‘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 fight 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 you 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-fight 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 time. That last time 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.’