Needful Things

1

The rain had stopped by daylight on Thursday, and by ten-thirty, when Polly looked out the front window of You Sew and Sew and saw Nettle Cobb, the clouds were beginning to break up. Nettle was carrying a rolled-up umbrella, and went scuttling along Main Street with her purse clamped under her arm as if she sensed the jaws of some new storm opening just behind her.

“How are your hands this morning, Polly?” Rosalie Drake asked.

Polly sighed inwardly. She would have to field the same question, but more insistently put, from Alan that afternoon, she supposed-she had promised to meet him for coffee at Nan’s Luncheonette around three.

You couldn’t fool the people who had known you for a long time. They saw the pallor of your face and the dark crescents below your eyes.

More important, they saw the haunted look in the eyes.

“Much better today, thanks,” she said. This was overstating the truth by more than a little; they were better, but much better?

Huh-uh.

“I thought with the rain and all-”

“It’s unpredictable, what makes them hurt. That’s the pure devil of it. But never mind that, Rosalie, come quick and look out the window. I think we’re about to witness a minor miracle.”

Rosalie joined Polly at the window in time to see the small, scuttling figure with the umbrella clutched tightly in one handpossibly for use as a bludgeon, judging from the way it was now being held-approach the awning of Needful Things.

“Is that Nettle? Is it really?” Rosalie almost gasped.

“It really is.”

“my God, she’s going in!”

But for a moment it seemed that Rosalie’s prediction had queered the deal. Nettle approached the door… then pulled back.

She shifted the umbrella from hand to hand and looked at the faqade of Needful Things as if it were a snake which might bite her.

“Go on, Nettle,” Polly said softly. “Go for it, sweetie!”

“The CLOSED sign must be in the window,” Rosalie said.

“No, he’s got another one that says TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. I saw it when I came in this morning.”

Nettle was approaching the door again. She reached for the knob, then drew back again.

“God, this is killing me,” Rosalie said. “She told me she might come back, and I know how much she likes carnival glass, but I never really thought she’d go through with it.”

“She asked me if it would be all right for her to leave the house on her break so she could come down to what she called ’that new place’ and pick up my cake-box,” Polly murmured.

Rosalie nodded. “That’s our Nettle. She used to ask me for permission to use the john.”

“I got an idea part of her was hoping I’d say no, there was too much to do. But I think part of her wanted me to say yes, too.”

Polly’s eyes never left the fierce, small-scale struggle going on less than forty yards away, a mini-war between Nettle Cobb and Nettle Cobb. If she actually did go in, what a step forward that would be for her!

Polly felt dull, hot pain in her hands, looked down, and saw she had been twisting them together. She forced them down to her sides.

“It’s not the cake-box and it’s not the carnival glass,” Rosalie said. “It’s him.”

Polly glanced at her.

Rosalie laughed and blushed a little. “Oh, I don’t mean Nettle’s got the hots for him, or anything like that, although she did look a little starry-eyed when I caught up with her outside. He was nice to her, Polly. That’s all. Honest and nice.”

“Lots of people are nice to her,” Polly said. “Alan goes out of his way to be kind to her, and she still shies away from him.”

“Our Mr. Gaunt has got a special kind of nice,” Rosalie said simply, and as if to prove this, they saw Nettle grasp the knob and turn it. She opened the door and then only stood there on the sidewalk clutching her umbrella, as if the shallow well of her resolve had been utterly exhausted. Polly felt a sudden certainty that Nettle would now pull the door closed again and hurry away. Her hands, arthritis or no arthritis, closed into loose fists.

Go on, Nettle. Go on in. Take a chance. Rejoin the world.

Then Nettle smiled, obviously in response to someone neither Polly nor Rosalie could see. She lowered the umbrella from its position across her chest… and went inside.

The door closed behind her.

Polly turned to Rosalie, and was touched to see that there were tears in her eyes. The two women looked at each other for a moment, and then embraced, laughing.

“Way to go, Nettle!” Rosalie said.

“Two points for our side!” Polly agreed, and the sun broke free of the clouds inside her head a good two hours before it would finally do so in the sky above Castle Rock.

2

Five minutes later, Nettle Cobb sat in one of the plush, high-backed chairs Gaunt had installed along one wall of his shop. Her umbrella and purse lay on the floor beside her, forgotten. Gaunt sat next to her, his hands holding hers, his sharp eyes locked on her vague ones. A carnival glass lampshade stood beside Polly Chalmers’s cake container on one of the glass display cases. The lampshade was a moderately gorgeous thing, and might have sold for three hundred dollars or better in a Boston antiques shop; Nettle Cobb had, nevertheless, just purchased it for ten dollars and forty cents, all the money she had had in her purse when she entered the shop.

Beautiful or not, it was, for the moment, as forgotten as her umbrella.

“A deed,” she was saying now. She sounded like a woman talking in her sleep. She moved her hands slightly, so as to grip Mr.

Gaunt’s more tightly. He returned her grip, and a little smile of pleasure touched her face.

“Yes, that’s right. It’s really just a small matter. You know Mr.

Keeton, don’t you?”

“Oh yes,” Nettle said. “Ronald and his son, Danforth. I know them both. Which do you mean?”

“The younger,” Mr. Gaunt said, stroking her palms with his long thumbs. The nails were slightly yellow and quite long. “The Head Selectman.”

“They call him Buster behind his back,” Nettle said, and giggled.

It was a harsh sound, a little hysterical, but Leland Gaunt did not seem alarmed. On the contrary; the sound of Nettle’s not-quite-right laughter seemed to please him. “They have ever since he was a little boy.”

“I want you to finish paying for your lampshade by playing a trick on Buster.”

“Trick?” Nettle looked vaguely alarmed.

Gaunt smiled. “Just a harmless prank. And he’ll never know it was you. He’ll think it was someone else.”

“Oh.” Nettle looked past Gaunt at the carnival glass lampshade, and for a moment something sharpened her gaze-greed, perhaps, or just simple longing and Pleasure. “Well…

“It will be all right, Nettle. No one will ever know… and you’ll have the lampshade.”

Nettle spoke slowly and thoughtfully. “My husband used to play tricks on me a lot. It might be fun to play one on someone else.” She looked back at him, and now the thing sharpening her gaze was alarm.

“If it doesn’t hurt him. I don’t want to hurt him. I hurt my husband, you know.”

“It won’t hurt him,” Gaunt said softly, stroking Nettle’s hands.

“It won’t hurt him a bit. I just want you to put some things in his house.”

“How could I get in Buster’s-”

“Here.”

He put something into her hand. A key. She closed her hand over it.

“When?” Nettle asked. Her dreaming eyes had returned to the lampshade again.

“Soon.” He released her hands am stood up. “And now, Nettle,

I really ought to put that beautiful lampshade into a box for you.

Mrs. Martin is coming to look at some Lalique in-” He glanced at his watch. “Goodness, in fifteen minutes! But I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am that you decided to come in. Very few people appreciate the beauty of carnival glass these days-most people are just dealers, with cash registers for hearts.”

Nettle also stood, and looked at the lampshade with the soft eyes of a woman who is in love. The agonized nervousness with which she had approached the shop had entirely disappeared. “It is lovely, isn’t it?”

