Needful Things (Page 17)

He sat up, shivering all over. His first impulse was to open his mouth and yell for his mother, as he had done when he was small and a nightmare had invaded his sleep. Then he realized that he wasn’t small anymore, he was eleven… and it wasn’t exactly the sort of dream you told your mother about, anyway, was it?

He lay back, eyes wide and staring into the dark. He glanced at the digital clock on the table next to the bed and saw it was four minutes past midnight. He could hear the sound of rain, hard now, pelting against his bedroom window, driven by huge, whooping gasps of wind. It sounded almost like sleet.

My card. My Sandy Koufax card it’s gone. it wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t, but he also knew he would not be able to go back to sleep until he’d checked to make sure it was still there, in the looseleaf binder where he kept his growing collection of Topps cards from 1956. He had checked it before leaving for school yesterday, had done so again when he got home, and last night, after supper, he had broken off playing pass in the back yard with Stanley Dawson to check on it once more. He had told Stanley he had to go to the bathroom. He had peeked at it one final time before crawling into bed and turning out the light. He recognized that it had become a kind of obsession with him, but recognition did not put a stop to it.

He slipped out of bed, barely noticing the way the cool air brought out goosebumps on his hot body and made his penis wilt.

He walked quietly across to his dresser. He left the shape of his own body behind him on the sheet which covered his mattress, printed in sweat. The big book lay on top of the dresser in a pool of white light thrown by the streetlamp outside.

He took it down, opened it, and paged rapidly through the sheets of clear plastic with the pockets you put the cards in. He passed Mel Parnell, Whitey Ford, and Warren Spahn-treasures over which he had once crowed mightily-with hardly a glance. He had a moment of terrible panic when he reached the sheets at the back of the book, the ones which were still empty, without seeing Sandy Koufax. Then he realized he had turned several pages at once in his hurry. He turned back, and yes, there he was-that narrow face, those faintly smiling, dedicated eyes looking out from beneath the bill of the cap.

To my good friend Brian, with best wishes, Sandy Koufax.

His fingers traced over the sloping lines of the inscription. His lips moved. He felt at peace again… or almost at peace. The card wasn’t really his yet. This was just sort of a… a trial run. There was something he had to do before it would really be his. Brian wasn’t completely sure what it was, but he knew it had something to do with the dream from which he had just wakened, and he was confident that he would know when the time (tomorrow? later today?) came.

He closed the looseleaf binder-BRIAN’s COLLECTION DO NOT TOUCH!

carefully printed on the file card Scotch-taped to the front-and returned it to the dresser. Then he went back to bed.

Only one thing about having the Sandy Koufax card was troubling.

He had wanted to show it to his father. Coming home from Needful Things, he had imagined just how it would be when he showed it to him.

He, Brian, elaborately casual: Hey, Dad, I picked up a ’56 today at the new store. Want to check it out? His dad would say okay, not really interested, just going along with Brian to his room to keep Brian happy-but how his eyes would light up when he saw what Brian had lucked into! And when he saw the inscription-!

Yes, he would be amazed and delighted, all right. He’d probably clap Brian on the back and give him a high-five.

But then what?

Then the questions would start, that was what… and that was the problem. His father would want to know, first, where he had gotten the card, and second, where he had gotten the money to buy such a card, which was (a.) rare, (b.) in excellent condition, and (c.) autographed.

The printed signature on the card read Sanford Koufax, which was the fabled fastball pitcher’s real name. The autographed signature read Sandy Koufax, and in the weird and sometimes high-priced world of baseball trading-card collectors, that meant fair market value might be as much as a hundred and fifty dollars.

In his mind, Brian tried out one possible answer.

I got it at the new store, Dad-Needful Things. The guy gave it to me at a really WICKED discount… he said it would make people more interested in coming to his store if they knew he kept his prices down, This was good as far as it went, but even a kid still a year too young to pay the full adult price of admission at the movies knew it didn’t go far enough. When you said somebody had given you a really good deal on something, people were always interested. Too interested.

Oh yeah? How much did he knock off Th’ per cent? Forty? Did @if? 1 rty he give i’t to you for half price? Thatd still be sixty or seventy bucks, Brian, and I KNOW you don’t have that kind of money just laying around in your piggy-bank.

Well… actually it was a little less than that, Dad.

Okay, tell me. How much did you pay?

Well… eighty-five cents.

He sold you a 1956 autographed Sandy Koufax baseball card, i’n uncirculated condition, for eighty-five cents?

Yeah, that’s where the real trouble would start, all right.

What kind of trouble? He didn’t know, exactly, but there would be a stink, he was sure of that. Somehow he would get blamed maybe by his dad, but by his mom for sure.

They might even try to make him give it back, and there was no way he was going to give it back. It wasn’t just signed; it was signed to Brian.

No way.

Hell, he hadn’t even been able to show Stan Dawson when Stan came over to play pass, although he’d wanted to-Stan would have fudged his jockeys. But Stan was going to sleep over on Friday night, and it was all too easy for Brian to imagine him saying to Brian’s dad: So howd you like Brian’s Sandy Koufax card, Mr. Rusk.-‘ Pretty rad, huh? The same went for his other friends. Brian had uncovered one of the great truths of small towns: many secretsin fact, all the really important secrets-cannot be shared. Because word has a way of getting around, and getting around fast.

He found himself in a strange and uncomfortable position. He had come by a great thing and could not show or share it. This should have vitiated his pleasure in his new acquisition, and it did, to some extent, but it also afforded him a furtive, niggardly satisfaction. He found himself not so much enjoying the card as gloating over it, and so he had uncovered another great truth: gloating in private provides its own peculiar pleasure. It was as if one corner of his mostly open and goodhearted nature had been walled off and then lit with a special black light that both distorted and enhanced what was hidden there.

And he was not going to give it up.

No way, uh-uh, negatory.

Then you better finish paying for it, a voice deep in his mind whispered.

He would. No problem there. He didn’t think the thing he was supposed to do was exactly nice, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t anything totally gross, either. just a… a… just a prank, a voice whispered in his mind, and he saw the eyes of Mr. Gaunt-dark blue, like the sea on a clear day, and strangely soothing. That’s all. just a little prank.

Yeah, just a prank, whatever it was.

No problem.

He settled deeper under his goosedown quilt, turned over on his side, closed his eyes, and immediately began to doze.

Something occurred to him as he and his brother sleep drew closer to each other. Something Mr. Gaunt had said. You will be a better advertisement than the local paper could ever THINK of being!

Only he couldn’t show the wonderful card he had bought. If a little thought had made that obvious to him, an eleven-year-old kid who wasn’t even bright enough to keep out of Hugh Priest’s way when he was crossing the street, shouldn’t a smart guy like Mr. Gaunt have seen it, too?

Well, maybe. But maybe not. Grownups didn’t think the same as normal people, and besides, he had the card, didn’t he? And it was in his book, right where it should be, wasn’t it?

The answer to both questions was yes, and so Brian let go of the whole thing an went back to sleep as the rain pelted against his window and the restless fall wind screamed in the angles beneath the eaves.

CHAPTER FOUR

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.