Roadwork (5 page)

From the third floor, over dry-cleaning, you could watch the progress of the construction. It cut across the Western business and residential sections like a long brown incision, an operation scar poulticed with mud. It was already across Guilder Street, and it had buried the park on Hebner Avenue where he used to take Charlie when he was small ... no more than a baby, really. What was the name of the park? He didn’t know. Just the Hebner Avenue Park I guess, Fred. There was a Little League ball park and a bunch of teeter-totters and a duck pond with a little house in the middle of it. In the summertime, the roof of the little house was always covered with bird shit. There had been swings, too. Charlie got his first swing experience in the Hebner Avenue Park. What do you think of that, Freddy old kid old sock? Scared him at first and he cried and then he liked it and when it was time to go home he cried because I took him off. Wet his pants all over the car seat coming home. Was that really fourteen years ago?

Another truck went by, carrying a payloader.

The Garson Block had been demolished about four months ago; that was three or four blocks west of Hebner Avenue. A couple of office buildings full of loan companies and a bank or two, the rest dentists and chiropractors and foot doctors. That didn’t matter so much, but Christ it had hurt to see the old Grand Theater go. He had seen some of his favorite movies there, in the early fifties.
Dial M for Murder,
with Ray Milland.
The Day the Earth Stood Still,
with Michael Rennie. That one had been on TV just the other night and he had meant to watch it and then fell asleep right in front of the fucking TV and never woke up until the national anthem. He had spilled a drink on the rug and Mary had had a bird over that, too.

The Grand, though—that had really been something. Now they had these new-breed movie theaters out in the suburbs, crackerjack little buildings in the middle of four miles of parking lot. Cinema I, Cinema II, Cinema III, Screening Room, Cinema MCMXLVII. He had taken Mary to one out in Waterford to see
The Godfather
and the tickets were $2.50 a crack and inside it looked like a fucking bowling alley. No balcony. But the Grand had had a marble floor in the lobby and a balcony and an ancient, lovely, grease-clotted popcorn machine where a big box cost a dime. The character who tore your ticket (which had cost you sixty cents) wore a red uniform, like a doorman, and he was at least six hundred. And he always croaked the same thing. “Hopeya enjoy da show.” Inside, the auditorium was huge and dark and filled with the smell of dusty velvet. When you sat down you didn’t crack your knees on the seat in front of you. And there was a huge cut-glass chandelier overhead. You never wanted to sit under it, because if it ever fell on you they’d have to scrape you up with a putty knife. The Grand was—

He looked at his wristwatch guiltily. Almost forty minutes had gone by. Christ, that was bad news. He had just lost forty minutes, and he hadn’t even been
thinking
that much. Just about the park and the Grand Theater.

Is there something wrong with you, Georgie?

There might be, Fred. I guess maybe there might be.

He wiped his fingers across his cheek under his eye and saw by the wetness on them that he had been crying.

 

He went downstairs to talk to Peter, who was in charge of deliveries. The laundry was in full swing now, the ironer thumping and hissing as the first of the Howard Johnson sheets were fed into its rollers, the washers grinding and making the floor vibrate, the shirt presses going
hissss-shuh!
as Ethel and Rhonda whipped them through.

Peter told him the universal had gone on number four’s truck and did he want to look at it before they sent it out to the shop? He said he didn’t. He asked Peter if Holiday Inn had gone out yet. Peter said it was being loaded, but the silly ass who ran the place had already called twice about his towels.

He nodded and went back upstairs to look for Vinnie Mason, but Phyllis said Vinnie and Tom Granger had gone out to that new German restaurant to dicker about tablecloths.

“Will you have Vinnie stop in when he gets back?”

“I will, Mr. Dawes. Mr. Ordner called and wanted to know if you’d call him back.”

“Thanks, Phyllis.”

He went back into the office, got the new things that had collected in the IN box and began to shuffle through them.

A salesman wanted to call about a new industrial bleach, Yello-Go. Where do they come up with the names, he wondered, and put it aside for Ron Stone. Ron loved to inflict Dave with new products, especially if he could wangle a free five hundred pounds of the product for test runs.

A letter of thanks from the United Fund. He put it aside to tack on the announcement board downstairs by the punch-clock.

A circular for office furniture in Executive Pine. Into the wastebasket.

