Stephen King - Needful Things

Norris thought of telling Gaunt that nine o’clock was hardly the middle of the night, and in a sleepy little place like Castle Rock, protecting the investments of the local business people was rarely much of a chore. Then he looked back at the Bazun rod and reel and that old longing, so surprisingly strong and fresh, washed over him again. He thought of going out on the lake with such a rod this weekend, going out early in the morning with a box of worms and a big Thermos of fresh coffee from Nan’s. it would almost be like being with the old man again.

“Well…”

“Oh, come on,” Gaunt coaxed. “if I can do a little selling after hours, you can do a little buying on the town’s time. And, really, Officer Ridgewick-I don’t think anyone is going to rob the bank tonight, do you?”

Norris looked toward the bank, which flicked first yellow and then black in the measured stutter of the blinker-light, and laughed.

“I doubt it.”

“Well?”

“Okay,” Norris said. “But if we can’t make a deal in a couple of minutes, I’ll really have to split.”

Leland Gaunt groaned and laughed at the same time. “I think I hear the soft sound of my pockets being turned out,” he said.

“Come along, Officer Ridgewick-a couple of minutes it shall be.”

“I sure would like to have that rod,” Norris blurted. It was a bad way to start a trade and he knew it, but he couldn’t help it.

“And so you shall,” Mr. Gaunt said. “I’m going to offer you the best deal of your life, Officer Ridgewick.”

He led Norris inside Needful Things and closed the door.

Wilma jerzyck did not know her husband, Pete, quite as well as she thought she did.

She went to bed that Thursday night planning to go over to Nettle Cobb’s first thing Friday morning and Take Care of Things.

Her frequent wrangles sometimes simply faded away, but on those occasions when they came to a head, it was Wilma who picked the duelling ground and chose the weapons. The first rule of her confrontational life-style was Always get the last word. The second was Always make the first move. Making this first move was what she thought of as Taking Care of Things, and she meant to take care of Nettle in a hurry. She told Pete she just might see how many times she could turn the crazy bitch’s head around before it popped off the stem.

She fully expected to spend most of the night awake and steaming, taut as a drawn bowstring; it wouldn’t have been the first time.

Instead, she slipped off to sleep less than ten minutes after lying down, and when she woke up she felt refreshed and oddly calm.

Sitting at the kitchen table in her housecoat on Friday morning, it came to her that maybe it was too early to Take Care of Things Permanently. She had scared the living Jesus out of Nettle on the phone last night; as mad as Wilma had been, she hadn’t been mad enough to miss that. Only a person as deaf as a stone post could have missed it.

Why not just let Ms. Mental Illness of 1991 swing in the wind for a little while? Let her be the one to lie awake nights, wondering from which direction the Wrath of Wilma would fall. Do a few drive-bys, perhaps make a few more phone calls. As she sipped her coffee (Pete sat across the table, watching her apprehensively from above the sports section of the paper), it occurred to her that, if Nettle was as cracked as everyone said, she might not have to Take Care of Things at all. This might be one of those rare occasions when Things Took Care of Themselves. She found this thought so cheering that she actually allowed Pete to kiss her as he gathered up his briefcase and made ready to leave for work.

The idea that her frightened mouse of a husband might have drugged her never crossed Wilma’s mind. Nevertheless, that was just what Pete jerzyck had done, and not for the first time, either.

Wilma knew that she had cowed her husband, but she had no idea to how great an extent. He did not just live in fear of her; he lived in awe of her, as natives in certain tropical climes once supposedly lived in awe and superstitious dread of the Great God Thunder Mountain, which might brood silently over their sunny lives for years or even generations before suddenly exploding in a murderous tirade of burning lava.

Such natives, whether real or hypothetical, undoubtedly had their own rituals of propitiation. These may not have helped much when the mountain awoke and cast its bolts of thunder and rivers of fire at their villages, but they surely improved everyone’s peace of mind when the mountain was quiet. Pete jerzyck had no high rituals with which he could worship Wilma; it seemed that more prosaic measures would have to serve. Prescription drugs instead of Communion wafers, for instance.

He made an appointment with Ray Van Allen, Castle Rock’s only family practitioner, and told him that he wanted something which would relieve his feelings of anxiety. His work-schedule was a bitch, he told Ray, and as his commission-rate rose, he found it harder and harder to leave his work-related problems at the office.

He had finally decided it was time to see if the doctor could prescribe something that would smooth off some of the rough edges.

Ray Van Allen knew nothing about the pressures of the real estate game, but he had a fair idea of what the pressures of living with Wilma must be like. He suspected that Pete jerzyck would have a lot less anxiety if he never left the office at all, but of course it was not his place to say so. He wrote a prescription for Xanax, cited the usual cautions, and wished the man good luck and God speed. He believed that, as Pete went down the road of life in tandem with that particular mare, he would need a lot of both.

Pete used the Xanax but did not abuse it. Neither did he tell Wilma about it-she would have had a cow if she knew he was using drugs.

He was careful to keep his Xanax prescription in his briefcase, which contained papers in which Wilma had no interest at all. He took five or six pills a month, most of them on the days before Wilma started her period.

Then, last summer, Wilma had gotten into a wrangle with Henrietta Longman, who owned and operated The Beauty Rest up on Castle Hill. The subject was a botched perm. Following the initial shouting match, there was an exchange between them at Hemphill’s Market the next day, then a yelling match on Main Street a week later. That one almost degenerated into a brawl.

In the aftermath, Wilma had paced back and forth through the house like a caged lioness, swearing she was going to get that bitch, that she was going to put her in the hospital. “She’ll need a Beauty Rest when I get through with her,” Wilma had grated through clenched teeth.

“You can count on it. I’m going up there tomorrow.

I’m going to go up there and Take Care of Things.”

Pete had realized with mounting alarm that this was not just talk; Wilma meant it. God knew what wild stunt she might pull.

He’d had visions of Wilma ducking Henrietta’s head in a vat of corrosive goo that would leave the woman as bald as Sinead O’Connor for the rest of her life.

He’d hoped for some modulation of temperament overnight, but when Wilma got up the next morning, she was even angrier.

He wouldn’t have believed it possible, but it seemed it was. The dark circles under her eyes were a proclamation of the sleepless rug ’ lit she had spent.

“Wilma,” he’d said weakly, “I really don’t think it’s such a good idea for you to go up there to The Beauty Rest today. I’m sure, if You think this over-”

“I thought it over last night,” Wilma had replied, turning that frighteningly flat gaze of hers on him, “and I decided that when I finish with her, she’s never going to burn the roots of anyone else’s hair. When I finish with her, she’s going to need a Seeing Eye dog just to find her way to the john. And if you fuck around with me’ Pete, you and her can buy your goddam dogs from the same litter of German shepherds.”