Roadwork Read online

  He lay wakeful, telling himself they weren’t going to catch him. He had worn his gloves. No fingerprints. He had Mary’s bucket and the white cover that went over the top. He had hidden his tracks, had shaken off possible pursuit just as a fugitive will throw off bloodhounds by walking in a creek. None of these thoughts brought him sleep or comfort. They would catch him. Perhaps someone on Heron Place had seen his car and thought it suspicious that any vehicle should be out so late on such a stormy night. Perhaps someone had jotted down his license plate number and was even now being congratulated by the police. Perhaps they had gotten paint scrapings from the Heron Place construction barrier and were now cajoling his guilty name out of some auto registration computer. Perhaps-

  He rolled and thrashed in his bed, waiting for the dancing blue shadows to come in his window, waiting for the heavy knock on his door, waiting for some bodiless, Kafkaesque voice to call: Okay, open up in there! And when he finally fell asleep he did it without knowing it, because thought continued without a break, shifting from conscious rumination to the skewed world of dreams with hardly a break, like a car going from drive to low. Even in his dreams he thought he was awake, and in his dreams he committed suicide over and over: burned himself; bludgeoned himself by standing under an anvil and pulling a rope; hanged himself; blew out the stove’s pilot lights and then turned on the oven and all four burners; shot himself; defenestrated himself; stepped in front of a speeding Greyhound bus; swallowed pills; swallowed Vanish toilet bowl disinfectant; stuck a can of Glade Pine Fresh aerosol in his mouth, pushed the button, and inhaled until his head floated off into the sky like a child’s balloon; committed hara-kari while kneeling in a confessional at St. Dom’s, confessing his self-murder to a dumbfounded young priest even as his guts accordioned out onto the bench like beef stew, performing an act of contrition in a fading, bemused voice as he lay in his blood and the steaming sausages of his intestines. But most vividly, over and over, he saw himself behind the wheel of the LTD, racing the engine a little in the closed garage, taking deep breaths and leafing through a copy of National Geographic, examining pic-tures of life in Tahiti and Aukland and the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, turning the pages ever more slowly, until the sound of the engine faded to a fawaway sweet hum and the green waters of the South Pacific inundated him in rocking warmth and took him down to a silver fathom.

  December 19, 1973

  It was 12:30 in the afternoon when he woke up and got out of bed. He felt as though he had been on a huge bender. His head ached monstrously. His bladder was cramped and full. There was a dead-snake taste in his mouth. Walking made his heart thud like a snare drum. He was not even allowed the luxury of believing (for however short a time) that he had dreamed everything he remembered of the previous night, because the smell of gasoline seemed rubbed into his flesh and it rose, fulsomely fragrant, from the pile of his clothes. The snow was over, the sky was clear, and the bright sunshine made his eyes beg for mercy.

  He went into the bathroom, sat on the ring, and a huge diarrhea movement rushed out of him like a mail train highballing through a deserted station. His waste fell into the water with a sickening series of jets and plops that made him groan and clutch his head. He urinated without getting up, the rich and dismaying smell of his digestion’s unsavory end product rising thickly around him.

  He flushed and went downstairs on his orange-wood legs, taking clean clothes with him. He would wait until the godawful smell cleared out of the bathroom and then he would shower, maybe all afternoon.

  He gobbled three Excedrin from the green bottle on the shelf over the kitchen sink, then washed them down with two big gulps of Pepto-Bismol. He put on hot water for coffee and smashed his favorite cup by fumbling it off its hook. He swept it up, put out another, dumped instant Maxwell House into it, and then went into the dining room.

  He turned on the radio and swept across the dial looking for news, which, like a cop, was never there when you needed it. Pop music. Feed and grain reports. A Golden Nugget ‘Cause You Dug It. A call-in talk show. A swap-shop program. Paul Harvey selling Banker’s Life Insurance. More pop music. No news.

  The water for the coffee was boiling. He set the radio to one of the pop stations and brought his coffee back to the table and drank it black. There was an inclination to vomit with the first two mouthfuls, but after that it was better.

  The news came on, first national, then local.

  On the city newsfront, a fire was set at the site of the 784 thruway extension construction near Grand Street in the early hours of this morning. Police Lieutenant Henry King said that vandals apparently used gasoline bombs to fire a crane, two payloaders, two bulldozers, a pickup truck, and the on-site office of the Lane Construction Company, which was entirely gutted.

  An exultation as bitter and dark as the taste of his unsweetened coffee closed his throat at the words entirely gutted.

  Damage done to the payloaders and bulldozers was minor, according to Francis Lane, whose company got a substantial subcontracting bid on the crosstown extension, but the demolition crane, valued at $60,000, is expected to be out of service for as long as two weeks.

  Two weeks? Was that all?

  More serious, according to Lane, was the burning of the on-site office, which contained time sheets, work records, and ninety percent of the company’s cost accounting records over the last three months. “This is going to be the very devil to straighten out,” Lane said. “It may set us back a month or more.”

  Maybe that was good news. Maybe an extra month of time made it all worthwhile.

