Needful Things (11 page)

The Castle Rock Public Works pick-up truck he had been driving was still sitting at the rear of the Tiger's dirt parking lot. Hugh Priest was the not-so-proud possessor of several OUI driving violations, and following the last one—which had resulted in a six-month suspension of his privilege to drive—that bastard Keeton, his co-bastards Fullerton and Samuels, and their co-bitch Williams had made it clear that they had reached the end of their patience with him. The next OUI would probably result in the permanent loss of his license, and would certainly result in the loss of his job.

This did not cause Hugh to stop drinking—no power on earth could do that—but it did cause him to form a firm resolution: no more drinking and driving. He was fifty-one years old, and that was a little late in life to be changing jobs, especially with a long drunk-driving rap-sheet following him around like a tin can tied to a dog's tail.

That was why he was walking home tonight, and one fuck of a long walk it was, and there was a certain Public Works employee named Bobby Dugas who was going to have some tall explaining to do tomorrow, unless he wanted to go home with a few less teeth than he had come to work with.

As Hugh passed Nan's Luncheonette, a light drizzle began to mist down. This did not improve his temper.

He had asked Bobby, who had to drive right past Hugh's place on his way home every night, if he was going to drop down to the Tiger that evening for a few brewskis. Bobby Dugas had said, Why shore, Hubert—Bobby always called him Hubert, which was not his fucking
name,
and you could bet
that
shit was going to change, too, and soon.
Why shore, Hubert, I'll prob'ly be down around seven, same as always.

So Hugh, confident of a ride if he got a little too pixillated to drive, had pulled into the Tiger at just about five minutes of four (he'd knocked off a little early, almost an hour and a half early, actually, but what the hell, Deke Bradford hadn't been around), and had waded right in. And come seven o'clock, guess what? No Bobby Dugas! Golly-gosh-wow! Come eight and nine and nine-thirty, guess
further
what? More of the same, by God!

At twenty to ten, Henry Beaufort, bartender and owner of The Mellow Tiger, had invited Hugh to put an egg in his shoe and beat it, to make like a tree and leave, to imitate an amoeba and split—in other words, to get the fuck out. Hugh had been outraged. It was true he had kicked the jukebox, but the goddam Rodney Crowell record had been skipping again.

“What was I supposed to do, just sit here and listen to it?” he demanded of Henry. “You oughtta take that record off, that's all. Guy sounds like he's havin a fuckin pepileptic fit.”

“You haven't had enough, I can see that,” Henry said, “but you've had all you're going to get here. You'll have to get the rest out of your own refrigerator.”

“What if I say no?” Hugh demanded.

“Then I call Sheriff Pangborn,” Henry said evenly.

The other patrons of the Tiger—there weren't many this late on a weeknight—were watching this exchange with interest. Men were careful to be polite around Hugh Priest, especially when he was in his cups, but he was never going to win Castle Rock's Most Popular Fella contest.

“I wouldn't like to,” Henry continued, “but I
will
do it, Hugh. I'm sick and tired of you kicking my Rock-Ola.”

Hugh considered saying,
Then I guess I'll just have to kick
YOU
a few
times instead, you frog son of a bitch.
Then he thought of that fat bastard Keeton, handing him a pink slip for kicking up dickens in the local tavern. Of course, if he really got fired the pink would come in the mail, it always did, pigs like Keeton never dirtied their hands (or risked a fat lip) by doing it in person, but it helped to think of that—it turned the dials down a little. And he
did
have a couple of six-packs at home, one in the fridge and the other in the woodshed.

“Okay,” he said. “I don't need this action, anyway. Gimme my keys.” For he had turned them over to Henry, as a precaution, when he sat down at the bar six hours and eighteen beers ago.

“Nope.” Henry wiped his hands on a piece of towel and stared at Hugh unflinchingly.

“Nope?
What the hell do you mean,
nope?”

“I mean you're too drunk to drive. I know it, and when you wake up tomorrow morning, you're going to know it, too.”

