He folded the paper and put it on top of a tattered pile of magazines. The washer hummed and hummed, a low, soporific sound. Huns. Barbarians. They were the huns. They were the rippers and chewers and choppers, turning people out of their homes, kicking apart lives as a small boy might kick apart an anthill—
The young woman dragged her daughter, still crying for a bottle, out of the U-Wash-It. He closed his eyes and dozed off, waiting for his dryer to finish. A few minutes later he snapped awake, thinking he heard fire bells, but it was only a Salvation Army Santa who had taken up his position on the corner out front. When he left the laundry with his basket of clothes, he threw all his pocket change into Santa’s pot.
“God bless you,” Santa said.
December 25, 1973
The telephone woke him around ten in the morning. He fumbled the extension off the night table, put it to his ear, and an operator said crisply into his sleep, “Will you accept a collect call from Olivia Brenner?”
He was lost and could only fumble, “What? Who? I’m asleep.”
A distant, slightly familiar voice said, “Oh for Chrissake,” and he knew.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll take it.” Had she hung up on him? He got up on one elbow to see. “Olivia? You there?”
“Go ahead, please,” the operator overrode him, not willing to vary her psalm.
“Olivia, are you there?”
“I’m here.” The voice was crackling and distant.
“I’m glad you called.”
“I didn’t think you’d take the call.”
“I just woke up. Are you there? In Las Vegas?”
“Yes,” she said flatly. The word came out with curiously dull authority, like a plank dropped on a cement floor.
“Well, how is it? How are you doing?”
Her sigh was so bitter that it was almost a tearless sob. “Not so good.”
“No?”
“I met a guy my second ... no, third ... night here. Went to a party and got s-o-o-o fucked up—”
“Dope?” he asked cautiously, very aware that this was long distance and the government was everywhere.
“Dope?” she echoed crossly. “Of course it was dope. Bad shit, full of dex or something ... I think I got raped.”
The last trailed off so badly that he had to ask, “What?”
“Raped!”
she screamed, so loudly that the receiver distorted. “That’s when some stupid jock playing Friday night hippie plays hide the salami with you while your brains are somewhere behind you, dripping off the wall! Rape, do you know what rape is?”
“I know,” he said.
“Bullshit, you know.”
“Do you need money?”
“Why ask me that? I can’t fuck you over the telephone. I can’t even hand-job you.”
“I have some money,” he said. “I could send it. That’s all. That’s why.” Instinctively he found himself speaking, not soothingly, but softly, so she would have to slow down and listen.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Do you have an address?”
“General Delivery, that’s my address.”
“You don’t have an apartment?”
“Yeah, me and this other sad sack have got a place. The mailboxes are all broken. Never mind. You keep the money. I’ve got a job. Screw, I think I’m going to quit and come back. Merry Christmas to me.”
“What’s the job?”
“Pushing hamburgers in this fast-food joint. They got slots in the lobby, and people play them and eat hamburgers all night long, can you
believe
it? The last thing you have to do when your shift is over is to wipe off all the handles of the slot machines. They get all covered with mustard and mayo and catsup. And you should see the
people
here. All of them are fat. They’ve either got tans or bums. And if they don’t want to fuck you, you’re just part of the furniture. I’ve had offers from both sexes. Thank God my roomie’s about as sex-oriented as a juniper bush, I ... oh, Christ, why am I telling you all this? I don’t even know why I called you. I’m going to hitch out of here at the end of the week, when I get paid.”
He heard himself say: “Give it a month.”
“What?”
“Don’t go chickenshit. If you leave now you’ll always wonder what you went out there for.”
“Did you play football in high school? I bet you did.”
“I wasn’t even the waterboy.”
“Then you don’t know anything, do you?”
“I’m thinking about killing myself.”
“You don’t even ... what did you say?”
“I’m thinking about killing myself.” He said it calmly. He was no longer thinking about long distance and the people who might monitor long distance just for the fun of it—Ma Bell, the White House, the CIA, the Effa Bee Eye. “I keep trying things and they keep not working. It’s because I’m a little too old for them to work, I think. Something went wrong a few years ago and I knew it was a bad thing but I didn’t know it was bad for me. I thought it just happened and then I was going to get over it. But things keep falling down inside me. I’m sick with it. I keep doing things.”
