She had heard it shatter as it hit the gravel. Then she had cried.
But none of it mattered. It was humiliating and demeaning to have to try and pee into a Thermos bottle, sure it was, but it didn't matter because the mailman was coming - even now he would be loading his small blue-and-white truck at the ivy-covered brick post office on Carbine Street ... or maybe he had already begun his route, working his way out Route 117 toward the Maple Sugar Road.
Soon it would end. She would take Tad home, and they would go upstairs. They would strip and shower together, but before she got into the tub with him and under the shower, she would take the bottle of shampoo from the shelf and put the cap neatly on the edge of the sink, and she would wash first Tad's hair and then her own.
Tad was reading the yellow paper again, his lips moving soundlessly. Not real reading, not the way he would be reading in a couple of years (if we get out of this, her traitorous mind insisted on adding senselessly but instantly), but the kind that came from rote memorization. The way driving schools prepared functional illiterates for the written part of the driver's exam. She had read that somewhere too, or maybe seen it on a TV news story, and wasn't it amazing, the amount of crud the human mind was capable of storing up? And wasn't it amazing how easily it all came
spewing out when there was nothing else to engage it? Like a subconscious garbage disposal running in reverse.
That made her think of something that had happened in her parents'
house, back when it had still been her house too. Less than two hours before one of her mother's Famous Cocktail Parties (that was how ' Donna's father always referred to them, with a satirical tone that automatically conferred the capital letters - the same satirical tone that could sometimes drive Samantha into a frenzy), the disposal in the kitchen sink had somehow backed up into the bar sink, and when her mother turned the gadget on again in an effort to get rid of everything, green goo had exploded all over the ceiling. Donna had been about fourteen at the time, and she remembered that her mother's utter, hysterical rage had both frighened and sickened her. She had been sickened because her mother was throwing a tantrum in front of the people who loved and needed her most over the opinion of a group of casual acquaintances who were coming over to drink free booze and munch up a lot of free canapes. She had been frightened because she could see no logic in her mother's tantrum ... and because of the expression she had seen in her father's eyes. It had been a kind of resigned disgust. That had been the first time she had really believed - believed in her gut - that she was going to grow up and become a woman, a woman with at least a fighting chance to be a better woman than her own mother, who could get into such a frightening state over what was really such a little thing....
She dosed her eyes and tried to dismiss the whole train of thought, uneasy at the vivid emotions that memory called up. SPCA, greenhouse effect, garbage disposals, what next? How I Lost My Virginity? Six Well-Loved Vacations? The mailman, that was the thing to think about, the goddam mailman.
'Mommy, maybe the car will start now.'
'Honey, I'm scared to try it because the battery is so low.'
'But we're just sitting here,' he said, sounding petulant and tired and cross. 'What does it matter if the battery's low or not if we're just sitting here? Try it!'
'Don't you go giving me Orders, kiddo, or I'll. whack your ass for you!'
He cringed away from her hoarse, angry voice and she cursed herself again. He was scratchy ... so, who could blame him?
Besides, he was right. That was what had really made her angry.
But Tad didn't understand, the real reason she didn't want to try the engine again was because she was afraid it would bring the dog.
She was afraid it would bring Cujo, and more than anything else she didn't want that.
Grimly, she turned the key in the ignition. The Pinto's engine cranked very slowly now, with a draggy, protesting sound. h coughed twice but did not fire. She turned the key off and tapped the horn. It gave a foggy, low honk that probably didn't carry fifty yards, let alone to that house at the bottom of the hill.
'Mere,' she said briskly and cruelly. 'Are you happy? Good.'
Tad began to cry. He began the way she always remembered it beginning when he was a baby: his mouth drawing into a trembling bow, the tears spilling down his cheeks even before the first sobs came. She pulled him to her then, saying she was sorry, saying she didn't mean to be mean, it was just that she was upset too, telling him that it would be over as soon as the madman got there, that she would take him home and wash his hair. And thought: A fighting chance to be a better woman than your mother. Sure. Sure, kid.
