Needful Things (38 page)

Brian took one of these and walked up the lawn until he was less than ten feet from the Jerzycks' big living-room window—what had been called a “picture window” back in the early sixties, when this house had been built. He wound up, hesitated for only a moment, and then let fly like Sandy Koufax facing the lead-off batter in the seventh game of the World Series. There was a huge and unmusical crash, followed by a thud as the rock hit the living-room carpet and rolled across the floor.

The sound had an odd effect on Brian. His fear left him, and his distaste for this further task—which could by no stretch of the imagination be dismissed as something so inconsequential as a prank—also evaporated. The sound of breaking glass excited him . . . made him feel, in fact, the way he felt when he had his daydreams about Miss Ratcliffe. Those had been foolish, and he knew that now, but there was nothing foolish about
this.
This was
real.

Besides, he found that he now wanted the Sandy Koufax card more than ever. He had discovered another large fact about possessions and the peculiar psychological state they induce: the more one has to go through because of something one owns, the more one wants to keep that thing.

Brian took two more rocks and walked over to the broken picture window. He looked inside and saw the rock he had thrown. It was lying in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen. It looked very improbable there—like
seeing a rubber boot on a church altar or a rose lying on the engine block of a tractor. One of the rubber bands holding the note to the rock had snapped, but the other was still okay. Brian's gaze shifted to the left and he found himself regarding the Jerzycks' Sony TV.

Brian wound up and threw. The rock hit the Sony dead-on. There was a hollow bang, a flash of light, and glass showered the carpet. The TV tottered on its stand but did not quite fall over. “Stee-rike
two!”
Brian muttered, then gave voice to a strange, strangled laugh.

He threw the other rock at a bunch of ceramic knick-knacks standing on a table by the sofa, but missed. It hit the wall with a thump and gouged out a chunk of plaster.

Brian laid hold of the Playmate's handle and lugged it around to the side of the house. He broke two bedroom windows. In back, he pegged a loaf-sized rock through the window in the top half of the kitchen door, then threw several more through the hole. One of these shattered the Cuisinart standing on the counter. Another blasted through the glass front of the RadarRange and landed right inside the microwave. “Stee-rike
three!
Siddown, bush!” Brian cried, and then laughed so hard he almost wet his pants.

When the throe had passed, he finished his circuit of the house. The Playmate was lighter now; he found he could carry it with one hand. He used his last three rocks to break the basement windows which showed among Wilma's fall flowers, then ripped up a few handfuls of the blooms for good measure. With that done, he closed the cooler, returned to his bicycle, put the Playmate into the basket, and mounted up for the ride home.

The Mislaburskis lived next door to the Jerzycks. As Brian pedaled out of the Jerzyck driveway, Mrs. Mislaburski opened her front door and came out on the stoop. She was dressed in a bright green wrapper. Her hair was bound up in a red doo-rag. She looked like an advertisement for Christmas in hell.

“What's going on over there, boy?” she asked sharply.

“I don't know, exactly. I think Mr. and Mrs. Jerzyck must be having an argument,” Brian said, not stopping. “I just came over to ask if they needed anyone to shovel
their driveway this winter, but I decided to come back another time.”

Mrs. Mislaburski directed a brief, baleful glance at the Jerzyck house. Because of the hedges, only the second story was visible from where she stood. “If I were you, I wouldn't come back at all,” she said. “That woman reminds me of those little fish they have down in South America. The ones that eat the cows whole.”

“Piranha-fish,” Brian said.

“That's right. Those.”

Brian kept on pedaling. He was now drawing away from the woman in the green wrapper and red doo-rag. His heart was hustling right along, but it wasn't hammering or racing or anything like that. Part of him felt quite sure he was still dreaming. He didn't feel like himself at all—not like the Brian Rusk who got all A's and B's, the Brian Rusk who was a member of the Student Council and the Middle School Good Citizens' League, the Brian Rusk who got nothing but l's in deportment.

“She'll kill somebody one of these days!” Mrs. Mislaburski called indignantly after Brian. “You just mark my words!”

Under his breath Brian whispered: “I wouldn't be a bit surprised.”

He did indeed spend the rest of the day in bed. Under ordinary circumstances, this would have concerned Cora, perhaps enough to take Brian over to the Doc in the Box

in Norway. Today, however, she hardly noticed that her son wasn't feeling well. This was because of the wonderful sunglasses Mr. Gaunt had sold her—she was absolutely entranced with them.