A circular for a Phone-Mate that would broadcast a message and record incoming calls when you were out, up to thirty seconds.
I’m not here, stupid. Buzz off.
Into the wastebasket.

A letter from a lady who had sent the laundry six of her husband’s shirts and had gotten them back with the collars burned. He put it aside for later action with a sigh. Ethel had been drinking her lunch again.

A water-test package from the university. He put it aside to go over with Ron and Tom Granger after lunch.

A circular from some insurance company with Art Linkletter telling you how you could get eighty thousand dollars and all you had to do for it was die. Into the wastebasket.

A letter from the smart mick realtor who was peddling the Waterford plant, saying there was a shoe company that was very interested in it, the Thom McAn shoe company no less, no small cheese, and reminding him that the Blue Ribbon’s ninety-day option to buy ran out on November 26.
Beware, puny laundry executive. The hour draweth nigh.
Into the wastebasket.

Another salesman for Ron, this one peddling a cleaner with the larcenous name of Swipe. He put it with Yello-Go.

He was turning to the window again when the intercom buzzed. Vinnie was back from the German restaurant.

“Send him in.”

Vinnie came right in. He was a tall young man of twenty-five with an olive complexion. His dark hair was combed into its usual elaborately careless tumble. He was wearing a dark red sport coat and dark brown pants. A bow tie. Very rakish, don’t you think, Fred? I do, George, I do.

“How are you, Bart?” Vinnie asked.

“Fine,” he said. “What’s the story on that German restaurant?”

Vinnie laughed. “You should have been there. That old kraut just about fell on his knees he was so happy to see us. We’re really going to murder Universal when we get settled into the new plant, Bart. They hadn’t even sent a circular, let alone their rep. That kraut, I think he thought he was going to get stuck washing those tablecloths out in the kitchen. But he’s got a place there you wouldn’t believe. Real beer hall stuff. He’s going to murder the competition. The aroma ... God!” He flapped his hands to indicate the aroma and took a box of cigarettes from the inside pocket of his sport coat. “I’m going to take Sharon there when he gets rolling. Ten percent discount.”

In a weird kind of overlay he heard Harry the gun shop proprietor saying:
We give a ten percent discount on orders over three hundred.

My God, he thought. Did I buy those guns yesterday? Did I really?

That room in his mind went dark.

Hey, Georgie, what are you—

“What’s the size of the order?” he asked. His voice was a little thick and he cleared his throat.

“Four to six hundred tablecloths a week once he gets rolling. Plus napkins. All genuine linen. He wants them done in Ivory Snow. I said that was no problem.”

He was taking a cigarette out of the box now, doing it slowly, so he could read the label. There was something he could really come to dislike about Vinnie Mason: his dipshit cigarettes. The label on the box said:

Now who in God’s world except Vinnie would smoke Player’s Navy Cut? Or King Sano? Or English Ovals? Or Marvels or Murads or Twists? If someone put out a brand called Shit-on-a-Stick or Black Lung, Vinnie would smoke them.

“I did tell him we might have to give him two-day service until we get switched over,” Vinnie said, giving him a last loving flash of the box as he put it away. “When we go up to Waterford.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. Shall I blast him, Fred? Sure. Blow him out of the water, George.

“Really?” He snapped a light to his cigarette with a slim gold Zippo and raised his eyebrows through the smoke like a British character actor.

“I had a note from Steve Ordner yesterday. He wants me to drop over Friday evening for a little talk about the Waterford plant.”

“Oh?”

“This morning I had a phone call from Steve Ordner while I was down talking to Peter Wasserman. Mr. Ordner wants me to call him back. That sounds like he’s awfully anxious to know something, doesn’t it?”

“I guess it does,” Vinnie said, flashing his number 2 smile—
Track wet, proceed with caution.

“What I want to know is who made Steve Ordner so all-at-once fucking anxious. That’s what I want to know.”

“Well—”

“Come on, Vinnie. Let’s not play coy chambermaid. It’s ten o’clock and I’ve got to talk to Ordner, I’ve got to talk to Ron Stone, I’ve got to talk to Ethel Gibbs about burnt shirt collars. Have you been picking my nose while I wasn’t looking?”

