Roadwork (22 page)

“You’re flushing your future right down the john, Vinnie. Life’s too short for that. What are you going to tell your daughter when—”

Vinnie punched him in the eye. A bolt of white pain flashed up into his head and he staggered backward, arms flying out. The kids who had been following Santa scattered as his packages—dolls, GI Joe, chess set—went flying. He hit a rack of toy telephones, which sprayed across the floor. Somewhere a little girl screamed like a hurt animal and he thought
Don’t cry, darling, it’s just dumb old George falling down, I do it frequently around the house these days
and someone else—jolly old Santa, maybe—was cursing and yelling for the store detective. Then he was on the floor amid the toy telephones, which all came equipped with battery-powered tape loops, and one of them was saying over and over in his ear: “Do you want to go to the circus? Do you want to go to the circus? Do you ...”

The shrilling of the telephone brought him out of a thin, uneasy afternoon sleep. He had been dreaming that a young scientist had discovered that, by changing the atomic composition of peanuts just a little, America could produce unlimited quantities of low-polluting gasoline. It seemed to make everything all right, personally and nationally, and the tone of the dream was one of burgeoning jubilation. The phone was a sinister counterpoint that grew and grew until the dream split open and let in an unwelcome reality.

He got up from the couch, went to the phone, and fumbled it to his ear. His eye didn’t hurt anymore, but in the hall mirror he could see that it was still colorful.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Bart. Tom.”

“Yeah, Tom. How are you?”

“Fine. Listen, Bart. I thought you’d want to know. They’re demolishing the Blue Ribbon tomorrow.”

His eyes snapped wide. “Tomorrow? It can’t be tomorrow. They ... hell, it’s almost Christmas!”

“That’s why.”

“But they’re not up to it yet.”

“It’s the only industrial building left in the way,” Tom said. “They’re going to raze it before they knock off for Christmas.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. They had a news feature on that morning program. ‘City Day.’ ”

“Are you going to be there?”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “Too much of my life went by inside that pile for me to be able to stay away.”

“Then I guess I’ll see you there.”

“I guess you will.”

He hesitated. “Listen, Tom. I want to apologize. I don’t think they’re going to reopen the Blue Ribbon, in Waterford or anyplace else. If I screwed you up royally—”

“No, I’m not hurting. I’m up at Brite-Kleen, doing maintenance. Shorter hours, better pay. I guess I found the rose in the shitheap.”

“How is it?”

Tom sighed across the wire. “Not so good,” he said. “But I’m past fifty now. It’s hard to change. It would have been the same in Waterford.”

“Tom, about what I did—”

“I don’t want to hear about it, Bart.” Tom sounded uncomfortable. “That’s between you and Mary. Really.”

“Okay.”

“Uh ... you getting along good?”

“Sure. I’ve got a couple of things on the line.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” Tom paused so long that the silence on the line became thick, and he was about to thank him for calling and hang up when Tom added: “Steve Ordner called up about you. Called me right up at my house.”

“Is that so? When?”

“Last week. He’s pissed like a bear at you, Bart. He kept asking if any of us had any idea you had been sandbagging the Waterford plant. But it was more than that. He was asking all sorts of other things.”

“Like what?”

“Like did you ever take stuff home, office supplies and stuff like that. Did you ever draw from petty cash without putting in a voucher. Or get your laundry done on the company clock. He even asked me if you had any kind of kickback deal going with the motels.”

“That son of a bitch,” he said wonderingly.

“Like I say, he’s hunting around for a nice raw cob to stick up your pump, Bart. I think he’d like to find a criminal charge he could get you on.”

“He can’t. It’s all in the family. And the family’s broken up now.”

“It broke up a long time ago,” Tom said evenly. “When Ray Tarkington died. I don’t know anyone who’s pissed off at you but Ordner. Those guys downtown ... it’s just dollars and cents to them. They don’t know nothing about the laundry business and they don’t care to know.”

He could think of nothing to say.

“Well ...” Tom sighed. “I thought you ought to know. And I s’pose you heard about Johnny Walker’s brother.”