“Very lovely,” Mr. Gaunt agreed warmly. “And I can’t tell you… can’t even begin to express… how happy it makes me to know it will have a good home, a place where someone will do more than dust it on Wednesday afternoons and then, after years of that, break it in a careless moment and sweep the pieces up and then drop them into the trash without a second thought.”

“I’d never do that!” Nettle cried.

“I know you wouldn’t,” Mr. Gaunt said. “It’s one of your charms, Netitia.”

Nettle looked at him, amazed. “How did you know my name?”

“I have a flair for them. I never forget a name or a face.”

He went through the curtain at the back of his shop. When he returned, he held a flat sheet of white cardboard in one hand and a large fluff of tissue paper in the other. He set the tissue paper down beside the cake container (it began at once to expand, with secret little ticks and snaps, into something which looked like a giant corsage) and began to fold the cardboard into a box exactly the right size for the lampshade. “I know you’ll be a fine custodian of the item you have purchased. That’s why I sold it to you.”

“Really? I thought… Mr. Keeton… and the trick…”

“No, no, no!” Mr. Gaunt said, half-laughing and half-exasperated. “Anyone will play a trick! People love to play tricks! But to place objects with people who love them and need them… that is a different kettle of fish altogether. Sometimes, Netitia, I think that what I really sell is happiness… what do you think?”

“Well,” Nettle said earnestly, “I know you’ve made me happy, Mr.

Gaunt. Very happy.”

He exposed his crooked, Jostling teeth in a wide smile. “Good!

That’s good!” Mr. Gaunt pushed the tissue-paper corsage into the box, cradled the lampshade in its ticking whiteness, closed the box, and taped it shut with a flourish. “And here we are! Another satisfied customer has found her needful thing!”

He held the box out to her. Nettle took it. And as her fingers touched his she felt a shiver of revulsion, although she had gripped them with great strength-even ardor-a few moments ago. But that interlude had already begun to seem hazy and unreal. He put the Tupperware cake container on top of the white box. She saw something inside the former.

“What’s that?”

“A note for your employer,” Gaunt said.

Alarm rose to Nettle’s face at once. “Not about me?”

“Good heavens, no!” Gaunt said, laughing, and Nettle relaxed at once. When he was laughing, Mr. Gaunt was impossible to resist or distrust. “Take care of your lampshade, Netitia, and do come again.”

“I will,” Nettle said, and this could have been an answer to both admonitions, but she felt in her heart (that secret repository where needs and fears elbowed each other continuously like uncomfortable passengers in a crowded subway car) that, while she might come here again, the lampshade was the only thing she-would ever buy in Needful Things.

Yet what of that? It was a beautiful thing, the sort of thing she had always wanted, the only thing she needed to complete her modest collection. She considered telling Mr. Gaunt that her husband might still be alive if he had not smashed a carnival glass lampshade much like this one fourteen years ago, that it had been the last straw, the one which finally drove her over the edge. He had broken many of her bones during their years together, and she had let him live. Finally he had broken something she really needed, and she had taken his life.

She decided she did not have to tell Mr. Gaunt this.

He looked like the sort of man who might already know.

3

“Polly! Polly, she’s coming out!”

Polly left the dressmaker’s dummy where she had been slowly and carefully pinning up a hem, and hurried to the window. She and Rosalie stood side by side, watching as Nettle left Needful Things in a state which could only be described as heavily laden.

Her purse was under one arm, her umbrella was under the other, and in her hands she held Polly’s Tupperware cake container balanced atop a square white box.

“Maybe I better go help her,” Rosalie said.

“No.” Polly put out a hand and restrained her gently. “Better not. I think she’d only be embarrassed and fluttery.”

They watched Nettle walk up the street. She no longer scuttled, as if before the jaws of a storm; now she seemed almost to drift.

No, Polly thought. No, that isn’t right. It’s more like… floating.

Her mind suddenly made one of those odd connections which were almost like cross-references, and she burst out laughing.

Rosalie looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Share?”

“It’s the look on her face,” Polly said, watching Nettle cross Linden Street in slow, dreamy steps.

“What do you mean?”

“She looks like a woman who just got laid… and had about three orgasms.”

Rosalie turned pink, looked at Nettle once more, and then screamed with laughter. Polly joined in. The two of them held each other and rocked back and forth, laughing wildly.

“Gee,” Alan Pangborn said from the front of the store. “Ladies laughing well before noon! It’s too early for champagne, so what is it?”

“Four!” Rosalie said, giggling madly. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “It looked more like four to me!”

Then they were off again, rocking back and forth in each other’s arms, howling with laughter while Alan stood watching them with his hands in the pockets of his uniform pants, smiling quizzically.

4

Norris Ridgewick arrived at the Sheriff’s Office in his street clothes about ten minutes before the noon whistle blew at the mill. He had the mid-shift, from twelve until nine p.m right through the weekend, and that was just the way he liked it. Let somebody else clean up the messes on the highways and byways of Castle County after the bars closed at one o’clock; he could do it, had done it on many occasions, but he almost always puked his guts. He sometimes puked his guts even if the victims were up, walking around, and yelling that they didn’t have to take any fucking breathalyzer test, and that kind of they knew their Constipational rights- Norris just had a stomach. Sheila Brigham liked to tease him by saying he was like Deputy Andy on that TV show Twin Peaks, but Norris knew he wasn’t.

Deputy Andy cried when he saw dead people. Norris didn’t cry, but he was apt to puke on them, the way he had almost puked on Homer Gamache that time when he had found Homer sprawled in a ditch out by Homeland Cemetery, beaten to death with his own artificial arm.

Norris glanced at the roster, saw that both Andy Clutterbuck and John LaPointe were out on patrol, then at the daywatch board.

Nothing there for him, which was also just the way he liked it.

To make his day complete-this end of it, at least-his second uniform had come back from the cleaners… on the day, promised, for once.

That would save him a trip home to change.

A note pinned to the plastic dry-cleaning bag read, “Hey Barney-you owe me $5.25. Do not stiff me this time or you will be a sadder amp; wiser man when the sun goes down.” It was signed Clut.

Norris’s good mood was unbroken even by the note’s salutation.

Sheila Brigham was the only person in the Castle Rock Sheriff’s Office who thought of Norris as a Twin Peaks kind of guy (Norris had an idea that she was the only person in the department-besides himself, that was-who even watched the show). The other deputies-john LaPointe, Seat Thomas, Andy Clutterbuck-called him Barney, after the Don Knotts character on the old Andy Griffith Show. This sometimes irritated him, but not today. Four days of mid-shift, then three days off. A whole week of silk laid out before him. Life could sometimes be grand.

He pulled a five and a one from his wallet and laid them on Clut’s desk. “Hey, Clut, live a little,” he jotted on the back of a report form, signed his name with a flourish, and left it by the money. Then he stripped the dry-cleaning bag off the uniform and took it into the men’s room. He whistled as he changed clothes, then waggled his eyebrows approvingly as he stared at his reflection in the mirror. He was Squared Away, by God. One hundred per cent Squared Away. The evildoers of Castle Rock had damned well better be on the lookout today, around him in the mirror, but before he He caught movement beh’ could do more than begin to turn his head he had been grabbed, spun around, and slammed into the tiles beside the urinals. His head bonked the wall, his cap fell off, and then he was looking into the round, flushed face of Danforth Keeton.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing, Ridgewick?” he asked.

