Needful Things Read online

  The thought of kicking ass (particularly on this scale) always put Wilma in a good mood.

  Nor was the prospect of ass-kicking the only pleasure of Wilma's Sunday. She hadn't had to cook a heavy Sunday meal for once, and Pete was safely parked with Jake and Frieda. If she was lucky, he would spend the whole afternoon watching men try to rupture each other's spleens and she could watch the movie in peace. But first she thought she might call her old friend Nettie. She thought she had Crazy Nettie pretty well buffaloed, and that was all very well ... for a start. But only for a start. Nettie still had those muddy sheets to pay for, whether she knew it or not. The time had come to put a few more moves on Miss Mental Illness of 1991. This prospect filled Wilma with anticipation, and she drove home as fast as she could.

  12

  Like a man in a dream, Danforth Keeton walked to his refrigerator and pulled off the pink slip which had been taped there. The words

  TRAFFIC VIOLATION WARNING

  were printed across the top in black block letters. Below these words was the following message: Just a WARNING--but please read and heed!

  You have been observed breaking one or more traffic laws. The citing officer has elected to "let you off with a warning" this time, but he has recorded the make, model, and license number of your car, and next time you will be charged. Please remember that traffic laws are for EVERYBODY.

  Drive defensively!

  Arrive alive!

  Your Local Police Department thanks you!

  Below the sermon was a series of blanks labelled MAKE, MODEL, and LIC. #. Printed on the slip in the first two blanks were the words Cadillac and Seville. Neatly printed in the blank for LIC. # was this:

  BUSTER 1.

  Most of the slip was taken up by a checklist of common traffic violations such as failure to signal, failure to stop, and illegal parking. None of them was checked. Toward the bottom were the words OTHER VIOLATION(S), followed by two blank lines. OTHER VIOLATION(S) had been checked. The message on the lines provided to describe the violation was also neatly printed in small block capitals. It read:

  BEING THE BIGGEST COCKSUCKER IN CASTLE ROCK.

  At the bottom was a line with the words CITING OFFICER printed under it. The rubber-stamp signature on this line was Norris Ridgewick.

  Slowly, very slowly, Keeton clenched his fist on the pink slip. It crackled and bent and crumpled. At last it disappeared between Keeton's big knuckles. He stood in the middle of the kitchen, looking around at all the other pink slips. A vein beat time in the center of his forehead.

  "I'll kill him," Keeton whispered. "I swear to God and all the saints I'll kill that skinny little fuck."

  13

  When Nettie arrived home it was only twenty past one, but it felt to her as if she had been gone for months, maybe even years. As she walked up the cement path to her door, her terrors slipped from her shoulders like invisible weights. Her head still ached from the tumble she had taken, but she thought a headache was a very small price to pay for being allowed to arrive back at her own little house safe and undetected.

  She still had her own key; that was in the pocket of her dress. She took it out and put it in the lock. "Raider?" she called as she turned it. "Raider, I'm home!"

  She opened the door.

  "Where's Mummy's wittle boy, hmmm? Where is ums? Izzum hungwy?" The hallway was dark, and at first she did not see the small bundle lying on the floor. She took her key out of the lock and stepped in. "Is Mummy's wittle boy awful hungwy? Izzum just sooo hung--"

  Her foot struck something which was both stiff and yielding, and her voice halted in mid-simper. She looked down and saw Raider.

  At first she tried to tell herself she wasn't seeing what her eyes told her she was seeing--wasn't, wasn't, wasn't. That wasn't Raider on the floor with something sticking out of his chest--how could it be?

  She closed the door and beat frantically at the wall-switch with one hand. At last the hall light jumped on and she saw. Raider was lying on the floor. He was lying on his back the way he did when he wanted to be scratched, and there was something red jutting out of him, something that looked like ... looked like ...

  Nettie uttered a high, wailing scream--it was so high it sounded like the whine of some huge mosquito--and fell on her knees beside her dog.

