bill. “Yeah, you got this. Don’t spend it all in one place. The fool and his money soon parted.”
“All right. Thank you!”
“So long,” Camber said. He didn’t ask for another kiss.
“Good-bye, Daddy.” Brett stood on the sidewalk and watched his father climb into the car and drive away. He never saw his father alive again.
At quarter past eight that morning, Gary Pervier staggered out of his house in his pee-stained underwear shorts and urinated into the honeysuckle. In a perverse sort of way he hoped that someday his piss would become so rancid with booze that it would blight the honeysuckle. That day hadn’t come yet.
“Arrrrouggh, my head!” he screamed, holding it with his free hand as he watered the honeysuckle which had buried his fence. His eyes were threaded with bright snaps of scarlet. His heart clattered and roared like an old water pump that was drawing more air than water just lately. A terrible stomach cramp seized him as he finished voiding himself—they had been getting more common lately—and as he doubled up a large and foul-smelling flatulence purred out from between his skinny shanks.
He turned to go back in, and that was when he heard the growling begin. It was a low, powerful sound coming from just beyond the point where his overgrown side yard merged with the hayfield beyond it.
He turned toward the sound quickly, his headache forgotten, the clatter and roar of his heart forgotten, the cramp forgotten. It had been a long time since he’d had a flashback to his war in France, but he had one now. Suddenly his mind was screaming, Germans! Germans! Squad down!
But it wasn’t the Germans. When the grass parted it was Cujo who appeared.
“Hey boy, what are you growling f—” Gary said, and then faltered.
It had been twenty years since he had seen a rabid dog, but you didn’t forget the look. He had been in an Amoco station east of Machias, headed back from a camping trip down Eastport way. He had been driving the old Indian motorcycle he’d had for a while in the mid-fifties. A panting, slat-sided yellow dog had drifted by outside that Amoco station like a ghost. Its sides had been moving in and out in rapid, shallow sprints of respiration. Foam was dripping from its mouth in a steady watery stream. It eyes were rolling wildly. Its hindquarters were caked with shit. It had been reeling rather than walking, as if some unkind soul had opened its jaws an hour before and filled it full of cheap whiskey.
“Hot damn, there he is,” the pump jockey said. He had dropped the adjustable wrench he was holding and had rushed into the cluttered, dingy little office which adjoined the station’s garage bay. He had come out with a .30-.30 clutched in his greasy, big-knuckled hands. He went out onto the tarmac, dropped to one knee, and started shooting. His first shot had been low, shearing away one of the dog’s back legs in a cloud of blood. That yellow dog never even moved, Gary remembered as he stared at Cujo now. Just looked around blankly as if it didn’t have the slightest idea what was happening to it. The pump jockey’s second try had cut the dog almost in half. Cuts hit the station’s one pump in a black and red splash. A moment later three more guys had pulled in, three of Washington County’s finest crammed shoulder to shoulders in the cab of a 1940 Dodge pickup. They were all armed. They piled out and pumped another eight or nine rounds into the dead dog. An hour after that, as the pump jockey was finishing up putting a new headlamp on the front of Gary’s Indian cycle, the County Dog Officer arrived in a Studebaker with no door on the passenger side. She donned long rubber gloves and cut off what was left of the yellow dog’s head to send to State Health and Welfare.
Cujo looked a hell of a lot spryer than that long-ago yellow dog, but the other symptoms were exactly the same. Not too far gone, he thought. More dangerous. Holy Jesus, got to get my gun—
He started to back away. “Hi, Cujo . . . nice dog, nice boy, nice doggy—” Cujo stood at the edge of the lawn, his great head lowered, his eyes reddish and filmy, growling.
“Nice boy—”
To Cujo, the words coming from THE MAN meant nothing. They were meaningless sounds, like the wind. What mattered was