The Sun Dog (4 page)

'Is that so?' Kevin asked, interested in spite of himself.

'Oh, ayuh!' Pop said, chipper as a chickadee, blue eyes twinkling at Kevin through the smoke from his fuming stewpot of a pipe and from behind his round rimless glasses. It was the sort of twinkle which may indicate either good humor or avarice. 'What I mean to say is that people laughed at those cameras the way they laughed at the Volkswagen Beetles when
they
first come out ... but they bought the Polaroids just like they bought the VWs. Because the Beetles got good gas mileage and didn't go bust so often as American cars, and the Polaroids did one thing the Kodaks and even the Nikons and Minoltas and Leicas didn't.'

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The Sun Dog

'Took instant pictures.'

Pop smiled. 'Well
...
not exactly. What I mean to say is you took your pitcher, and then you yanked on this flap to pull it out. It didn't have no motor, didn't make that squidgy little whining noise like modern Polaroids.'

So there was a perfect way to describe that sound after all, it was just that you had to find a Pop Merrill to tell it to you: the sound that Polaroid cameras made when they spat out their produce was a
squidgy little whine.

'Then you had to time her,' Pop said.

'Time -?'

'Oh, ayuh!' Pop said with great relish, bright as the early bird who has found that fabled worm. 'What I mean to say is they didn't have none of this happy automatic crappy back in those days. You yanked and out come this long strip which you put on the table or whatever and timed off sixty seconds on your watch. Had to be sixty, or right around there, anyway. Less and you'd have an underexposed pitcher. More and it'd be overexposed.'

'Wow,' Kevin said respectfully. And this was not bogus respect, jollying the old man along in hopes he would get back to the point, which was not a bunch of long-dead cameras that had been wonders in their day but his
own
camera, the damned balky Sun 660 sitting on Pop's worktable with the guts of an old seven-day clock on its right and something which looked suspiciously like a dildo on its left. It wasn't bogus respect and Pop knew it, and it occurred to Pop (it wouldn't have to Kevin) how fleeting that great white god 'state-of-the-art' really was; ten years, he thought, and the phrase itself would be gone. From the boy's fascinated expression, you would have thought he was hearing about something as antique as George Washington's wooden dentures instead of a camera everyone had thought was the ultimate only thirty-five years ago. But of course this boy had still been circling around in the unhatched void thirty-five years ago, part of a female who hadn't yet even met the male who would provide his other half.

'What I mean to say is it was a regular little darkroom goin on in there between the pitcher and the backing,' Pop resumed, slow at first but speeding up as his own mostly genuine interest in the subject resurfaced (but the thoughts of who this kid's father was and what the kid might be worth to him and the strange thing the kid's camera was up to never completely left his mind). 'And at the end of the minute, you peeled the pitcher off the back - had to be careful when you did it, too, because there was all this goo like jelly on the back, and if your skin was in the least bit sensitive, you could get a pretty good burn.'

'Awesome,' Kevin said. His eyes were wide, and now he looked like a kid hearing about the old two-holer outhouses which Pop and all his childhood colleagues (they were almost all colleagues; he had had few childhood friends in Castle Rock, perhaps preparing even then for his life's work of rooking the summer people and the other children somehow sensing it, like a faint smell of skunk) had taken for granted, doing your business as fast as you could in high summer because one of the wasps always circling around down there between the manna and the two holes which were the heaven from which the manna fell might at any time take a notion to plant its stinger in one of your tender little boycheeks, and also doing it as fast as you could in deep winter because your tender little boycheeks were apt to freeze solid if you didn't.
Well, Pop
thought, so
much for the
Camera of the Future. Thirty-five years and to this kid it's interestin in the same way a backyard shithouse is
interestin.

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The Sun Dog

'The negative was on the back,' Pop said. 'And your positive - well, it was black and white, but it was
fine
black and white. It was just as crisp and clear as you'd ever want even today. And you had this little pink thing, about as long as a school eraser. as I remember; it squeegeed out some kind of chemical, smelled like ether, and you had to rub it over the pitcher as fast as you could, or that pitcher'd roll right up, like the tube in the middle of a roll of bung-fodder.'