  "Raider! Oh Jesus Savior meek and mild! Oh my God, Raider, you ain't dead, are you? You ain't dead?"

  Her hand--her cold, cold hand--beat at the red thing sticking out of Raider's chest the way it had beat at the light-switch a few seconds before. At last it caught hold and she tore it free, using a strength drawn from the deepest wells of her grief and horror. The corkscrew came out with a thick ripping sound, pulling chunks of flesh, small clots of blood, and tangles of hair with it. It left a ragged dark hole the size of a four-ten slug. Nettie shrieked. She dropped the gory corkscrew and gathered the small, stiff body in her arms.

  "Raider!" she cried. "Oh my little doggy! No! Oh no!" She rocked him back and forth against her breast, trying to bring him back to life with her warmth, but it seemed she had no warmth to give. She was cold. Cold.

  Some time later she put his body down on the hall floor again and fumbled around with her hand until she found the Swiss Army knife with the murdering corkscrew jutting out of its handle. She picked it up dully, but some of that dullness left her when she saw that a note had been impaled upon the murder weapon. She pulled it off with numb fingers and held it up close in front of her. The paper was stiff with her poor little dog's blood, but she could still read the words scrawled on it:

  The look of distracted grief and horror slowly left Nettie's eyes. It was replaced with a gruesome sort of intelligence that sparkled there like tarnished silver. Her cheeks, which had gone as pale as milk when she finally understood what had happened here, began to fill with dark red color. Her lips peeled slowly back from her teeth. She bared them at the note. Two harsh words slid out of her open mouth, hot and hoarse and rasping:

  "You ... bitch!"

  She crumpled the paper in her fist and threw it against the wall. It bounced back and landed near Raider's body. Nettie pounced upon it, picked it up, and spat on it. Then she threw it away again. She got up and walked slowly down to the kitchen, her hands opening, snapping shut into fists, then springing open only to snap shut again.

  14

  Wilma Jerzyck drove her little yellow Yugo into her driveway, got out, and walked briskly toward the front door, digging in her purse for her housekey. She was humming "Love Makes the World Go Round" under her breath. She found the key, put it in the lock ... and then paused as some random movement caught the comer of her eye. She looked to her right, and gaped at what she saw.

  The living-room curtains were fluttering in the brisk afternoon wind. They were fluttering outside the house. And the reason they were fluttering outside the house was that the big picture window, which had cost the Clooneys four hundred dollars to replace when their idiot son had broken it with a baseball three years ago, was shattered. Long arrows of glass pointed inward from the frame toward the central hole.

  "What the fuck?" Wilma cried, and turned the key in the lock so hard she almost broke it off.

  She rushed indoors, grabbing the door to slam it shut behind her, and then froze in place. For the first time in her adult life, Wilma Wadlowski Jerzyck was shocked to complete immobility.

  The living room was a shambles. The TV--their beautiful big-screen TV on which they still owed eleven payments--was shattered. The innards were black and smoking. The picture-tube lay in a thousand shiny fragments on the carpet. Across the room, a huge hole had been knocked in one of the living-room walls. A large package, shaped like a loaf, lay below this hole. Another lay in the doorway to the kitchen.

  She closed the door and approached the object in the doorway. One part of her mind, not quite coherent, told her to be very careful--it might be a bomb. As she passed the TV, she caught a hot, unpleasant aroma--a cross between singed insulation and burned bacon.r />
  She squatted down by the package in the doorway and saw it wasn't a package at all--at least, not in any ordinary sense. It was a rock with a piece of lined notebook paper wrapped around it and held in place with a rubber band. She pulled the paper out and read this message:

  When she had read it twice, she looked at the other rock. She went over to it and pulled off the sheet of paper rubber-banded to it. Identical paper, identical message. She stood up, holding one wrinkled sheet in each hand, looking from one to the other again and again, her eyes moving like those of a woman watching a hotly contested Ping-Pong match. Finally she spoke three words:

  "Nettie. That cunt."

