Roadwork Read online

  Ordner said carefully: “What about your own future? What about Mary’s?”

  “You don’t care about that. It’s just a lever you think you might be able to use. Let me ask you something, Steve. Is this going to hurt you? Is it going to cut into your salary? Into your yearly dividend? Into your retirement fund?”

  Ordner shook his head. “Go on home, Bart. You’re not yourself.”

  “Why? Because I’m talking about you and not just about bucks?”

  “You’re disturbed, Bart.”

  “You don’t know,” he said, standing up and planting his fists on the Lucite top of Ordner’s desk. “You’re mad at me but you don’t know why. Someone told you that if a situation like this ever came up you should be mad. But you don’t know why.”

  Ordner repeated carefully: “You’re disturbed.”

  “You’re damn right I am. What are you?”

  “Go home, Bart.”

  “No, but I’ll leave you alone and that’s what you want. Just answer one question. For one second stop being the corporation man and answer one question for me. Do you care about this? Does any of it mean a damn to you?”

  Ordner looked at him for what seemed a long time. The city was spread out behind him like a kingdom of towers, wrapped in grayness and mist. He said: “No.”

  “All right,” he said softly. He looked at Ordner without animosity. “I didn’t do it to screw you. Or the corporation.”

  “Then why? I answered your question. You answer mine. You could have signed on the Waterford plant. After that it would have been someone else’s worry. Why didn’t you?”

  He said: “I can’t explain. I listened to myself. But people talk a different language inside. It sounds like the worst kind of shit if you try to talk about it. But it was the right thing.”

  Ordner looked at him unflinchingly. “And Mary?”

  He was silent.

  “Go home, Bart, Ordner said.

  “What do you want, Steve?”

  Ordner shook his head impatiently. “We’re done, Bart. If you want to have an encounter session with someone, go to a bar.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Only for you to get out of here and go home.”

  “What do you want from life, then? Where are you hooked into things?”

  “Go home, Bart.”

  “Answer me! What do you want?” He looked at Ordner nakedly.

  Ordner answered quietly, “I want what everyone wants. Go home, Bart.”

  He left without looking back. And he never went there again.

  When he got to Magliore’s Used Cars, it was snowing hard and most of the cars he passed had their headlights on. His windshield wipers beat a steady back-and-forth tune, and beyond their sweep snow that had been defrosted into slush ran down the Saf-T-Glass like tears.

  He parked in back and walked around to the office. Before he went in, he looked at his ghostly reflection in the plate glass and scrubbed a thin pink film from his lips. The encounter with Ordner had upset him more than he would have believed. He had picked up a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in a drugstore and had chugged half of it on the way out here. Probably won’t shit for a week, Fred. But Freddy wasn’t at home. Maybe he had gone to visit Monohan’s relatives in Bombay.

  The woman behind the adding machine gave him a strange speculative smile and waved him in.

  Magliore was alone. He was reading The Wall Street Journal, and when he came in, Magliore threw it across the desk and into the wastebasket. It landed with a rattling thump.

  “It’s going right to fucking hell,” Magliore said, as if continuing an interior dialogue that had started some time ago. “All these stockbrokers are old women, just like Paul Harvey says. Will the president resign? Will he? Won’t he? Will he? Is GE going to go bankrupt with the energy shortage? It gives me a pain in the ass.”

  “Yeah,” he said, but not sure of what he was agreeing to. He felt uneasy, and he wasn’t totally sure Magliore remembered who he was. What should he say? I’m the guy who called you a dork, remember? Christ, that was no way to start.

  “Snowing harder, ain’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I hate the snow. My brother, he goes to Puerto Rico November first every year, stays until April fifteenth. He owns forty percent of a hotel there. Says he has to look after his investment. Shit. He wouldn’t know how to look after his own ass if you gave him a roll of Charmin. What do you want?”

  “Huh?” He jumped a little, and felt guilty.

