Roadwork

December 5, 1973

He was drinking his private drink, Southern Comfort and Seven-Up, and watching some TV program he didn’t know the name of. The hero of the program was either a plainclothes cop or a private detective, and some guy had hit him over the head. This had made the plainclothes cop (or private detective) decide that he was getting close to something. Before he had a chance to say what, there was a commercial for Gravy Train. The man in the commercial was saying that Gravy Train, when mixed with warm water, made its own gravy. He asked the audience if it didn’t look just like beef stew. To Barton George Dawes it looked just like a loose bowel movement that somebody had done in a red dog dish. The program came back on. The private eye (or plainclothes police detective) was questioning a black bartender who had a police record. The bartender said dig. The bartender said, flake off. The bartender said dude. He was a very hip bartender, all right, but Barton George Dawes thought that the private cop (or plainclothes investigator) had his number.

He was quite drunk, and he was watching television in his shorts and nothing else. The house was hot. He had turned the thermostat to seventy-eight degrees and had left it there ever since Mary left. What energy crisis? Fuck you, Dick. Also the horse you rode in on. Fuck Checkers, too. When he got on the turnpike, he drove at seventy, giving the finger to motorists who honked at him to slow down. The president’s consumer expert, some woman who looked as if she might have been a child star in the 1930s before passing time had turned her into a political hermaphrodite, had been on a public-service program two nights ago, talking about the ways!! You amp; I!! could save electricity around the house. Her name was Virginia Knauer, and she was very big on different ways YOU amp; I could save energy, because this thing was a real bitch and we were all in it together. When the program was over he had gone into the kitchen and turned on the electric blender. Mrs. Knauer had said that blenders were the second-biggest small appliance energy wasters. He had let the blender run on all night and when he got up the next morning-yesterday morning-the motor had burned out. The greatest electricity waster, Mrs. Knauer had said, were those little electric space heaters. He didn’t have an electric space heater, but he had toyed with the idea of getting one so he could run it day and night until it burned up. Possibly, if he was drunk and passed out, it would burn him up, too. That would be the end of the whole silly self-pitying mess.

He poured himself another drink and fell to musing over the old TV programs, the ones they had been running when he and Mary were still practically newlyweds and a brand new RCA console model TV-your ordinary, garden-variety RCA console model black-and-white TV-was something to boggle over. There had been “The Jack Benny Program” and “Amos ‘n Andy,” those original jiveass niggers. There was “Dragnet,” the original “Dragnet” with Ben Alexander for Joe Friday’s partner instead of that new guy, Harry somebody. There had been “Highway Patrol,” with Broderick Crawford growling ten-four into his mike and everybody driving around in Buicks that still had portholes on the side. “Your Show of Shows.” “Your Hit Parade,” with Gisele MacKenzie singing things like “Green Door” and “Stranger in Paradise.” Rock and roll had killed that one. Or how about the quiz shows, how about them? “Tic-Tac-Dough” and “TwentyOne” every Monday night, starring Jack Barry. People going into isolation booths and putting UN-style earphones on their heads to hear fucking incredible questions they had already been briefed on. “The $64,000 Question,” with Hal March. Contestants staggering offstage with their arms full of reference books. “Dotto,” with Jack Narz. And Saturday morning programs like “Annie Oakley,” who was always saving her kid brother Tag from some Christless mess. He had always wondered if that kid was really her bastard. There was “Rin-Tin-Tin,” who operated out of Fort Apache. “Sergeant Preston,” who operated out of the Yukon-sort of a roving assignment, you might say. “Range Rider,” with Jock Mahoney. “Wild Bill Hickok,” with Guy Madison and Andy Devine as Jingles. Mary would say Bart, if people knew you watched all that stuff, they’d think you were feeble. Honestly, a man your age! And he had always replied, I want to be able to talk to my kids, kid. Except there had never been any kids, not really. The first one had been nothing but a dead mess-what was that old joke about putting wheels on miscarriages?-and the second had been Charlie, who it was best not to think of. I’ll be seeing you in my dreams, Charlie. Every night it seemed he and his son got together in one dream or another. Barton George Dawes and Charles Frederick Dawes, reunited by the wonders of the subconscious mind. And here we are, folks, back in Disney World’s newest head trip, Self-Pity Land, where you can take a gondola ride down The Canal of Tears, visit the Museum of Old Snapshots, and go for a ride in The Wonderful NostalgiaMobile, driven by Fred MacMurray. The last stop on your tour is this wonderful replica of Crestallen Street West. It’s right here inside this giant Southern Comfort bottle, preserved for all time. That’s right, madam, just duck your head as you walk into the neck. It’ll widen out soon. And this is the home of Barton George Dawes, the last living resident of Crestallen Street West. Look right in the window here just a second, sonny, I’ll boost you up. That’s George all right, sitting in front of his Zenith color TV in his striped boxer shorts, having a drink and crying. Crying? Of course he’s crying. What else would he be doing in Self-Pity Land? He cries all the time. The flow of his tears is regulated by our WORLD-FAMOUS TEAM OF ENGINEERS. On Mondays he just mists a little, because that’s a slow night. The rest of the week he cries a lot more. On the weekend he goes into overdrive, and on Christmas we may float him right away. I admit he’s a little disgusting, but nontheless, he’s one of SelfPity Land’s most popular inhabitants, right up there with our recreation of King Kong atop the Empire State Building. He-

He threw his drink at the television.

He missed by quite a bit. The glass hit the wall, fell to the floor, and shattered. He burst into fresh tears.

Crying, he thought: Look at me, look at me, Jesus you’re disgusting. You’re such a fucking mess it’s beyond belief. You spoiled your whole life and Mary’s too and you sit here joking about it, you fucking waste. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus-

He was halfway to the telephone before he could stop himself. The night before, drank and crying, he had called Mary and begged her to come back. He had begged until she began to cry and hung up on him. It made him squirm and grin to think of it, that he had done such a Godawful embarrassing thing.

He went on to the kitchen, got the dustpan and the whiskbroom, and went back to the living room. He shut off the TV and swept up the glass. He took it into the kitchen, weaving slightly, and dumped it into the trash. Then he stood there, wondering what to do next.

He could hear the insectile buzz of the refrigerator and it frightened him. He went to bed. And dreamed.

December 6, 1973

It was half past three and he was slamming up the turnpike toward home, doing seventy. The day was clear and hand and bright, the temperature in the low thirties. Every day since Mary had left he went for a long ride on the turnpike-in a way, it had become his surrogate work. It soothed him. When the road was unrolling in front of him, its edges clearly marked by the low early winter snowbanks on either side, he was without thought and at peace. Sometimes he sang along with the radio in a lusty, bellowing voice. Often on these trips he thought he should just keep going, letting way lead on to way, getting gas on the credit card. He would drive south and not stop until he ran out of roads or out of land. Could you drive all the way to the tip of South America? He didn’t know.

But he always came back. He would get off the turnpike, eat hamburgers and French fries in some pickup restaurant, and then drive into the city, arriving at sunset or just past.

He always drove down Stanton Street, parked, and got out to look at whatever progress the 784 extension had made during the day. The construction company had mounted a special platform for rubberneckers-mostly old men and shoppers with an extra minute-and during the day it was always full. They lined up along the railing like clay ducks in a shooting gallery, the cold vapor pluming from their mouths, gawking at the bulldozers and graders and the surveyors with their sextants and tripods. He could cheerfully have shot all of them.

