Roadwork Read online

  He went upstairs and called Ordner’s office, hoping Ordner would be out drinking lunch. No breaks today. The secretary put him right through.

  “Bart!” Steve Ordner said. “Always good to talk with you.”

  “Same here. I was talking to Vinnie Mason a little earlier, and he seemed to think you might be a little worried about the Waterford plant.”

  “Good God, no. Although I did think, maybe Friday night, we could lay out a few things-”

  “Yeah, I called mainly to say Mary can’t make it.”

  “Oh?”

  “A virus. She doesn’t dare go five seconds from the nearest john.”

  “Say, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Cram it, you cheap dick.

  “The doctor gave her some pills and she seems to be feeling better. But she might be, you know, catching.”

  “What time can you make it, Bart? Eight?”

  “Yeah, eight’s fine.”

  That’s right, screw up the Friday Night Movie, prick. What else is new?

  “How is the Waterford business progressing, Bart?”

  “That’s something we’d better talk about in person, Steve.”

  “That’s fine.” Another pause. “Carla sends her best. And tell Mary that both Carla and I…”

  Sure. Yeah. Blah, blah, blah.

  November 22, 1973

  He woke up with a jerk that knocked the pillow onto the floor, afraid he might have screamed. But Mary was still sleeping in the other bed, a silent mound. The digital clock on the bureau said:

  4:23 A.M.

  It clicked into the next minute. Old Bea from Baltimore, the one who was into consciousness-raising hydrotherapy, had given it to them last Christmas. He didn’t mind the clock, but he had never been able to get used to the click when the numbers changed. 4:23 click, 4:24 click, a person could go nuts.

  He went down to the bathroom, turned on the light, and urinated. It made his heart thump heavily in his chest. Lately when he urinated his heart thumped like a fucking bass drum. Are you trying to tell me something, God?

  He went back to bed and lay down, but sleep didn’t come for a long time. He had thrashed around while he slept, and the bed had been remolded into enemy territory. He couldn’t get it right again. His arms and legs also seemed to have forgotten which way they arranged themselves when he slept.

  The dream was easy enough to figure out. No sweat there, Fred. A person could work that circuit breaker trick easy enough when he was awake; he could go on coloring in some picture piece by piece and pretending he couldn’t see the whole thing. You could bury the big picture under the floor of your mind. But there was a trapdoor. When you were asleep, sometimes it banged open and something crawled up out of the darkness. Click.

  4:42 A.M.

  In the dream he had been at Pierce Beach with Charlie (funny, when he had given Vinnie Mason that little thumbnail autobiography he had forgotten to mention Charlie-isn’t that funny, Fred? No, I don’t think it’s too funny, George. Neither do I, Fred. But it’s late. Or early. Or something.)

  He and Charlie were on that long white beach and it was a fine day for the beach-bright blue sky and the sun beaming down like the face on one of those idiotic smiley-smile buttons. People on bright blankets and under umbrellas of many different hues, little kids dibbling around the water’s edge with plastic pails. A lifeguard on his whitewashed tower, his skin as brown as a boot, the crotch of his white Latex swim trunks bulging, as if penis and testicle size were somehow a job prerequisite and he wanted everyone in the area to know they were not being let down. Someone’s transistor radio blaring rock and roll and even now he could remember the tune:

  But I love that dirty water,

  Owww, Boston, you’re my home.

  Two girls walking by in bikinis, safe and sane inside beautiful screwable bodies, never for you but for boyfriends nobody ever saw, their toes kicking up tiny fans of sand.

  Only it was funny, Fred, because the tide was coming and there was no tide at Pierce Beach because the nearest ocean was nine hundred miles away.

  He and Charlie were making a sand castle. But they had started too near the water and the incoming waves kept coming closer and closer.

  We have to build it farther back, Dad, Charlie said, but he was stubborn and kept building. When the tide brought the water up to the first wall, he dug a moat with his fingers, spreading the wet sand like a woman’s vagina. The water kept coming.

  Goddam it! He yelled at the water.

