Needful Things

by Stephen King

  Keeton, who overtopped Norris by five inches and outweighed him by a hundred pounds, gave the deputy a harsh little shake and then did let go. He pulled the ticket out of his pocket and brandished it under Norris's nose. "Is this your name on this goddam thing or isn't it?" he demanded, as though Norris had already denied it.

  Norris Ridgewick knew perfectly well that it was his signature, rubber-stamped but perfectly recognizable, and that the ticket had been pulled from his citation book.

  "You were parked in the crip space," he said, stepping away from the wall and rubbing the back of his head. Damned if he didn't think there was going to be a knot there. As his initial surprise (and Buster had jumped the living Jesus out of him, he couldn't deny that) abated, his anger grew.

  "The what?"

  "The handicap space!" Norris shouted. And furthermore, it was Alan himself who told me to write that ticket!

  he was about to continue, and then didn't. Why give this fat pig the satisfaction of passing the buck? "You've been told about it before, Buh ... Danforth, and you know it."

  "What did you call me?" Danforth Keeton asked ominously. Red splotches the size of cabbage roses had grown on his cheeks and jowls.

  "That's a valid ticket," Norris said, ignoring this last, "and as far as I'm concerned, you better pay it. Why, you're lucky I don't cite you for assaulting a police officer as well!"

  Danforth laughed. The sound banged flatly off the walls. "I don't see any police officer," he said. "I see a narrow piece of shit packaged to look like beef jerky."

  Norris bent over and picked up his hat. His guts were a roil of fear--Danforth Keeton was a bad enemy for a man to have--and his anger had deepened into fury. His hands trembled. He took a moment, nonetheless, to set his hat squarely on his head.

  "You can take this up with Alan, if you want--"

  "I'm taking it up with you!"

  "--but I'm done talking about it. Make sure you pay that within thirty days, Danforth, or we'll have to come and get you." Norris drew himself up to his full five-foot-six and added: "We know where to find you."

  He started out. Keeton, his face now looking a little like sunset in a nuclear blast area, stepped forward to block his escape route. Norris stopped and levelled a finger at him.

  "If you touch me I'll throw you in a cell, Buster. I mean it."

  "Okay, that's it," Keeton said in a queer, toneless voice. "That is it. You're fired. Take off that uniform and start looking for another j--"

  "No," a voice said from behind them, and they both looked around. Alan Pangborn was standing in the men's-room doorway.

  Keeton rolled his hands into fat white fists. "You keep out of this."

  Alan walked in, letting the door swoosh slowly shut behind him. "No," he said. "I was the one who told Norris to write that ticket. I also told him I was going to forgive it before the appropriations meeting. It's a five-dollar ticket, Dan. What the hell got into you?"

  Alan's voice was puzzled. He felt puzzled. Buster had never been a sweet-natured man, not even at the best of times, but an outburst like this was overboard even for him. Since the end of the summer, the man had seemed ragged and always on edge--Alan had often heard the distant bellow of his voice when the selectmen were in committee meetings--and his eyes had taken on a look which was almost haunted. He wondered briefly if Keeton might be sick, and decided that was a consideration for some later time. Right now he had a moderately ugly situation on his hands.

  "Nothing got into me," Keeton said sulkily, and smoothed back his hair. Norris took some satisfaction in noticing that Keeton's hands were also trembling. "I'm just good and goddam tired of self-important pricks like this man here ... I try to do a lot for this town ... hell, I accomplish a lot for this town ... and I'm sick of the constant persecution ..." He paused a moment, his fat throat working, and then burst out: "He called me Buster! You know how I feel about that!"

  "He'll apologize," Alan said calmly. "Won't you, Norris?"

  "I don't know that I will," Norris said. His voice was trembly and his gut was rolling, but he was still angry. "I know he doesn't like it, but the truth is, he surprised it out of me. I was just standing here, looking in the mirror to make sure my tie was straight, when he grabbed me and threw me against the wall. I smacked my head a pretty good one. Jeez, Alan, I don't know what I said."

  Alan's eyes shifted back to Keeton. "Is that true?"

  Keeton dropped his own eyes. "I was mad," he said, and Alan supposed it was as close as a man like him could get to a spontaneous and undirected apology. He glanced back at Norris to see if the deputy understood this. It looked as if maybe Norris did. That was good; it was a long step toward defusing this nasty little stinkbomb. Alan relaxed a little.

