“None of your business,” Mr. Delevan said in a rough voice which was both angry and embarrassed.

The day was chilly. Mr. Delevan had been looking for his light jacket. Now he stopped and turned around and looked at his son, who was standing behind him, wearing his own jacket and holding the Sun camera in one hand.

“All right,” he said. “I never pulled that crap on you before and I guess I don’t want to start now. You know what I mean.”

“Yes,” Kevin said, and thought: I know exactly what you’re talking about, is what I mean to say.

“Your mother doesn’t know anything about this.”

“I won’t tell her.”

“Don’t say that,” his father told him sharply. “Don’t start down that road or you’ll never stop.”

“But you said you never—”

“No, I never told her,” his father said, finding the jacket at last and shrugging into it. “She never asked and I never told her. If she never asks you, you never have to tell her. That sound like a bullshit qualification to you?”

“Yeah,” Kevin said. “To tell the truth, it does.”

“Okay,” Mr. Delevan said. “Okay ... but that’s the way we do it. If the subject ever comes up, you—we—have to tell. If it doesn’t, we don’t. That’s just the way we do things in the grown-up world. It sounds fucked up, I guess, and sometimes it is fucked up, but that’s how we do it. Can you live with that?”

“Yes. I guess so.”

“Good. Let’s go.”

They walked down the driveway side by side, zipping their jackets. The wind played with the hair at John Delevan’s temples, and Kevin noted for the first time—with uneasy surprise—that his father was starting to go gray there.

“It was no big deal, anyway,” Mr. Delevan said. He might almost have been talking to himself. “It never is with Pop Merrill. He isn’t a big-deal kind of guy, if you know what I mean.”

Kevin nodded.

“He’s a fairly wealthy man, you know, but that junk-shop of his isn’t the reason why. He’s Castle Rock’s version of Shylock.”

“Of who?”

“Never mind. You’ll read the play sooner or later if education hasn’t gone entirely to hell. He loans money at interest rates that are higher than the law allows.”

“Why would people borrow from him?” Kevin asked as they walked toward downtown under trees from which leaves of red and purple and gold sifted slowly down.

“Because,” Mr. Delevan said sourly, “they can’t borrow anyplace else.”

“You mean their credit’s no good?”

“Something like that.”

“But we ... you...”

“Yeah. We’re doing all right now. But we weren’t always doing all right. When your mother and I were first married, how we were doing was all the way across town from all right.”

He fell silent again for a time, and Kevin didn’t interrupt him.

“Well, there was a guy who was awful proud of the Celtics one year,” his father said. He was looking down at his feet, as if afraid to step on a crack and break his mother’s back. “They were going into the play-offs against the Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers. They—the Celtics—were favored to win, but by a lot less than usual. I had a feeling the Seventy-Sixers were going to take them, that it was their year.”

He looked quickly at his son, almost snatching the glance as a shoplifter might take a small but fairly valuable item and tuck it into his coat, and then went back to minding the cracks in the sidewalk again. They were now walking down Castle Hill and toward the town’s single signal-light at the crossing of Lower Main Street and Watermill Lane. Beyond the intersection, what locals called the Tin Bridge crossed Castle Stream. Its overstructure cut the deep-blue autumn sky into neat geometrical shapes.

“I guess it’s that feeling, that special sureness, that infects the poor souls who lose their bank accounts, their houses, their cars, even the clothes they stand up in at casinos and back-room poker games. That feeling that you got a telegram from God. I only got it that once, and I thank God for that.

“In those days I’d make a friendly bet on a football game or the World Series with somebody, five dollars was the most, I think, and usually it was a lot less than that, just a token thing, a quarter or maybe a pack of cigarettes.”

This time it was Kevin who shoplifted a glance, only Mr. Delevan caught it, cracks in the sidewalk or no cracks.

“Yes, I smoked in those days, too. Now I don’t smoke and I don’t bet. Not since that last one. That last one cured me.

“Back then your mother and I had only been married two years. You weren’t born yet. I was working as a surveyor’s assistant, bringing home just about a hundred and sixteen dollars a week. Or that was what I cleared, anyway, when the government finally let go of it.

“This fellow who was so proud of the Celtics was one of the engineers. He even wore one of those green Celtics warm-up jackets to work, the kind that have the shamrock on the back. The week before the play-offs, he kept saying he’d like to find someone brave enough and stupid enough to bet on the Seventy-Sixers, because he had four hundred dollars just waiting to catch him a dividend.

“That voice inside me kept getting louder and louder, and the day before the championship series started, I went up to him on lunch-break. My heart felt like it was going to tear right out of my chest, I was so scared.”