Norris had forgotten all about the ticket he had slipped under the windshield wiper of Keeton’s Cadillac the night before. Now it all came back to him.

“Let go of me!” he said. He tried for a tone of indignation, but his voice came out in a worried squeak. He felt his cheeks growing hot. Whenever he was angry or scared-and right now he was both-he blushed like a girl.

Keeton, who overtopped Norris by five inches and outweighed him by a hundred pounds, gave the deputy a harsh little shake and then did let go. He pulled the ticket out of his pocket and brandished it under Norris’s nose. “Is this your name on this goddam thing or isn’t it?”

he demanded, as though Norris had already denied it.

Norris Ridgewick knew perfectly well that it was his signature, rubber-stamped but perfectly recognizable, and that the ticket had been pulled from his citation book.

“You were parked in the crip space,” he said, stepping away from the wall and rubbing the back of his head. Damned if he didn’t think there was going to be a knot there. (and Buster had jumped the living Jesus out of him, he couldn’t deny that) As his initial surprise abated, his anger grew.

“The what?”

“The handicap space!” Norris shouted. And furthermore, it was Alan himself who told me to write that ticket! he was about to continue, and then didn’t. Why give this fat pig the satisfaction of passing the buck? “You’ve been told about it before, Buh… Danforth, and you know it.”

“What did you call me?” Danforth Keeton asked ominously.

Red splotches the size of cabbage roses had grown on his cheeks and jowls.

“That’s a valid ticket,” Norris said, ignoring this last, “and as far as I’m concerned, you better pay it. Why, you’re lucky I don’t cite you for assaulting a police officer as well!”

Danforth laughed. The sound banged flatly off the walls. “I don’t see any police officer,” he said. “I see a narrow piece of shit packaged to look like beef jerky.”

Morris bent over and picked up his hat. His guts were a roil of fear-Danforth Keeton was a bad enemy for a man to have-and his anger had deepened into fury. His hands trembled. He took a moment, nonetheless, to set his hat squarely on his head.

“You can take this up with Alan, if you want-”

“I’m taking it up with you!”

“-but I’m done talking about it. Make sure you pay that within thirty days, Danforth, or we’ll have to come and get you.” Norris drew himself up to his full five-foot-six and added: “We know where to find you.”

He started out. Keeton, his face now looking a little like sunset in a nuclear blast area, stepped forward to block his escape route.

Norris stopped and levelled a finger at him.

“if you touch me I’ll throw you in a cell, Buster. I mean it.”

“Okay, that’s it,” Keeton said in a queer, toneless voice. “That is it. You’re fired. Take off that uniform and start looking for another j-”

“No,” a voice said from behind them, and they both looked around. Alan Pangborn was standing in the men’s-room doorway.

Keeton rolled his hands into fat white fists. “You keep out of this.”

Alan walked in, letting the door swoosh slowly shut behind him.

“No,” he said. “I was the one who told Norris to write that ticket.

I also told him I was going to forgive it before the appropriations meeting. It’s a five-dollar ticket, Dan. What the hell got into you?”

Alan’s voice was puzzled. He felt puzzled. Buster had never been a sweet-natured man, not even at the best of times, but an outburst like this was overboard even for him. Since the end of the summer, the man had seemed ragged and always on edge-Alan had often heard the distant bellow of his voice when the selectmen were in committee meetings-and his eyes had taken on a look which was almost haunted. He wondered briefly If Keeton might be sick, and decided that was a consideration for some later time.

Right now he had a moderately ugly situation on his hands.

“Nothing got into me,” Keeton said sulkily, and smoothed back his hair. Norris took some satisfaction in noticing that Keeton’s hands were also trembling. “I’m just good and goddam tired of selfimportant pricks like this man here… I try to do a lot for this town… hell, I accomplish a lot for this town… and I’m sick of the constant persecution. He paused a moment, his fat throat working, and then burst out: “He called me Buster! You know how I feel about that!”

“He’ll apologize,” Alan said calmly. “Won’t you, Norris?”

“I don’t know that I will,” Norris said. His voice was trembly and his gut was rolling, but he was still angry. “I know he doesn’t like it, but the truth is, he surprised it out of me. I was just standing here, looking in the mirror to make sure my tie was straight, when he grabbed me and threw me against the wall. I smacked my head a pretty good one. Jeer, Alan, I don’t know what I said.”

Alan’s eyes shifted back to Keeton. “Is that true?”

Keeton dropped his own eyes. “I was mad,” he said, and Alan supposed it was as close as a man like him could get to a spontaneous and undirected apology. He glanced back at Norris to see if the deputy understood this. It looked as if maybe Norris did. That was good; it was a long step toward defusing this nasty little stinkbomb.

Alan relaxed a little.

“Can we consider this incident closed?” he asked both men.

“Just kind of chalk it up to experience and go on from here?”

“All right by me,” Norris said after a moment. Alan was touched.

Norris was scrawny, he had a habit of leaving half-full cans of jolt and Nehi in the cruisers he used, and his reports were horrors… but he had yards of heart. He was backing down, but not because he was afraid of Keeton. If the burly Head Selectman thought that was it, he was making a very bad mistake.

“I’m sorry I called you Buster,” Norris said. He wasn’t, not a bit, but it didn’t hurt to say he was. He supposed.

Alan looked at the heavy-set man in the loud sport-coat and open-necked golfer’s shirt. “Danforth?”

“All right, it never happened,” Keeton said. He spoke in a tone of overblown magnanimity, and Alan felt a familiar wave of dislike wash over him. A voice buried somewhere deep in his mind, the primitive crocodile-voice of the subconscious, spoke up briefly but clearly: Why don’t you have a heart attack, Buster? Why don’t you do us all a favor and die?

“All right,” he said. “Good dea-”

“If,” Keeton said, raising one finger.

Alan raised his eyebrows. “If?”

“If we can do something about this ticket.” He held it out toward Alan, tweezed between two fingers, as if it were a rag which had been used to clean up some dubious spill.

Alan sighed. “Come on in the office, Danforth. We’ll talk about it.” He looked at Norris. “You’ve got the duty, right?”

“Right,” Norris said. His stomach was still in a ball. His good feelings were gone, probably for the rest of the day, it was that fat pig’s fault, and Alan was going to forgive the ticket. He understood it-politics-but that didn’t mean he had to like it.

“Do you want to hang around?” Alan asked. It was as close as he could come to asking, Do you need to talk this out? with Keeton standing right there and glowering at both of them.

“No,” Norris said. “Places to go and things to do. Talk to you later, Alan.” He left the men’s room, brushing past Keeton without a glance. And although Norris did not know it, Keeton restrained, with a great-almost heroic-effort, an irrational but mighty urge to plant a foot in his ass to help him on his way.

Alan made a business of checking his own reflection in the mirror, giving Norris time to make a clean getaway, while Keeton stood by the door, watching him impatiently. Then Alan pushed out into the bullpen area again with Keeton at his heels.

A small, dapper man in a cream-colored suit was sitting in one of the two chairs outside the door to his office, ostentatiously reading a large leather-bound book which could only have been a Bible.

Alan’s heart sank. He had been fairly sure nothing else too unpleasant could happen this morning-it would be noon in only two or three minutes, so the idea seemed a reasonable one but he had been wrong.

