CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Pop’s vacant gaze held as he left LaVerdiere’s. It
held as he crossed the sidewalk with the boxes of film in his hand.
It broke and became an expression of somehow unsettling alertness
as he stepped off into the gutter ... and stopped there, with one
foot on the sidewalk and one planted amid the litter of squashed
cigarette butts and empty potato-chip bags. Here was another Pop
Molly would not have recognized, although there were those who had
been sharp-traded by the old man who would have known it quite
well. This was neither Merrill the lecher nor Merrill the robot,
but Merrill the animal with its wind up. All at once he was there,
in a way he seldom allowed himself to be there in public. Showing
so much of one’s true self in public was not, in Pop’s estimation,
a good idea. This morning, however, he was far from being in
command of himself, and there was no one out to observe him,
anyway. If there had been, that person would not have seen Pop the
folksy crackerbarrel philosopher or even Pop the sharp trader, but
something like the spirit of the man. In that moment of being
totally there, Pop looked like a rogue dog himself, a stray who has
gone feral and now pauses amid a midnight henhouse slaughter,
raggedy ears up, head cocked, bloodstreaked teeth showing a little
as he hears some sound from the farmer’s house and thinks of the
shotgun with its wide black holes like a figure eight rolled onto
its side. The dog knows nothing of figure eights, but even a dog
may recognize the dim shape of eternity if its instincts are honed
sharp enough.
Across the town square he could see the
urine-yellow front of the Emporium Galorium, standing slightly
apart from its nearest neighbors: the vacant building which had
housed The Village Washtub until earlier that year, Nan’s
Luncheonette, and You Sew and Sew, the dress-and-notions shop run
by Evvie Chalmers’s great-granddaughter, Polly-a woman of whom we
must speak at another time.
There were slant-parking spaces in front of all the
shops on Lower Main Street, and all of them were empty ... except
for one, which was just now being filled with a Ford station-wagon
Pop recognized. The light throb of its engine was clearly audible
in the morning-still air. Then it cut off, the brakelights went
out, and Pop pulled back the foot which had been in the gutter and
prudently withdrew himself to the corner of LaVerdiere’s. Here he
stood as still as that dog who has been alerted in the henhouse by
some small sound, the sort of sound which might be disregarded in
the killing frenzy of dogs neither so old nor so wise as this
one.
John Delevan got out from behind the wheel of the
station-wagon. The boy got out on the passenger side. They went to
the door of the Emporium Galorium. The man began to knock
impatiently, loud enough so the sound of it came as clearly to Pop
as the sound of the engine had done. Delevan paused, they both
listened, and then Delevan started in again, not knocking now but
hammering at the door, and you didn’t have to be a goddam
mind-reader to know the man was steamed up.
They know, Pop thought. Somehow they know.
Damned good thing I smashed the fucking camera.
He stood a moment longer, nothing moving except his
hooded eyes, and then he slipped around the corner of the drugstore
and into the alley between it and the neighboring bank. He did it
so smoothly that a man fifty years younger might have envied the
almost effortless agility of the movement.
This morning, Pop figured, it might be a little
wiser to go back home by backyard express.