Roadwork Read online

  “This must be part three,” she said. There was still mild contempt and hostility in her tone, but now it was cut with a certain tired amusement. “How did a nice girl like you get in a car like this?”

  “Oh, to hell with it,” he said. “You’re impossible.”

  “That’s right, I am.” She snuffed her cigarette in his ashtray and then wrinkled her nose. “Look at this. Full of candy wrappers and cellophane and every other kind of shit. Why don’t you get a litterbag?”

  “Because I don’t smoke. If you had just called ahead and said, Barton old boy, I intend to be hitching the turnpike today so give me a ride, would you? And by the way, clear the shit out of your ashtray because I intend to smoke-then I would have emptied it. Why don’t you just throw it out the window?”

  She was smiling. “You have a nice sense of irony.”

  “It’s my sad life.”

  “Do you know how long it takes filter tips to biodegrade? Two hundred years, that’s how long. By that time your grandchildren will be dead.”

  He shrugged. “You don’t mind me breathing in your used carcinogens, screwing up the cilia in my lungs, but you don’t want to throw a filter tip out into the turnpike. Okay.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Listen, do you want to let me out? Is that it?”

  “No,” he said. “Why don’t we just talk about something neutral? The state of the dollar. The state of the Union. The state of Arkansas.”

  “I think I’d rather catch a little nap if you don’t mind. It looks like I’m going to be up most of the night.”

  “Fine.”

  She tilted the watchcap over her eyes, folded her arms, and became still. After a few moments her breathing deepened to long strokes. He looked at her in short snatches, shoplifting an image of her. She was wearing blue jeans, tight, faded, thin. They molded her legs closely enough to let him know that she wasn’t wearing a second pair or long-handles. They were long legs, folded under the dashboard for comfort, and they were probably blushing lobster red now, itching like hell. He started to ask her if her legs itched, and then thought how it would sound. The thought of her hitchhiking all night on Route 7, either getting rides in short hops or not getting rides at all, made him feel uncomfortable. Night, thin pants, temperatures in the 20’s. Well, it was her business. If she got cold enough, she could go in someplace and warm up. No problem.

  They passed exits 14 and 13. He stopped looking at her and concentrated on his driving. The speedometer needle stayed pegged at seventy, and he stayed in the passing lane. More cars honked at him. As they passed exit 12, a man in a station wagon which bore a KEEP IT AT 50 bumper sticker honked three times and blipped his lights indignantly. He gave the station wagon the finger.

  With her eyes still closed she said: “You’re going too fast. That’s why they’re honking.”

  “I know why they’re doing it.”

  “But you don’t care.”

  “No.”

  “Just another concerned citizen,” she intoned, “doing his part to rid America of the energy squeeze.”

  “I don’t give a tin weasel about the energy squeeze.”

  “So say we; so say we all.”

  “I used to drive at fifty-five on the turnpike. No more, no less. That’s where my car got the best mileage. Now I’m protesting the Trained Dog Ethic. Surely you read about it in your sociology courses? Or am I wrong? I took it for granted you were a college kid.”

  She sat up. “I was a sociology major for a while. Well, sort of. But I never heard of the Trained Dog Ethic.”

  “That’s because I made it up.”

  “Oh. April Fool.” Disgust. She slid back down in the seat and tilted the watchcap over her eyes again.

  “The Trained Dog Ethic, first advanced by Barton George Dawes in late 1973, fully explains such mysteries as the monetary crisis, inflation, the Viet Nam war, and the current energy crisis. Let us take the energy crisis as an example. The American people are the trained dogs, trained in this case to love oil-guzzling toys. Cars, snowmobiles, large boats, dune buggies, motorcycles, minicycles, campers, and many, many more. In the years 1973 to 1980 we will be trained to hate energy toys. The American people love to be trained. Training makes them wag their tails. Use energy. Don’t use energy. Go pee on the newspaper. I don’t object to saving energy, I object to training.”