The Rev. William Rose closed his Bible (the binding of which almost matched his suit) and bounced to his feet. “Chief-uh Pangborn,” he said. The Rev. Rose was one of those deep-thicket Baptists who begin to twist the tails of their words when they are emotionally cranked up. “May I please speak to you?”

“Give me five minutes, please, Reverend Rose. I have a matter to attend to.”

“This is-uh extremely important.”

I bet, Alan thought. “So is this. Five minutes.”

He opened the door and ushered Keeton into his office before the Reverend Willie, as Father Brigham liked to call him, could say anything else.

5

“It’ll be about Casino Nite,” Keeton said after Alan had closed the I office door. “You mark my words. Father John Brigham is a bullheaded Irishman, but I’ll take him over that fellow anytime. Rose is an incredibly arrogant prick.”

There goes the pot, calling the kettle black, Alan thought.

“Have a seat, Danforth.”

Keeton did. Alan went around his desk, held the parking ticket up, and tore it into small fragments. These he tossed into the wastebasket. “There. Okay?”

“Okay,” Keeton said, and moved to rise.

“No, sit down a moment longer.”

Keeton’s bushy eyebrows drew together below his high, pink forehead in a thundercloud.

“Please,” Alan added. He dropped into his own swivel chair.

His hands came together and tried to make a blackbird; Alan caught them at it and folded them firmly together on the blotter.

“We’re having an appropriations committee meeting next week dealing with budgetary matters for Town Meeting in February-” Alan began.

“Damn right,” Keeton rumbled.

“-and that’s a political thing,” Alan went on. “I recognize it and you recognize it. I just tore up a perfectly valid parking ticket because of a political consideration.”

Keeton smiled a little. “You’ve been in town long enough to know how things work, Alan. One hand washes the other.”

Alan shifted in his chair. It made its little creakings and squeakings-sounds he sometimes heard in his dreams after long, hard days. The kind of day this one was turning out to be.

“Yes,” he said. “One hand washes the other. But only for so long.”

The eyebrows drew together again. “What does that mean?”

“It means that there’s a place, even in small towns, where politics have to end. You need to remember that I’m not an appointed official. The selectmen may control the purse strings, but the voters elect me. And what they elect me to do is to protect them, and to preserve and uphold the law. I took the oath, and I try to hold to it.”

“Are you threatening me? Because if you are-” Just then the mill-whistle went off. It was muted in here, but Danforth Keeton still jumped as if he had been stung by a wasp.

His eyes widened momentarily, and his hands clamped down to white claws on the arms of his chair.

Alan felt that puzzlement again. He’s as skittish as a mare in heat.

What the hell’s wrong with him?

For the first time he found himself wondering if maybe Mr.

Danforth Keeton, who had been Castle Rock’s Head Selectman since long before Alan himself ever heard of the place, had been uP to something that was not strictly kosher.

“I’m not threatening you,” he said. Keeton was beginning to relax again, but warily… as if he were afraid the mill-whistle might go off again,)just to goose him.

“That’s good. Because it isn’t just a question of purse strings, Sheriff Pangborn. The Board of Selectmen, along with the three County Commissioners, holds right of approval over the hiringand the firing-of Sheriff’s Deputies. Among many other rights of approval I’m sure you know about.”

“That’s just a rubber stamp.”

I e d. From his inside “So it has always been,” Keeton agr e pocket he produced a Roi-Tan cigar. He pulled it between his fingers, making the cellophane crackle. “That doesn’t mean it has to stay Now who is threatening whom? Alan thought, but did not say.

Instead he leaned back in his chair and looked at Keeton. Keeton met his eyes for a few seconds, then dropped his gaze to the cigar and began picking at the wrapper.

“The next time you park in the handicap space, I’m going to ticket you myself, and that citation will stand,” Alan said. “And if You ever lay your hands on one of my deputies again, I’ll book you on a charge of third-degree assault. That will happen no matter how many so-called rights of approval the selectmen hold. Because politics only stretches so far with me. Do you understand?”

’ Keeton looked down at the cigar for a long moment, as if meditating. When he looked up at Alan again, his eyes had turned to small, hard flints. “If you want to find out just how hard my ass is, that way.”

Sheriff Pangborn, just go on pushing me.” There was anger written on Keeton’s face-yes, most assuredly-but Alan thought there was something else written there, as well. He thought it was fear. Did he see that? Smell it? He didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. But what Keeton was afraid of… that might matter. That might matter a lot.

“Do you understand?” he repeated.

“Yes,” Keeton said. He stripped the cellophane from his cigar with a sudden hard gesture and dropped it on the floor. He stuck the cigar in his mouth and spoke around it. “Do you understand me?”

The chair creaked and croaked as Alan rocked forward again.

He looked at Keeton earnestly. “I understand what you’re saying, but I sure as hell don’t understand how you’re acting, Danforth.

We’ve never been best buddies, you and I-”

“That’s for sure,” Keeton said, and bit off the end of his cigar.

For a moment Alan thought that was going to end up on the floor, too, and he was prepared to let it go if it did-politics-but Keeton spat it into the palm of his hand and then deposited it in the clean ashtray on the desk. It sat there like a small dog-turd.

“-but we’ve always had a pretty good working relationship.

Now this. Is there something wrong? If there is, and I can help-”

“Nothing is wrong,” Keeton said, rising abruptly. He was angry again-more than just angry. Alan could almost see the steam coming out of his ears. “It’s just that I’m so tired of this… persecution.”

It was the second time he had used the word. Alan found it an odd word, an unsettling word. In fact, he found this whole conversation unsettling.

“Well, you know where I am,” Alan said.

“God, yes!” Keeton said, and went to the door.

“And, please, Danforth-remember about the handicap space.”

“Fuck the handicap space!” Keeton said, and slammed out.

Alan sat behind his desk and looked at the closed door for a long time, a troubled expression on his face. Then he went around the desk, picked up the crumpled cellophane cylinder lying on the floor, dropped it into the wastebasket, and went to the door to invite Steamboat Willie in.

6

“Mr. Keeton looked rather upset,” Rose said. He seated himself carefully in the chair the Head Selectman had just vacated, looked with distaste at the cigar-end sitting in the ashtray, and then placed his white Bible carefully in the center of his ungenerous lap.

“Lots of appropriations meetings in the next month or so,” Alan said vaguely. “I’m sure it’s a strain for all the selectmen.”

“Yes,” Rev. Rose agreed. “For Jesus-uh told us: ’render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s, and render unto God those things which are God’s."’ “Uh-huh,” Alan said. He suddenly wished he had a cigarette, something like a Lucky or a Pall Mall that was absolutely stuffed with tar and nicotine. “What can I render unto you this afternoon, R… Reverend Rose?” He was horrified to realize he had just come extremely close to calling the man Reverend Willie.

Rose took off his round rimless spectacles, polished them, and then settled them back in place, hiding the two small red spots high up on his nose. His black hair, plastered in place with some sort of hair potion Alan could smell but not identify, gleamed in the light of the fluorescent grid set into the ceiling.

“It’s about the abomination Father John Brigham chooses to call Casino Nite,” the Rev. Rose announced at last. “If you recall, Chief Pangborn, I came to you not long after I first heard of this dreadful idea to demand that you refuse to sanction such an event in the name-uh of decency.”

“Reverend Rose, if you’ll recall-” Rose held up one hand imperiously and dipped the other into his jacket pocket. He came out with a pamphlet which was almost the size of a paperback book. It was, Alan saw with a sinking heart (but no real surprise), the abridged version of the State of Maine’s Code of Laws.

