Needful Things

  He saw that he had left large bloody smears on the box-top, and he looked down at himself. For the first time he noticed that he was covered with blood. His meaty forearms looked as though they belonged to a Chicago hog-butcher. Depression folded over him again in a soft, black wave. They had beaten him ... okay. Yet he would escape Them. He would escape Them just the same.

  He got up, weary to his very center, and plodded slowly upstairs. He undressed as he went, kicking off his shoes in the living room, dropping his pants at the foot of the stairs, then sitting down halfway up to peel off his socks. Even they were bloody. The shirt gave him the hardest time; pulling off a shirt while you were wearing a handcuff was the devil's own job.

  Almost twenty minutes passed between the murder of Mrs. Keeton and Buster's trudge to and through the shower. He might have been taken into custody without a problem at almost any time during that period ... but on Lower Main Street a transition of authority was going on, the Sheriff's Office was in almost total disarray, and the whereabouts of Danforth "Buster" Keeton simply did not seem very important.

  Once he had towelled dry, he put on a clean pair of pants and a tee-shirt--he didn't have the energy to tussle again with long sleeves--and went back down to his study. Buster sat in his chair and looked at Winning Ticket again, hoping that his depression might prove to be just an ephemeral thing, that some of his earlier joy might return. But the picture on the box seemed to have faded, dulled. The brightest color in evidence was a smear of Myrtle's blood across the flanks of the two-horse.

  He took the top off and looked inside. He was shocked to see that the little tin horses were leaning sadly every whichway. Their colors had also faded. A broken bit of spring poked through the hole where you inserted the key to wind the machinery.

  Someone's been in here! his mind cried. Someone's been at it! One of Them! Ruining me wasn't enough! They had to ruin my game, too!

  But a deeper voice, perhaps the fading voice of sanity, whispered that this was not true. This is how it was from the very start, the voice whispered. You just didn't see it.

  He went back to the closet, meaning to take down the gun after all. It was time to use it. He was feeling around for it when the telephone rang. Buster picked it up very slowly, knowing who was on the other end.

  Nor was he disappointed.

  2

  "Hello, Dan," said Mr. Gaunt. "How are you this fine evening?"

  "Terrible," Buster said in a glum, draggy voice. "The world has turned to boogers. I'm going to kill myself."

  "Oh?" Mr. Gaunt sounded a trifle disappointed, nothing more.

  "Nothing's any good. Even the game you sold me is no good."

  "Oh, I doubt that very much," Mr. Gaunt replied with a touch of asperity. "I check all my merchandise very carefully, Mr. Keeton. Very carefully indeed. Why don't you look again?"

  Buster did, and what he saw astounded him. The horses stood up straight in their slots. Each coat looked freshly painted and glistening. Even their eyes seemed to spark fire. The tin race-course was all bright greens and dusty summer browns. The track looks fast, he thought dreamily, and his eyes shifted to the box-top.

  Either his eyes, dulled by his deep depression, had tricked him or the colors there had deepened in some amazing way in the few seconds since the telephone had rung. Now it was Myrtle's blood he could barely see. It was drying to a drab maroon.

  "My God!" he whispered.

  "Well?" Mr. Gaunt asked. "Well, Dan? Am I wrong? Because if I am, you must defer your suicide at least long enough to return your purchase to me for a full refund. I stand behind my merchandise. I have to, you know. I have my reputation to protect, and that's a proposition I take very seriously in a world where there's billions of Them and only one of me."

  "No ... no!" Buster said. "It's ... it's beautiful!"

  "Then you were in error?" Mr. Gaunt persisted.

  "I ... I guess I must have been."

  "You admit you were in error?"

  "I ... yes."

  "Good," Mr. Gaunt said. His voice lost its edge. "Then by all means, go ahead and kill yourself. Although I must admit I am disappointed. I thought I had finally met a man who had guts enough to help me kick Their asses. I guess you're just a talker, like all the rest." Mr. Gaunt sighed. It was the sigh of a man who realizes he has not glimpsed light at the end of the tunnel after all.

  A strange thing was happening to Buster Keeton. He felt his vitality and purpose surging back. His own interior colors seemed to be brightening, intensifying again.