  He rebuilt the wall. A wave knocked it down. People started to scream about something. Others were running. The lifeguard’s whistle blew like a silver arrow. He didn’t look up. He had to save the castle. But the water kept coming, lapping his ankles, slurping a turret, a roof, the back of the castle, all of it. The last wave withdrew, showing only bland sand, smooth and flat and brown and shining.

  There were more screams. Someone was crying. He looked up and saw the lifeguard was giving Charlie mouth-to-mouth. Charlie was wet and white except for his lips and eyelids, which were blue. His chest was not rising and falling. The lifeguard stopped trying. He looked up. He was smiling.

  He was out over his head, the lifeguard was saying through his smile. Isn’t it time you went?

  He screamed: Charlie! and that was when he had wakened, afraid he might really have screamed.

  He lay in the darkness for a long time, listening to the digital clock click, and tried not to think of the dream. At last he got up to get a glass of milk in the kitchen, and it was not until he saw the turkey thawing on a plate on the counter that he remembered it was Thanksgiving and today the laundry was closed. He drank his milk standing up, looking thoughtfully at the plucked body. The color of its skin was the same as the color of his son’s skin in his dream. But Charlie hadn’t drowned, of course.

  When he got back into bed, Mary muttered something interrogative, thick and indecipherable with sleep.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Go to sleep.”

  She muttered something else.

  “Okay,” he said in the darkness.

  She slept.

  Click.

  It was five o’clock, five in the morning. When he finally dozed off, dawn had come into the bedroom like a thief. His last thought was of the Thanksgiving turkey, sitting on the kitchen counter below the glare of the cold fluorescent overhead, dead meat waiting thoughtlessly to be devoured.

  November 23, 1973

  He drove their two-year-old LTD into Stephan Ordner’s driveway at five minutes of eight and parked it behind Ordner’s bottle-green Delta 88. The house was a rambling fieldstone, discreetly drawn back from Henreid Drive and partially hidden behind a high privet that was now skeletal in the smoky butt end of autumn. He had been here before, and knew it quite well. Downstairs was a massive rock-lined fireplace, and more modest ones in the bedrooms upstairs. They all worked. In the basement there was a Brunswick billiard table, a movie screen for home movies, a KLH sound system that Ordner had converted to quad the year before. Photos from Ordner’s college basketball days dotted the walls-he stood six foot five and still kept in shape. Ordner had to duck his head going through doorways, and he suspected that Ordner was proud of it. Maybe he had had the doorways lowered so he could duck through them. The dining room table was a slab of polished oak, nine feet long. A wormy-oak highboy complimented it, gleaming richly through six or eight coats of varnish. A tall china cabinet at the other end of the room; it stood-oh, about six foot five, wouldn’t you say, Fred? Yes, just about that. Out back there was a sunken barbecue pit almost big enough to broil an uncut dinosaur, and a putting green. No kidney-shaped pool. Kidney-shaped pools were considered jejune these days. Strictly for the Ra-worshiping Southern California middle-classers. The Ordners had no children, but they supported a Korean kid, a South Vietnamese kid, and were putting a Ugandan through engineering school so he could go back home and build hydroelectric dams. They were Democrats, and had been Democrats for Nixon.

 
His feet whispered up the walk and he rang the bell. The maid opened the door.

  “Mr. Dawes,” he said.

  “Of course, sir. I’ll just take your coat. Mr. Ordner is in the study.”

  “Thank you.”

  He gave her his topcoat and walked down the hall past the kitchen and the dining room. Just a peek at the big table and the Stephan Ordner Memorial Highboy. The rug on the floor ended and he walked down a hallway floored with white-and-black waxed linoleum checks. His feet clicked.

  He reached the study door and Ordner opened it just as he was reaching for the knob, as he had known Ordner would.

  “Bart!” Ordner said. They shook hands. Ordner was wearing a brown cord jacket with patched elbows, olive slacks, and Burgundy slippers. No tie.

  “Hi, Steve. How’s finance?”