  He found himself thinking of Mr. Piazzi’s dog, who had first stopped wagging his tail, had then starred rolling his eyes, and had then ripped out Luigi Bronticelli’s throat.

  “Like Pavlov’s dogs,” he said. “They were trained to salivate at the sound of a bell. We’ve been trained to salivate when somebody shows us a Bombardier Skidoo with overdrive or a Zenith color TV with a motorized antenna. I have one of those at my house. The TV has a Space Command gadget. You can sit in your chair and change the channels, hike the volume or lower it, turn it on or off. I stuck the gadget in my mouth once and pushed the on button and the TV came right on. The signal went right through my brain and still did the job. Technology is wonderful.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said.

  “I guess so.” They passed exit 11.

  “I think I’ll go to sleep. Tell me when we get to the end.”

  “Okay.”

  She folded her arms and closed her eyes again.

  They passed exit 10.

  “It isn’t the Trained Dog Ethic I object to anyway,” he said. “It’s the fact that the masters are mental, moral, and spiritual idiots.”

  “You’re trying to soothe your conscience with a lot of rhetoric,” she said with her eyes still closed. “Why don’t you just slow down to fifty? You’ll feel better.”

  “I will not feel better.” And he spat it out so vehemently that she sat up and looked at him.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I lost my wife and my job because either the world has gone crazy or I have. Then I pick up a hitchhiker-a nineteen-year-old kid for Chrissake, the kind that’s supposed to take it for granted that the world’s gone crazy-and she tells me it’s me, the world is doing just fine. Not much oil, but other than that, just fine.”

  “I’m twenty-one.”

  “Good for you,” he said bitterly. “If the world’s so sane, what’s a kid like you doing hitchhiking to Las Vegas in the middle of winter? Planning to spend the whole night hitchhiking along Route 7 and probably getting frostbite in your legs because you’re not wearing anything under those pants?”

  “I am so wearing something underneath! What do you think I am?”

  “I think you’re stupid!” he roared at her. “You’re going to freeze your ass off!”

  “And then you won’t be able to get a piece of it, right?” she inquired sweetly.

  “Oh boy,” he muttered. “Oh boy.”

  They roared past a sedan moving at fifty. The sedan beeped at him. “Eat it!” He yelled. “Raw!”

  “I think you better let me off right now,” she said quietly.

  “Never mind,” he said. “I’m not going to crash us up. Go to sleep.”

  She looked at him distrustfully for a long second, then folded her arms and closed her eyes. They went past exit 9.

  They passed exit 2 at five after four. The shadows stretching across the road had taken on the peculiar blue cast that is the sole property of winter shadows. Venus was already in the east. The traffic had thickened as they approached the city.

  He glanced over toward her and saw she was sitting up, looking out at the hurrying, indifferent automobiles. The car directly in front of them had a Christmas tree lashed to its roof rack. The girl’s green eyes were very wide, and for a moment he fell into them and saw out of them in the perfect empathy that comes to human beings at mercifully infrequent intervals. He saw that all the cars were going to someplace where it was warm, someplace where there was business to transact or friends to greet or a loom of family life to pick up and sti
tch upon. He saw their indifference to strangers. He understood in a brief, cold instant of comprehension what Thomas Carlyle called the great dead locomotive of the world, rushing on and on.

  “We’re almost there?” she asked.

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  “Listen, if I was hard on you-”

  “No, I was hard on you. Listen, I’ve got nothing in particular to do. I’ll take you around to Landy.”

  “No-”

  “Or I’ll stick you in the Holiday Inn for the night. No strings attached. Merry Christmas and all that.”

  “Are you really separated from your wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “And so recently?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has she got your kids?”

  “We have no kids.” They were coming up on the tollbooths. Their green golights twinkled indifferently in the early twilight.

  “Take me home with you, then.”