  "You mean it's not too late?"

  "You must have skipped Poetry 101. 'Tis never too late to seek a newer world. Not if you're a man with some spine. Why, I had everything all set up for you, Mr. Keeton. I was counting on you, you see."

  "I like plain old Dan a lot better," Buster said, almost shyly.

  "All right. Dan. Are you really set on making such a cowardly exit from life?"

  "No!" Buster cried. "It's just ... I thought, what's the use? There's too many of Them."

  "Three good men can do a lot of damage, Dan."

  "Three? Did you say three?"

  "Yes ... there's another of us. Someone else who sees the danger, who understands what They are up to."

  "Who?" Buster asked eagerly. "Who?"

  "In time," Mr. Gaunt said, "but for now, time is in short supply. They'll be coming for you."

  Buster looked out the study window with the narrowed eyes of a ferret which smells danger on the wind. The street was empty, but only for the time being. He could feel Them, sense Them massing against him.

  "What should I do?"

  "Then you're on my team?" Mr. Gaunt asked. "I can count on you after all?"

  "Yes!"

  "All the way?"

  " 'Til hell freezes over or you say different!"

  "Very good," Mr. Gaunt said. "Listen carefully, Dan." And as Mr. Gaunt talked and Buster listened, gradually sinking into that hypnotic state which Mr. Gaunt seemed to induce at will, the first rumbles of the approaching storm had begun to shake the air outside.

  3

  Five minutes later, Buster left his house. He had put a light jacket on over his tee-shirt and stuffed the hand with the cuff still on it deep into one of his pockets. Halfway down the block he found a van parked against the curb just where Mr. Gaunt had told him he would find it. It was bright yellow, a guarantee most passersby would look at the paint instead of the driver. It was almost windowless, and both sides were marked with the logo of a Portland TV station.

  Buster took a quick but careful look in both directions, then got in. Mr. Gaunt had told him the keys would be under the seat. They were. Sitting on the passenger seat was a paper shopping bag. In it Buster found a blonde wig, a pair of yuppie wire-rimmed glasses, and a small glass bottle.

  He put the wig on with some misgivings--long and shaggy, it looked like the scalp of a dead rock singer--but when he looked at himself in the van's rearview mirror, he was astounded by how well it fit. It made him look younger. Much younger. The lenses of the yuppie spectacles were clear glass, and they changed his appearance (at least in Buster's opinion) even more than the wig. They made him look smart, like Harrison Ford in The Mosquito Coast. He stared at himself in fascination. All at once be looked thirtysomething instead of fifty-two, like a man who might very well work for a TV station. Not as a news correspondent, nothing glamorous like that, but perhaps as a cameraman or even a producer.

  He unscrewed the top of the bottle and grimaced-- the stuff inside smelled like a melting tractor battery. Tendrils of smoke rose from the mouth of the bottle. Got to be careful with this stuff, Buster thought. Got to be real careful.

  He put the empty cuff under his right thigh and pulled the chain taut. Then he poured some of the bottle's contents on the chain just below the cuff on his wrist, being careful not to drip any of the dark, viscous liquid on his skin. The steel immediately began to smoke and bubble. A few drops struck the rubber floormat and it also began to bubble. Smo
ke and a horrid frying smell rose from it. After a few moments Buster pulled the empty cuff out from under his thigh, hooked his fingers through it, and yanked briskly. The chain parted like paper and he threw it on the floor. He was still wearing a bracelet, but he could live with that; the chain and the swinging empty cuff had been the real pain in the keister. He slotted the key in the ignition, started the engine, and drove away.

  Not three minutes later, a Castle County Sheriff's car driven by Seaton Thomas turned into the driveway of the Keeton home, and old Seat discovered Myrtle Keeton sprawled half in and half out of the doorway between the garage and the kitchen. Not long after, his car was joined by four State Police units. The cops tossed the house from top to bottom, looking for either Buster or some sign of where he might have gone. No one gave the game sitting on his study desk a second glance. It was old, dirty, and obviously broken. It looked like something that might have come out of a poor relation's attic.

  4

  Eddie Warburton, the janitor at the Municipal Building, had been pissed off at Sonny Jackett for more than two years. Over the last couple of days, this anger had built into a red rage.

