Needful Things (Page 76)

Brian considered it briefly. No. He couldn’t imagine going down to the video arcade, not today, maybe not ever again. All the other kids would be there-today you’d have to wait in line to get at the good games like Air Raid-but he was different from them now, and he might always be different.

After all, he had a 1956 Sandy Koufax card.

Still, he wanted to do something nice for Sean, for anyone-something that would make up a little for the monstrous thing he had done to Wilma jerzyck. So he told Sean he might want to play some video games that afternoon, but to take some quarters in the meantime.

Brian shook them out of his big plastic Coke bottle bank.

"Jeepers!" Sean said, his eyes round. "There’s eight… nine… ten quarters here! You really must be sick!"

"Yeah, I guess I must be. Have fun, Sean-o. And don’t tell Mom, or she’ll make you put them back."

"She’s in her room, moonin around in those dark glasses," Sean said. "She doesn’t even know we’re alive." He paused for a moment and then added: "I hate those dark glasses. They’re totally creepy."

He looked more closely at his big brother. "You really don’t look so great, Bri."

"I don’t feel so great," Brian said truthfully. "I think I’ll lie down."

"Well… I’ll wait for you awhile. See if you feel any better.

I’ll be watchin cartoons on channel fifty-six. Come on down if you feel better." Sean shook the quarters in his cupped hands.

"I will," Brian said, and closed his door softly as his little brother walked away.

But he hadn’t felt any better. As the day drew on, he just went on feeling (cloudier) worse and worse. He thought of Mr. Gaunt. He thought of Sandy Koufax. He thought of that glaring newspaper headlineMURDEROUS SPAT LEAVES TWO WOMEN DEAD IN CASTLE ROCK. He thought of those pictures, familiar faces swimming up from clumps of black dots.

Once he almost fell asleep, and then the little record player started up in his mother and father’s bedroom. Mom was playing her scratchy Elvis 45s again. She had been doing it almost all weekend.

Thoughts went whirling and rocking through Brian’s head like bits of clutter caught up in a cyclone.

MURDEROUS SPAT.

"You know they said you was high-class… but that was just a lie… "It was a duel.

MURDEROus: Nettle Cobb, the lady with the dog.

"You ain’t never caught a rabbit… "When you deal with me, you want to remember two things, SPA T: Wilma jerzyck, the lady with the sheets.

Mr. Gaunt knows hest…

"… and you ain’t no friend of mine… and the duelling isn’t done until Mr. Gaunt SAYS it’s done.

Around and around these thoughts went, a jumble of terror, guilt, and misery set to the beat of Elvis Presley’s golden hits. By noon, Brian’s stomach had begun to roil and knot. He hurried down to the bathroom at the end of the hall in his stocking feet, closed the door, and vomited into the toilet bowl as quietly as he could.

His mother didn’t hear. She was still in her room, where Elvis was now telling her he wanted to be her teddy bear.

As Brian walked slowly back to his room, feeling more miserable than ever, a horrible, haunting certainty came to him: his Sandy Koufax card was gone. Someone had stolen it last night while he slept. He had participated in a murder because of that card, and now it was gone.

He broke into a run, almost slipped on the rug in the middle of his bedroom floor, and snatched his baseball-card book from the top of the dresser. He turned through the pages with such terrified speed that he tore several loose from the ring-binders. But the card-the card-was still there: that narrow face looking out at him from beneath its plastic covering on the last page. Still there, and Brian felt a great, miserable relief sweep through him.

He slipped the card from its pocket, went over to the bed, and lay down with it in his hands. He didn’t see how he could ever let go of it again. It was all he had gotten out of this nightmare. The only thing. He didn’t like it anymore, but it was his. If he could have brought Nettle Cobb and Wilma jerzyck back to life by burning it up, he would have been hunting for matches at once (or so he really believed), but he couldn’t bring them back, and since he couldn’t, the thought of losing the card and having nothing at all was insupportable.

So he held it in his hands and looked at the ceiling and listened to the dim sound of Elvis, who had moved on to "Wooden Heart."

It was not surprising that Sean had told him he looked bad; his face was white, his eyes huge and dark and listless. And his own heart felt pretty wooden, now that he thought about it.

Suddenly a new thought, a really horrible thought, cut across the darkness inside his head with the affrighted, speeding brilliance of a comet: He had been seen!

He sat bolt upright on his bed, staring at himself in the mirror on his closet door with horror. Bright green wrapper! Bright red kerchief over a bunch of hair-rollers! Mrs. Mislaburski!