  “You came to me to get something. How can I get it for you if I don’t know what it is?”

  When it was put with such abrupt baldness, he found it hard to speak. The word for what he wanted seemed to have too many corners to come out of his mouth. He remembered something he had done as a kid and smiled a little.

  “What’s funny?” Magliore asked with sharp pleasantness. “With business the way it is, I could use a joke.”

  “Once, when I was a kid, I put a yo-yo in my mouth,” he said.

  “That’s funny?”

  “No, I couldn’t get it out. That’s funny. My mother took me to the doctor and he got it out. He pinched my ass and when I opened my mouth to yell, he just yanked it out.”

  “I ain’t going to pinch your ass,” Magliore said. “What do you want, Dawes?”

  “Explosives,” he said.

  Magliore looked at him. He rolled his eyes. He started to say something and slapped one of his hanging jowls instead. “Explosives.”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew this guy was a fruiter,” Magliore told himself. “I told Pete when you left, 'There goes a guy looking for an accident to happen.' That’s what I told him.”

  He said nothing. Talk of accidents made him think of Johnny Walker.

  “Okay, Okay, I’ll bite. What do you want explosives for? You going to blow up the Egyptian Trade Exposition? You going to skyjack an airplane? Or maybe just blow your mother-in-law to hell?”

  “I wouldn’t waste explosives on her,” he said stiffly, and that made them both laugh, but it didn’t break the tension.

  “So what is it? Who have you got a hardon against?”

  He said: “I don’t have a hardon against anyone. If I wanted to kill somebody, I’d buy a gun.” Then he remembered he had bought a gun, had bought two guns, and his Pepto-Bismol-drugged stomach began to roll again.

  “So why do you need explosives?”

  “I want to blow up a road.”

  Magliore looked at him with measured incredulity. All his emotions seemed larger than life; it was as if he had adopted his character to fit the magnifying properties of his glasses. “You want to blow up a road? What road?”

  “It hasn’t been built yet.” He was beginning to get a sort of perverse pleasure from this. And of course, it was postponing the inevitable confrontation with Mary.

  “So you want to blow up a road that hasn’t been built. I had you wrong, mister. You’re not a fruitcake. You’re a psycho. Can you make sense?”

  Picking his words carefully, he said: “They’re building a road that’s known as the 784 extension. When it’s done, the state turnpike will go right through the city. For certain reasons I don’t want to go into-because I can’t-that road has wrecked twenty years of my life. It’s-”

  “Because they’re gonna knock down the laundry where you work, and your house?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I told you I was gonna check you. Did you think I was kidding? I even knew you were gonna lose your job. Maybe before you did.”

  “No, I knew that a month ago,” he said, not thinking about what he was saying. “And how are you going to do it? Were you planning to just drive past the construction, lighting fuses with your cigar and throwing bundles of dynamite out of your car window?”

  “No. Whenever there’s a holiday, they leave all their machines at the site. I want to blow them all up. And all three of the new overpasses. I want to blow them up, too.”<
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  Magliore goggled at him. He goggled for a long time. Then he threw back his head and laughed. His belly shook and his belt buckle heaved up and down like a chip of wood riding a heavy swell. His laughter was full and hearty and rich. He laughed until tears splurted out of his eyes and then he produced a huge comic-opera handkerchief from some inner pocket and wiped them. He stood watching Magliore laugh and was suddenly very sure that this fat man with the thick glasses was going to sell him the explosives. He watched Magliore with a slight smile on his face. He didn’t mind the laughter. Today laughter sounded good.

  “Man, you’re crazy, all right,” Magliore said when his laughter had subsided to chuckles and hitchings. “I wish Pete could have been here to hear this. He’s never gonna believe it. Yesterday you call me a d-dork and t-today… t-t-today…” And he was off again, roaring his laughter, mopping his eyes with his handkerchief.

  When his mirth had subsided again, he asked, “How were you gonna finance this little venture, Mr. Dawes? Now that you’re no longer gainfully employed?”

