Roadwork (32 page)

He took the TV dinner out and ate it. He wandered around the house, looking at things. He began to have an idea.

 

At three o’clock he called Fenner and told him to send out the form. He would sign it if Fenner took care of the two items they had discussed. Fenner sounded very pleased, even relieved. He said he would be glad to take care of things, and would see he had a form tomorrow. Fenner said he was glad he had decided to be sensible.

“There are a couple of conditions,” he said.

“Conditions,” Fenner replied, and sounded instantly wary.

“Don’t get excited. It’s nothing you can’t handle.”

“Let’s hear them,” Fenner said. “But I’m warning you, Dawes, you’ve squeezed us for about all you can.”

“You get the form over to the house tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll bring it to your office on Wednesday. I want you to have a check for sixty-eight thousand five hundred dollars waiting for me. A cashier’s check. I’ll trade you the release form for the check.”

“Mr. Dawes, we can’t do business that way—”

“Maybe you’re not supposed to, but you
can.
The same way you’re not supposed to tap my phone and God knows what else. No check, no form. I’ll get the lawyer instead.”

Fenner paused. He could almost hear Fenner thinking.”

“All right. What else?”

“I don’t want to be bothered anymore after Wednesday. On the twentieth, it’s yours. Until then it’s mine.”

“Fine,” Fenner said instantly, because of course that wasn’t a condition at all. The law said the house was his until midnight on the nineteenth, incontrovertibly the city’s property a minute later. If he signed the city’s release form and took the city’s money, he could holler his head off to every newspaper and TV station in town and not get a bit of sympathy.

“That’s all,” he said.

“Good,” Fenner said, sounding extremely happy. “I’m glad we could finally get together on this in a rational way, Mr.—”

“Fuck you,” he said, and hung up.

He wasn’t there when the courier dropped the bulky brown envelope containing form 6983-426-73-74 (blue folder) through his letter slot. He had gone out into darkest Norton to talk to Sal Magliore. Magliore was not overjoyed to see him, but as he talked, Magliore grew more thoughtful.

Lunch was sent in—spaghetti and veal and a bottle of Gallo red. It was a wonderful meal. Magliore held up his hand to stop him when he got to the part about the five-thousand-dollar bribe and Fenner’s knowledge of Olivia. He made a telephone call and spoke briefly to the man on the other end. Magliore gave the man on the other end the Crestallen Street address. “Use the van,” he said and hung up. He twirled more spaghetti onto his fork and nodded across the table for the story to go on.

When he finished, Magliore said: “You’re lucky they weren’t tailing you. You’d be in the box right now.”

He was full to bursting, unable to eat another mouthful. He had not had such a meal in five years. He complimented Magliore, and Magliore smiled.

“Some of my friends, they don’t eat pasta anymore. They got an image to keep up. So they eat at steak houses or places that have French food or Swedish food or something like that. They got the ulcers to prove it. Why ulcers? Because you can’t change what you are.” He was pouring spaghetti sauce out of the grease-stained cardboard takeout bucket the spaghetti had come in. He began to mop it up with crusts of garlic bread, stopped, looked across the table with those strange, magnified eyes and said: “You’re asking me to help you commit a mortal sin.”

He looked at Magliore blankly, unable to hide his surprise.

Magliore laughed crossly. “I know what you’re thinkin’. A man in my business is the wrong guy to talk about sin. I already told you that I had one guy knocked off. More than one guy, too. But I never killed anyone that didn’t deserve to be killed. And I look at it this way: a guy who dies before God planned him to die, it’s like a rain-out at the ball park. The sins that guy committed, they don’t count. God has got to let ’em in because they didn’t have all the time to repent He meant them to have. So killing a guy is really sparing him the pain of hell. So in a way, I done more for those guys than the Pope himself could have done. I think God knows that. But this isn’t any of my business. I like you a lot. You got balls. Doing what you did with those gas bombs, that took balls. This, though. This is something different.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything. It’s my own free will.”

Magliore rolled his eyes. “Jesus Mary! Joseph the carpenter! Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

“Because you have what I need.”

“I wish to God I didn’t.”

“Are you going to help me?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve got the money now. Or will have, shortly.”

“It ain’t a matter of money. It’s a matter of principle. I never dealt with a fruitcake like you before. I’ll have to think about it. I’ll call you.”

He decided it would be wrong to press further and left.

 

He was filling out the relocation form when Magliore’s men came. They were driving a white Econoline van with RAY’S TV SALES AND SERVICE written on the side, below a dancing TV with a big grin on its picture tube. There were two men, wearing green fatigues and carrying bulky service cases. The cases contained real TV repair tools and tubes, but they also contained sundry other equipment. They “washed” his house. It took an hour and a half. They found bugs in both phones, one in his bedroom, one in the dining room. None in the garage, which made him feel relieved.

“The bastards,” he said, holding the shiny bugs in his hand. He dropped the bugs to the floor and ground them under his heel.

On the way out, one of the men said, not unadmiringly: “Mister, you really beat the shit out of that TV. How many times did you have to hit it?”

“Only once,” he said.

When they had driven away into the cold late afternoon sunshine, he swept the bugs into a dustpan and dropped their shattered, twinkling remains into the kitchen wastebasket. Then he made himself a drink.

There were only a few people in the bank at 2:30 in the afternoon, and he went directly to one of the tables in the middle of the floor with the city’s cashier’s check. He tore a deposit ticket out of the back of his checkbook and made it out in the sum of $34,250. He went to a teller’s window and presented the ticket and the check.

The teller, a young girl with sin-black hair and a short purple dress, her legs clad in sheer nylon stockings that would have brought the Pope to present arms, looked from the ticket to the check and then back again, puzzled.

“Something wrong with the check?” he asked pleasantly. He had to admit he was enjoying this.