  According to Lieutenant King, the vandals fled the construction site in a station wagon, possibly a late-model Chevrolet. He appealed for anyone who may have seen the car leaving the construction area by Heron Street to come forward. Francis Lane estimated total damage in the area of $100,000.

  In other local news, State Representative Muriel Reston again appealed for…

  He snapped it off.

  Now that he had heard, and had heard in daylight, things seemed a little better. It was possible to look at things rationally. Of course the police didn’t have to give out all their leads, but if they really were looking for a Chevy instead of a Ford, and if they were reduced to pleading for eyewitnesses to come forward, then maybe he was safe, at least for the time being. And if there had been an eyewitness, no amount of worrying would change that.

  He would throw away Mary’s floor-bucket and open the garage to air out the stink of gasoline. Make up a story to explain the broken back window if anyone asked about it. And most important, he would try to prepare himself mentally for a visit from the police. As the last resident of Crestallen Street West, it might be perfectly logical for them to at least check him out. And they wouldn’t have to sniff up his back trail very far to find out he had been acting erratically. He had screwed up the plant. His wife had left him. A former co-worker had punched him out in a department store. And of course, he had a station wagon, Chevrolet or not. All bad. But none of it proof.

  And if they did dig up proof, he supposed he would go to jail. But there were worse things than jail. Jail wasn’t the end of the world. They would give him a job, feed him. He wouldn’t have to worry about what was going to happen when the insurance money ran out. Sure, there were a lot of things worse than jail. Suicide, for instance. That was worse. He went upstairs and showered.

  Later that afternoon he called Mary. Her mother answered and went to get Mary with a sniff. But when Mary herself answered, she sounded nearly gay.

  “Hi Bart. Merry Christmas in advance.”

  “No, Mary Christmas,” he responded. It was an old joke that had graduated from humor to tradition.

  “Sure,” she said. “What is it, Bart?”

  “Well, I’ve got a few presents… just little stuff… for you and the nieces and nephews. I wondered if we could get together somewhere. I’ll give them to you. I didn’t wrap the kids’ presents-”

  “I’d be glad to wrap them. But you shou
ldn’t have. You’re not working.”

  “But I’m working on it,” he said.

  “Bart, have you… have you done anything about what we talked about?”

  “The psychiatrist?”

  “Yes,”

  “I called two. One is booked up until almost June. The other guy is going to be in the Bahamas until the end of March. He said he could take me then.”

  “What were their names?”

  “Names? Gee, honey, I’d have to look them up again to tell you. Adams, I think the first guy was. Nicholas Adams-”

  “Bart,” she said sadly.

  “It might have been Aarons,” he said wildly.

  “Bart,” she said again.

  “Okay.” he said. “Believe what you want. You will anyway.”

  “Bart, if you’d only

  “What about the presents? I called about the presents, not the goddam shrink.”

  She sighed. “Bring them over Friday, why don’t you? I can-”

  “What, so your mother and father can hire Charles Manson to meet me at the door? Let’s just meet on neutral ground, okay?”

  “They’re not going to be here.” she said. “They’re going to spend Christmas with Joanna.” Joanna was Joanna St. Claire, Jean Galloway’s cousin, who lived in Minnesota. They had been close friends in their girlhood (back in that pleasant lull between the War of 1812 and the advent of the Confederacy, he sometimes thought), and Joanna had had a stroke in July. She was still trying to get over it, but Jean had told him and Mary that the doctors said she could go at any time. That must be nice, he thought, having a time bomb built right into your head like that. Hey, bomb, is it today? Please not today. I haven’t finished the new Victoria Holt.

  “Bart? Are you there?”

  “Yes. I was woolgathering.”

  “Is one o’clock all right?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Was there anything else?”

  “No, huh-uh.

  “Well…”

  “Take good care, Mary.”

  “I will. Bye, Bart.” “Good-bye.

  They hung up and he wandered into the kitchen to make himself a drink. The woman he had just talked to on the phone wasn’t the same woman that had sat tearfully on the living room couch less than a month ago, pleading for some reason to help explain the tidal wave that had just swept grandly through her ordered life, destroying the work of twenty years and leaving only a few sticks poking out of the mudflats. It was amazing. He shook his head over it the way he would have shaken his head over the news that Jesus had come down from the sky and had taken Richard Nixon up to heaven upon wheels of fire. She has regained herself.

  More: She had regained a person he hardly knew at all, a girl-woman he barely remembered. Like an archaeologist she had excavated that person, and the person was a little stiff in the joints from its long storage, but still perfectly usable. The joints would ease and the new-old person would be a whole woman, perhaps scarred by this upheaval but not seriously hurt. He knew her perhaps better than she thought, and he had been able to tell, strictly from the tone of her voice, that she was moving ever close to the idea of divorce, the idea of a clean break with the past… a break that would splint well and leave no trace of a limp. She was thirty-eight. Half of her life was ahead of her. There were no children to be casually maimed in the car wreck of this marriage. He would not suggest divorce, but if she did he would agree. He envied her new person and her new beauty. And if she looked back ten years from now on her marriage as a long dark corridor leading into sunlight, he could feel sorry she felt that way, but he couldn’t blame her. No, he couldn’t blame her.