“Listen,” Hugh said patiently. “When I gave you the goddam keys, I thought I had a ride home. Bobby Dugas said he was coming down for a few beers. It's not my fault the numb fuck never showed.”

Henry sighed. “I sympathize with that, but it's not my problem. I could get sued if you wiped someone out. I doubt if that means much to you, but it does to me. I got to cover my ass, buddy. In this world, nobody else does it for you.”

Hugh felt resentment, self-pity, and an odd, inchoate wretchedness well to the surface of his mind like some foul liquid seeping up from a long-buried canister of toxic waste. He looked from his keys, hanging behind the bar next to the plaque which read
IF YOU DON'T LIKE OUR TOWN LOOK FOR A TIME-TABLE
, back to Henry. He was alarmed to find he was on the verge of tears.

Henry glanced past him at the few other customers currently in attendance. “Hey! Any of you yo-yos headed up Castle Hill?”

Men looked down at their tables and said nothing. One or two cracked their knuckles. Charlie Fortin sauntered toward the men's room with elaborate slowness. No one answered.

“See?” Hugh said. “Come on, Henry, gimme my keys.”

Henry had shaken his head with slow finality. “If you want to come in here and do some drinking another time, you want to take a hike.”

“Okay, I will!” Hugh said. His voice was that of a pouty child on the verge of a temper tantrum. He crossed the floor with his head down and his hands balled into tight fists. He waited for someone to laugh. He almost hoped someone would. He would clean some house then, and fuck the job. But the place was silent except for Reba McEntire, who was whining something about Alabama.

“You can pick up your keys tomorrow!” Henry called after him.

Hugh said nothing. With a mighty effort he had restrained himself from putting one scuffed yellow workboot right through Henry Beaufort's damned old Rock-Ola as he went by. Then, with his head down, he had passed out into darkness.

Now the mist had become a proper drizzle, and Hugh guessed the drizzle would develop into a steady, drenching rain by the time he reached home. It was just his luck. He walked steadily onward, not weaving quite so much now (the air had had a sobering effect on him), eyes moving restlessly from side to side. His mind was troubled, and he wished someone would come along and give him some lip. Even a little lip would do tonight. He thought briefly of the kid who had stepped in front of his truck yesterday afternoon, and wished sulkily that he had knocked the brat all the way across the street. It wouldn't have been his fault, no way. In his day, kids had looked where they were going.

He passed the vacant lot where the Emporium Galorium had stood before it burned down, You Sew and Sew, Castle Rock Hardware . . . and then he was passing Needful Things. He glanced into the display window, looked back up Main Street (only a mile and a half to go, now,
and maybe he would beat the rain before it really started to pelt down, after all), and then came to a sudden halt.

His feet had carried him past the new store, and he had to go back. There was a single light on above the window display, casting its soft glow down over the three items arranged there. The light also spilled out onto his face, and it worked a wondrous transformation there. Suddenly Hugh looked like a tired little boy up long past his bedtime, a little boy who has just seen what he wants for Christmas—what he
must
have for Christmas, because all at once nothing else on God's green earth would do. The central object in the window was flanked by two fluted vases (Nettie Cobb's beloved carnival glass, although Hugh didn't know this and would not have cared if he did).

It was a fox-tail.

Suddenly it was 1955 again, he had just gotten his license, and he was driving to the Western Maine Schoolboy Championship game—Castle Rock vs. Greenspark—in his dad's '53 Ford convertible. It was an unseasonably warm November day, warm enough to pull that old ragtop down and tack the tarp over it (if you were a bunch of hot-blooded kids ready, willing, and able to raise some hell, that was), and there were six of them in the car. Peter Doyon had brought a flask of Log Cabin whiskey, Perry Como was on the radio, Hugh Priest was sitting behind the white wheel, and fluttering from the radio antenna had been a long, luxuriant fox-tail, just like the one he was now looking at in the window of this store.

He remembered looking up at that fluttering fox-tail and thinking that, when he owned a convertible of his own, he was going to have one just like that.