Kevin burst out laughing, tickled by these pleasant antiquities.

Pop quit long enough to get his pipe going again. When he had, he resumed: 'A camera like that, nobody but the Polaroid people really knew what it was doing - I mean to say those people were
close - but
it was
mechanical.
You
could take it
apart.'

He looked at Kevin's Sun with some distaste.

'And, lots of times when one went bust, that was as much as you needed. Fella'd come in with one of those and say it wouldn't work, moanin about how he'd have to send it back to the Polaroid people to get it fixed and that'd prob'ly take months and would I take a look. "Well," I'd say, "prob'ly nothin I can do, what I mean to say is nobody really knows about these cameras but the Polaroid people and they're goddam close, but I'll take a look." All the time knowin it was prob'ly just a loose screw inside that shutter-housin or maybe a fouled spring, or hell, maybe junior slathered some peanut butter in the film compartment.'

One of his bright bird-eyes dropped in a wink so quick and so marvellously sly that, Kevin thought, if you hadn't known he was talking about summer people, you would have thought it was your paranoid imagination, or, more likely, missed it entirely.

'What I mean to say is you had your perfect situation,' Pop said. 'If you could fix it, you were a goddam wonderworker. Why, I have put eight dollars and fifty cents in my pocket for takin a couple of little pieces of potato-chip out from between the trigger and the shutter-spring, my son, and the woman who brought that camera in kissed me on the lips. Right ... on ... the lips.'

Kevin observed Pop's eye drop momentarily closed again behind the semi-transparent mat of blue smoke.

'And of course, if it was somethin you couldn't fix, they didn't hold it against you because, what I mean to say, they never really expected you to be able to do nothin in the first place. You was only a last resort before they put her in a box and stuffed newspapers around her to keep her from bein broke even worse in the mail, and shipped her off to Schenectady.

'But - this camera.' He spoke in the ritualistic tone of distaste all philosophers of the crackerbarrel, whether in Athens of the golden age or in a small-town junk-shop during this current one of brass, adopt to express their view of entropy without having to come right out and state it. 'Wasn't put together, son. What I mean to say is it was
poured.
I could maybe pop the lens, and will if you want me to, and I
did
look in the film compartment, although I knew I wouldn't see a goddam thing wrong - that I recognized, at least - and I didn't. But beyond that I can't go. I could take a hammer and wind it right to her, could
break
it, what I mean to say, but fix it?' He spread file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20...ing%20-%20A%20note%20On%20The%20sun%20Dog.HTM (16 of 119)7/28/2005 9:22:38 PM

The Sun Dog

his hands in pipe-smoke. 'Nossir.'

'Then I guess I'll just have to -'
return it after all,
he meant to finish, but Pop broke in.

'Anyway, son, I think you knew that. What I mean to say is you're a bright boy, you can see when a thing's all of a piece. I don't think you brought that camera in to be
fixed. I
think you know that even if it
wasn't
all of a piece, a man couldn't fix what
that
thing's doing, at least not with a screwdriver. I think you brought it in to ask me if I knew what it's up to.'

'Do you?' Kevin asked. He was suddenly tense all over.

'I might,' Pop Merrill said calmly. He bent over the pile of photographs twenty-eight of them now, counting the one Kevin had snapped to demonstrate, and the one Pop had snapped to demonstrate to himself. 'These in order?'

'Not really. Pretty close, though. Does it matter?'

'I think so,' Pop said. 'They're a little bit different, ain't they? Not much, but a little.'

'Yeah,' Kevin said. 'I can see the difference in
some
of them, but .

'Do you know which one is the first? I could prob'ly figure it out for myself, but time is money, son.'

'That's easy,' Kevin said, and picked one out of the untidy little pile. 'See the frosting?' He pointed at a small brown spot on the picture's white edging.

