Four Past Midnight (104 page)

“How much interest did Pop charge you, Dad?”

His father looked at him sharply. “Does he let you call him that?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Watch out for him, then,” Mr. Delevan said. “He's a snake.”

Then he sighed, as if admitting to both of them that he was begging the question, and knew it. “Ten per cent. That's what the interest was.”

“That's not so m—”

“Compounded weekly,” Mr. Delevan added.

Kevin sat struck dumb for a moment. Then: “But that's not
legal!”

“How true,” Mr. Delevan said dryly. He looked at the strained expression of incredulity on his son's face and his own strained look broke. He laughed and clapped his son on the shoulder. “It's only the world, Kev,” he said. “It kills us all in the end, anyhow.”

“But—”

“But nothing. That was the freight, and he knew I'd pay it. I knew they were hiring on the three-to-eleven shift at the mill over in Oxford. I told you I'd gotten myself ready to lose, and going to Pop wasn't the only thing I did. I'd talked to your mother, said I might take a shift over there for awhile. After all, she'd been wanting a newer car, and maybe to move to a better apartment, and get a little something into the bank in case we had some kind of financial setback.”

He laughed.

“Well, the financial setback had happened, and she didn't know it, and I meant to do my damnedest to keep her from finding out. I didn't know if I could or not, but I meant to do my damnedest. She was dead set against it. She said I'd kill myself, working sixteen hours a day. She said those mills were dangerous, you were always reading about someone losing an arm or leg or even getting crushed to death under the rollers. I told her not to worry, I'd get a job in the sorting room, minimum wage but sit-down work, and if it really was too much, I'd give it up. She was still against it. She said she'd go to work herself, but I talked her out of
that.
That was the last thing I wanted, you know.”

Kevin nodded.

“I told her I'd quit six months, eight at the outside, anyway. So I went up and they hired me on, but not in the sorting room. I got a job in the rolling shed, feeding raw stock into a machine that looked like the wringer on a giant's washing machine. It was dangerous work, all right; if you slipped or if your attention wandered—and it was hard to keep that from happening because it was so damned monotonous— you'd lose part of yourself or all of it. I saw a man lose his hand in a roller once and I never want to see anything like that again. It was like watching a charge of dynamite go off in a rubber glove stuffed with meat.”

“God-
damn
,” Kevin said. He had rarely said that in his father's presence, but his father did not seem to notice.

“Anyway, I got two dollars and eighty cents an hour, and after two months they bumped me to three ten,” he said. “It was hell. I'd work on the road project all day long—at least it was early spring and not hot—and then race off to the mill, pushing that Chevy for all it was worth to keep from being late. I'd take off my khakis and just about jump into a pair of blue-jeans and a tee-shirt and work the rollers from three until eleven. I'd get home around midnight and the worst part was the nights when your mother waited up—which she did two or three nights a week—and I'd have to act cheery and full of pep when I could hardly walk a straight line, I was so tired. But if she'd seen that—”

“She would have made you stop.”

“Yes. She would. So I'd act bright and chipper and tell her funny stories about the sorting room where I wasn't working and sometimes I'd wonder what would happen if she ever decided to drive up some night—to give me a hot dinner, or something like that. I did a pretty good job, but some of it must have showed, because she kept telling me I was silly to be knocking myself out for so little—and it really did seem like chicken-feed once the government dipped their beak and Pop dipped his. It seemed like just about what a fellow working in the sorting room for minimum wage would clear. They paid Wednesday afternoons, and I always made sure to cash my check in the office before the girls went home.

“Your mother never saw one of those checks.

“The first week I paid Pop fifty dollars—forty was interest, and ten was on the four hundred, which left three hundred and ninety owing. I was like a walking zombie. On the road I'd sit in my car at lunch, eat my sandwich, and then sleep until the foreman rang his goddamned bell. I
hated
that bell.

“I paid him fifty dollars the second week-thirty-nine was interest, eleven was on the principal—and I had it down to three hundred and seventy-nine dollars. I felt like a bird trying to eat a mountain one peck at a time.