“Nooo, but ... you want to deposit $34,250 and you want $34,250 in cash? Is that it?”

He nodded.

“Just a moment, sir, please.”

He smiled and nodded, keeping a close eye on her legs as she went to the manager’s desk, which was behind a slatted rail but not glassed in, as if to say this man was as human as you or I ... or almost, anyway. The manager was a middle-aged man dressed in young clothes. His face was as narrow as the gate of heaven and when he looked at the teller (telleress?) in the purple dress, he arched his eyebrows.

They discussed the check, the deposit slip, its implications for the bank and possibly for the entire Federal Deposit System. The girl bent over the desk, her skirt rode up in back, revealing a mauve-colored slip with lace on the hem. Love o love o careless love, he thought. Come home with me and we will diddle even unto the end of the age, or until they rip my house down, whichever comes first. The thought made him smile. He had a hard-on... well, a semi, anyway. He looked away from her and glanced around the bank. There was a guard, probably a retired cop, standing impassively between the safe and the front doors. An old lady laboriously signing her blue Social Security check. And a large poster on the left wall which showed a picture of the earth as photographed from outer space, a large blue-green gem set against a field of black. Over the planet, in large letters, was written:

Underneath the planet, in slightly smaller letters:

The pretty teller came back. “I’ll have to give this to you in five hundreds and hundreds,” she said.

“That’s fine.”

She made out a receipt for his deposit and then went into the bank vault. When she came out, she had a small carrying case. She spoke to the guard and he came over with her. The guard looked at him suspiciously.

She counted out three stacks of ten thousand dollars, twenty five-hundred-dollar bills in each stack. She banded each one and then slipped an adding machine notation between the band and the top bill of each stack. In each case the adding machine slip said:

$10,000

She counted out forty-two hundreds, riffling the bills quickly with the pad of her right index finger. On top of these she laid five ten-dollar bills. She banded the bundle and slid in another adding machine slip which said:

$4,250

The four bundles were lined up side by side, and the three of them eyed them suspiciously for a moment, enough money to buy a house, or five Cadillacs, or a Piper Cub airplane, or almost a hundred thousand cartons of cigarettes.

Then she said, a little dubiously: “I can give you a zipper bag—”

“No, this is fine.” He scooped the bundles up and dropped them into his overcoat pockets. The guard watched this cavalier treatment of his
raison d’être
with impassive contempt; the pretty teller seemed fascinated (her salary for five years was disappearing casually into the pockets of this man’s off-the-rack overcoat and it hardly made a bulge); and the manager was looking at him with barely concealed dislike, because a bank was a place where money was supposed to be like God, unseen and reverentially regarded.

“Good ’nough,” he said, stuffing his checkbook down on top of the ten-thousand-dollar bundles. “Take it easy.”

He left and they all looked after him. Then the old woman shuffled up to the pretty teller and presented her Social Security check, properly signed, for payment. The pretty teller gave her two hundred and thirty-five dollars and sixty-three cents.

 

When he got home he put the money in a dusty beer stein on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet. Mary had given the stein to him as a gag present on his birthday, five years ago. He had never particularly cared for it, preferring to drink his beer directly from the bottle. Written on the side of the stein was an emblem showing an Olympic torch and the words:

He put the stein back, now filled with a headier brew, and went upstairs to Charlie’s room, where his desk was. He rummaged through the bottom drawer and found a small manila envelope. He sat down at the desk, added up the new checkbook balance and saw that it came out to $35,053.49. He addressed the manila envelope to Mary, in care of her folks. He slipped the checkbook inside, sealed the envelope, and rummaged in his desk again. He found a half-full book of stamps, and put five eight-centers on the envelope. He regarded it for a moment, and then, below the address, he wrote:

He left the envelope standing on his desk and went into the kitchen to make himself a drink.

It was late in the evening, snowing, and Magliore hadn’t called. He was sitting in the living room with a drink, listening to the stereo because the TV was still
hors de combat.
He had gone out earlier with two ten-dollar bills from the beer stein and had bought four rock and roll albums. One of them was called Let It Bleed by the Rolling Stones. They had been playing it at the party, and he liked it better than the others he had bought, which seemed sort of sappy. One of them, an album by a group called Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, was so sappy that he had broken it over his knee. But
Let It Bleed
was filled with loud, leering, thumping music. It banged and jangled. He liked it a great deal. It reminded him of “Let’s Make a Deal,” which was MC’ed by Monte Hall. Now Mick Jagger was singing.

He had been thinking about the bank poster, showing the whole earth, various and new, with the legend that invited the viewer to GO AWAY. It made him think about the trip he had taken on New Year’s Eve. He had gone away, all right. Far away.

But hadn’t he enjoyed it?

The thought brought him up short.

He had been dragging around for the last two months like a dog whose balls had been caught in a swinging door. But hadn’t there been compensations along the way?

He had done things he never would have done otherwise. The trips on the turnpike, as mindless and free as migration. The girl and the sex, the touch of her breasts so unlike Mary’s. Talking with a man who was a crook. Being accepted finally by that man as a serious person. The illegal exhilaration of throwing the gasoline bombs and the dreamy terror, like drowning, when it seemed the car would not lurch up over the embankment and carry him away. Deep emotions had been excavated from his dry, middle-echelon executive’s soul like the relics of a dark religion from an archaeological dig. He knew what it was to be
alive.

Of course there were bad things. The way he had lost control in Handy Andy’s, shouting at Mary. The gnawing loneliness of those first two weeks alone, alone for the first time in twenty years with only the dreadful, mortal beat of his own heart for company. Being punched by Vinnie—Vinnie Mason of all people! —in the department store. The awful fear hangover the morning after he had firebombed the construction. That lingered most of all.