  She walked into the kitchen and drew in breath over her teeth in a harsh, whistling gasp. She cut her hand on a sliver of glass taking the rock out of the microwave and picked the splinter absently out of her palm before removing the paper banded to the rock. It bore the same message.

  Wilma walked quickly through the other rooms downstairs and observed more damage. She took all the notes. They were all the same. Then she walked back to the kitchen. She looked at the damage unbelievingly.

  "Nettie," she said again.

  At last the iceberg of shock around her was beginning to melt. The first emotion to replace it was not anger but incredulity. My, she thought, that woman really must be crazy. She really must, if she thought she could do something like this to me--to me!--and live to see the sun go down. Who did she think she was dealing with here, Rebecca of Fuckybrook Farm?

  Wilma's hand closed on the notes in a spasm. She bent over and rubbed the crumpled carnation of paper sticking out of her fist briskly over her wide bottom.

  "I wipe my fucking ass on your last warning!" she cried, and threw the papers away.

  She looked around the kitchen again with the wondering eyes of a child. A hole in the microwave. A big dent in the Amana refrigerator. Broken glass all over. In the other room the TV, which had cost them almost sixteen hundred dollars, smelled like a Fry-O-Lator full of hot dogshit. And who had done it all? Who?

  Why, Nettie Cobb had done it, that was who. Miss Mental Illness of 1991.

  Wilma began to smile.

  A person who did not know Wilma might have mistaken it for a gentle smile, a kindly smile, a smile of love and good fellowship. Her eyes shone with some powerful emotion; the unwary might have mistaken it for exaltation. But if Peter Jerzyck, who knew her best, had seen her face at that moment, he would have run the other way as fast as his legs could carry him.

  "No," Wilma said in a soft, almost caressing voice. "Oh, no, babe. You don't understand. You don't understand what it means to fuck with Wilma. You don't have the slightest idea what it means to fuck with Wilma Wadlowski Jerzyck."

  Her smile widened.

  "But you will."

  Two magnetized steel strips had been mounted on the wall near the microwave. Most of the knives which had hung from these strips had been knocked loose by the rock Brian had pegged into the RadarRange; they lay on the counter in a pick-up-sticks jumble. Wilma picked out the longest, a Kingsford carving knife with a white bone handle, and slowly ran her wounded palm along the side of the blade, smearing the cutting edge with blood.

  "I'm going to teach you everything you need to know."

  Holding the knife in her fist, Wilma strode across the living room, crunching glass from the broken window and the TV picture-tube under the low heels of her black for-church shoes. She went out the door without closing it and cut across her lawn in the direction of Ford Street.

  15

  At the same time Wilma was selecting a knife from the clutter of them on the counter, Nettie Cobb was pulling a meat-cleaver from one of her kitchen drawers. She knew it was sharp, because Bill Fullerton down at the barber shop had put an edge on it for her less than a month ago.

  Nettie turned and walked slowly down the hallway toward her front door. She stopped and knelt for a moment beside Raider, her poor little dog who had never done anything to anyone.

  "I warned her," she said softly as she stroked Raider's fur. "I warned her, I gave that crazy Polish woman every chance. I gave her every chance in the world. My dear little doggy. You wait for me. You wait, because I'll be with you soon."

  She got up and went out of her house, bothering with the door no more than Wilma had bothered with hers. Security had ceased to interest Nettie. She stood on the stoop for a moment, taking deep breaths, then cut across her lawn in the direction of Willow Street.

  16

  Danforth Keeton ran into his study and ripped open the closet door. He crawled all the way to the back. For a terrible moment he thought the game was gone, that the goddam intruding persecuting motherfucker Deputy Sheriff had taken it, and his future along with it. Then his hands fell upon the box and he tore back the lid. The tin racetrack was still there. And the envelope was still tucked beneath it. He bent it back and forth, listening to the bills crackle inside, and then replaced it.

