Mr Delevan cupped his own hands to the sides of his face and pressed his nose to the glass. They stood there side by side, backs to the square, looking into the dimness of the Emporium Galorium like the world’s most dedicated window-shoppers. ‘Well,’ he said after a few seconds, ‘it looks like if he absconded he left his shit behind.’
‘Yeah – but that’s not what I mean. Do you see it?’
‘See what?’
‘Hanging on that post. The one by the bureau with all the clocks on it.’
And after a moment, Mr Delevan did see it: a Polaroid camera, hanging by its strap from a hook on the post. He thought he could even see the chipped place, although that might have been his imagination.
It’s not your imagination.
The smile faded off his lips as he realized he was starting to feel what Kevin was feeling: the weird and distressing certainty that some simple yet terribly dangerous piece of machinery was running … and unlike most of Pop’s clocks, it was running right on time.
‘Do you think he’s just sitting upstairs and waiting for us to go away?’ Mr Delevan spoke aloud, but he was really talking to himself. The lock on the door looked both new and expensive … but he was willing to bet that if one of them -probably Kevin was in better shape – hit the door hard enough, it would rip right through the old wood. He mused randomly: A lock is only as good as the door you put it in. People never think.
Kevin turned his strained face to look at his father. In that moment, John Delevan was as struck by Kevin’s face as Kevin had been by his not long ago. He thought: I wonder how many fathers get a chance to see what their sons will look like as men? He won’t always look this strained, this tightly drawn – God, I hope not – but this is what he will look like. And, Jesus, he’s going to be handsome!
He, like Kevin, had that one moment in the midst of whatever it was that was going on here, and the moment was a short one, but he also never forgot; it was always within his mind’s reach.
‘What?’ Kevin asked hoarsely. ‘What, Dad?’
‘You want to bust it? Because I’d go along.’
‘Not yet. I don’t think we’ll have to. I don’t think he’s here … but he’s close.’
You can’t know any such thing. Can’t even think it.
But his son did think it, and he believed Kevin was right. Some sort of link had been formed between Pop and his son. ‘Some sort’ of link? Get serious. He knew perfectly well what the link was. It was that fucking camera hanging on the wall in there, and the longer this went on, the longer he felt that machinery running, its gears grinding and its vicious unthinking cogs turning, the less he liked it.
Break the camera, break the camera, he thought, and said: ‘Are you sure, Kev?’
‘Let’s go around to the back. Try the door there.’
‘There’s a gate. He’ll keep it locked.’
‘Maybe we can climb over.’
‘Okay,’ Mr Delevan said, and followed his son down the steps of the Emporium Galorium and around to the alley, wondering as he went if he had lost his mind.
But the gate wasn’t locked. Somewhere along the line Pop had forgotten to lock it, and although Mr Delevan hadn’t liked the idea of climbing over the fence, or maybe falling over the fence, quite likely tearing the hell out of his balls in the process, he somehow liked the open gate even less. All the same, he and Kevin went through it and into Pop’s littered backyard, which not even the drifts of fallen October leaves could improve.
Kevin wove his way through the piles of junk Pop had thrown out but not bothered to take to the dump, and Mr Delevan followed him. They arrived at the chopping block at about the same time Pop was coming out of Mrs Althea Linden’s backyard and onto Mulberry Street, a block west. He would follow Mulberry Street until he reached the offices of the Wolf Jaw Lumber Company. Although the company’s pulp trucks would already be coursing the roads of western Maine and the yowl and yark of the cutters’ chainsaws would have been rising from the area’s diminishing stands of hardwood since six-thirty or so, no one would come in to man the office until nine, which was still a good fifteen minutes away. At the rear of the lumber company’s tiny backyard was a high board fence. It was gated, and this gate was locked, but Pop had the key. He would unlock the gate and step through into his own backyard.
Kevin reached the chopping block. Mr Delevan caught up, followed his son’s gaze, and blinked. He opened his mouth to ask what in the hell this was all about, then shut it again. He was starting to have an idea of what in the hell it was all about without any aid from Kevin. It wasn’t light to have such ideas, wasn’t natural, and he knew from bitter experience (in which Reginald Marion ‘Pop’ Merrill himself had played a part at one point, as he had told his son not so long ago) that doing things on impulse was a good way to reach the wrong decision and go flying off half-cocked, but it didn’t matter. Although he did not think it in such terms, it would be fair to say Mr Delevan just hoped he could apply for readmittance to the Reasonable tribe when this was over.
At first he thought he was looking at the smashed remains of a Polaroid camera. Of course that was just his mind, trying to find a little rationality in repetition; what lay on and around the chopping block didn’t look anything at all like a camera, Polaroid or otherwise. All those gears and flywheels could only belong to a clock. Then he saw the dead cartoon-bird and even knew what kind of clock. He opened his mouth to ask Kevin why in God’s name Pop would bring a cuckoo clock out back and then sledgehammer it to death. He thought it over again and decided he didn’t have to ask, after all. The answer to that was also beginning to come. He didn’t want it to come, because it pointed to madness on what seemed to Mr Delevan a grand scale, but that didn’t matter; it came anyway.
You had to hang a cuckoo clock on something. You had to hang it because of the pendulum weights. And what did you hang it on? Why, a hook, of course.
Maybe a hook sticking out of a beam.
Like the beam Kevin’s Polaroid had been hanging on.
Now he spoke, and his words seemed to come from some long distance away: ‘What in the hell is wrong with him, Kevin? Has he gone nuts?’
‘Not gone,’ Kevin answered, and his voice also seemed to come from some long distance away as they stood above the chopping block, looking down on the busted timepiece. ‘Driven there. By the camera.’
‘We’ve got to smash it,’ Mr Delevan said. His voice seemed to float to his ears long after he had felt the words coming out of his mouth.
‘Not yet,’ Kevin said. ‘We have to go to the drugstore first. They’re having a special sale on them.’
‘Having a special sale on wh-’
Kevin touched his arm. John Delevan looked at him. Kevin’s head was up, and he looked like a deer scenting fire. In that moment the boy was more than handsome; he was almost divine, like a young poet at the hour of his death.
‘What?’ Mr Delevan asked urgently.
‘Did you hear something?’ Alertness slowly changing to doubt.
‘A car on the street,’ Mr Delevan said. How much older was he than his son? he wondered suddenly.
Twenty-five years? Jesus, wasn’t it time he started acting it?
He pushed the strangeness away from him, trying to get it at arm’s length. He groped desperately for his maturity and found a little of it. Putting it on was like putting on a badly tattered overcoat.
‘You sure that’s all it was, Dad?’
‘Yes. Kevin, you’re wound up too tight. Get hold of yourself or . Or what? But he knew, and laughed shakily. ‘Or you’ll have us both running like a pair of rabbits.’
Kevin looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, like someone coming out of a deep sleep, perhaps even a trance, and then nodded. ‘Come on.’
‘Kevin, why? What do you want? He could be upstairs, just not answering 0’
‘I’ll tell you when we get there, Dad. Come on.’ And almost dragged his father out of the littered backyard and into the narrow alleyway.
‘Kevin, do you want to take my arm off, or what?’ Mr Delevan asked when they got back to the sidewalk.