Needful Things (55 page)

Suddenly a new thought, a really horrible thought, cut across the darkness inside his head with the affrighted, speeding brilliance of a comet:
He had been seen!

He sat bolt upright on his bed. staring at himself in the mirror on his closet door with horror. Bright green wrapper! Bright red kerchief over a bunch of hair-rollers! Mrs. Mislaburski!

What's going on over there, boy?

I don't know, exactly. I think Mr. and Mrs. Jerzyck must be having an argument.

Brian got off his bed and went over to the window,
half-expecting to see Sheriff Pangborn turning into the driveway in his police cruiser right this minute. He wasn't, but he would be coming soon. Because when two women killed each other in a murderous spat, there was an investigation. Mrs. Mislaburski would be questioned. And she would say that she had seen a boy at the Jerzycks' house. That boy, she would tell the Sheriff, had been Brian Rusk.

Downstairs, the telephone began to ring. His mother didn't pick it up, even though there was an extension in the bedroom. She just went on singing along with the music. At last he heard Sean answer. “Who is it please?”

Brian thought calmly:
He'll get it out of me. I can't lie, not to a policeman. I couldn't even lie to Mrs. Leroux about who broke the vase on her desk when she had to go down to the office that time. He'll get it out of me and I'll go to jail for murder.

That was when Brian Rusk first began to think of suicide. These thoughts were not lurid, not romantic; they were very calm, very rational. His father kept a shotgun in the garage, and at that moment the shotgun seemed to make perfect sense. The shotgun seemed to be the answer to everything.

“Bri-unnn! Telephone!”

“I don't want to talk to Stan!” he yelled. “Tell him to call back tomorrow!”

“It's not Stan,” Sean called back. “It's a guy. A grown-up.”

Large icy hands seized Brian's heart and squeezed it. This was it—Sheriff Pangborn was on the phone.

Brian? I have some questions to ask you. They're very serious questions. I'm afraid if you don't come right down to answer them, I'll have to come and get you. I'll have to come in my police car. Pretty soon your name is going to be in the paper, Brian, and your picture is going to be on TV, and all your friends will see it. Your mother and father will see it, too, and your little brother. And when they show the picture, the man on the news will say, “This is Brian Rusk, the boy who helped murder Wilma Jerzyck and Nettie Cobb.”

“Huh-huh-who is it?” he called downstairs in a shrieky little voice.

“I dunno!” Sean had been torn away from
The Transformers
and sounded irritated. “I think he said his name was Crowfix. Something like that.”

Crowfix?

Brian stood in the doorway, his heart thumping in his chest. Two big clown-spots of color now burned in his pallid face.

Not Crowfix.

Koufax.

Sandy Koufax had called him on the phone. Except Brian had a pretty good idea of who it
really
was.

He went down the stairs on leaden feet. The telephone handset seemed to weigh at least five hundred pounds.

“Hello, Brian,” Mr. Gaunt said softly.

“Huh-Huh-Hello,” Brian replied in the same shrieky little voice.

“You don't have a thing to worry about,” Mr. Gaunt said. “If Mrs. Mislaburski had
seen
you throw those rocks, she wouldn't have asked you what was going on over there, now would she?”

“How do you know about that?” Brian again felt like throwing up.

“That doesn't matter. What matters is that you did the right thing, Brian. Exactly the right thing. You said you thought Mr. and Mrs. Jerzyck were having an argument. If the police
do
find you, they'll just think you heard the person who was throwing the rocks. They'll think you didn't see him because he was behind the house.”

Brian looked through the archway into the TV room to make sure Sean wasn't snooping. He wasn't; he was sitting cross-legged in front of the TV with a bag of microwave popcorn in his lap.

“I can't lie!” he whispered into the telephone. “I always get caught out when I lie!”

“Not this time, Brian,” Mr. Gaunt said. “This time you're going to do it like a champ.”

And the most horrible thing of all was that Brian thought Mr. Gaunt knew best about this, too.

While her older son was thinking of suicide and then dickering in a desperate, quiet whisper with Mr. Gaunt, Cora Rusk was dancing quietly around her bedroom in her housecoat.