But at night, with the temperatures down in the 20’s, with sunset a bitter orange line in the west and thousands of stars already pricking coldly through the firmament overhead, he could measure the road’s progress alone and undisturbed. The moments he spent there were becoming very important to him-he suspected that in an obscure way, the moments spent on the observation platform were recharging him, keeping him tied to a world of at least half-sanity. In those moments before the evening’s long plunge into drunkenness had begun, before the inevitable urge to call Mary struck, before he began the evening’s activities in Self-Pity-Land he was totally himself, coldly and blinkingly sober. He would curl his hands over the iron pipe and stare down at the construction until his fingers became as unfeeling as the iron itself and it became impossible to tell where the world of himself-the world of human things-ended and the outside world of tractors and cranes and observation platforms began. In those moments there was no need to blubber or pick over the rickrack of the past that jumbled his memory. In those moments he felt his self pulsing warmly in the cold indifference of the early-winter evening, a real person, perhaps still whole.

Now, whipping up the turnpike at seventy, still forty miles away from the Westgate tollbooths, he saw a figure standing in the breakdown land just past exit 16, muffled up in a CPO coat and wearing a black knitted watchcap. The figure was holding up a sign that said (amazingly, in all this snow): LAS VEGAS. And underneath that, defiantly: or BUST!

He slammed on the power brake and felt the seat belt strain a groove in his middle with the swift deceleration, a little exhilarated by the Richard Petty sound of his own squealing tires. He pulled over about twenty yards beyond the figure. It tucked its sign under its arm and ran toward him. Something about the way the figure was running told him the hitchhiker was a girl.

The passenger door opened and she got in.

“Hey, thanks.”

“Sure.” He glanced in the rearview mirror and pulled out, accelerating back to seventy. The road unrolled in front of him again. “A long way to Vegas.”

“It sure is.” She smiled at him, the stock smile for people that told her it was a long way to Vegas, and pulled off her gloves. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“No, go ahead.”

She pulled out a box of Marlboros. “Like one?”

“No, thanks.”

She stuck a cigarette in her mouth, took a box of kitchen matches from her CPO pocket, lit her smoke, took a huge drag and chuffed it out, fogging part of the windshield, put Marlboros and matches away, loosened the dark blue scarf around her neck and said: “I appreciate the ride. It’s cold out there.”

“Were you waiting long?”

“About an hour. The last guy was drunk. Man, I was glad to get out.”

He nodded. “I’ll take you to the end of the turnpike.”

“End?” She looked at him. “You’re going all the way to Chicago?”

“What? Oh, no.” He named his city.

“But the turnpike goes through there.” She pulled a Sunoco road map, dog-eared from much thumbing, from her other coat pocket. “The map says so.”

“Unfold it and look again.”

She did so.

“What color is the part of the turnpike we’re on now?”

“Green.”

“What color is the part going through the city?”

“Dotted green. It’s… oh, Christ! It’s under construction!”

“That’s right. The world-famous 784 extension. Girl, you’ll never get to Las Vegas if you don’t read the key to your map.”

She bent over it, her nose almost touching the paper. Her skin was clear, perhaps normally milky, but now the cold had brought a bloom to her cheeks and forehead. The tip of her nose was red, and a small drop of water hung beside her left nostril. Her hair was clipped short, and not very well. A home job. A pretty chestnut color. Too bad to cut it, worse to cut it badly. What was that Christmas story by O. Henry? “The Gift of the Magi.” Who did you buy a watch chain for, little wanderer?

“The solid green picks up at a place called Landy,” she said. “How far is that from where this part ends?”

“About thirty miles.”

“Oh Christ.”

She puzzled over the map some more. Exit 15 flashed by.

“What’s the bypass road?” she asked finally. “It just looks like a snarl to me.”

“Route 7’s best,” he said. “It’s at the last exit, the one they call Westgate.” He hesitated. “But you’d do better to just hang it up for the night. There’s a Holiday Inn. We won’t get there until almost dark, and you don’t want to try hitching up Route 7 after dark.”

“Why not?” she asked, looking over at him. Her eyes were green and disconcerting; an eye color you read about occasionally but rarely see.

“It’s a city bypass road,” he said, taking charge of the passing lane and roaring past a whole line of vehicles doing fifty. Several of them honked at him angrily. “Four lanes with a little bitty concrete divider between them. Two lanes west toward Landy, two lanes east into the city. Lots of shopping centers and hamburger stands and bowling alleys and all that. Everybody is going in short hops. No one wants to stop.”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “Is there a bus to Landy?”

“There used to be a city bus, but it went bankrupt. I guess there must be a Greyhound-

“Oh, fuck it.” She squidged the map back together and stuffed it into her pocket. She stared at the road, looking put out and worried.

“Can’t afford a motel room?”

“Mister, I’ve got thirteen bucks. I couldn’t rent a doghouse.”

“You can stay at my house if you want,” he said.

“Yeah, and maybe you better let me out right here.”

“Never mind. I withdraw the offer.”

“Besides, what would your wife think?” She looked pointedly at the wedding ring on his finger. It was a look that suggested she thought he might also hang around school play yards after the monitor had gone home for the day.

“My wife and I are separated.”

“Recently?”

“Yes. As of December first.”

“And now you’ve got all these hang-ups that you could use some help with,” she said. There was contempt in her voice but it was an old contempt, not aimed specifically at him. “Especially some help from a young chick.”

“I don’t want to lay anybody,” he said truthfully. “I don’t even think I could get it up.” He realized he had just used two terms that he had never used before a woman in his life, but it seemed all right. Not good or bad but all right, like discussing the weather.

“Is that supposed to be a challenge?” she asked. She drew deeply on her cigarette and exhaled more smoke.

“No,” he said. “I suppose it sounds like a line if you’re looking for lines. I suppose a girl on her own has to be looking for them all the time.”

“This must be part three,” she said. There was still mild contempt and hostility in her tone, but now it was cut with a certain tired amusement. “How did a nice girl like you get in a car like this?”

“Oh, to hell with it,” he said. “You’re impossible.”

“That’s right, I am.” She snuffed her cigarette in his ashtray and then wrinkled her nose. “Look at this. Full of candy wrappers and cellophane and every other kind of shit. Why don’t you get a litterbag?”

“Because I don’t smoke. If you had just called ahead and said, Barton old boy, I intend to be hitching the turnpike today so give me a ride, would you? And by the way, clear the shit out of your ashtray because I intend to smoke-then I would have emptied it. Why don’t you just throw it out the window?”

She was smiling. “You have a nice sense of irony.”

“It’s my sad life.”

“Do you know how long it takes filter tips to biodegrade? Two hundred years, that’s how long. By that time your grandchildren will be dead.”

He shrugged. “You don’t mind me breathing in your used carcinogens, screwing up the cilia in my lungs, but you don’t want to throw a filter tip out into the turnpike. Okay.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Listen, do you want to let me out? Is that it?”

“No,” he said. “Why don’t we just talk about something neutral? The state of the dollar. The state of the Union. The state of Arkansas.”

“I think I’d rather catch a little nap if you don’t mind. It looks like I’m going to be up most of the night.”

“Fine.”

She tilted the watchcap over her eyes, folded her arms, and became still. After a few moments her breathing deepened to long strokes. He looked at her in short snatches, shoplifting an image of her. She was wearing blue jeans, tight, faded, thin. They molded her legs closely enough to let him know that she wasn’t wearing a second pair or long-handles. They were long legs, folded under the dashboard for comfort, and they were probably blushing lobster red now, itching like hell. He started to ask her if her legs itched, and then thought how it would sound. The thought of her hitchhiking all night on Route 7, either getting rides in short hops or not getting rides at all, made him feel uncomfortable. Night, thin pants, temperatures in the 20’s. Well, it was her business. If she got cold enough, she could go in someplace and warm up. No problem.