“I now come again,” Rev. Rose said in ringing tones, “to demand that you forbid this event not only in the name of decency but i’n the name of the law!”

“Reverend Rose “This is Section 24, subsection 9, paragraph 2 of the Maine State Code of Laws,” Rev. Rose overrode him. His cheeks now flared with color, and Alan realized that the only thing he’d managed to do in the last few minutes was swap one crazy for another.

“’Except where noted-uh,’ “Rev. Rose read, his voice now taking on the pulpit chant with which his mostly adoring congregation was so familiar, “’games of chance, as previously defined in Section 23 of the Code-uh, where wagers of money are induced as a condition of play, shall be deemed illegal."’ He snapped the Code closed and looked at Alan. His eyes were blazing. “Shall be deemed-uh illegal!” he cried.

Alan felt a brief urge to throw his arms in the air and yell Praiseuhjeesus! When it had passed he said: “I’m aware of those sections of the Code which pertain to gambling, Reverend Rose. I looked them up after your earlier visit to me, and I showed them to Albert Martin, who does a lot of the town’s legal work. His opinion was that Section 24 does not apply to such functions as Casino Nite.”

He paused, then added: “I have to tell you that was my opinion, as well.”

“Impossible!” Rose spat. “They propose to turn a house of the Lord into a gambler’s lair, and you tell me that is legal?”

“It’s every bit as legal as the bingo games that have been going on at the Daughters of Isabella Hall since 1931.”

“This-uh is not bingo! This is roulette-uh! This is playing cards for money! This is"-Rev. Rose’s voice trembled-"dice-uh!”

Alan caught his hands trying to make another bird, and this time he locked them together on the desk blotter. “I had Albert write a letter of inquiry to Jim Tierney, the State’s Attorney General.

The answer was the same. I’m sorry, Reverend Rose. I know it offends you. Me, I’ve got a thing about kids on skateboards. I’d outlaw them if I could, but I can’t. In a democracy we sometimes have to put up with things we don’t like or approve of.”

“But this is gambling!” Rev. Rose said, and there was real anguish in his voice. “This is gambling for money! How can such a thing be legal, when the Code specifically says-”

“The way they do it, it’s really not gambling for money. Each participant… pays a donation at the door. In return, the participant is given an equal amount of play money. At the end of the night, a number of prizes-not money but prizes-are auctioned off. A VCR, a toaster-oven, a Dirt Devil, a set of china, things like that.” And some dancing, interior imp made him add: “I believe the initial donation may even be tax deductible.”

“It is a sinful abomination,” Rev. Rose said. The color had faded from his cheeks. His nostrils flared.

“That’s a moral judgment, not a legal one. It’s done this way all over the country.”

“Yes,” Rev. Rose said. He got to his feet, clutching his Bible before him like a shield. “By the Catholics. The Catholics love gambling. I intend to put a stop to this, Chief-uh Pangborn. With your help or without it.”

Alan also got up. “A couple of things, Reverend Rose. It’s Sheriff Pangborn, not Chief. And I can’t tell you what to say from your pulpit any more than I can tell Father Brigham what sort of events he can run in his church, or the Daughters of Isabella Hall, or the K of C Hall-as long as they’re not expressly forbidden by the State’s laws, that is-but I can warn you to be careful, and I think I have to warn you to be careful.”

Rose looked at him coldly. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that you’re upset. The posters your people have been putting up around town are okay, and the letters to the paper are okay, but there’s a line of infringement you must not cross. My advice is to let this one go by.”

“When-uh Jesus saw the whores and the moneylenders in-uh the Temple, He did not consult any written Code of Laws, Sheriff.

When-uh Jesus saw those evil men and women defiling the house of the Lord-uh, He looked for no line of infringement. Our Lord did what He-uh knew to be right!”

“Yes,” Alan said calmly, “but you’re not Him.”

Rose looked at him for a long moment, eyes blazing like gas-jets, and Alan thought: Uh-oh. This guy’s just as mad as a hatter.

“Good day, Chief Pangborn,” Rose said coldly.

This time Alan did not bother to correct him. He only nodded and held out his hand, knowing perfectly well it would not be shaken. Rose turned and stalked toward the door, Bible still held against his chest.

“Let this one go by, Reverend Rose, okay?” Alan called after him.

Rose neither turned nor spoke. He strode out the door and slammed it shut behind him hard enough to rattle the glass in the frame. Alan sat down behind his desk and pressed the heels of his palms to his temples.

A few moments later, Sheila Brigham poked her head timidly in through the door. “Alan?”

“is he gone?” Alan asked without looking up.

“The preacher? Yes. He slammed out of here like a March wind.

“Elvis has left the building,” Alan said hollowly.

“What?”

“Never mind.” He looked up. “I’d like some hard drugs, please.

Would you check the evidence locker, Sheila, and see what we have?”

She smiled. “Already have. The cupboard’s bare, I’m afraid.

Would a cup of coffee do?”

He smiled back. The afternoon had begun, and it had to be better than this morning-had to. “Sold.”

“Good deal.” She closed the door, and Alan at last let his hands out of jail. Soon a series of blackbirds was flying through a band of sunshine on the wall across from the window.

7

On Thursdays, the last period of the day at Castle Rock Middle School was set aside for activities. Because he was an honor student and would not be enrolled in a school activity until casting for the Winter Play took place, Brian Rusk was allowed to leave early on that day-it balanced out his late Tuesdays very nicely.

This Thursday afternoon he was out the side door almost before the sixth-period bell had stopped ringing. His packsack contained not only his books but the rain-slicker his mother had made him wear that morning, and it bulged comically on his back.

He rode away fast, his heart beating hard in his chest. He had something (a deed) to do. A little chore to get out of the way. Sort of a fun chore, actually. He now knew what it was. It had come to him clearly as he had been daydreaming his way through math class.

As Brian descended Castle Hill by way of School Street, the sun came out from behind the tattering clouds for the first time that day. He looked to his left and saw a shadow-boy on a shadowbike keeping pace with him on the wet pavement.

You’ll have to go fast to keep up with me today, shadow-kid, he thought. I got places to go and things to do.

Brian pedaled through the business district without looking across Main Street at Needful Things, pausing briefly at intersections for a perfunctory glance each way before hurrying on again.

When he reached the intersection of Pond (which was his street) and Ford streets, he turned right instead of continuing up Pond Street to his house. At the intersection of Ford and Willow, he turned left.

Willow Street paralleled Pond Street; the back yards of the houses on the two streets backed up against each other, divided in most cases by board fences.

Pete and Wilma Jersyck lived on Willow Street.

Got to be a little careful here.

But he knew how to be careful; he had worked all that out in his mind on the ride from school, and it had come easily, almost as though it had also been there all along, like his knowledge of the thing he was supposed to do.

The jerzyck house was quiet and the driveway was empty, but that didn’t necessarily make everything safe and okay. Brian knew that Wilma worked at least part of the time at Hemphill’s Market out on Route I17, because he had seen her there, running a cashregister with the ever-present scarf tied over her head, but that didn’t mean she was there now. The beat-up little Yugo she drove might be parked in the jerzyck garage, where he couldn’t see.

Brian pedaled his bike up the driveway, got off, and put down the kickstand. He could feel his heartbeat in his ears and his throat now.

