Needful Things (30 page)

He had been Third Selectman then. Steve Frazier, now at least five years in his grave, had been Castle Rock's Head Selectman. Keeton and Frazier had gone “up the city” (trips to Lewiston were always referred to in this way) along with Butch Nedeau, The Rock's overseer of County Social Services, and Harry Samuels, who had been a Selectman for most of his adult life and would probably die as one. The occasion had been a statewide conference of county officials; the subject had been the new revenue-sharing laws . . . and it was revenue-sharing, of course, that had caused most of his trouble. Without it, Keeton would have been forced to dig his grave with a pick and shovel. With it, he had been able to use a financial bucket-loader.

It was a two-day conference. On the evening between, Steve had suggested they go out and have a little fun in the big city. Butch and Harry had declined. Keeton had no interest in spending the evening with Steve Frazier, either—he was a fat old blowhard with lard for brains. He had gone, though. He supposed he would have gone if Steve had suggested they spend the evening touring the deepest shitpits of hell. Steve was, after all, the Head Selectman. Harry Samuels would be content to drone along as Second, Third, or Fourth Selectman for the rest of
his life, Butch Nedeau had already indicated that he meant to step down after his current term . . . but Danforth Keeton had ambitions, and Frazier, fat old blowhard or not, was the key to them.

So they had gone out, stopping first at The Holly,
BE JOLLY AT THE HOLLY
! read the motto over the door, and Frazier had gotten very jolly indeed, drinking Scotch-and-waters as if the Scotch had been left out of them, and whistling at the strippers, who were mostly fat and mostly old and always slow. Keeton thought most of them looked stoned. He remembered thinking it was going to be a long evening.

Then they had gone to the Lewiston Raceway and everything changed.

They got there in time for the fifth pace, and Frazier had hustled a protesting Keeton over to the betting windows like a sheepdog nipping a wayward lamb back to the herd.

“Steve, I don't know anything about this—”

“That
doesn't matter,” Frazier replied happily, breathing Scotch fumes into Keeton's face. “We're gonna be lucky tonight, Buster. I can feel it.”

He hadn't any idea of how to bet, and Frazier's constant chatter made it hard to listen to what the other bettors in line were saying when they got to the two-dollar window.

When he got there, he pushed a five-dollar bill across to the teller and said, “Number four.”

“Win, place, or show?” the teller asked, but for a moment Keeton had not been able to reply. Behind the teller he saw an amazing thing. Three clerks were counting and banding huge piles of currency, more cash than Keeton had ever seen in one place.

“Win, place, or show?” the teller repeated impatiently. “Hurry up, buddy. This is not the Public Library.”

“Win,” Keeton had said. He hadn't the slightest idea what “place” and “show” meant, but “win” he understood very well.

The teller thrust him a ticket and three dollars' change—a one and a two. Keeton looked at the two with curious interest as Frazier placed his bet. He had known there
were
such things as two-dollar bills, of course, but he didn't think he'd ever
seen
one before. Thomas Jefferson
was on it. Interesting. In fact, the whole thing was interesting—the smells of horses, popcorn, peanuts; the hurrying crowds; the atmosphere of urgency. The place was
awake
in a way he recognized and responded to at once. He had felt this sort of wakefulness in himself before, yes, many times, but it was the first time he had ever sensed it in the wider world. Danforth “Buster” Keeton, who rarely felt a part of anything, not really, felt he was a part of this. Very much a part.

“This beats hell out of The Holly,” he said as Frazier rejoined him.

“Yeah, harness racing's okay,” Frazier said. “It won't ever replace the World Series, but you know. Come on, let's get over to the rail. Which horse did you bet on?”

Keeton didn't remember. He'd had to check his ticket. “Number four,” he said.

“Place or show?”

“Uh . . . win.”

Frazier shook his head in good-natured contempt and clapped him on the shoulder. “Win's a sucker bet, Buster, It's a sucker bet even when the tote-board says it isn't. But you'll learn.”

And, of course, he had.