They passed exits 14 and 13. He stopped looking at her and concentrated on his driving. The speedometer needle stayed pegged at seventy, and he stayed in the passing lane. More cars honked at him. As they passed exit 12, a man in a station wagon which bore a KEEP IT AT 50 bumper sticker honked three times and blipped his lights indignantly. He gave the station wagon the finger.

With her eyes still closed she said: “You’re going too fast. That’s why they’re honking.”

“I know why they’re doing it.”

“But you don’t care.”

“No.”

“Just another concerned citizen,” she intoned, “doing his part to rid America of the energy squeeze.”

“I don’t give a tin weasel about the energy squeeze.”

“So say we; so say we all.”

“I used to drive at fifty-five on the turnpike. No more, no less. That’s where my car got the best mileage. Now I’m protesting the Trained Dog Ethic. Surely you read about it in your sociology courses? Or am I wrong? I took it for granted you were a college kid.”

She sat up. “I was a sociology major for a while. Well, sort of. But I never heard of the Trained Dog Ethic.”

“That’s because I made it up.”

“Oh. April Fool.” Disgust. She slid back down in the seat and tilted the watchcap over her eyes again.

“The Trained Dog Ethic, first advanced by Barton George Dawes in late 1973, fully explains such mysteries as the monetary crisis, inflation, the Viet Nam war, and the current energy crisis. Let us take the energy crisis as an example. The American people are the trained dogs, trained in this case to love oil-guzzling toys. Cars, snowmobiles, large boats, dune buggies, motorcycles, minicycles, campers, and many, many more. In the years 1973 to 1980 we will be trained to hate energy toys. The American people love to be trained. Training makes them wag their tails. Use energy. Don’t use energy. Go pee on the newspaper. I don’t object to saving energy, I object to training.”

He found himself thinking of Mr. Piazzi’s dog, who had first stopped wagging his tail, had then starred rolling his eyes, and had then ripped out Luigi Bronticelli’s throat.

“Like Pavlov’s dogs,” he said. “They were trained to salivate at the sound of a bell. We’ve been trained to salivate when somebody shows us a Bombardier Skidoo with overdrive or a Zenith color TV with a motorized antenna. I have one of those at my house. The TV has a Space Command gadget. You can sit in your chair and change the channels, hike the volume or lower it, turn it on or off. I stuck the gadget in my mouth once and pushed the on button and the TV came right on. The signal went right through my brain and still did the job. Technology is wonderful.”

“You’re crazy,” she said.

“I guess so.” They passed exit 11.

“I think I’ll go to sleep. Tell me when we get to the end.”

“Okay.”

She folded her arms and closed her eyes again.

They passed exit 10.

“It isn’t the Trained Dog Ethic I object to anyway,” he said. “It’s the fact that the masters are mental, moral, and spiritual idiots.”

“You’re trying to soothe your conscience with a lot of rhetoric,” she said with her eyes still closed. “Why don’t you just slow down to fifty? You’ll feel better.”

“I will not feel better.” And he spat it out so vehemently that she sat up and looked at him.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “I lost my wife and my job because either the world has gone crazy or I have. Then I pick up a hitchhiker-a nineteen-year-old kid for Chrissake, the kind that’s supposed to take it for granted that the world’s gone crazy-and she tells me it’s me, the world is doing just fine. Not much oil, but other than that, just fine.”

“I’m twenty-one.”

“Good for you,” he said bitterly. “If the world’s so sane, what’s a kid like you doing hitchhiking to Las Vegas in the middle of winter? Planning to spend the whole night hitchhiking along Route 7 and probably getting frostbite in your legs because you’re not wearing anything under those pants?”

“I am so wearing something underneath! What do you think I am?”

“I think you’re stupid!” he roared at her. “You’re going to freeze your ass off!”

“And then you won’t be able to get a piece of it, right?” she inquired sweetly.

“Oh boy,” he muttered. “Oh boy.”

They roared past a sedan moving at fifty. The sedan beeped at him. “Eat it!” He yelled. “Raw!”

“I think you better let me off right now,” she said quietly.

“Never mind,” he said. “I’m not going to crash us up. Go to sleep.”

She looked at him distrustfully for a long second, then folded her arms and closed her eyes. They went past exit 9.

They passed exit 2 at five after four. The shadows stretching across the road had taken on the peculiar blue cast that is the sole property of winter shadows. Venus was already in the east. The traffic had thickened as they approached the city.

He glanced over toward her and saw she was sitting up, looking out at the hurrying, indifferent automobiles. The car directly in front of them had a Christmas tree lashed to its roof rack. The girl’s green eyes were very wide, and for a moment he fell into them and saw out of them in the perfect empathy that comes to human beings at mercifully infrequent intervals. He saw that all the cars were going to someplace where it was warm, someplace where there was business to transact or friends to greet or a loom of family life to pick up and stitch upon. He saw their indifference to strangers. He understood in a brief, cold instant of comprehension what Thomas Carlyle called the great dead locomotive of the world, rushing on and on.

“We’re almost there?” she asked.

“Fifteen minutes.”

“Listen, if I was hard on you-”

“No, I was hard on you. Listen, I’ve got nothing in particular to do. I’ll take you around to Landy.”

“No-”

“Or I’ll stick you in the Holiday Inn for the night. No strings attached. Merry Christmas and all that.”

“Are you really separated from your wife?”

“Yes.”

“And so recently?”

“Yes.”

“Has she got your kids?”

“We have no kids.” They were coming up on the tollbooths. Their green golights twinkled indifferently in the early twilight.

“Take me home with you, then.”

“I don’t have to do that. I mean, you don’t have to-”

“I’d just as soon be with somebody tonight,” she said. “And I don’t like to hitchhike at night. It’s scary.”

He slid up to a tollbooth and rolled down his window, letting in cold air. He gave the toll taker his card and a dollar ninety. He pulled out slowly. They passed a reflectorized sign that said:

“All right,” he said cautiously. He knew he was probably wrong to keep trying to reassure her-probably achieving just the opposite effect-but he couldn’t seem to help it. “Listen, it’s just that the house is very lonely by myself. We can have supper, and then maybe watch TV and eat popcorn. You can have the upstairs bedroom and I’ll-”

She laughed a little and he glanced at her as they went around the cloverleaf.

But she was hard to see now, a little indistinct. She could have been something he dreamed. The idea bothered him.

“Listen,” she said. “I better tell you this right now. That drunk I was riding with? I spent the night with him. He was going on to Stilson, where you picked me up. That was his price.”

He paused for the red light at the foot of the cloverleaf.

“My roommate told me it would be like that, but I didn’t believe her. I wasn’t going to fuck my way across the country, not me.” She looked at him fleetingly, but he still couldn’t read her face in the gloom. “But it’s not people making you. It’s being so disconnected from everything, like spacewalking. When you come into a big city and think of all the people in there, you want to cry. I don’t know why, but you do. It gets so you’d spend the night picking some guy’s bleeding pimples just to hear him breathe and talk.”

“I don’t care who you’ve been sleeping with,” he said and pulled out into traffic. Automatically he turned onto Grand Street, heading for home past the 784 construction.

“This salesman,” she said. “He’s been married fourteen years. He kept saying that while he was humping me. Fourteen years, Sharon, he keeps saying, fourteen years, fourteen years. He came in about fourteen seconds.” She uttered short bark of laughter, rueful and sad.

“Is that your name? Sharon?”

