner. And I suppose he does make a lot of money, by our standards.'

'Maybe she shows her credit cards around because sometimes she still feels poor inside,' Brett said.

She was struck by the almost eerie perceptiveness of that, as well. She ruffled his hair gently, no longer angry at him. 'You did say you liked her.'

'Yeah, I do. There she is, right over there.'

'I see her.'

They went over and joined Holly, who already had an armload of curtains and was now prospecting for tablecloths.

The sun had finally gone down behind the house.

Little by little, the oven that was inside the Trentons' Pinto began to cool off. A more-or-less steady breeze sprang up, and Tad turned his face into it gratefully. He felt better, at least for the time being, than he had all day. In fact, all the rest of the day before now seemed like a terribly bad dream, one he could only partly remember. At times he had gone away; had simply left the car and gone away. He could remember that. He had gone on a horse. He and the horse had ridden down a long field, and there were rabbits playing there, 'lust like in that cartoon his mommy and daddy had taken him to see at the Magic Lantern Theater in Bridgton. There was a pond at the end of the field, and ducks in the pond. The ducks were friendly. Tad played with them. It was better there than with Mommy, because the monster was where Mommy was, the monster that had gotten out of his closet. The monster was not in the place where the ducks were. Tad liked it there, although he knew in a vague way that if he stayed in that place too long, he might forget how to get back to the car.

'Men the sun had gone behind the house. There were cool shadows, almost thick enough to have a texture, like velvet. The monster had stopped trying to get them. The mailman hadn't come, but at least now he was able to rest comfortably. The worst thing was being so thirsty. Never in his life had he wanted a drink so much. That was what made the place where the ducks were so nice - it was a wet, green place.

'What did you say, honey?' Mommy's face bending down over him.

'Thirsty,' he said in a frog's croak. 'I'm so thirsty, Mommy.' He remembered that he used to say 'firsty' instead of 'thirsty.' But some of the kids at daycamp had laughed at him and called him a baby, the same way they laughed at Randy Hofnager for saying 'brefkust' when he meant 'breakfast'. So he began to say it right, scolding himself fiercely inside whenever he forgot.

'Yes, I know. Mommy's thirsty coo.'

'I bet there's water in that house.'

'Honey, we can't go into the house. Not just yet. The bad dog's in front of the car.'

'Where?' Tad got up on his knees and was surprised at the lightness that ran lazily through his head, like a slowbreaking wave. He put a hand on the dashboard to support himself, and the hand seemed on the end of an arm that was a mile long. 'I don't see him.' Even his voice was distant, echoey.

'Sit back down, Tad. You're...'

She was still talking, and he could feel her sitting him back into the scat, but it was all distant. The words were coming to him over a long gray distance; it was foggy between him and her, as it had been foggy this morning ... or yesterday morning ... or on whatever morning it had been when his daddy left to go on his trip. But there was a bright place up ahead, so he left his mother to go to it. It was the duck place.

Ducks and a pool and lilypads. Mommy's voice became a faraway drone. Her beautiful face, so large, always there, so calm, so like the moon that sometimes looked in his window when he awoke late at night having to go peepee ... that face became gray and lost definition. It melted into the gray mist. Her voice became the lazy sound of bees which were far too nice to sting, and lapping water.

Tad played with the ducks.

Donna dozed off, and when she woke up again all the shadows had blended with one another and the last of the light in the Camber driveway was the color of ashes. It was dusk. Somehow it had gotten around to dusk again and they were - unbelievably - still here. The sun sat on the horizon, round and scarlet-orange. It looked to her like a basketball that had been dipped in blood. She moved her tongue around in her mouth. Saliva that had dotted into a thick gum broke apart reluctantly and became more or less ordinary spit again. Her throat felt like a flannel. She thought how wonderful it would be to lie under the garden faucet at home, turn the spigot on full, open her mouth, and just let the icy water cascade in. The image was powerful enough to make her shiver and break out in a skitter of gooseflesh, powerful enough to make her head ache.

Was the dog still in front of the car?

She looked, but of course there was no real way of telling. All she could see for sure vas that it wasn't in front of the barn.

She tapped the horn, but it only produced a rusty hoot and nothing changed. He could be anywhere. She ran her finger along the silver crack in her window and wondered what would happen if the dog hit the glass a few more times. Could it break through? She wouldn't have believed so twenty-four hours before, but now she wasn't so sure.

She looked at the door leading to Cambers' porch again. It seemed father away than it had before. That made her think of a concept they had discussed in a college psychology course. Idee fixe, the instructor, a prissy little man with a toothbrush mustache, had called it. If you get on a down escalator that isn't moving, you'll suddenly find it very hard to walk. That had amused her so much that she had eventually found a down escalator in Bloomingdale's that was marked OUT OF ORDER and had walked down it. She had found to her further amusement that the prissy Iittle associate professor was right -your legs just didn't want to move. That had led her to try and imagine what would happen to your head if the stairs in your house suddenly started to move as you were walking down them. The very idea had made her laugh out loud.

But it wasn't so funny now. As a matter of fact, it wasn't funny at all.

That porch door definitely looked farther away.

The dog's psyching me out.

She tried to reject the thought as soon as it occurred to her, and then stopped trying. Things had become too desperate now to indulge in the luxury of lying to herself. Knowingly or unknowingly, Cujo was psyching her out. Using, perhaps, her own idee fixe of how the world was supposed to be. But things had changed. The smooth escalator ride was over. She could not just continue to stand on the still steps with her son and wait for somebody to start the motor again. The fact was, she and Tad were under siege by dog.

Tad was sleeping. If the dog was in the barn, she could make it now.

But if it's still in front of the car? Or under it?

She remembered something her father used to say sometimes when he was watching the pro football games on TV. Her dad almost always got tanked for these occasions, and usually ate a large plate of cold beans left over from Saturday-night supper. As a result, the TV room was uninhabitable for normal earth fife by the fourth quarter; even the dog would slink out, an uneasy deserter's grin on its face.

This saying of her father's was reserved for particularly fine tackles and intercepted passes. 'He laid back in the tall bushes on that one!' her father would cry. It drove her mother crazy ... but by the time Donna was a teenager,