Roadwork Read online

  “No,” he said urgently. “Oh Mary, no.” He wanted to cry now, but that would be wrong. That would be very wrong.

  “Because I gave you a dead baby and then a baby with a built-in self-destruct? Do you think I murdered your son? Is that why?”

  “Mary, he was our son-”

  “He was yours!” she screamed at him.

  “Don’t, Mary. Don’t.” He tried to hold her and she fought away from him.

  “Don’t you touch me.”

  They looked at each other, stunned, as if they had discovered for the first time that there was more to them than they had ever dreamed of-vast white spaces on some interior map.

  “Mary, I can’t help what I did. Please believe that.” But it could have been a lie. Nonetheless, he plunged on: “If it had something to do with Charlie, it did. I’ve done some things I don’t understand. I… I cashed in my life insurance policy in October. That was the first thing, the first real thing, but things had been happening in my mind long before that. But it was easier to do things than to talk about them. Can you understand that? Can you try?”

  “What’s going to happen to me, Barton? I don’t know anything but being your wife. What’s going to happen to me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s like you raped me,” she said, and began to cry again.

  “Mary, please don’t do that anymore. Don’t… try not to do that anymore.”

  “When you were doing all those things, didn’t you ever think of me? Didn’t you ever think that I depend on you?”

  He couldn’t answer. In a strange, disconnected way it was like talking to Magliore again. It was as if Magliore had beaten him home and put on a girdle and Mary’s clothes and a Mary mask. What next? The offer of the old whore?

  She stood. “I’m going upstairs. I’m going to lie down.”

  “Mary-” She did not cut him off, but he discovered there were no words to follow that first.

  She left the room and he heard her footsteps going upstairs. After that he heard the creak of her bed as she lay down on it. After that he heard her crying again. He got up and turned on the TV and jacked the volume so he wouldn’t be able to hear it. On the TV, Merv Griffin was chatting with celebrities.

  Part two

  DECEMBER

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused armies of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  –MATTHEW ARNOLD

  “Dover Beach”

  December 5, 1973

  He was drinking his private drink, Southern Comfort and Seven-Up, and watching some TV program he didn’t know the name of. The hero of the program was either a plainclothes cop or a private detective, and some guy had hit him over the head. This had made the plainclothes cop (or private detective) decide that he was getting close to something. Before he had a chance to say what, there was a commercial for Gravy Train. The man in the commercial was saying that Gravy Train, when mixed with warm water, made its own gravy. He asked the audience if it didn’t look just like beef stew. To Barton George Dawes it looked just like a loose bowel movement that somebody had done in a red dog dish. The program came back on. The private eye (or plainclothes police detective) was questioning a black bartender who had a police record. The bartender said dig. The bartender said, flake off. The bartender said dude. He was a very hip bartender, all right, but Barton George Dawes thought that the private cop (or plainclothes investigator) had his number.

  He was quite drunk, and he was watching television in his shorts and nothing else. The house was hot. He had turned the thermostat to seventy-eight degrees and had left it there ever since Mary left. What energy crisis? Fuck you, Dick. Also the horse you rode in on. Fuck Checkers, too. When he got on the turnpike, he drove at seventy, giving the finger to motorists who honked at him to slow down. The president’s consumer expert, some woman who looked as if she might have been a child star in the 1930s before passing time had turned her into a political hermaphrodite, had been on a public-service program two nights ago, talking about the ways!! You amp; I!! could save electricity around the house. Her name was Virginia Knauer, and she was very big on different ways YOU amp; I could save energy, because this thing was a real bitch and we were all in it together. When the program was over he had gone into the kitchen and turned on the electric blender. Mrs. Knauer had said that blenders were the second-biggest small appliance energy wasters. He had let the blender run on all night and when he got up the next morning-yesterday morning-the motor had burned out. The greatest electricity waster, Mrs. Knauer had said, were those little electric space heaters. He didn’t have an electric space heater, but he had toyed with the idea of getting one so he could run it day and night until it burned up. Possibly, if he was drunk and passed out, it would burn him up, too. That would be the end of the whole silly self-pitying mess.