  That was a funny way to put it. No longer gainfully employed. When you said it that way, it really sounded true. He was out of a job. All of this was not a dream.

  “I cashed in my life insurance last month,” he said. “I’d been paying on a ten-thousand-dollar policy for ten years. I’ve got about three thousand dollars.”

  “You’ve really been planning this for that long?”

  “No,” he said honestly. “When I cashed the policy in, I wasn’t sure what I wanted it for.”

  “In those days you were still keeping your options open, right? You thought you might burn the road, or machine-gun it to death, or strangle it, or-”

  “No. I just didn’t know what I was going to do. Now I know.”

  “Well count me out.”

  “What?” He blinked at Magliore, honestly stunned. This wasn’t in the script. Magliore was supposed to give him a hard time, in a fatherly son of way. Then sell him the explosive. Magliore was supposed to offer a disclaimer, something like: If you get caught, I’ll deny I ever heard of you.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said no. N-o. That spells no.” He leaned forward. All the good humor had gone out of his eyes. They were flat and suddenly small in spite of the magnification the glasses caused. They were not the eyes of a jolly Neapolitan Santa Claus at all.

  “Listen,” he said to Magliore. “If I get caught, I’ll deny I ever heard of you. I’ll never mention your name.”

  “The fuck you would. You’d spill your fucking guts and cop an insanity plea. I’d go up for life.”

  “No, listen-”

  “You listen,” Magliore said. “You’re funny up to a point. That point has been got to. I said no, I meant no. No guns, no explosive, no dynamite, no nothing. Because why? Because you’re a fruitcake and I’m a businessman. Somebody told you I could 'get' things. I can get them, all right. I’ve gotten lots of things for lots of people. I’ve also gotten a few things for myself. In 1946, I got a two-to-five bit for carrying a concealed weapon. Did ten months. In 1952 I got a conspiracy rap, which I beat. In 1955, I got a tax-evasion rap, which I also beat. In 1959 I got a receiving-stolen-property rap which I didn’t beat. I did eighteen months in Castleton, but the guy who talked to the grand jury got life in a hole in the ground. Since 1959 I been up three times, case dismissed twice, rap beat once. They’d like to get me again because one more good one and I’m in for twenty years, no time off for good behavior. A man in my condition, the only part of him that comes out after twenty years is his kidneys, which they give to some Norton nigger in the welfare ward. This is some game to you. Crazy, but a game. It’s no game to me. You think you’re telling the truth when you say you’d keep your mouth shut. But you’re lying. Not to me, to you. So the answer is flat no.” He threw up his hands. “If it had been broads, Jesus, I woulda given you two free just for that floor show you put on yesterday. But I ain’t going for any of this.”

  “All right,” he said. His stomach felt worse than ever. He felt like he was going to throw up.

  “This place is clean,” Magliore said, “and I know it’s clean. Furthermore, I know you’re clean, although God knows you’re not going to be if you go on like this. But I’ll tell you something. About two years ago, this nigger came to me and said he wanted explosives. He wasn’t going to blow up something harmless like a road. He was going to blow up a fucking federal courthouse.”

  Don’t tell me any more, he was thinking. I’m going to puke, I think. His stomach felt full of feathers, all of them tickling at once.

  “I sold him the goop,” Magliore said. “Some of this, some of that. We dickered. He talked to his guys, I talked to my guys. Money changed hands. A lot of money. The goop changed hands. They caught the guy and two of his buddies before they could hurt anyone, thank God. But I never lost a minute’s sleep worrying was he going to spill his guts to the cops or the county prosecutor or the Effa Bee Eye. You know why? Because he was with a whole bunch of fruitcakes, nigger fruitcakes, and they’re the worst kind, and a bunch of fruitcakes is a different proposition altogether. A single nut like you, he doesn’t give a shit. He burns out like a lightbulb. But if there are thirty guys and three of them get caught, they just zip up their lips and put things on the back burner.”

