Roadwork Page 6

  “What’s he in?”

  “What are they all in?” Tom asked, tapping his cigarette ash into his plate. “Dope, girls, gambling, crooked investments, sharking. And murdering other crooks. Did you see that in the paper? Just last week. They found some guy in the trunk of his car behind a filling station. Shot six times in the head and his throat cut. That’s really ridiculous. Why would anyone want to cut a guy’s throat after they just shot him six times in the head? Organized crime, that’s what Sally OneEye’s in.”

  “Does he have a legitimate business?”

  “Yeah, I think he does. Out on the Landing Strip, beyond Norton. He sells cars. Magliore’s Guaranteed Okay Used Cars. A body in every trunk.” Tom laughed and tapped more ashes into his plate. Gayle came back and asked then if they wanted more coffee. They both ordered more

  “I got those cotter pins today for the boiler door,” Tom said. “They remind me of my dork.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yeah, you should see those sons of bitches. Nine inches long and three through the middle.”

  “Did you mention my dork?” he asked, and they both laughed and talked shop until it was time to go back to work.

  He got off the bus that afternoon at Barker Street and went into Duncan’s, which was a quiet neighborhood bar. He ordered a beer and listened to Duncan bitch for a little while about the Mustangs-Chargers game. A man came up from the back and told Duncan that the Bowl-a-Score machine wasn’t working right. Duncan went back to look at it, and he sipped his beer and looked at the TV. There was a soaper on, and two women were talking in slow, apocalyptic tones about a man named Hank. Hank was coming home from college, and one of the women had just found out that Hank was her son, the result of a disastrous experiment that had occurred after her high school prom twenty years ago.

  Freddy tried to say something, and George shut him right up. The circuit breaker was in fine working order. Had been all day.

  That’s right, you fucking schizo! Fred yelled, and then George sat on him. Go peddle your papers, Freddy. You’re persona non grata around here.

  “Of course I’m not going to tell him,” said one of the women on the tube. “How do you expect me to tell him that?”

  “Just… tell him,” said the other woman.

  “Why should I tell him? Why should I knock his whole life out of orbit over something that happened twenty years ago?”

  “Are you going to lie to him'?”

  “I’m not going to tell him anything.”

  “You have to tell him.”

  “Sharon, I can’t afford to tell him.”

  “If you don’t tell him, Betty, I’ll tell him myself.”

  “That fucking machine is all fucked to shit,” Duncan said, coming back. “That’s been a pain in the ass ever since they put it in. Now what have I got to do? Call the fucking Automatic Industries Company. Wait twenty minutes until some dipshit secretary connects me with the right line. Listen to some guy tell me that they’re pretty busy but they’ll try to send a guy out Wednesday. Wednesday! Then some guy with his brains between the cheeks of his ass will show up on Friday, drink four bucks’ worth of free beer, fix whatever’s wrong and probably rig something else to break in two weeks, and tell me I shouldn’t let the guys throw the weights so hard. I used to have pinball machines. That was good. Those machines hardly ever fucked up. But this is progress. If I’m still here in 1980, they’ll take out the Bowl-a-Score and put in an Automatic Blow-Job. You want another beer?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  Duncan went to draw it. He put fifty cents on the bar and walked back to the phone booth beside the broken Bowl-a-Score.

  He found what he was looking for in the yellow pages under Automobiles, New and Used. The listing there said: MAGLIORE’s USED CARS, Rt. 16, Norton 892-4576

  Route 16 became Venner Avenue as you went farther into Norton. Venner Avenue was also known as the Landing Strip, where you could get all the things the yellow pages didn’t advertise.

  He put a dime in the phone and dialed Magliore’s Used Cars. The phone was picked up on the second ring, and male voice said: “Magliore’s Used Cars.”

  “This is Dawes,” he said. “Barton Dawes. Can I talk to Mr. Magliore?”

  “Says busy. But I’ll be glad to help you if I can. Pete Mansey.”

  “No, it has to be Mr. Magliore, Mr. Mansey. It’s about those two Eldorados.”

