Leland Gaunt—Buster Keeton

Leland Gaunt—Buster Keeton is a relationship of manipulation that converts Buster’s private compulsions and public office into instruments of danger. Gaunt’s influence helps Buster recast his paranoia as a shared cause, while Buster’s control over municipal funds and access to town property gives that alliance practical force. The turning point is a public-works purchase: a request for dynamite becomes an enlarged order that Buster welcomes as a source of power and possibility.

The Groundwork of the Alliance

Buster’s connection to Gaunt takes hold against an already compromised financial and emotional life. At the race track, Buster moves from a first victory to larger wagers and mounting losses. After losing $160, he returns hoping to recover the money, then loses another $210. To conceal the shortfall from Myrtle, he takes $100 from the town’s petty-cash fund. What begins as an effort to hide gambling losses from his wife has therefore already crossed into misuse of public money.

The losses deepen rather than end the habit. Buster’s gambling continues, and he finds a bookie so that he can place bets larger than those accepted at the track. The bookie does not improve his luck; instead, his financial position becomes harder to contain. By the autumn of 1990, the package of concealment is beginning to come apart. This history matters to his relationship with Gaunt because Buster is not simply a frightened official: he is also a man with concrete reasons to fear scrutiny, even as he interprets the danger through a persecutory fixation.

That scrutiny is real. The state wants to audit Castle Rock’s books, including tax records, revenue-sharing records, town expenses, road maintenance, law-enforcement budgets, Parks Department budgets, and the financial records of a state-funded experimental tree farm. Buster keeps the Bureau of Taxation correspondence and his replies in a locked filing-cabinet drawer. His replies bear the initials of his secretary, Shirley Laurence, but she has not typed them. The altered correspondence and the concealed records make the audit a genuine threat, even as Buster’s sense of persecution distorts how he understands the people around him.

Gaunt as Imagined Ally

Gaunt’s place in Buster’s thinking is clearest when Buster groups him with himself against the sheriff’s office. Buster believes that he and Mr. Gaunt know about “Them,” and imagines the two of them making a formidable team. The language of partnership disguises the imbalance: Buster experiences Gaunt as an ally, but the relationship serves Gaunt’s purposes by turning Buster’s grievance and fear into readiness for action.

The connection does not erase Buster’s responsibility. His suspicion is intensified by a pattern of harassment, including warning slips accusing him of embezzlement, but the accusation attaches to conduct he has actually concealed. One slip displays “EMBEZZLEMENT” under the heading for other violations. Buster has already taken town petty cash and falsified correspondence; the harassment weaponizes his vulnerability, while his response folds the exposure into a larger story of persecution.

The Dynamite Order

The alliance gains a concrete municipal instrument when a fund-release form arrives in Buster’s office. Deke requests $940 to buy 16 cases of dynamite from Case Construction and Supply in Lewiston, explaining that a granite ridge at the gravel pit on Town Road No. 5 must be blasted away to reach more gravel. The request gives Buster an official pretext to authorize explosives for a public-works purpose.

Buster reads Deke’s explanation twice, changes the form, initials the edits, and signs his own name beneath Deke’s. He raises the requested amount from $940 to $1,400 and adds a recommendation to obtain at least 20 cases while the supply is good. When asked whether he wants to inspect the gravel pit, he declines and asks instead to be told when the dynamite arrives. His assurance that the explosives must not fall into the wrong hands gives the exchange an ominous double edge: he speaks as the person responsible for safeguarding them while arranging for a much larger quantity to be acquired.

The order is more than an abstract show of support for Gaunt. Buster expects the 20 cases of Taggart Hi-Impact dynamite to be stored in the town’s Public Works shed, and he has a key to that shed. The purchase thus links his official authority, his private sense of alliance with Gaunt, and the material means to cause destruction. His office makes the explosives available; his access makes the arrangement consequential.

Consequences and Significance

The scene ends not with an explosion but with Buster’s anticipation of what might follow. Looking out at Main Street, he thinks that a great deal has happened and more will happen over the next couple of days. The town appears busier than it did when he looked over it in despair on Saturday morning; now, with the explosives expected in a shed he can enter, he imagines almost anything happening. The shift from despair to purposeful expectation marks how far Gaunt’s influence has carried him.

Buster’s alliance with Gaunt operates through both perception and logistics. Gaunt’s supposed knowledge of “Them” gives Buster’s fear the shape of companionship, while the altered purchase form turns that companionship into a practical route to explosives. The irony is sharp: an official who once had reason to fear an audit uses the machinery of public works to enable a danger that threatens the town itself. His paranoia does not make the audit imaginary, and Gaunt’s influence does not make Buster’s decisions involuntary. The relationship is dangerous precisely because manipulation finds an opening in genuine wrongdoing and is then acted out through Buster’s own authority and choices.