Roadwork Read online

“You want to drive over with me?”

  “I better not. Ron’s hollering for pressure on the boiler.” He shrugged, embarrassed. “You know Ron. The show must go on.”

  “All right.”

  He got back into his car and drove out toward St. Mary’s Hospital. Jesus Christ, of all the people for it to happen to. Johnny Walker was the only person left at the laundry besides himself who had been working at the Blue Ribbon in 1953Johnny, in fact, went back to 1946. The thought lodged in his throat like an omen. He knew from reading the papers that the 784 extension was going to make the dangerous Deakman intersection pretty much obsolete.

  His name wasn’t Johnny at all, not really. He was Corey Everett Walker-he had seen it on enough time cards to know that. But he had been known as Johnny even twenty years ago. His wife had died in 1956 on a vacation trip in Vermont. Since then he had lived with his brother, who drove a sanitation truck for the city. There were dozens of workers at the Blue Ribbon who called Ron “Stoneballs” behind his back, but Johnny had been the only one to use it to his face and get away with it.

  He thought: If Johnny dies, I’m the oldest employee the laundry has got. Held over for a twentieth record-breaking year. Isn’t that a sketch, Fred?

  Fred didn’t think so.

  Johnny’s brother was sitting in the waiting room of the emergency wing, a tall man with Johnny’s features and high complexion, dressed in olive work clothes and a black cloth jacket. He was twirling an olive-colored cap between his knees and looking at the floor. He glanced up at the sound of footsteps.

  “You from the laundry?” he asked.

  “Yes. You’re…” He didn’t expect the name to come to him, but it did. “Arnie, right?”

  “Yeah, Arnie Walker.” He shook his head slowly. “I dunno, Mr…?”

  “Dawes.”

  “I dunno, Mr. Dawes. I seen him in one of those examinin rooms. He looked pretty banged up. He ain’t a kid anymore. He looked bad.”

  “I’m very sorry,” he said.

  “That’s a bad corner. It wasn’t the other guy’s fault. He just skidded in the snow. I don’t blame the guy. They say he broke his nose but that was all. It’s funny the way those things work out, you know it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I remember one time when I was driving a big rig for Hemingway, this was in the early sixties, and I was on the Indiana Toll Road and I saw-”

  The outer door banged open and a priest came in. He stamped snow from his boots and then hurried up the corridor, almost running. Arnie Walker saw him, and his eyes widened and took on the glazed look of shock. He made a whining, gasping noise in his throat and tried to stand up. He put an arm around Arnie’s shoulders and restrained him.

  “Jesus!” Arnie cried. “He had his pyx, did you see it? He’s gonna give him the last rites… maybe he’s dead already. Johnny-”

  There were other people in the waiting room: a teenage kid with a broken arm, an elderly woman with an elastic bandage around one leg, a man with his thumb wrapped in a giant dressing. They looked up at Arnie and then down, self-consciously, at their magazines.

  “Take it easy,” he said meaninglessly.

  “Let me go,” Arnie said. “I got to go see.”

  “Listen-”

  “Let me go!”

  He let him go. Arnie Walker went around the corner and out of sight, the way the priest had gone. He sat in the plastic contour seat for a moment, wondering what to do. He looked at the floor, which was covered with black, slushy tracks. He looked at the nurses’ station, where a woman was covering a switchboard. He looked out the window and saw that the snow had stopped.

  There was a sobbing scream from up the corridor, where the examining rooms were.

  Everybody looked up, and the same half-sick expression was on every face.

  Another scream, followed by a harsh, braying cry of grief.

  Everyone looked back at their magazines. The kid with the broken arm swallowed audibly, producing a small click in the silence.

  He got up and went out quickly, not looking back.

  At the laundry everyone on the floor came over, and Ron Stone didn’t stop them.

  I don’t know, he told them. I never found out if he was alive or dead. You’ll hear. I just don’t know.

  He fled upstairs, feeling weird and disconnected.

  “Do you know how Johnny is, Mr. Dawes?” Phyllis asked him. He noticed for the first time that Phyllis, jaunty blue-rinsed hair notwithstanding, was looking old.