  “I don’t have to do that. I mean, you don’t have to-”

  “I’d just as soon be with somebody tonight,” she said. “And I don’t like to hitchhike at night. It’s scary.”

  He slid up to a tollbooth and rolled down his window, letting in cold air. He gave the toll taker his card and a dollar ninety. He pulled out slowly. They passed a reflectorized sign that said:

  THANK YOU FOR DRIVING SAFELY!

  “All right,” he said cautiously. He knew he was probably wrong to keep trying to reassure her-probably achieving just the opposite effect-but he couldn’t seem to help it. “Listen, it’s just that the house is very lonely by myself. We can have supper, and then maybe watch TV and eat popcorn. You can have the upstairs bedroom and I’ll-”

  She laughed a little and he glanced at her as they went around the cloverleaf.

  But she was hard to see now, a little indistinct. She could have been something he dreamed. The idea bothered him.

  “Listen,” she said. “I better tell you this right now. That drunk I was riding with? I spent the night with him. He was going on to Stilson, where you picked me up. That was his price.”

  He paused for the red light at the foot of the cloverleaf.

  “My roommate told me it would be like that, but I didn’t believe her. I wasn’t going to fuck my way across the country, not me.” She looked at him fleetingly, but he still couldn’t read her face in the gloom. “But it’s not people making you. It’s being so disconnected from everything, like spacewalking. When you come into a big city and think of all the people in there, you want to cry. I don’t know why, but you do. It gets so you’d spend the night picking some guy’s bleeding pimples just to hear him breathe and talk.”

  “I don’t care who you’ve been sleeping with,” he said and pulled out into traffic. Automatically he turned onto Grand Street, heading for home past the 784 construction.

  “This salesman,” she said. “He’s been married fourteen years. He kept saying that while he was humping me. Fourteen years, Sharon, he keeps saying, fourteen years, fourteen years. He came in about fourteen seconds.” She uttered short bark of laughter, rueful and sad.

  “Is that your name? Sharon?”

  “No. I guess that was his wife’s name.”

  He pulled over to the curb.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, instantly distrustful.

  “Nothing much,” he said. “This is part of going home. Get out, if you want. I’ll show you something.”

  They got out and walked over to the observation platform, now deserted. He laid his bare hands on the cold iron pipe of the railing and looked down. They had been undercoating today, he saw. The last three working days they had put down gravel. Now undercoat. Deserted equipment-trucks and bulldozers and yellow backhoes-stood silently about in the shades of evening like a museum exhibit of dinosaurs. Here we have the vegetarian stegosaurus, the flesh-eating triceratops, the fearsome earth-munching diesel shovel. Bon appetit.

  “What do you think of it?” he asked her.

  “Am I supposed to think something?” She was fencing, trying to figure this out.

  “You must think something,” he said.

  She shrugged. “It’s roadwork, so what? They’re building a road in a city I’ll probably never be in again. What am I supposed to think? It’s ugly.”

  “Ugly,” he echoed, relieved.

  “I grew up in Portland, Maine,” she said. “We lived in a big apartment building and they put this shopping center up across the street-”

  “Did they tear anything down to make it?”

  “Huh?”

  “Did they-”

  “Oh. No, it was just a vacant lot with a big field behind it. I was just six or seven. I thought they were going to go on digging and ripping and plowing forever. And all I could think… it’s funny… all I could think was the poor old earth, it’s like they’re giving it an enema and they never asked if it wanted one or if there was something wrong. I had some kind of an intestinal infection that year, and I was the block expert on enemas.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “We went over one Sunday when they weren’t working and it was a lot like this, very quiet, like a corpse that died in bed. They had part of the foundations laid, and there were all of these yellow metal things sticking out of the cement-”

  “Core rods.”

