all of Ray-Gun’s teeth too,” Gary said, and stood up unsteadily. The lawn chair fell over and collapsed itself. If you had guessed that Gary Pervier didn’t give a shit, you would have been right. “Scuse me, boy.” He went inside and built himself another screwdriver. The kitchen was a buzzing, fly-blown horror of split-open green garbage bags, empty cans, and empty liquor bottles.
When Gary came back out again, fresh drink in hand, Cujo had left.
On the last day of June, Donna Trenton came back from downtown Castle Rock (the locals called it “downstreet,” but at least she hadn’t picked up that particular Maine-ism yet), where she had dropped Tad off at his afternoon daycamp and picked up a few groceries at the Agway Market. She was hot and tired, and the sight of Steve Kemp’s battered Ford Econoline van with the gaudy desert murals painted on the sides suddenly turned her furious.
Anger had simmered all day. Vic had told her about the impending trip at breakfast, and when she had protested being left alone with Tad for what might be ten days or two weeks or God only knew, he made it clear to her exactly what the stakes were. He had thrown a scare into her, and she didn’t like to be frightened. Up until this morning she had treated the Red Razberry Zingers affair as a joke—a rather good one at Vic and Roger’s expense. She had never dreamed that such an absurd thing could have such serious consequences.
Then Tad had been scratchy about going off to the day-camp, complaining that a bigger boy had pushed him down last Friday. The bigger boy’s name was Stanley Dobson, and Tad was afraid that Stanley Dobson might push him down again today. He had cried and clutched onto her when she got him to the American Legion field where the camp was held, and she’d had to pry his fingers loose from her blouse finger by finger, making her feel more like a Nazi than a mom: You vill go to daykemp, ja? Ja, mein Mamma! Sometimes Tad seemed so young for his age, so vulnerable. Weren’t only children supposed to be precocious and resourceful? His fingers had been chocolatey and had left fingerprints on her blouse. They reminded her of the bloodstained handprints you sometimes saw in cheap detective magazines.
To add to the fun, her Pinto had started to act funny on the way home from the market, jerking and hitching, as if it had an automotive case of hiccups. It had smoothed out after a bit, but what could happen once could happen again, and—
—and, just to put a little icing on the cake, here was Steve Kemp.
“Well, no bullshit,” she muttered, grabbed her bag of groceries, and got out, a pretty, dark-haired woman of twenty-nine, tall, gray-eyed. She somehow managed to look tolerably fresh in spite of the relentless heat, her Tad-printed blouse, and academy-gray shorts that felt pasted to her hips and fanny.
She went up the steps quickly and into the house by the porch door. Steve was sitting in Vic’s living-room chair. He was drinking one of Vic’s beers. He was smoking a cigarette—presumably one of his own. The TV was on, and the agonies of General Hospital played out there, in living color.
“The princess arrives,” Steve said with the lopsided grin she had once found so charming and interestingly dangerous. “I thought you were never going to—”
“I want you out of here, you son of a bitch,” she said tonelessly, and went through into the kitchen. She put the grocery bag down on the counter and started putting things away. She could not remember when she had last been so angry, so furious that her stomach had tied itself in a gripping, groaning knot. One of the endless arguments with her mother, maybe. One of the real horrorshows before she had gone away to school. When Steve came up behind her and slipped his tanned arms around her bare midriff, she acted with no thought at all; she brought her elbow back into his lower chest. Her temper was not cooled by the obvious fact that he had anticipated her. He played a lot of tennis, and her elbow felt as if it had struck a stone wall coated with a layer of hard rubber.
She turned around and looked into his grinning, bearded face. She stood five-eleven and was an inch taller than Vic when she wore heels, but Steve was nearly six-five.