“The third week I almost went into the roller myself, and it scared me so bad I woke up for a few minutes—enough to have an idea, anyway, so I guess it was a blessing in disguise. I had to give up smoking. I couldn't understand why I hadn't seen it before. In those days a pack of smokes cost forty cents. I smoked two packs a day. That was five dollars and sixty cents a week!

“We had a cigarette break every two hours and I looked at my pack of Tareytons and saw I had ten, maybe twelve. I made those cigarettes last a week and a half, and I never bought another pack.

“I spent a month not knowing if I could make it or not. There were days when the alarm went off at six o‘clock and I knew I couldn't, that I'd just have to tell Mary and take whatever she wanted to dish out. But by the time the second month started, I knew I was probably going to be all right. I think to this day it was the extra five sixty a week—that, and all the returnable beer and soda bottles I could pick up along the sides of the road—that made the difference. I had the principal down to three hundred, and that meant I could knock off twenty-five, twenty-six dollars a week from it, more as time went on.

“Then, in late April, we finished the road project and got a week off, with pay. I told Mary I was getting ready to quit my job at the mill and she said thank God, and I spent that week off from my regular job working all the hours I could get at the mill, because it was time and a half. I never had an accident. I saw them, saw men fresher and more awake than I was have them, but I never did. I don't know why. At the end of that week I gave Pop Merrill a hundred dollars and gave my week's notice at the paper mill. After that last week I had whittled the nut down enough so I could chip the rest off my regular pay-check without your mother noticing.”

He fetched a deep sigh.

“Now you know how I know Pop Merrill, and why I don't trust him. I spent ten weeks in hell and he reaped the sweat off my forehead and my ass, too, in ten-dollar bills that he undoubtedly took out of that Crisco can or another one and passed on to some other sad sack who had got himself in the same kind of mess I did.”

“Boy, you must hate him.”

“No,” Mr. Delevan said, getting up. “I don't hate him and I don't hate myself. I got a fever, that's all. It could have been worse. My marriage could have died of it, and you and Meg never would have been born, Kevin. Or I might have died of it myself. Pop Merrill was the cure. He was a
hard
cure, but he worked. What's hard to forgive is
how
he worked. He took every damned cent and wrote it down in a book in a drawer under his cash register and looked at the circles under my eyes and the way my pants had gotten a way of hanging off my hip-bones and he said nothing.”

They walked toward the Emporium Galorium, which was painted the dusty faded yellow of signs left too long in country store windows, its false front both obvious and unapologetic. Next to it, Polly Chalmers was sweeping her walk and talking to Alan Pangborn, the county sheriff. She looked young and fresh with her hair pulled back in a horsetail; he looked young and heroic in his neatly pressed uniform. But things were not always the way they looked; even Kevin, at fifteen, knew that. Sheriff Pangborn had lost his wife and youngest son in a car accident that spring, and Kevin had heard that Ms. Chalmers, young or not, had a bad case of arthritis and might be crippled up with it before too many more years passed. Things were not always the way they looked. This thought caused him to glance toward the Emporium Galorium again ... and then to look down at his birthday camera, which he was carrying in his hand.

“He even did me a favor,” Mr. Delevan mused. “He got me to quit smoking. But I don't trust him. Walk careful around him, Kevin. And no matter what, let me do the talking. I might know him a little better now.”

So they went into the dusty ticking silence, where Pop Merrill waited for them by the door, with his glasses propped on the bald dome of his head and a trick or two still up his sleeve.

“Well, and here you are, father and son,” Pop said, giving them an admiring, grandfatherly smile. His eyes twinkled behind a haze of pipe-smoke and for a moment, although he was clean-shaven, Kevin thought Pop looked like Father Christmas. “You've got a fine boy, Mr. Delevan.
Fine
.”

“I know,” Mr. Delevan said. “I was upset when I heard he'd been dealing with you because I want him to stay that way.”