  He poured himself another drink and fell to musing over the old TV programs, the ones they had been running when he and Mary were still practically newlyweds and a brand new RCA console model TV-your ordinary, garden-variety RCA console model black-and-white TV-was something to boggle over. There had been “The Jack Benny Program” and “Amos ‘n Andy,” those original jiveass niggers. There was “Dragnet,” the original “Dragnet” with Ben Alexander for Joe Friday’s partner instead of that new guy, Harry somebody. There had been “Highway Patrol,” with Broderick Crawford growling ten-four into his mike and everybody driving around in Buicks that still had portholes on the side. “Your Show of Shows.” “Your Hit Parade,” with Gisele MacKenzie singing things like “Green Door” and “Stranger in Paradise.” Rock and roll had killed that one. Or how about the quiz shows, how about them? “Tic-Tac-Dough” and “TwentyOne” every Monday night, starring Jack Barry. People going into isolation booths and putting UN-style earphones on their heads to hear fucking incredible questions they had already been briefed on. “The $64,000 Question,” with Hal March. Contestants staggering offstage with their arms full of reference books. “Dotto,” with Jack Narz. And Saturday morning programs like “Annie Oakley,” who was always saving her kid brother Tag from some Christless mess. He had always wondered if that kid was really her bastard. There was “Rin-Tin-Tin,” who operated out of Fort Apache. “Sergeant Preston,” who operated out of the Yukon-sort of a roving assignment, you might say. “Range Rider,” with Jock Mahoney. “Wild Bill Hickok,” with Guy Madison and Andy Devine as Jingles. Mary would say Bart, if people knew you watched all that stuff, they’d think you were feeble. Honestly, a man your age! And he had always replied, I want to be able to talk to my kids, kid. Except there had never been any kids, not really. The first one had been nothing but a dead mess-what was that old joke about putting wheels on miscarriages?-and the second had been Charlie, who it was best not to think of. I’ll be seeing you in my dreams, Charlie. Every night it seemed he and his son got together in one dream or another. Barton George Dawes and Charles Frederick Dawes, reunited by the wonders of the subconscious mind. And here we are, folks, back in Disney World’s newest head trip, Self-Pity Land, where you can take a gondola ride down The Canal of Tears, visit the Museum of Old Snapshots, and go for a ride in The Wonderful NostalgiaMobile, driven by Fred MacMurray. The last stop on your tour is this wonderful replica of Crestallen Street West. It’s right here inside this giant Southern Comfort bottle, preserved for all time. That’s right, madam, just duck your head as you walk into the neck. It’ll widen out soon. And this is the home of Barton George Dawes, the last living resident of Crestallen Street West. Look right in the window here just a second, sonny, I’ll boost you up. That’s George all right, sitting in front of his Zenit
h color TV in his striped boxer shorts, having a drink and crying. Crying? Of course he’s crying. What else would he be doing in Self-Pity Land? He cries all the time. The flow of his tears is regulated by our WORLD-FAMOUS TEAM OF ENGINEERS. On Mondays he just mists a little, because that’s a slow night. The rest of the week he cries a lot more. On the weekend he goes into overdrive, and on Christmas we may float him right away. I admit he’s a little disgusting, but nontheless, he’s one of SelfPity Land’s most popular inhabitants, right up there with our recreation of King Kong atop the Empire State Building. He-

  He threw his drink at the television.

  He missed by quite a bit. The glass hit the wall, fell to the floor, and shattered. He burst into fresh tears.

  Crying, he thought: Look at me, look at me, Jesus you’re disgusting. You’re such a fucking mess it’s beyond belief. You spoiled your whole life and Mary’s too and you sit here joking about it, you fucking waste. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus-

  He was halfway to the telephone before he could stop himself. The night before, drank and crying, he had called Mary and begged her to come back. He had begged until she began to cry and hung up on him. It made him squirm and grin to think of it, that he had done such a Godawful embarrassing thing.