It sounded like the ruffle of drums. He walked to the front door, rehearsing the lines he would speak if it turned out Mrs. jerzyck was there after all.

Hi, Mrs. jerzyck, I’m Brian Rusk, from the other side of the block?

I go to the MiddleSchoolandpretty soon we’re going to beselling magazine subscriptions, so the band can get new uniforms, and I’ve been asking people if they want magazines. So I can come back later when I’ve got my sales kit. We get prizes if we sell a lot.

It had sounded good when he was working it out in his head, and it still sounded good, but he felt tense all the same. He stood on the doorstep for a minute, listening for sounds inside the house-a radio, a TV tuned to one of the stories (not Santa Barbara, though; it wouldn’t be Santa Barbara time for another couple of hours), maybe a vacuum. He heard nothing, but that didn’t mean any more than the empty driveway.

Brian rang the doorbell. Faintly, somewhere in the depths of the house, he heard it: Bing-Bong!

He stood on the stoop, waiting, looking around occasionally to see if anyone had noticed him, but Willow Street seemed fast asleep.

And there was a hedge in front of the jerzyck house. That was good. When you were up to (a deed) something that people-your Ma and Pa, for instance-wouldn’t exactly approve of, a hedge was about the best thing in the world.

It had been half a minute, and nobody was coming. So far so good… but it was also better to be safe than sorry. He rang the doorbell again, thumbing it twice this time, so the sound from the belly of the house was BingBong! BingBong!

Still nothing.

Okay, then. Everything was perfectly okay. Everything was, in fact, most sincerely awesome and utterly radical.

Sincerely awesome and utterly radical or not, Brian could not resist another look around-a rather furtive one this time-as he trundled his bike, with the kickstand still down, between the house and the garage. In this area, which the friendly folks at the Dick Perry Siding and Door Company in South Paris called a breezeway, Brian parked his bike again. Then he walked on into the back yard.

His heart was pounding harder than ever. Sometimes his voice shook when his heart was pounding hard like this. He hoped that if Mrs. jerzyck was out back, planting bulbs or something, his voice wouldn’t shake when he told her about the magazine subscriptions.

If it did, she might suspect he wasn’t telling the truth. And that could lead to kinds of trouble he didn’t even want to think about.

He halted near the back of the house. He could see part of the jerzyck back yard, but not all of it. And suddenly this didn’t seem like so much fun any more. Suddenly it seemed like a mean trickno more than that, but certainly no less. An apprehensive voice suddenly spoke up in his mind. Why not just climb back on your bike again, Brian? Go on back home. Have a glass of milk and think this over.

Yes. That seemed like a very good-a very sane-idea. He actually began to turn around… and then a picture came to him, one which was a great deal more powerful than the voice. He saw a long black car-a Cadillac or maybe a Lincoln Mark IV-pulling up in front of his house. The driver’s door opened and Mr. Leland Gaunt stepped out. Only Mr. Gaunt was no longer wearing a smoking jacket like the one Sherlock Holmes wore in some of the stories.

The Mr. Gaunt who now strode across the landscape of Brian’s imagination wore a formidable black suit-the suit of a funeral director-and his face was no longer friendly. His dark-blue eyes were even darker in anger, and his lips had pulled back from his crooked teeth… but not in a smile. His long, thin legs went scissoring up the walk to the Rusk front door, and the shadow-man attached to his heels looked like a hangman in a horror movie.

When he got to the door he would not pause to ring the bell, oh no. He would simply barge in. If Brian’s Ma tried to get in his way he would push her aside. If Brian’s Pa tried to get in his way he would knock him down. And if Brian’s little brother, Sean, tried to get in his way he would heave him the length of the house, like a quarterback throwing a Hail Mary. He would stride upstairs, bellowing Brian’s name, and the roses on the wallpaper would wilt when that hangman’s shadow passed over them.

He’dfind me, too, Brian thought. His face as he stood by the side of the jerzyck house was a study in dismay. It wouldn’t matter if I tried to hide. It wouldn’t matter if I went all the way to Bombay.

He’d find me. And when he did. He tried to block the picture, to turn it off, and couldn’t. He saw Mr. Gaunt’s eyes growing, turning into blue chasms which went down and down into some horrid indigo eternity. He saw Mr. Gaunt’s long hands, with their queerly even fingers, turning into claws as they descended upon his shoulders. He felt his skin crawl at that loathsome touch. He heard Mr. Gaunt bellowing: You have something of mine, Brian, and you haven’t Paidfor it!

I’ll give it back! he heard himself screaming at that twisted, burning face. Please oh please I’ll give it back I’ll give it back, Just don’t hurt me!

Brian returned to himself, as dazed as he had been when he came out of Needful Things on Tuesday afternoon. The feeling now wasn’t as pleasant as it had been then.

He didn’t want to give back the Sandy Koufax card, that was the thing.

He didn’t want to, because it was his.

8

Myra Evans stepped under the awning of Needful Things just as her best friend’s son was finally walking into Wilma jerzyck’s back yard.

Myra’s glance, first behind her and then across Main Street, was even more furtive than Brian’s glance across Willow Street had been.

If Cora-who really was her best friend-knew she was here, and, more important, why she was here, she would probably never speak to Myra again. Because Cora wanted the picture, too.

Never mind that, Myra thought. Two sayings occurred to her and both seemed to fit this situation. First come, first served was one.

What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her was the other.

All the same, Myra had donned a large pair of Foster Grant sunglasses before coming downtown. Better safe than sorry was another worthwhile piece of advice.

Now she advanced slowly on the door and studied the sign which hung there:

TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY

Myra did not have an appointment. She had come down here on the spur of the moment, galvanized into action by a call from Cora not twenty minutes ago.

“I’ve been thinking about it all day! I’ve simply got to have it, Myra-I should have bought it on Wednesday, but I only had four dollars in my purse and I wasn’t sure if he’d take a personal check.

You know how embarrassing it is when people won’t. I’ve been kicking myself ever since. Why, I hardly slept a wink last night. I know you’ll think it’s silly, but it’s true.”

Myra didn’t think it was silly at all, and she knew it was true, because she had hardly slept a wink last night, either. And it was wrong of Cora to assume that picture should be hers simply because she had seen it first-as if that gave her some sort of divine right, or something.

“I don’t believe she saw it first, anyway,” Myra said in a small, sulky voice. “I think I saw it first.”

The question of who had seen that absolutely delicious picture first was really moot, anyway. What wasn’t moot was how Myra felt when she thought of coming into Cora’s house and seeing that picture of Elvis hung above the mantel, right between Cora’s ceramic Elvis figure and Cora’s porcelain Elvis beer-stein. When she thought of that, Myra’s stomach rose to somewhere just under her heart and hung there, knotted like a wet rag. It was the way she’d felt during the first week of the war against Iraq.

It wasn’t right. Cora had all sorts of nice Elvis things, had even seen Elvis in concert once. That had been at the Portland Civic Center, a year or so before The King was called to heaven to be with his beloved mother.

“That picture should be mine,” she muttered, and, summoning all her courage, she knocked on the door. it was opened almost before she could lower her hand, and a narrow-shouldered man almost bowled her over on his way out.

