Needful Things (14 page)

“Really? I thought . . . Mr. Keeton . . . and the trick . . .”

“No, no, no!” Mr. Gaunt said, half-laughing and half-exasperated.
“Anyone
will play a trick! People love to play tricks! But to place objects with people who love them and need them . . . that is a different kettle of fish altogether. Sometimes, Netitia, I think that what I
really
sell is happiness . . . what do you think?”

“Well,” Nettie said earnestly, “I know you've made
me
happy, Mr. Gaunt. Very happy.”

He exposed his crooked, jostling teeth in a wide smile. “Good! That's good!” Mr. Gaunt pushed the tissue-paper corsage into the box, cradled the lampshade in its ticking whiteness, closed the box, and taped it shut with a flourish. “And here we are! Another satisfied customer has found her needful thing!”

He held the box out to her. Nettie took it. And as her fingers touched his she felt a shiver of revulsion, although she had gripped them with great strength—even ardor—a few moments ago. But that interlude had already begun to seem hazy and unreal. He put the Tupperware cake container on top of the white box. She saw something inside the former.

“What's that?”

“A note for your employer,” Gaunt said.

Alarm rose to Nettie's face at once. “Not about
me?”

“Good heavens, no!” Gaunt said, laughing, and Nettie relaxed at once. When he was laughing, Mr. Gaunt was impossible to resist or distrust. “Take care of your lampshade, Netitia, and do come again.”

“I will,” Nettie said, and this could have been an answer to both admonitions, but she felt in her heart (that secret repository where needs and fears elbowed each other continuously like uncomfortable passengers in a crowded subway car) that, while she might come here again, the lampshade was the only thing she would ever buy in Needful Things.

Yet what of that? It was a
beautiful
thing, the sort of thing she had always wanted, the only thing she needed to complete her modest collection. She considered telling
Mr. Gaunt that her husband might still be alive if he had not smashed a carnival glass lampshade much like this one fourteen years ago, that it had been the last straw, the one which finally drove her over the edge. He had broken many of her bones during their years together, and she had let him live. Finally he had broken something she
really
needed, and she had taken his life.

She decided she did not have to tell Mr. Gaunt this.

He looked like the sort of man who might already know.

“Polly! Polly, she's coming out!”

Polly left the dressmaker's dummy where she had been slowly and carefully pinning up a hem, and hurried to the window. She and Rosalie stood side by side, watching as Nettie left Needful Things in a state which could only be described as heavily laden. Her purse was under one arm, her umbrella was under the other, and in her hands she held Polly's Tupperware cake container balanced atop a square white box.

“Maybe I better go help her,” Rosalie said.

“No.” Polly put out a hand and restrained her gently. “Better not. I think she'd only be embarrassed and fluttery.”

They watched Nettie walk up the street. She no longer scuttled, as if before the jaws of a storm; now she seemed almost to drift.

No,
Polly thought.
No, that isn't right. It's more like . . . floating.

Her mind suddenly made one of those odd connections which were almost like cross-references, and she burst out laughing.

Rosalie looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Share?”

“It's the look on her face,” Polly said, watching Nettie cross Linden Street in slow, dreamy steps.

“What do you mean?”

“She looks like a woman who just got laid . . . and had about three orgasms.”

Rosalie turned pink, looked at Nettie once more, and then screamed with laughter. Polly joined in. The two of them held each other and rocked back and forth, laughing wildly.

“Gee,” Alan Pangborn said from the front of the store. “Ladies laughing well before noon! It's too early for champagne, so what is it?”

“Four!” Rosalie said, giggling madly. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “It looked more like four to me!”

Then they were off again, rocking back and forth in each other's arms, howling with laughter while Alan stood watching them with his hands in the pockets of his uniform pants, smiling quizzically.

