He took his Pentel pen from his inner coat pocket, took a napkin from the holder, and wrote swiftly across it:
The Sharp Cereal Professor needs to apologize.
He looked at it. The letters were getting larger, fuzzing as the ink sank into the napkin. Below that first sentence he added:
Decent burial.
And below that:
DAYLIGHT burial.
He still wasn’t sure what it meant; it was more metaphor than sense, but that was how his best ideas came to him. And there was something there. He felt sure of it.
Cujo lay on the floor of the garage, in semi-gloom. It was hot in here but it was even worse outside . . . and the daylight outside was too bright. It never had been before; in fact, he had never even really noticed the quality of the light before. But he was noticing now. Cujo’s head hurt. His muscles hurt. The bright light made his eyes hurt. He was hot And his muzzle still ached where he had been scratched.
Ached and festered.
THE MAN was gone somewhere. Not long after he left, THE BOY and THE WOMAN had gone somewhere, leaving him alone. THE BOY had put a big dish of food out for Cujo, and Cujo had eaten a little bit. The food made him feel worse instead of better, and he left the rest of it alone.
Now there was the growl of a truck turning into the driveway. Cujo got up and went to the barn door, knowing already it was a stranger. He knew the sound of both THE MAN’S truck and the family car. He stood in the doorway, head poking out into the bright glare that hurt his eyes. The truck backed up the driveway and then stopped. Two men got down from the cab and came around to the back. One of them ran up the truck’s sliding back door. The rattling, banging noise hurt Cujo’s ears. He whined and retreated back into the comforting gloom.
The truck was from Portland Machine. Three hours ago, Charity Camber and her still-dazzled son had gone into Portland Machine’s main office on Brighton Avenue and she had written a personal check for a new Jörgen chainfall—wholesale had turned out to be exactly $1,241.71, tax included. Before going to Portland Machine she had gone into the State Liquor Store on Congress Street to fill out a lottery claim form. Brett, forbidden absolutely to come inside with her, stood on the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets.
The clerk told Charity she would get a Lottery Commission check in the mail. How long? Two weeks at the very outside. It would come minus a deduction of roughly eight hundred dollars for taxes. This sum was based on her declaration of Joe’s yearly income.
The deduction for taxes before the fact did not anger Charity at all. Up until the moment when the clerk had checked her number against his sheet, she had been holding her breath, still unable to believe this had really happened to her. Then the clerk had nodded, congratulated her, and even called the manager out of his office to meet her. None of that mattered. What mattered was that now she could breathe again, and the ticket was no longer her responsibility. It had returned to the bowels of the Lottery Commission. Her Check Would Be in the Mail—wonderful, mystical, talismanic phrase.
And still she felt a small pang as she watched the dog-eared ticket, limp with her own nervous perspiration, clipped to the form she had filled out and then stored away. Lady Luck had singled her out. For the first time in her life, maybe for the only time, that heavy muslin drape of the everyday had been twitched a little, showing her a bright and shining world beyond. She was a practical woman, and in her heart she knew that she hated her husband more than a little, and feared him more than a little, but that they would grow old together, and he would die, leaving her with his debts and—this she would not admit for sure even in her secret heart, but now she feared it!—perhaps with his spoilt son.
If her name had been plucked from the big drum in the twice-yearly Super Drawing, if she had won ten times the five thousand dollars she had won, she might have entertained notions of pushing aside that dull muslin curtain, taking her son by the hand, and leading them both out into whatever was