  “All right,” he said again. His eyes felt small and hot.

  “Listen,” Magliore said, a little more quietly. “Three thousand bucks wouldn’t buy you what you want, anyway. This is like the black market, you know what I mean?-no pun intended. It would take three or four times that to buy the goop you need.”

  He said nothing. He couldn’t leave until Magliore dismissed him. This was like a nightmare, only it wasn’t. He had to keep telling himself that he wouldn’t do something stupid in Magliore’s presence, like trying to pinch himself awake.

  “Dawes?”

  “What?”

  “It wouldn’t do any good anyway. Don’t you know that? You can blow up a person or you can blow up a natural landmark or you can destroy a piece of beautiful art, like that crazy shit that took a hammer to the Pieta, may his dink rot off. But you can’t blow up buildings or roads or anything like that. It’s what all these crazy niggers don’t understand. If you blow up a federal courthouse, the feds build two to take its place-one to replace the blown-up one and one just to rack up each and every black ass that gets busted through the front door. If you go around killing cops, they hire six cops for every one you killed-and every one of the new cops is on the prod for dark meat. You can’t win, Dawes. White or black. If you get in the way of that road, they’ll plow you under along with your house and your job.”

  “I have to go now,” he heard himself say thickly.

  “Yeah, you look bad. You need to get this out of your system. I can get you an old whore if you want her. Old and stupid. You can beat the shit out of her, if you want to. Get rid of the poison. I sort of like you, and-”

  He ran. He ran blindly, out the door and through the main office and out into the snow. He stood there shivering, drawing in great white freezing gulps of the snowy air. He was suddenly sure that Magliore would come out after him, collar him, take him back into the office, and talk to him until the end of time. When Gabriel trumpeted in the Apocalypse, Sally One-Eye would still be patiently explaining the invulnerability of all systems everywhere and urging the old whore on him.

  When he got home the snow was almost six inches deep. The plows had been by and he had to drive the LTD through a crusted drift of snow to get in the driveway. The LTD made it no sweat. It was a good heavy car.

  The house was dark. When he opened the door and stepped in, stamping snow off on the mat, it was also silent. Merv Griffin was not chatting with the celebrities.

  “Mary?” He called. There was no answer. “Mary?”

  He was willing to think she wasn’t home until he heard her crying in the living room. He took off his topcoat and hung it on its hanger in the closet. Th
ere was a small box on the floor under the hanger. The box was empty. Mary put it there every winter, to catch drips. He had sometimes wondered: Who cares about drips in a closet? Now the answer came to him, perfect in its simplicity. Mary cared. That’s who.

  He went into the living room. She was sitting on the couch in front of the blank Zenith TV, crying. She wasn’t using a handkerchief. Her hands were at her sides.

  She had always been a private weeper, going into the upstairs bedroom to do it, or if it surprised her, hiding her face in her hands or a handkerchief. Seeing her this way made her face seem naked and obscene, the face of a plane crash victim. It twisted his heart.

  “Mary,” he said softly.

  She went on crying, not looking at him. He sat down beside her.

  “Mary,” he said. “It’s not as bad as that. Nothing is.” But he wondered.

  “It’s the end of everything,” she said, and the words came out splintered by her crying. Oddly, the beauty she had not achieved for good or lost for good was in her face now, shining. In this moment of the final smash, she was a lovely woman.

  “Who told you?”

  “Everybody told me!” She cried. She still wouldn’t look at him, but one hand came up and made a twisting, beating movement against the air before falling against the leg of her slacks.” Tom Granger called. Then Ron Stone’s wife called. Then Vincent Mason called. They wanted to know what was wrong with you. And I didn’t know! I didn’t know anything was wrong!”

  “Mary,” he said, and tried to take her hand. She snatched it away as if he might be catching.

  “Are you punishing me?” she asked, and finally looked at him. “Is that what you’re doing? Punishing me?”