Roadwork (15 page)

“All right,” he said. His stomach felt worse than ever. He felt like he was going to throw up.

“This place is clean,” Magliore said, “and I know it’s clean. Furthermore, I know
you’re
clean, although God knows you’re not going to be if you go on like this. But I’ll you something. About two years ago, this nigger came to me and said he wanted explosives. He wasn’t going to blow up something harmless like a road. He was going to blow up a fucking federal courthouse.”

Don’t tell me any more, he was thinking. I’m going to puke, I think. His stomach felt full of feathers, all of them tickling at once.

“I sold him the goop,” Magliore said. “Some of this, some of that. We dickered. He talked to his guys, I talked to my guys. Money changed hands. A lot of money. The goop changed hands. They caught the guy and two of his buddies before they could hurt anyone, thank God. But I never lost a minute’s sleep worrying was he going to spill his guts to the cops or the county prosecutor or the Effa Bee Eye. You know why? Because he was with a whole
bunch
of fruitcakes, nigger fruitcakes, and they’re the worst kind, and a
bunch
of fruitcakes is a different proposition altogether. A single nut like you, he doesn’t give a shit. He bums out like a lightbulb. But if there are thirty guys and three of them get caught, they just zip up their lips and put things on the back burner.”

“All right,” he said again. His eyes felt small and hot.

“Listen,” Magliore said, a little more quietly. “Three thousand bucks wouldn’t buy you what you want, anyway. This is like the black market, you know what I mean?—no pun intended. It would take three or four times that to buy the goop you need.”

He said nothing. He couldn’t leave until Magliore dismissed him. This was like a nightmare, only it wasn’t. He had to keep telling himself that he wouldn’t do something stupid in Magliore’s presence, like trying to pinch himself awake.

“Dawes?”

“What?”

“It wouldn’t do any good anyway. Don’t you know that? You can blow up a person or you can blow up a natural landmark or you can destroy a piece of beautiful art, like that crazy shit that took a hammer to the Pieta, may his dink rot off. But you can’t blow up buildings or roads or anything like that. It’s what all these crazy niggers don’t understand. If you blow up a federal courthouse, the feds build two to take its place—one to replace the blown-up one and one just to rack up each and every black ass that gets busted through the front door. If you go around killing cops, they hire six cops for every one you killed—and every one of the new cops is on the prod for dark meat. You can’t win, Dawes. White or black. If you get in the way of that road, they’ll plow you under along with your house and your job.”

“I have to go now,” he heard himself say thickly.

“Yeah, you look bad. You need to get this out of your system. I can get you an old whore if you want her. Old and stupid. You can beat the shit out of her, if you want to. Get rid of the poison. I sort of like you, and—”

He ran. He ran blindly, out the door and through the main office and out into the snow. He stood there shivering, drawing in great white freezing gulps of the snowy air. He was suddenly sure that Magliore would come out after him, collar him, take him back into the office, and talk to him until the end of time. When Gabriel trumpeted in the Apocalypse, Sally One-Eye would still be patiently explaining the invulnerability of all systems everywhere and urging the old whore on him.

 

When he got home the snow was almost six inches deep. The plows had been by and he had to drive the LTD through a crusted drift of snow to get in the driveway. The LTD made it no sweat. It was a good heavy car.

The house was dark. When he opened the door and stepped in, stamping snow off on the mat, it was also silent. Merv Griffin was not chatting with the celebrities.

“Mary?” He called. There was no answer. “Mary?”

He was willing to think she wasn’t home until he heard her crying in the living room. He took off his topcoat and hung it on its hanger in the closet. There was a small box on the floor under the hanger. The box was empty. Mary put it there every winter, to catch drips. He had sometimes wondered: Who cares about drips in a closet? Now the answer came to him, perfect in its simplicity. Mary cared. That’s who.

He went into the living room. She was sitting on the couch in front of the blank Zenith TV, crying. She wasn’t using a handkerchief. Her hands were at her sides. She had always been a private weeper, going into the upstairs bedroom to do it, or if it surprised her, hiding her face in her hands or a handkerchief. Seeing her this way made her face seem naked and obscene, the face of a plane crash victim. It twisted his heart.