  "Can we consider this incident closed?" he asked both men. "Just kind of chalk it up to experience and go on from here?"

  "All right by me," Norris said after a moment. Alan was touched. Norris was scrawny, he had a habit of leaving half-full cans of Jolt and Nehi in the cruisers he used, and his reports were horrors ... but he had yards of heart. He was backing down, but not because he was afraid of Keeton. If the burly Head Selectman thought that was it, he was making a very bad mistake.

  "I'm sorry I called you Buster," Norris said. He wasn't, not a bit, but it didn't hurt to say he was. He supposed.

  Alan looked at the heavy-set man in the loud sport-coat and open-necked golfer's shirt. "Danforth?"

  "All right, it never happened," Keeton said. He spoke in a tone of overblown magnanimity, and Alan felt a familiar wave of dislike wash over him. A voice buried somewhere deep in his mind, the primitive crocodile-voice of the subconscious, spoke up briefly but clearly: Why don't you have a heart attack, Buster? Why don't you do us all a favor and die?

  "All right," he said. "Good dea--"

  "If," Keeton said, raising one finger.

  Alan raised his eyebrows. "If?"

  "If we can do something about this ticket." He held it out toward Alan, tweezed between two fingers, as if it were a rag which had been used to clean up some dubious spill.

  Alan sighed. "Come on in the office, Danforth. We'll talk about it." He looked at Norris. "You've got the duty, right?"

  "Right," Norris said. His stomach was still in a ball. His good feelings were gone, probably for the rest of the day, it was that fat pig's fault, and Alan was going to forgive the ticket. He understood it--politics--but that didn't mean he had to like it.

  "Do you want to hang around?" Alan asked. It was as close as he could come to asking, Do you need to talk this out? with Keeton standing right there and glowering at both of them.

  "No," Norris said. "Places to go and things to do. Talk to you later, Alan." He left the men's room, brushing past Keeton without a glance. And although Norris did not know it, Keeton restrained, with a great--almost heroic--effort, an irrational but mighty urge to plant a foot in his ass to help him on his way.

  Alan made a business of checking his own reflection in the mirror, giving Norris time to make a clean getaway, while Keeton stood by the door, watching him impatiently. Then Alan pushed out into the bullpen area again with Keeton at his heels.

  A small, dapper man in a cream-colored suit was sitting in one of the two chairs outside the door to his office, ostentatiously reading a large leather-bound book which could only have been a Bible. Alan's heart sank. He had been fairly sure nothing else too unpleasant could happen this morning--it would be noon in only two or three minutes, so the idea seemed a reasonable one--but he had been wrong.

  The Rev. William Rose closed his Bible (the binding of which almost matched his suit) and bounced to his feet. "Chief-uh Pangborn," he said. The Rev. Rose was one of those deep-thicket Baptists who begin to twist the tails of their words when they are emotionally cranked up. "May I please speak to you?"

  "Give me five minutes, please, Reverend Rose. I have a matter to attend to."

  "This is-uh extremely important."

  I bet, Alan thought. "So is this. Five
minutes."

  He opened the door and ushered Keeton into his office before the Reverend Willie, as Father Brigham liked to call him, could say anything else.

  5

  "It'll be about Casino Nite," Keeton said after Alan had closed the office door. "You mark my words. Father John Brigham is a bull-headed Irishman, but I'll take him over that fellow anytime. Rose is an incredibly arrogant prick."

  There goes the pot, calling the kettle black, Alan thought.

  "Have a seat, Danforth."

  Keeton did. Alan went around his desk, held the parking ticket up, and tore it into small fragments. These he tossed into the wastebasket. "There. Okay?"

  "Okay," Keeton said, and moved to rise.

  "No, sit down a moment longer."

  Keeton's bushy eyebrows drew together below his high, pink forehead in a thundercloud.

  "Please," Alan added. He dropped into his own swivel chair. His hands came together and tried to make a blackbird; Alan caught them at it and folded them firmly together on the blotter.

  "We're having an appropriations committee meeting next week dealing with budgetary matters for Town Meeting in February--" Alan began.

  "Damn right," Keeton rumbled.

