The Crossroads (12 page)

That’s one thing the cops did. Scared you into the safe, permanent small-time. But what does a guy need? A car, a pad, some good threads, food and women. Women who can pay the freight.

A deal like that just isn’t worth the risk.

But there is a lot of difference between twenty-two sixty-six and what must be in that old duck’s box in the bank. Two five zero zero zero zero dot zero zero. That is large money. They move that kind around in armor plate and keep it behind bars. You hardly ever find a situation where you run into one old man, all alone, carrying that kind of money. It’s a rare thing.

But not for me, baby.

You wouldn’t want to risk killing him. Lift a few rolls of tar tape and a six-inch length of three-quarter-inch pipe. Load the pipe with sand and plug it. Pad it real thick with the tape. One flick of the wrist. Catch him as he sags and yank him into one of those booths she was talking about.

Hold it! Just because she’s gone nuts, I don’t have to too. It’s not for me, baby.

It wouldn’t hurt to buy a hat and try that cotton in the chops deal and see if I look different enough. Just idle curiosity. I wouldn’t be doing a damn thing. Just buying a hat. Anybody can buy a hat. Christ, I don’t even know what my size is. Couldn’t use sunglasses. Too sneaky-looking. Wonder where you go to buy ordinary glasses. Hat, glasses, cotton in the chops. Use the charcoal brown suit. Never have liked it. Too damn dull and plain.

Get off it, boy!

The girl and all the money.

Best place to cross over is Brownsville, or maybe McAllen, over to Reynosa.

How many times in your life do you get this kind of a setup?

Slow down, ole Glenn!

One thing has always helped, though. You look so honest, boy. Nobody around here has dug you. Nobody except that bartender, and he got fired for tapping the till. Takes one to know one? Maybe that’s how Sylvia knew I might go for it. Larceny in her heart. Nuts about me.

Just kid her along That’s all. And buy a hat.

During a lull, Pete Drovek came into the station with Marty Simmons. Glenn was sitting on the corner of the
desk having a Coke and a package of peanut crackers. He got up as they came in.

“Did you meet Glenn, Pete? Glenn Lawrenz.”

“I’ve seen you around, of course,” Pete said. Glenn put the Coke down to shake hands.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Drovek.”

“Make it Pete, Glenn. I’m just another hired hand around here.”

“Glenn’s been with us six months,” Marty said. “He’s got a lot of hustle.”

“Thanks, Marty,” Glenn said. He felt uncomfortable so close to Pete Drovek. It disturbed him that Pete looked and acted like a nice guy. Funny he wasn’t able to keep his wife home. He looked as if he could. But you couldn’t tell, really. Some guys just didn’t have it for a dolly like Sylvia.

“Pete is working into the gas and service end,” Marty said.

“I’ll spend some time at each station every day,” Pete said casually. “Learn the ropes.”

“That’s fine!” Glenn said too heartily. He saw a car slowing to turn in. “Excuse me,” he said. He hustled out and was ready, waiting, smiling, when the car stopped beside the gas island. “Fill it up with the extra, sir?”

As he pumped the gas, cleaned the windshield, fan windows and headlight lenses, checked the oil, water, battery level and power steering fluid level, he kept thinking about Pete. The guy had a sharp look. Suppose he happened to be around when Sylvia came in? Suppose he caught on about the notes, got hold of one? He decided he’d ask Marty if he could switch to the four-to-midnight. Think up some reasonable excuse for wanting a less desirable shift. He told himself it didn’t have anything to do with Sylvia’s crazy idea. Nothing at all. And it wouldn’t be like giving her up. With Pete hanging around the stations they’d find some way to shack up during the day, before he had to come to work. Or maybe after midnight when he was off on those trips he was always taking. Just changing shifts and buying a hat didn’t mean anything. Anybody could do that. It didn’t mean anything at all. It
would just make it easier to kid her along, make her think he might really do it, keep her from cutting off the supply.

