The Sun Dog (17 page)

Find out!
he thought ironically. Go
ahead! Just keep taking pitchers! You'll find out! You'll find out PLENTY!

'And you, sir,' Emory Chaffee was saying, for he had only been stopped for a moment; creatures of little imagination are rarely stopped for long by such trivial things as consideration, 'are one hell of a salesman!'

The memory of McCarty was still very close to the surface of Pop's mind, and it still rankled.

'If you think it's a fake -' he began.

'A fake? Not at all! Not ... at
all!'
Chaffee's buck-toothed smile spread wide in all its repulsive splendor. He spread his hands in a surely-you-jest motion. 'But I'm afraid, you see, that we can't do business on this particular item, Mr Merrill. I'm sorry to say so, but -'

'Why?' Pop bit off. 'If you don't think the goddam thing's a fake, why in the hell don't you want it?' And he was astonished to hear his voice rising in a kind of plaintive, balked fury. There had never been anything like this, never in the history of the world, Pop was sure of it, nor ever would be again. Yet it seemed he couldn't give the goddam thing away.

'But . . .' Chaffee looked puzzled, as if not sure how to state it, because whatever it was he had to say seemed so obvious to him. In that moment he looked like a pleasant but not very capable pre-school teacher trying to teach a file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20...ing%20-%20A%20note%20On%20The%20sun%20Dog.HTM (77 of 119)7/28/2005 9:22:39 PM

The Sun Dog

backward child how to tie his shoes. 'But it doesn't do anything, does it?'

'Doesn't do anything?' Pop nearly screamed. He couldn't believe he had lost control of himself to such a degree as this, and was losing more all the time. What was happening to him? Or, cutting closer to the bone, what was the son-of-a-bitching
camera
doing to him? 'Doesn't do anything? What are you, blind? It takes pitchers of
another
world!
It takes pitchers that move in time from one to the next, no matter
where you
take em or
when you
take em in
this
world! And that ... that thing ... that
monster -'

Oh. Oh dear. He had finally done it. He had finally gone too far. He could see it in the way Chaffee was looking at him.

'But it's just a dog, isn't it?' Chaffee said in a low, comforting voice. It was the sort of voice you'd use to try and soothe a madman while the nurses ran for the cabinet where they kept the hypos and the knock-out stuff.

'Ayuh,' Pop said slowly and tiredly. 'Just a dog is all it is. But you said yourself it was a hell of an ugly brute.'

'That's right, that's right, I did,' Chaffee said, agreeing much too quickly. Pop thought if the man's grin got any wider and broader he might just be treated to the sight of the top three-quarters of the idiot's head toppling off into his lap. 'But ... surely you see, Mr Merrill ... what a problem this presents for the collector. The serious collector.'

'No, I guess I don't,' Pop said, but after running through the entire list of Mad Hatters, a list which had seemed so promising at first, he was beginning to. In fact, he was beginning to see a whole
host
of problems the Polaroid Sun presented for the serious collector. As for Emory Chaffee ... God knew what Emory thought, exactly.

'There are most certainly such things as ghost photographs,' Chaffee said in a rich, pedantic voice that made Pop want to strangle him. 'But these are not ghost photographs. They -'

'They're sure as hell not
normal
photographs!'

'My point exactly,' Chaffee said, frowning slightly. 'But what sort of photographs
are
they? One can hardly say, can one? One can only display a perfectly normal camera that photographs a dog which is apparently preparing to leap. And once it leaps, it will be gone from the frame of the picture. At that point, one of three things may happen. The camera may start taking normal pictures, which is to say, pictures of the things it is aimed at; it may take no more pictures at all, its one purpose, to photograph - to
document '
one might even say - that dog, completed; or it may simply go on taking pictures of that white fence and the ill-tended lawn behind it.' He paused and added, 'I suppose someone might walk by at some point, forty photographs down the line - or four hundred - but unless the photographer raised his angle, which he doesn't seem to have done in any of these, one would only see the passerby from the waist down. More or less.' And, echoing Kevin's father without even knowing who Kevin's father was, he added: 'Pardon me for saying so, Mr Merrill, but you've shown me something I thought I'd never see: an inexplicable and almost irrefutable paranormal occurrence that is really quite boring.'