  “Whatever. And there was lots of pipe and bundles of wire covered with clear plastic wrap and there was a lot of raw dirt around. Funny to think of it that way, whoever heard of cooked dirt, but that’s how it looked. Just raw. We played hide-and-go-seek around the place and my mother came over and got us and gave me and my sister hell for it. She said little kids can get into bad trouble around construction. My little sister was only four and she cried her head off. Funny to re-member all that. Can we get back in the car now? I’m cold.

  “Sure,” he said, and they did.

  As they drove on she said: “I never thought they’d have anything out of that place but a mess. Then pretty soon the shopping center was all there. I can remember the day they hot-topped the parking lot. And a few days after that some men came with a little push-wagon and made all the yellow parking lines. Then they had a big party and some hot-shit cut a ribbon and everybody started using it and it was just like they never built it. The name of the big department store was Mammoth Mart, and my mom used to go there a lot. Sometimes when Angie and I were with her I’d think of all those orange rods sticking through the cement down in the basement. It was like a secret thought.”

  He nodded. He knew about secret thoughts.

  “What does it mean to you?” she asked.

  “I’m still trying to figure that out,” he said.

  He was going to make TV dinners, but she looked in the freezer and saw the roast and said she’d fix it if he didn’t mind waiting for it to cook.

  “Sure,” he said. “I didn’t know how long to cook it or even what temperature.”

  “Do you miss your wife?”

  “Like hell.”

  “Because you don’t know how to cook the roast?” she asked, and he didn’t answer that. She baked potatoes and cooked frozen corn. They ate in the breakfast nook and she ate four thick slices of the roast, two potatoes, and two helpings of the corn.

  “I haven’t eaten like that in a year,” she said, lighting a cigarette and looking into her empty plate. “I’ll probably heave my guts.”

  “What have you been eating?”

  “Animal crackers.”

  “What?”

  “Animal crackers.”

  “I thought that’s what you said.”

  “They’re cheap,” she said. “And they fill you up. They’ve got a lot of nutrients and stuff, too. It says so right on the box.”

  “Nutrients my ass. You’re getting zits, girl. You’re too old for those. Come here.”

  He led her into the dining room and opened Mary’s china cupboard. He took out a silver serving dish and pulled a thick pile of paper money out of it. Her eyes widened.


  “Who’d you off, mister?”

  “I offed my insurance policy. Here. Here’s two hundred bucks. Eat on it.”

  But she didn’t touch the money. “You’re nuts,” she said. “What do you think I’m going to do to you for two hundred dollars?”

  “Nothing.”

  She laughed.

  “All right.” He put the money on the sideboard and put the silver serving dish back into the cupboard. “If you don’t take it with you in the morning, I’ll flush it down the john.” But he didn’t think he would.

  She looked into his face. “You know, I think you would.”

  He said nothing.

  “We’ll see,” she said. “In the morning.”

  “In the morning,” he echoed.

  He was watching “To Tell the Truth” on the television. Two of the contestants were lying about being the world’s champion female bronc rider, and one was telling the truth. The panel, which included Soupy Sales, Bill Cullen, Arlene Dahl, and Kitty Carlisle, had to guess which one was telling the truth. Garry Moore, television’s only three-hundred-year-old game show host, smiled and cracked jokes and dinged a bell when each panelist’s time was up.

  The girl was looking out the window. “Hey,” she said. “Who lives on this street, anyway? All the houses look dark.”

  “Me and the Dankmans,” he said. “And the Dankmans are moving out January fifth.”

  “Why?”

  “The road,” he said. “Would you like a drink?”

  “What do you mean, the road?”

  “It’s coming through here,” he said. “This house is going to be somewhere in the middle of the median strip, as near as I can figure.”

  “That’s why you showed me the construction?”

  “I guess so. I used to work for a laundry about two miles from here. The Blue Ribbon. It’s going through there, too.”

  “That’s why you lost your job? Because the laundry was closing?”

  “Not exactly. I was supposed to sign an option on a new plant in a suburb called Waterford and I didn’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I couldn’t bear to,” he said simply. “You want a drink?”