“Mary,” he said softly.

She went on crying, not looking at him. He sat down beside her.

“Mary,” he said. “It’s not as bad as that. Nothing is.” But he wondered.

“It’s the end of everything,” she said, and the words came out splintered by her crying. Oddly, the beauty she had not achieved for good or lost for good was in her face now, shining. In this moment of the final smash, she was a lovely woman.

“Who told you?”

“Everybody told me!”
She cried. She still wouldn’t look at him, but one hand came up and made a twisting, beating movement against the air before falling against the leg of her slacks. “Tom Granger called. Then Ron Stone’s
wife
called. Then Vincent Mason called. They wanted to know what was wrong with you. And I didn’t
know!
I didn’t know anything
was
wrong!”

“Mary,” he said, and tried to take her hand. She snatched it away as if he might be catching.

“Are you punishing me?” she asked, and finally looked at him. “Is that what you’re doing? Punishing me?”

“No,” he said urgently. “Oh Mary, no.” He wanted to cry now, but that would be wrong. That would be very wrong.

“Because I gave you a dead baby and then a baby with a built-in self-destruct? Do you think I murdered your son? Is that why?”

“Mary, he was
our
son—”

“He was yours!”
she screamed at him.

“Don’t, Mary. Don’t.” He tried to hold her and she fought away from him.

“Don’t you touch me.”

They looked at each other, stunned, as if they had discovered for the first time that there was more to them than they had ever dreamed of—vast white spaces on some interior map.

“Mary, I can’t help what I did. Please believe that.” But it could have been a lie. Nonetheless, he plunged on: “If it had something to do with Charlie, it did. I’ve done some things I don’t understand. I ... I cashed in my life insurance policy in October. That was the first thing, the first
real
thing, but things had been happening in my mind long before that. But it was easier to do things than to talk about them. Can you understand that? Can you try?”

“What’s going to happen to me, Barton? I don’t know anything but being your wife. What’s going to happen to me?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s like you raped me,” she said, and began to cry again.

“Mary, please don’t do that anymore. Don’t ... try not to do that anymore.”

“When you were doing all those
things,
didn’t you ever think of me? Didn’t you ever think that I
depend
on you?”

He couldn’t answer. In a strange, disconnected way it was like talking to Magliore again. It was as if Magliore had beaten him home and put on a girdle and Mary’s clothes and a Mary mask. What next? The offer of the old whore?

She stood. “I’m going upstairs. I’m going to lie down.”

“Mary—” She did not cut him off, but he discovered there were no words to follow that first.

She left the room and he heard her footsteps going upstairs. After that he heard the creak of her bed as she lay down on it. After that he heard her crying again. He got up and turned on the TV and jacked the volume so he wouldn’t be able to hear it. On the TV, Merv Griffin was chatting with celebrities.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused armies of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

—MATTHEW ARNOLD
“Dover Beach”

He was drinking his private drink, Southern Comfort and Seven-Up, and watching some TV program he didn’t know the name of. The hero of the program was either a plainclothes cop or a private detective, and some guy had hit him over the head. This had made the plainclothes cop (or private detective) decide that he was getting close to something. Before he had a chance to say what, there was a commercial for Gravy Train. The man in the commercial was saying that Gravy Train, when mixed with warm water, made its own gravy. He asked the audience if it didn’t look just like beef stew. To Barton George Dawes it looked just like a loose bowel movement that somebody had done in a red dog dish. The program came back on. The private eye (or plainclothes police detective) was questioning a black bartender who had a police record. The bartender said
dig.
The bartender said
flake off.
The bartender said
dude.
He was a very hip bartender, all right, but Barton George Dawes thought that the private cop (or plainclothes investigator) had his number.