“Because you didn’t have four hundred dollars,” Kevin said. “The other guy did, but you didn’t.” He was looking at his father openly now, the camera completely forgotten for the first time since his first visit to Pop Merrill. The wonder of what the Sun 660 was doing was lost—temporarily, anyway—in this newer, brighter wonder: as a young man his father had done something spectacularly stupid, just as Kevin knew other men did, just as he might do himself someday, when he was on his own and there was no adult member of the Reasonable tribe to protect him from some terrible impulse, some misbegotten instinct. His father, it seemed, had briefly been a member of the Instinctive tribe himself. It was hard to believe, but wasn’t this the proof?

“Right.”

“But you bet him.”

“Not right away,” his father said. “I told him I thought the Seventy-Sixers would take the championship, but four hundred bucks was a lot to risk for a guy who was only a surveyor’s assistant.”

“But you never came right out and told him you didn’t have the money.”

“I’m afraid it went a little further than that, Kevin. I implied I did have it. I said I couldn’t afford to lose four hundred dollars, and that was disingenuous, to say the least. I told him I couldn’t risk that kind of money on an even bet—still not lying, you see, but skating right up to the edge of the lie. Do you see?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know what would have happened—maybe nothing—if the foreman hadn’t rung the back-to-work bell right then. But he did, and this engineer threw up his hands and said, ‘I’ll give you two-to-one, sonny, if that’s what you want. It don’t matter to me. It’s still gonna be four hundred in my pocket.’ And before I knew what was happening we’d shook on it with half a dozen men watching and I was in the soup, for better or worse. And going home that night I thought of your mother, and what she’d say if she knew, and I pulled over to the shoulder of the road in the old Ford I had back then and I puked out the door.”

A police car came rolling slowly down Harrington Street. Norris Ridgewick was driving and Andy Clutterbuck was riding shotgun. Clut raised his hand as the cruiser turned left on Main Street. John and Kevin Delevan raised their hands in return, and autumn drowsed peacefully around them as if John Delevan had never sat in the open door of his old Ford and puked into the road-dust between his own feet.

They crossed Main Street.

“Well... you could say I got my money’s worth, anyway. The Sixers took it right to the last few seconds of the seventh game, and then one of those Irish bastards—I forget which one it was—stole the ball from Hal Greer and went to the hole with it and there went the four hundred dollars I didn’t have. When I paid that goddam engineer off the next day he said he ‘got a little nervous there near the end.’ That was all. I could have popped his eyes out with my thumbs.”

“You paid him off the next day? How’d you do that?”

“I told you, it was like a fever. Once we shook hands on the bet, the fever passed. I hoped like hell I’d win that bet, but I knew I’d have to think like I was going to lose. There was a lot more at stake than just four hundred dollars. There was the question of my job, of course, and what might happen if I wasn’t able to pay off the guy I’d bet with. He was an engineer, after all, and technically my boss. That fellow had just enough son of a bitch in him to have fired my ass if I didn’t pay the wager. It wouldn’t have been the bet, but he would have found something, and it would have been something that would go on my work-record in big red letters, too. But that wasn’t the biggest thing. Not at all.”

“What was?”

“Your mother. Our marriage. When you’re young and don’t have either a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, a marriage is under strain all the time. It doesn’t matter how much you love each other, that marriage is like an overloaded packhorse and you know it can fall to its knees or even roll over dead if all the wrong things happen at all the wrong times. I don’t think she would have divorced me over a four-hundred-dollar bet, but I’m glad I never had to find out for sure. So when the fever passed, I saw that I might have bet a little more than four hundred dollars. I might just have bet my whole goddam future.”

They were approaching the Emporium Galorium. There was a bench on the verge of the grassy town common, and Mr. Delevan gestured for Kevin to sit down.

“This won’t take long,” he said, and then laughed. It was a grating, compressed sound, like an inexperienced driver working a transmission lever. “It hurts too much to stretch out, even after all these years.”

So they sat on the bench and Mr. Delevan finished the story of how he happened to know Pop Merrill while they looked across the grassy common with the bandstand in the middle.

“I went to him the same night I made the bet,” he said. “I told your mother I was going out for cigarettes. I went after dark, so no one would see me. From town, I mean. They would have known I was in some kind of trouble, and I didn’t want that. I went in and Pop said, ‘What’s a professional man like you doing in a place like this, Mr. John Delevan?’ and I told him what I’d done and he said, ‘You made a bet and already you have got your head set to the idea you’ve lost it.’ ‘If I do lose it,’ I said, ‘I want to make sure I don’t lose anything else.’

“That made him laugh. ‘I respect a wise man,’ he said. ‘I reckon I can trust you. If the Celtics win, you come see me. I’ll take care of you. You got an honest face.’ ”

“And that was all?” Kevin asked. In eighth-grade math, they had done a unit on loans, and he still remembered most of it. “He didn’t ask for any, uh, collateral?”

