Roadwork Read online

He wiped his fingers across his cheek under his eye and saw by the wetness on them that he had been crying.

  He went downstairs to talk to Peter, who was in charge of deliveries. The laundry was in full swing now, the ironer thumping and hissing as the first of the Howard Johnson sheets were fed into its rollers, the washers grinding and making the floor vibrate, the shirt presses going hissss-shuh! as Ethel and Rhonda whipped them through.

  Peter told him the universal had gone on number four’s truck and did he want to look at it before they sent it out to the shop? He said he didn’t. He asked Peter if Holiday Inn had gone out yet. Peter said it was being loaded, but the silly ass who ran the place had already called twice about his towels.

  He nodded and went back upstairs to look for Vinnie Mason, but Phyllis said Vinnie and Tom Granger had gone out to that new German restaurant to dicker about tablecloths.

  “Will you have Vinnie stop in when he gets back?”

  “I will, Mr. Dawes. Mr. Ordner called and wanted to know if you’d call him back.”

  “Thanks, Phyllis.”

  He went back into the office, got the new things that had collected in the IN box and began to shuffle through them.

  A salesman wanted to call about a new industrial bleach, Yello-Go. Where do they come up with the names, he wondered, and put it aside for Ron Stone. Ron loved to inflict Dave with new products, especially if he could wangle a free five hundred pounds of the product for test runs.

  A letter of thanks from the United Fund. He put it aside to tack on the announcement board downstairs by the punch-clock.

  A circular for office furniture in Executive Pine. Into the wastebasket.

  A circular for a Phone-Mate that would broadcast a message and record incoming calls when you were out, up to thirty seconds. I’m not here, stupid. Buzz off. Into the wastebasket.

  A letter from a lady who had sent the laundry six of her husband’s shirts and had gotten them back with the collars burned. He put it aside for later action with a sigh. Ethel had been drinking her lunch again.

  A water-test package from the university. He put it aside to go over with Ron and Tom Granger after lunch.

  A circular from some insurance company with Art Linkletter telling you how you could get eighty thousand dollars and all you had to do for it was die. Into the wastebasket.

  A letter from the smart mick realtor who was peddling the Waterford plant, saying there was a shoe company that was very interested in it, the Tom McAn shoe company no less, no small cheese, and reminding him that the Blue Ribbon’s ninety-day option to buy ran out on November 26. Beware, puny laundry executive. The hour draweth nigh. Into the wastebasket.

  Another salesman for Ron, this one peddling a cleaner with the larcenous name of Swipe. He put it with Yello-Go.

  He was turning to the window again when the intercom buzzed. Vinnie was back from the German restaurant.

  “Send him in.”

  Vinnie came right in. He was a tall young man of twenty-five with an olive complexion. His dark hair was combed into its usual elaborately careless tumble. He was wearing a dark red sport coat and dark brown pants. A bow tie. Very rakish, don’t you think, Fred? I do, George, I do.

  “How are you, Bart?” Vinnie asked.

  “Fine,” he said. “What’s the story on that German restaurant?”

  Vinnie laughed. “You should have been there. That old kraut just about fell on his knees he was so happy to see us. We’re really going to murder Universal when we get settled into the new plant, Bart. They hadn’t even sent a circular, let alone their rep. That kraut, I think he thought he was going to get stuck washing those tablecloths out in the kitchen. But he’s got a place there you wouldn’t believe. Real beer hall stuff. He’s going to murder the competition. The aroma… God!” He flapped his hands to indicate the aroma and took a box of cigarettes from the inside pocket of his sport coat. “I’m going to take Sharon there when he gets rolling. Ten percent discount.”

  In a weird kind of overlay he heard Harry the gun shop proprietor saying: We give a ten percent discount on orders over three hundred.

  My God, he thought. Did I buy those guns yesterday? Did I really?

  That room in his mind went dark.

  Hey, Georgie, what are you-

  “What’s the size of the order?” he asked. His voice was a little thick and he cleared his throat.

  “Four to six hundred tablecloths a week once he gets rolling. Plus napkins. All genuine linen. He wants them done in Ivory Snow. I said that was no problem.”

