Dolan's Cadillac (2 page)

it whispered. Fool
him with a
real
one.

I swerved the Buick over to the shoulder and shuddered to a stop with both feet on the brake-pedal. I stared into my

own wide, startled eyes in the rear-view mirror.

Inside, the voice that spoke for Elizabeth began to laugh. It was wild, mad laughter, but after a few moments I began to

laugh along with it.

The other teachers laughed at me when I joined the Ninth Street Health Club. One of them wanted to know if someone

had kicked sand in my face. I laughed along with them. People don't get suspicious of a man like me as long as he

keeps laughing along with them. And why shouldn't 1 laugh? My wife had been dead seven years, hadn't she? Why,

she was no more than dust and hair and a few bones in her coffin! So why shouldn't I laugh? It's only when a man like

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me stops laughing that people wonder if something is wrong.

I laughed along with them even though my muscles ached all that fall and winter. I laughed even though I was

constantly hungry - no more second helpings, no more late-night snacks, no more beer, no more before-dinner gin and

tonic. But lots of red meat and greens, greens, greens.

I bought myself a Nautilus machine for Christmas.

No - that's not quite right.
Elizabeth
bought me a Nautilus machine for Christmas.

I saw Dolan less frequently; I was too busy working out, losing my pot belly, building up my arms and chest and legs.

But there were times when it seemed I could not go on with it, that recapturing anything like real physical fitness was

going to be impossible, that I could not five without second helpings and pieces of coffee cake and the occasional

dollop of sweet cream in my coffee. When those times came I would park across from one of his favorite restaurants or

perhaps go into one of the clubs he favored and wait for him to show up, stepping from the fog-gray Cadillac with an

arrogant, icy blonde or a laughing redhead on his arm - or one on each. There he would be, the man who had killed my

Elizabeth, there he would be, resplendent in a formal shirt from Bijan's, his gold Rolex winking in the nightclub lights.

When I was tired and discouraged I went to Dolan as a man with a raging thirst might seek out an oasis in the desert. I

drank his poisoned water and was refreshed.

In February I began to run every day, and then the other teachers laughed at my bald head, which peeled and pinked

and then peeled and pinked again, no matter how much sun-block I smeared on it. I laughed right along with them, as if

I had not twice nearly fainted and spent long, shuddering minutes with cramps stabbing the muscles of my legs at the

end of my runs.

When summer came, I applied for a job with the Nevada Highway Department. The municipal employment office

stamped a tentative approval on my form and sent me along to a district foreman named Harvey Blocker. Blocker was a

tall man, burned almost black by the Nevada sun. He wore jeans, dusty workboots, and a blue tee-shirt with cut-off

sleeves. BAD ATTITUDE, the shirt proclaimed. His muscles were big rolling slabs under his skin. He looked at my

application. Then he looked at me and laughed. The application looked very puny rolled up in one of his huge fists.

'You got to be kidding, my friend. I mean, you have
got
to be. We talkin desert sun and desert heat here - none of that

yuppie tanning-salon shit. What are you in real life, bubba? An accountant?'

'A teacher,' I said. 'Third grade.'

'Oh,
honey,'
he said, and laughed again. 'Get out my face, okay?'

I had a pocket watch - handed down from my great-grandfather, who worked on the last stretch of the great

transcontinental railroad. He was there, according to family legend, when they hammered home the golden spike. I took

the watch out and dangled it in Blocker's face on its chain.

'See this?' I said. 'Worth six, maybe seven hundred dollars.'

'This a bribe?' Blocker laughed again. A great old laugher was he. 'Man, I've heard of people making deals with the

devil, but you're the first one I ever met who wanted to
bribe
himself into hell.' Now he looked at me with something like

compassion. 'You may
think
you understand what you're tryin to get yourself into, but I'm here to tell you you don't

have the slightest idea. In July I've seen it go a hundred and seventeen degrees out there west of Indian Springs. It

makes strong men cry. And you ain't strong, bubba. I don't have to see you with your shirt off to know you ain't got

nothin on your rack but a few yuppie health-club muscles, and they won't cut it out in the Big Empty.'

I said, 'The day you decide I can't cut it, I'll walk off the job. You keep the watch. No argument.'

'You're a fucking liar.'

I looked at him. He looked back for some time.

'You're
not
a fucking liar.' He said this in tones of amazement.

'No.'

'You'd give the watch to Tinker to hold?' He cocked his thumb at a humongous black man in a tie-dyed shirt who was

sitting nearby in the cab of a bulldozer, eating a fruit-pie from McDonald's and listening.

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'Is he trustworthy?'

'You're damned tooting.'

'Then he can hold it until you tell me to take a hike or until I have to go back to school in September.'

'And what do I put up?'

I pointed to the employment application in his fist. 'Sign that,' I said. 'That's what you put up.'

'You're crazy.'

I thought of Dolan and of Elizabeth and said nothing.

'You'd start on shit-work,' Blocker warned. 'Shovelling hotpatch out of the back of a truck and into potholes. Not

because I want your damned watch - although I'll be more than happy to take it - but because that's where everyone

starts.'

'All right.'

'As long as you understand, bubba.'

'I do.'

'No,' Blocker said, 'you don't. But you will.'

And he was right.

I remember next to nothing about the first couple of weeks - just shovelling hot-top and tamping it down and walking

along behind the truck with my head down until the truck stopped at the next pothole. Sometimes we worked on the

Strip and I'd hear the sound of jackpot bells ringing in the casinos. Sometimes 1 think the bells were just ringing in my

head. I'd look up and

I'd see Harvey Blocker looking at me with that odd look of compassion, his face shimmering in the heat baking off the

road. And sometimes I'd look over at Tinker, sitting under the canvas parasol which covered the cab of his 'dozer, and

Tinker would hold up my great-granddad's watch and swing it on the chain so it kicked off sunflashes.