  “He’s bad,” he said. “The priest came to give him the last rites.”

  “Oh, what a dirty shame. And so close to Christmas.”

  “Did someone go out to Deakman to pick up his load?”

  She looked at him a little reproachfully. “Tom sent out Harry Jones. He brought it in five minutes ago.”

  “Good,” he said, but it wasn’t good. It was bad. He thought of going down to the washroom and dumping enough Hexlite into the washers to disintegrate all of it-when the extract ended and Pollack opened the machines there would be nothing but a pile of gray fluff. That would be good.

  Phyllis had said something and he hadn’t heard.

  “What? I’m sorry.”

  “I said that Mr. Ordner called. He wants you to call back right away. And a fellow named Harold Swinnerton. He said the cartridges had come in.”

  “Harold-?” And then he remembered. Harvey’s Gun Shop. Only Harvey, like Marley, was as dead as a doornail. “Yes, right.”

  He went into his office and closed the door. The sign on his desk still said:

  THINK!

  It May Be A New Experience

  He took it off the desk and dropped it into the wastebasket. Chink.

  He sat behind his desk, took everything out of the IN basket and threw it into the wastebasket without looking at it. He paused and looked around the office. The walls were wood-paneled. On the left were two framed degrees: one from college, one from the Laundry Institute, where he had gone during the summers of 1969 and 1970. Behind the desk was a large blow-up of himself shaking hands with Ray Tarkington in the Blue Ribbon parking lot just after it had been hot-topped. He and Ray were smiling. The laundry stood in the background, three trucks backed into the loading bay. The smokestack still looked very white.

  He had been in this office since 1967, over six years. Since before Woodstock, before Kent State, before the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, since before Nixon. Years of his life had been spent between these four walls. Millions of breaths, millions of heartbeats. He looked around, seeing if he felt anything. He felt faintly sad. That was all.

  He cleaned out his desk, throwing away personal papers and his personal account books. He wrote his resignation on the back of a printed wash formula and slipped it into a laundry pay envelope. He left the impersonal things-the paper clips, the Scotch tape, the big book of checks, the pile of blank time cards held together with robber bands.

  He got up, took the two degrees off the wall, and threw them into the wastebasket. The glass covering the Laundry Institute diploma shattered. The squares where the degrees had hung all these years were a little brighter than the rest of the wall, and that was all.

  The phone rang and he picked it up, thinking it would be Ordner. But it was Ron Stone, calling from downstairs.

  “ Bart?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Johnny passed away a half hour ago. I guess he never really had a chance.”

  “I’m very sorry. I want to shut it down the rest of the day, Ron.”

  Ron sighed. “That’s best, I guess. But won’t you catch hell from the big bosses?”

  “I don’t work for the big bosses anymore. I just wrote my resignation.” There. It was out. That made it real.

  A dead beat of silence on the other end. He could hear the washers and the steady thumping hiss of the ironer. The mangler, they called it, on account of what would happen to you if you ever got caught in it.-

  “I must h
ave heard you wrong,” Ron said finally. “I thought you said-”

  “I said it, Ron. I’m through. It’s been a pleasure working with you and Tom and even Vinnie, when he could keep his mouth shut. But it’s over.”

  “Hey, listen, Bart. Take it easy. I know this has got you upset-”

  “It’s not over Johnny,” he said, not knowing if it was true or not. Maybe he still would have made an effort to save himself, to save the life that had existed under a protective dome of routine for the last twenty years. But when the priest had walked quickly past them down the hall, almost running, to the place where Johnny lay dying or dead, and when Arnie Walker had made that funny whining noise high up in his throat, he had given up. Like driving a car in a skid, or fooling yourself that you were driving, and then just taking your hands off the wheel and putting them over your eyes.

  “It’s not over Johnny,” he repeated.

  “Well, listen… listen…” Ron sounded very upset.

  “Look, I’ll talk to you later, Ron,” he said, not knowing if he would or not. “Go on, have them punch out.”

  “Okay. Okay, but-”

  He hung up gently.

  He took the phone book out of the drawer and looked in the yellow pages under GUNS. He dialed Harvey’s Gun Shop.