“No. I guess that was his wife’s name.”

He pulled over to the curb.

“What are you doing?” she asked, instantly distrustful.

“Nothing much,” he said. “This is part of going home. Get out, if you want. I’ll show you something.”

They got out and walked over to the observation platform, now deserted. He laid his bare hands on the cold iron pipe of the railing and looked down. They had been undercoating today, he saw. The last three working days they had put down gravel. Now undercoat. Deserted equipment-trucks and bulldozers and yellow backhoes-stood silently about in the shades of evening like a museum exhibit of dinosaurs. Here we have the vegetarian stegosaurus, the flesh-eating triceratops, the fearsome earth-munching diesel shovel. Bon appetit.

“What do you think of it?” he asked her.

“Am I supposed to think something?” She was fencing, trying to figure this out.

“You must think something,” he said.

She shrugged. “It’s roadwork, so what? They’re building a road in a city I’ll probably never be in again. What am I supposed to think? It’s ugly.”

“Ugly,” he echoed, relieved.

“I grew up in Portland, Maine,” she said. “We lived in a big apartment building and they put this shopping center up across the street-”

“Did they tear anything down to make it?”

“Huh?”

“Did they-”

“Oh. No, it was just a vacant lot with a big field behind it. I was just six or seven. I thought they were going to go on digging and ripping and plowing forever. And all I could think… it’s funny… all I could think was the poor old earth, it’s like they’re giving it an enema and they never asked if it wanted one or if there was something wrong. I had some kind of an intestinal infection that year, and I was the block expert on enemas.

“Oh,” he said.

“We went over one Sunday when they weren’t working and it was a lot like this, very quiet, like a corpse that died in bed. They had part of the foundations laid, and there were all of these yellow metal things sticking out of the cement-”

“Core rods.”

“Whatever. And there was lots of pipe and bundles of wire covered with clear plastic wrap and there was a lot of raw dirt around. Funny to think of it that way, whoever heard of cooked dirt, but that’s how it looked. Just raw. We played hide-and-go-seek around the place and my mother came over and got us and gave me and my sister hell for it. She said little kids can get into bad trouble around construction. My little sister was only four and she cried her head off. Funny to re-member all that. Can we get back in the car now? I’m cold.

“Sure,” he said, and they did.

As they drove on she said: “I never thought they’d have anything out of that place but a mess. Then pretty soon the shopping center was all there. I can remember the day they hot-topped the parking lot. And a few days after that some men came with a little push-wagon and made all the yellow parking lines. Then they had a big party and some hot-shit cut a ribbon and everybody started using it and it was just like they never built it. The name of the big department store was Mammoth Mart, and my mom used to go there a lot. Sometimes when Angie and I were with her I’d think of all those orange rods sticking through the cement down in the basement. It was like a secret thought.”

He nodded. He knew about secret thoughts.

“What does it mean to you?” she asked.

“I’m still trying to figure that out,” he said.

He was going to make TV dinners, but she looked in the freezer and saw the roast and said she’d fix it if he didn’t mind waiting for it to cook.

“Sure,” he said. “I didn’t know how long to cook it or even what temperature.”

“Do you miss your wife?”

“Like hell.”

“Because you don’t know how to cook the roast?” she asked, and he didn’t answer that. She baked potatoes and cooked frozen corn. They ate in the breakfast nook and she ate four thick slices of the roast, two potatoes, and two helpings of the corn.

“I haven’t eaten like that in a year,” she said, lighting a cigarette and looking into her empty plate. “I’ll probably heave my guts.”

“What have you been eating?”

“Animal crackers.”

“What?”

“Animal crackers.”

“I thought that’s what you said.”

“They’re cheap,” she said. “And they fill you up. They’ve got a lot of nutrients and stuff, too. It says so right on the box.”

“Nutrients my ass. You’re getting zits, girl. You’re too old for those. Come here.”

He led her into the dining room and opened Mary’s china cupboard. He took out a silver serving dish and pulled a thick pile of paper money out of it. Her eyes widened.

“Who’d you off, mister?”

“I offed my insurance policy. Here. Here’s two hundred bucks. Eat on it.”

But she didn’t touch the money. “You’re nuts,” she said. “What do you think I’m going to do to you for two hundred dollars?”

“Nothing.”

She laughed.

“All right.” He put the money on the sideboard and put the silver serving dish back into the cupboard. “If you don’t take it with you in the morning, I’ll flush it down the john.” But he didn’t think he would.

She looked into his face. “You know, I think you would.”

He said nothing.

“We’ll see,” she said. “In the morning.”

“In the morning,” he echoed.

He was watching “To Tell the Truth” on the television. Two of the contestants were lying about being the world’s champion female bronc rider, and one was telling the truth. The panel, which included Soupy Sales, Bill Cullen, Arlene Dahl, and Kitty Carlisle, had to guess which one was telling the truth. Garry Moore, television’s only three-hundred-year-old game show host, smiled and cracked jokes and dinged a bell when each panelist’s time was up.

The girl was looking out the window. “Hey,” she said. “Who lives on this street, anyway? All the houses look dark.”

“Me and the Dankmans,” he said. “And the Dankmans are moving out January fifth.”

“Why?”

“The road,” he said. “Would you like a drink?”

“What do you mean, the road?”

“It’s coming through here,” he said. “This house is going to be somewhere in the middle of the median strip, as near as I can figure.”

“That’s why you showed me the construction?”

“I guess so. I used to work for a laundry about two miles from here. The Blue Ribbon. It’s going through there, too.”

“That’s why you lost your job? Because the laundry was closing?”

“Not exactly. I was supposed to sign an option on a new plant in a suburb called Waterford and I didn’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“I couldn’t bear to,” he said simply. “You want a drink?”

“You don’t have to get me drunk,” she said.

“Oh, Christ,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Your mind runs on just one track, doesn’t it?”

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.

“Screwdrivers are about the only drinks I like. Do you have vodka and orange juice?”

“Yes.”

“No pot, I guess.”

“No, I’ve never used it.”

He went out into the kitchen and made her a screwdriver. He mixed himself a Comfort and Seven-Up and took them back into the living room. She was playing with the Space Command gadget, and the TV switched from channel to channel, displaying its seven-thirty wares: “To Tell the Truth,” snow, “What’s My Line,” “I Dream of Jeannie,” “Gilligan’s Island,” snow, “I Love Lucy,” snow, snow, Julia Child making something with avocados that looked a little like dog whoop, “The New Price Is Right,” snow, and then back to Garry Moore, who was daring the panel to discover which of the three contestants was the real author of a book about what it was like to be lost for a month in the forests of Saskatchewan.

He gave her her drink.

“Did you eat beetles, number two?” Kitty Carlisle asked.

“What’s the matter with you people?” the girl asked. “No ’star Trek.' Are you heathens?”

“They run it at four o’clock on channel eight,” he said.

“Do you watch it?”

“Sometimes. My wife always watches Merv Griffin.”

“I didn’t see any beetles,” number two said. “If I’d seen any, I would have eaten them.” The audience laughed heartily.

“Why did she move out? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” She looked at him warily, as if the price of his confession might be tiresomely high.

“The same reason I got fired off my job,” he said, sitting down.

“Because you didn’t buy that plant?”

“No. Because I didn’t buy a new house.”

“I voted for number two,” Soupy Sales said, “because he looks like he’d eat a beetle if he saw one.” The audience laughed heartily.

“Didn’t… wow. Oh, wow.” She looked at him over her drink without blinking. The expression in her eyes seemed to be a mixture of awe, admiration, and terror. “Where are you going to go?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re not working?”