  He went on to the kitchen, got the dustpan and the whiskbroom, and went back to the living room. He shut off the TV and swept up the glass. He took it into the kitchen, weaving slightly, and dumped it into the trash. Then he stood there, wondering what to do next.

  He could hear the insectile buzz of the refrigerator and it frightened him. He went to bed. And dreamed.

  December 6, 1973

  It was half past three and he was slamming up the turnpike toward home, doing seventy. The day was clear and hand and bright, the temperature in the low thirties. Every day since Mary had left he went for a long ride on the turnpike-in a way, it had become his surrogate work. It soothed him. When the road was unrolling in front of him, its edges clearly marked by the low early winter snowbanks on either side, he was without thought and at peace. Sometimes he sang along with the radio in a lusty, bellowing voice. Often on these trips he thought he should just keep going, letting way lead on to way, getting gas on the credit card. He would drive south and not stop until he ran out of roads or out of land. Could you drive all the way to the tip of South America? He didn’t know.

  But he always came back. He would get off the turnpike, eat hamburgers and French fries in some pickup restaurant, and then drive into the city, arriving at sunset or just past.

  He always drove down Stanton Street, parked, and got out to look at whatever progress the 784 extension had made during the day. The construction company had mounted a special platform for rubberneckers-mostly old men and shoppers with an extra minute-and during the day it was always full. They lined up along the railing like clay ducks in a shooting gallery, the cold vapor pluming from their mouths, gawking at the bulldozers and graders and the surveyors with their sextants and tripods. He could cheerfully have shot all of them.

  But at night, with the temperatures down in the 20’s, with sunset a bitter orange line in the west and thousands of stars already pricking coldly through the firmament overhead, he could measure the road’s progress alone and undisturbed. The moments he spent there were becoming very important to him-he suspected that in an obscure way, the moments spent on the observation platform were recharging him, keeping him tied to a world of at least half-sanity. In those moments before the evening’s long plunge into drunkenness had begun, before the inevitable urge to call Mary struck, before he began the evening’s activities in Self-Pity-Land he was totally himself, coldly and blinkingly sober. He would curl his hands over the iron pipe and stare down at the construction until his fingers became as unfeeling as the iron itself and it became impossible to tell where the world of himself-the world of human things-ended and the outside world of tractors and cranes and observation platforms began. In those moments there was no need to blubber or pick over the rickrack of the past that jumbled his memory. In those moments he felt his self pulsing warmly in the cold indifference of the early-winter evening, a real person, perhaps still whole.

  Now, whipping up the turnpike at seventy, still forty miles away from the Westgate tollbooths, he saw a figure standing in the breakdown land just past exit 16, muffled up in a CPO coat and wearing a black knitted watchcap. The figure was holding up a sign that said (amazingly, in all this snow): LAS VEGAS. And underneath that, defiantly: or BUST!

  He slammed on the power brake and felt the seat belt strain a groove in his middle with the swift deceleration, a little exhilarated by the Richard Petty sound of his own squealing tires. He pulled over about twenty yards beyond the figure. It tucked its sign under its arm and ran toward him. Something about the way the figure was running told him the hitchhiker was a girl.

  The passenger door opened and she got in.

  “Hey, thanks.”

  “Sure.” He glanced in the rearview mirror and pulled out, accelerating back to seventy. The road unrolled in front of him again. “A long way to Vegas.”

  “It sure is.” She smiled at him, the stock smile for people that told her it was a long way to Vegas, and pulled off her gloves. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “No, go ahead.”

  She pulled out a box of Marlboros. “Like one?”

  “No, thanks.”

