‘ Dad?’
‘I suppose he could have,’ Mr Delevan said. ‘But why?’
Kevin could only shake his head. He didn’t know why. But that was all right; Mr Delevan thought he did, and it was something of a relief. Maybe honest men didn’t have to learn the world’s simplest truths over and over again; maybe some of those truths eventually stuck fast. He’d only had to articulate the question aloud in order to find the answer. Why did the Pop Merrills of this world do anything? To make a profit. That was the reason, the whole reason, and nothing but the reason. Kevin had wanted to destroy it. After looking at Pop’s videotape, Mr Delevan had found himself in accord with that. Of the three of them, who had been the only one capable of taking a longer view?
Why, Pop, of course. Reginald Marion ‘Pop’ Merrill.
John Delevan had been sitting on the edge of Kevin’s bed with an arm about his son’s shoulders. Now he stood up. ‘Get dressed. I’ll go downstairs and call in. I’ll tell Brandon I’ll probably just be late, but to assume I won’t be in at all.’
He was preoccupied with this, already talking to Brandon Reed in his mind, but not so preoccupied he didn’t see the gratitude which lighted his son’s worried face. Mr Delevan smiled a little and felt that uncharacteristic gloom first ease and then let go entirely. There was this much, at least: his son was as yet not too old to take comfort from him, or accept him as a higher power to whom appeals could sometimes be directed in the knowledge that they would be acted upon; nor was he himself too old to take comfort from his son’s comfort.
‘I think,’ he said, moving toward the door, ‘that we ought to pay a call on Pop Merrill.’ He glanced at the clock on Kevin’s night-table. It was ten minutes after eight, and in back of the Emporium Galorium, a
sledgehammer was coming down on an imitation German cuckoo clock. ‘He usually opens around eight-thirty. just about the time we’ll get there, I think. If you get a wiggle on, that is.’
He paused on his way out and a brief, cold smile flickered on his mouth. He was not smiling at his son. ‘I think he’s got some explaining to do, is what I mean to say.’
Mr Delevan went out, closing the door behind him. Kevin quickly began to dress.
CHAPTER 14
The Castle Rock LaVerdiere’s Super Drug Store was a lot more than just a drugstore. Put another way, it was really only a drugstore as an afterthought. It was as if someone had noticed at the last moment – just before the grand opening, say – that one of the words in the sign was still ‘Drug.’ That someone might have made a mental note to tell someone else, someone in the company’s management, that here they were, opening yet another LaVerdiere’s, and they had by simple oversight neglected yet again to correct the sign so it read more simply and accurately, LaVerdiere’s Super Store … and, after making the mental note, the someone in charge of noticing such things had delayed the grand opening a day or two so they could shoe-horn in a prescription counter about the size of a telephone booth in the long building’s furthest, darkest, and most neglected corner.
The LaVerdiere’s Super Drug Store was really more of a jumped-up five-and-dime than anything else. The town’s last real five-and-dime, a long dim room with the feeble, fly-specked overhead globes hung on chains and reflected murkily in the creaking but often-waxed wooden floor, had been The Ben Franklin Store. It had given up the ghost in 1978 to make way for a video-games arcade called Galaxia and E-Z
Video Rentals, where Tuesday was Toofers Day and no one under the age of twenty could go in the back room.
LaVerdiere’s carried everything the old Ben Franklin had carried, but the goods were bathed in the pitiless light of Maxi-Glo fluorescent bars which gave every bit of stock its own hectic, feverish shimmer. Buy me!
each item seemed to shriek. Buy me or you may die! Or your wife may die! Or your kids! Or your best friend! Possibly all of them at once! Why? How should I know? I’m just a brainless item sitting on a Pre-fab LaVerdiere’s shelf! But doesn’t it feel true? You know It does! So buy me and buy me RIGHT … NOW!
There was an aisle of notions, two aisles of first-aid supplies and nostrums, an aisle of video and audio tapes (both blank and pre-recorded). There was a long rack of magazines giving way to paperback books, a display of lighters under one digital cash-register and a display of watches under another (a third register was hidden in the dark corner where the pharmacist lurked in his lonely shadows). Halloween candy had taken over most of the toy aisle (the toys would not only come back after Halloween but eventually take over two whole aisles as the days slid remorselessly down toward Christmas). And, like something too neat to exist in reality except as a kind of dumb admission that there was such a thing as Fate with a capital F, and that Fate might, in its own way, indicate the existence of that whole ‘other world’ about which Pop had never before cared (except in terms of how it might fatten his pocketbook, that was) and about which Kevin Delevan had never before even thought, at the front of the store, in the main display area, was a carefully arranged work of salesmanship which was billed as the FALL FOTO FESTIVAL.
This display consisted of a basket of colorful autumn leaves spilling out on the floor in a bright flood (a flood too large to actually have come from that one basket alone, a careful observer might have concluded).
Amid the leaves were a number of Kodak and Polaroid cameras – several Sun 660s among the latter – and all sorts of other equipment: cases, albums, film, flashbars. In the midst of this odd cornucopia, an old-fashioned tripod rose like one of H. G. Wells’s Martian death-machines towering over the crispy wreck of London. It bore a sign which told all patrons interested enough to look that this week one could obtain SUPER REDUCTIONS ON ALL POLAROID CAMERAS & ACCESSORIES!
At eight-thirty that morning, half an hour after LaVerdiere’s opened for the day, ‘all patrons’ consisted of Pop Merrill and Pop alone. He took no notice of the display but marched straight to the only open counter, where Molly Durham had just finished laying out the watches on their imitationvelvet display-cloth.
Oh no, here comes old Eyeballs, she thought, and grimaced. Pop’s idea of a really keen way to kill a stretch of time about as long as Molly’s coffee-break was to kind of ooze up to the counter where she was working (he always picked hers, even if he had to stand in line; in fact, she thought he liked it better when there was a line) and buy a pouch of Prince Albert tobacco. This was a purchase an ordinary fellow could transact in maybe thirty seconds, but if she got Eyeballs out of her face in under three minutes, she thought she was doing very well indeed. He kept all of his money in a cracked leather purse on a chain, and he’d haul it out of his pocket – giving his doorbells a good feel on the way, it always looked to Molly – and then open it. It always gave out a little screee-eek! noise, and honest to God if you didn’t expect to see a moth flutter out of it, just like in those cartoons people draw of tightwads. On top of the purse’s contents there would be a whole mass of paper money, bills that looked somehow as if you shouldn’t handle them, as if they might be coated with disease germs of some kind, and jingling silver underneath. Pop would fish out a dollar bill and then kind of hook the other bills to one side with one of those thick fingers of his to get to the change underneath – he’d never give you a couple of bucks, hunh-uh, that would make everything go too quick to suit him – and then he’d work that out, too. And all the time his eyes would be busy, flicking down to the purse for a second or two but mostly letting the fingers sort out the proper coins by touch while his eyes crawled over her boobs, her belly, her hips, and then back up to her boobs again. Never once her face; not even so far as her mouth, which was a part of a girl in which most men seemed to be interested; no, Pop Merrill was strictly interested in the lower portions of the female anatomy. When he finally finished – and no matter how quick that was, it always seemed like three times as long to Molly – and got the hell out of the store again, she always felt like going somewhere and taking a long shower.