On that same Monday Jack Paris spent a couple of bored, restless hours in the office, looking over maintenance and repair reports, asking Joan pointless questions. Before noon he drove north to the big new Crossroads Shopping Center and made himself agreeable to the manager of the supermarket, and the managers of a few of the other stores. He introduced himself to clerks who didn’t know him. He spent a long time in the sporting goods department of the big hardware store, looking at putters. At last he bought a new one. He had lunch down at Truck Haven and enjoyed kidding his pretty dark-haired niece about her new job. After lunch he spent another half-hour in the office, then walked up to the Crossroads Bowladrome, got his ball and shoes out of the locker, joined two men who were practicing on their day off, and spent a completely happy rainy afternoon, competing for beers. He had one very hot game when he threw four strikes, a spare, three strikes and a spare, and struck out for a two fifty-seven. He liked the rumble of the ball, the blast of the pins, and the feel of using the long tough muscles of his back.

And on that same Monday Jeana Portoni spent a slow day working as hard as she could, scrubbing, rearranging and dusting the stock, taking an inventory of all the glassware, making careful selections from a new wholesale catalogue, repricing merchandise that had not moved as fast as she had hoped, writing business letters on her portable, leaping up to greet the random customer with a somewhat nervous smile.

She tried not to think about Chip. About the night before last. He had arrived at ten. And it had been exceedingly wonderful with him, better than ever before. And then had come the stupid, tiresome quarrel, and it had been all her fault. There, in the cozy darkness in his arms, when she should have been content to be with him, she had said in a flat voice, too loud for the darkness and
his closeness, “I would estimate that eleven seconds after I let you in, we were in bed.”

“Were we?” he said sleepily.

She had felt the rigidity of an inexplicable anger in her body. “Any little ceremonial approach, any restraint at all would be such a terrible waste of time, darling. We have to get down to essentials. Because that’s all we have. A nice tumble in the hay. There isn’t anything else.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Oh, I’m all right. I’m just learning to face facts, darling. Available Jeana. Knock twice and I open the door. I could have a sign painted.”

“What the hell are you getting at?”

“A person likes to know where she stands. I’m just a handy romp for Chip Drovek, and if we try to pretend it’s anything more than that, we’re kidding the troops, dearest.”

“Listen …”

“Oh, I don’t mind at all. So glad to be of service and all that. Happy to do my part, darling. But after all, let’s not try to call it some immortal romance. The white knight and the princess. This is no mighty conflagration. It’s a grass fire. We just soothe each other’s nerves a little. And we won’t make trouble for each other. It’s an arrangement, darling. Completely physical. Just a little free-hand …”

It was the first time in her life she had ever said that horrid word. It had, of course, made him terribly angry. He had shaken her roughly. She had wept. And finally, unable to do anything with her, he had walked out in anger.

Now she knew that she had begun the quarrel because she loved him so much, and their future was so hopeless. And guilt had been involved too. There was a woman less than a mile away from them who was his wife. She might be hopelessly alcoholic, but she was his wife. And Jeana sensed that no good could come from this clandestine relationship, no matter how delicious it had become, and how necessary it seemed to them.

Chip was a good man. The best of men. Strong and sane and generous. She felt that even without all the rest
of it she could love him. It was not the idealization of the love object. She could see his flaws. But the rest of it with them was such a previously inexperienced perfection, that it had made her too greedy to be entirely his, so the world could know. Anxious to carry his strong sons. Precious time was going by.

So she had been a bitch, and if he never came to her again, it would be a cruel but just punishment. With a man like that you had no right to be bitchy. Instead you should be grateful for scraps. You could live forty lifetimes without ever having even this much of love.

She worked hard all day. He had not come to the shop. She had not seen him pass. When the long day ended she would probably go home and scrub the apartment, wash and iron and mend, hoping for the sleep that would come through exhaustion. She was ashamed of herself. Speaking to him with a foul mouth, like a dirty little girl chalking words on the sidewalk. Trying to soil the only meaningful thing in the world.

He was a man. He could pop Clara into a sanitarium and get her dried out sufficiently to divorce her. Fix her up with an income. Turn her loose. And she would be dead in a year. The blurred but placid routine of her days gave her her only stability. Divorce would be another word for murder. And they could not build their life upon that. It would diminish Chip, diminish both of them and what they had. She was harsh enough with herself to understand that the concealed, unconscious motive of her bitchiness had been to force Chip to do precisely that, to cast off Clara so they could build their cheap castle on soiled sand and live unhappily ever after. Yet, even if they agreed they could not do that, would it make the present relationship any more noble or virtuous? The sane thing to do was to stop. End the relationship. Wait out the years calmly and, should it become possible for them to have an aboveboard relationship at some future time, see if they were both willing at that time.

