Needful Things - Stephen King [70]
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.
CHAPTER SIX
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