“Arnie? No, what about him?”

“Killed himself.”

Tom sounded as if he might be sucking back spit through his upper plate. “Ran a hose from the exhaust pipe of his car into the back window and shut everything up. The newsboy found him.”

“Holy God,” he whispered. He thought of Arnie Walker sitting in the hospital waiting room chair and shivered, as if a goose had walked over his grave. “That’s awful.”

“Yeah ...” That sucking noise again. “Listen, I’ll be seeing you, Bart.”

“Sure. Thanks for calling.”

“Glad to do it. Bye.”

He hung up slowly, still thinking of Arnie Walker and that funny, whining gasp Arnie had made when the priest hurried in.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” he said to the empty room, and the words fell dead as he uttered them and he went into the kitchen to fix himself a drink.

The word had a hissing trapped sound, like a snake squirming through a small crevice. It slipped between the tongue and the roof of the mouth like a convict on the lam.

His hand trembled as he poured Southern Comfort, and the neck of the bottle chattered against the rim of the glass. Why did he do that, Freddy? They were just a couple of old farts who roomed together. Jesus Christ, why would
anybody
do that?

But he thought he knew why.

He got to the laundry around eight in the morning and they didn’t start to tear it down until nine, but even at eight there was quite a gallery on hand, standing in the cold with their hands thrust into their coat pockets and frozen breath pluming from their mouths like comic strip balloons—Tom Granger, Ron Stone, Ethel Diment, the shirt girl who usually got tipsy on her lunch break and then burned the hell out of unsuspecting shirt collars all afternoon, Gracie Floyd and her cousin Maureen, both of whom had worked on the ironer, and ten or fifteen others.

The highway department had put out yellow saw-horses and smudge pots and large orange-and-black signs that said:

The signs would route traffic around the block. The sidewalk that fronted the laundry had been closed off, too.

Tom Granger tipped a finger at him but didn’t come over. The others from the laundry glanced at him curiously and then put their heads together.

A paranoid’s dream, Freddy. Who’ll be the first to trot over and scream
j’accuse
in my face?

But Fred wasn’t talking.

Around quarter of nine a new ’74 Toyota Corolla pulled up, the ten-day plate still taped in the rear window, and Vinnie Mason got out, resplendent and a little self-conscious in a new camel’s hair overcoat and leather gloves. Vinnie shot him a sour glance that would have bent steel nails out of plumb and then walked over to where Ron Stone was standing with Dave and Pollack.

At ten minutes of nine they brought a crane up the street, the wrecking ball dangling from the top of the gantry like some disembodied Ethiopian teat. The crane was rolling very slowly on its ten chest-high wheels, and the steady, crackling roar of its exhaust beat into the silvery chill of the morning like an artisan’s hammer shaping a sculpture of unknown import.

A man in a yellow hard hat directed it up over the curb and through the parking lot, and he could see the man high up in the cab changing gears and clutching with one blocklike foot. Brown smoke pumped from the crane’s overhead stack.

A weird, diaphanous feeling had been haunting him ever since he had parked the station wagon three blocks over and walked here, a simile that wouldn’t quite connect. Now, watching the crane halt at the base of the long brick plant, just to the left of what had been the loading bays, the sense of it came to him. It was like stepping into the last chapter of an Ellery Queen mystery where all the participants have been gathered so that the mechanics of the crime could be explained and the culprit unmasked. Soon someone—Steve Ordner, most likely—would step out of the crowd, point at him and scream:
He’s the one! Bart Dawes! He killed the Blue Ribbon!
At which point he would draw his pistol in order to silence his nemesis, only to be riddled with police bullets.

The fancy disturbed him. He looked toward the road to assure himself and felt a sinking-elevator sensation in his belly as he saw Ordner’s bottle-green Delta 88 parked just beyond the yellow barriers, exhaust pluming from the twin tailpipes.

Steve Ordner was looking calmly back at him through the polarized glass.