  "--and that's a political thing," Alan went on. "I recognize it and you recognize it. I just tore up a perfectly valid parking ticket because of a political consideration."

  Keeton smiled a little. "You've been in town long enough to know how things work, Alan. One hand washes the other."

  Alan shifted in his chair. It made its little creakings and squeakings--sounds he sometimes heard in his dreams after long, hard days. The kind of day this one was turning out to be.

  "Yes," he said. "One hand washes the other. But only for so long."

  The eyebrows drew together again. "What does that mean?"

  "It means that there's a place, even in small towns, where politics have to end. You need to remember that I'm not an appointed official. The selectmen may control the purse strings, but the voters elect me. And what they elect me to do is to protect them, and to preserve and uphold the law. I took the oath, and I try to hold to it."

  "Are you threatening me? Because if you are--"

  Just then the mill-whistle went off. It was muted in here, but Danforth Keeton still jumped as if he had been stung by a wasp. His eyes widened momentarily, and his hands clamped down to white claws on the arms of his chair.

  Alan felt that puzzlement again. He's as skittish as a mare in heat. What the hell's wrong with him?

  For the first time he found himself wondering if maybe Mr. Danforth Keeton, who had been Castle Rock's Head Selectman since long before Alan himself ever heard of the place, had been up to something that was not strictly kosher.

  "I'm not threatening you," he said. Keeton was beginning to relax again, but warily ... as if he were afraid the mill-whistle might go off again, just to goose him.

  "That's good. Because it isn't just a question of purse strings, Sheriff Pangborn. The Board of Selectmen, along with the three County Commissioners, holds right of approval over the hiring--and the firing--of Sheriff's Deputies. Among many other rights of approval I'm sure you know about."

  "That's just a rubber stamp."

  "So it has always been," Keeton agreed. From his inside pocket he produced a Roi-Tan cigar. He pulled it between his fingers, making the cellophane crackle. "That doesn't mean it has to stay that way."

  Now who is threatening whom? Alan thought, but did not say. Instead he leaned back in his chair and looked at Keeton. Keeton met his eyes for a few seconds, then dropped his gaze to the cigar and began picking at the wrapper.

  "The next time you park in the handicap space, I'm going to ticket you myself, and that citation will stand," Alan said. "And if you ever lay your hands on one of my deputies again, I'll book you on a charge of third-degree assault. That will happen no matter how many so-called rights of approval the selectmen hold. Because politics only stretches so far with me. Do you understand?"

  Keeton looked down at the cigar for a long moment, as if meditating. When he looked up at Alan again, his eyes had turned to small, hard flints. "If you want to find out just how hard my ass is, Sheriff Pangborn, just go on pushing me." There was anger written on Keeton's face--yes, most assuredly--but Alan thought there was something else written there, as well. He thought it was fear. Did he see that? Smell it? He didn't know, and it didn't matter. But what Keeton was afraid of ... that might matter. That might matter a lot.

  "Do you understand?" he repeated.

  "Yes," Keeton said. He stripped the cellophane from his cigar with a sudden hard gesture and dropped it on the floor. He stuck the cigar in his mouth and spoke around it. "Do you understand me?"

  The chair creaked and croaked as Alan rocked forward again. He looked at Keeton earnestly. "I understand what you're saying, but I sure as hell don't understand how you're acting, Danforth. We've never been best buddies, you and I--"

  "That's for sure," Keeton said, and bit off the end of his cigar. For a moment Alan thought that was going to end up on the floor, too, and he was prepared to let it go if it did--politics--but Keeton spat it into the palm of his hand and then deposited it in the clean ashtray on the desk. It sat there like a small dog-turd.

  "--but we've always had a pretty good working relationship. Now this. Is there something wrong? If there is, and I can help--"

  "Nothing is wrong," Keeton said, rising abruptly. He was angry again--more than just angry. Alan could almost see the steam coming out of his ears. "It's just that I'm so tired of this ... persecution."

  It was the second time he had used the word. Alan found it an odd word, an unsettling word. In fact, he found this whole conversation unsettling.

  "Well, you know where I am," Alan said.

  "God, yes!" Keeton said, and went to the door.

  "And, please, Danforth--remember about the handicap space."

  "Fuck the handicap space!" Keeton said, and slammed out.

