But she would do better, she promised herself. Because the mailman would be along soon.
“I think the muh—I think the doggy’s going to eat us,” Tad said.
She started to reply and then didn’t. Cujo still wasn’t around. The sound of the Pinto’s engine turning over hadn’t brought him. Maybe he was asleep. Maybe he had had a convulsion and died. That would be wonderful . . . especially if it had been a slow convulsion. A painful one. She looked at the back door again. It was so temptingly near. It was locked. She was sure of that now. When people went away, they locked up. It would be foolhardy to try for the door, especially with the mailman due so soon. Play it as though it were real, Vic sometimes said. She would have to, because it was real. Better to assume the dog was still alive, and lying just inside those half-open garage doors. Lying in the shade.
The thought of shade made her mouth water.
It was almost eleven o’clock then. It was about forty-five minutes later when she spotted something in the grass beyond the edge of the driveway on Tad’s side of the car. Another fifteen minutes of examination convinced her that it was an old baseball bat with a friction-taped handle, half obscured by witch grass and timothy.
A few minutes after that, just before noon, Cujo stumbled out of the barn, blinking his red, rheumy eyes stupidly in the hot sun.
When they come to take you down,
When they bring that wagon ’round,
When they come to call on you
And drag your poor body down . . .
Jerry Garcia’s voice, easy but somehow weary, came floating down the hall, magnified and distorted by someone’s transistor radio until it sounded as if the vocal were floating down a long steel tube. Closer by, someone was moaning. That morning, when he went down to the smelly industrial bathroom to shave and shower, there had been a puddle of vomit in one of the urinals and a large quantity of dried blood in one of the washbasins.
“Shake it, shake it, Sugaree,” Jerry Garcia sang, “just don’t tell’em you know me.”
Steve Kemp stood at the window of his room on the fifth floor of the Portland YMCA, looking down at Spring Street, feeling bad and not knowing why. His head was bad. He kept thinking about Donna Trenton and how he had fucked her over—fucked her over and then hung around. Hung around for what? What the fuck had happened?
He wished he were in Idaho. Idaho had been much on his mind lately. So why didn’t he stop honking his donk and just go? He didn’t know. He didn’t like not knowing. He didn’t like all these questions screwing up his head. Questions were counterproductive to a state of serenity, and serenity was necessary to the development of the artist. He had looked at himself this morning in one of the toothpaste-spotted mirrors and had thought he looked old. Really old. When he came back to his room he had seen a cockroach zigzagging busily across the floor. The omens were bad.
She didn’t give me the brush because I’m old, he thought. I’m not old. She did it because her itch was scratched, because she’s a bitch, and because I gave her a spoonful of her own medicine. How did Handsome Hubby like his little love note, Donna? Did Handsome Hubby dig it?
Did hubby get his little love note?
Steve crushed his cigarette out in the jar top that served the room as an ashtray. That was really the central question, wasn’t it? With that one answered, the answers to the other questions would drop into place. The hateful hold she had gotten over him by telling him to get lost before he was ready to end the affair (she had humiliated him, goddammit), for one thing—for one very big thing.
Suddenly he knew what to do, and his heart began to thud heavily with anticipation. He put a hand into his pocket and jingled the change there. He went out. It was just past noon, and in Castle Rock, the mailman for whom Donna hoped had begun that part of his rounds which covered the Maple Sugar Road and Town Road No. 3.
Vic, Roger, and Rob Martin spent Tuesday morning at Image-Eye and then went out for beers and burgers. A few burgers and a great many beers later, Vic suddenly realized that he was drunker than he