Four Past Midnight

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.'

'You paid him off the next day? How'd you do that?'

'I told you, it was like a fever. Once we shook hands on the bet, the fever passed. I hoped like hell I'd win that bet, but I knew I'd have to think like I was going to lose. There was a lot more at stake than just four hundred dollars. There was the question of my job, of course, and what might happen if I wasn't able to pay off the guy I'd bet with. He was an engineer, after all, and technically my boss. That fellow had just enough son of a bitch in him to have fired my ass if I didn't pay the wager. It wouldn't have been the bet, but he would have found something, and it would have been something that would go on my work-record in big red letters, too. But that wasn't the biggest thing. Not at all.'

'What was?'

'Your mother. Our marriage. When you're young and don't have either a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, a marriage is under strain all the time. It doesn't matter how much you love each other, that marriage is like an overloaded packhorse and you know it can fall to its knees or even roll over dead if all the wrong things happen at all the wrong times. I don't think she would have divorced me over a fourhundred-dollar bet, but I'm glad I never had to find out for sure. So when the fever passed, I saw that I might have bet a little more than four hundred dollars. I might just have bet my whole goddam future.' They were approaching the Emporium Galorium. There was a bench on the verge of the grassy town common, and Mr Delevan gestured for Kevin to sit down.

'This won't take long,' he said, and then laughed. It was a grating, compressed sound, like an inexperienced driver working a transmission lever. 'It hurts too much to stretch out, even after all these years.'

So they sat on the bench and Mr Delevan finished the story of how he happened to know Pop Merrill while they looked across the grassy common with the bandstand in the middle.

'I went to him the same night I made the bet,' he said. 'I told your mother I was going out for cigarettes. I went after dark, so no one would see me. From town, I mean. They would have known I was in some kind of trouble, and I didn't want that. I went in and Pop said, 'What's a professional man like you doing in a place like this, Mr John Delevan?' and I told him what I'd done and he said, 'You made a bet and already you have got your head set to the idea you've lost it.' 'If I do lose it,' I said, 'I want to make sure I don't lose anything else.'

'That made him laugh. 'I respect a wise man,' he said. 'I reckon I can trust you. If the Celtics win, you come see me. I'll take care of you. You got an honest face.'

'And that was all?' Kevin asked. In eighth-grade math, they had done a unit on loans, and he still remembered most of it. 'He didn't ask for any, uh, collateral?'

'People who go to Pop don't have collateral,' his father said. 'He's not a loan-shark like you see in the movies; he doesn't break any legs if you don't pay up. But he has ways of fixing people.'

'What ways?'

'Never mind,' John Delevan said. 'After that last game ended, I went upstairs to tell your mother I was going to go out for cigarettes - again. She was asleep, though, so I was spared that lie. It was late, late for Castle Rock, anyway, going on eleven, but the lights were on in his place. I knew they would be. He gave me the money in tens. He took them out of an old Crisco can. All tens. I remember that. They were crumpled but he had made them straight. Forty ten-dollar bills, him counting them out like a bank-clerk with that pipe going and his glasses up on his head and for just a second there I felt like knocking his teeth out. Instead I thanked him. You don't know how hard it can be to say thank you sometimes. I hope you never do. He said, 'You understand the terms, now, don't you?' and I said I did, and he said, 'That's good. I ain't worried about you. What I mean to say is you got an honest face. You go on and take care of your business with that fella at work, and then take care of your business with me. And don't make any more bets. Man only has to look in your face to see you weren't cut out to be a gambler. ' So I took the money and went home and put it under the floor-mat of the old Chevy and lay next to your mother and didn't sleep a wink all night long because I felt filthy. Next day I gave the tens to the engineer I bet with, and he counted them out, and then he just folded them over and tucked them into one of his shirt pockets and buttoned the flap like that cash didn't mean any more than a gas receipt he'd have to turn in to the chief contractor at the end of the day. Then he clapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Well, you're a good man, Johnny. Better than I thought. I won four hundred but I lost twenty to Bill Untermeyer. He bet you'd come up with the dough first thing this morning and I bet him I wouldn't see it till the end of the week. If I ever did.' 'I pay my debts,' I said. 'Easy, now,' he said, and clapped me on the shoulder again, and I think that time I really did come close to popping his eyeballs out with my thumbs.'

'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.'