Cujo

horns.

'It's all right,' Vic said, starting to dress.

'All this on your mind ... and you went ahead with the trip?'

'What good would it have done to stay at home?' Vic asked. 'It happened. I ... I only found out on Thursday. I thought ... some distance. . time to think ... perspective ... I don't know all the stupid goddam things I thought. Now this.'

'Not your fault,' Roger said earnestly.

'Rog, at this point I don't know what's my fault and what isn't. I'm worried about Donna, and I'm out of my mind about Tad. I just want to get back there. And I'd like to get my hands on that fucker Kemp. I'd. . .'His voice had been rising. It abruptly sank. His shoulders sagged. For a moment he looked drawn and old and almost totally used up. Then he went to the suitcase on the floor and began to hunt for fresh clothes. 'Call Avis at the airport, would you, and get me a car? My wallet's there on the nightstand. They'll want the American Express number.'

'I'll call for both of us. I'm going back with you.'

'No.'

'But --?

'But nothing.' Vic slipped into a dark blue shirt. He had it buttoned halfway up before he saw he had it wrong; one tail hung far below the other. He unbuttoned it and started again. He was in motion now, and being in motion was better, but that feeling of unreality persisted. He kept having thoughts about movie sets, where what looks like Italian marble is really just Con-Tact paper, where all the rooms end just above the camera's sight line and where someone is always lurking in the background with a clapper board. Scene #41, Vic convinces Roger to Keep On Plugging, Take One. He was an actor and this was some crazy absurdist film. But it was undeniably better when the body was in motion.

'Hey, man

'Roger, this changes nothing in the situation between Ad Worx and the Sharp Company. I came along after I knew about Donna and this guy Kemp partly because I wanted to keep up a front - I guess no guy wants to advertise when he find out his wife has been getting it on the side - but mostly because I knew that the people who depend on us have to keep eating no matter who my wife decides to go to bed with.'

'Go easy on yourself, Vic. Stop digging yourself with it.'

'I can't seem to do that,' Vic said. 'Even now I can't seem to do that.'

'And I can't just go on to New York as if nothing's happened!'

'As far as we know, nothing has. The cop kept emphasizing that to me. You can go on. You can see it through. Maybe it'll turn out to have been nothing but a charade all along, but ... people have to try, Roger. There's nothing else to do. Besides, there's nothing you can do back in Maine except hang out.'

'Jesus, it feels wrong. It feels all wrong.'

'It's not. I'll call you at the Biltmore as soon as I know something.' Vic zippered his slacks and stepped into his loafers. 'Now go on and call Avis for me. I'll catch a cab out to Logan from downstairs. Here, I'll write my Amex number down for you.'

He did this, and Roger stood silently by as he got his coat and went to the door.

'Vic,' Roger said.

He turned, and Roger embraced him clumsily but with surprising strength. Vic hugged him back, his cheek against Roger's shoulder.

'I'll pray to God everything's okay,' Roger said hoarsely.

'Okay,' Vic said, and went out.

The elevator hummed faintly on the way down - not really moving at all, he thought. It's a sound effect. Two drunks supporting each other got on at lobby level as he got off. Extras, he thought.

He spoke to the doorman - another extra - and after about five minutes a cab rolled up to the blue hotel awning.

The cab driver was black and silent. He had his radio tuned to an FM soul station. The Temptations sang 'Power' endlessly as the cab took him toward Logan Airport through streets that were almost completely deserted. Helluva good movie set, he thought. As the Temptations faded out, a jiveass dj came on with the weather forecast. It had been hot yesterday, he reported, but you didn't see nuthin yesterday, brothers and sisters. Today was going to be the hottest day of the summer so far, maybe a record-breaker. The big G's weather prognosticator, Altitude Lou McNally, was calling for temperatures of over 100 degrees inland and not much cooler on the coast. A mass of warm, stagnant air had moved up from the south and was being held in place over New England by hands of high pressure. 'So if you gas gonna reach, you gotta head for the beach,' the jiveass dj finished. 'It ain't goan be too pretty if you hangin out in the city. And just to prove the point, here's Michael Jackson. He's goin 'Off the Wall'.'

The forecast meant little or nothing to Vic, but it would have terrified Donna even more than she already was, had she known.

As she had the day before, Charity awoke just before dawn. She awoke listening, and for a few moments she wasn't even sure what she was listening for. Then she remembered. Boards creaking. Footsteps. She was listening to see if her son was going to go walking again.

But the house was silent.

She got out of bed, went to the door, and looked out into the hall. The hall was empty. After a moment's debate she went down to Brett's room and looked in on him. There was nothing showing under his sheet but a lick of his hair. If he had gone walking, he had done it before she woke up. He was deeply asleep now.

Charity went back to her room and sat on her bed, looking out at the faint white line on the horizon. She was aware that her decision had been made. Somehow, secretly, in the night while she slept. Now, in the first cold light of day, she was able to examine what she had decided, and she felt that she could count the cost.

It occurred to her that she had never unburdened herself to her sister Holly as she had expected she would do. She still might have, if not for the credit cards at lunch yesterday. And then last night she had told Charity how much this, that, and the other had cost - the Buick four-door, the Sony color set, the parquet floor in the hallway. As if, in Holly's mind, each of these things still carried invisible price tags and always would.

Charity still liked her sister. Holly was giving and kindhearted, impulsive, affectionate, warm. But her way of living had forced her to close off some of the heartless truths about the way she and Charity had grown up poor in rural Maine, the truths that had more or less force Charity into marriage with Joe Camber while luck - really no different from Charity's winning lottery ticket - had allowed Holly to meet Jim and escape the life back home forever.

She was afraid that if she had told Holly that she had been trying to get Joe's permission to come down here for years, that this trip had only occurred because of brutal generalship on her part, and that even so it had almost come down to Joe's strapping her with his leather belt... she was afraid that if she told Holly those things, her sister's reaction would be horrified anger rather than anything rational and helpful. Why horrified anger? Perhaps because, deep down in a part of the human soul where Buick station wagons, and Sony color TVs with Trinitron picture tubes, and parquet floors can never quite make their final stilling impact, Holly would recognize that she might have escaped a similar marriage, a similar life, by the thinnest of margins.

She hadn't told because Holly had entrenched herself in her uppermiddle-class suburban life like a watchful soldier in a foxhole. She hadn't told because horrified anger could not solve her problems. She hadn't told because no one likes to look like a freak in a sideshow, living through the days and weeks and months and years with an