What’s going on over there, boy?

I don’t know, exactly. I think Mr. and Mrs. jerzyck must be having an argument.

Brian got off his bed and went over to the window, half expecting to see Sheriff Pangborn turning into the driveway in his police cruiser right this minute. He wasn’t, but he would be coming soon. Because when two women killed each other in a murderous spat, there was an investigation. Mrs. Mislaburski would be questioned. And she would say that she had seen a boy at the jerzycks’ house. That boy, she would tell the Sheriff, had been Brian Rusk.

Downstairs, the telephone began to ring. His mother didn’t pick it up, even though there was an extension in the bedroom. She)just went on singing along with the music. At last he heard Sean answer.

"Who is it please?"

Brian thought calmly: He’ll get it out of me. I can’t lie, not to a policeman. I couldn’t even lie to Mrs. Leroux about who broke the vase on her desk when she had to go down to the office that time.

He’ll get it out of me and I’ll go to jailfor murder.

That was when Brian Rusk first began to think of suicide. These thoughts were not lurid, not romantic; they were very calm, very rational. His father kept a shotgun in the garage, and at that moment the shotgun seemed to make perfect sense. The shotgun seemed to be the answer to everything.

"Bri-unnn! Telephone!"

"I don’t want to talk to Stan!" he yelled. "Tell him to call back tomorrow!"

"It’s not Stan," Sean called back. "It’s a guy. A grown-up."

Large icy hands seized Brian’s heart and squeezed it. This was it-Sheriff Pangborn was on the phone.

Brian? I have some questions to ask you. They’re very serious questions. I’m afraid if you don’t come right down to answer them, I’ll have to come and get you. I’ll have to come in my police car.

Pretty soon your name is going to be in the paper, Brian, and your picture is going to be on TV, and all your friends will see it. Your mother and father will see it, too, and your little brother. And when they show the picture, the man on the news will say, "This is Brian Rusk, the boy who helped murder Wilma jerzyck and Nettle Cobb."

"Huh-huh-who is it?" he called downstairs in a shrieky little voice.

"I dunno!" Sean had been torn away from The Transformers and sounded irritated. "I think he said his name was Crowfix. Something like that."

Crowfix?

Brian stood in the doorway, his heart thumping in his chest.

Two big clown-spots of color now burned in his pallid face.

Not Crowfix.

Koufax.

Sandy Koufax had called him on the phone. Except Brian had a pretty good idea of who it really was.

He went down the stairs on leaden feet. The telephone handset seemed to weigh at least five hundred pounds.

"Hello, Brian," Mr. Gaunt said softly.

"Huh-Huh-Hello," Brian replied in the same shrieky little voice.

"You don’t have a thing to worry about," Mr. Gaunt said. "If Mrs. Mislaburski had seen you throw those rocks, she wouldn’t have asked you what was going on over there, now would she?"

"How do you know about that?" Brian again felt like throwing up.

"That doesn’t matter. What matters is that you did the right thing, Brian. Exactly the right thing. You said you thought Mr. and Mrs. jerzyck were having an argument. If the police do find you, they’ll just think you heard the person who was throwing the rocks.

They’ll think you didn’t see him because he was behind the house."

Brian looked through the archway into the TV room to make sure Sean wasn’t snooping. He wasn’t; he was sitting cross-legged in front of the TV with a bag of microwave popcorn in his lap.

"I can’t lie!" he whispered into the telephone. "I always get caught out when I lie!"

"Not this time, Brian," Mr. Gaunt said. "This time you’re going to do it like a champ."

And the most horrible thing of all was that Brian thought Mr.

Gaunt knew best about this, too.

2

While her older son was thinking of suicide and then dickering in a desperate, quiet whisper with Mr. Gaunt, Cora Rusk was dancing quietly around her bedroom in her housecoat.

Except it wasn’t her bedroom.

When she put on the sunglasses Mr. Gaunt had sold her, she was in Graceland.

She danced through fabulous rooms which smelled of Pine-Sol and fried food, rooms where the only sounds were the quiet hum of air conditioners (only a few of the windows at Graceland actually opened; many were nailed shut and all were shaded), the whisper of her feet on deep-pile rugs, and the sound of Elvis singing "My Wish Came True" in his haunting, pleading voice. She danced beneath the huge chandelier of French crystal in the dining room and past the trademark stained-glass peacocks. She trailed her hands across the rich blue velvet drapes. The furniture was French Provincial. The walls were blood red.