“People who go to Pop don’t have collateral,” his father said. “He’s not a loan-shark like you see in the movies; he doesn’t break any legs if you don’t pay up. But he has ways of fixing people.”

“What ways?”

“Never mind,” John Delevan said. “After that last game ended, I went upstairs to tell your mother I was going to go out for cigarettes—again. She was asleep, though, so I was spared that lie. It was late, late for Castle Rock, anyway, going on eleven, but the lights were on in his place. I knew they would be. He gave me the money in tens. He took them out of an old Crisco can. All tens. I remember that. They were crumpled but he had made them straight. Forty ten-dollar bills, him counting them out like a bank-clerk with that pipe going and his glasses up on his head and for just a second there I felt like knocking his teeth out. Instead I thanked him. You don’t know how hard it can be to say thank you sometimes. I hope you never do. He said, ‘You understand the terms, now, don’t you?’ and I said I did, and he said, ‘That’s good. I ain’t worried about you. What I mean to say is you got an honest face. You go on and take care of your business with that fella at work, and then take care of your business with me. And don’t make any more bets. Man only has to look in your face to see you weren’t cut out to be a gambler.’ So I took the money and went home and put it under the floor-mat of the old Chevy and lay next to your mother and didn’t sleep a wink all night long because I felt filthy. Next day I gave the tens to the engineer I bet with, and he counted them out, and then he just folded them over and tucked them into one of his shirt pockets and buttoned the flap like that cash didn’t mean any more than a gas receipt he’d have to turn in to the chief contractor at the end of the day. Then he clapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Well, you’re a good man, Johnny. Better than I thought. I won four hundred but I lost twenty to Bill Untermeyer. He bet you’d come up with the dough first thing this morning and I bet him I wouldn’t see it till the end of the week. If I ever did.’ ‘I pay my debts,’ I said. ‘Easy, now,’ he said, and clapped me on the shoulder again, and I think that time I really did come close to popping his eyeballs out with my thumbs.”

“How much interest did Pop charge you, Dad?”

His father looked at him sharply. “Does he let you call him that?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Watch out for him, then,” Mr. Delevan said. “He’s a snake.”

Then he sighed, as if admitting to both of them that he was begging the question, and knew it. “Ten per cent. That’s what the interest was.”

“That’s not so m—”

“Compounded weekly,” Mr. Delevan added.

Kevin sat struck dumb for a moment. Then: “But that’s not legal!”

“How true,” Mr. Delevan said dryly. He looked at the strained expression of incredulity on his son’s face and his own strained look broke. He laughed and clapped his son on the shoulder. “It’s only the world, Kev,” he said. “It kills us all in the end, anyhow.”

“But—”

“But nothing. That was the freight, and he knew I’d pay it. I knew they were hiring on the three-to-eleven shift at the mill over in Oxford. I told you I’d gotten myself ready to lose, and going to Pop wasn’t the only thing I did. I’d talked to your mother, said I might take a shift over there for awhile. After all, she’d been wanting a newer car, and maybe to move to a better apartment, and get a little something into the bank in case we had some kind of financial setback.”

He laughed.

“Well, the financial setback had happened, and she didn’t know it, and I meant to do my damnedest to keep her from finding out. I didn’t know if I could or not, but I meant to do my damnedest. She was dead set against it. She said I’d kill myself, working sixteen hours a day. She said those mills were dangerous, you were always reading about someone losing an arm or leg or even getting crushed to death under the rollers. I told her not to worry, I’d get a job in the sorting room, minimum wage but sit-down work, and if it really was too much, I’d give it up. She was still against it. She said she’d go to work herself, but I talked her out of that. That was the last thing I wanted, you know.”

Kevin nodded.

“I told her I’d quit six months, eight at the outside, anyway. So I went up and they hired me on, but not in the sorting room. I got a job in the rolling shed, feeding raw stock into a machine that looked like the wringer on a giant’s washing machine. It was dangerous work, all right; if you slipped or if your attention wandered—and it was hard to keep that from happening because it was so damned monotonous— you’d lose part of yourself or all of it. I saw a man lose his hand in a roller once and I never want to see anything like that again. It was like watching a charge of dynamite go off in a rubber glove stuffed with meat.”

“God-damn,” Kevin said. He had rarely said that in his father’s presence, but his father did not seem to notice.

“Anyway, I got two dollars and eighty cents an hour, and after two months they bumped me to three ten,” he said. “It was hell. I’d work on the road project all day long—at least it was early spring and not hot—and then race off to the mill, pushing that Chevy for all it was worth to keep from being late. I’d take off my khakis and just about jump into a pair of blue-jeans and a tee-shirt and work the rollers from three until eleven. I’d get home around midnight and the worst part was the nights when your mother waited up—which she did two or three nights a week—and I’d have to act cheery and full of pep when I could hardly walk a straight line, I was so tired. But if she’d seen that—”

“She would have made you stop.”

