Needful Things (17 page)

It wasn't
right.
Cora had all sorts of nice Elvis things, had even seen Elvis in concert once. That had been at the Portland Civic Center, a year or so before The King was called to heaven to be with his beloved mother.

“That picture should be
mine,”
she muttered, and, summoning all her courage, she knocked on the door.

It was opened almost before she could lower her hand, and a narrow-shouldered man almost bowled her over on his way out.

“Excuse me,” he muttered, not raising his head, and she barely had time to register the fact that it was Mr. Constantine, the pharmacist at LaVerdiere's Super Drug. He hurried across the street and then onto the Town Common, holding a small wrapped package in his hands, looking neither to the right nor to the left.

When she looked back, Mr. Gaunt was in the doorway, smiling at her with his cheery brown eyes.

“I don't have an appointment . . .” she said in a small voice. Brian Rusk, who had grown used to hearing Myra pronouncing on things in a tone of total authority and assurance, would not have recognized that voice in a million years.

“You do now, dear lady,” Mr. Gaunt said, smiling and standing aside. “Welcome back! Enter freely, and leave some of the happiness you bring!”

After one final quick look around that showed her no one she knew, Myra Evans scurried into Needful Things.

The door swung shut behind her.

A long-fingered hand, as white as the hand of a corpse,
reached up in the gloom, found the ring-pull which hung down, and drew the shade.

Brian didn't realize he had been holding his breath until he let it out in a long, whistling sigh.

There was no one in the Jerzyck back yard.

Wilma, undoubtedly encouraged by the improving weather, had hung out her wash before leaving for work or wherever she had gone. It flapped on three lines in the sunshine and freshening breeze. Brian went to the back door and peered in, shading the sides of his face with his hands to cut the glare. He was looking into a deserted kitchen. He thought of knocking and decided it was just another way to keep from doing what he had come to do. No one was here. The best thing was to complete his business and then get the hell out.

He walked slowly down the steps and into the Jerzyck back yard. The clotheslines, with their freight of shirts, pants, underwear, sheets, and pillow-cases, were to the left. To the right was a small garden from which all the vegetables, with the exception of a few puny pumpkins, had been harvested. At the far end was a fence of pine boards. On the other side, Brian knew, was the Haverhills' place, only four houses down from his own.

The heavy rain of the night before had turned the garden into a swamp; most of the remaining pumpkins sat half-submerged in puddles. Brian bent, picked up a handful of dark-brown garden muck in each hand, and then advanced on the clothesline with dribbles of brown water running between his fingers.

The clothesline closest to the garden was hung with sheets along its entire length. They were still damp, but drying quickly in the breeze. They made lazy flapping sounds. They were pure, pristine white.

Go on,
Mr. Gaunt's voice whispered in his mind.
Go for it, Brian—just like Sandy Koufax. Go for it!

Brian drew his hands back over his shoulders, palms up to the sky. He was not entirely surprised to find he had
a hard-on again, as in his dream. He was glad he hadn't chickened out. This was going to be
fun.

He brought his hands forward, hard. The mud slung off his palms in long brown swoops that spread into fans before striking the billowing sheets. It splattered across them in runny, ropy parabolas.

He went back to the garden, got two more handfuls, threw them at the sheets, went back, got more, and threw that, too. A kind of frenzy descended on him. He trundled busily back and forth, first getting the mud, then throwing it.

He might have gone on all afternoon if someone hadn't yelled. At first he thought it was
him
the someone was yelling at. He hunched his shoulders and a terrified little squeal escaped him. Then he realized it was just Mrs. Haverhill, calling her dog from the other side of the fence.

Just the same, he had to get out of here. And quick.

He paused for a moment, though, looking at what he had done, and he felt a momentary quiver of shame and unease.

The sheets had protected most of the clothes, but the sheets themselves were plastered with muck. There were only a few isolated white patches left to show what color they had originally been.

