Cujo by Stephen King Read Free Book Online Page B

turn the medal into an ashtray. Buddy had been shocked. Gary told Buddy he would have gotten him to make it into a toilet bowl so he could shit in it, but it wasn’t big enough. Buddy spread the story, and maybe that had been Gary’s intention, or maybe it hadn’t.
    Either way, it had driven the local hippies crazy with admiration. In the summer of ’68 most of these hippies were on vacation in the Lakes Region with their wealthy parents before returning to their colleges in September, where they were apparently studying up on Protest, Pot, and Pussy.
    After Gary had his DSC turned into an ashtray by Buddy Torgeson, who did custom welding in his spare time and who worked days down to the Castle Falls Esso (they were all Exxon stations now, and Gary Pervier didn’t give a shit), a version of the story found its way into the Castle Rock Call. The story was written by a local-yokel reporter who construed the act as an antiwar gesture. That was when the hippies started to show up at Gary’s place on Town Road No. 3. Most of them wanted to tell Gary he was “far out.” Some of them wanted to tell him he was “some kind of heavy.” A few wanted to tell him he was “too fucking much.”
    Gary showed them all the same thing, which was his Winchester .30-.06. He told them to get off his property. As far as he was concerned they were all a bunch of long-haired muff-diving crab-crawling asshole pinko fucksticks. He told them he didn’t give a shit if he blew their guts from Castle Rock to Fryeburg. After a while they stopped coming, and that was the end of the DSC affair.
    One of those German bullets had taken Gary Pervier’s right testicle off; a medic had found most of it splattered across the seat of his GI-issue underwear. Most of the other one survived, and sometimes he could still get a pretty respectable bone-on. Not, he had frequently told Joe Camber, that he gave much of a shit one way or the other. His grateful country had given him the Distinguished Service Cross. A grateful hospital staff in Paris had discharged him in February 1945 with an 80-percent disability pension and a gold-plated monkey on his back. A grateful hometown gave him aparade on the Fourth of July 1945 (by then he was twenty-one instead of twenty, able to vote, his hair graying around the temples, and he felt all of seven hundred, thank you very much). The grateful town selectmen had remanded the property taxes on the Pervier place in perpetuity. That was good, because he would have lost it twenty years ago otherwise. He had replaced the morphine he could no longer obtain with high-tension booze and had then proceeded to get about his life’s work, which was killing himself as slowly and as pleasantly as he could.
    Now, in 1980, he was fifty-six years old, totally gray, and meaner than a bull with a jackhandle up its ass. About the only three living creatures he could stand were Joe Camber, his boy Brett, and Brett’s big Saint Bernard, Cujo.
    He tilted back in the decaying lawn chair, almost went over on his back, and used up some more of his screwdriver. The screwdriver was in a glass he had gotten free from a McDonald’s restaurant. There was some sort of purple animal on the glass. Something called a Grimace. Gary ate a lot of his meals at the Castle Rock McDonald’s, where you could still get a cheap hamburger. Hamburgers were good. But as for the Grimace . . . and Mayor McCheese . . . and Monsieur Ronald Fucking McDonald . . . Gary Pervier didn’t give a shit for any of them.
    A broad, tawny shape was moving through the high grass to his left, and a moment later Cujo, on one of his rambles, emerged into Gary’s tattered front yard. He saw Gary and barked once, politely. Then he came over, wagging his tail.
    â€œCuje, you old sonofawhore,” Gary said. He put his screwdriver down and began digging methodically through his pockets for dog