He remembered refusing the flask when it came around to him. He was driving, and you didn't drink while you were driving, because you were responsible for the lives of others. And he remembered one other thing, as well: the certainty that he was living the best hour of the best day of his life.

The memory surprised and hurt him in its clarity and total sensory recall—smoky aroma of burning leaves, November sun twinkling on guardrail reflectors, and now, looking at the fox-tail in the display window of Needful
Things, it struck him that it
had
been the best day of his life, one of the last days before the booze had caught him firmly in its rubbery, pliant grip, turning him into a weird variation of King Midas: everything he had touched since then, it seemed, had turned to shit.

He suddenly thought:
I could change.

This idea had its own arresting clarity.

I could start over.

Were such things possible?

Yes, I think sometimes they are. I could buy that fox-tail and tie it on the antenna of my Buick.

They'd laugh, though. The guys'd laugh.

What guys? Henry Beaufort? That little pissant Bobby Dugas? So what? Fuck em. Buy that fox-tail, tie it to the antenna, and drive—

Drive where?

Well, how about that Thursday-night A.A. meeting over in Greenspark for a start?

For a moment the possibility stunned and excited him, the way a long-term prisoner might be stunned and excited by the sight of the key left in the lock of his jail cell by a careless warder. For a moment he could actually see himself doing it, picking up a white chip, then a red chip, then a blue chip, getting sober day by day and month by month. No more Mellow Tiger. Too bad. But also no more paydays spent in terror that he would find a pink slip in his envelope along with his check, and that was not so too bad.

In that moment, as he stood looking at the fox-tail in the display window of Needful Things, Hugh could see a future. For the first time in years he could see a future, and that beautiful orange fox-brush with its white tip floated through it like a battle-flag.

Then reality crashed back in, and reality smelled like rain and damp, dirty clothes. There would be no fox-tail for him, no A.A. meetings, no chips, no future. He was
fifty-one fucking years old,
and fifty-one was too old for dreams of the future. At fifty-one you had to keep running just to escape the avalanche of your own past.

If it had been business hours, though, he would have taken a shot at it, anyway. Damned if he wouldn't. He'd
walk in there, just as big as billy-be-damned, and ask how much was that fox-tail in the window. But it was ten o'clock, Main Street was locked up as tight as an ice-queen's chastity belt, and when he woke up tomorrow morning, feeling as if someone had planted an icepick between his eyes, he would have forgotten all about that lovely fox-tail, with its vibrant russet color.

Still, he lingered a moment longer, trailing dirty, callused fingers over the glass like a kid looking into a toyshop window. A little smile had touched the corners of his mouth. It was a gentle smile, and it looked out of place on Hugh Priest's face. Then, somewhere up on Castle View, a car backed off several times, sounds as sharp as shotgun blasts on the rainy air, and Hugh was startled back to himself.

Fuck it. What the hell are you thinking of?

He turned away from the window and pointed his face toward home again—if you wanted to call the two-room shack with the tacked-on woodshed where he lived home. As he passed under the canopy, he looked at the door . . . and stopped again.

The sign there, of course, read

OPEN
.

Like a man in a dream, Hugh put his hand out and tried the knob. It turned freely under his hand. Overhead, a small silver bell tinkled. The sound seemed to come from an impossible distance away.

A man was standing in the middle of the shop. He was running a feather-duster over the top of a display case and humming. He turned toward Hugh when the bell rang. He didn't seem a bit surprised to see someone standing in his doorway at ten minutes past ten on a Wednesday night. The only thing that struck Hugh about the man in that confused moment was his eyes—they were as black as an Indian's.

“You forgot to turn your sign over, buddy,” Hugh heard himself say.

“No, indeed,” the man replied politely. “I don't sleep very well, I'm afraid, and some nights I take a fancy to open late. One never knows when a fellow such as yourself may stop by . . .
and take a fancy to something. Would you like to come in and look around?”

Hugh Priest came in and closed the door behind him.

“There's a fox-tail—” Hugh began, then had to stop, clear his throat, and start again. The words had come out in a husky, unintelligible mutter. “There's a fox-tail in the window.”