  “You got a bum steer,” Mansey said. “We’re not taking any big cars in trade the rest of the year, on account of this energy business. Nobody’s buying them. So-”

  “I’m buying,” he said.

  “What’s that”

  “Two Eldorados. One 1970, one 1972. One gold, one cream. I spoke to Mr. Magliore about them last week. It’s a business deal.”

  “Oh yeah, right. He really isn’t here now, Mr. Dawes. To tell you the truth, he’s in Chicago. He’s not getting in until eleven o’clock tonight.”

  Outside, Duncan was hanging a sign on the Bowl-a-Score. The sign said:

  OUT OF ORDER

  “Well he be in tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, sure will. Was this a trade deal?”

  “No, straight buy.”

  “One of the specials?”

  He hesitated a moment, then said: “Yes, that’s right. Would four o’clock be okay?”

  “Sure, fine.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Mansey.”

  “I’ll tell him you called.”

  “You do that,” he said, and hung up carefully. His palms were sweating.

  Merv Griffin was chatting with celebrities when got home. There was nothing in the mail; that was a relief. He went into the living room.

  Mary was sipping a hot nom concoction in a teacup. There was a box of Kleenex beside her and the room smelled of Vicks.

  “Are you all right?” He asked her

  “Don’d kiss be,” she said, and her voice had a distant foghorning quality. “I cabe downd with sobething.”

  “Poor kid.” He kissed her forehead.

  “I hade do ask you, Bard, bud would you ged the groceries tonighd? I was goig kith Meg Carder, bud I had to call her ad beg off.”

  “Sure. Are you running a fever?”

  “Dno. Well, baybe a liddle.”

  “Want me to make an appointment with Fontaine for you?”

  “Dno. I will toborrow if I don’d feel bedder.”

  “You’re really stuffy.”

  “Yes. The Vicks helbed for a while, bud dow-” She shrugged and smiled wanly. “I soud like Dodald Duck.”

  He hesitated a moment and then said, “I’ll be home a little bit late tomorrow night.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m going out to Northside to look at a house. It seems like a good one. Six rooms. A little backyard. Not too far from the Hobarts.”

  Freddy said quite clearly: Why, you dirty low-life son of a bitch.

  Mary brightened. “That’s woderful! Cad I go look with you?”

  “Better not, with that cold.”

  “I’ll huddle ub.”

  “Next time,” he said firmly.

  “Ogay.” She looked at him. “Thang God you’re finally booing on this,” she said. “I was worried.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “I wodn’t.”

  She took a sip of the hot rum drink and snuggled against him. He could hear her breath snuffling in and out. Merv Griffin was chatting with James Brolin about his new movie, Westworld. Soon to be showing at barbershops all over the country.

  After a while Mary got up and put TV dinners in the oven. He got up, switched the TV over to reruns of “F Troop” and tried not to listen to Freddy. After a while, though, Freddy changed his tune.

  Do you remember how you got the first TV, Georgie?

  He smiled a little, looking not at Forrest Tucker but right through him. I do, Fred. I surely do.

  They had come home one evening, about two years after they were married, from the Upshaws, where they had be
en watching “Your Hit Parade” and “Dan Fortune,” and Mary had asked him if he didn’t think Donna Upshaw had seemed a little… well, off. Now, sitting here, he could remember Mary, slim and oddly, fetchingly taller in a pair of white sandals she had gotten to celebrate summer. She had been wearing white shorts, too; her legs looked long and coltish, as if they really might go all the way up to her chin. In truth, he hadn’t been very interested in whether or not Donna Upshaw had seemed a little off; he had been interested in divesting Mary of those tight shorts. That had been where his interest lay-not to put too fine a point on it.

  “Maybe she’s getting a little tired of serving Spanish peanuts to half the neighborhood just because they’re the only people on the street with a TV,” he said.

  He supposed he had seen the little frown line between her eyes-the one that always meant Mary was cooking something up, but by then they were halfway upstairs, his hand was roaming down over the seat of those shorts-what little seat there was-and it wasn’t until later, until after, that she said:

  “How much would a table model cost us, Bart?”