But she knew she could not be that sane. That reasonable. That cold. Not when, from finger tips to toes, she
had this endless ache for him. But maybe it had, in fact, ended.

Even in despair her sense of humor could function. There should be, she thought, an institution to cure this addiction. Lock me up, Doc, I’m hooked. What would be the therapy? Cold showers of course. Traditional. Regular exercise. Anti-aphrodisiacs. Lecture courses on the sins of the flesh. Austere music. Algebra problems. Basket weaving. Gray denim and no makeup. But they couldn’t cure me. I’d be hopeless. They’d have to lock me in the cellar. A hopeless addict of love, rattling the bars, screaming of my need. And she seemed like such a
nice
girl, even a little repressed—check with Arthur on that—and to think she could turn into a veritable nymph! You just never know, do you?

She had to explain to Chip. Apologize. If he didn’t come near her, she would have to go to him.

The rain began to come down more heavily at dusk that Monday. In front of the supermarket a heavy woman, trying to run to her car, fell and splintered her ankle on the curb and was still screaming when the ambulance came. At Wonderland, the top shop in the Shopping Center, the thickset proprietor locked the front door, adjusted the night lights, took his bosomy, pimply young clerk into the storeroom, violated her with the deftness of long habit upon a Little Guy Junior Trampoline, dropped her at her bus stop and drove home, looking forward to the usual Monday evening of poker with his wife and the neighbors. Four Japanese diplomats in a Cadillac stopped at the northernmost gas station across from the Bowladrome and each one took a sample of every road map out of the rack. Thirty miles north of Walterburg a tractor-trailer combo skidded, jackknifed, and toppled onto an ancient Packard which had contained three generations of the Shaplow family of Mexia, Texas. After the truck was jacked off the mess it was found that a small dog had survived unharmed. With the aid of some hamburg and an accomplice, a free-lance photographer got a flash picture of the dog apparently howling by the squashed ruin and
sold it to a press service. Nancy Drovek sat in her room at home, reading the latest Pogo book and soaking her feet in a basin of hot water. A small bored boy in the Motor Hotel Restaurant hooked the ankle of a passing waitress with a toy cane, a souvenir of Rock City. She fell onto her tray, scalding her throat with soup and cutting her right hand badly on a broken glass. She sprang up immediately, belted the small boy out of his chair with a full left hook, and dissolved into tears of pain, anger and the frustration often experienced by all waitresses. At the Crossroads Pantry three dowdy women left, in lieu of tips, cards of thanks imprinted with a passage from the scriptures for the edification of the infuriated waitress. In Unit 23 of the Midland Motel, a burly homosexual barber named Mulligan decided finally to kill himself. He had been considering it for some months. With the decision made, he was able to go to sleep almost immediately. Down the road at the Highway Diner, Mark Brodey smothered a slab of questionable beef in brown spicy gravy and thought about stacks of money. At the Bowladrome, Sally Addlaggar, bowling anchor for the Kindly Drycleaners in the Guys and Gals League, stuck her first ball right in the pocket. Despite all that extravagant body English which had won her a permanent gallery among the more susceptible males, she wound up with a six ten split and shrieked a very naughty word, and waited beside the rack, flaming with indignation. At the Crossroads Drive-in Theater, just beyond the Bowladrome, in a pink-and-blue DeSoto in the fifth rank of cars, while a monstrous suffering face of Gregory Peck filled the wide-angle screen, the high-school sophomore daughter of Joe Varadi lost the ultimate long-precarious fragment of her innocence, whined with pain, wept, and could not be comforted at all until the cartoon feature began. Pete Drovek stood naked beside the oversized bed and frowned down at Sylvia. Her face was stuffed into a pillow. He shrugged and walked into the bathroom and showered, wondering what had made her act so wooden and odd all of a sudden. If she got difficult she was going to be more trouble than she was worth. On the hill, a mile from the highway,
Papa Drovek sat in his parlor reading
The Old Man and the Sea
. His lips moved as he read. It would only last two or at the most three more evenings and he knew he would be sorry when it ended. Gloria Quinn arrived home earlier than usual, wondering what had been eating the boss man all day. Clara Drovek had fallen asleep in her chair. A pair of newlyweds sat in a dim corner of the Starlight Club and suddenly decided they could eat a lot later.