Somewhere a bell went off with a loud
Brrrrrrannggg!
that made Keeton jump. A voice bellowed,
“And theyyy'rrre
OFF!”
through the Raceway's speakers. A thunderous roar went up from the crowd, and Keeton had felt a sudden spurt of electricity course through his body. Hooves tattooed the dirt track. Frazier grabbed Keeton's elbow with one hand and used the other to make a path through the crowd to the rail. They came out less than twenty yards from the finish line.

Now the announcer was calling the race. Number seven, My Lass, leading at the first turn, with number eight, Broken Field, second, and number one, How Do?, third. Number four was named Absolutely—the dumbest name for a horse Keeton had ever heard in his life—and it was running sixth. He hardly cared. He was transfixed by the pelting horses, their coats gleaming under the floodlights, by the blur of wheels as the sulkies swept around the turn, the bright colors of the silks worn by the drivers.

As the horses entered the backstretch, Broken Field
began to press My Lass for the lead. My Lass broke stride and Broken Field flew by her. At the same time, Absolutely began to move up on the outside—Keeton saw it before the disembodied voice of the announcer sent the news blaring across the track, and he barely felt Frazier elbowing him, barely heard him screaming, “That's your horse, Buster! That's your horse
and she's got a chance!”

As the horses thundered down the final straightaway toward the place where Keeton and Frazier were standing, the entire crowd began to bellow. Keeton had felt the electricity whip through him again, not a spark this time but a storm. He began to bellow with them; the next day he would be so hoarse he could barely speak above a whisper.

“Absolutely!”
he screamed.
“Come on Absolutely, come on you bitch and
RUN
!”

“Trot,” Frazier said, laughing so hard tears ran down his cheeks. “Come on you bitch and
trot.
That's what you mean, Buster.”

Keeton paid no attention. He was in another world. He was sending brain-waves out to Absolutely, sending her telepathic strength through the air.

“Now it's Broken Field and How Do?, How Do? and Broken Field,” the godlike voice of the announcer chanted, “and Absolutely is gaining fast as they come to the last eighth of a mile—”

The horses approached, raising a cloud of dust. Absolutely trotted with her neck arched and her head thrust forward, legs rising and falling like pistons; she passed How Do? and Broken Field, who was flagging badly, right where Keeton and Frazier were standing. She was still widening her lead when she crossed the finish line.

When the numbers went up on the tote-board, Keeton had to ask Frazier what they meant. Frazier had looked at his ticket, then at the board. He whistled soundlessly.

“Did I make my money back?” Keeton asked anxiously.

“Buster, you did a little better than that. Absolutely was a thirty-to-one shot.”

Before he left the track that night, Keeton had made just over three hundred dollars. That was how his obsession was born.

He took his overcoat from the tree in the corner of his office, drew it on, started to leave, then stopped, holding the doorknob in his hand. He looked back across the room. There was a mirror on the wall opposite the window. Keeton looked at it for a long, speculative moment, then walked across to it. He had heard about how They used mirrors—he hadn't been born yesterday.

He put his face against it, ignoring the reflection of his pallid skin and bloodshot eyes. He cupped a hand to either cheek, cutting off the glare, narrowing his eyes, looking for a camera on the other side. Looking for Them.

He saw nothing.

After a long moment he stepped away, swabbed indifferently at the smeared glass with the sleeve of his overcoat, and left the office. Nothing
yet,
anyway. That didn't mean They wouldn't come in tonight, pull out his mirror, and replace it with one-way glass. Spying was just another tool of the trade for the Persecutors. He would have to check the mirror every day now.

“But I can,” he said to the empty upstairs hallway. “I can do that. Believe me.”

Eddie Warburton was mopping the lobby floor and didn't look up as Keeton stepped out onto the street.

His car was parked around back, but he didn't feel like driving. He felt too confused to drive; he would probably put the Caddy through someone's store window if he tried. Nor was he aware, in the depths of his confused mind, that he was walking away from his house rather than toward it. It was seven-fifteen on Saturday morning, and he was the only person out in Castle Rock's small business district.