“No.”

“What do you do all day?”

“I ride on the turnpike.”

“And watch TV at night?”

“And drink. Sometimes I make popcorn. I’m going to make popcorn later on tonight.”

“I don’t eat popcorn.”

“Then I’ll eat it.”

She punched the off button on the Space Command gadget (he sometimes thought of it as a “module” because today you were encouraged to think of everything that zapped on and off as a module) and the picture on the Zenith twinkled down to a bright dot and then winked out.

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” she said. “You threw your wife and your job down the drain-”

“But not necessarily in that order.”

“Whatever. You threw them away over this road. Is that right?”

He looked at the blank TV uncomfortably. Even though he rarely followed what was happening on it very closely, it made him uncomfortable to have it off. “I don’t know if it is or not,” he said. “You can’t always understand something just because you did it.”

“Was it a protest?”

“I don’t know. If you’re protesting something, it’s because you think something else would be better. All those people protested the war because they thought peace would be better. People protest drug laws because they think other drug laws would be fairer or more fun or less harm or… I don’t know. Why don’t you turn the TV on?”

“In a minute.” He noticed again how green her eyes were, intent, catlike. “Is it because you hate the road? The technological society it represents? The dehumanizing effect of-”

“No, he said. It was so difficult to be honest, and he wondered why he was even bothering when a lie would end the discussion so much more quickly and neatly. She was like the rest of the kids, like Vinnie, like the people who thought education was truth: she wanted propaganda, complete with charts, not an answer. “I’ve seen them building roads and buildings all my life. I never even thought about it, except it was a pain in the ass to use a detour or have to cross the street because the sidewalk was ripped up or the construction company was using a wrecking ball.”

“But when it hit home… to your house and your job, you said no.”

“I said no all right.” But he wasn’t sure what he had said no to. Or had he said yes? Yes, finally yes to some destructive impulse that had been part of him all along, as much a built in self-destruct mechanism as Charlie’s tumor? He found himself wishing Freddy would come around. Freddy could tell her what she wanted to hear. But Fred had been playing it cool.

“You’re either crazy or really remarkable,” she said.

“People are only remarkable in books,” he said. “Let’s have the TV.”

She turned it on. He let her pick the show.

“What are you drinking?”

It was quarter of nine. He was tipsy, but not as drunk as he would have been by now alone. He was making popcorn in the kitchen. He liked to watch it pop in the tempered glass popper, rising and rising like snow that had sprung up from the ground rather than come down from the sky.

“Southern Comfort and Seven-Up,” he said.

“What?”

He chuckled, embarrassed.

“Can I try one?” She showed him her empty glass and grinned. It was the first completely unselfconscious expression she had shown him since he had picked her up. “You make a lousy screwdriver.”

“I know,” he said. “Comfort and Seven-Up is my private drink. In public I stick to scotch. Hate scotch.”

The popcorn was done, and he poured it into a large plastic bowl.

“Can I have one?”

“Sure.”

He mixed her a Comfort and Seven-Up, then poured a melted stick of butter over the popcorn.

“That’s going to put a lot of cholesterol in your bloodstream,” she said, leaning in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room. She sipped her drink. “Hey, I like this.”

“Sure you do. Keep it a secret and you’ll always be one up.”

He salted the popcorn.

“That cholesterol clogs up your heart,” she said. “The passageways for the blood get smaller and smaller and then one day… graaag!” She clutched dramatically at her bosom and spilled some of her drink on her sweater.

“I metabolize it all away,” he told her, and went through the doorway. He brushed her breast (primly bra-ed, by the feel) on the way by. It felt a way Mary’s breast hadn’t felt in years. It was maybe not such a good way to think.

She ate most of the popcorn.

She started to yawn during the eleven o’clock news, which was mostly about the energy crisis and the White House tapes.

“Go on upstairs,” he said. “Go to bed.”

She gave him a look.

He said, “We’re going to get along good if you stop looking like somebody goosed you every time the word 'bed' comes up. The primary purpose of the Great American Bed is sleeping, not intercoursing.”

That made her smile.

“You don’t even want to turn down the sheets?”

“You’re a big girl.”

She looked at him calmly. “You can come up with me if you want,” she said. “I decided that an hour ago.”

“No… but you don’t have any idea how attractive the invitation is. I’ve only slept with three women in my entire life, and the first two were so long ago I can hardly remember them. Before I was married.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Not at all.”

“Listen, it wouldn’t be just because you gave me a ride or let me sleep over or anything like that. Or the money you offered.”

“It’s good of you to say that,” he said, and got up. “You better go up now.” But she didn’t follow his suit. “You ought to know why you’re not doing it.” “I should?”

“Yes. If you do things and can’t explain them-like you said-that might be okay because they still get done. But if you decide not to, you ought to know why.”

“All right,” he said. He nodded toward the dining room, where the money still lay in the silver dish. “It’s the money. You’re too young to be off whoring.”

“I won’t take it,” she said promptly.

“I know you won’t. That’s why I won’t. I want you to take it.”

“Because everybody isn’t as nice as you?”

“That’s right.” He looked at her challengingly.

She shook her head in an exasperated way and stood up. “All right. But you’re a bourgeois, you know that?”

“Yes.”

She came over and kissed him on the mouth. It was exciting. He could smell her, and the smell was nice. He was almost instantly hard.

“Go on,” he said.

“If you reconsider during the night-”

“I won’t.” He watched her go to the stairs, her feet bare. “Hey?”

She turned, her eyebrows raised.

“What’s your name?”

“Olivia, if it matters. Stupid, isn’t it? Like Olivia DeHaviland.”

“No, it’s okay. I like it. Night, Olivia.”

“Night.”

She went up. He heard the light click on, the way he had always heard it when Mary went up before him. If he listened closely, he might be able to hear the quietly maddening sound of her sweater against her skin as she pulled it over her head, or the snap of the catch that held her jeans nipped in to her waist…”

Using the Space Command module, he turned on the TV.

His penis was still fully erect, uncomfortable. It bulged against the crotch of his pants, what Mary had sometimes called the rock of ages and sometimes the snake-that-turned-to-stone in their younger days, when bed was nothing but another playground sport. He pulled at the folds of his underwear and when it didn’t go down, he stood up. After a while the erection wilted and he sat down again.

When the news was over, a movie came on-John Agar in Brain from Planet Arous. He fell asleep sitting in front of the TV with the Space Command module still clasped loosely in one hand. A few minutes later there was a stirring beneath the fly of his pants as his erection returned, stealthily, like a murderer revisiting the scene of an ancient crime.

December 7, 1973

But he did go to her in the night.

The dream of Mr. Piazzi’s dog came to him, and this time he knew the boy approaching the dog was Charlie before the bitch struck. That made it worse and when Mr. Piazzi’s dog lunged, he struggled up from sleep like a man clawing his way out of a shallow, sandy grave.

He clawed at the air, not awake but not asleep either, and he lost his sense of balance on the couch, where he had finally curled up. He tottered miserably on the edge of balance for a moment, disoriented, terrified for his dead son who died over and over again in his dreams.

He fell onto the floor, banging his head and hurting his shoulder, and came awake enough to know he was in his own living room and that the dream was over. The reality was miserable, but not actively terrifying.

What was he doing? A sort of gestalt reality of what he had done to his life came to him, a hideous overview. He had ripped it right down the middle, like a cheap piece of cloth. Nothing was right anymore. He was hurting. He could taste stale Southern Comfort in the back of his throat, and he burped up some acid-tasting sour stuff and swallowed it back.

