Roadwork (11 page)

He and Jack Hobart went home and watched the game. They drank a lot of beer. But it wasn’t so good.

When Jack was getting into his car to go home at quarter past twelve, he looked up bleakly and said: “That goddam highway. That’s what fucked up the works.”

“It sure did.” He thought Jack looked old, and it scared him. Jack was about his age.

“You keep in touch, Bart.”

“I will.”

They grinned hollowly at each other, a little drunk, a little sick. He watched Jack’s car until its taillights had disappeared down the long, curving hill.

He was a little hung-over and a little sleepy from staying up so late. The sound of the laundry washers kicking onto the extract cycle seemed loud in his ears, and the steady
thump-hiss
of the shirt presses and the ironer made him want to wince.

Freddy was worse. Freddy was playing the very devil today.

Listen, Fred was saying. This is your last chance, my boy. You’ve still got all afternoon to get over to Monohan’s office. If you let it wait until five o’clock, it’s going to be too late.

Sure it doesn’t. But right after work Monohan is going to feel a pressing need to go see some relatives. In Alaska. For him it means the difference between a forty-five-thousand-dollar commission and fifty thousand dollars—the price of a new car. For that kind of money you don’t need a pocket calculator. For that kind of money you might discover relatives in the sewer system under Bombay.

But it didn’t matter. It had gone too far. He had let the machine run without him too long. He was hypnotized by the coming explosion, almost lusted for it. His belly groaned in its own juices.

He spent most of the afternoon in the washroom, watching Ron Stone and Dave run test loads with one of the new laundry products. It was loud in the washroom. The noise hurt his tender head, but it kept him from hearing his thoughts.

 

After work he got his car out of the parking lot—Mary had been glad to let him have it for the day since he was seeing about their new house—and drove through downtown and through Norton.

In Norton, blacks stood around on street corners and outside bars. Restaurants advertised different kinds of soul food. Children hopped and danced on chalked sidewalk grids. He saw a pimpmobile—a huge pink Eldorado Cadillac—pull up in front of an anonymous brownstone apartment building. The man who got out was a Wilt Chamberlain-size black in a white planter’s hat and a white ice cream suit with pearl buttons and black platform shoes with huge gold buckles on the sides. He carried a malacca stick with a large ivory ball on the top. He walked slowly, majestically, around to the hood of the car, where a set of caribou antlers were mounted. A tiny silver spoon hung on a silver chain around his neck and winked in the thin autumn sun. He watched the man in the rearview mirror as the children ran to him for sweets.

Nine blocks later the tenements thinned to ragged, open fields that were still soft and marshy. Oily water stood between hummocks in puddles, their surfaces flat, deadly rainbows. On the left, near the horizon, he could see a plane landing at the city’s airport.

He was now on Route 16, traveling past the exurban sprawl between the city and the city limits. He passed McDonald’s. Shakey’s, Nino’s Steak Pit. He passed a Dairy Freez and the Noddy-Time Motel, both closed for the season. He passed the Norton Drive-In, where the marquee said:

He passed a bowling alley and a driving range that was closed for the season. Gas stations—two of them with signs that said:

It was still four days until they got their gasoline allotments for December. He couldn’t find it in himself to feel sorry for the country as a whole as it went into this science-fiction-style crisis—the country had been pigging petroleum for too long to warrant his sympathy—but he could feel sorry for the little men with their peckers caught in the swing of a big door.

A mile farther on he came to Magliore’s Used Cars. He didn’t know what he had expected, but he felt disappointed. It looked like a cut-rate, fly-by-night operation. Cars were lined up on the lot facing the road under looped lines of flapping banners—red, yellow, blue, green—that had been tied between light standards that would shine down on the product at night. Prices and slogans soaped on the windshields:
and
and on a dusty old Valiant with flat tires and a cracked windshield:

A salesman wearing a gray-green topcoat was nodding and smiling noncommittally as a young kid in a red silk jacket talked to him. They were standing by a blue Mustang with cancer of the rocker panels. The kid said something vehement and thumped the driver’s side door with the flat of his hand. Rust flaked off in a small flurry. The salesman shrugged and went on smiling. The Mustang just sat there and got a little older.