Brian got up around six o'clock, about fifteen minutes before his Pa came in from a day spent fishing on the lake with two friends. He got himself a Pepsi from the fridge and stood by the stove, drinking it. He felt quite a bit better.

He felt as if he might have finally fulfilled his part of the deal he had made with Mr. Gaunt.

He had also decided that Mr. Gaunt did indeed know best.

Nettie Cobb, without the slightest premonition of the unpleasant surprise awaiting her at home, was in high good spirits as she walked down Main Street toward Needful Things. She had a strong intuition that, Sunday morning or not, the shop would be open, and she was not disappointed.

“Mrs. Cobb!” Leland Gaunt said as she came in. “How very nice to see you!”

“It's nice to see you, too, Mr. Gaunt,” she said . . . and it was.

Mr. Gaunt came over, his hand out, but Nettie shrank from his touch. It was dreadful behavior, so impolite, but she simply couldn't help herself. And Mr. Gaunt seemed to understand, God bless him. He smiled and changed course, closing the door behind her instead. He flipped the sign from
OPEN
to
CLOSED
with the speed of a professional gambler palming an ace.

“Sit down, Mrs. Cobb! Please! Sit down!”

“Well, all right . . . but I just came to tell you that Polly . . . Polly is . . .” She felt strange, somehow. Not bad, exactly, but strange. Swimmy in the head. She sat down rather gracelessly in one of the plush chairs. Then Mr. Gaunt was standing before her, his eyes fixed on hers, and the world seemed to center upon him and grow still again.

“Polly isn't feeling so well, is she?” Mr. Gaunt asked.

“That's it,” Nettie agreed gratefully. “It's her hands, you know. She has . . .”

“Arthritis, yes, terrible, such a shame, shit happens, life's a bitch and then you die, tough titty said the kitty. I know, Nettie.” Mr. Gaunt's eyes were growing again. “But there's no need for me to call her . . . or call
on
her, for that matter. Her hands are feeling better now.”

“Are they?” Nettie asked distantly.

“You betcha! They still hurt, of course, which is good, but they don't hurt badly enough to keep her away, and that's better still—don't you agree, Nettie?”

“Yes,” Nettie said faintly, but she had no idea of what she was agreeing to.

“You,” Mr. Gaunt said in his softest, most cheerful voice, “have got a big day ahead of you, Nettie.”

“I do?” It was news to her; she had been planning to spend the afternoon in her favorite living-room chair, knitting and watching TV with Raider at her feet.

“Yes. A
very
big. day. So I want you to just sit there and rest for a moment while I go get something. Will you do that?”

“Yes . . .”

“Good. And close your eyes, why don't you? Have a really
good
rest, Nettie!”

Nettie obediently closed her eyes. An unknown length of time later, Mr. Gaunt told her to open them again. She did, and felt a pang of disappointment. When people told you to close your eyes, sometimes they wanted to give you something nice. A present. She had hoped that when she opened her eyes again, Mr. Gaunt might be holding another carnival glass lampshade, but all he had was a pad of paper. The sheets were small and pink. Each one was headed with the words

TRAFFIC VIOLATION WARNING.

“Oh,” she said. “I thought it might be carnival glass.”

“I don't think you'll be needing any more carnival glass, Nettie.”

“No?” The pang of disappointment returned. It was stronger this time.

“No. Sad, but true. Still, I imagine you remember promising you'd do something for me.” Mr. Gaunt sat down next to her. “You
do
remember that, don't you?”

“Yes,” she said. “You want me to play a trick on Buster. You want me to put some papers in his house.”

“That's right, Nettie—very good. Do you still have the key I gave you?”

Slowly, like a woman in an underwater ballet, Nettie brought the key from the right-hand pocket of her coat. She held it up so Mr. Gaunt could see it.

“That's very good!” he told her warmly. “Now put it back, Nettie. Put it back where it's safe.”

She did.

“Now. Here are the papers.” He put the pink pad in one of her hands. Into the other he placed a Scotch-tape dispenser.
Alarm bells were going off somewhere inside her now, but they were far away, hardly audible.

“I hope this won't take long. I ought to go home soon. I have to feed Raider. He's my little dog.”