  He was taking a cigarette out of the box now, doing it slowly, so he could read the label. There was something he could really come to dislike about Vinnie Mason: his dipshit cigarettes. The label on the box said:

  PLAYER’s NAVY CUT

  CIGARETTES

  MEDIUM

  Now who in God’s world except Vinnie would smoke Player’s Navy Cut? Or King Sano? Or English Ovals? Or Marvels or Murads or Twists? If someone put out a brand called Shit-on-a-Stick or Black Lung, Vinnie would smoke them.

  “I did tell him we might have to give him two-day service until we get switched over,” Vinnie said, giving him a last loving flash of the box as he put it away. “When we go up to Waterford.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. Shall I blast him, Fred? Sure. Blow him out of the water, George.

  “Really?” He snapped a light to his cigarette with a slim gold Zippo and raised his eyebrows through the smoke like a British character actor.

  “I had a note from Steve Ordner yesterday. He wants me to drop over Friday evening for a little talk about the Waterford plant.”

  “Oh?”

  “This morning I had a phone call from Steve Ordner while I was down talking to Peter Wasserman. Mr. Ordner wants me to call him back. That sounds like he’s awfully anxious to know something, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess it does,” Vinnie said, flashing his number 2 smile-Track wet, proceed with caution.

  “What I want to know is who made Steve Ordner so all-at-once fucking anxious. That’s what I want to know.”

  “Well-”

  “Come on, Vinnie. Let’s not play coy chambermaid. It’s ten o’clock and I’ve got to talk to Ordner, I’ve got to talk to Ron Stone, I’ve got to talk to Ethel Gibbs about burnt shirt collars. Have you been picking my nose while I wasn’t looking?”

  “Well, Sharon and I were over to St-to Mr. Ordner’s house Sunday night for dinner-”

  “And you just happened to mention that Bart Dawes has been laying back on Waterford while the 784 extension gets closer and closer, is that it?”

  “Bart!” Vinnie protested. “It was all perfectly friendly. It was very-”

  “I’m sure it was. So was his little note inviting me to court. I imagine our little phone call will be perfectly friendly, too. That’s not the point. The point is that he invited you and your wife to dinner in hopes that you’d run off at the mouth and he had no cause to be disappointed.”

  “Bart-”

  He leveled his finger at Vinnie. “You listen to me, Vinnie. If you drop any more shit like this for me to walk in, you’ll be looking for a new job. Count on it.”

  Vinnie was shocked. The cigarette was all but forgotten between his fingers.

  “Vinnie, let me tell you something,” he said, dropping his voice back to normal. “I know that a young guy like you has listened to six thousand lectures on how old guys like me tore up the world when they were your age. But you earned this one.”

  Vinnie opened his mouth to protest.

  “I don’t think you slipped the knife into me,” he said, holding up a hand to forestall Vinnie’s protest. “If I thought that, I would have had a pink for you when you walked in here. I just think you were dumb. You got in that great big house and had three drinks before dinner and then a soup course and a salad with Thousand Island dressing and then surf and turf for the main course and it was all served by a maid in a black uniform and Carla was d
oing her lady-of-the-manor bit-but not being the least bit condescending-and there was a strawberry tort or blueberry buckle with whipped cream for dessert and then a couple of coffee brandies or Tia Maria and you just spilled your guts. Is that about how it went?”

  “Something like that,” Vinnie whispered. His expression was three parts shame and two parts bullish hate.

  “He started off by asking how Bart was. You said Bart was fine. He said Bart was a damned good man, but wouldn’t it be nice if he could pick his feet up a little on that Waterford deal. You said, it sure would. He said, By the way, how’s that going. You said, Well it really isn’t my department and he said, Don’t tell me, Vincent, you know what’s going on. And you said, All I know is that Bart hasn’t closed the deal yet. I heard that the Thom McAn people are interested in the site but maybe that’s just a rumor. Then he said, Well I’m sure Bart knows what he’s doing and you said, Yeah, sure and then you had another coffee brandy and he asked you if you thought the Mustangs would make the play-offs and then you and Sharon were going home and you know when you’ll be out there again, Vinnie?”