“That's hard,” Pop said, with the faintest touch of reproach. “That's hard comin from a man who when he had nowhere else to turn—”

“That's over,” Mr. Delevan said.

“Ayuh, ayuh, that's just what I mean to say.”

“But this isn't.”

“It will be,” Pop said. He held a hand out to Kevin and Kevin gave him the Sun camera. “It will be today.” He held the camera up, turning it over in his hands. “This is a piece of work. What
kind
of piece I don't know, but your boy wants to smash it because he thinks it's dangerous. I think he's right. But I told him, ‘You don't want your daddy to think you're a sissy, do you?' That's the only reason I had him ho you down here, John—”

“I liked ‘Mr. Delevan' better.”

“All right,” Pop said, and sighed. “I can see you ain't gonna warm up none and let bygones be bygones.”

“No.”

Kevin looked from one man to the other, his face distressed.

“Well, it don't matter,” Pop said; both his voice and face went cold with remarkable suddenness, and he didn't look like Father Christmas at all. “When I said the past is the past and what's done is done, I meant it ... except when it affects what people do in the here and now. But I'm gonna say this, Mr. Delevan: I don't bottom deal, and you know it.”

Pop delivered this magnificent lie with such flat coldness that both of them believed it; Mr. Delevan even felt a little ashamed of himself, as incredible as that was.

“Our business was our business. You told me what you wanted, I told you what I'd have to have in return, and you give it to me, and there was an end to it. This is another thing.” And then Pop told a lie even more magnificent, a lie which was simply too towering to be disbelieved. “I got no stake in this, Mr. Delevan. There is nothing I want but to help your boy. I like him.”

He smiled and Father Christmas was back so fast and strong that Kevin forgot he had ever been gone. Yet more than this: John Delevan, who had for months worked himself to the edge of exhaustion and perhaps even death between the rollers in order to pay the exorbitant price this man demanded to atone for a momentary lapse into insanity—John Delevan forgot that other expression, too.

Pop led them along the twisting aisles, through the smell of dead newsprint and past the tick-tock clocks, and he put the Sun 660 casually down on the worktable a little too near the edge (just as Kevin had done in his own house after taking that first picture) and then just went on toward the stairs at the back which led up to his little apartment. There was a dusty old mirror propped against the wall back there, and Pop looked into it, watching to see if the boy or his father would pick the camera up or move it further away from the edge. He didn't think either would, but it was possible.

They spared it not so much as a passing glance and as Pop led them up the narrow stairway with the ancient eroded rubber treads he grinned in a way it would have been bad business for anyone to see and thought,
Damn, I'm good!

He opened the door and they went into the apartment.

 

 

Neither John nor Kevin Delevan had ever been in Pop's private quarters, and John knew of no one who had. In a way this was not surprising; no one was ever going to nominate Pop as the town's number-one citizen. John thought it was not
impossible
that the old fuck had a friend or two—the world never exhausted its oddities, it seemed—but if so, he didn't know who they were.

And Kevin spared a fleeting thought for Mr. Baker, his favorite teacher. He wondered if, perchance, Mr. Baker had ever gotten into the sort of crack he'd need a fellow like Pop to get him out of. This seemed as unlikely to him as the idea of Pop having friends seemed to his father ... but then, an hour ago the idea that his own father—

Well. It was best let go, perhaps.

Pop
did
have a friend (or at least an acquaintance) or two, but he didn't bring them here. He didn't want to. It was his place, and it came closer to revealing his true nature than he wanted anyone to see. It struggled to be neat and couldn't get there. The wallpaper was marked with water-stains; they weren't glaring, but stealthy and brown, like the phantom thoughts that trouble anxious minds. There were crusty dishes in the old-fashioned deep sink, and although the table was clean and the lid on the plastic waste-can was shut, there was an odor of sardines and something else—unwashed feet, maybe—which was almost not there. An odor as stealthy as the water-stains on the wallpaper.