“Have you got cancer?” she whispered.
“I think I do.”
“You ought to go to a hospital, get—”
“It’s soul cancer.”
“You’re ego-tripping, man.”
“Maybe so,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. One way or the other, things are set and they’ll turn out the way they will. Only one thing that bothers me, and that’s a feeling I get from time to time that I’m a character in some bad writer’s book and he’s already decided how things are going to turn out and why. It’s easier to see things that way, even, than to blame it on God—what did He ever do for me, one way or the other? No, it’s this bad writer, it’s his fault. He cut my son down by writing in a brain tumor. That was chapter one. Suicide or no suicide, that comes just before the epilogue. It’s a stupid story.”
“Listen,” she said, troubled, “if they have one of those Dial Help outfits in your town, maybe you ought to ...”
“They couldn’t do anything for me,” he said, “and it doesn’t matter. I want to help you. For Chrissake look around out there before you go chickenshit. Get off dope, you said you were going to. The next time you look around you’ll be forty and your options will mostly be gone.”
“No, I can’t take this. Some other place—”
“All places are the same unless your mind changes. There’s no magic place to get your mind right. If you feel like shit, everything you see looks like shit. I know that. Newspaper headlines, even the signs I see, they all say yeah, that’s right, Georgie, pull the plug. This eats the bird.”
“Listen—”
“No, no,
you
listen. Dig your ears out. Getting old is like driving through snow that just gets deeper and deeper. When you finally get in over your hubcaps, you just spin and spin. That’s life. There are no plows to come and dig you out. Your ship isn’t going to come in, girl. There are no boats for nobody. You’re never going to win a contest. There’s no camera following you and people watching you struggle. This is
it.
All of it.
Everything.”
“You don’t know what it’s
like
here!” she cried.
“No, but I know what it’s like here.”
“You’re not in charge of my life.”
“I’m going to send you five hundred dollars—Olivia Brenner, c/o General Delivery, Las Vegas.”
“I won’t be here. They’ll send it back.”
“They won’t. Because I’m not going to put on a return address.”
“Throw it away, then.”
“Use it to get a better job.”
“No.”
“Then use it for toilet paper,” he said shortly, and hung up. His hands were shaking.
The phone rang five minutes later. The operator said: “Will you accept—”
“No,” he said, and hung up.
The phone rang twice more that day, but it was not Olivia either time.
Around two in the afternoon Mary called him from Bob and Janet Preston’s house—Bob and Janet, who always reminded him, like it or not, of Fred and Wilma Flintstone. How was he? Good. A lie. What was he doing for Christmas dinner? Going out to Old Customhouse tonight for turkey with all the trimmings. A lie. Would he like to come over here instead? Janet had all kinds of leftovers and would be happy to get rid of some. No, he really wasn’t very hungry at the minute. The truth. He was pretty well looped, and on the spur of the moment he told her he would come to Walter’s party. She sounded pleased. Did he know it was BYOB? When did Wally Hamner have a party that wasn’t? he asked, and she laughed. They hung up and he went back to sit in front of the TV with a drink.
The phone rang again around seven-thirty, and by that time he was nothing as polite as looped—he was pissy-assed drunk.
“Lo?”
“Dawes?”
“Dozz here; whozzere?”
“Magliore, Dawes. Sal Magliore.”
He blinked and peered into his glass. He looked at the Zenith color TV, where he had been watching a movie called
Home for the Holidays.
It was about a family that had gathered at their dying patriarch’s house on Christmas Eve and somebody was murdering them one by one. Very Christmasy.
“Mr. Magliore,” he said, pronouncing carefully. “Merry Christmas, sir! And the best of everything in the new year!”
“Oh, if you only knew how I dread ‘74,” Magliore said dolefully. “That’s the year the oil barons are going to take over the country, Dawes. You see if they don’t. Look at my sales sheet for December if you don’t believe me. I sold a 1971 Chevy Impala the other day, this car is clean as a whistle, and I sold it for a thousand bucks. A
thousand bucks!
Do you believe that? A forty-five-percent knockdown in one year. But I can sell all the ’71 Vegas I can get my hands on for fifteen, sixteen hundred bucks. And what are they, I ask you?”
“Little cars?” he asked cautiously.