Norris Ridgewick arrived at the Sheriff's Office in his street clothes about ten minutes before the noon whistle blew at the mill. He had the mid-shift, from twelve until nine p.m., right through the weekend, and that was just the way he liked it. Let somebody else clean up the messes on the highways and byways of Castle County after the bars closed at one o'clock; he could do it,
had
done it on many occasions, but he almost always puked his guts. He sometimes puked his guts even if the victims were up, walking around, and yelling that they didn't have to take any fucking breathalyzer test, they knew their Constipational rights. Norris just had that kind of a stomach. Sheila Brigham liked to tease him by saying he was like Deputy Andy on that TV show
Twin Peaks,
but Norris knew he wasn't. Deputy Andy cried when he saw dead people. Norris didn't cry, but he was apt to puke on them, the way he had almost puked on Homer Gamache that time when he had found Homer sprawled in a ditch out by Homeland Cemetery, beaten to death with his own artificial arm.

Norris glanced at the roster, saw that both Andy Clutterbuck and John LaPointe were out on patrol, then at the daywatch board. Nothing there for him, which was
also just the way he liked it. To make his day complete—this end of it, at least—his second uniform had come back from the cleaners . . . on the day promised, for once. That would save him a trip home to change.

A note pinned to the plastic dry-cleaning bag read, “Hey Barney—you owe me $5.25. Do not stiff me this time or you will be a sadder & wiser man when the sun goes down.” It was signed
Clut.

Norris's good mood was unbroken even by the note's salutation. Sheila Brigham was the only person in the Castle Rock Sheriff's Office who thought of Norris as a
Twin Peaks
kind of guy (Norris had an idea that she was the only person in the department—besides himself, that was—who even watched the show). The other deputies—John LaPointe, Seat Thomas, Andy Clutterbuck—called him Barney, after the Don Knotts character on the old
Andy Griffith Show.
This sometimes irritated him, but not today. Four days of mid-shift, then three days off. A whole week of silk laid out before him. Life could sometimes be grand.

He pulled a five and a one from his wallet and laid them on Clut's desk. “Hey, Clut, live a little,” he jotted on the back of a report form, signed his name with a flourish, and left it by the money. Then he stripped the dry-cleaning bag off the uniform and took it into the men's room. He whistled as he changed clothes, then waggled his eyebrows approvingly as he stared at his reflection in the mirror. He was Squared Away, by God. One hundred per cent Squared Away. The evildoers of Castle Rock had damned well better be on the lookout today, or—

He caught movement behind him in the mirror, but before he could do more than begin to turn his head he had been grabbed, spun around, and slammed into the tiles beside the urinals. His head bonked the wall, his cap fell off, and then he was looking into the round, flushed face of Danforth Keeton.

“What in the hell do you think you're doing, Ridgewick?” he asked.

Norris had forgotten all about the ticket he had slipped under the windshield wiper of Keeton's Cadillac the night before. Now it all came back to him.

“Let go of me!” he said. He tried for a tone of indignation, but his voice came out in a worried squeak. He
felt his cheeks growing hot. Whenever he was angry or scared—and right now he was both—he blushed like a girl.

Keeton, who overtopped Norris by five inches and outweighed him by a hundred pounds, gave the deputy a harsh little shake and then did let go. He pulled the ticket out of his pocket and brandished it under Norris's nose. “Is this your name on this goddam thing or isn't it?” he demanded, as though Norris had already denied it.

Norris Ridgewick knew perfectly well that it was his signature, rubber-stamped but perfectly recognizable, and that the ticket had been pulled from his citation book.

“You were parked in the crip space,” he said, stepping away from the wall and rubbing the back of his head. Damned if he didn't think there was going to be a knot there. As his initial surprise (and Buster had jumped the living Jesus out of him, he couldn't deny that) abated, his anger grew.

“The
what?”

“The
handicap
space!” Norris shouted.
And furthermore, it was Alan himself who told me to write that ticket!
he was about to continue, and then didn't. Why give this fat pig the satisfaction of passing the buck? “You've been told about it before, Buh . . . Danforth, and you know it.”

“What
did you call me?” Danforth Keeton asked ominously. Red splotches the size of cabbage roses had grown on his cheeks and jowls.