There was a combination office and garage in the center of the lot. He parked and got out of his car. There was a lift in the garage, and an old Dodge with giant fins was up on it. A mechanic walked out from under, holding a muffler in both grease-gloved hands like a chalice.

“Say, you can’t park there, mister. That’s in the right-of-way.”

“Where should I park?”

“Take it around back if you’re goin in the office.”

He drove the LTD around to the back, creeping carefully down the narrow way between the corrugated metal side of the garage and a row of cars. He parked behind the garage and got out. The wind, strong and cutting, made him wince. The heater had disarmed his face and he had to squint his eyes to keep them from tearing.

There was an automobile junkyard back here. It stretched for acres, amazing the eye. Most of the cars had been gutted of parts and now they sat on their wheel rims or axles like the victims of some awful plague who were too contagious to even be dragged to the dead-pit. Grilles with empty headlight sockets gazed at him raptly.

He walked back out front. The mechanic was installing the muffler. An open bottle of Coke was balanced on a pile of tires to his right.

He called to the mechanic: “Is Mr. Magliore in?” Talking to mechanics always made him feel like an asshole. He had gotten his first car twenty-four years ago, and talking to mechanics still made him feel like a pimply teenager.

The mechanic looked over his shoulder and kept working his socket wrench. “Yeah, him and Mansey. Both in the office.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure.”

 

He went into the office. The walls were imitation pine, the floor muddy squares of red and white linoleum. There were two old chairs with a pile of tattered magazines between them—
Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, True Argosy.
No one was sitting in the chairs. There was one door, probably leading to an inner office, and on the left side, a little cubicle like a theater box office. A woman was sitting in there, working an adding machine. A yellow pencil was poked into her hair. A pair of harlequin glasses hung against her scant bosom, held by a rhinestone chain. He walked over to her, nervous now. He wet his lips before he spoke.

“Excuse me.”

She looked up. “Yes?”

He had a crazy impulse to say:
I’m here to see Sally One-Eye, bitch. Shake your tail.

Instead, he said: “I have an appointment with Mr. Magliore.”

“You do?” She looked at him warily for a moment and then riffled through some slips on the table beside the adding machine. She pulled one out. “Your name is Dawes? Barton Dawes?”

“That’s right.”

“Go right in.” She stretched her lips at him and began to peck at the adding machine again.

He was very nervous. Surely they knew he had conned them. They were running some kind of midnight auto sales here, that much had been obvious from the way Mansey had spoken to him yesterday. And they knew he knew. Maybe it would be better to go right out the door, drive like hell to Monohan’s office, and maybe catch him before he left for Alaska or Timbuktu or wherever he would be leaving for.

Finally, Freddy said. The man shows some sense.

He walked over to the door in spite of Freddy, opened it, and stepped into the inner office. There were two men. The one behind the desk was fat and wearing heavy glasses. The other was razor thin and dressed in a salmon-pink sports coat that made him think of Vinnie. He was bending over the desk. They were looking at a J.C. Whitney catalogue.

They looked up at him. Magliore smiled from behind his desk. The glasses made his eyes appear faded and enormous, like the yolks of poached eggs.

“Mr. Dawes?”

“That’s right.”

“Glad you could drop by. Want to shut the door?”

“Okay.”

He shut it. When he turned back, Magliore was no longer smiling. Neither was Mansey. They were just looking at him, and the room temperature seemed to have gone down twenty degrees.

“Okay,” Magliore said. “What is this shit?”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“I talk for free. But not to shitbirds like you. You call up Pete and give him a line of crap about two Eldorados.” He pronounced it “Eldoraydos.” “You talk to me, mister. You tell me what your act is.”

Standing by the door, he said: “I heard maybe you sold things.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Cars. I sell cars.”