“Excuse me,” he muttered, not raising his head, and she barely had time to register the fact that it was Mr. Constantine, the pharmacist at LaVerdiere’s Super Drug. He hurried across the street and then onto the Town Common, holding a small wrapped package in his hands, looking neither to the right nor to the left.

When she looked back, Mr. Gaunt was in the doorway, smiling at her with his cheery brown eyes.

“I don’t have an appointment she said in a small voice.

Brian Rusk, who had grown used to hearing Myra pronouncing on things in a tone of total authority and assurance, would not have recognized that voice in a million years.

“You do now, dear lady,” Mr. Gaunt said, smiling and standing aside. “Welcome back! Enter freely, and leave some of the happiness you bring!”

After one final quick look around that showed her no one she knew, Myra Evans scurried into Needful Things.

The door swung shut behind her.

A long-fingered hand, as white as the hand of a corpse, reached up in the gloom, found the ring-pull which hung down, and drew the shade.

Brian didn’t realize he had been holding his breath until he let it out in a long, whistling sigh.

There was no one in the jerzyck back yard.

Wilma, undoubtedly encouraged by the improving weather, had hung out her wash before leaving for work or wherever she had gone. It flapped on three lines in the sunshine and freshening breeze. Brian went to the back door and peered in, shading the sides of his face with his hands to cut the glare. He was looking into a deserted kitchen.

He thought of knocking and decided it was just another way to keep from doing what he had come to do. No one was here. The best thing was to complete his business and then get the hell out.

He walked slowly down the steps and into the jerzyck back yard.

The clotheslines, with their freight of shirts, pants, underwear, sheets, and pillow-cases, were to the left. To the right was a small garden from which all the vegetables, with the exception of a few puny pumpkins, had been harvested. At the far end was a fence of pine boards. On the other side, Brian knew, was the Haverhills’ place, only four houses down from his own.

The heavy rain of the night before had turned the garden into a swamp; most of the remaining pumpkins sat half-submerged in puddles.

Brian bent, picked up a handful of dark-brown garden muck in each hand, and then advanced on the clothesline with dribbles of brown water running between his fingers.

The clothesline closest to the garden was hung with sheets along its entire length. They were still damp, but drying quickly in the breeze. They made lazy flapping sounds. They were pure, pristine white.

Go on, Mr. Gaunt’s voice whispered in his mind. Go for it, Brian-just like Sandy Koufax. Go for i’t!

Brian drew his hands back over his shoulders, palms up to the sky.

He was not entirely surprised to find he had a hard-on again, as in his dream. He was glad he hadn’t chickened out. This was going to be fun.

He brought his hands forward, hard. The mud slung off his palms in long brown swoops that spread into fans before striking the billowing sheets. It splattered across them in runny, ropy parabolas.

He went back to the garden, got two more handfuls, threw them at the sheets, went back, got more, and threw that, too. A kind of frenzy descended on him. He trundled busily back and forth, first getting the mud, then throwing it.

He might have gone on all afternoon if someone hadn’t yelled.

At first he thought it was him the someone was yelling at. He hunched his shoulders and a terrified little squeal escaped him. Then he realized it was just Mrs. Haverhill, calling her dog from the other side of the fence.

Just the same, he had to get out of here. And quick.

He paused for a moment, though, looking at what he had done, and he felt a momentary quiver of shame and unease.

The sheets had protected most of the clothes, but the sheets themselves were plastered with muck. There were only a few isolated white patches left to show what color they had originally been.

Brian looked at his hands, which were caked with mud. Then he hurried over to the corner of the house, where there was a faucet bib.

It hadn’t been turned off yet; when he turned the handle, a cold stream of water poured from the spigot. He thrust his hands into it and rubbed them together hard. He washed until all the mud was gone, including the goo under his fingernails, unmindful of the spreading numbness. He even held his shirt-cuffs under the spigot.

He turned off the faucet, went back to his bike, put up the kickstand, and walked it back down the driveway. He had a very bad moment when he saw a small yellow compact car coming, but it was a Civic, not a Yugo. It went past without slowing, its driver unmindful of the little boy with the red, chapped hands frozen beside his bike in the jerzyck driveway, the little boy whose face was nearly a billboard with one word-GUILTY!-screaming across it.

When the car was gone, Brian mounted his bike and began to I pedal, hellbent for leather. He didn’t stop until he was coasting up his own driveway. The numbness was leaving his hands by then, but they itched and smarted… and they were still red.

When he went in, his mother called, “That you, Brian?” from the living room.

“Yes, Ma.” What he had done in the jerzyck back yard already seemed like something he might have dreamed. Surely the boy standing here in this sunny, sane kitchen, the boy who was now going to the refrigerator and taking out the milk, could not be the same boy who had plunged his hands up to the wrists in the mud of Wilma jerzyck’s garden and then flung that mud at Wilma Jerzyck’s clean sheets again and again and again.

Surely not.

He poured himself a glass of milk, studying his hands as he did.

They were clean. Red, but clean. He put the milk back. His heart had returned to its normal rhythm.

“Did you have a good day at school, Brian?” Cora’s voice floated out.

“It was okay.”

“Want to come in and watch TV with me? Santa Barbara will be on pretty soon, and there’s Hershey’s Icsses.”

“Sure,” he said, “but I’m going upstairs for a few minutes first.”

“Don’t you leave a milk-glass up there! It goes all sour and stinks and it never comes off in the dishwasher!”

“I’ll bring it down, Ma.”

“You better!”

Brian went upstairs and spent half an hour sitting at his desk, dreaming over his Sandy Koufax card. When Sean came in to ask if he wanted to go down to the corner store with him, Brian shut his baseball-card book with a snap and told Sean to get out of his room and not to come back until he learned how to knock on a door when it was shut. He heard Sean standing out in the hallway, crying, and felt no sympathy at all.

There was, after all, such a thing as manners.

Warden threw a party in the county jail, Prison band was there and they began to wail, The band was J’Umpin and the joint began to swing, Y’oughtta heard those knocked-out jailhirds sing!

The King stands wi’th his legs apart, his blue eyes blazing, the bell bottoms of his white JUmpsuit shaking. Rhinestones glitter andflash in the overhead spotlights. A sheaf of blue-black hair falls across his forehead. The mike is near his mouth, but not so near Myra cannot see the pouty curl of his upper lip.

She can see everything. She is i’n the first row.

And suddenly, as the rhythm section blasts off, he is holding a hand out, holding it out to HER, the way Bruce Springsteen (who will never be The King in a million years, no matter how hard he tries) holds his hand out to that girl i’n his “Dancing in the Dark” video.

For a moment she’s too stunned to do anything, too stunned to move, and then hands from behind push her forward, and HIs hand has closed over her wrist, HIs hand is pulling her up on stage. She can SMELL him, a mixture of sweat, English Leather, and hot, clean flesh.

A bare moment later, Myra Evans is in Elvis Presley’s arms.

The satin of his jumpsuit is slick under her hands. The arms around her are muscular. That face, HIS face, the face of The King, is inches from hers. He is dancing with her-they are a couple, Myra Josephine Evans from Castle Rock, Malone, and Elvis Aron Presley, from Memphis, Tennessee! They dirty-dance their way across a wide stage in front of four thousand screaming fans as the jordanaires chant that funky old fifties refrain: “Let’s rock… everybody let’s rock…

“His hips move in against hers; she can feel the coiled tension at the center of him nudging against her belly. Then he twirls her, her skirt flares out flat, showing her legs all the way to the lace of her Victoria’s Secret panties, her hand spins inside his like an axle inside a huh, and then he is drawing her to him again, and his hand slides down the small of her hack to the swell of her buttocks, cupping her tightly to him.

