began to roll over and over in the high timothy grass, snapping at it, his eyes rolling.
The world was a crazy sea of smells. He would track each to its source and dismember it.
Cujo began to growl again. He found his feet. He slipped deeper into the fog that was even now beginning to thin, a big dog who weighed just under two hundred pounds.
Brett stood in the dooryard for more than fifteen minutes after Cujo had melted back into the fog, not knowing what to do. Cujo had been sick. He might have eaten a poison bait or something. Brett knew about rabies, and if he had ever seen a woodchuck or a fox or a porcupine exhibiting the same symptoms, he would have guessed rabies. But it never crossed his mind that his dog could have that awful disease of the brain and the nervous system. A poison bait, that seemed the most likely.
He should tell his father. His father could call the vet. Or maybe Dad could do something himself, like that time two years ago, when he had pulled the porcupine needles out of Cujo’s muzzle with his pliers, working each quill first up, then down, then out, being careful not to break them off because they would fester in there. Yes, he would have to tell Dad. Dad would do something, like that time Cuje got into it with Mr. Porky Pine.
But what about the trip?
He didn’t need to be told that his mother had won them the trip through some desperate stratagem, or luck, or a combination of the two. Like most children, he could sense the vibrations between his parents, and he knew the way the emotional currents ran from one day to the next the way a veteran guide knows the twists and turns of an upcountry river. It had been a near thing, and even though his dad had agreed, Brett sensed that this agreement had been grudging and unpleasant. The trip was not on for sure until he had dropped them off and driven away. If he told Dad Cujo was sick, might he not seize on that as an excuse to keep them home?
He stood motionless in the dooryard. He was, for the first time in his life, in a total mental and emotional quandary. After a little while he began to hunt for Cujo behind the barn. He called him in a low voice. His parents were still sleeping, and he knew how sound carried in the morning fog. He didn’t find Cujo anywhere . . . which was just as well for him.
The alarm burred Vic awake at quarter to five. He got up, shut it off, and blundered down to the bathroom, mentally cursing Roger Breakstone, who could never get to the Portland Jetport twenty minutes before check-in like any normal air traveler. Not Roger. Roger was a contingency man. There might always be a flat tire or a roadblock or a washout or an earthquake. Aliens from outer space might decide to touch down on runway 22.
He showered, shaved, gobbled vitamins, and went back to the bedroom to dress. The big double bed was empty and he sighed a little. The weekend he and Donna had just passed hadn’t been very pleasant . . . in fact, he could honestly say he never wanted to go through such a weekend again in his life. They had kept their normal, pleasant faces on—for Tad—but Vic had felt like a participant at a masquerade ball. He didn’t like to be aware of the muscles in his face at work when he smiled.
They had slept in the same bed together, but for the first time the king-sized double seemed too small to Vic. They slept each on one side, the space between them a crisply sheeted no-man’s-land. He had lain awake both Friday and Saturday nights, morbidly aware of each shift in Donna’s weight as she moved, the sound of her nightdress against her body. He found himself wondering if she was awake, too, on her side of the emptiness that lay between them.
Last night, Sunday night, they had tried to do something about that empty space in the middle of the bed. The sex part had been moderately successful, if a little tentative (at least neither of them had cried when it was over; for some reason he had been morbidly sure that one of them would do that). But Vic was not sure you could call