  Vinnie didn’t say anything.

  “You’ll be out there when Steve Ordner needs another snitch. That’s when.”

  “I’m sorry,” Vinnie said sulkily. He started to get up.

  “I’m not through.”

  Vinnie sat down again and looked into the corner of the room with smoldering eyes.

  “I was doing your job twelve years ago, do you know that? Twelve years, it probably seems like a long time to you. To me, I hardly know where the fuck the time went. But I remember the job well enough to know you like it. And that you do a good job. That reorganization in dry-cleaning, with the new numbering system… that was a masterpiece.”

  Vinnie was staring at him, bewildered.

  “I started in the laundry twenty years ago,” he said. “In 1953, I was twenty years old. My wife and I were just married. I’d finished two years of business administration and Mary and I were going to wait, but we were using the interruption method, you see. We were going to town and somebody slammed the door downstairs and startled me right into an orgasm. She got pregnant out of it. So whenever I get feeling smart these days I just remind myself that one slammed door is responsible for me being where I am today. It’s humbling. In those days there was no slick abortion law. When you got a girl pregnant, you married her or you ran out on her. End of options. I married her and took the first job I could get, which was here. Washroom helper, exactly the same job that Pollack kid is doing downstairs right this minute. Everything was manual in those days, and everything had to be pulled wet out of the washers and extracted in a big Stonington wringer that held five hundred pounds of wet flatwork. If you loaded it wrong, it would take your fucking foot off. Mary lost the baby in her seventh month and the doctor said she’d never have another one. I did the helper’s job for three years, and my average take-home for fifty-five hours was fifty-five dollars. Then Ralph Albert’s son, who was the boss of the washroom in those days, got in a little fender-bender accident and died of a heart attack in the street while he and the other guy were exchanging insurance companies. He was a fine man. The whole laundry shut down the day of his funeral. After he was decently buried, I went to Ray Tarkington and asked for his job. I was pretty sure I’d get it. I knew everything about how to wash, because Ralph had shown me.

  “This was a family business in those days, Vinnie. Ray and his dad, Don Tarkington, ran it. Don got it from his father, who started the Blue Ribbon in 1926. It was a nonunion shop and I suppose the labor people would say all three of the Tarkingtons were paternalistic exploiters of the uneducated working man and woman. And they were. But when Betty Keeson slipped on the wet floor and broke her arm, the Tarkingtons paid the hospital bill and there was ten bucks a week for food until she could come back. And every Christmas they put on a big dinner out in the marking-in room-the best chicken pies you ever ate, and cranberry jelly and rolls and your choice of chocolate or mince pudding for dessert. Don and Ray gave every woman a pair of earrings for Christmas and every man a brand-new tie. I’ve still got my nine ties in the closet at home. When Don Tarkington died in 1959, I wore one of them to his funeral. It was out of style and Mary gave me holy hell, but I wore it anyway. The place was dark and the bouts were long and the work was drudgery, but the people cared about you. If the extractor broke down, Don and Ray would be right down there with the rest of us, the sleeves of their white shirts rolled up, wringing out those sheets by hand. That’s what a family business was, Vinnie. Something like that.

  “So when Ralph died and Ray Tarkington said he’d already hired a guy from outside to run the washroom, I couldn’t understand what in hell was going on. And Ray says, My father and I want you to go back to college. And I say, Great, on what? Bus tokens? And he hands me a cashier’s check for two thousand dollars. I looked at it and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I say, What is this? And he says, It’s not enough, but it’ll get your tuition, your room, and your books. For the rest you work your summers here, okay? And I say, is there a way to thank you? And he says, yeah, three ways. First, repay the loan. Second, repay the in terest. Third, bring what you learn back to the Blue Ribbon. I took the check home and showed Mary and she cried. Put her hands right over her face and cried.”

  Vinnie was looking at him now with frank amazement.