“I know all about Raider,” said Mr. Gaunt, and offered Nettie a wide smile. “But I have a feeling that he doesn't have much appetite today. I don't think you need to worry about him pooping on the kitchen floor, either.”

“But—”

He touched her lips with one of his long fingers, and she felt suddenly sick to her stomach.

“Don't,” she whined, pressing back into her chair. “Don't, it's awful.”

“So they tell me,” Mr. Gaunt agreed. “So if you don't want me to be awful to you, Nettie, you mustn't ever say that awful little word to me.”

“What word?”

“But.
I disapprove of that word. In fact, I think it's fair to say I
hate
that word. In the best of all possible worlds, there would be no need for such a puling little word. I want you to say something else for me, Nettie—I want you to say some words that I love. Words that I absolutely
adore.”

“What words?”

“Mr. Gaunt knows best. Say that.”

“Mr. Gaunt knows best,” she repeated, and as soon as the words were out of her mouth she understood how absolutely and completely true they were.

“Mr. Gaunt
always
knows best.”

“Mr. Gaunt
always
knows best.”

“Right! Just like Father,” Mr. Gaunt said, and then laughed hideously. It was a sound like plates of rock moving deep in the earth, and the color of his eyes shifted rapidly from blue to green to brown to black when he did it. “Now, Nettie—listen carefully. You have this one little errand to do for me and then you can go home. Do you understand?”

Nettie understood.

And she listened very carefully.

South Paris is a small and squalid milltown eighteen miles northeast of Castle Rock. It is not the only jerkwater Maine town named after a European city or country; there is a Madrid (the natives pronounce it
Mad
-drid), a Sweden, an Etna, a Calais (pronounced so it rhymes with Dallas), a Cambridge, and a Frankfort. Someone may know how or why so many wide places in the road ended up with such an exotic variety of names, but I do not.

What I do know is that about twenty years ago a very good French chef decided to move out of New York and open his own restaurant in Maine's Lakes Region, and that he
further
decided there could be no better place for such a venture than a town named South Paris. Not even the stench of the tanning mills could dissuade him. The result was an eating establishment called Maurice. It is still there to this day, on Route 117 by the railroad tracks and just across the road from McDonald's. And it was to Maurice that Danforth “Buster” Keeton took his wife for lunch on Sunday, October 13th.

Myrtle spent a good deal of that Sunday in an ecstatic daze, and the fine food at Maurice was not the reason. For the last few months—almost a year, really—life with Danforth had been extremely unpleasant. He ignored her almost completely . . . except when he yelled at her. Her self-esteem, which had never been very high, plummeted to new depths. She knew as well as any woman ever has that abuse does not have to be administered with the fists
to be effective. Men as well as women can wound with their tongues, and Danforth Keeton knew how to use his very well; he had inflicted a thousand invisible cuts on her with its sharp sides over the last year.

She did not know about the gambling—she really believed he went to the track mostly to watch. She didn't know about the embezzlement, either. She did know that several members of Danforth's family had been unstable, but she did not connect this behavior with Danforth himself. He didn't drink to excess, didn't forget to put on his clothes before going out in the morning, didn't talk to people who weren't there, and so she assumed he was all right. She assumed, in other words, that something was wrong with her. That at some point this something had simply caused Danforth to stop loving her.

She had spent the last six months or so trying to face the bleak prospect of the thirty or even forty loveless years which lay ahead of her as this man's mate, this man who had become by turns angry, coldly sarcastic, and unmindful of her. She had become just another piece of furniture as far as Danforth was concerned . . . unless, of course, she got in his way. If she did that—if his supper wasn't ready for him when he was ready for it, if the floor in his study looked dirty to him, even if the sections of the newspaper were in the wrong order when he came to the breakfast table—he called her dumb. He told her that if her ass fell off, she wouldn't know where to find it. He said that if brains were black powder, she wouldn't be able to blow her nose without a blasting cap. At first she had tried to defend herself from these tirades, but he cut her defenses apart as if they were the walls of a child's cardboard castle. If she grew angry in turn, he overtopped her into white rages that terrified her. So she had given anger up and had descended into dooms of bewilderment instead. These days she only smiled helplessly in the face of his anger, promised to do better, and went to their room, where she lay on the bed and wept and wondered whatever was to become of her and wished-wished-
wished
that she had a friend she could talk to.