  Half asleep, he had answered, “Well, I guess we could get a Motorola for twenty-eight, maybe thirty bucks. But the Philco-”

  “Not a radio. A TV.”

  He sat up, turned on the lamp, and looked at her. She was lying there naked, the sheet down around her hips, and although she was smiling at him, he thought she was serious. It was Mary’s I-dare-you grin.

  “Mary, we can’t afford a TV.”

  “How much for a table model? A GE or a Philco or something?”

  “New?”

  “New?”

  He considered the question, watching the play of lamplight across the lovely round curves of her breasts. She had been so much slimmer then (although she’s hardly a fatty now, George, he reproached himself; never said she was, Freddy my boy), so much more alive somehow. Even her hair had crackled out its own message: alive, awake, aware…

  “Around seven hundred and fifty dollars,” he said, thinking that would douse the grin… but it hadn’t.

  “Well, look,” She said, sitting up Indian-fashion in bed, her legs crossed under the sheet.

  “I am,” he said, grinning

  “Not at that.” But she laughed, and a flush had spread prettily down her cheeks to her neck (although she hadn’t pulled the sheet up, he remembered).

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “Why do men want a TV?” she asked. “To watch all the sports on the weekends. And why do women want one? Those soap operas in the afternoon. You can listen while you iron or put your feet up if your work’s done. Now suppose we each found something to do-something that pays-during that time we’d otherwise just be sitting around…”

  “reading a book, or maybe even making love?” he suggested.

  “We always find time for that,” she said, and laughed, and blushed, and her eyes were dark in the lamplight and it threw a warm, semicircular shadow between her breasts, and he knew then that he was going to give in to her, he would have promised her a fifteen-hundred-dollar Zenith console model if she would just let him make love to her again, and at the thought he felt himself stiffening, felt the snake turning to stone, as Mary had once said when she’d had a little too much to drink at the Ridpaths’ New Year’s Eve party (and now, eighteen years later, he felt the snake turning to stone again-over a memory).

  “Well, all right,” he said. “I’m going to moonlight weekends and you’re going of moonlight afternoons. But what, dear Mary, Oh-not-so-Virgin Mary, are we going to do?”

  She pounced on him, giggling, her breasts a soft weight on his stomach (flat-enough in those days, Freddy, not a sign of a bay window). “That’s the trick of it!” she said. “What’s today'? June eighteenth?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, you do your weekend things, and on December eighteenth we’ll put our money together-”

  “-and buy a toaster,” he said, grinning.

  “-and get that TV,” she said solemnly. “I’m sure we can do it, Bart.” Then the giggles broke out again. “But the fun part’ll be that we won’t tell each other what we’re up to until after.”

  “Just as long as I don’t see a red light over the door when I come home from work tomorrow,” he said, capitulating.

  She grabbed him, got on top of him, started to tickle. The tickling turned to caresses.

  “Bring it to me,” she whispered against his neck, and gripped him with gentle yet excruciating pressure, guiding him and squeezing him at the same time. “Put it in me, Bart.”

  And later, in the dark again, hands crossed behind his head. he said: “We don’t tell each other, right?”

  “Nope.”

  “Mary, what brought this on? What I said about Donna Upshaw not wanting to serve Spanish peanuts to half the neighborhood?”

  There were no giggles in her voice when she replied. Her voice was flat, austere, and just a little frightening: a faint taste of winter in the warm June air of their third-floor walkup apartment. “I don’t like to freeload, Bart. And I won’t. Ever.”

  For a week and a half he had turned her quirky little proposal over in his mind, wondering just what in the hell he was suppose to do to bring in his half of the seven hundred and fifty dollars (and probably more like three-quarters of it, the way it’ll turn out, he thought) on the next twenty or so weekends. He was a little old to be mowing lawns for quarters. And Mary had gotten a look-a smug sort of look-that gave him the idea that she had either landed something or was land-ing something. Better get on your track shoes, Bart, he thought, and had to laugh out loud at himself.

