Plot
Pedott, a peddler, has the curious ability to give people exactly what they need before they need it. The old man enters a cafe where he first gives a woman a vial of cleaner. Then, he gives a down-on-his-luck ex-baseball player bus tickets to Scranton, Pennsylvania. The ball player receives a job offer in the city the tickets are for; and the ball player needs his jacket cleaned, for which the woman just happens to have the cleaner.
Renard, a small time thug, asks Pedott to give him what he needs, and the peddler gives him a pair of scissors which save Renard's life when his scarf gets caught in an elevator's doors. Renard shows up at Pedott's apartment, asking for another thing he "needs," and the peddler comes up with a leaky pen that predicts a winning racehorse.
Renard continues menacing Pedott for more. Pedott gives him a pair of new shoes. When a car suddenly heads directly toward Renard, he tries to run, but the new soles are so slippery, he cannot escape on the wet pavement. He is struck and killed by the passing car. The shoes, Pedott explains to Renard's corpse, were what Pedott needed, because he foresaw that Renard would eventually kill him. At the end of the episode the peddler gives a couple a comb, which they use to groom themselves just before they are photographed as witnesses for a newspaper story covering the "hit and run" accident that killed Fred Renard.
Read more about this topic: What You Need
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)