Cujo

In the small town of Castle Rock, Maine, the summer heat hangs thick and heavy, pressing down on secrets and simmering resentments. For Donna Trenton, the quiet of her house has become a sound of its own, a hollow wind whistling through the empty spaces of her life now that her son, Tad, is old enough for day camp. An affair with a local furniture restorer has been a brief, thrilling distraction, but now it is over, and the guilt remains. Her husband, Vic, a good man grappling with a crisis at his small advertising agency, feels her drifting away. His unease culminates in the discovery of an anonymous, poison-pen letter. "I enjoyed fucking the shit out of her," it says. The confrontation that follows is a landscape of pain and confusion, a quiet, desperate conversation in which Donna tries to explain a feeling she hardly understands herself. "Men grapple, and women dust," she tells him, speaking of an emptiness that has grown inside her, a terror of watching her own life narrow to a pinprick of bake sales and antique-shop knickknacks.

Miles away, at the end of a dead-end road, Charity Camber lives in a different kind of quiet desperation. Her husband, Joe, is a hard, controlling man, and she dreams of taking their son, Brett, to visit her sister in Connecticut - a world away from Joe's sullen moods and the grime of his auto garage. When she wins five thousand dollars in the state lottery, she sees her chance. In a tense kitchen standoff, smelling of steak and fear, she barters with her husband. She offers him the winnings, a brand-new chainfall for his shop, and even a promise she despises: she will let Brett go deer hunting with Joe and his drinking cronies in the fall. In exchange, she and Brett get one week of freedom. The bargain is sealed with a grim, joyless act of marital duty in their bedroom, leaving Charity to lie awake under the moonlight, wondering if any escape could possibly be worth the price.

The Cambers' Saint Bernard, Cujo, has always been a good dog. Weighing nearly two hundred pounds, he is a gentle giant, beloved by ten-year-old Brett. But one hot June morning, a rabbit chase leads him to a small, hidden cave in the north field. The hole is home to a colony of bats, and as Cujo squeezes his head inside, barking furiously at the trapped rabbit, the terrified creatures swarm out. One, sick with rabies, latches onto the dog's nose, its needle-sharp teeth sinking deep. Cujo retreats, whining, the bat's foul taste in his mouth. He does not know that a fire has been lit in his blood, a slow, degenerative sickness that will soon begin to burn away his memory, his gentleness, and his mind, leaving only a vessel of agonizing pain and mindless fury.

As the Fourth of July weekend approaches, the separate threads of these lives begin to pull taut. Vic, needing to save his business, prepares to leave on a ten-day trip to Boston and New York, the rift between him and Donna raw and unresolved. In his haste and worry, he forgets to call Joe Camber about fixing the failing carburetor on Donna's Pinto. Charity and Brett, meanwhile, pack their bags. On the morning of their departure, Brett sees Cujo in the fog-drenched yard, his eyes red and filmed over, foam dripping from his muzzle. The boy knows something is terribly wrong, but his mother, terrified of losing their one chance to escape, silences him. “He just scared you,” she insists, and they drive away, leaving the sick dog behind with Joe, who is himself preparing to leave for Boston with his friend Gary Pervier as soon as his wife and son are on the bus.

The sickness in Cujo's head becomes a buzzing, roaring agony. The world turns into a crazy quilt of threatening smells and terrifying sounds. His simple dog's life, once governed by love for his boy and a desire for food and pats, is now ruled by a single, overwhelming imperative: to kill the things that are causing his pain. He finds Gary Pervier urinating into the honeysuckle beside his house and tears his throat out. When Joe Camber comes looking for his friend, he finds the body and realizes with dawning horror what has happened to his dog. He runs for the phone, but Cujo is already there, a two-hundred-pound monster of matted fur and blood, waiting in the shadows of the kitchen.

The heat is relentless. Donna Trenton, with four-year-old Tad beside her, nurses her ailing Pinto along the winding country roads toward Camber's Garage. The car jerks and stalls, coughs and backfires, but she coaxes it up the long, steep hill to the isolated farmhouse. As she coasts into the driveway, the engine gives one last shudder and dies. The yard is silent, empty. No one appears to be home. She gets out of the car, intending to let Tad out of his seatbelt, and a low, thick growling sound stops her cold. From the shadows of the barn, Cujo emerges. It is the same dog Tad once petted, but its coat is now matted with blood and mud, its eyes are red and weeping, and a terrible, senseless hatred radiates from it like heat.

Donna scrambles back into the car an instant before the dog slams into the driver's-side door with the force of a battering ram. She fumbles Tad's window shut just as Cujo's bloody muzzle thrusts inside, snarling and snapping. The car will not start. The horn, which she blasts in a desperate SOS, eventually weakens and dies as the battery drains. They are trapped. The sun beats down, turning the small car into an oven. The world outside the windows becomes a shimmering, heat-distorted prison yard, patrolled by a single, tireless, and insane guard.

Hours stretch into a day, then a night, then another day. The heat is a torment. Thirst becomes an agony. Tad, small and vulnerable, begins to fade, slipping into a delirious state where he talks of friendly ducks in a cool, green pond. Donna's hope, pinned first on the Cambers' return, then on the daily mailman, withers and dies. The mail has been held. No one is coming. The dog waits, a patient, slobbering engine of death, its own body wracked with the final, violent stages of the disease. It seems to watch her, to know her, as if it is not just a sick animal but a physical manifestation of all the monsters Tad has ever feared in his closet.

A police cruiser finally turns into the driveway. For a heart-stopping moment, salvation seems at hand. But Cujo has been hiding. He ambushes Sheriff Bannerman before the man can even call for backup, tearing him apart with a savage finality that extinguishes Donna's last flicker of hope. She knows now that no one is coming to save them. Tad is slipping away, his breathing shallow, his body wracked by a small, terrible convulsion. It is up to her.

Gritting her teeth against the pain in her own dog-bitten leg, she gets out of the car, grabbing an old, splintered baseball bat from the weeds. What follows is a primal, bloody battle under the blaring afternoon sun. She swings the bat again and again, screaming with a fury born of terror and a mother's love, breaking the dog's bones, feeling the splintered wood of the bat give way in her hands. The dying animal lunges one last time, and with a final, desperate thrust, she drives the jagged remnant of the bat into its eye and through to its brain. The monster is dead. But as Vic's car finally pulls into the driveway, drawn by a terrible premonition, he finds his wife standing blood-soaked and triumphant over the dog's corpse, only to discover that their son, Tad, lies still and silent in the back of the Pinto, a small victim not of the monster's teeth, but of the relentless, indifferent heat.