The big struggle was not to faint, to hold onto consciousness no matter what. All through June I held on, and the first

week of July, and then Blocker sat down next to me one lunch hour while I was eating a sandwich with one shaking

hand. I shook sometimes until ten at night. It was the heat. It was either shake or faint, and when I thought of Dolan I

somehow managed to keep shaking.

'You still ain't strong, bubba,' he said.

'No,' I said. 'But like the man said, you should have seen the materials I had to start with.'

'I keep expecting to look around and see you passed out in the middle of the roadbed and you keep not doing it. But

you gonna.'

'No, I'm not.'

'Yes, you are. If you stay behind the truck with a shovel, you gonna.'

'No.'

'Hottest part of the summer still coming on, bubba. Tink calls it cookiesheet weather.'

'I'll be fine.'

He pulled something out of his pocket. It was my great-granddad's watch. He tossed it in my lap. 'Take this fucking

thing,' he said, disgusted. 'I don't want it.'

'You made a deal with me.'

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'I'm calling it off.'

'If you fire me, I'll take you to arbitration,' I said. 'You signed my form. You-'

'I ain't firing you,' he said, and looked away. 'I'm going to have Tink teach you how to run a front-end loader.'

I looked at him for a long time, not knowing what to say. My third-grade classroom, so cool and pleasant, had never

seemed so far away ... and still I didn't have the slightest idea of how a man like Blocker thought, or what he meant

when he said the things he said. I knew that he admired me and held me in contempt at the same time, but I had no idea

why he felt either way.
And you don't need to care, darling,
Elizabeth spoke up suddenly inside my mind.
Dolan is

your business. Remember Dolan.

'Why do you want to do that?' I asked at last.

He looked back at me then, and I saw he was both furious and amused. But the fury was the emotion on top, I think.

'What is it with you, bubba? What do you think I am?'

'I don't-'

'You think I want to kill you for your fucking watch? That what you think?'

'I'm sorry.'

'Yeah, you are. Sorriest little motherfucker I ever saw.'

I put my great-granddad's watch away.

'You ain't
never
gonna be strong, bubba. Some people and plants take hold in the sun. Some wither up and die. You

dyin. You know you are, and still you won't move into the shade. Why? Why you pulling this crap on your system?'

'I've got my reasons.'

'Yeah, I bet you do. And God help anyone who gets in your way.

He got up and walked off.

Tinker came over, grinning.

'You think you can learn to run a front-end loader?'

'I think so,' I said.

'I think so, too,' he said. 'Ole Blockhead there likes you - he just don't know how to say so.'

'I noticed.'

Tink laughed. 'Tough little motherfucker, ain't you?'

'I hope so,' I said.

I spent the rest of the summer driving a front-end loader, and when I went back to school that fall, almost as black as

Tink himself, the other teachers stopped laughing at me. Sometimes they looked at me out of the corners of their eyes

after I passed, but they had stopped laughing.

I've got my reasons.

That's what I told him. And I did. I did not spend that season in hell just on a whim. I had to get in shape, you see.

Preparing to dig a grave for a man or a woman may not require such drastic measures, but it was not just a man or

woman I had in mind.

It was that damned Cadillac I meant to bury.

By April of the following year I was on the State Highway Commission's mailing list. Every month I received a bulletin

called
Nevada Road Signs. I
skimmed most of the material, which concerned itself with pending highway improvement

bills, road equipment that had been bought and sold, State Legislature action on such subjects as sand-dune control

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and new anti-erosion techniques. What I was interested in was always on the last page or two of the bulletin. This

section, simply titled The Calendar, listed the dates and sites of roadwork in each coming month. I was especially

interested in sites and dates followed by a simple four-letter abbreviation: RPAV. This stood for repaving, and my

experience on Harvey Blocker's crew had showed me that these were the operations which most frequently called for

detours. But not
always
- no indeed. Closing a section of road is a step the Highway Commission never takes unless

there is no other choice. But sooner or later,

I thought, those four letters might spell the end for Dolan. Just four letters, but there were times when I saw them in

my dreams: RPAV.

Not that it would be easy, or perhaps even soon - I knew I might have to wait for years, and that someone else might

get Dolan in the meantime. He was an evil man, and evil men live dangerous lives. Four loosely related vectors would

have to come together, like a rare conjunction of the planets: travel for Dolan, vacation time for me, a national holiday,

and a three-day weekend.

Years, maybe. Or maybe never. But I felt a kind of serenity - a surety that it would happen, and that when it did I

would be prepared. And eventually it did happen. Not that summer, not that fall, and not the following spring. But in

June of last year, I opened
Nevada Road Signs
and saw this in The Calendar:

JULY 1-JULY 22 (tent.):

US 71 MI 440-472 (WESTBND) RPAV

Hands shaking, I paged through my desk calendar to July and saw that July 4th fell on a Monday.

So here were three of the four vectors, for surely there would be a detour somewhere in the middle of such an

extensive repaving job.

But Dolan ... what about Dolan? What about the fourth vector?

Three times before I could remember him going to LA during the week of the Fourth of July - a week which is one of

the few slow ones in Las Vegas. I could remember three other times when he had gone somewhere else - once to New

York, once to Miami, once all the way to London - and a fourth time when he had simply stayed put in Vegas.

If he went ...

Was there a way I could find out?

I thought on this long and hard, but two visions kept intruding. In the first I saw Dolan's Cadillac speeding west

toward LA along US 71 at dusk, casting a long shadow behind it. I saw it passing DETOUR AHEAD signs, the last of

them warning CB owners to turn off their sets. I saw the Cadillac passing abandoned road equipment - bulldozers,