He began to shiver and seized his knees in a futile effort to stop it. In the night everything was strange. What was he doing, sitting on the floor of his living room and holding his knees and shaking like an old drunk in an alley? Or like a catatonic, a fucking psycho, that was more like it. Was that it? Was he a psycho? Nothing sort of funny and whimsical like a fruitcake or a dork or a rubber crutch but an out-and-out psycho? The thought dumped him into fresh terror. Had he gone to a hoodlum in an effort to get explosives? Was he really hiding two guns out in the garage, one of them big enough to kill an elephant? A little whining noise came out of his throat and he got up tentatively, his bones creaking like those of a very old man.

He went up the stairs without allowing himself to think, and stepped into his bedroom. “Olivia?” he whispered. This was preposterous, like an old-time Rudolph Valentino movie. “Are you awake?”

“Yes,” she said. She didn’t even sound sleepy. “The clock was keeping me awake. That digital clock. It kept going click. I pulled the plug.”

“That’s all right,” he said. It was a ludicrous thing to say. “I had a bad dream.” The sound of covers being thrown back. “Come on. Get in with me.”

“I-”

“Will you shut up?”

He got in with her. She was naked. They made love. Then slept.

In the morning, the temperature was only 10 degrees. She asked him if he got a newspaper.

“We used to,” he said. “Kenny Upslinger delivered it. His family moved to Iowa.”

“Iowa, yet,” she said, and turned on the radio. A man was giving the weather. Clear and cold.

“Would you like a fried egg?”

“Two, if you’ve got them.”

“Sure. Listen, about last night-”

“Never mind last night. I came. That’s very rare for me. I enjoyed it.”

He felt a certain sneaking pride, maybe what she had wanted him to feel. He fried the eggs. Two for her, two for him. Toast and coffee. She drank three cups with cream and sugar.

“So what are you going to do?” she asked him when they had both finished.

“Take you out to the highway,” he said promptly.

She made an impatient gesture. “Not that. About your life.”

He grinned. “That sounds serious.”

“Not for me,” she said. “For you.”

“I haven’t thought about it,” he said. “You know, before”-he accented the word before slightly to indicate all of his life and all of its parts he had sailed off the edge of the world-“before the ax fell, I think I must have felt the way some condemned man feels in the death house. Nothing seemed real. It seemed I was living in a glass dream that would go on and on. Now everything seems real. Last night… that was very real.”

I’m glad,” she said, and she looked glad. “But what will you do now?”

“I really don’t know.”

She said: “I think that’s sad.”

“Is it?” he asked. It was a real question.

They were in the car again, driving Route 7 toward Landy. The traffic near the city was stop and go. People were on their way to work. When they passed the construction on the 784 extension, the day’s operation was already cranking up. Men in yellow hi-impact plastic construction hats and green rubber boots were climbing into their machines, frozen breath pluming from their mouths. The engine of one of the orange city payloaders cranked, cranked, kicked over with a coughing mortar-explosion sound, cranked again, then roared into a choppy idle. The driver gunned it in irregular bursts like the sound of warfare.

“From up here they look like little boys playing trucks in a sandpile,” she said.

Outside the city, traffic smoothed out. She had taken the two hundred dollars with neither embarrassment nor reluctance-with no special eagerness, either. She had slit a small section of the CPO coat’s lining, had put the bills inside, and had then sewed the slit back up with a needle and some blue thread from Mary’s sewing box. She had refused his offer of a ride to the bus station, saying the money would last longer if she went on hitching.

“So what’s a nice girl like you doing in a car like this?” he asked.

“Humh?” She looked at him, bumped out of her own thoughts.

He smiled. “Why you? Why Las Vegas? You’re living in the margins same as me. Give me some background.”

She shrugged. “There isn’t much. I was going to college at the University of New Hampshire, in Durham. That’s near Portsmouth. I was a junior this year. Living off campus. With a guy. We got into a heavy drug thing.”

“You mean like heroin?”

She laughed merrily. “No, I’ve never known anyone who did heroin. Us nice middle-class druggies stick to the hallucinogens. Lysergic acid. Mescaline. Peyote a couple of times, STP a couple of times. Chemicals. I did sixteen or eighteen trips between September and November.”

“What’s it like?” he asked.

“Do you mean, did I have any 'bad trips'?”

“No, I didn’t mean that at all,” he said defensively.

“There were some bad trips, but they all had good parts. And a lot of the good trips had bad parts. Once I decided I had leukemia. That was scary. But mostly they were just strange. I never saw God. I never wanted to commit suicide. I never tried to kill anyone.”

She thought that over for a minute. “Everybody has hyped the shit out of those chemicals. The straights, people like Art Linkletter, say they’ll kill you. The freaks say they’ll open all the doors you need to open. Like you can find a tunnel into the middle of yourself, as if your soul was like the treasure in an H. Rider Haggard novel. Have you ever read him?”

“I read She when I was a kid. Didn’t he write that?”

“Yes. Do you think your soul is like an emerald in the middle of an idol’s forehead?”

“I never thought about it.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I’ll tell you the best and the worst that ever happened to me on chemicals. The best was topping out in the apartment one time and watching the wallpaper. There were all these little round dots on the wallpaper and they turned into snow for me. I sat in the living room and watched a snowstorm on the wall for better than an hour. And after a while, I saw this little girl trudging through the snow. She had a kerchief on her head, a very rough material like burlap, and she was holding it like this-” She made a fist under her chin. “I decided she was going home, and bang! I saw a whole street in there, all covered with snow. She went up the street and then up a walk and into a house. That was the best. Sitting in the apartment and watching wallovision. Except Jeff called it headovision.”

“Was Jeff the guy you were living with?”

“Yes. The worst trip was one time I decided to plunge out the sink. I don’t know why. You get funny ideas sometimes when you’re tripping, except they seem perfectly normal. It seemed like I had to plunge the sink. So I got the plunger and did it… and all this shit came out of the drain. I still don’t know how much of it was real shit and how much was head shit. Coffee grounds. An old piece of shell. Great big hunks of congealed grease. Red stuff that looked like blood. And then the hand. Some guy’s hand.”

“A what?”

“A hand. I called to Jeff and said, Hey, somebody put somebody down the drain. But he had taken off someplace and I was alone. I plunged like hell and finally got the forearm out. The hand was lying on the porcelain, all spotted with coffee grounds, and there was the forearm, going right down the drain. I went into the living room for a minute to see if Jeff had come back, and when I went into the kitchen again, the arm and the hand was gone. It sort of worried me. Sometimes I dream about it.”

“That’s crazy,” he said, slowing down as they crossed a bridge that was under construction.

“Chemicals make you crazy,” she said. “Sometimes that’s a good thing. Mostly it isn’t. Anyway, we were into this heavy drug thing. Have you ever seen one of those drawings of what an atom looks like, with the protons and neutrons and electrons going around?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it was like our apartment was the nucleus and all the people who drifted in and out were the protons and electrons. People coming and going, drifting in and out, all disconnected, like in Manhattan Transfer.”

“I haven’t read that one.”

“You ought to. Jeff always said Dos Passos was the original gonzo journalist. Freaky book. Anyway, some nights we’d be sitting around watching TV with the sound shut off and a record on the stereo, everyone stoned, people balling in the bedroom, maybe, and you wouldn’t even know who the fuck everyone was. You know what I mean?”

Thinking of some of the parties he had wandered drunkenly through, as bemused as Alice in Wonderland, he said that he did.