  Ordner groaned theatrically. “Terrible. Have you looked at the stock market page lately?” He ushered him in and closed the door behind him. The walls were lined with books. To the left there was a small fireplace with an electric log. In the center, a large desk with some papers on it. He knew there was an IBM Selectric buried in that desk someplace; if you pressed the right button it would pop out on top like a sleek-black torpedo.

  “The bottom’s falling out,” he said.

  Ordner grimaced. “That’s putting it mildly. You can hand it to Nixon, Bart. He finds a use for everything. When they shot the domino theory to hell over in Southeast Asia, he just took it and put it to work on the American economy. Worked lousy over there. Works great over here. What are you drinking?”

  “Scotch-rocks would be fine.”

  “Got it right here.”

  He went to a fold-out cabinet, produced a fifth of scotch which returned only pocket change from your ten when purchased in a cut-rate liquor store, and splashed it over two ice cubes in a pony glass. He gave it to him and said, “Let’s sit down.”

  They sat in wing chairs drawn up by the electric fire. He thought: If I tossed my drink in there, I could blow that fucking thing to blazes. He almost did it, too.

  “Carla couldn’t be here either,” Ordner said. “One of her groups is sponsoring a fashion show. Proceeds to go to some teenage coffeehouse down in Norton.”

  “The fashion show is down there?”

  Ordner looked startled. “In Norton? Hell no. Over in Russell. I wouldn’t let Carla down in the Landing Strip with two bodyguards and a police dog. There’s a priest… Drake, I think his name is. Drinks a lot, but those little pick'ninnies love him. He’s sort of a liaison. Street priest.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes.”

  They looked into the fire for a minute. He knocked back half of his scotch.

  “The question of the Waterford plant came up at the last board meeting,” Ordner said. “Middle of November. I had to admit my pants were a little loose on the matter. I was given… uh, a mandate to find out just what the situation is. No reflection on your management, Bart-”

  “None taken,” he said, and knocked back some more scotch. There was nothing left in there now but a few blots of alcohol trapped between the ice cubes and the glass. “It’s always a pleasure when our jobs coincide, Steve.”

  Ordner looked pleased. “So what’s the story? Vin Mason was telling me the deal wasn’t closed.”

  “Vinnie Mason has got a dead short somewhere between his foot and his mouth.”

  “Then it’s closed?”

  “Closing. I expect to sign us into Waterford next Friday, unless something comes up.”

  “I was given to understand that the realtor made you a fairly reasonable offer, which you turned down.”

  He looked at Ordner, got up, and freshened the blots. “You didn’t get that from Vinnie Mason.”

  “No.”

  He returned to the wing-back chair and the electric fire. “I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me where you did get it?”

  Ordner spread his hands. “It’s business, Bart. When I hear something, I have to check into it-even if all my personal and professional knowledge of a man indicates that the something must be off-whack. It’s nasty, but that’s no reason to piss it around.”

  Freddy, nobody knew about that turn-down except the real estate guy and me. Old Mr. Just Business did a little personal checking, looks like. But that’s no reason to piss it around, right? Right, George. Should I blow him out of the water, Freddy? Better be cool, George. And I’d slow down on the firewater.

  “The figure I turned down was four-fifty,” he said. “Just for the record, is that what you heard?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “And that sounded reasonable to you.”

  “Well,” Ordner said, crossing his legs, “actually, it did. The city assessed the old plant at six-twenty, and the boiler can go right across town. Of course, there isn’t quite as much room for expansion, but the boys uptown say that since the main plant had already reached pretty much optimum size, there was no need for the extra room. It looked to me as if we might at least break even, perhaps turn a profit… although that wasn’t the main consideration. We’ve got to locate, Bart. And damn quick.”

  “Maybe you heard something else.”

  Ordner recrossed his legs and sighed. “Actually, I did. I heard that you turned down four-fifty and then Thom McAn came along and offered five.”

  “A bid the realtor can’t accept, in good faith.”

  “Not yet, but our option to buy runs out on Tuesday. You know that.”

  “Yes, I do. Steve, let me make three or four points, okay?”