“They’re fucking Maxwell House coffee cans, that’s what they are!” Magliore shouted. “Saltine boxes on wheels! Every time you look at the goddam things cross-eyed and say booga-booga at them the engine’s outa tune or the exhaust system drops off or the steering linkage is gone. Pintos, Vegas, Gremlins, they’re all the same, little suicide boxes. So I’m selling those as fast as I can get them and I can’t move a nice Chevy Impala unless I fuckin’ give it away. And you say happy new year. Jesus! Mary! Joseph the carpenter!”
“That’s seasonal,” he said.
“I didn’t call about that anyway,” Magliore answered. “I called to say congratulations.”
“Congratuwhatchens?” He was honestly bewildered.
“You know. Crackle-crackle boom-boom.”
“Oh, you mean—”
“Sssst. Not on the phone. Be cool, Dawes.”
“Sure. Crackle-crackle boom-boom. That’s good.” He cackled.
“It was you, wasn’t it, Dawes?”
“To you I wouldn’t admit my middle name.”
Magliore roared. “That’s good.
You’re
good, Dawes. You’re a fruitcake, but you’re a clever fruitcake. I admire that.”
“Thanks,” he said, and cleverly knocked back the rest of his drink.
“I also wanted to tell you that everything was going ahead on schedule down there. Rumble and roar.”
“What?”
The glass he was holding fell from his fingers and rolled across the rug.
“They’ve got seconds on all that stuff, Dawes. Thirds on most of it. They’re paying cash until they got their bookwork straightened out, but everything is right-on.”
“You’re crazy.”
“No. I thought you ought to know. I told you, Dawes. Some things you can’t get rid of.”
“You’re a bastard. You’re lying. Why do you want to call a man up on Christmas night and tell him lies?”
“I ain’t lying. It’s your play again, Dawes. In this game, it’s
always
gonna be your play.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You poor son of a bitch,” Magliore said. He sounded honestly sorry and that was the worst part. “I don’t think it’s gonna be a very happy new year for you either.” He hung up.
And that was Christmas.
December 26, 1973
There was a letter from
them
in the mail (he had begun to see the anonymous people downtown that way, the personal pronoun in italics and printed in drippy, ominous letters like the printing on a horror movie poster), as if to confirm what Magliore had said.
He held it in his hand, looking down at the crisp white business envelope, his mind filled with almost all the bad emotions the human mind can feel: Despair, hatred, fear, anger, loss. He almost tore it into small pieces and threw it into the snow beside the house, and then knew he couldn’t do that. He opened it, nearly tearing the envelope in half, and realized that what he felt most was cheated. He had been gypped. He had been rooked. He had destroyed their machines and their records, and they had just brought up a few replacements. It was like trying to fight the Chinese Army singlehanded.
It’s your play again, Dawes. In this game it’s always gonna be your play.
The other letters had been form jobs, sent from the office of the highway department. Dear Friend,
a
big
crane is going to come to your house sometime soon. Be on the lookout for this exciting event as WE IMPROVE YOUR CITY!
This was from the city council, and it was personal. It said:
December 20, 1973
Mr. Barton G. Dawes 1241 Crestallen Street West M—, W—
Dear Mr. Dawes:
It has come to our attention that you are the last resident of Crestallen Street West who has not relocated. We trust that you are experiencing no undue problems in this matter. While we have a 19642-A form on file (acknowledgment of information concerning City Roads Project 6983-426- 73-74-HC), we do not yet have your relocation form (6983-426-73-74-HC-9004, blue folder). As you know, we cannot begin processing your check of reimbursement without this form. According to our 1973 tax assessment, the property at 1241 Crestallen Street West has been valued at $63,500, and so we are sure that you must be as aware of the situation’s urgency as we are. By law, you must relocate by January 20, 1974, the date that demolitions work is scheduled to begin on Crestallen Street West.
We must also point out again that according to the State Statute of Eminent Domain (S.L. 19452- 36), you would be in violation of the law to remain in your present location past midnight of January 19, 1974. We are sure you understand this, but we are pointing it out once more so that the record will be clear.
If you are having some problem with relocation, I hope you will call me during business hours, or better yet, stop by and discuss the situation. I am sure that things can be worked out; you will find us more than eager to cooperate in this matter. In the meantime, may I wish you a Merry Christmas and a most productive New Year?
Sincerely,
For the City Council
JTG/tk