Roadwork

PROLOGUE

But Viet Nam was over and the country was getting on.

On this hot August afternoon in 1972, the WHLM Newsmobile was parked near Westgate at the end of the Route 784 expressway. There was a small crowd around a bunting-covered podium that had been hurriedly tossed together; the bunting was thin flesh on a skeleton of naked planks. Behind it, at the top of a grassy embankment, were the highway tollbooths. In front of it, open, marshy land stretched toward the suburban hem of the city’s outskirts.

A young reporter named Dave Albert was doing a series of man-on-the-street interviews while he and his co-workers waited for the mayor and the governor to arrive for the ground-breaking ceremony.

He held the microphone toward an elderly man wearing tinted spectacles.

“Well,” the elderly man said, looking tremulously into the camera, “I think it’s a great thing for the city. We’ve needed this a long time. It’s… a great thing for the city.” He swallowed, aware that his mind was broadcasting echos of itself, helpless to stop, hypnotized by the grinding, Cyclopean eye of posterity. “Great,” he added limply.

“Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.”

“Do you think they’ll use it? On the news tonight?”

Albert flashed a professional, meaningless smile. “Hard to tell, sir. There’s a good chance.”

His sound man pointed up to the tollgate turnaround, where the governor’s Chrysler Imperial had just pulled up, winking and gleaming like a chrome-inlaid eight ball in the summer sunshine. Albert nodded back, held up a single finger. He and the cameraman approached a guy in a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves. The guy was looking moodily at the podium.

“Would you mind stating your opinion of all this, Mr…?”

“Dawes. No, I don’t mind.” His voice was low, pleasant.

“Speed,” the cameraman murmured.

The man in the white shirt said, still pleasantly, “I think it’s a piece of shit.”

The cameraman grimaced. Albert nodded, looking at the man in the white shirt reproachfully, and then made cutting gestures with the first two fingers of his right hand.

The elderly gentleman was looking at this tableau with real horror. Above, up by the tollbooths, the governor was getting out of his Imperial. His green tie was resplendent in the sun.

The man in the white shirt said politely: “Will that be on the six or eleven o’clock news?”

“Ho-ho, fells, you’re a riot,” Albert said sourly, and walked away to catch the governor. The cameraman trailed after him. The man in the white shirt watched the governor as he came carefully down the grassy slope.

Albert met the man in the white shirt again seventeen months later, but since neither of them remembered that they had met before, it might as well have been the first time.