CHAPTER FOUR
Pop Merrill turned the sign which hung in his door
from OPEN to CLOSED at two o‘clock on Friday afternoon, slipped
himself behind the wheel of his 1959 Chevrolet, which had been for
years perfectly maintained at Sonny’s Texaco at absolutely no cost
at all (the fallout of another little loan, and Sonny Jackett
another town fellow who would prefer hot coals pressed against the
soles of his feet to admitting that he not only knew but was deeply
indebted to Pop Merrill, who had gotten him out of a desperate
scrape over in New Hampshire in ’69), and took himself up to
Lewiston, a city he hated because it seemed to him that there were
only two streets in the whole town (maybe three) that weren’t
one-ways. He arrived as he always did when Lewiston and only
Lewiston would do: not by driving to it but arriving somewhere near
it and then spiraling slowly inward along those beshitted one-way
streets until he reckoned he was as close as he could get and then
walking the rest of the way, a tall thin man with a bald head,
rimless specs, clean khaki pants with creases and cuffs, and a blue
workman’s shirt buttoned right up to the collar.
There was a sign in the window of Twin City Camera
and Video that showed a cartoon man who appeared to be battling a
huge tangle of movie-film and losing. The fellow looked just about
ready to blow his stack. The words over and under the picture read:
TIRED OF FIGHTING? WE TRANSFER YOUR 8 MM MOVIES (SNAPSHOTS TOO!)
ONTO VIDEO TAPE!
Just another goddam gadget, Pop thought, opening
the door and going in. World’s dying of em.
But he was one of those people—world’s dying of
em—not at all above using what he disparaged if it proved
expedient. He spoke briefly with the clerk. The clerk got the
proprietor. They had known each other for many years (probably
since Homer sailed the wine-dark sea, some wits might have said).
The proprietor invited Pop into the back room, where they shared a
nip.
“That’s a goddam strange bunch of photos,” the
proprietor said.
“Ayuh.”
“The videotape I made of them is even
stranger.”
“I bet so.”
“That all you got to say?”
“Ayuh.”
“Fuck ya, then,” the proprietor said, and they both
cackled their shrill old-man’s cackles. Behind the counter, the
clerk winced.
Pop left twenty minutes later with two items: a
video cassette, and a brand-new Polaroid Sun 660, still in its
box.
When he got back to the shop, he called Kevin’s
house. He was not surprised when it was John Delevan who
answered.
“If you’ve been fucking my boy over, I’ll kill you,
you old snake,” John Delevan said without preamble, and distantly
Pop could hear the boy’s wounded cry: “Da-ad!”
Pop’s lips skinned back from his teeth—crooked,
eroded, pipe-yellow, but his own, by the bald-headed Christ—and if
Kevin had seen him in that moment he would have done more than
wonder if maybe Pop Merrill was something other than the
Castle Rock version of the Kindly Old Sage of the Crackerbarrel: he
would have known.
“Now, John,” he said. “I’ve been trying to help
your boy with that camera. That’s all in the world I’ve been trying
to do.” He paused. “Just like that one time I gave you a help when
you got a little too proud of the Seventy-Sixers, is what I mean to
say.”
A thundering silence from John Delevan’s end of the
line which meant he had plenty to say on that subject, but
the kiddo was in the room and that was as good as a gag.
“Now, your kid don’t know nothing about
that,” Pop said, that nasty grin broadening in the tick-tock
shadows of the Emporium Galorium, where the dominant smells were
old magazines and mouse-turds. “I told him it wasn’t none of his
business, just like I told him that this business here was.
I wouldn’t have even brought up that bet if I knew another way to
get you here, is what I mean to say. And you ought to see what I’ve
got, John, because if you don’t you won’t understand why the boy
wants to smash that camera you bought him—”
“Smash it!”
“—and why I think it’s a hell of a good idea. Now
are you going to come down here with him, or not?”
“I’m not in Portland, am I, dammit?”
“Never mind the CLOSED sign on the door,” Pop said
in the serene tone of a man who has been getting his own way for
many years and expects to go right on getting it for many more.
“Just knock.”
“Who in hell gave my boy your name, Merrill?”
“I didn’t ask him,” Pop said in that same
infuriatingly serene tone of voice, and hung up the telephone. And,
to the empty shop: “All I know is that he came. Just like they
always do.”