He was quite drunk, and he was watching television in his shorts and nothing else. The house was hot. He had turned the thermostat to seventy-eight degrees and had left it there ever since Mary left. What energy crisis? Fuck you, Dick. Also the horse you rode in on. Fuck Checkers, too. When he got on the turnpike, he drove at seventy, giving the finger to motorists who honked at him to slow down. The president’s consumer expert, some woman who looked as if she might have been a child star in the 1930s before passing time had turned her into a political hermaphrodite, had been on a public-service program two nights ago, talking about the ways!! You & I!! could save electricity around the house. Her name was Virginia Knauer, and she was very big on different ways YOU & I could save energy, because this thing was a real bitch and we were all in it together. When the program was over he had gone into the kitchen and turned on the electric blender. Mrs. Knauer had said that blenders were the second-biggest small appliance energy wasters. He had let the blender run on all night and when he got up the next morning—yesterday morning—the motor had burned out. The greatest electricity waster, Mrs. Knauer had said, were those little electric space heaters. He didn’t have an electric space heater, but he had toyed with the idea of getting one so he could run it day and night until it burned up. Possibly, if he was drunk and passed out, it would burn him up, too. That would be the end of the whole silly self-pitying mess.

He poured himself another drink and fell to musing over the old TV programs, the ones they had been running when he and Mary were still practically newlyweds and a brand new RCA console model TV—your ordinary, garden-variety RCA console model black-and-white TV—was something to boggle over. There had been “The Jack Benny Program” and “Amos ’n Andy,” those original jiveass niggers. There was “Dragnet,” the original “Dragnet” with Ben Alexander for Joe Friday’s partner instead of that new guy, Harry somebody. There had been “Highway Patrol,” with Broderick Crawford growling ten-four into his mike and everybody driving around in Buicks that still had portholes on the side. “Your Show of Shows.” “Your Hit Parade,” with Gisele MacKenzie singing things like “Green Door” and “Stranger in.Paradise.” Rock and roll had killed that one. Or, how about the quiz shows, how about them? “Tic-Tac-Dough” and “Twenty-One” every Monday night, starring Jack Barry. People going into isolation booths and putting UN-style earphones on their heads to hear fucking incredible questions they had already been briefed on. “The $64,000 Question,” with Hal March. Contestants staggering offstage with their arms full of reference books. “Dotto,” with Jack Narz. And Saturday morning programs like “Annie Oakley,” who was always saving her kid brother Tag from some Christless mess. He had always wondered if that kid was really her bastard. There was “Rin-Tin-Tin,” who operated out of Fort Apache. “Sergeant Preston,” who operated out of the Yukon—sort of a roving assignment, you might say. “Range Rider,” with Jock Mahoney. “Wild Bill Hickok,” with Guy Madison and Andy Devine as Jingles. Mary would say Bart, if people knew you watched all that stuff, they’d think you were feeble. Honestly, a man your age! And he had always replied, I want to be able to talk to my kids, kid. Except there had never been any kids, not really. The first one had been nothing but a dead mess—what was that old joke about putting wheels on miscarriages?—and the second had been Charlie, who it was best not to think of. I’ll be seeing you in my dreams, Charlie. Every night it seemed he and his son got together in one dream or another. Barton George Dawes and Charles Frederick Dawes, reunited by the wonders of the subconscious mind. And here we are, folks, back in Disney World’s newest head trip, Self-Pity Land, where you can take a gondola ride down The Canal of Tears, visit the Museum of Old Snapshots, and go for a ride in The Wonderful NostalgiaMobile, driven by Fred MacMurray. The last stop on your tour is this wonderful replica of Crestallen Street West. It’s right here inside this giant Southern Comfort bottle, preserved for all time. That’s right, madam, just duck your head as you walk into the neck. It’ll widen out soon. And this is the home of Barton George Dawes, the last living resident of Crestallen Street West. Look right in the window here—just a second, sonny, I’ll boost you up. That’s George all right, sitting in front of his Zenith color TV in his stupid boxer shorts, having a drink and crying. Crying? Of course he’s crying. What else would he be doing in Self-Pity Land? He cries all the time. The flow of his tears is regulated by our WORLD-FAMOUS TEAM OF ENGINEERS. On Mondays he just mists a little, because that’s a slow night. The rest of the week he cries a lot more. On the weekend he goes into overdrive, and on Christmas we may float him right away. I admit he’s a little disgusting, but nonetheless, he’s one of Self-Pity Land’s most popular inhabitants, right up there with our recreation of King Kong atop the Empire State Building. He—