Brian looked at his hands, which were caked with mud. Then he hurried over to the corner of the house, where there was a faucet bib. It hadn't been turned off yet; when he turned the handle, a cold stream of water poured from the spigot. He thrust his hands into it and rubbed them together hard. He washed until all the mud was gone, including the goo under his fingernails, unmindful of the spreading numbness. He even held his shirt-cuffs under the spigot.

He turned off the faucet, went back to his bike, put up the kickstand, and walked it back down the driveway. He had a very bad moment when he saw a small yellow compact car coming, but it was a Civic, not a Yugo. It went past without slowing, its driver unmindful of the little boy with the red, chapped hands frozen beside his bike in the Jerzyck driveway, the little boy whose face was nearly
a billboard with one word—
GUILTY!
—screaming across it.

When the car was gone, Brian mounted his bike and began to pedal, hellbent for leather. He didn't stop until he was coasting up his own driveway. The numbness was leaving his hands by then, but they itched and smarted . . . and they were still red.

When he went in, his mother called, “That you, Brian?” from the living room.

“Yes, Ma.” What he had done in the Jerzyck back yard already seemed like something he might have dreamed. Surely the boy standing here in this sunny, sane kitchen, the boy who was now going to the refrigerator and taking out the milk, could not be the same boy who had plunged his hands up to the wrists in the mud of Wilma Jerzyck's garden and then flung that mud at Wilma Jerzyck's clean sheets again and again and again.

Surely not.

He poured himself a glass of milk, studying his hands as he did. They were clean. Red, but clean. He put the milk back. His heart had returned to its normal rhythm.

“Did you have a good day at school, Brian?” Cora's voice floated out.

“It was okay.”

“Want to come in and watch TV with me?
Santa Barbara
will be on pretty soon, and there's Hershey's Kisses.”

“Sure,” he said, “but I'm going upstairs for a few minutes first.”

“Don't you leave a milk-glass up there! It goes all sour and stinks and it
never
comes off in the dishwasher!”

“I'll bring it down, Ma.”

“You better!”

Brian went upstairs and spent half an hour sitting at his desk, dreaming over his Sandy Koufax card. When Sean came in to ask if he wanted to go down to the corner store with him, Brian shut his baseball-card book with a snap and told Sean to get out of his room and not to come back until he learned how to knock on a door when it was shut. He heard Sean standing out in the hallway, crying, and felt no sympathy at all.

There
was,
after all, such a thing as manners.

Warden threw a party in the county jail,

Prison band was there and they began to wail,

The band was jumpin and the joint began to swing,

Y'oughtta heard those knocked-out jailbirds sing!

The King stands with his legs apart, his blue eyes blazing, the bell bottoms of his white jumpsuit shaking. Rhinestones glitter and flash in the overhead spotlights. A sheaf of blue-black hair falls across his forehead. The mike is near his mouth, but not so near Myra cannot see the pouty curl of his upper lip.

She can see everything. She is in the first row.

And suddenly, as the rhythm section blasts off, he is holding a hand out, holding it out to
HER
, the way Bruce Springsteen (who will never be The King in a million years, no matter how hard he tries) holds his hand out to that girl in his “Dancing in the Dark” video.

For a moment she's too stunned to do anything, too stunned to move, and then hands from behind push her forward, and
HIS
hand has closed over her wrist,
HIS
hand is pulling her up on stage. She can
SMELL
him, a mixture of sweat, English Leather, and hot, clean flesh.

A bare moment later, Myra Evans is in Elvis Presley's arms.

The satin of his jumpsuit is slick under her hands. The arms around her are muscular. That face,
HIS
face, the face of The King, is inches from hers. He is dancing with her—they are a couple, Myra Josephine Evans from Castle Rock, Maine, and Elvis Aron Presley, from Memphis, Tennessee! They dirty-dance their way across a wide stage in front of four thousand screaming fans as the Jordanaires chant that funky old fifties refrain: “Let's rock . . . everybody let's rock . . .”

