Roadwork (34 page)

He parked, locked the car, and went inside. There were only two customers, a young black kid in an oversize pea coat who seemed to be dozing, and an old white boozer who was sipping coffee from a thick white porcelain mug. His hands trembled helplessly each time the mug approached his mouth. The boozer’s skin was yellow and when he looked up his eyes were haunted with light, as if the whole man were trapped inside this stinking prison, too deep to get out.

Drake was sitting behind the counter at the rear, next to a two-burner hotplate. One Silex held hot water, the other black coffee. There was a cigar box on the counter with some change in it. There were two signs, crayoned on construction paper. One said:

The other sign said:

Drake looked up from his magazine, a tattered copy of
The National Lampoon.
For a moment his eyes went that peculiar hazy shade of a man snapping his mental fingers for the right name, and then he said: “Mr. Dawes, how are you?”

“Good. Can I get a cup of coffee?”

“Sure can.” He took one of the thick mugs off the second layer of the pyramid behind him and poured. “Milk?”

“Just black.” He gave Drake a quarter and Drake gave him a dime out of the cigar box. “I wanted to thank you for the other night, and I wanted to make a contribution.”

“Nothing to thank me for.”

“Yes there is. That party was what they call a bad scene.”

“Chemicals can do that. Not always, but sometimes. Some boys brought in a friend of theirs last summer who had dropped acid in the city park. The kid went into a screaming fit because he thought the pigeons were coming after him to eat him. Sounds like a
Reader’s Digest
horror story, doesn’t it?”

“The girl who gave me the mescaline said she once plunged a man’s hand out of the drain. She didn’t know afterwards if it really happened or not.”

“Who was she?”

“I really don’t know,” he said truthfully. “Anyway, here.” He put a roll of bills on the counter next to the cigar box. The roll was secured with a rubber band.

Drake frowned at it without touching it.

“Actually it’s for this place,” he said. He was sure Drake knew that, but he needed to plug Drake’s silence.

Drake unfastened the rubber band, holding the bills with his left, manipulating with that oddly scarred right. He put the rubber band aside and counted slowly.

“This is five thousand dollars,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Would you be offended if I asked you where—”

“I got it? No, I wouldn’t be offended. From the sale of my house to this city. They are going to put a road through there.”

“Your wife agrees?”

“My wife has no say in the matter. We are separated. Soon to be divorced. She has her half of the sale to do with as she sees fit.”

“I see.”

Behind them, the old boozer began to hum. It was not a tune; just humming.

Drake poked moodily at the bills with his right forefinger. The corners of the bills were curled up from being rolled. “I can’t take this,” he said finally.

“Why not?”

Drake said: “Don’t you remember what we talked about?”

He did. “I’ve no plans that way.”

“I think you do. A man with his feet planted in this world does not give money away on a whim.”

“This is not a whim,” he said firmly.

Drake looked at him sharply. “What would you call it? A chance acquaintance?”

“Hell, I’ve given money away to people I’ve never seen. Cancer researchers. A Save-the-Child Foundation. A muscular dystrophy hospital in Boston. I’ve never been
in
Boston.”

“Sums this large?”

“No.”

“And cash money, Mr. Dawes. A man who still has a use for money never wants to see it. He cashes checks, signs papers. Even playing nickle-ante poker he uses chips. It makes it symbolic. And in our society a man with no use for money hasn’t much use for living, either.”