'Ayup.' Pop didn't spare the dab of frosting more than a glance. He looked closely at the photograph, and after a moment he opened the drawer of his worktable. Tools were littered untidily about inside. To one side, in its own space, was an object wrapped in jeweler's velvet. Pop took this out, folded the cloth back, and removed a large magnifying glass with a switch in its base. He bent over the Polaroid and pushed the switch. A bright circle of light fell on the picture's surface.

'That's neat!' Kevin said.

'Ayup,' Pop said again. Kevin could tell that for Pop he was no longer there. Pop was studying the picture closely. If one had not known the odd circumstances of its taking, the picture would hardly have seemed to warrant such close scrutiny. Like most photographs which are taken with a decent camera, good film, and by a photographer at least intelligent enough to keep his finger from blocking the lens, it was clear, understandable ... and, like so many Polaroids, oddly undramatic. It was a picture in which you could identify and name each object, but its content was as flat as its surface. It was not well composed, but composition wasn't what was wrong with it - that undramatic flatness could hardly be called
wrong
at all, any more than a real day in a real life could be called wrong because nothing worthy of even a made-for-television movie happened during its course. As in so many Polaroids, the things in the picture were only
there,
like an empty chair on a porch or an unoccupied child's swing in a back yard or a passengerless car sitting at an unremarkable curb without even a flat tire to make it interesting file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20...ing%20-%20A%20note%20On%20The%20sun%20Dog.HTM (17 of 119)7/28/2005 9:22:38 PM

The Sun Dog

or unique.

What was wrong with the picture was the
feeling
that it was wrong. Kevin had remembered the sense of unease he had felt while composing his subjects for the picture he
meant
to take, and the ripple of gooseflesh up his back when, with the glare of the flashbulb still lighting the room, he had thought,
It's mine.
That was what was wrong, and as with the man in the moon you can't unsee once you've seen it, so, he was discovering, you couldn't
unfeel
certain feelings ... and when it came to these pictures, those feelings were bad. Kevin thought:
It's like there was a wind - very soft, very cold - blowing out of that picture.
For the first time, the idea that it might be something
supernatural - that
this was part of a Manifestation - did something more than just intrigue him. For the first time he found himself wishing he had simply let this thing go.
It's mine - that
was what he had thought when his finger had pushed the shutter-button for the first time. Now he found himself wondering if maybe he hadn't gotten that backward.

I'm scared of it. Of what it's doing.

That made him mad, and he bent over Pop Merrill's shoulder, hunting as grimly as a man who has lost a diamond in a sandpile, determined that, no matter what he saw (always supposing he
should
see something new, and he didn't think he would; he had studied all these photographs often enough now to believe he had seen all there was to see in them), he would
look
at it,
study
it, and under no circumstances allow himself to unsee it. Even if he could ... and a dolorous voice inside suggested very strongly that the time for unseeing was now past, possibly forever.

What the picture showed was a large black dog in front of a white picket fence. The picket fence wasn't going to be white much longer, unless someone in that flat Polaroid world painted or at least whitewashed it. That didn't seem likely; the fence looked untended, forgotten. The tops of some pickets were broken off. Others sagged loosely outward.

The dog was on a sidewalk in front of the fence. His hindquarters were to the viewer. His tail, long and bushy, drooped. He appeared to be smelling one of the fence-pickets - probably, Kevin thought, because the fence was what his dad called a 'letter-drop,' a place where many dogs would lift their legs and leave mystic yellow squirts of message before moving on.

The dog looked like a stray to Kevin. Its coat was long and tangled and sown with burdocks. One of its ears had the crumpled look of an old battle-scar. Its shadow trailed long enough to finish outside the frame on the weedy, patchy lawn inside the picket fence. The shadow made Kevin think the picture had been taken not long after dawn or not long before sunset; with no idea of the direction the photographer
(what
photographer, ha-ha) had been facing, it was impossible to tell which, just that he (or she) must have been standing only a few degrees shy of due east or west.

There was something in the grass at the far left of the picture which looked like a child's red rubber ball. It was inside the fence, and enough behind one of the lackluster clumps of grass so it was hard to tell. file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20...ing%20-%20A%20note%20On%20The%20sun%20Dog.HTM (18 of 119)7/28/2005 9:22:38 PM