  “Hello, Harvey’s.”

  “This is Barton Dawes,” he said.

  “Oh, right. Those shells came in late yesterday afternoon. I told you I’d have them in plenty of time for Christmas. Two hundred rounds.”

  “Good. Listen, I’m going to be awfully busy this afternoon. Are you open tonight?”

  “Open nights until nine right up to Christmas.”

  “Okay. I’ll try to get in around eight. If not, tomorrow afternoon for sure.”

  “Good enough. Listen, did you find out if it was Boca Rio?”

  “Boca…” Oh, yes, Boca Rio, where his cousin Nick Adams would soon be hunting. “Boca Rio. Yeah, I think it was.”

  “Jesus, I envy him. That was the best time I ever had in my life.”

  “Shaky cease-fire holds,” he said. A sudden image came to him of Johnny Walker’s head mounted over Stephan Ordner’s electric log fireplace, with a small polished bronze plaque beneath, saying:

  HOMO LAUNDROMAT

  November 28, 1973

  Bagged on the corner of Deakman

  “What was that?” Harry Swinnerton asked, puzzled.

  “I said, I envy him too,” he said, and closed his eyes. A wave of nausea raced through him. I’m cracking up, he thought. This is called cracking up.

  “Oh. Well, I’ll see you, then.”

  “Sure. Thanks again, Mr. Swinnerton.”

  He hung up, opened his eyes, and looked around his denuded office again. He flicked the button on the intercom.

  “Phyllis?”

  “Yes, Mr. Dawes?”

  “Johnny died. We’re going to shut it down.”

  “I saw people leaving and thought he must have.” Phyllis sounded as if she might have been crying.

  “See if you can get Mr. Ordner on the phone before you go, will you?”

  “Surely.”

  He swiveled around in his chair and looked out the window. A road grader, bright orange, was lumbering by with chains on its oversize wheels, lashing at the road. This is their fault, Freddy. All their fault. I was doing okay until those guys down at City Hall decided to rip up my life. I was doing fine, right, Freddy?

  Freddy?

  Fred?

  The phone rang and he picked it up. “Dawes.”

  “You’ve gone crazy,” Steve Ordner said flatly. “Right out of your mind.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I personally called Mr. Monohan this morning at nine-thirty. The McAn people signed the papers on the Waterford plant at nine o’clock. Now what the fuck happened, Barton?”

  “I think we’d better discuss that in person.”

  “So do I. And I think you ought to know that you’re going to have to do some fast talking if you want to save your job.”

  “Stop playing games with me, Steve.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve got no intention of keeping me on, not even as the sweeper. I’ve written my resignation already. It’s sealed up, but I can quote it from memory. 'I quit. Signed, Barton George Dawes.'”

  “But why?” He sounded physically wounded. But he wasn’t whining like Arnie Walker. He doubted if Steve Ordner had done any whining since his eleventh birthday. Whining was the last resort of lesser men.

  “Two o’clock?” he asked.

  “Two is fine.”

  “Good-bye, Steve.”

  “Bart-”

  He hung up and looked blankly at the wall. After a while, Phyllis poked her head in, looking tired and nervous and bewildered beneath her smart Older Person hairdo. Seeing her boss sitting quietly in his denuded office did nothing to improve her state of mind.

  “Mr. Dawes, should I go? I’d be glad to stay, if-”

  “No, go on, Phyllis. Go home.”

  She seemed to be struggling to say something else, and he turned around and looked out the window, hoping to spare them both embarrassment. After a moment, the door snicked closed, very softly.

  Downstairs, the boiler whined and died. Motors began to start up in the parking lot.

  He sat in his empty office in the empty laundry until it was time to go and see Ordner. He was saying good-byes.

  Ordner’s office was downtown, in one of the new high-rise office buildings that the energy crisis might soon make obsolete. Seventy stories high, all glass, inefficient to heat in winter, a horror to cool in summer. Amroco’s offices were on the fifty-fourth floor.

  He parked his car in the basement parking lot, took the escalator up to lobby level, went through a revolving door, and found the right bank of elevators. He rode up with a black woman who had a large Afro. She was wearing a jumper and was holding a steno notebook.