His hips move in against hers; she can feel the coiled tension at the center of him nudging against her belly. Then he twirls her, her skirt flares out flat, showing her legs all the way to the lace of her Victoria's Secret panties, her hand spins inside his like an axle inside a hub, and then he is drawing her to him again, and his hand slides down the
small of her back to the swell of her buttocks, cupping her tightly to him. For a moment she looks down and there, beyond and below the glare of the footlights, she sees Cora Rusk staring up. Cora's face is baleful with hate and witchy with envy.

Then Elvis turns her head toward him and speaks in that syrupy mid-South drawl: “Ain't we supposed to be lookin at each othah, honeh?”

Before she can reply, his full lips are on hers; the smell of him and the feel of him fill the world. Then, suddenly, his tongue is in her mouth—the King of Rock and Roll is french-kissing her in front of Cora and the whole damned world! He draws her tight against him again and as the horns kick in with a syncopated shriek, she feels ecstatic heat begin to uncoil in her loins. Oh, it has never been like this, not even down at Castle Lake with Ace Merrill all those years ago. She wants to scream, but his tongue is buried in her mouth and she can only claw into his smooth satin back, pumping her hips as the horns thunder into “My Way.”

Mr. Gaunt sat in one of the plush chairs, watching Myra Evans with clinical detachment as her orgasm ripped through her. She was shaking like a woman experiencing a total neural breakdown, the picture of Elvis clutched tightly in her hands, eyes closed, bosom heaving, legs tightening, loosening, tightening, loosening. Her hair had lost its beauty-shop curl and lay against her head in a not-too-charming helmet. Her double chins ran with sweat much as Elvis's own had done as he gyrated ponderously across the stage during his last few concerts.

“Ooohh!” Myra cried, shaking like a bowl of jelly on a plate. “Ooooh! Oooooooh my
God!
Ooooooooooooh my
Gahhhhhhhhd!
OOOOHHHHH—”

Mr. Gaunt idly tweezed the crease of his dark slacks between his thumb and forefinger, shook it out to its former razor sharpness, then leaned forward and snatched the picture from Myra's hands. Her eyes, full of dismay,
flew open at once. She grabbed for the picture, but it was already out of her reach. She started to get up.

“Sit down,” Mr. Gaunt said.

Myra remained where she was, as if she had been turned to stone during the act of rising.

“If you ever want to see this picture again, Myra,
sit . . . down.”

She sat, staring at him in dumb agony. Large patches of sweat were creeping out from under her arms and along the sides of her breasts.

“Please,” she said. The word came out in a croak so dusty that it was like a puff of wind in the desert. She held her hands out.

“Name me a price,” Gaunt invited.

She thought. Her eyes rolled in her sweaty face. Her Adam's apple went up and down.

“Forty dollars!” she cried.

He laughed and shook his head.

“Fifty!”

“Ridiculous. You must not want this picture very badly, Myra.”

“I do!” Tears began to seep from the corners of her eyes. They ran down her cheeks, mixing with the sweat there. “I
doooooo!”

“All right,” he said. “You want it. I accept the fact that you want it. But do you need it, Myra? Do you really
need
it?”

“Sixty! That's all I've got! That's every red cent!”

“Myra, do I look like a child to you?”

“No—”

“I think I must. I'm an old man—older than you would believe, I've aged very well, if I do say so myself—but I really think I must look like a child to you, a child who will believe a woman who lives in a brand-new duplex less than three blocks from Castle View has only sixty dollars to her name.”

“You don't understand! My husband—”

Mr. Gaunt rose, still holding the picture. The smiling man who had stood aside to grant her admittance was no longer in this room. “You didn't have an appointment, Myra, did you? No. I saw you out of the goodness of my heart. But now I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to leave.”

“Seventy! Seventy dollars!”

“You insult my intelligence. Please go.”

Myra fell on her knees before, him. She was weeping in hoarse, panicky sobs. She clutched his calves as she grovelled before him. “Please! Please, Mr. Gaunt! I have to have that picture! I have to! It does . . . you wouldn't
believe
what it does!”