Buster Keeton

Buster Keeton is Castle Rock’s treasurer, a public official whose gambling losses lead him to steal from the town and whose growing belief in a conspiracy called “Them” turns him into an accomplice in the town’s destruction. His story joins a verifiable financial crime to a delusion that recasts scrutiny as persecution: he is not merely accused in his own mind, but genuinely implicated in embezzlement, and he ultimately uses his office to authorize a larger supply of dynamite for Leland Gaunt’s plan.

Identity and Public Office

As Castle Rock’s treasurer, Buster works alongside the town’s other selectmen and selectwoman. The office gives him access to public accounts and authority over municipal spending. It also provides the setting for his personal crisis: in his office, he hides the racing page in his desk drawer, handles an ordinary fund-release request, and turns a routine administrative signature into a step toward the bombing campaign.

The financial record behind his crisis is concrete. After losing money at the track, he takes one hundred dollars from the town’s petty-cash fund to cover a shortfall in his checking account, which he fears his wife, Myrtle, will notice. He minimizes the amount as negligible, but the theft establishes a boundary already crossed: his private gambling losses are being transferred to the public purse.

Gambling and the Unraveling Accounts

Buster’s losses accumulate as he tries to recover what he has spent. After an early night of betting, he returns to the track aiming to win back enough to break even; instead, he loses another two hundred and ten dollars the following week. He borrows from petty cash to conceal the resulting hole in his accounts, and the attempt to patch one loss with public money begins a cycle he cannot control.

By autumn 1990, the concealment is coming apart. Buster has found a bookie, which lets him place larger bets than the track itself will accept, but the expanded stakes do not improve his luck. He keeps hoping gambling will let him recoup what he has lost, even as the financial package he has assembled begins to fail. The narrative makes the mechanism of his downfall visible: betting creates the losses, borrowing disguises them temporarily, and the growing gap between the records and the money makes discovery increasingly likely.

The prospect of an official audit gives that exposure an immediate form. The state’s letter to the Castle Rock selectmen orders an examination of all the town books, not just one account: tax and revenue-sharing records, expenses, road maintenance, law-enforcement and Parks Department budgets, and the accounts for the state-funded experimental tree farm. Buster privately keeps the Bureau of Taxation correspondence and his replies in a locked bottom drawer. Although the letters bear the initials “DK/sl,” his secretary Shirley Laurence typed none of his responses. The correspondence is therefore bound up with his own attempts to manage the scrutiny, rather than being routine work delegated to her.

The threat he fears is not wholly imaginary. Among the slips he tries to burn, one identifies the offense as “EMBEZZLEMENT.” His paranoid interpretation of hostile warnings does not undo the underlying fact: he has diverted public money, and an audit could expose it. That tension distinguishes his character arc from a simple story of persecution. He is subject to manipulation and increasingly deluded, but the threatened inquiry also points toward real misconduct for which he is responsible.

“Them” and the Alliance with Gaunt

Buster’s conviction that he is under attack reorganizes his view of the people around him. He judges Ariadne St. Claire, the selectmen’s shared secretary, as too foolish to be one of “Them,” while Sheriff Pangborn and the deputies become enemies in a wider imagined plot. The delusion supplies a story that can absorb every threat, including the evidence of his own actions, and gives him a sense of purpose when his financial and domestic life is unstable.

On the day he feels more alert, Buster believes the warning slips have been dealt with because they have been burned. Myrtle has also stopped edging away from him, although he admits he no longer cares much for her and is chiefly annoyed that she treats him as dangerous. He anticipates winning a large sum at the raceway that night, with the holiday crowds promising greater payoffs, and has begun thinking in terms of quinellas and trifectas. His improved mood rests on temporary concealment, renewed gambling expectations, and his certainty that he and Gaunt are on the same side.

Buster’s alliance with Leland Gaunt converts suspicion into action. He believes that he and Gaunt will make a formidable team against “Them.” Rather than simply waiting for the conspiracy he imagines to strike, he uses his public office to provide material for the violence that Gaunt is organizing. His delusion thus becomes a channel for purposeful participation, not an excuse that erases the consequences of his choices.

The Dynamite Authorization

Ariadne brings Buster a fund-release form prepared by Deke Bradford. The request is for nine hundred and forty dollars to pay Case Construction and Supply in Lewiston for sixteen cases of dynamite. Bradford’s explanation says that workers have encountered a granite ridge at the gravel pit on Town Road No. 5 and need explosives to reach more gravel. The stated purpose is municipal work, and the form offers Buster a legitimate administrative route to approve the purchase.

He reads Bradford’s note twice, makes a change, adds a sentence, initials both alterations, and signs the form. He increases the amount to fourteen hundred dollars and changes the order to at least twenty cases of Taggart Hi-Impact dynamite. The added quantity exceeds the request and equips the plot with explosives under the cover of a public-works purchase. Buster jokes to Ariadne that everyone thinks he is a skinflint, while she finds something unsettling in his smile.

After signing, he looks out at Main Street and thinks that a great deal has happened since the weekend and that still more will happen in the next few days. He knows that the twenty cases will be stored in the town’s Public Works shed, and that he has a key to it. His casual access to the shed and his ability to amend an official order make municipal authority an instrument of sabotage. The dynamite does not remain an abstract possibility: the amended requisition links his office directly to the explosives later used against the town.

Death and Narrative Significance

Buster and Ace Merrill plant forty sticks of dynamite in two clusters of twenty at the Municipal Building. Buster insists that one bomb be placed on Amanda Williams’s desk in the Selectmen’s Wing, explaining his decision with a misogynistic dismissal of women in politics. The other is placed on the judge’s chair in the courtroom. The attack turns the town’s civic center—its administrative and judicial spaces—into the targets of a final, catastrophic explosion.

The blast kills Buster along with Frank Jewett and George T. Nelson, whose quarrel has just begun to give way to recognition. The explosion vaporizes the two men as well as Buster’s own future; its scale dwarfs the other bombings, and fire tears through the building. Buster’s death closes the line that began with a concealed hundred-dollar withdrawal and continued through gambling losses, audit fears, and an altered purchase order for explosives.

His role in the novel depends on holding two truths together. The town’s audit and the evidence of embezzlement are real, but Buster interprets exposure through a persecutory fantasy that Gaunt encourages and exploits. Once convinced that ordinary authorities are “Them,” he can understand collaboration in violence as self-defense and public theft as a weapon against enemies. The sequence from bookkeeping to dynamite shows how private compulsion and political office combine: the concealed accounts make him vulnerable, his delusion gives that vulnerability an enemy, and his signature helps turn it into mass destruction.