“That’s a pretty goddamned materialistic attitude for—”

“A priest? But I’m not that anymore. Not since this happened.” He held up the scarred, wounded hand. “Shall I tell you how I get the money to keep this place on its feet? We came too late for the window-dressing charities like the United Fund or the City Appeal Fund. The people who work here are all retired, old people who don’t understand the kids who come in here, but want to be something besides just a face leaning out of a third-story window watching the street. I’ve got some kids on probation that scout up bands to play for free on Friday and Saturday night, bands that are just starting up and need the exposure. We pass the hat. But mostly the grease comes from rich people, the upper crust. I do tours. I speak at ladies’ teas. I tell them about the kids on bummers and the Sterno freaks that sleep under the viaducts and make newspaper fires to keep from freezing in the winter. I tell them about the fifteen-year-old girl who’d been on the road since 1971 and came in here with big white lice crawling all over her head and her pubic hair. I tell them about all the VD in Norton. I tell them about the fishermen, guys that hang out in the bus terminals looking for boys on the run, offering them jobs as male whores. I tell them about how these young boys end up blowing some guy in a theater men’s room for ten dollars, fifteen if he promises to swallow the come. Fifty percent for him and fifty percent for his pimp. And these women, their eyes go all shocked and then sort of melty and tender, and probably their thighs get all wet and sloppy, but they pony up and that’s the important thing. Sometimes you can latch onto one and get more than a ten-buck contribution. She takes you to her house in Crescent for dinner, introduces you to the family, and gets you to say grace after the maid brings the first course. And you say it, no matter how bad the words taste in your mouth and you rumple the kid’s hair—there’s always one, Dawes, just the one, not like the nasty rabbits down in this part of town that breed a whole tenementful of them—and you say what a fine young man you’ve got here, or what a pretty girl, and if you’re very lucky the lady will have invited some of her bridge buddies or country club buddies to see this sideshow-freak priest, who’s probably a radical and running guns to the Panthers or the Algerian Freedom League, and you do the old Father Brown bit, add a trace of the auld Blarney, and smile until your face hurts. All this is known as shaking the money tree, and it’s all done in the most elegant of surroundings, but going home it feels just like you were down on your knees and eating some AC/DC businessman’s cock in one of the stalls at Cinema 41. But what the hell, that’s my game, part of my ‘penance’ if you’ll pardon the word, but my penance doesn’t include necrophilia. And that, Mr. Dawes, is what I feel you are offering me. And that’s why I have to say no.”

“Penance for what?”

“That,” said Drake with a twisted smile, “is between me and God.”

“Then why pick this method of finance, if it’s so personally repugnant to you? Why don’t you just—”

“I do it this way because it’s the only way. I’m locked in.”

With a sudden, horrible sinking of despair, he realized that Drake had just explained why he had come here, why he had done everything.

“Are you all right, Mr. Dawes? You look—”

“I’m fine. I want to wish you the best of luck. Even if you’re not getting anywhere.”

“I have no illusions,” Drake said, and smiled. “You ought to reconsider ... anything drastic. There are alternatives.”

“Are there?” He smiled back. “Close this place now. Walk out with me and we’ll go into business together. I am making a serious proposal.”

“You’re making sport of me.”

“No,” he said. “Maybe somebody is making sport of both of us.” He turned away, rolling the bills into a short, tight cylinder again. The kid was still sleeping. The old man had put his cup down half empty on the table and was looking at it vacuously. He was still humming. On his way by, he stuffed the roll of bills into the old man’s cup, splashing muddy coffee onto the table. He left quickly and unlocked his car at the curb, expecting Drake to follow him out and remonstrate, perhaps save him. But Drake did not, perhaps expecting him to come back in and save himself.

Instead, he got into his car and drove away.

He went downtown to the Sears store and bought an automobile battery and a pair of jumper cables. Written on the side of the battery were these words, printed in raised plastic:

He went home and put them in the front closet with the wooden crate. He thought of what would happen if the police came here with a search warrant. Guns in the garage, explosives in the living room, a large amount of cash in the kitchen. B. G. Dawes, desperate revolutionary. Secret Agent X-9, in the pay of a foreign cartel too hideous to be mentioned. He had a subscription to
Reader’s Digest,
which was filled with such spy stories, along with an endless series of crusades, anti-smoking, anti-pornography, anti-crime. It was always more frightening when the purported spy was a suburban WASP, one of us. KGB agents in Willamette or Des Moines, passing microdots in the drugstore lending library, plotting violent overthrow of the republic at drive-in movies, eating Big Macs with one tooth hollowed out so as to contain prussic acid.

