'Shit!'
The hammer struck once more and there was a longer pause. Then her husband hollered: 'Brett!'
She always cringed a little when he raised his voice that way and yelled for their boy. Brett loved his father very much, but Charity had never been sure just how Joe felt about his son. That was a dreadful thing to be thinking, but it was true. Once, about two years ago, she had had a horrible nightmare, one she didn't think she would ever forget. She dreamed that her husband drove a pitchfork directly into Brett's chest. The tines went right through him and poked out the back of Brett's T-shirt, holding it out the way tent poles hold a tent up in the air. Little sucker didn't come when I hollered him down, her dream husband said, and she had awakened with a jerk beside her real husband, who had been sleeping the sleep of beer beside her in his boxer shorts. The moonlight had been falling through the window and onto the bed where she now sat, moonlight in a cold and uncaring flood of light, and she had understood just how afraid a person could be, how fear was a monster with yellow teeth, set afoot by an angry God to eat the unwary and the unfit. Joe had used his hands on her a few times in the course of their marriage, and she had learned. She wasn't a genius, maybe, but her mother hadn't raised any fools.
Now she did what Joe told her and rarely argued. She guessed Brett was that way too. But she feared for the boy sometimes.
She went to the window in time to see Brett run across the yard and into the barn. Cujo traded at Brett's heels, looking hot and dispirited.
Faintly: 'Hold this for me, Brett.'
More faintly: 'Sure, Daddy.'
The hammering started again, that merciless icepick sound: Whing!
Whing! Whing! She imagined Brett holding something against something - a coldchisel against a frozen bearing, maybe, or a square spike against a lockbolt. Her husband a Pall Mall jittering in the comer of his thin mouth, his T-shirt sleeves rolled up, swinging a five-pound pony-hammer. And if he was drunk ... if his aim was a little off .
In her mind she could hear Brett's agonized bowl as the hammer mashed his hand to a red, splintered pulp, and she crossed her arms over her bosom against the vision.
She looked at the thing in her hand again and wondered if there was a way she could use it. More than anything in the world, she wanted to go to Connecticut to see her sister Holly. It had been six years now, in the summer of 1974 - she remembered well enough, because it had been a bad summer for her except for that one pleasant weekend. 'Seventy-four had been the year Brett's night problems had begun -restlessness, bad dreams, and, more and more frequently, incidents of sleepwalking. It was also the year Joe began drinking heavily. Brett's uneasy nights and his somnambulism had eventually gone away. Joe's drinking had not.
Brett had been four then; he was ten now and didn't even remember his Aunt Holly, who had been married for six years. She had a little boy, named after her husband, and a little girl. Charity had never seen either child, her own niece and nephew, except for the Kodachromes Holly occasionally sent in *the mail.
She had gotten scared of asking Joe. He was tired of hearing her talk about it, and if she asked him again he might hit her. It had been almost sixteen months since she'd last asked him if maybe they couldn't take a little vacation down Connecticut way. Not much of a one for traveling was Mrs.
Camber's son Joe. He liked it just fine in Castle Rock. Once a year he and that old tosspot Gary Pervier and some of their cronies
would go up north to Moosehead to shoot deer. Last November he had wanted to take Brett. She had put her foot down and it had stayed down, in spite of Joe's sullen mutterings and Brett's wounded eyes. She was not going to have the boy out with that bunch of men for two weeks, listening to a lot of vulgar talk and jokes about sex and seeing what animals men could turn into when they got to drinking nonstop over a period of days and weeks. All of them with loaded guns, walking in the woods. Loaded guns, loaded men, somebody always got hurt sooner or later, fluorescent-orange hats and vests or not. It wasn't going to be Brett. Not her son.
The hammer struck the steel steadily, rhythmically. It stopped. She relaxed a little. Then it started again.
She supposed that sooner or later Brett would go with them, and that would be the end of him for her. He would join their club, and ever after she would be little more than a kitchen drudge that kept the clubhouse neat. Yes, that day would come, and she knew it, and she grieved for it. But at least she had been able to stave it off for another year.
And this year? Would she be able to keep him home with her this November) Maybe not. Either way, it would be better -not all right but at least better - if she could take Brett down to Connecticut first. Take him down there and show him how some ...
... some ...
Oh, say it, if only to yourself.
(how some decent people lived)
If Joe would let them go alone ... but there was no sense thinking of that. Joe could go places alone or with his friends, but she couldn't, not even with Brett in tow. That was one of their marriage's ground rules. Yet she couldn't help thinking about how much better it would be without him - without him sitting in
Holly's kitchen, swilling beer, looking Holly's Jim up and down with those insolent brown eyes. It would he better without him being impatient to be gone until Holly and Jim were also impatient for them to be gone ...
She and Brett.
Just the two of them.
They could go on the bus.
She thought: Last November, he wanted to take Brett hunting with, him.
She thought: Could a trade be worked out?
Cold came to her, filling the hollows of her bones with spun glass.
Would she actually agree to such a trade? He could take Brett to Moosehead with him in the fall if Joe in his turn would agree to let them go to Stratford on the bus -?
There was money enough - now there was - but money alone wouldn't do it. He'd take the money and that would be the last she would see of it. Unless she played her cards just right. just ... right.
Her mind began to move faster. The pounding outside stopped. She saw Brett leave the barn, trotting, and was dimly grateful. Some premonitory part of her was convinced that if the boy ever came to serious harm, it would be in that dark place with the sawdust spread over the old grease on the plank floor.
There was a way. There must be a way.
If she was willing to gamble.
In her fingers she held a lottery ticket. She turned it over and over in her hand as she stood at the window, thinking.
When Steve Kemp got back to his shop, he was in a kind of furious ecstasy. His shop was on the western outskirts of Castle Rock, on
Route 11. He had rented it from a farmer who had holdings in both Castle Rock and in neighboring Bridgton. The farmer was not just a nurd; he was a Super Nurd.
The shop was dominated by Steve's stripping vat, a corrugated iron pot that looked big enough to boil an entire congregation of missionaries at one time. Sitting around it like small satellites around a large planet was his work: bureaus, dressers, china cupboards, bookcases, tables. The air was aromatic with varnish, stripping compound, linseed oil.
He had a fresh change of clothes in a battered TWA flightbag; he had planned to change after making love to the fancy cunt. Now he hurled the bag across the shop. It bounced off the far wall and landed on top of a dresser. He walked across to it and batted it aside. He drop-kicked it as it came down, and it hit the ceiling before failing on its side like a dead woodchuck. Then he simply stood, breathing hard, inhaling the heavy smells, staring vacantly at three chairs he had promised to cane by the end of the week. His thumbs were jammed into his belt. His fingers were curled into fists. His lower lip was pooched out. He looked like a kid sulking after a bawling-out.
'Cheap-shit!' he breathed, and went after the flightbag. He made as if to kick it again, then changed his mind and picked it up. He went through the shed and into the three-room house that adjoined the shop. If anything, it was hotter in the house. Crazy July heat. It got in your head. The kitchen was full of dirty dishes. Flies buzzed around a green plastic Hefty bag filled with Beefaroni and tuna-fish cans. The living room was dominated by a big old Zenith black-and-white TV he had rescued from the Naples dump. A big spayed brindle cat, name of Bernie Carbo, slept on top of it like a dead thing.