While he waited, he took the Sun 660 he had bought
in Lewiston out of its box and buried the box deep in the trash-can
beside his worktable. He looked at the camera thoughtfully, then
loaded the four-picture starter-pack that came with the camera.
With that done, he unfolded the body of the camera, exposing the
lens. The red light to the left of the lightning-bolt shape came on
briefly, and then the green one began to stutter. Pop was not very
surprised to find he was filled with trepidation. Well, he
thought, God hates a coward, and pushed the shutter-release.
The clutter of the Emporium Galorium’s barnlike interior was bathed
in an instant of merciless and improbable white light. The camera
made its squidgy little whine and spat out what would be a Polaroid
picture—perfectly adequate but somehow lacking; a picture that was
all surfaces depicting a world where ships undoubtedly would
sail off the fuming and monster-raddled edge of the earth if they
went far enough west.
Pop watched it with the same mesmerized expression
Clan Delevan had worn as it waited for Kevin’s first picture to
develop. He told himself this camera would not do the same thing,
of course not, but he was stiff and wiry with tension just the same
and, tough old bird or not, if a random board had creaked in the
place just then, he almost certainly would have cried out.
But no board did creak, and when the picture
developed it showed only what it was supposed to show: clocks
assembled, clocks in pieces, toasters, stacks of magazines tied
with twine, lamps with shades so horrible only women of the British
upper classes could truly love them, shelves of quarter paperbacks
(six for a buck) with titles like After Dark My Sweet and
Fire in the Flesh and The Brass Cupcake, and, in the distant
background, the dusty front window. You could read the letters
EMPOR backward before the bulky silhouette of a bureau blocked off
the rest.
No hulking creature from beyond the grave; no
knife-wielding doll in blue overalls. Just a camera. He supposed
the whim which had caused him to take a picture in the first place,
just to see, showed how deeply this thing had worked its way under
his skin.
Pop sighed and buried the photograph in the
trash-can. He opened the wide drawer of the worktable and took out
a small hammer. He held the camera firmly in his left hand and then
swung the hammer on a short arc through the dusty tick-tock air. He
didn’t use a great deal of force. There was no need. Nobody took
any pride in workmanship anymore. They talked about the wonders of
modern science, synthetics, new alloys, polymers, Christ knew what.
It didn’t matter. Snot. That was what everything was really made
out of these days, and you didn’t have to work very hard to bust a
camera that was made of snot.
The lens shattered. Shards of plastic flew from
around it, and that reminded Pop of something else. Had it been the
left or right side? He frowned. Left. He thought. They wouldn’t
notice anyway, or remember which side themselves if they did, you
could damn near take that to the bank, but Pop hadn’t feathered his
nest with damn-nears. It was wise to be prepared.
Always wise.
He replaced the hammer, used a small brush to sweep
the broken chunks of glass and plastic off the table and onto the
floor, then returned the brush and took out a grease-pencil with a
fine tip and an X-Act-O knife. He drew what he thought was the
approximate shape of the piece of plastic which had broken off
Kevin Delevan’s Sun when Meg knocked it on the floor, then used the
X-Act-O to carve along the lines. When he thought he had dug deep
enough into the plastic, he put the X-Act-O back in the drawer, and
then knocked the Polaroid camera off the worktable. What had
happened once ought to happen again, especially with the
fault-lines he had pre-carved.
It worked pretty slick, too. He examined the
camera, which now had a chunk of plastic gone from the side as well
as a busted lens, nodded, and placed it in the deep shadow under
the worktable. Then he found the piece of plastic that had split
off from the camera, and buried it in the trash along with the box
and the single exposure he had taken.
Now there was nothing to do but wait for the
Delevans to arrive. Pop took the video cassette upstairs to the
cramped little apartment where he lived. He put it on top of the
VCR he had bought to watch the fuck-movies you could buy nowadays,
then sat down to read the paper. He saw there had been a
plane-crash in Pakistan. A hundred and thirty people killed. Goddam
fools were always getting themselves killed, Pop thought, but that
was all right. A few less woggies in the world was a good thing all
around. Then he turned to the sports to see how the Red Sox had
done. They still had a good chance of winning the Eastern
Division.