  “So in 1955 I went back to school and I got a degree in 1957. I went back to the laundry and Ray put me to work as boss of the drivers. Ninety dollars a week. When I paid the first installment on the loan, I asked Ray what the interest was going to run. He says, One percent. I said, What? He says, You heard me. Don’t you have something to do? So I say, Yeah I think I better go downtown and get a doctor up here to examine your head. Ray laughs like hell and tells me to get the fuck out of his office. I got the last of that money repaid in 1960, and do you know what, Vinnie? Ray gave me a watch. This watch.”

  He shot his cuff and showed Vinnie the Bulova watch with its gold expansion band.

  “He called it a deferred graduation present. Twenty dollars interest is what I paid on my education, and that son of a bitch turns around and gives me an eighty-buck watch. Engraved on the back it says: Best from Don amp; Ray, The Blue Ribbon Laundry. Don was already a year in his grave then.

  “In 1963 Ray put me on your job, keeping an eye on dry-cleaning, opening new accounts, and running the Laundromat branches-only in those days there were just five instead of eleven. I stayed with that until 1967, and then Ray put me in this job here. Then, four years ago, he had to sell. You know about that, the way the bastards put the squeeze on him. It turned him into an old man. So now we’re part of a corporation with two dozen other irons in the fire-fast food, Ponderosa golf, those three eyesore discount department stores, the gas stations, all that shit. And Steve Ordner’s nothing but a glorified foreman. There’s a board of directors somewhere in Chicago or Gary that spends maybe fifteen minutes a week on the Blue Ribbon operation. They don’t give a shit about running a laundry. They don’t know shit about it. They know how to read a cost accountant’s report, that’s what they know. The cost accountant says, Listen. They’re extending 784 through Westside and the Blue Ribbon is standing right in the way, along with half the residential district. And the directors say, Oh, is that right? How much are they allowing us on the property? And that’s it. Christ, if Don and Ray Tarkington were alive, they’d have those cheap highway department fucks in court with so many restraining orders on their heads that they wouldn’t get out from under until the year 2000. They’d go after them with a good sharp stick. Maybe they were a couple of buck-running paternalistic bastards, but they had a sense of place, Vinnie. You don’t get that out of a cost accountant’s report. If they were alive and someone told them that the highway commission was going to bury the laundry in eight lanes of composition hot-top, you would have heard the scream all the way down to city hall.”

  “But they’re dead,” Vinni
e said.

  “Yeah, they’re dead, all right.” His mind suddenly felt flabby and unstrung, like an amateur’s guitar. Whatever he had needed to say to Vinnie had been lost in a welter of embarrassing personal stuff. Look at him, Freddy, he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. He doesn’t have a clue. “Thank God they’re not here to see this.”

  Vinnie didn’t say anything.

  He gathered himself with an effort. “What I’m trying to say, Vinnie, is that there are two groups involved here. Them and us. We’re laundry people. That’s our business. They’re cost accountant people. That’s their business. They send down orders from on high, and we have to follow them. But that’s all we have to do. Do you understand?”

  “Sure, Bart,” Vinnie said, but he could see that Vinnie didn’t understand at all. He wasn’t sure he did himself.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll speak to Ordner. But just for your information, Vinnie, the Waterford plant is as good as ours. I’m closing the deal next Tuesday.”

  Vinnie grinned, relieved. “Jesus, that’s great.”

  “Yes. Everything’s under control.”

  As Vinnie was leaving, he called after him: “You tell me how that German restaurant is, okay?”

  Vinnie Mason tossed him his number 1 grin, bright and full of teeth, all systems go. “I sure will, Bart.”

  Then Vinnie was gone and he was looking at the closed door. I made a mess of that, Fred. I didn’t think you did so badly, George. Maybe you lost the handle at the end, but it’s only in books that people say everything right the first time. No, I frigged up. He went out of here thinking Barton Dawes has lost a few cards out of his deck. God help him he’s right. George, I have to ask you something, man to man. No, don’t shut me off. Why did you buy those guns, George? Why did you do that?

  Thump, the circuit breaker.

  He went down on the floor, gave Ron Stone the salesmen’s folders, and when he walked away Ron was bawling for Dave to come over and look at this stuff, might be something in it. Dave rolled his eyes. There was something in it, all right. It was known as work.