His mind went briefly back to that first night at Lewiston Raceway. He couldn't do anything wrong, it seemed. Steve Frazier had lost thirty dollars and said he was leaving after the ninth race. Keeton said he thought he would stay awhile longer. He barely looked at Frazier, and barely noticed when Frazier was gone. He did remember thinking it was nice not to have someone at his elbow saying Buster
This and Buster That all the time. He hated the nickname, and of course Steve knew it—that was why he used it.

The next week he had come back again, alone this time, and had lost sixty dollars' worth of previous winnings. He hardly cared. Although he thought often of those huge stacks of banded currency, it wasn't the money, not really; the money was just the symbol you took away with you, something that said you had been there, that you had been, however briefly, part of the big show. What he really cared about was the tremendous, walloping excitement that went through the crowd when the starter's bell rang, the gates opened with their heavy, crunching thud, and the announcer yelled,
“Theyyy'rrre
OFF!”
What he cared about was the roar of the crowd as the pack rounded the third turn and went hell-for-election down the backstretch, the hysterical camp-meeting exhortations from the stands as they rounded the fourth turn and poured on the coal down the homestretch. It was alive, oh, it was so alive. It was so alive that—

—that it was dangerous.

Keeton decided he'd better stay away. He had the course of his life neatly planned. He intended to become Castle Rock's Head Selectman when Steve Frazier finally pulled the pin, and after six or seven years of that, he intended to stand for the State House of Representatives. After that, who knew? National office was not out of reach for a man who was ambitious, capable . . . and sane.

That was the
real
trouble with the track. He hadn't recognized it at first, but he had recognized it soon enough. The track was a place where people paid their money, took a ticket . . . and gave up their sanity for a little while. Keeton had seen too much insanity in his own family to feel comfortable with the attraction Lewiston Raceway held for him. It was a pit with greasy sides, a snare with hidden teeth, a loaded gun with the safety removed. When he went, he was unable to leave until the last race of the evening had been run. He knew. He had tried. Once he had made it almost all the way to the exit turnstiles before something in the back of his brain, something powerful, enigmatic, and reptilian, had arisen, taken control, and turned his feet around. Keeton was terrified of fully waking that reptile. Better to let it sleep.

For three years he had done just that. Then, in 1984, Steve Frazier had retired, and Keeton had been elected Head Selectman. That was when his real troubles began.

He had gone to the track to celebrate his victory, and since he was celebrating, he decided to go whole hog. He bypassed the two- and five-dollar windows, and went straight to the ten-dollar window. He had lost a hundred and sixty dollars that night, more than he felt comfortable losing (he told his wife the next day that it had been forty), but not more than he could
afford
to lose. Absolutely not.

He returned a week later, meaning to win back what he had lost so he could quit evens. And he had almost made it.
Almost
—that was the key word. The way he had almost made it to the exit turnstiles. The week after, he had lost two hundred and ten dollars. That left a hole in the checking account Myrtle would notice, and so he had borrowed a little bit from the town's petty-cash fund to cover the worst of the shortfall. A hundred dollars. Peanuts, really.

Past that point, it all began to blur together. The pit had greased sides, all right, and once you started sliding you were doomed. You could expend your energy clawing at the sides and succeed in slowing your fall . . . but that, of course, only drew out the agony.

If there had been a point of no return, it had been the summer of 1989. The pacers ran nightly during the summer, and Keeton was in attendance constantly through the second half of July and all of August. Myrtle had thought for a while that he was using the racetrack as an excuse, that he was actually seeing another woman, and that was a laugh—it really was. Keeton couldn't have got a hard-on if Diana herself had driven down from the moon in her chariot with her toga open and a
FUCK ME DANFORTH
sign hung around her neck. The thought of how deep he'd dipped into the town treasury had caused his poor dick to shrivel to the size of a pencil eraser.

When Myrtle finally became convinced of the truth, that it was only horse racing after all, she had been relieved. It kept him out of the house, where he tended to be something of a tyrant, and he couldn't be losing too badly, she had reasoned, because the checkbook balance didn't
fluctuate that much. It was just that Danforth had found a hobby to keep him amused in his middle age.