  When the transmission of Eddie's neat little Honda Civic had seized up during the summer of 1989, Eddie hadn't wanted to take it to the nearest Honda dealership. That would have involved a large towing fee. Bad enough that the tranny hadn't expired until three weeks after the drive-train warranty had done the same thing. So he had gone to Sonny Jackett first, had asked Sonny if he had any experience working on foreign cars.

  Sonny told him he did. He spoke in that expansive, patronizing way most back-country Yankees had of talking to Eddie. We're not prejudiced, boy, that tone said. This is the north, you know. We don't hold with all that southern crap. Of COURSE you're a nigger, anyone can see that, but it don't mean a thing to us. Black, yellow, white, or green, we rook em all like you've never seen. Bring it on in here.

  Sonny had fixed the Honda's transmission, but the bill had been a hundred dollars more than Sonny had said it would be, and they'd almost gotten into a fist-fight over it one night at the Tiger. Then Sonny's lawyer (Yankees or crackers, it was Eddie Warburton's experience that all white men had lawyers) called Eddie and told him Sonny was going to take him to small claims court. Eddie ended up fifty dollars out of pocket as a result of that little experience and the fire in the Honda's electrical system happened five months later. The car had been parked in the Municipal Building's lot. Someone had yelled to Eddie, but by the time he got outside with a fire extinguisher, the interior of his car was a dancing mass of yellow fire. It had been a total loss.

  He'd wondered ever since if Sonny Jackett had set that fire. The insurance investigator said it was a bona fide accident which had been caused by a short-circuit ... a one-in-a-million type of thing. But what did that fellow know? Probably nothing, and besides, it wasn't his money. Not that the insurance had been enough to cover Eddie's investment.

  And now he knew. He knew for sure.

  Earlier today he had gotten a little package in the mail. The items inside had been extremely enlightening: a number of blackened alligator clips, an old, lop-eared photograph, and a note.

  The clips were of the sort a man could use to start an electrical fire. One simply stripped the insulation from the right pairs of wires in the right places, clipped the wires together, and voila.

  The snapshot showed Sonny and a number of his whitebread friends, the fellows who were always lounging on kitchen chairs in the gas station office when you went down there. The location was not Sonny's Sunoco, however ; it was Robicheau's Junkyard out on Town Road #5. The honkies were standing in front of Eddie's bumed-out Civic, drinking beer, laughing ... and eating chunks of watermelon.

  The note was short and to the point. Dear Nigger: Fucking with me was a bad mistake.

  At first Eddie wondered why Sonny would send him such a note (although he did not relate it to the letter he himself had slipped through Polly Chalmers's mail-slot at Mr. Gaunt's behest). He decided it was because Sonny was even dumber and meaner than most honkies. Still--if the business was still rankling in Sonny's guts, why had he waited so long to reopen it? But the more he brooded over those old times

  (Dear Nigger:)

  the less the questions seemed to matter. The note and the blackened alligator clips and that old photograph got into his head, buzzing there like a cloud of hungry mosquitoes.

  Earlier tonight he had bought a gun from Mr. Gaunt.

  The fluorescents in the Sunoco station's office threw a white trapezoid on the macadam of the service tarmac as Eddie pulled in--driving the second-hand Olds which had replaced the Civic. He got out, one hand in his jacket pocket, holding the gun.

  He paused outside the door for a minute, looking in. Sonny was sitting beside his cash register in a plastic chair which was rocked back on its rear legs. Eddie could just see the top of Sonny's cap over his open newspaper. Reading the paper. Of course. White men always had lawyers, and after a day of shafting black fellows like Eddie, they always sat in their offices, rocked back in their chairs and reading the paper.

  Fucking white men, with their fucking lawyers and their fucking newspapers.

  Eddie drew the automatic pistol and went inside. A part of him which had been asleep suddenly woke up and screamed in alarm that he shouldn't do this, it was a mistake. But the voice didn't matter. It didn't matter because suddenly Eddie didn't seem to be inside himself at all. He seemed to be a spirit hovering over his own shoulder, watching all this happen. An evil imp had taken over his controls.