This amazing but apparently sincere remark forced Pop to disregard whatever Chaffee might think about his file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20...ing%20-%20A%20note%20On%20The%20sun%20Dog.HTM (78 of 119)7/28/2005 9:22:39 PM

The Sun Dog

sanity and ask again: 'It really is only a dog, as far as you can see?'

'Of course,' Chaffee said, looking mildly surprised. 'A stray mongrel that looks exceedingly bad-tempered.'

He sighed.

'And it wouldn't be taken seriously, of course. What I mean is it wouldn't be taken seriously by people who don't know you personally, Mr Merrill. People who aren't familiar with your honesty and reliability in these matters. It looks like a trick, you see? And not even a very good one. Something on the order of a child's Magic Eight-Ball.'

Two weeks ago, Pop would have argued strenuously against such an idea. But that was before he had been not walked but actually
propelled
from that bastard McCarty's house.

'Well, if that's your final word,' Pop said, getting up and taking the camera by the strap.

'I'm very sorry you made a trip to such little purpose,' Chaffee said ... and then his horrid grin burst forth again, all rubbery lips and huge teeth shining with spit. 'I was about to make myself a Spam sandwich when you drove in. Would you care to join me, Mr Merrill? I make quite a nice one, if I do say so myself. I add a little horseradish and Bermuda onion - that's my secret - and then I -'

'I'll pass,' Pop said heavily. As in the Pus Sisters' parlor, all he really wanted right now was to get out of here and put miles between himself and this grinning idiot. Pop had a definite allergy to places where he had gambled and lost. just lately there seemed to be a lot of those. Too goddam many. 'I already had m'dinner, is what I mean to say. Got to be getting back.'

Chaffee laughed fruitily. 'The lot of the toiler in the vineyards is busy but yields great bounty,' he said.
Not just lately, Pop
thought.
Just lately it ain't yielded no fucking bounty at all.

'It's a livin anyway,' Pop replied, and was eventually allowed out of the house, which was damp and chill (what it must be like to live in such a place come February, Pop couldn't imagine) and had that mousy, mildewed smell that might be rotting curtains and sofa-covers and such ... or just the smell money leaves behind when it has spent a longish period of time in a place and then departed. He thought the fresh October air, tinged with just a small taste of the lake and a stronger tang of pine-needles, had never smelled so good. He got into his car and started it up. Emory Chaffee, unlike the Pus Sister who had shown him as far as the door and then closed it quickly behind him, as if afraid the sun might strike her and turn her to dust like a vampire, was standing on the front porch, grinning his idiot grin and actually waving, as if he were seeing Pop off on a goddam ocean cruise.

And, without thinking, just as he had taken the picture of (or at, anyway) the old black woman without thinking, he had snapped Chaffee and the just-starting-to-moulder house which was all that remained of the Chaffee family holdings. He didn't remember picking the camera up off the seat where he had tossed it in disgust before closing his door, was not even aware that the camera was in his hands or the shutter fired until he heard the whine of the file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20...ing%20-%20A%20note%20On%20The%20sun%20Dog.HTM (79 of 119)7/28/2005 9:22:39 PM

The Sun Dog

mechanism shoving the photograph out like a tongue coated with some bland gray fluid -Milk of Magnesia, perhaps. That sound seemed to vibrate along his nerve-endings now, making them scream; it was like the feeling you got when something too cold or hot hit a new filling.

He was peripherally aware that Chaffee was laughing as if it was the best goddam joke in the world before snatching the picture from the slot in a kind of furious horror, telling himself he had imagined the momentary, blurred sound of a snarl, a sound like you might hear if a power-boat was approaching while you had your head ducked under water; telling himself he had imagined the momentary feeling that the camera had
bulged
in his hands, as if some huge pressure inside had pushed the sides out momentarily. He punched the glove-compartment button and threw the picture inside and then closed it so hard and fast that he tore his thumbnail all the way down to the tender quick.

He pulled out jerkily, almost stalling, then almost hitting one of the hoary old spruces which flanked the house end of the long Chaffee driveway, and all the way up that driveway he thought he could hear Emory Chaffee laughing in loud mindless cheery bellows of sound:
Haw! Haw! Haw! Haw!