“Well, Sharon and I were over to St—to Mr. Ordner’s house Sunday night for dinner—”

“And you just happened to mention that Bart Dawes has been laying back on Waterford while the 784 extension gets closer and closer, is that it?”

“Bart!” Vinnie protested. “It was all perfectly friendly. It was very—”

“I’m sure it was. So was his little note inviting me to court. I imagine our little phone call will be perfectly friendly, too. That’s not the point. The point is that he invited you and your wife to dinner in hopes that you’d run off at the mouth and he had no cause to be disappointed.”

“Bart—”

He leveled his finger at Vinnie. “You listen to me, Vinnie. If you drop any more shit like this for me to walk in, you’ll be looking for a new job. Count on it.”

Vinnie was shocked. The cigarette was all but forgotten between his fingers.

“Vinnie, let me tell you something,” he said, dropping his voice back to normal. “I know that a young guy like you has listened to six thousand lectures on how old guys like me tore up the world when they were your age. But you earned this one.”

Vinnie opened his mouth to protest.

“I don’t think you slipped the knife into me,” he said, holding up a hand to forestall Vinnie’s protest. “If I thought that, I would have had a pink for you when you walked in here. I just think you were dumb. You got in that great big house and had three drinks before dinner and then a soup course and a salad with Thousand Island dressing and then surf and turf for the main course and it was all served by a maid in a black uniform and Carla was doing her lady-of-the-manor bit—but not being the least bit condescending—and there was a strawberry tort or blueberry buckle with whipped cream for dessert and then a couple of coffee brandies or Tia Maria and you just spilled your guts. Is that about how it went?”

“Something like that,” Vinnie whispered. His expression was three parts shame and two parts bullish hate.

“He started off by asking how Bart was. You said Bart was fine. He said Bart was a damned good man, but wouldn’t it be nice if he could pick his feet up a little on that Waterford deal. You said, it sure would. He said, By the way, how’s that going. You said, Well it really isn’t my department and he said, Don’t tell me, Vincent, you know what’s going on. And you said, All I know is that Bart hasn’t closed the deal yet. I heard that the Thom McAn people are interested in the site but maybe that’s just a rumor. Then he said, Well I’m sure Bart knows what he’s doing and you said, Yeah, sure and then you had another coffee brandy and he asked you if you thought the Mustangs would make the play-offs and then you and Sharon were going home and you know when you’ll be out there again, Vinnie?”

Vinnie didn’t say anything.

“You’ll be out there when Steve Ordner needs another snitch. That’s when.”

“I’m sorry,” Vinnie said sulkily. He started to get up.

“I’m not through.”

Vinnie sat down again and looked into the corner of the room with smoldering eyes.

“I was doing your job twelve years ago, do you know that? Twelve years, that probably seems like a long time to you. To me, I hardly know where the fuck the time went. But I remember the job well enough to know you like it. And that you do a good job. That reorganization in dry-cleaning, with the new numbering system ... that was a masterpiece.”

Vinnie was staring at him, bewildered.

“I started in the laundry twenty years ago,” he said. “In 1953, I was twenty years old. My wife and I were just married. I’d finished two years of business administration and Mary and I were going to wait, but we were using the interruption method, you see. We were going to town and somebody slammed the door downstairs and startled me right into an orgasm. She got pregnant out of it. So whenever I get feeling smart these days I just remind myself that one slammed door is responsible for me being where I am today. It’s humbling. In those days there was no slick abortion law. When you got a girl pregnant, you married her or you ran out on her. End of options. I married her and took the first job I could get, which was here. Washroom helper, exactly the same job that Pollack kid is doing downstairs right this minute. Everything was manual in those days, and everything had to be pulled wet out of the washers and extracted in a big Stonington wringer that held five hundred pounds of wet flatwork. If you loaded it wrong, it would take your fucking foot off. Mary lost the baby in her seventh month and the doctor said she’d never have another one. I did the helper’s job for three years, and my average take-home for fifty-five hours was fifty-five dollars. Then Ralph Albertson, who was the boss of the washroom in those days, got in a little fender-bender accident and died of a heart attack in the street while he and the other guy were exchanging insurance companies. He was a fine man. The whole laundry shut down the day of his funeral. After he was decently buried, I went to Ray Tarkington and asked for his job. I was pretty sure I’d get it. I knew everything about how to wash, because Ralph had shown me.