Except it wasn't her bedroom.

When she put on the sunglasses Mr. Gaunt had sold her, she was in Graceland.

She danced through fabulous rooms which smelled of Pine-Sol and fried food, rooms where the only sounds were the quiet hum of air conditioners (only a few of the windows at Graceland actually opened; many were nailed shut and all were shaded), the whisper of her feet on deep-pile rugs, and the sound of Elvis singing “My Wish Came True” in his haunting, pleading voice. She danced beneath the huge chandelier of French crystal in the dining room and past the trademark stained-glass peacocks. She trailed her hands across the rich blue velvet drapes. The furniture was French Provincial. The walls were blood red.

The scene changed like a slow dissolve in a movie and Cora found herself in the basement den. There were racks of animal horns on one wall and columns of framed gold records on another. Blank TV screens bulged from a third wall. Behind the long, curved bar were shelves stocked with Gatorade: orange, lime, lemon flavors.

The record-changer on her old portable phonograph with the picture of The King on its vinyl cover clicked. Another forty-five dropped down. Elvis began to sing “Blue Hawaii,” and Cora hula-hulaed into the Jungle Room with its frowning Tiki gods, the couch with the gargoyle armrests, the mirror with its lacy frame of feathers plucked from the breasts of living pheasants.

She danced. With the sunglasses she had purchased in Needful Things masking her eyes, she danced. She danced at Graceland while her son crept back upstairs and lay down on his bed again and looked at the narrow face of Sandy Koufax and thought about alibis and shotguns.

Castle Rock Middle School was a frowning pile of red brick standing between the Post Office and the Library, a hold-over from the time when the town elders didn't feel entirely comfortable with a school unless it looked like a reformatory. This one had been built in 1926 and filled that particular bill admirably. Each year the town got a little closer to deciding to build a new one, one with actual windows instead of loopholes and a playground that didn't look like a penitentiary exercise yard and classrooms that actually stayed warm in the winter.

Sally Ratcliffe's speech therapy room was an afterthought in the basement, tucked away between the furnace room and the supply closet with its stacks of paper towels, chalk, Ginn and Company textbooks, and barrels of fragrant red sawdust. With her teacher's desk and six smaller pupil desks in the room there was barely enough space to turn around, but Sally had tried to make the place as cheery as possible, just the same. She knew that most kids who were tapped for speech therapy—the stutterers, the lispers, the dyslexics, the nasal blocks—found the experience a frightening, unhappy one. They were teased by their peers and closely questioned by their parents. There was no need for the environment to be unnecessarily grim on top of all that.

So there were two mobiles hanging from the dusty ceiling pipes, pictures of TV and rock stars on the walls, and a big Garfield poster on the door. The words in the balloon coming out of Garfield's mouth said, “If a cool cat like me can talk that trash, so can you!”

Her files were woefully behind even though school had been in session for only five weeks. She had meant to spend the whole day updating them, but at quarter past one Sally gathered them all up, stuck them back into the file-drawer they had come from, slammed it shut, and locked it. She told herself she was quitting early because the day was too nice to spend cooped up in this basement room, even with the furnace mercifully silent for a change. This wasn't entirely the truth, however. She had very definite plans for this afternoon.

She wanted to go home, she wanted to sit in her chair by the window with the sun flooding into her lap, and she wanted to meditate upon the fabulous splinter of wood she had bought in Needful Things.

She had become more and more sure that the splinter was an authentic miracle, one of the small, divine treasures God had scattered around the earth for His faithful to find. Holding it was like being refreshed by a dipper of well-water on a hot day. Holding it was like being fed when you were hungry. Holding it was . . .

Well, holding it was ecstasy.

And something had been nagging at her, as well. She had put the splinter in the bottom drawer of her bedroom dresser, beneath her underwear, and she had been careful to lock her house when she went out, but she had a terrible, nagging feeling that someone might break in and steal the

(relic holy relic)

splinter. She knew it didn't make much sense—what robber would want to steal an old gray piece of wood, even if he found it? But if the robber happened to
touch
it . . . if those sounds and images filled
his
head as they filled hers every time she closed the splinter in her small fist . . . well . . .

