Needful Things (Page 56)

She wiped it away with the sleeve of her coat and went on running.

The sidewalk was deserted, and most eyes inside the houses which were occupied this early Sunday afternoon were trained on the Patriots-jets game. Nettle was seen by only one person.

Tansy Williams, fresh from two days in Portland where she and her mommy had gone to visit Grampa, was looking out the livingroom window, sucking a lollypop and holding her teddy bear, Owen, under her left arm, when Nettle went by with wings on her heels.

"Mommy, a lady just ran by," Tansy reported.

Amanda Williams was sitting in the kitchen with Myrtle Keeton.

They each had a cup of coffee. The fondue pot sat between them on the table. Myrtle had just asked if there was any town business going on that Dan should know about, and Amanda considered this a very odd question. If Buster wanted to know something, why hadn’t he come in himself? For that matter, why such a question on a Sunday afternoon in the first place?

"Honey, Mommy’s talking with Mrs. Keeton."

"She had blood on her," Tansy reported further.

Amanda smiled at Myrtle. "I told Buddy that if he was going to rent that Fatal Attraction, he should wait until Tansy was in bed to watch it."

Meantime, Nettle went on running. When she reached the intersection of Castle View and Laurel, she had to stop for awhile.

The Public Library was here, and there was a curved stone wall running around its lawn. She leaned against it, gasping and sobbing for breath as the wind tore past her, tugging at her coat. Her hands were pressed against her left side, where she had a deep stitch.

She looked back up the hill and saw that the street was empty.

Buster had not been following her after all; that had just been her imagination. After a few moments she was able to hunt through her coat pockets for a Kleenex to wipe away some of the blood on her face.

She found one, and she also discovered that the key to Buster’s house was no longer there. It might have fallen out of her pocket as she ran down the hill, but she thought it more likely that she had left it in the lock of the front door. But what did that matter? She had gotten out before Buster saw her, that was the important thing. She thanked God that Mr. Gaunt’s voice had spoken to her in the nick of time, forgetting that Mr. Gaunt was the reason she had been in Buster’s home in the first place.

She looked at the smear of blood on the Kleenex and decided the cut probably wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The flow seemed to be slowing down. The stitch in her side was going away, too. She pushed off the rock wall and began to plod toward home with her head down, so the cut wouldn’t show.

Home, that was the thing to think about. Home and her beautiful carnival glass lampshade. Home and the Sunday Super Movie.

Home and Raider. When she was at home with the door locked, the shades pulled, the TV on, and Raider sleeping at her feet, all of this would seem like a horrible dream-the sort of dream she’d had in juniper Hill, after she had killed her husband.

Home, that was the place for her.

Nettle walked a little faster. She would be there soon.

11

Pete and Wilma jerzyck had a light lunch with the Pulaskis after Mass, and following lunch, Pete and jake Pulaski settled in front of the TV to watch the Patriots kick some New York ass. Wilma cared not a fig for football-baseball, basketball, or hockey, either, as far as that went. The only pro sport she liked was wrestling, and although Pete didn’t know it, Wilma would have left him in the wink of an eye for Chief jay Strongbow.

She helped Frieda with the dishes, then said she was going home to watch the rest of the Sunday Super Movie-it was On the Beach, with Gregory Peck. She told Pete she was taking the car.

"That’s fine," he said, his eyes never leaving the TV. "I don’t mind walking."

"Goddam good thing for you," she muttered under her breath as she went out.

Wilma was actually in a good mood, and the major reaion had to do with Casino Nite. Father John wasn’t backing down on it the way Wilma had expected him to do, and she had liked the way he’d looked that morning during the homily, which was called "Let Us Each Tend Our Own Garden." His tone had been as mild as ever, but there had been nothing mild about his blue eyes or his outthrust chin. Nor had all his fancy gardening metaphors fooled Wilma or anyone else about what he was saying: if the Baptists insisted on sticking their collective nose into the Catholic carrot-patch, they were going to get their collective ass kicked.

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

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

12

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

TRAFFIC VIOLATION WARNING

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

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

Drive defensively!

Arrive alive!

Your Local Police Department thanks you!

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

BUSTER 1.

Most of the slip was taken up by a checklist of common traffic violations such as failure to signal, failure to stop, and illegal parking.

None of them was checked. Toward the bottom were the words OTHER VIOLATION(S), followed by two blank lines. OTHER VIOLATION(S) had been checked. The message on the lines provided to describe the violation was also neatly printed in small block capitals. It read:

BEING THE BIGGEST COCKSUCKER IN CASTLE ROCK.

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

Slowly, very slowly, Keeton clenched his fist on the pink slip.

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

"I’ll kill him," Keeton whispered. "I swear to God and all the saints I’ll kill that skinny little f**k."

13

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

She still had her own key; that was in the pocket of her dress.

She took it out and put it in the lock. "Raider?" she called as she turned it. "Raider, I’m home!"

She opened the door.

"Where’s Mummy’s wittle boy, hmmm? Where is urns? Izzum hungwy?"

The hallway was dark, and at first she did not see the small bundle lying on the floor. She took her key out of the lock and stepped in.

"Is Mummy’s wittle boy awful hungwy? Izzum just sooo hung-" Her foot struck something which was both stiff and yielding, and her voice halted in mid-simper. She looked down and saw Raider.

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

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

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

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

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

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