“So one night there was a Bob Hope special on. And everybody was sitting around all smoked up, laughing like hell at all those old one-liners, all those same stock expressions, all that good-natured kidding of the power-crazies in Washington. Just sitting around the tube like all the mommies and daddies back home and I thought well, that’s what we went through Viet Nam for, so Bob Hope could close the generation gap. It’s just a question of how you’re getting high.”

“But you were too pure for all that.”

“Pure? No, that wasn’t it. But I started to think of the last fifteen years or so like some kind of grotesque Monopoly game. Francis Gary Powers gets shot down in his U-2. Lose one turn. Niggers dispersed by fire hoses in Selma. Go directly to jail. Freedom riders shotgunned in Mississippi, marches, rallies, Lester Maddox with his ax handle, Kennedy getting blown up in Dallas, Viet Nam, more marches, Kent State, student strikes, women’s liberation, and all for what? So a bunch of heads can sit around stoned in a crummy apartment watching Bob Hope? Fuck that. So I decided to split.”

“What about Jeff?”

She shrugged. “He has a scholarship. He’s doing good. He says he’s going to come out next summer, but I won’t look for him until I see him.” There was a peculiar disillusioned expression on her face that probably felt like hardy forebearance on the inside.

“Do you miss him?”

“Every night.”

“Why Vegas? Do you know someone out there?”

“No.”

“It seems like a funny place for an idealist.”

“Is that what you think I am?” She laughed and lit a cigarette. “Maybe. But I don’t think an ideal needs any particular setting. I want to see that city. It’s so different from the rest of the country that it must be good. But I’m not going to gamble. I’m just going to get a job.”

“Then what?”

She blew out smoke and shrugged. They were passing a sign that said:

“Try to get something together,” she said. “I’m not going to put any dope in my head for a long time and I’m going to quit these.” She gestured her cigarette in the air, and it made an accidental circle, as if it knew a different truth. “I’m going to stop pretending my life hasn’t started yet. It has. It’s twenty percent over. I’ve drunk the cream.”

“Look. There’s the turnpike entrance.”

He pulled over to the side.

“What about you, man? What are you going to do?”

Carefully, he said: “See what develops. Keep my options open.”

She said: “You’re not in such hot shape, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“No, I don’t mind.”

“Here. Take this.” She was holding out a small aluminum packet between the first and second fingers of her right hand.

He took it and looked at it. The foil caught the bright morning sun and heliographed darts of light at his eyes. “What is it?”

“Product four synthetic mescaline. The heaviest, cleanest chemical ever made.” She hesitated. “Maybe you should just flush it down the john when you get home. It might fuck you up worse than you are. But it might help. I’ve heard of it.”

“Have you ever seen it?”

She smiled bitterly. “No.”

“Will you do something for me? If you can?”

“If I can.”

“Call me on Christmas day.”

“Why?”

“You’re like a book I haven’t finished. I want to know how a little more of it comes out. Make it a collect call. Here, I’ll write down the number.”

He was fumbling a pen out of his pocket when she said, “No.”

He looked at her, puzzled and hurt. “No?”

“I can get the number from directory assistance if I need it. But maybe it would be best not to.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I like you, but it’s like someone put a hurtin' on you. I can’t explain. It’s like you were going to do something really bonkers.”

“You think I’m a fruitcake,” he heard himself say. “Well, fuck you.”

She got out of the car stiffly. He leaned over. “Olivia-”

“Maybe that’s not my name.”

“Maybe it is. Please call.”

“Be careful with that stuff,” she said, pointing at the little aluminum packet. “You’re space walking, too.”

“Good-bye. Be careful.”

“Careful, what’s that?” The bitter smile again. “Good-bye, Mr. Dawes. Thanks. You’re good in bed, do you mind me saying that? You are. Good-bye.”

She slammed the door closed, crossed Route 7, and stood at the base of the turnpike entrance ramp. He watched her show a thumb to a couple of cars. Neither of them stopped. Then the road was clear and he U-turned, honking once. In the rearview mirror he saw a small facsimile of her wave.

Silly twit, he thought, stuffed full of every strange conceit in the world. Still, when he put his hand out to turn on the radio, the fingers trembled.

He drove back to the city, got on the turnpike, and drove two hundred miles at seventy. Once he almost threw the small aluminum packet out the window. Once he almost took the pill inside. At last he just put it in his coat pocket.

When he got home he felt washed out, empty of emotion. The 784 extension had progressed during the day; in a couple of weeks the laundry would be ready for the wrecking ball. They had already taken out the heavy equipment. Tom Granger had told him about that in an odd, stilted phone conversation three nights ago. When they leveled it he would spend the day watching. He would even pack a bag lunch.

There was a letter for Mary from her brother in Jacksonville. He didn’t know about the split, then. He put it aside absently with some other mail for Mary that he kept forgetting to forward.

He put a TV dinner in the oven and thought about making himself a drink. He decided not to. He wanted to think about his sexual encounter with the girl the night before, relish it, explore its nuances. A few drinks and it would take on the unnatural, fevered color of a bad sex movie-Restless Coeds, ID Required-and he didn’t want to think of her like that.

But it wouldn’t come, not the way he wanted it. He couldn’t remember the precise tight feel of her breasts or the secret taste of her nipples. He knew that the actual friction of intercourse had been more pleasurable with her than with Mary. Olivia had been a snugger fit, and once his penis had popped out of her vagina with an audible sound, like the pop of a champagne cork. But he couldn’t really say what the pleasure had been. Instead of being able to feel it, he wanted to masturbate. The desire disgusted him. Furthermore, his disgust disgusted him. She wasn’t holy, he assured himself as he sat down to eat his TV dinner. Just a tramp on the bum. To Las Vegas, yet. He found himself wishing that he could view the whole incident with Magliore’s jaundiced eye, and that disgusted him most of all.

Later that night he got drunk in spite of all his good intentions, and around ten o’clock the familiar maudlin urge to call Mary rose up in him. He masturbated instead, in front of the TV, and came to climax while an announcer was showing incontrovertibly that Anacin hit and held the highest pain-relief level of any brand.

December 8, 1973

He didn’t go riding Saturday. He wandered uselessly around the house, putting off the thing that had to be done. At last he called the home of his in-laws. Lester and Jean Galloway, Mary’s parents, were both nearing their seventies. On his previous calls, Jean (whom Charlie had always called “Mamma Jean") had answered the telephone, her voice freezing to ice chips when she realized who was on the line. To her, and to Lester also, undoubtedly, he was like some animal that had run amok and bitten her daughter. Now the animal kept calling up, obviously drunk, whining for their girl to come back so he could bite her again.

He heard Mary herself answer, “Hello?” with enough relief so he could talk normally.

“Me, Mary.”

“Oh, Bart. How are you?” Impossible to read her voice.

“Fair.”

“How are the Southern Comfort supplies holding out?”

“Mary, I’m not drinking.”

“Is that a victory?” She sounded cold, and he felt a touch of panic, mostly that his judgment had been impossibly bad. Could someone he had known so long and whom he thought he knew so well be slipping away so easily?

“I guess it is,” he said lamely.

“I understand the laundry had to close down,” she said.

“Probably just temporary.” He had the weird sensation that he was riding in an elevator, conversing uncomfortably with someone who regarded him as a bore.

“That isn’t what Tom Granger’s wife said.” There, accusation at last. Accusation was better than nothing.

“Tom won’t have any problem. The competition uptown has been after him for years. The Brite-Kleen people.”

He thought she sighed. “Why did you call, Bart?”

“I think we ought to get together,” he said carefully. “We have to talk this over, Mary.”

“Do you mean a divorce?” She said it calmly enough, but he thought it was her voice in which he sensed panic now.