  December 21, 1973

  He had given her the presents in Jean Galloway’s ticking, ormolu living room, and the conversation that followed had been stilted and awkward. He had never been in this room alone with her, and he kept feeling that they should neck. It was a rusty knee-jerk reaction that made him feel like a bad double exposure of his college self.

  “Did you lighten you hair?” he asked.

  “Just a shade.” She shrugged a little.

  “It’s nice. Makes you look younger.”

  “You’re getting a little gray around the temples, Bart. Makes you look distinguished.”

  “Bullshit, it makes me look ratty.”

  She laughed-a little too high-pitched-and looked at the presents on the little side table. He had wrapped the owl pin, had left the toys and the chess set for her to do. The dolls looked blankly at the ceiling, waiting for some little girl’s hands to bring them to life.

  He looked at Mary. Their eyes caught seriously for a moment and he thought irrevocable words were going to spill out of her and he was frightened. Then the cuckoo jumped out of the clock, announced one-thirty, and they both jumped and then laughed. The moment had passed. He got up so it wouldn’t come around again. Saved by a cuckoo bird, he thought. That fits.

  “Got to go,” he said.

  “An appointment?”

  “Job interview.”

  “Really?” She looked glad, “Where? Who? How much?”

  He laughed and shook his head. “There’s a dozen other applicants with as good a chance as me. I’ll tell you when I get it.”

  “Conceited.”

  “Sure.”

  “Bart, what are you doing Christmas?” She looked concerned and solemn, and it suddenly came to him that an invitation to Christmas dinner and not to some new year’s divorce court had been the thing on her lips inside. God! He almost sprayed laughter.

  “I’m going to eat at home.”

  “You can come here,” she said. “It would be just the two of us.”

  “No,” he said, thoughtfully and then more firmly: “No. Emotions have a way of getting out of hand during the holidays. Another time.”

  She was nodding, also thoughtfully.

  “Will you be eating alone?” he asked.

  “I can go to Bob and Janet’s. Really, are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well…” But she looked relieved.

  They walked to the door and shared a bloodless kiss.

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  “You better.”

  “And give my best to Bobby.”

  “I will.”

  He was halfway down the walk to the car when she called: “Bart! Bart, wait a minute!”

  He turned almost fearfully.

  “I almost forgot,” she said. “Wally Hammer called and invited us to his New Year’s party. I accepted for both of us. But if you don’t want to-”

  “Wally?” He frowned. Walter Hammer was about their only crosstown friend. He worked for a local ad agency. “Doesn’t he know we’re, you know, separated?”

  “He knows, but you know Walt. Things like that don’t faze him much.”

  Indeed they didn’t. Just thinking about Walter made him smile. Walter, always threatening to quit advertising in favor of advanced truss design. Composer of obscene limericks and even more obscene parodies of popular tunes. Divorced twice and tagged hard both times. Now impotent, if you believed gossip, and in this case he thought the gossip was probably true. How long had it been since he had seen Walt? Four months? Six? Too long.

  “That might be fun,” he said, and then a thought stuck him.

  She scanned it from his face in her old way and said, “There won’t be any laundry people there.”

  “He and Steve Ordner know each other.”

  “Well, yes, him-” She shrugged to show how unlikely she thought it was that him would be there, and the shrug turned into an elbow-holding little shiver. It was only about twenty-five degrees.

  “Hey, go on in,” he said. “You’ll freeze, dummy.”

  “Do you want to go?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.” He kissed her again, this time a little more firmly, and she kissed back. At a moment like this, he could regret everything-but the regret was far away, clinical.

  “Merry Chri
stmas, Bart,” she said, and he saw she was crying a little.

  “Next year will be better,” he said, the phrase comforting but without any root meaning. “Go inside before you catch pneumonia.”

  She went in and he drove away, still thinking about Wally Hammer’s New Year’s Eve party. He thought he would go.

  December 24, 1973

  He found a small garage in Norton that would replace the broken back window for ninety dollars. When he asked the garage man if he would be working the day before Christmas, the garage man said: “Hell yes, I’ll take it any way I can get it.

  He stopped on the way at a Norton U-Wash-It and put his clothes in two machines. He automatically rotated the agitators to see what kind of shape the spring drives were in, and then loaded them carefully so each machine would extract (only in the laundromats they called it “spin-dry") without kicking off on the overload. He paused, smiling a little. You can take the boy out of the laundry, Fred, but you can’t take the laundry out of the boy. Right, Fred? Fred? Oh fuck yourself.

  “That’s a hell of a hole,” the garage man said, peering at the spiderwebbed glass.

  “Kid with a snowball,” he said. “Rock in the middle of it.”

  “It was,” he said. “It really was.”

  When the window was replaced he drove back to the U-Wash-It, put his clothes in the dryer, set it to medium-hot, and put thirty cents in the slot. He sat down and picked up someone’s discarded newspaper. The U-Wash-It’s only other customer was a tired-looking young woman with wire-rimmed glasses and blond streaks in her long, reddish-brown hair. She had a small girl with her, and the small girl was throwing a tantrum.