  She stuck a cigarette in her mouth, took a box of kitchen matches from her CPO pocket, lit her smoke, took a huge drag and chuffed it out, fogging part of the windshield, put Marlboros and matches away, loosened the dark blue scarf around her neck and said: “I appreciate the ride. It’s cold out there.”

  “Were you waiting long?”

  “About an hour. The last guy was drunk. Man, I was glad to get out.”

  He nodded. “I’ll take you to the end of the turnpike.”

  “End?” She looked at him. “You’re going all the way to Chicago?”

  “What? Oh, no.” He named his city.

  “But the turnpike goes through there.” She pulled a Sunoco road map, dog-eared from much thumbing, from her other coat pocket. “The map says so.”

  “Unfold it and look again.”

  She did so.

  “What color is the part of the turnpike we’re on now?”

  “Green.”

  “What color is the part going through the city?”

  “Dotted green. It’s… oh, Christ! It’s under construction!”

  “That’s right. The world-famous 784 extension. Girl, you’ll never get to Las Vegas if you don’t read the key to your map.”

  She bent over it, her nose almost touching the paper. Her skin was clear, perhaps normally milky, but now the cold had brought a bloom to her cheeks and forehead. The tip of her nose was red, and a small drop of water hung beside her left nostril. Her hair was clipped short, and not very well. A home job. A pretty chestnut color. Too bad to cut it, worse to cut it badly. What was that Christmas story by O. Henry? “The Gift of the Magi.” Who did you buy a watch chain for, little wanderer?

  “The solid green picks up at a place called Landy,” she said. “How far is that from where this part ends?”

  “About thirty miles.”

  “Oh Christ.”

  She puzzled over the map some more. Exit 15 flashed by.

  “What’s the bypass road?” she asked finally. “It just looks like a snarl to me.”

  “Route 7’s best,” he said. “It’s at the last exit, the one they call Westgate.” He hesitated. “But you’d do better to just hang it up for the night. There’s a Holiday Inn. We won’t get there until almost dark, and you don’t want to try hitching up Route 7 after dark.”

  “Why not?” she asked, looking over at him. Her eyes were green and disconcerting; an eye color you read about occasionally but rarely see.

  “It’s a city bypass road,” he said, taking charge of the passing lane and roaring past a whole line of vehicles doing fifty. Several of them honked at him ang
rily. “Four lanes with a little bitty concrete divider between them. Two lanes west toward Landy, two lanes east into the city. Lots of shopping centers and hamburger stands and bowling alleys and all that. Everybody is going in short hops. No one wants to stop.”

  “Yeah.” She sighed. “Is there a bus to Landy?”

  “There used to be a city bus, but it went bankrupt. I guess there must be a Greyhound-

  “Oh, fuck it.” She squidged the map back together and stuffed it into her pocket. She stared at the road, looking put out and worried.

  “Can’t afford a motel room?”

  “Mister, I’ve got thirteen bucks. I couldn’t rent a doghouse.”

  “You can stay at my house if you want,” he said.

  “Yeah, and maybe you better let me out right here.”

  “Never mind. I withdraw the offer.”

  “Besides, what would your wife think?” She looked pointedly at the wedding ring on his finger. It was a look that suggested she thought he might also hang around school play yards after the monitor had gone home for the day.

  “My wife and I are separated.”

  “Recently?”

  “Yes. As of December first.”

  “And now you’ve got all these hang-ups that you could use some help with,” she said. There was contempt in her voice but it was an old contempt, not aimed specifically at him. “Especially some help from a young chick.”

  “I don’t want to lay anybody,” he said truthfully. “I don’t even think I could get it up.” He realized he had just used two terms that he had never used before a woman in his life, but it seemed all right. Not good or bad but all right, like discussing the weather.

  “Is that supposed to be a challenge?” she asked. She drew deeply on her cigarette and exhaled more smoke.

  “No,” he said. “I suppose it sounds like a line if you’re looking for lines. I suppose a girl on her own has to be looking for them all the time.”