  He hurried to the window, looking out for Myrtle. She mustn't see the pink slips. He had to take them all down before Myrtle got back, and how many were there? A hundred? He looked around his study and saw them stuck up everywhere. A thousand? Yes, maybe. Maybe a thousand. Even two thousand did not seem entirely out of the question. Well, if she got here before he was done cleaning up, she would just have to wait on the step, because he wasn't going to let her in until every one of these goddamned persecuting things was burning in the kitchen woodstove. Every ... damned ... one.

  He snatched the slip dangling from the light-fixture. The tape stuck to his cheek and he pawed it away with a little squeal of anger. On this one, a single word glared up from the line reserved for OTHER VIOLATION(S): EMBEZZLEMENT

  He ran to the reading lamp by his easy chair. Snatched up the slip taped to the shade.

  OTHER VIOLATION(S): MISAPPROPRIATION OF TOWN FUNDS

  The TV: HORSE-FUCKING

  The glass of his Lions Club Good Citizenship Award, mounted above the fireplace: CORN HOLING YOUR MOTHER

  The kitchen door: COMPULSIVE MONEY-CHUCKING AT LEWISTON RACEWAY

  The door to the garage: PSYCHOTIC GARBAGE-HEAD PARANOIA

  He gathered them up as fast as he could, eyes wide and bulging from his fleshy face, his thinning hair standing up in wild disarray. He was soon panting and coughing, and an ugly reddish-purple color began to overspread his cheeks. He looked like a fat child with a grown-up's face on some strange, desperately important treasure hunt.

  He pulled one from the front of the china closet: STEALING FROM THE TOWN PENSION FUND TO PLAY THE PONIES

  Keeton hurried into his study with a pile of slips clutched in his right hand, strands of tape flying back from his fist, and began to pluck up more of the slips. The ones in here all stuck to a single subject, and with horrible accuracy: EMBEZZLEMENT.

  THEFT.

  STEALING.

  EMBEZZLEMENT.

  FRAUD.

  MISAPPROPRIATION.

  BAD STEWARDSHIP.

  EMBEZZLEMENT.

  That word most of all, glaring, shouting, accusing: OTHER VIOLATION(S): EMBEZZLEMENT.

  He thought he heard something outside and ran to the window again. Maybe it was Myrtle. Maybe it was Norris Ridgewick, come by to gloat and laugh. If so, Keeton would get his gun and shoot him. But not in the head. No. In the head would be too good, too quick, for scum like Ridgewick. Keeton would guthole him, and leave him to scream himself to death on the lawn.

  But it was only the Garsons' Scout, trundling down the View toward town. Scott Garson was the town's most important banker. Keeton and his wife sometimes took dinner with the Garsons--they were nice people, and Garson himself was politically important. What would he think if he saw these slips? What would he think of that word, EMBEZZLEMENT, screaming off the pink violation slips again and again, screaming like a woman being raped in the middle of the night?

  He ran back into the dining room, panting. Had he missed any? He didn't think so. He'd gotten them all, at least d
own he--

  No! There was one! Right on the newel post of the stairway! What if he had missed that one? My God!

  He ran to it, snatched it up.

  MAKE: SHITMOBILE

  MODEL: OLD AND WEARY

  LIC. #: OLDFUCK 1

  OTHER VIOLATION(S): FINANCIAL FAGGOTRY

  More? Were there more? Keeton coursed through the downstairs rooms at a dead run. His shirttail had come out of his pants and his hairy belly was bobbling wildly over his beltbuckle. He saw no more ... at least not down here.

  After another quick, frantic look out the window to make sure Myrt wasn't yet in sight, he pelted upstairs with his heart thundering in his chest.

  17

  Wilma and Nettie met on the comer of Willow and Ford. There they halted, staring at each other like gunslingers in a spaghetti Western. The wind flapped their coats briskly to and fro. The sun shuttered in and out of the clouds; their shadows came and went like fitful visitors.

  No traffic moved on either of these two streets, or on the sidewalks. They owned this little comer of the autumn afternoon.

  "You killed my dog, you bitch!"

  "You broke my TV! You broke my windows! You broke my microwave, you crazy cunt!"