At that moment the wrecking ball swung through its arc with a low, ratcheting scream, and the small crowd sighed as it struck the brick wall and punched through with a hollow booming noise like detonating cannon fire.

By four that afternoon there was nothing left of the Blue Ribbon but a jumbled pile of brick and glass, through which protruded the shattered main beams like the broken skeleton of some exhumed monster.

 

What he did later he did with no conscious thought of the future or consequences. He did it in much the same spirit that he had bought the two guns at Harvey’s Gun Shop a month earlier. Only there was no need to use the circuit breaker because Freddy had shut up.

He drove to a gas station and filled up the LTD with hi-test. Clouds had come in over the city during the day, and the radio was forecasting a storm—six to ten inches of new snow. He drove back home, parked the station wagon in the garage, and went down cellar.

Under the stairs there were two large cartons of returnable soda and beer bottles, the top layer covered with a thick patina of dust. Some of the bottles probably went back five years. Even Mary had forgotten about them in the last year or so and had given up pestering him about taking them back for the refund. Most of the stores didn’t even accept returnables now. Use them once, throw them away. What the hell.

He stacked the two cartons one on top of the other and carted them out to the garage. When he went back to the kitchen to get a knife, a funnel, and Mary’s floor-washing pail, it had begun to spit snow.

He turned on the garage light and took the green plastic garden hose off its nail, where it had been looped since the third week of September. He cut off the nozzle and it fell to the cement floor with a meaningless clink. He paid out three feet and cut it again. He kicked the rest away and looked at the length of hose thoughtfully for a moment. Then he unscrewed his gas cap and slipped the hose gently in, like a delicate lover.

He had seen gas siphoned before, knew the principle, but had never done it himself. He steeled himself for the taste of gasoline and sucked on the end of the hose-length. For a moment there was nothing but an invisible, glutinous resistance, and then his mouth filled with a liquid so cold and foreign that he had to stifle an impulse to gasp and draw some of it down his throat. He spat it out with a grimace, still tasting it on his tongue like some peculiar death. He tilted the hose over Mary’s floor-bucket, and a stream of pinkish gasoline spurted into the bottom. The flow fell away to a trickle and he thought he would have to go through the ritual again. But then the flow strengthened a bit and remained constant. Gas flowed into the bucket with a sound like urination in a public toilet.

He spat on the floor, rinsed the inside of his mouth with saliva, spat again. Better. It came to him that although he had been using gasoline almost every day of his adult life, he had never been on such intimate terms with it. The only other time he had actually touched it was when he had filled the small tank of his Briggs & Stratton lawn mower to the overflow point. He was suddenly glad that this had happened. Even the residual taste in his mouth seemed okay.

He went back into the house while the bucket filled (it was snowing harder now) and got some rags from Mary’s cleaning cupboard under the sink. He took them back into the garage and tore them into long strips, which he laid out on the hood of the LTD.

When the floor-bucket was half full, he switched the hose into the galvanized steel bucket he usually filled with ashes and clinkers to spread in the driveway when the going was icy. While it filled, he put twenty beer and soda bottles in four neat rows and filled each one three-quarters full, using the funnel. When that was done, he pulled the hose out of the gas tank and poured the contents of the steel pail into Mary’s bucket. It filled it almost to the brim.

He stuffed a rag wick into each bottle, plugging the necks completely. He went back to the house, carrying the funnel. The snow filled the earth in slanting, wind-driven lines. The driveway was already white. He put the funnel into the sink and then got the cover that fitted over the top of the bucket from Mary’s cupboard. He took it back to the garage and snapped it securely over the gasoline. He opened the LTD’s tailgate and put the bucket of gasoline inside. He put his Molotov cocktails into one of the cartons, fitting them snugly one against the other so they would stand at attention like good soldiers. He put the carton on the passenger seat up front, within hand’s reach. Then he went back into the house, sat down in his chair, and turned on the Zenith TV with his Space Command module. The “Tuesday Movie of the Week” was on. It was a western, starring David Janssen. He thought David Janssen made a shitty cowboy.