“That's a valid ticket,” Norris said, ignoring this last, “and as far as I'm concerned, you better pay it. Why, you're lucky I don't cite you for assaulting a police officer as well!”

Danforth laughed. The sound banged flatly off the walls. “I don't see any police officer,” he said. “I see a narrow piece of shit packaged to look like beef jerky.”

Norris bent over and picked up his hat. His guts were a roil of fear—Danforth Keeton was a bad enemy for a man to have—and his anger had deepened into fury. His hands trembled. He took a moment, nonetheless, to set his hat squarely on his head.

“You can take this up with Alan, if you want—”

“I'm taking it up with
you!”

“—but I'm done talking about it. Make sure you pay
that within thirty days, Danforth, or we'll have to come and get you.” Norris drew himself up to his full five-foot-six and added: “We know where to find you.”

He started out. Keeton, his face now looking a little like sunset in a nuclear blast area, stepped forward to block his escape route. Norris stopped and levelled a finger at him.

“If you touch me I'll throw you in a cell, Buster. I mean it.”

“Okay, that's it,” Keeton said in a queer, toneless voice.
“That
is it. You're fired. Take off that uniform and start looking for another j—”

“No,” a voice said from behind them, and they both looked around. Alan Pangborn was standing in the men's-room doorway.

Keeton rolled his hands into fat white fists. “You keep out of this.”

Alan walked in, letting the door swoosh slowly shut behind him. “No,” he said. “I was the one who told Norris to write that ticket. I also told him I was going to forgive it before the appropriations meeting. It's a five-dollar ticket, Dan. What the hell got into you?”

Alan's voice was puzzled. He
felt
puzzled. Buster had never been a sweet-natured man, not even at the best of times, but an outburst like this was overboard even for him. Since the end of the summer, the man had seemed ragged and always on edge—Alan had often heard the distant bellow of his voice when the selectmen were in committee meetings—and his eyes had taken on a look which was almost haunted. He wondered briefly if Keeton might be sick, and decided that was a consideration for some later time. Right now he had a moderately ugly situation on his hands.

“Nothing got into me,” Keeton said sulkily, and smoothed back his hair. Norris took some satisfaction in noticing that Keeton's hands were also trembling. “I'm just good and goddam tired of self-important pricks like this man here . . . I try to do a lot for this town . . . hell, I
accomplish
a lot for this town . . . and I'm sick of the constant persecution . . .” He paused a moment, his fat throat working, and then burst out: “He called me Buster! You know how I feel about that!”

“He'll apologize,” Alan said calmly. “Won't you, Norris?”

“I don't know that I will,” Norris said. His voice was trembly and his gut was rolling, but he was still angry. “I know he doesn't like it, but the truth is, he surprised it out of me. I was just standing here, looking in the mirror to make sure my tie was straight, when he grabbed me and threw me against the wall. I smacked my head a pretty good one. Jeez, Alan, I don't know
what
I said.”

Alan's eyes shifted back to Keeton. “Is that true?”

Keeton dropped his own eyes. “I was mad,” he said, and Alan supposed it was as close as a man like him could get to a spontaneous and undirected apology. He glanced back at Norris to see if the deputy understood this. It looked as if maybe Norris did. That was good; it was a long step toward defusing this nasty little stinkbomb. Alan relaxed a little.

“Can we consider this incident closed?” he asked both men. “Just kind of chalk it up to experience and go on from here?”

“All right by me,” Norris said after a moment. Alan was touched. Norris was scrawny, he had a habit of leaving half-full cans of Jolt and Nehi in the cruisers he used, and his reports were horrors . . . but he had yards of heart. He was backing down, but not because he was afraid of Keeton. If the burly Head Selectman thought that was it, he was making a very bad mistake.

“I'm sorry I called you Buster,” Norris said. He wasn't, not a bit, but it didn't hurt to
say
he was. He supposed.

Alan looked at the heavy-set man in the loud sport-coat and open-necked golfer's shirt. “Danforth?”