For a moment she looks down and there, beyond and below the glare of the footlights, she sees Cora Rusk staring up. Cora’s face is baleful with hate and witchy with envy.

Then Elvis turns her head toward him and speaks in that syrupy mid-South drawl.- “Ain’t we supposed to be lookin at each othah, honeh?”

Before she can reply, his full lips are on hers; the smell of him and thefeel ofhimfill the world. Then, suddenly, his tongue is in her mouththe King of Rock and Roll is french-kissing her in front of Cora and the whole damned world! He draws her tight against him again and as the horns kick in with a syncopated shriek, she feels ecstatic heat begin to uncoil in her loins. Oh, it has never been like this, not even down at Castle Lake with Ace Merrill all those years ago. She wants to scream, but his tongue is hurled in her mouth and she can only claw “into his smooth satin back, pumping her hips as the horns thunder into “My Way.”

Mr. Gaunt sat in one of the plush chairs, watching Myra Evans with clinical detachment as her orgasm ripped through her. She was shaking like a woman experiencing a total neural breakdown, the picture of Elvis clutched tightly in her hands, eyes closed, bosom heaving, legs tightening, loosening, tightening, loosening. Her hair had lost its beauty-shop curl and lay against her head in a not-toocharming helmet. Her double chins ran with sweat much as Elvis’s own had done as he gyrated ponderously across the stage during his last few concerts.

“Ooohh!” Myra cried, shaking like a bowl of jelly on a plate.

“Ooooh! Oooooooh my God! Ooooooooooooh my Gahhhhhhhhd!

OOOOHHHHH-” Mr. Gaunt idly tweezed the crease of his dark slacks between his thumb and forefinger, shook it out to its former razor sharpness, then leaned forward and snatched the picture from Myra’s hands.

Her eyes, full of dismay, flew open at once. She grabbed for the picture, but it was already out of her reach. She started to get up.

“Sit down,” Mr. Gaunt said.

Myra remained where she was, as if she had been turned to stone during the act of rising.

“If you ever want to see this picture again, Myra, sit… down.”

She sat, staring at him in dumb agony. Large patches of sweat were creeping out from under her arms and along the sides of her breasts.

“Please,” she said. The word came out in a croak so dusty that it was like a puff of wind in the desert. She held her hands out.

“Name me a price,” Gaunt invited.

She thought. Her eyes rolled in her sweaty face. Her Adam’s apple went up and down.

“Forty dollars!” she cried.

He laughed and shook his head.

“Fifty!”

“Ridiculous. You must not want this picture very badly, Myra.”

“I do!” Tears began to seep from the corners of her eyes. They ran down her cheeks, mixing with the sweat there. “I doooooo!”

“All right,” he said. “You want it. I accept the fact that you want it. But do you need it, Myra? Do you really need it?”

“Sixty! That’s all I’ve got! That’s every red cent!”

“Myra, do I look like a child to you?”

No-”

“I think I must. I’m an old man-older than you would believe, I’ve aged very well, if I do say so myself-but I really think I must look like a child to you, a child who will believe a woman who lives in a brand-new duplex less than three blocks from Castle View has only sixty dollars to her name.”

“You don’t understand! My husband-” Mr. Gaunt rose, still holding the picture. The smiling man who had stood aside to grant her admittance was no longer in this room.

“You didn’t have an appointment, Myra, did you? No. I saw you out of the goodness of my heart. But now I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

“Seventy! Seventy dollars!”

“You insult my intelligence. Please go.”

Myra fell on her knees before him. She was weeping in hoarse, panicky sobs. She clutched his calves as she grovelled before him. “Please! Please, Mr. Gaunt! I have to have that picture! I have to! It does… you wouldn’t believe what it does!”

Mr. Gaunt looked at the picture of Elvis and a momentary look of distaste crossed his face. “I don’t think I’d want to know,” he said.

“It looked extremely… sweaty.”

“But if it was more than seventy dollars, I’d have to write a check. Chuck would know. He’d want to know what I spent it for. And if I told him, he’d… he’d…”

“That,” Mr. Gaunt said, “is not my problem. I am a shopkeeper, not a marriage counsellor.” He was looking down at her, speaking to the top of her sweaty head. “I’m sure that someone else-Mrs. Rusk, for instance will be able to afford this rather unique likeness of the late Mr. Presley.”

At the mention of Cora, Myra’s head snapped up. Her eyes were sunken, glittering points in deep brown sockets. Her teeth were revealed in a snarl. She looked, in that instant, quite insane.

“You’d sell it to her?” she hissed.

“I believe in free trade,” Mr. Gaunt said. “It’s what made this country great. I really wish you’d let go of me, Myra. Your hands are positively running with sweat. I’m going to have to have these pants dry-cleaned, and even then I’m not sure-”

“Eighty! Eighty dollars!”

“I’ll sell it to you for exactly twice that,” Mr. Gaunt said.

“One hundred and sixty dollars.” He grinned, revealing his large, crooked teeth. “And Myra-your personal check is good with me.”

She uttered a howl of despair. “I can’t! Chuck will kill me!”

“Maybe,” Mr. Gaunt said, “but you would be dying for a hunkahunka burning love, would you not?”

“A hundred,” Myra whined, grabbing his calves again as he tried to step away from her. “Please, a hundred dollars.”

“A hundred and forty,” Gaunt countered. “It’s as low as I can go. It is my final offer.”

“All right,” Myra panted. “All right, that’s all right, I’ll pay it-”

“And you’ll have to throw in a blowjob, of course,” Gaunt said, grinning down at her.

She looked up at him, her mouth a perfect “O”. “What did you say?” she whispered.

“Blow me!” he shouted down at her. “Fellate me! Open that gorgeous metal-filled mouth of yours and gobble my crank!”

“Oh my God,” Myra moaned.

“As you wish,” Mr. Gaunt said, beginning to turn away.

She grabbed him before he could leave her. A moment later her shaking hands were scrabbling at his fly.

He let her scrabble for a few moments, his face amused, and then he slapped her hands away. “Forget it,” he said. “Oral sex gives me amnesia.”

“What-”

“Never mind, Myra.” He tossed her the picture. She flailed her hands at it, caught it somehow, and clutched it to her bosom. “There is one other thing, however.”

“What?” she hissed at him.

“Do you know the man who tends the bar on the other side of the Tin Bridge?”

She was beginning to shake her head, her eyes filling with alarm again, then realized who he must mean. “Henry Beaufort?”

“Yes. I believe he also owns the establishment, which is called The Mellow Tiger. A rather interesting name.”

“Well, I don’t know him, but I know who he is, I guess.”

She had never been in The Mellow Tiger in her life, but she knew as well as anyone who owned and ran the place.

“Yes. Him. I want you to play a little trick on Mr. Beaufort.”

“What… what kind of a trick?”

Gaunt reached down, grasped one of Myra’s sweat-slimy hands, and helped her to her feet.

“That,” he said, “is something we can talk about while you write your check, Myra.” He smiled then, and all his charm flooded back into his face. His brown eyes sparkled and danced. “And by the way, would you like your picture gift-wrapped?”