Roadwork (14 page)

“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?”

“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.”

Ordner’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.”

Ordner said carefully: “What about your own future? What about Mary’s?”

“You don’t care about that. It’s just a lever you think you might be able to use. Let me ask you something, Steve. Is this going to hurt you? Is it going to cut into your salary? Into your yearly dividend? Into your retirement fund?”

Ordner shook his head. “Go on home, Bart. You’re not yourself.”

“Why? Because I’m talking about you and not just about bucks?”

“You’re disturbed, Bart.”

“You don’t know,” he said, standing up and planting his fists on the Lucite top of Ordner’s desk. “You’re mad at me but you don’t know why. Someone told you that if a situation like this ever came up you should be mad. But you don’t know why.”

Ordner repeated carefully. “You’re disturbed.”

“You’re damn right I am. What are you?”

“Go home, Bart.”

“No, but I’ll leave you alone and that’s what you want. Just answer one question. For one second stop being the corporation man and answer one question for me. Do you care about this? Does any of it mean a damn to you?”

Ordner looked at him for what seemed a long time. The city was spread out behind him like a kingdom of towers, wrapped in grayness and mist. He said: “No.”

“All right,” he said softly. He looked at Ordner without animosity. “I didn’t do it to screw you. Or the corporation.”

“Then why? I answered your question. You answer mine. You could have signed on the Waterford plant. After that it would have been someone else’s worry. Why didn’t you?”

He said: “I can’t explain. I listened to myself. But people talk a different language inside. It sounds like the worst kind of shit if you try to talk about it. But it was the right thing.”

Ordner looked at him unflinchingly. “And Mary?”

He was silent.

“Go home, Bart,” Ordner said.

“What do you want, Steve?”

Ordner shook his head impatiently. “We’re done, Bart. If you want to have an encounter session with someone, go to a bar.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Only for you to get out of here and go home.”

“What do you want from life, then? Where are you hooked into things?”

“Go home, Bart.”

“Answer me!
What do you
want?”
He looked at Ordner nakedly.

Ordner answered quietly, “I want what everyone wants. Go home, Bart.”

He left without looking back. And he never went there again.

 

When he got to Magliore’s Used Cars, it was snowing hard and most of the cars he passed had their headlights on. His windshield wipers beat a steady back-and-forth tune, and beyond their sweep snow that had been defrosted into slush ran down the Saf-T-Glass like tears.

He parked in back and walked around to the office. Before he went in, he looked at his ghostly reflection in the plate glass and scrubbed a thin pink film from his lips. The encounter with Ordner had upset him more than he would have believed. He had picked up a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in a drugstore and had chugged half of it on the way out here. Probably won’t shit for a week, Fred. But Freddy wasn’t at home. Maybe he had gone to visit Monohan’s relatives in Bombay.

The woman behind the adding machine gave him a strange speculative smile and waved him in.

Magliore was alone. He was reading
The Wall Street Journal,
and when he came in, Magliore threw it across the desk and into the wastebasket. It landed with a rattling thump.

“It’s going right to fucking
hell,”
Magliore said, as if continuing an interior dialogue that had started some time ago. “All these stockbrokers are old women, just like Paul Harvey says. Will the president resign? Will he? Won’t he? Will he? Is GE going to go bankrupt with the energy shortage? It gives me a pain in the ass.”

“Yeah,” he said, but not sure of what he was agreeing to. He felt uneasy, and he wasn’t totally sure Magliore remembered who he was. What should he say?
I’m the guy who called you a dork, remember?
Christ, that was no way to start.

“Snowing harder, ain’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“I hate the snow. My brother, he goes to Puerto Rico November first every year, stays until April fifteenth. He owns forty percent of a hotel there. Says he has to look after his investment. Shit. He wouldn’t know how to look after his own ass if you gave him a roll of Charmin. What do you want?”

“Huh?” He jumped a little, and felt guilty.

“You came to me to get something. How can I get it for you if I don’t know what it is?”

When it was put with such abrupt baldness, he found it hard to speak. The word for what he wanted seemed to have too many comers to come out of his mouth. He remembered something he had done as a kid and smiled a little.

“What’s funny?” Magliore asked with sharp pleasantness. “With business. the way it is, I could use a joke.”

“Once, when I was a kid, I put a yo-yo in my mouth,” he said.

“That’s funny?”

“No, I couldn’t get it out.
That’s
funny. My mother took me to the doctor and he got it out. He pinched my ass and when I opened my mouth to yell, he just yanked it out.”

“I ain’t going to pinch your ass,” Magliore said. “What do you want, Dawes?”

“Explosives,” he said.

Magliore looked at him. He rolled his eyes. He started to say something and slapped one of his hanging jowls instead. “Explosives.”

“Yes.”

“I knew this guy was a fruiter,” Magliore told himself. “I told Pete when you left, ‘There goes a guy looking for an accident to happen.’ That’s what I told him.”

He said nothing. Talk of accidents made him think of Johnny Walker.

“Okay, okay, I’ll bite. What do you want explosives for? You going to blow up the Egyptian Trade Exposition? You going to skyjack an airplane? Or maybe just blow your mother-in-law to hell?”

“I wouldn’t waste explosives on her,” he said stiffly, and that made them both laugh, but it didn’t break the tension.