  “I like your Afro,” he said abruptly, for no reason.

  She looked at him coolly and said nothing. Nothing at all.

  The reception room of Stephan Ordner’s office was furnished with free-form chairs and a redheaded secretary who sat beneath a reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.” There was an oyster-colored shag rug on the floor. Indirect lighting. Indirect Muzak, piping Mantovani.

  The redhead smiled at him. She was wearing a black jumper, and her hair was bound with a hank of gold yarn. “Mr. Dawes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go right in, please.”

  He opened the door and went right in. Ordner was writing something at his desk, which was topped with an impressive slab of Lucite. Behind him, a huge window gave on a western view of the city. He looked up and put his pen down. “Hello, Bart,” he said quietly.

  “Hello.”

  “Sit down.”

  “Is this going to take that long?”

  Ordner looked at him fixedly. “I’d like to slap you,” he said. “Do you know that? I’d like to slap you all the way around this office. Not hit you or beat you up. Just slap you.”

  “I know that,” he said, and did.

  “I don’t think you have any idea of what you threw away,” Ordner said. “I suppose the McAn people got to you. I hope they paid you a lot. Because I had you personally earmarked for an executive vice-presidency in this corporation. That would have paid thirty-five thousand a year to start. I hope they paid you more than that.”

  “They didn’t pay me a cent.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why, Bart? Why in the name of God?”

  “Why should I tell you, Steve?” He took the chair he was supposed to take, the supplicant’s chair, on the other side of the big, Lucite-topped desk.

  For a moment Ordner seemed to be at a loss. He shook his head the way a fighter will when he has been tagged, but not seriously.

  “Because you’re my employee. How’s that for a start?”
<
br />   “Not good enough.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Steve, I was Ray Tarkington’s employee. He was a real person. You might not have cared for him, but you had to admit he was real. Sometimes when you were talking to him he broke wind or burped or picked dead skin out of his ear. He had real problems. Sometimes I was one of them. Once, when I made a bad decision about billing a motel out in Crager Plaza, he threw me against a door. You’re not like him. The Blue Ribbon is Tinkertoys to you, Steve. You don’t care about me. You care about your own upward mobility. So don’t give me that employee shit. Don’t pretend you stuck your cock in my mouth and I bit it.”

  If Ordner’s face was a facade, there was no crack in it. His features continued to register modulated distress, no more. “Do you really believe that?” Ordner asked.

  “Yes. You only give a damn about the Blue Ribbon as it affects your status in the corporation. So let’s cut the shit. Here.” He slid his resignation across the Lucite top of the desk.

  Ordner gave his head another little shake. “And what about the people you’ve hurt, Bart? The little people. Everything else aside, you were in a position of importance.” He seemed to taste the phrase. “What about the people at the laundry who are going to lose their jobs because there’s no new plant to switch to?”

  He laughed harshly and said: “You cheap son of a bitch. You’re too fucking high to see down, aren’t you?”

  Ordner colored. He said carefully: “You better explain that, Bart.”

  “Every single wage earner at the laundry, from Tom Granger on down to Pollack in the washroom, has unemployment insurance. It’s theirs. They pay for it. If you’re having trouble with that concept, think of it as a business deduction. Like a four-drink lunch at Benjamin’s.”

  Stung, Ordner said, “That’s welfare money and you know it.”

  He reiterated: “You cheap son of a bitch.”

  Ordners’s hands came together and formed a double fist. They clenched together like the hands of a child that has been taught to say the Lord’s Prayer by his bed. “You’re overstepping yourself, Bart.”

  “No, I’m not. You called me here. You asked me to explain. What did you want to hear me say? I’m sorry, I screwed up, I’ll make restitution? I can’t say that. I’m not sorry. I’m not going to make restitution. And if I screwed up, that’s between me and Mary. And she’ll never even know, not for sure. Are you going to tell me I hurt the corporation? I don’t think even you are capable of such a lie. After a corporation gets to a certain size, nothing can hurt it. It gets to be an act of God. When things are good it makes a huge profit, and when times are bad it just makes a profit, and when things go to hell it takes a tax deduction. Now you know that.”