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 idée 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 life 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, almost everything about her father drove her mother crazy.
She now had a vision of Cujo in front of the Pinto, not sleeping at all but crouched on the gravel with his back legs coiled under him, his bloodshot eyes fixed intently on the spot where she would first appear if she left the car on the driver’s side. He was waiting for her, hoping she would be foolish enough to get out. He was laying back in the tall bushes for her.
She rubbed both hands over her face in a quick and nervous washing gesture. Overhead, Venus now peeked out of the darkening blue. The sun had made its exit, leaving a still but somehow crazed yellow light over the fields. Somewhere a bird sang, stopped, then sang again.
It came to her that she was nowhere near as anxious to leave the car and run for the door as she had been that afternoon. Part of it was having dozed off and then wakened not knowing exactly where the dog was. Part of it was the simple fact that the heat was drawing back—the tormenting heat and what it was doing to Tad had been the biggest thing goading her to make a move. It was quite comfortable in the car now, and Tad’s half-lidded, half-swooning state had become a real sleep. He was resting comfortably, at least for the time being.
But she was afraid those things were secondary to the main reason she was still here—that, little by little, some psychological point of readiness had been reached and passed. She remembered from her childhood diving lessons at Camp Tapawingo that there came an instant, that first time on the high board, when you either had to try it or retreat ignominiously to let the girl behind you have her crack at it. There came a day during the learning-to-drive experience when you finally had to leave the empty country roads behind and try it in the city. There came a time. Always there came a time. A time to dive, a time to drive, a time to try for the back door.
Sooner or later the dog would show itself. The situation was bad, granted, but not yet desperate. The right time came around in cycles—that was not anything she had been taught in a psychology class; it was something she knew instinctively. If you chickened down from the high board on Monday, there was no law that said you couldn’t go right back again on Tuesday. You could—
Reluctantly, her mind told her that was a deadly-false bit of reasoning.
She was not as strong tonight as she had been last night. She would be even weaker and more dehydrated tomorrow morning. And that was not the worst of it. She had been sitting almost all the time for—how long?—it didn’t seem possible, but it was now some twenty-eight hours. What if