  Alan sat behind his desk and looked at the closed door for a long time, a troubled expression on his face. Then he went around the desk, picked up the crumpled cellophane cylinder lying on the floor, dropped it into the wastebasket, and went to the door to invite Steamboat Willie in.

  6

  "Mr. Keeton looked rather upset," Rose said. He seated himself carefully in the chair the Head Selectman had just vacated, looked with distaste at the cigar-end sitting in the ashtray, and then placed his white Bible carefully in the center of his ungenerous lap.

  "Lots of appropriations meetings in the next month or so," Alan said vaguely. "I'm sure it's a strain for all the selectmen."

  "Yes," Rev. Rose agreed. "For Jesus-uh told us: 'Render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar's, and render unto God those things which are God's.' "

  "Uh-huh," Alan said. He suddenly wished he had a cigarette, something like a Lucky or a Pall Mall that was absolutely stuffed with tar and nicotine. "What can I render unto you this afternoon, R ... Reverend Rose?" He was horrified to realize he had just come extremely dose to calling the man Reverend Willie.

  Rose took off his round rimless spectacles, polished them, and then settled them back in place, hiding the two small red spots high up on his nose. His black hair, plastered in place with some sort of hair potion Alan could smell but not identify, gleamed in the light of the fluorescent grid set into the ceiling.

  "It's about the abomination Father John Brigham chooses to call Casino Nite," the Rev. Rose announced at last. "If you recall, Chief Pangborn, I came to you not long after I first heard of this dreadful idea to demand that you refuse to sanction such an event in the name-uh of decency."

  "Reverend Rose, if you'll recall--"

  Rose held up one hand imperiously and dipped the other into his jacket pocket. He came out with a pamphlet which was almost the size of a paperback book. It was, Alan saw with a sinking heart (but no real surprise), the abridged version of the State of Maine's Code of Laws.

 
"I now come again," Rev. Rose said in ringing tones, "to demand that you forbid this event not only in the name of decency but in the name of the law!"

  "Reverend Rose--"

  "This is Section 24, subsection 9, paragraph 2 of the Maine State Code of Laws," Rev. Rose overrode him. His cheeks now flared with color, and Alan realized that the only thing he'd managed to do in the last few minutes was swap one crazy for another. " 'Except where noted-uh,' " Rev. Rose read, his voice now taking on the pulpit chant with which his mostly adoring congregation was so familiar, " 'games of chance, as previously defined in Section 23 of the Code-uh, where wagers of money are induced as a condition of play, shall be deemed illegal.' " He snapped the Code closed and looked at Alan. His eyes were blazing. "Shall be deemed-uh illegal!" he cried.

  Alan felt a brief urge to throw his arms in the air and yell Praise-uh Jeesus! When it had passed he said: "I'm aware of those sections of the Code which pertain to gambling, Reverend Rose. I looked them up after your earlier visit to me, and I showed them to Albert Martin, who does a lot of the town's legal work. His opinion was that Section 24 does not apply to such functions as Casino Nite." He paused, then added: "I have to tell you that was my opinion, as well."

  "Impossible!" Rose spat. "They propose to turn a house of the Lord into a gambler's lair, and you tell me that is legal?"

  "It's every bit as legal as the bingo games that have been going on at the Daughters of Isabella Hall since 1931."

  "This-uh is not bingo! This is roulette-uh! This is playing cards for money! This is"--Rev. Rose's voice trembled--" dice-uh!"

  Alan caught his hands trying to make another bird, and this time he locked them together on the desk blotter. "I had Albert write a letter of inquiry to Jim Tierney, the State's Attorney General. The answer was the same. I'm sorry, Reverend Rose. I know it offends you. Me, I've got a thing about kids on skateboards. I'd outlaw them if I could, but I can't. In a democracy we sometimes have to put up with things we don't like or approve of."

  "But this is gambling!" Rev. Rose said, and there was real anguish in his voice. "This is gambling for money! How can such a thing be legal, when the Code specifically says--"

  "The way they do it, it's really not gambling for money. Each ... participant ... pays a donation at the door. In return, the participant is given an equal amount of play money. At the end of the night, a number of prizes--not money but prizes--are auctioned off. A VCR, a toaster-oven, a Dirt Devil, a set of china, things like that." And some dancing, interior imp made him add: "I believe the initial donation may even be tax deductible."