  Pretty fine days, weren’t they, Freddy? he asked himself now as Forrest Tucker and “F Troop” gave way to a cereal commercial where an animated rabbit preached that “Trix are for kids.” They were, Georgie. They were fucking great days.

  One day he had been unlocking his car after work, and he had happened to look at the big industrial smokestack behind dry-cleaning, and it came to him.

  He had put the keys back in his pocket and went in to talk to Don Tarkington. Don leaned back in his chair, looked at him from under shaggy eyebrows that were even then turning white (as were the hairs which bushed out of his ears and curled from his nostrils), hands steepled on his chest.

  “Paint the stack,” Don said.

  He nodded.

  “Weekends.”

  He nodded again.

  “Flat fee-three hundred dollars.”

  And again.

  “You’re crazy.”

  He burst out laughing.

  Don smiled a little. “You got a dope habit, Bart?”

  “No,” he said. “But I’ve got a little thing on with Mary.”

  “A bet?” The shaggy eyebrows went up half a mile

  “More gentlemanly than that. A wager, I guess you’d call it. Anyway, Don, the stack needs the paint, and I need the three hundred dollars. What do you say? A painting contractor would charge you four and a quarter.”

  “You checked.”

  “I checked.”

  “You crazy bastard,” Don said, and burst out laughing. “You’ll probably kill yourself.”

  “Yeah, I probably will,” he said, and began laughing himself (and here, eighteen years later, as the Trix rabbit gave way to the evening news, he sat grinning like a fool).

  And that was how, one weekend after the Fourth of July, he found himself on a shaky scaffolding eighty feet in the air, a paintbrush in his hand and his ass wagging in the wind. Once a sudden afternoon thunderstorm had come up, snapped one of the ropes which held up the scaffolding as easily as you might snap a piece of twine holding a package, and he almost did fall. The safety rope around his waist had held and he had lowered himself to the roof, heart thudding like a drum, sure that no power on earth would get him back up there-not for a lousy table-model TV. But he had gone back. Not for the TV, but for Mary. For the look of the lamplight on her small, uptilted breasts; for the dare-you grin on
her lips and in her eyes-her dark eyes which could sometimes turn so light or darken even more, into summer thunderheads.

  By early September he had finished the stack; it stood cleanly white against the sky, a chalk mark on a blueboard, slim and bright. He looked at it with some pride as he scrubbed his spattered forearms with paint thinner

  Don Tarkington paid him by check. “Not a bad job,” was his only comment, “considering the jackass that did it.”

  He picked up another fifty dollars paneling the walls of Henry Chalmers’ new family room-in those days, Henry had been the plant foreman-and painting Ralph Tremont’s aging Chris-Craft. When December 18 rolled around, he and Mary sat down at their small dining room table like adversary but oddly friendly gunslingers, and he put three hundred and ninety dollars in cash in front of her-he had banked the money and there had been some interest.

  She put four hundred and sixteen dollars with it. She took it from her apron pocket. It made a much bigger wad than his, because most of it was ones and fives.

  He gasped at it and then said, “What the Christ did you do, Mare?”

  Smiling, she said: “I made twenty-six dresses, hemmed up forty-nine dresses, hemmed down sixty-four dresses; I made thirty-one skirts; I crocheted three samplers; I hooked four rugs, one of latch-hook style; I made five sweaters, two afghans and one complete set of table linen; I embroidered sixty-three handkerchiefs; twelve sets of towels and twelve sets of pillowcases, and I can see all the monograms in my sleep.”

  Laughing, she held out her hands, and for the first time he really noticed the thick pads of calluses on the tips of the fingers, like the calluses a guitar player eventually builds up.

  “Oh Christ, Mary,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Christ, look at your hands.”

  “My hands are fine,” she said, and her eyes darkened and danced. “And you looked very cute up there on the smokestack, Bart. I thought once I’d buy a slingshot and see if I couldn’t hit you in the butt-”

  Roaring, he had jumped up and chased her through the living room and into the bedroom. Where we spent the rest of the afternoon, as I recall it, Freddy old man.