So she'd go home. She'd change into shorts and a halter and spend an hour or so in quiet

(exaltation)

meditation, feeling the floor beneath her turn into a deck which heaved slowly up and down, listening to the animals moo and low and baa, feeling the light of a different sun, waiting for the magic moment—she was sure it would come if she held the splinter long enough, if she remained very, very quiet and very, very prayerful—when the bow of the huge, lumbering boat should come to rest on the mountain top with a low grinding sound. She did not know why God had seen fit to bless her, of all the world's faithful, with this bright and shining miracle, but since He had, Sally meant to experience it as fully and as completely as she could.

She went out the side door and crossed the playground to the faculty parking lot, a tall, pretty young woman with darkish blonde hair and long legs. There was a good deal of talk about those legs in the barber shop when Sally
Ratcliffe went strolling by in her sensible low heels, usually with her purse in one hand and her Bible—stuffed with tracts—in the other.

“Christ, that woman's got legs right up to her chin,” Bobby Dugas said once.

“Don't let em worry you,” Charlie Fortin replied. “You ain't never gonna feel em wrapped around
your
ass. She belongs to Jesus and Lester Pratt. In that order.”

The barber shop had exploded into hearty male laughter on the day when Charlie had gotten that one—a genuine Knee-Slapper—off. And outside, Sally Ratcliffe had walked along on her way to Rev. Rose's Thursday Evening Bible Study for Young Adults, unknowing, uncaring, wrapped securely in her own cheerful innocence and virtue.

No jokes were made about Sally's legs or Sally's
anything
if Lester Pratt happened to be in The Clip Joint (and he went there at least once every three weeks to have the bristles of his crewcut sharpened). It was clear to most of those in town who cared about such things that he believed Sally farted perfume and shit petunias, and you didn't argue about such things with a man who was put together like Lester. He was an amiable enough guy, but on the subjects of God and Sally Ratcliffe he was always dead serious. And a man like Lester could pull off your arms and legs before putting them back on in new and interesting ways, if he wanted to.

He and Sally had had some pretty hot sessions, but they had never gone All the Way. Lester usually returned home after these sessions in a state of total discomposure, his brain bursting with joy and his balls bursting with frustrated jizz, dreaming of the night, not too far away now, when he wouldn't have to stop. He sometimes wondered if he might not drown her the first time they actually Did It.

Sally was also looking forward to marriage and an end to sexual frustration . . . although these last few days, Lester's embraces had seemed a little less important to her. She had debated telling him about the splinter of wood from the Holy Land she had purchased at Needful Things, the splinter with the miracle inside it, and in the end she hadn't. She
would,
of course; miracles should be shared.
It was undoubtedly a sin
not
to share them. But she had been surprised (and a little dismayed) by the feeling of jealous possessiveness which rose up in her each time she thought of showing Lester the splinter and inviting him to hold it.

No!
an angry, childish voice had cried out the first time she had considered this.
No, it's mine! It wouldn't mean as much to him as it does to me! It
couldn't!

The day would come when she
would
share it with him, just as the day would come when she would share her body with him—but it was not time for either of those things to happen yet.

This hot October day belonged strictly to
her.

There were only a few cars in the faculty lot, and Lester's Mustang was the newest and nicest of them. She'd been having lots of problems with her own car—something in the drive-train kept breaking down—but that was no real problem. When she had called Les this morning and asked if she could have his car yet again (she'd only returned it after a six-day loan at noon the day before), he agreed to drive it over right away. He could jog back, he said, and later he and a bunch of The Guys were going to play touch football. She guessed he would have insisted that she take the car even if he
had
needed it, and that seemed perfectly all right to her. She was aware—in a vague, unfocused way that was the result of intuition rather than experience—that Les would jump through hoops of fire if she asked him to, and this established a chain of adoration which she accepted with naive complacency. Les worshipped her; they both worshipped God; everything was as it should be; world without end, amen.