“So what is it? Who have you got a hardon against?”

He said: “I don’t have a hardon against anyone. If I wanted to kill somebody, I’d buy a gun.” Then he remembered he
had
bought a gun, had bought
two
guns, and his Pepto-Bismol-drugged stomach began to roll again.

“So why do you need explosives?”

“I want to blow up a road.”

Magliore looked at him with measured incredulity. All his emotions seemed larger than life; it was as if he had adopted his character to fit the magnifying properties of his glasses. “You want to blow up a road? What road?”

“It hasn’t been built yet.” He was beginning to get a sort of perverse pleasure from this. And of course, it was postponing the inevitable confrontation with Mary.

“So you want to blow up a road that hasn’t been built. I had you wrong, mister. You’re not a fruitcake. You’re a psycho. Can you make sense?”

Picking his words carefully, he said: “They’re building a road that’s known as the 784 extension. When it’s done, the state turnpike will go right through the city. For certain reasons I don’t want to go into-because I can‘t—that road has wrecked twenty years of my life. It’s—”

“Because they’re gonna knock down the laundry where you work, and your house?”

“How did you know that?”

“I told you I was gonna check you. Did you think I was kidding? I even knew you were gonna lose your job. Maybe before you did.”

“No, I knew that a month ago,” he said, not thinking about what he was saying.

“And how are you going to do it? Were you planning to just drive past the construction, lighting fuses with your cigar and throwing bundles of dynamite out of your car window?”

“No. Whenever there’s a holiday, they leave all their machines at the site. I want to blow them all up. And all three of the new overpasses. I want to blow them up, too.”

Magliore goggled at him. He goggled for a long time. Then he threw back his head and laughed. His belly shook and his belt buckle heaved up and down like a chip of wood riding a heavy swell. His laughter was full and hearty and rich. He laughed until tears splurted out of his eyes and then he produced a huge comic-opera handkerchief from some inner pocket and wiped them. He stood watching Magliore laugh and was suddenly very sure that this fat man with the thick glasses was going to sell him the explosives. He watched Magliore with a slight smile on his face. He didn’t mind the laughter. Today laughter sounded good.

“Man, you’re crazy, all right,” Magliore said when his laughter had subsided to chuckles and hitchings. “I wish Pete could have been here to hear this. He’s never gonna believe it. Yesterday you call me a d-dork and t-today ... t-t-today ...” And he was off again, roaring his laughter, mopping his eyes with his handkerchief.

When his mirth had subsided again, he asked, “How were you gonna finance this little venture, Mr. Dawes? Now that you’re no longer gainfully employed?”

That was a funny way to put it.
No longer gainfully employed.
When you said it that way, it really sounded true. He was out of a job. All of this was not a dream.

“I cashed in my life insurance last month,” he said. “I’d been paying on a ten-thousand-dollar policy for ten years. I’ve got about three thousand dollars.”

“You’ve really been planning this for that long?”

“No,” he said honestly. “When I cashed the policy in, I wasn’t sure what I wanted it for.”

“In those days you were still keeping your options open, right? You thought you might burn the road, or machine-gun it to death, or strangle it, or—”

“No. I just didn’t know what I was going to do. Now I know.”

“Well count me out.”

“What?” He blinked at Magliore, honestly stunned. This wasn’t in the script. Magliore was supposed to give him a hard time, in a fatherly sort of way. Then sell him the explosive. Magliore was supposed to offer a disclaimer, something like:
If you get caught, I’ll deny I ever heard of you.

“What did you say?”

“I said no. N-o. That spells no.” He leaned forward. All the good humor had gone out of his eyes. They were flat and suddenly small in spite of the magnification the glasses caused. They were not the eyes of a jolly Neapolitan Santa Claus at all.

“Listen,” he said to Magliore. “If I get caught, I’ll deny I ever heard of you. I’ll never mention your name.”

“The fuck you would. You’d spill your fucking guts and cop an insanity plea. I’d go up for life.”

“No, listen—”

“You
listen,” Magliore said. “You’re funny up to a point. That point has been got to. I said no, I meant no. No guns, no explosive, no dynamite, no nothing. Because why? Because you’re a fruitcake and I’m a businessman. Somebody told you I could ‘get’ things. I can get them, all right. I’ve gotten lots of things for lots of people. I’ve also gotten a few things for myself. In 1946, I got a two-to-five bit for carrying a concealed weapon. Did ten months. In 1952 I got a conspiracy rap, which I beat. In 1955, I got a tax-evasion rap, which I also beat. In 1959 I got a receiving-stolen-property rap which I didn’t beat. I did eighteen months in Castleton, but the guy who talked to the grand jury got life in a hole in the ground. Since 1959 I been up three times, case dismissed twice, rap beat once. They’d like to get me again because one more good one and I’m in for twenty years, no time off for good behavior. A man in my condition, the only part of him that comes out after twenty years is his kidneys, which they give to some Norton nigger in the welfare ward. This is some game to you. Crazy, but a game. It’s no game to me. You think you’re telling the truth when you say you’d keep your mouth shut. But you’re lying. Not to me, to you. So the answer is flat no.” He threw up his hands. “If it had been broads, Jesus, I woulda given you two free just for that floor show you put on yesterday. But I ain’t going for any of this.”