“No,” he said. “Other stuff. Stuff like ...” He looked around at the fake-pine-paneled walls. God knew how many agencies were bugging this place. “Just stuff,” he finished, and the words came out on crutches.

“You mean stuff like dope and whores (‘hoors’) and off-track betting? Or did you want to buy a hitter to knock off your wife or your boss?” Magliore saw him wince and laughed harshly. “That’s not too bad, mister, not bad at all for a shitbird. That’s the big ‘What if this place is bugged’ act, right? That’s number one at the police academy, am I right?”

“Look, I’m not a—”

“Shut up,” Mansey said. He was holding the J.C. Whitney catalogue in his hands. His fingernails were manicured. He had never seen manicured nails exactly like that except on TV commercials where the announcer had to hold a bottle of aspirin or something. “If Sal wants you to talk, he’ll tell you to talk.”

He blinked and shut his mouth. This was like a bad dream.

“You guys get dumber every day,” Magliore said. “That’s all right. I like to deal with dummies. I’m used to dealing with dummies. I’m good at it. Now. Not that you don’t know it, but this office is as clean as a whistle. We wash it every week. I got a cigar box full of bugs at home. Contact mikes, button mikes, pressure mikes, Sony tape recorders no bigger than your hand. They don’t even try that much anymore. Now they send shitbirds like you.”

He heard himself say: “I’m not a shitbird.”

An expression of exaggerated surprise spread across Magliore’s face. He turned to Mansey. “Did you hear that? He said he wasn’t a shitbird.”

“Yeah, I heard that,” Mansey said.

“Does he look like a shitbird to you?”

“Yeah, he does,” Mansey said.

“Even talks like a shitbird, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“So if you’re not a shitbird,” Magliore said, turning back to him, “what are you?”

“I’m—” he began, not sure of just what to say. What
was
he? Fred, where are you when I need you?

“Come on, come on,” Magliore said. “State Police? City? IRS? FBI? He look like prime Effa Bee Eye to you, Pete?”

“Yeah,” Pete said.

“Not even the city police would send out a shitbird like you, mister. You must be Effa Bee Eye or a private detective. Which is it?”

He began to feel angry.

“Throw him out, Pete,” Magliore said, losing interest. Mansey started forward, still holding the J.C. Whitney catalogue.

“You stupid dork!” He suddenly yelled at Magliore. “You probably see policemen under your bed, you’re so stupid! You probably think they’re home screwing your wife when you’re here!”

Magliore looked at him, magnified eyes widening. Mansey froze, a look of unbelief on his face.

“Dork?” Magliore said, turning the word over in his mouth the way a carpenter will turn a tool he doesn’t know over in his hands. “Did he call me a dork?”

He was stunned by what he had said.

“I’ll take him around back,” Mansey said, starting forward again.

“Hold it,” Magliore breathed. He looked at him with honest curiosity. “Did you call me a dork?”

“I’m not a cop,” he said. “I’m not a crook, either. I’m just a guy that heard you sold stuff to people who had the money to buy it. Well, I’ve got the money. I didn’t know you had to say the secret word or have a Captain Midnight decoder ring or all that silly shit. Yes, I called you a dork. I’m sorry I did if it will stop this man from beating me up. I’m ...” He wet his lips and could think of no way to continue. Magliore and Mansey were looking at him with fascination, as if he had just turned into a Greek marble statue before their very eyes.

“Dork,” Magliore breathed. “Frisk this guy, Pete.”

Pete’s hands slapped his shoulders and he turned around.

“Put your hands on the wall,” Mansey said, his mouth beside his ear. He smelled like Listerine. “Feet out behind you. Just like on the cop shows.”

“I don’t watch the cop shows,” he said, but he knew what Mansey meant, and he put himself in the frisk position. Mansey ran his hands up his legs, patted his crotch with all the impersonality of a doctor, slipped a hand into his belt, ran his hands up his sides, slipped a finger under his collar.

“Clean,” Mansey said.

“Turn around, you,” Magliore said.