'Ma,' he said urgently.
She turned to him - it seemed almost that she was turning on him.
'Did he say something to you?'
'No ... no. It's Cujo.'
'Cujo? What about Cujo?,
'He's sick.'
'What do you mean, sick?'
Brett told her about having his second bowl of Cocoa Bears out on the back steps, about walking into the fog, and how Cujo had suddenly appeared, his eyes red and wild, his muzzle dripping foam.
'And he wasn't walking right,' Brett finished. 'He was kind of, you know, staggering. I think I better tell Daddy. '
'No,' his mother said fiercely, and grasped him by the shoulders hard enough to hurt. 'You do no such a thing!'
He looked at her, surprised and frightened. She relaxed her grip a little and spoke more quietly.
'He just scared you, coming out of the fog like that. There's probably nothing wrong with him at all. Right?'
Brett groped for the right words to make her understand how terrible Cujo had looked, and how for a moment he had thought the dog was going to turn on him. He couldn't find the words. Maybe he didn't want to find them.
'If there is something wrong,' Charity continued, 'it's probably just some little thing. He might have gotten a dose of skunk -'
'I didn't smell any sk-'
'or he might have been running a woodchuck or a rabbit. Might even have jumped a moose down there in that bog. Or he might have eaten some nettles.'
'I guess he could have,' Brett said doubtfully.
'Your father would just jump on something like that,' she said. 'I can hear him now. "Sick ' ' is be? Well, he's your dog, Brett. You see to him. I got too much work to do to be messing around with your mutt."'
Brett nodded unhappily. It was his own thought exactly, magnified by the brooding way his father had been eating breakfast while the sports blared around the kitchen.
'If you just leave him, he'll come mooching around your dad, and your dad will take care of him,' Charity said. 'He loves Cujo almost as much as you do, although he'd never say it. If he sees something's wrong, he'll fetch him over to the vet's in South Paris.'
'Yeah, I guess he would.' His mother's words rang true to him, but he was still unhappy about it.
She bent and kissed his cheek. 'I'll tell you! We can call your father tonight, if you want. How would that be? And when you talk to him, you just say, sort of casually, "You feeding my dog, ]Daddy?"
And then you'll know.'
'Yeah,' Brett said. He smiled gratefully at his mother, and she smiled back, relieved, the trouble averted. But, perversely, it had given them something else to worry about during the seemingly interminable period before Joe backed the car up to the porch steps and silently began to load their four pieces of luggage into the wagon (into one of them Charity had surreptitiously placed all six of her snapshot albums). This new worry was that Cujo would lurch into the yard before they could drive away and stick Joe Camber with the problem.
But Cujo hadn't shown up.
Now Joe lowered the tailgate of the Country Squire, handed Brett the two small bags, and took the two large ones for himself.
'Woman, you got so much luggage I wonder if you ain't leavin on one of those Reno divorce cruises instead of going down to Connecticut.'
Charity and Brett smiled uneasily. It sounded like an attempt at humor, but with Joe Camber you were never really sure.
'That would be a day,' she said.
'I guess I'd just have to chase you down and drag you back with my new chainfall,' he said, unsmiling. His green hat was cocked squarely on the back of his head. 'Boy, you gonna take care of your mom?'
Brett nodded.
'Yeah, you better. ' He measured the boy. 'You're getting pretty damn big. Probably you ain't got a kiss to give your old man.'
'I guess I do, Daddy,' Brett said. He hugged his father tight and kissed his stubbly cheek, smelling sour sweat and a phantom of last night's vodka. He was surprised and overwhelmed by his love for his father, a feeling that sometimes still came, always when it was least expected (but less and less often over the last two or three years, something his mother did not know and would not have believed if told). It was a love that had nothing to do with Joe Camber's day-to-day behavior toward him or his mother; it was a brute, biological thing that he would never be free of, a phenomenon with many illusory referents of the sort which haunt for a lifetime: the smell of cigar-smoke, the look of a double-edged razor reflected in a mirror, pants hung over a chair, certain curse words.
His father hugged him back and then turned to Charity. He put a finger under her chin and turned her face up a little. From the loading bays behind the squat brick building they heard a bus warming up. Its engine was a low and guttural diesel rumble. 'Have a good time,' he said.
Her eyes filled with tears and she wiped them away quickly. The gesture was nearly one of anger. 'Okay,' she said.
Abruptly the tight, dosed, noncommittal expression descended over his face. It came down like the clap of a knight's visor. He
was the perfect country man again. 'Let's get these cases in, boy!
Feels like there's lead in this one ... Jesus-please-us!'
He stayed with them until all four bags had been checked, looking closely at each tag, oblivious of the baggage handler's condescending expression of amusement. He watched the handler trundle the bags out on a dolly and load them into the guts of the bus. Then he turned to Brett again.
'Come on out on the sidewalk with me,' he said.
