‘Did you number em, like I asked?’ Pop asked when Kevin delivered them.
‘Yes, one to fifty-eight,’ Kevin said. He thumbed through the stack of photographs, showing Pop the small circled numbers in the lower lefthand corner of each. ‘But I don’t know if it matters. I’ve decided to get rid of the camera.’
‘Get rid of it? That ain’t what you mean.’
‘No. I guess not. I’m going to break it up with a sledgehammer.’
Pop looked at him with those shrewd little eyes. ‘That so?’
‘Yes,’ Kevin said, meeting the shrewd gaze steadfastly. ‘Last week I would have laughed at the idea, but I’m not laughing now. I think the thing is dangerous.’
‘Well, I guess you could be right, and I guess you could tape a charge of dynamite to it and blow it to smithereens if you wanted. It’s yours, is what I mean to say. But why don’t you hold off a little while?
There’s somethin I want to do with these pitchers. You might be interested.’
‘What?’
‘I druther not say,’ Pop answered, ‘case it don’t turn out. But I might have somethin by the end of the week that’d help you decide better, one way or the other.’
‘I have decided,’ Kevin said, and tapped something that had shown up in the last two photographs.
‘What is it?’ Pop asked. ‘I’ve looked at it with m’glass, and I feel like I should know what it is – it’s like a name you can’t quite remember but have right on the tip of your tongue, is what I mean to say – but I don’t quite.’
‘I suppose I could hold off until Friday or so,’ Kevin said, choosing not to answer the old man’s question. ‘I really don’t want to hold off much longer.’
‘Scared?’
‘Yes,’ Kevin said simply. ‘I’m scared.’
‘You told your folks?’
‘Not all of it, no.’
‘Well, you might want to. Might want to tell your dad, anyway, is what I mean to say. You got time to think on it while I take care of what it is I want to take care of.’
‘No matter what you want to do, I’m going to put my dad’s sledgehammer on it come Friday,’ Kevin said. ‘I don’t even want a camera anymore. Not a Polaroid or any other kind.’
‘Where is it now?’
‘In my bureau drawer. And that’s where it’s going to stay.’
‘Stop by the store here on Friday,’ Pop said. ‘Bring the camera with you. We’ll take a look at this little idear of mine, and then, if you want to bust the goddam thing up, I’ll provide the sledgehammer myself. No charge. Even got a chopping block out back you can set it on.’
‘That’s a deal,’ Kevin said, and smiled.
‘Just what have you told your folks about all this?’
‘That I’m still deciding. I didn’t want to worry them. My mom, especially.’ Kevin looked at him curiously.
‘Why did you say I might want to tell my dad?’
‘You bust up that camera, your father is going to be mad at you,’ Pop said. ‘That ain’t so bad, but he’s maybe gonna think you’re a little bit of a fool, too. Or an old maid, squallin burglar to the police on account of a creaky board is what I mean to say.’
Kevin flushed a little, thinking of how angry his father had gotten when the idea of the supernatural had come up, then sighed. He hadn’t thought of it in that light at all, but now that he did, he thought Pop was probably right. He didn’t like the idea of his father being mad at him, but he could live with it. The idea that his father might think him a coward, a fool, or both, though … that was a different kettle of fish altogether.
Pop was watching him shrewdly, reading these thoughts as easily as a man might read the headlines on the front pages of a tabloid newspaper as they crossed Kevin’s face.
‘You think he could meet you here around four in the afternoon on Friday?’
‘No way,’ Kevin said. ‘He works in Portland. He hardly ever gets home before six.’
‘I’ll give him a call, if you want,’ Pop said. ‘He’ll come if I call.’
Kevin gave him a wide-eyed stare.
Pop smiled thinly. ‘Oh, I know him,’ he said. ‘Know him of old. He don’t like to let on about me any more than you do, and I understand that, but what I mean to say is I know him. I know a lot of people in this town. You’d be surprised, son.’
‘How?’
‘Did him a favor one time,’ Pop said. He popped a match alight with his thumbnail, and veiled those eyes behind enough smoke so you couldn’t tell if it was amusement, sentiment, or contempt in them.
‘What kind of favor?’
‘That,’ Pop said, ‘is between him and me. Just like this business here’ – he gestured at the pile of photographs
-‘is between me and you. That’s what I mean to say.’
‘Well … okay … I guess. Should I say anything to him?’
‘Nope!’ Pop said in his chipper way. ‘You let me take care of everything.’ And for a moment, in spite of the obfuscating pipe-smoke, there was something in Pop Merrill’s eyes Kevin Delevan didn’t care for. He went out, a sorely confused boy who knew only one thing for sure: he wanted this to be over.
When he was gone, Pop sat silent and moveless for nearly five minutes. He allowed his pipe to go out in his mouth and drummed his fingers, which were nearly as knowing and talented as those of a concert violinist but masqueraded as equipment which should more properly have belonged to a digger of ditches or a pourer of cement, next to the stack of photographs. As the smoke dissipated, his eyes stood out clearly, and they were as cold as ice in a December puddle.
Abruptly he put the pipe in its holder and called a camera-and-video shop in Lewiston. He asked two questions. The answer to both of them was yes.
Pop hung up the phone and went back to drumming his fingers on the table beside the Polaroids. What he was planning wasn’t really fair to the boy, but the boy had uncovered the corner of something he not only didn’t understand but didn’t want to understand.
Fair or not, Pop didn’t believe he intended to let the boy do what the boy wanted to do. He hadn’t decided what he himself meant to do, not yet, not entirely, but it was wise to be prepared.
That was always wise.
He sat and drummed his fingers and wondered what that thing was the boy had seen. He had obviously felt Pop would know – or might know – but Pop hadn’t a clue. The boy might tell him on Friday. Or not. But if the boy didn’t, the father, to whom Pop had once loaned four hundred dollars to cover a bet on a basketball game, a bet he had lost and which his wife knew nothing about, certainly would. If, that was, he could.
Even the best of fathers didn’t know all about their sons anymore once those sons were fifteen or so, but Pop thought Kevin was a very young fifteen, and that his dad knew most things … or could find them out.
He smiled and drummed his fingers and all the clocks began to charge wearily at the hour of five.
CHAPTER 4
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 oneways. 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 spiralling 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.