  “Be my guest.”

  “First, Waterford is going to put us three miles away from our industrial contracts-that’s an average. That’s going to send our operating overhead way up. All the motels are out by the Interstate. Worse than that, our service is going to be slower. Holiday Inn and Hojo are on our backs now when we’re fifteen minutes late with the towels. What’s it going to be like when the tracks have to fight their way through three miles of crosstown traffic?”

  Ordner was shaking his head. “Bart, they’re extending the Interstate. That’s why we’re moving, remember? Our boys say there will be no time lost in deliveries. It may even go quicker, using the extension. And they also say the motel corporations have already bought up good land in Waterford and Russell, near what will be the new interchange. We’re going to improve our position by going into Waterford, not worsen it.”

  I stubbed my toe, Freddy. He’s looking at me like I’ve lost all my marbles. Right, George. Kee-rect.

  He smiled. “Okay. Point taken. But those other motels won’t be up for a year, maybe two. And if this energy business is as bad as it looks-”

  Ordner said flatly: “That’s a policy decision, Bart. We’re just a couple of foot soldiers. We carry out the orders.” It seemed to him that there was a dart of reproach there.

  “Okay. But I wanted my own view on record.”

  “Good. It is. But you don’t make policy, Bart. I want that perfectly clear. If the gasoline supplies dry up and all the motels fall flat, we’ll take it on the ear, along with everyone else. In the meantime, we’d better let the boys upstairs worry about that and do our jobs.”

  I’ve been rebuked, Fred. That you have, George.

  “All right. Here’s the rest. I estimate it will take two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for renovations before the Waterford plant ever turns out a clean sheet.”

  “What?” Ordner set his drink down hard.

  Aha, Freddy. Hit a bare nerve there.

  “The walls are full of dry rot. The masonry on the east and north sides has mostly crumbled away to powder. And the floors are so bad that the first heavy-duty washer we put in there is going to end up in the basement.”

  “That’s firm? That two-fifty figure?”

  “Firm. We’re going to need a new outside stack. New flooring, downstairs and up. And it’s going to take five electricians two weeks to take care of that end. The place is only wired for two-forty-volt circuits and w
e have to have five-fifty loads. And since we’re going to be at the far end of all the city utility conduits, I can promise you our power and water bills are going to go up twenty percent. The power increases we can live with, but I don’t have to tell you what a twenty percent water-cost increase means to a laundry.”

  Ordner was looking at him now, shocked.

  “Never mind what I said about the utility increase. That comes under operating overhead, not renovations. So where was I? The place has to be rewired for five-fifty. We’re going to need a good burglar alarm and closed circuit TV. New insulation. New roofing. Oh yeah, and a drainage system. Over on Fir Street we’re up on high ground, but Douglas Street sits at the bottom of a natural basin. The drainage system alone will cost anywhere from forty to seventy thousand dollars to put in.”

  “Christ, how come Tom Granger hasn’t told me any of this?”

  “He didn’t go with me to inspect the place.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I told him to stay at the plant.”

  “You did what?”

  “That was the day the furnace went out,” he said patiently. “We had orders piling up and no hot water. Tom had to stay. He’s the only one in the place that can talk to that furnace.”

  “Well Christ, Bart, couldn’t you have taken him down another day?”

  He knocked back the rest of his drink. “I didn’t see the point.”

  “You didn’t see the-” Ordner couldn’t finish. He set his glass down and shook his head, like a man who has been punched. “Bart, do you know what it’s going to mean if your estimate is wrong and we lose that plant? It’s going to mean your job, that’s what it’s going to mean. My God, do you want to end up carrying your ass home to Mary in a basket? Is that what you want?”

  You wouldn’t understand, he thought, because you’d never make a move unless you were covered six ways and had three other fall guys lined up. That’s the way you end up with four hundred thousand in stocks and funds, a Delta 88, and a typewriter that pops out of a desk at you like some silly jack-in-the-box. You stupid fuckstick, I could con you for the next ten years. I just might do it, too.