  "I got something for you, you cheating sumbitch," Eddie heard his mouth say, and watched his finger pull the trigger of the automatic twice. Two small black circles appeared in a headline which said MCKERNAN APPROVAL RATING SOARS. Sonny Jackett screamed and jerked. The rear legs of the tipped-back chair skidded and Sonny went tumbling to the floor with blood soaking into his coverall ... except the name stitched on the coverall in gold thread was RICKY. It wasn't Sonny at all but Ricky Bissonette.

  "Ah, shit!" Eddie screamed. "I shot the wrong fuckin honky!"

  "Hello, Eddie," Sonny Jackett remarked from behind him. "Good thing for me I was in the shithouse, wasn't it?"

  Eddie began to turn. Three bullets from the automatic pistol Sonny had bought from Mr. Gaunt late that afternoon entered his lower back, pulverizing his spine, before he could get even halfway around.

  He watched, eyes wide and helpless, as Sonny bent down toward him. The muzzle of the gun Sonny held was as big as the mouth of a tunnel and as dark as forever. Above it, Sonny's face was pale and set. A streak of grease ran down one cheek.

  "Planning to steal my new socket-wrench set wasn't your mistake," Sonny said as he pressed the barrel of the automatic against the center of Eddie Warburton's forehead. "Writing and telling me you were gonna do it ... that was your mistake."

  A great white light--the light of understanding--suddenly went on in Eddie's mind. Now he remembered the letter he had pushed through the Chalmers woman's mail-slot, and he found himself able to put that piece of mischief together with the note he had received and the one Sonny was talking about.

  "Listen!" he whispered. "You have to listen to me, Jackett--we been played for suckers, both of us. We--"

  "Goodbye. black boy," Sonny said, and pulled the trigger.

  Sonny looked fixedly at what remained of Eddie Warburton for almost a full minute, wondering if he should have listened to what Eddie had to say. He decided the answer was no. What could a fellow dumb enough to send a note like that have to say that could possibly matter?

  Sonny got up, walked into the office, and stepped over Ricky Bissonette's legs. He opened the safe and took out the adjustable socket-wrenches Mr. Gaunt had sold him. He was still looking at them, picking each one up, handling it lovingly, then putting it back in the custom case again, when the State Police arrived to take him into custody.

  5

  Park at the corner of Birch and Main, Mr. Gaunt had to
ld Buster on the telephone, and just wait. I will send someone to you.

  Buster had followed these instructions to the letter. He had seen a great many comings and goings at the mouth of the service alley from his vantage point one block up--almost all his friends and neighbors, it seemed to him, had a little business to do with Mr. Gaunt this evening. Ten minutes ago the Rusk woman had walked down there with her dress unbuttoned, looking like something out of a bad dream.

  Then, not five minutes after she came back out of the alley, putting something into her dress pocket (the dress was still unbuttoned and you could see a lot, but who in his right mind, Buster wondered, would want to look), there had been several gunshots from farther up Main Street. Buster couldn't be sure, but he thought they came from the Sunoco station.

  State Police cruisers came winding up Main from the Municipal Building, their blue lights flashing, scattering reporters like pigeons. Disguise or no disguise, Buster decided it would be prudent to climb into the back of the van for a little while.

  The State Police cars roared by, and their whirling blue lights picked out something which leaned against the van's rear doors--a green canvas duffle bag. Curious, Buster undid the knot in the drawstring, pulled the mouth of the bag open, and looked inside.

  There was a box on top of the bag's contents. Buster took it out and saw the rest of the duffle was full of timers. Hotpoint clock-timers. There were easily two dozen of them. Their smooth white faces stared up at him like pupilless Orphan Annie eyes. He opened the box he had removed and saw it was full of alligator clips--the kind electricians sometimes used to make quick connections.

  Buster frowned ... and then, suddenly, his mind's eye saw an office form--a Castle Rock fund-release form, to be exact. Typed neatly in the space provided for Goods andlor Services to Be Supplied were these words: 16 CASES OF DYNAMITE.

  Sitting in the back of the van, Buster began to grin. Then he began to laugh. Outside, thunder boomed and rolled. A tongue of lightning licked out of the dragging belly of a cloud and jabbed down into Castle Stream.