Stephen King - Needful Things

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!