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.
CHAPTER 5
‘What was it?’ Kevin asked as they prepared to go. They had the house to themselves. Meg was at her ballet class, and it was Mrs Delevan’s day to play bridge with her friends. She would come home at five with a large loaded pizza and news of who was getting divorced or at least thinking of it.