His heart slammed in his chest, and his head felt as if someone was using a sledgehammer inside there. The small cluster of veins which nestled in the hollows of each temple pulsed steadily. He got himself under control little by little. Five miles, and the little man inside his head quit using the sledgehammer. Ten miles (by now he was almost halfway back to Castle Rock), and his heartbeat was back to normal. And he told himself: You
ain't gonna look at it.
YOU
AIN'T. Let the goddam thing rot in there. You don't
need to look at it, and you don't need to take no more of em, either. Time to mark the thing off as a dead loss.
Time to do what you should have let the boy, do in the first place.
So of course when he got to the Castle View rest area, a turn-out from which you could, it seemed, see all of western Maine and half of New Hampshire, he swung in and turned off his motor and opened the glove compartment and brought out the picture which he had taken with no more intent or knowledge than a man might have if he did a thing while walking in his sleep. The photograph had developed in there, of course; the chemicals inside that deceptively flat square had come to life and done their usual efficient job. Dark or light, it didn't make any difference to a Polaroid picture.

The dog-thing was crouched all the way down now. It was as fully coiled as it was going to get, a trigger pulled back to full cock. Its teeth had outgrown its mouth so that the thing's snarl seemed now to be not only an expression of rage but a simple necessity; how could its lips ever fully close over those teeth? How could those jaws ever chew? It looked more like a weird species of wild boar than a dog now, but what it really looked like was nothing Pop had ever seen before. It did more than hurt his eyes to look at it; it hurt his
mind.
It made him feel as if he was going crazy.

Why not get rid of that camera right here?
he thought suddenly. You
can. Just get out, walk to the guardrail
there, and toss her over. All gone. Goodbye.

But that would have been an impulsive act, and Pop Merrill belonged to the Reasonable tribe - belonged to it body and soul, is what I mean to say. He didn't want to do anything on the spur of the moment that he might regret later, and

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The Sun Dog

If you don't
do this, you'll regret it later.

But no. And no. And no. A man couldn't run against his nature. It was unnatural. He needed time to think. To be sure.

He compromised by throwing the print out instead and then drove on quickly. For a minute or two he felt as if he might throw up, but the urge passed. When it did, he felt a little more himself. Safely back in his shop, he unlocked the steel box, took out the Sun, rummaged through his keys once more, and located the one for the drawer where he kept his 'special' items. He started to put the camera inside
...
and paused, brow furrowed. The image of the chopping block out back entered his mind with such clarity, every detail crisply firmed, that it was like a photograph itself.

He thought:
Never mind all that about how a man can't run against his nature. That's crap, and you know it. It
ain't in a man's nature to eat dirt, but you could eat a whole bowl of it, by the bald-headed Christ, if someone
with a gun pointed at your head told you to do it. You know what time it is, chummy - time to do what you should
have let the boy do in the first place. After all, It ain't like you got any investment in this.
But at this, another part of his mind rose in angry, fist-waving protest.
Yes
I do! I do
have an investment,
goddammit! That kid smashed a perfectly good Polaroid camera! He may not know it, but that don't change the
fact that I'm out a hundred and thirty-nine bucks!

'Oh, shit on toast!' he muttered agitatedly. 'It ain't that! It ain't the fuckin
money!'

No - it wasn't the fucking money. He could at least admit that it wasn't the money. He could afford it; Pop could indeed have afforded a great deal, including his own mansion in Portland's Bramhall district and a brand-new Mercedes-Benz to go in the carport. He never would have bought those things - he pinched his pennies and chose to regard almost pathological miserliness as nothing more than good old Yankee thrift - but that didn't mean he couldn't have had them if he so chose.

It wasn't about money; it was about something more important than money ever could be. It was about
not
getting skinned. Pop
had made a life's work out of
not getting skinned,
and on the few occasions when he had been, he had felt like a man with red ants crawling around inside his skull. Take the business of the goddam Kraut record-player, for instance. When Pop found out that antique dealer from Boston - Donahue, his name had been - had gotten fifty bucks more than he'd ought to have gotten for a 1915