“Yes. She would. So I’d act bright and chipper and tell her funny stories about the sorting room where I wasn’t working and sometimes I’d wonder what would happen if she ever decided to drive up some night—to give me a hot dinner, or something like that. I did a pretty good job, but some of it must have showed, because she kept telling me I was silly to be knocking myself out for so little—and it really did seem like chicken-feed once the government dipped their beak and Pop dipped his. It seemed like just about what a fellow working in the sorting room for minimum wage would clear. They paid Wednesday afternoons, and I always made sure to cash my check in the office before the girls went home.

“Your mother never saw one of those checks.

“The first week I paid Pop fifty dollars—forty was interest, and ten was on the four hundred, which left three hundred and ninety owing. I was like a walking zombie. On the road I’d sit in my car at lunch, eat my sandwich, and then sleep until the foreman rang his goddamned bell. I hated that bell.

“I paid him fifty dollars the second week-thirty-nine was interest, eleven was on the principal—and I had it down to three hundred and seventy-nine dollars. I felt like a bird trying to eat a mountain one peck at a time.

“The third week I almost went into the roller myself, and it scared me so bad I woke up for a few minutes—enough to have an idea, anyway, so I guess it was a blessing in disguise. I had to give up smoking. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t seen it before. In those days a pack of smokes cost forty cents. I smoked two packs a day. That was five dollars and sixty cents a week!

“We had a cigarette break every two hours and I looked at my pack of Tareytons and saw I had ten, maybe twelve. I made those cigarettes last a week and a half, and I never bought another pack.

“I spent a month not knowing if I could make it or not. There were days when the alarm went off at six o‘clock and I knew I couldn’t, that I’d just have to tell Mary and take whatever she wanted to dish out. But by the time the second month started, I knew I was probably going to be all right. I think to this day it was the extra five sixty a week—that, and all the returnable beer and soda bottles I could pick up along the sides of the road—that made the difference. I had the principal down to three hundred, and that meant I could knock off twenty-five, twenty-six dollars a week from it, more as time went on.

“Then, in late April, we finished the road project and got a week off, with pay. I told Mary I was getting ready to quit my job at the mill and she said thank God, and I spent that week off from my regular job working all the hours I could get at the mill, because it was time and a half. I never had an accident. I saw them, saw men fresher and more awake than I was have them, but I never did. I don’t know why. At the end of that week I gave Pop Merrill a hundred dollars and gave my week’s notice at the paper mill. After that last week I had whittled the nut down enough so I could chip the rest off my regular pay-check without your mother noticing.”

He fetched a deep sigh.

“Now you know how I know Pop Merrill, and why I don’t trust him. I spent ten weeks in hell and he reaped the sweat off my forehead and my ass, too, in ten-dollar bills that he undoubtedly took out of that Crisco can or another one and passed on to some other sad sack who had got himself in the same kind of mess I did.”

“Boy, you must hate him.”

“No,” Mr. Delevan said, getting up. “I don’t hate him and I don’t hate myself. I got a fever, that’s all. It could have been worse. My marriage could have died of it, and you and Meg never would have been born, Kevin. Or I might have died of it myself. Pop Merrill was the cure. He was a hard cure, but he worked. What’s hard to forgive is how he worked. He took every damned cent and wrote it down in a book in a drawer under his cash register and looked at the circles under my eyes and the way my pants had gotten a way of hanging off my hip-bones and he said nothing.”

They walked toward the Emporium Galorium, which was painted the dusty faded yellow of signs left too long in country store windows, its false front both obvious and unapologetic. Next to it, Polly Chalmers was sweeping her walk and talking to Alan Pangborn, the county sheriff. She looked young and fresh with her hair pulled back in a horsetail; he looked young and heroic in his neatly pressed uniform. But things were not always the way they looked; even Kevin, at fifteen, knew that. Sheriff Pangborn had lost his wife and youngest son in a car accident that spring, and Kevin had heard that Ms. Chalmers, young or not, had a bad case of arthritis and might be crippled up with it before too many more years passed. Things were not always the way they looked. This thought caused him to glance toward the Emporium Galorium again ... and then to look down at his birthday camera, which he was carrying in his hand.

“He even did me a favor,” Mr. Delevan mused. “He got me to quit smoking. But I don’t trust him. Walk careful around him, Kevin. And no matter what, let me do the talking. I might know him a little better now.”

So they went into the dusty ticking silence, where Pop Merrill waited for them by the door, with his glasses propped on the bald dome of his head and a trick or two still up his sleeve.