[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.The whole place had an air of nasty things swept under the faded hooked rugsand hidden beneath the old-fashioned, overstuffed easy-chair and sofa.Both of these articles were light green,and your eye wanted to tell you they matched but couldn't, because they didn't.Not quite.The only new things in the room were a large Mitsubishi television with a twenty-five-inch screen and a VCR onthe endtable beside it.To the left of the endtable was a rack which caught Kevin's eye because it was totallyempty.Pop had thought it best to put the better than seventy fuck-movies he owned in the closet for the timebeing.One video cassette rested on top of the television in an unmarked case.'Sit down,' Pop said, gesturing at the lumpy couch.He went over to the TV and slipped the cassette out of its case.Mr Delevan looked at the couch with a momentary expression of doubt, as if he thought it might have bugs, andthen sat down gingerly.Kevin sat beside him.The fear was back, stronger than ever.Pop turned on the VCR, slid the cassette in, and then pushed the carriage down.'I know a fellow up the city,' hebegan (to residents of Castle Rock and its neighboring towns, 'up the city' always meant Lewiston), 'who's run acamera store for twenty years or so.He got into the VCR business as soon as it started up, said it was going to bethe wave of the future.He wanted me to go halves with him, but I thought he was nuts.Well, I was wrong on thatone, is what I mean to say, but -''Get to the point,' Kevin's father said.'I'm tryin,' Pop said, wide-eyed and injured.'If you'll let me.'Kevin pushed his elbow gently against his father's side, and Mr Delevan said no more.'Anyway, a couple of years ago he found out rentin tapes for folks to watch wasn't the only way to make moneywith these gadgets.If you was willing to lay out as little as eight hundred bucks, you could take people's moviesand snapshots and put em on a tape for em.Lots easier to watch.'Kevin made a little involuntary noise and Pop smiled and nodded.'Ayuh.You took fifty-eight pitchers with that camera of yours, and we all saw each one was a little different thanfile:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20.ing%20-%20A%20note%20On%20The%20sun%20Dog.HTM (43 of 119)7/28/2005 9:22:38 PM The Sun Dogthe last one, and I guess we knew what it meant, but I wanted to see for myself.You don't have to be fromMissouri to say show me, is what I mean to say.''You tried to make a movie out of those snapshots?' Mr Delevan asked.'Didn't try,' Pop said.'Did.Or rather, the fella I know up the city did.But it was my idea.''Is it a movie?' Kevin asked.He understood what Pop had done, and part of him was even chagrined that hehadn't thought of it himself, but mostly he was awash in wonder (and delight) at the idea.'Look for yourself,' Pop said, and turned on the TV.'Fifty-eight pitchers.When this fella does snapshots for folks,he generally videotapes each one for five seconds - long enough to get a good look, he says, but not long enoughto get bored before you go on to the next one.I told him I wanted each of these on for just a single second, and torun them right together with no fades.'Kevin remembered a game he used to play in grade school when he had finished some lesson and had free timebefore the next one began.He had a little dime pad of paper which was called a Rain-Bo Skool Pad because therewould be thirty pages of little yellow sheets, then thirty pages of little pink sheets, then thirty pages of green, andso on.To play the game, you went to the very last page and at the bottom you drew a stick-man wearing baggyshorts and holding his arms out.On the next page you drew the same stick-man in the same place and wearingthe same baggy shorts, only this time you drew his arms further up.but just a little bit.You did that on everypage until the arms came together over the stick-man's head.Then, if you still had time, you went on drawing thestick-man, but now with the arms going down.And if you flipped the pages very fast when you were done, youhad a crude sort of cartoon which showed a boxer celebrating a KO: he raised his hands over his head, claspedthem, shook them, lowered them.He shivered.His father looked at him.Kevin shook his head and murmured, 'Nothing.''So what I mean to say is the tape only runs about a minute,' Pop said.'You got to look close.Ready?'No, Kevin thought.'I guess so,' Mr Delevan said.He was still trying to sound grumpy and put-out, but Kevin could tell he had gotteninterested in spite of himself.'Okay,' Pop Merrill said, and pushed the PLAY button.Kevin told himself over and over again that it was stupid to feel scared.He told himself this and it didn't do asingle bit of good.He knew what he was going to see, because he and Meg had both noticed the Sun was doing something besidessimply reproducing the same image over and over, like a photocopier; it did not take long for them to realize thatthe photographs were expressing movement from one to the next.file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20.ing%20-%20A%20note%20On%20The%20sun%20Dog.HTM (44 of 119)7/28/2005 9:22:38 PM The Sun Dog'Look,' Meg had said.'The dog's moving!'Instead of responding with one of the friendly-but-irritating wisecracks he usually reserved for his little sister,Kevin had said, 'It does look like it.but you can't tell for sure, Meg.''Yes, you can,' she said.They were in his room, where he had been morosely looking at the camera.It sat on themiddle of his desk with his new schoolbooks, which he had been meaning to cover, pushed to one side.Meg hadbent the goose-neck of his study-lamp so it shone a bright circle of light on the middle of his desk blotter.Shemoved the camera aside and put the first picture - the one with the dab of cake-frosting on it - in the center of thelight.'Count the fence-posts between the dog's behind and the righthand edge of the picture,' she said.'Those are pickets, not fence-posts,' he told her.'Like what you do when your nose goes on strike.''Ha-ha.Count them.'He did.He could see four, and part of a fifth, although the dog's scraggly hindquarters obscured most of that one.'Now look at this one.'She put the fourth Polaroid in front of him.Now he could see all of the fifth picket, and part of a sixth.So he knew - or believed - he was going to see a cross between a very old cartoon and one of those 'flip-books' heused to make in grammar school when the time weighed heavy on his hands
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]