You're just like her. That's just the kind of thing she would havesaid in a situation like this. When you're feeling bad, what you dois spread the misery, share the wealth. Well, like mother likedaughter, right? And maybe when Tad grows up, he'll feel thesame way about you as you feel about
'Why is it so hot, Mommy?' Tad asked dully.
'The greenhouse effect,' she answered, without even thinking about it. She wasn't up to this, and she knew it now. If this was, in any sense, a final examination on motherhood - or on adulthood itself -
then she was flagging the test. How long had they been stuck in this driveway? Fifteen hours at the very most. And she was cracking up, falling apart.
'Can I have a Dr Pepper when we get home, Mommy?' The Monster Words, sweaty and wrinkled, lay limply on his lap.
'All you can drink,' she said, and hugged him tight. But the feel of his body was frighteningly wooden. I shouldn't have shouted at him, she thought distractedly. If only I hadn't shouted.
But she would do better, she promised herself. Because the madman would be along soon.
'I think the muh - I think the doggy's going to eat us,' Tad said.
She started to reply and then didn't. Cujo still wasn't around. The sound of the Pinto's engine turning over hadn't brought him.
Maybe he was asleep. Maybe he had had a convulsion and died.
That would be wonderful ... especially if it had been a slow convulsion. A painful one. She looked at the back door again. It was so temptingly near. It was locked. She was sure of that now.
When people went away, they locked up. It would be foolhardy to try for the door, especially with the mailman due so soon. Play it as though it were real, Vic sometimes said. She would have to.
because it was real. Better to assume the dog was still alive, and lying just inside those half-open garage doors. Lying in the shade.
The thought of shade made her mouth water.
It was almost eleven o'clock then. It was about forty-five minutes later when she spotted something in the grass beyond the edge of Tad's side of the car. Another fifteen minutes of examination
convinced her that it was an old baseball bat with a friction-taped handle, half obscured by witch grass and timothy.
A few minutes after that, just before noon, Cujo stumbled out of the barn, blinking his red, rheumy eyes stupidly in the hot sun.
When they come to take you down,
When they bring that wagon 'round,
When they come to call on you
And drag your poor body down ...
Jerry Garcia's voice, easy but somehow weary, came floating down the hall, magnified and distorted by someone's transistor radio until it sounded as if the vocal were floating down a long steel tube.
Closer by, someone was moaning. That morning, when he went down to the smelly industrial bathroom to shave and shower, there had been a puddle of vomit in one of the urinals and a large quantity of dried blood in one of the washbasins.
'Shake it, shake it, Sugaree,' Jerry Garcia sang, 'just don't tell 'em you know me.'
Steve Kemp stood at the window of his room on the fifth floor of the Portland YMCA, looking down at Spring Street, feeling bad and not knowing why. His head was bad. He kept thinking about Donna Trenton and how he had fucked her over - fucked her over and then hung around. Hung around for what? What the fuck had happened?
He wished he were in Idaho. Idaho had been much on his mind lately. So why didn't he stop honking his donk and just go? He didn't know. He didn't like not knowing. He didn't like all these questions screwing up his head. Questions were counterproductive to a state of serenity, and serenity was necessary to the development of the artist. He had looked at himself this morning m one of the toothpaste-spotted mirrors and had thought he looked
old. Really old. When he came back to his room he had seen a cockroach zigzagging busily across the floor. The omens were bad.
She didn't give me the brush because I'm old, he thought. I'm not old. She did it because her itch was scratched, because she's a bitch, and because I gave her a spoonful of her own medicine. How did Handsome Hubby like his little love note, Donna? Did Handsome Hubby dig it?
Did hubby get his little love note?
Steve crushed his cigarette out in the jar top that served the room as an ashtray. That was really the central question, wasn't it? With that one answered, the answers to the other questions would drop into place. The hateful hold she had gotten over him by telling him to get lost before he was ready to end the affair (she had humiliated him, goddammit), for one thing - for one very big thing.
Suddenly he knew what to do, and his heart began to thud heavily with anticipation. He put a hand into his pocket and jingled the change there. He went out. It was just past noon, and in Castle Rock, the mailman for whom Donna hoped had begun that part of his rounds which covered the Maple Sugar Road and Town Road No. 3.