Yes, a search warrant and they would crucify him. But he was not really afraid anymore. Things seemed to have progressed beyond that point.

“Tell me what you want,” Magliore said wearily.

It was sleeting outside; the afternoon was gray and sad, a day when any city bus lurching out of the gray, membranous weather, spewing up slush in all directions with its huge tires, would seem like a figment of a manic-depressive’s fantasies, when the very act of living seemed slightly psycho.

“My house? My car? My wife? Anything, Dawes. Just leave me alone in my declining years.”

“Look,” he said, embarrassed, “I know I’m being a pest.”

“He knows he’s being a pest,” Magliore told the walls. He raised his hands and then let them fall back to his meaty thighs. “Then why in the name of Christ don’t you
stop
?”

“This is the last thing.”

Magliore rolled his eyes. “This ought to be beautiful,” he told the walls. “What is it?”

He pulled out some bills and said, “There’s eighteen thousand dollars here. Three thousand would be for you. A finder’s fee.”

“Who do you want found?”

“A girl in Las Vegas.”

“The fifteen’s for her?”

“Yes. I’d like you to take it and invest it in whatever operations you run that are good to invest in. And pay her dividends.”

“Legitimate operations?”

“Whatever will pay the best dividends. I trust your judgment.”

“He trusts my judgment,” Magliore informed the walls. “Vegas is a big town, Mr. Dawes. A transient town.”

“Don’t you have connections there?”

“As a matter of fact I do. But if we’re talking about some half-baked hippie girl who may have already cut out for San Francisco or Denver—”

“She goes by the name of Olivia Brenner. And I think she’s still in Las Vegas. She was last working in a fast-food restaurant—”

“Of which there are at least two million in Vegas,” Magliore said. “Jesus! Mary! Joseph the carpenter!”

“She has an apartment with another girl, or at least she did when I talked to her the last time. I don’t know where. She’s about five-eight, darkish hair, green eyes. Good figure. Twenty-one years old. Or so she says.”

“And suppose I can’t locate this marvelous piece of ass?”

“Invest the money and keep the dividends yourself. Call it nuisance pay.”

“How do you know I won’t do that anyway?”

He stood up, leaving the bills on Magliore’s desk. “I guess I don’t. But you have an honest face.”

“Listen,” Magliore said. “I don’t mean to bite your ass. You’re a man who’s already getting his ass bitten. But I don’t like this. It’s like you’re making me executor to your fucking last will and testament.”

“Say no if you have to.”

“No, no, no, you don’t get it. If she’s still in Vegas and going under this Olivia Brenner name I think I can find her and three grand is more than fair. It doesn’t hurt me one way or the other. But you spook me, Dawes. You’re really locked on course.”

“Yes.”

Magliore frowned down at the pictures of himself, his wife, and his children under the glass top of his desk.

“All right,” Magliore said. “This one last time, all right. But no more, Dawes. Absolutely not. If I ever see you again or hear you on the phone, you can forget it. I mean that. I got enough problems of my own without diddling around in yours.”

“I agree to that condition.”

He stuck out his hand, not sure that Magliore would shake it, but Magliore did.

“You make no sense to me,” Magliore said. “Why should I like a guy who makes no sense to me?”

“It’s a senseless world,” he said. “If you doubt it, just think about Mr. Piazzi’s dog.”

“I think about her a lot,” Magliore said.

He took the manila envelope containing the checkbook down to the post office box on the corner and mailed it. That evening he went to see a movie called
The Exorcist
because Max von Sydow was in it and he had always admired Max von Sydow a great deal. In one scene of the movie a little girl puked in a Catholic priest’s face. Some people in the back row cheered.

Mary called on the phone. She sounded absurdly relieved, gay, and that made everything much easier.