“Do you want one?”

“I don’t know what I want.” Her calm fractured and she sounded angry and scared. “I thought everything was fine. I was happy and I thought you were. Now, all at once, that’s all changed.”

“You thought everything was fine,” he repeated. He was suddenly furious with her. “You must have been pretty stupid if you thought that. Did you think I kicked away my job for a practical joke, like a high school senior throwing a cherry bomb into a toilet?”

“Then what is it, Bart? What happened?”

His anger collapsed like a rotten yellow snowbank and he found that there were tears beneath. He fought them grimly, feeling betrayed. This wasn’t supposed to happen sober. When you were sober you should be able to keep fucking control of yourself. But here he was, wanting to spill out everything and sob on her lap like a kid with a busted skate and a skinned knee. But he couldn’t tell her what was wrong because he didn’t precisely know and crying without knowing was too much like it’s-time-for-the-loony-bin stuff.

“I don’t know,” he said finally.

“Charlie?”

Helplessly, he said: “If that was part of it, how could you be so blind to the rest of it?”

“I miss him too, Bart. Still. Every day.”

Resentment again. You’ve got a funny way of showing it, then.

“This is no good,” he said finally. Tears were trickling down his cheeks but he had kept them out of his voice. Gentlemen, I think we’ve got it licked, he thought, and almost cackled. “Not over the phone, I called to suggest lunch on Monday. Handy Andy’s.”

“All right. What time?”

“It doesn’t matter. I can get off work.” The joke fell to the floor and died bloodlessly there.

“One o’clock?” she asked.

“Sure. I’ll get us a table.”

“Reserve one. Don’t just get there at eleven and start drinking.”

“I won’t,” he said humbly, knowing he probably would.

There was a pause. There seemed nothing else to say. Faintly, almost lost in the hum of the open wire, ghostly other voices discussed ghostly other things. Then she said something that surprised him totally.

“Bart, you need to see a psychiatrist.”

“I need a what?”

“Psychiatrist. I know how that sounds, just coming out flat. But I want you to know that whatever we decide, I won’t come back and live with you unless you agree.”

“Good-bye, Mary,” he said slowly. “I’ll see you on Monday.”

“Bart, you need help I can’t give.”

Carefully, inserting the knife as well as he could over two miles of blind wire, he said: “I knew that anyway. Good-bye, Mary.”

He hung up before he could hear the result and caught himself feeling glad. Game, set, and match. He threw a plastic milk pitcher across the room and caught himself feeling glad that he hadn’t thrown something breakable. He opened the cupboard over the sink, yanked out the first two glasses his hands came to, and threw them on the floor. They shattered.

Baby, you fucking baby! he screamed at himself. Why don’t you just hold your fucking breath until you turn fucking BLUE?

He slammed his right fist against the wall to shut out the voice and cried out at the pain. He held his wounded right in his left and stood in the middle of the floor, trembling. When he had himself under control he got a dustpan and the broom and swept the mess up, feeling scared and sullen and hung over.

December 9, 1973

He got on the turnpike, drove a hundred and fifty miles, and then drove back. He didn’t dare drive any farther. It was the first gasless Sunday and all the turnpike pit stops were closed. And he didn’t want to walk. See? He told himself. This is how they get shitbirds like you, Georgie. Fred? Is that really you? To what do I owe the honor of this visit, Freddy? Fuck off, buddy. On the way home he heard this public service ad on the radio:

“So you’re worried about the gasoline shortage and you want to make sure that you and your family aren’t caught short this winter. So now you’re on your way to your neighborhood gas station with a dozen five-gallon cans. But if you’re really worried about your family, you better turn around and go back home. Improper storage of gasoline is dangerous. It’s also illegal, but never mind that for a minute. Consider this: When gasoline fumes mix with the air, they become explosive. And one gallon of gas has the explosive potential of twelve sticks of dynamite. Think about that before you fill those cans. And then think about your family. You see-we want you to live.

“This has been a public service announcement from WLDM. The Music People remind you to leave gasoline storage to the people who are equipped to do it properly.”

He turned off the radio, slowed down to fifty, and pulled back into the cruising lane. “Twelve sticks of dynamite,” he said. “Man, that’s amazing.”

If he had looked into the rearview mirror, he would have seen that he was grinning.

December 10, 1973

He got to Handy Andy’s at just past eleven-thirty and the headwaiter gave him a table beside the stylized batwings that led to the lounge-not a good table, but one of the few empties left as the place filled up for lunch. Handy Andy’s specialized in steaks, chops, and something called the Andyburger, which looked a little like a chef’s salad stuck between a huge sesame seed roll with a toothpick to hold the whole contraption together. Like all big city restaurants within executive walking distance, it went through indefinable cycles of inness and outness. Two months ago he could have come in here at noon and had his pick of tables-three months hence he might be able to do the same. To him, it had always been one of life’s minor mysteries, like the incidents in the books of Charles Fort, or the instinct that always brought the swallows back to Capistrano.

He looked around quickly as he sat down, afraid he would see Vinnie Mason or Steve Ordner or some other laundry executive. But the place was stuffed with strangers. To his left, a young man was trying to persuade his girl that they could afford three days in Sun Valley this February. The rest of the room’s conversation was just soft babble-soothing.

“A drink, sir?” The waiter was at his elbow.

“Scotch-rocks, please,” he said.

“Very good, sir,” the waiter said.

He made the first one last until noon, killed two more by twelve-thirty, and then, just mulishly, he ordered a double. He was just draining it dry when he saw Mary walk in and pause in the door between the foyer and the dining room, looking for him. Heads turned to look at her and he thought: Mary, you ought to thank me-you’re beautiful. He raised his right hand and waved.

She raised her hand in return greeting and came to his table. She was wearing a knee-length wool dress, soft patterned gray. Her hair was braided in a single thick cable that hung down to her shoulder blades, a way he could not recall having seen her wear it (and maybe worn that way for just that reason). It made her look youthful, and he had a sudden guilty flash of Olivia, working beneath him on the bed he and Mary had shared so often.

“Hello, Bart,” she said.

“Hi. You look awful pretty.”

“Thanks.”

“Do you want a drink?”

“No… just an Andyburger. How long have you been here?”

“Oh, not long.”

The lunch crowd had thinned, and his waiter appeared almost at once. “Would you like to order now, sir?”

“Yes. Two Andyburgers. Milk for the lady. Another double for myself.” He glanced at Mary, but her face showed nothing. That was bad. If she had spoken, he would have canceled the double. He hoped he wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom, because he wasn’t sure he could walk straight. That would be a wonderful tidbit to carry back to the old folks at home. Carry me back to Ol' Virginnie. He almost giggled.

“Well, you’re not drunk, but you’re on your way,” she said, and unfolded her napkin on her lap.

“That’s pretty good,” he said. “Did you rehearse it?”

“Bart, let’s not fight.”

“No,” he agreed.

She toyed with her water glass; he picked at his coaster.

“Well?” she said finally.

“Well what?”

“You seemed to have something in mind when you called. Now that you’re full of Dutch courage, what is it?”

“Your cold is better,” he said idiotically, and tore a hole in his coaster without meaning to. He couldn’t tell her what was on the top of his mind: how she seemed to have changed, how she seemed suddenly sophisticated and dangerous, like a cruising secretary who has bartered for a later lunch hour and who would refuse any offer of a drink unless it came from a man inside a four-hundred-dollar suit. And who could tell just by glancing at the cut of the fabric.

“Bart, what are we going to do?”

“I’ll see a psychiatrist if you want me to,” he said, lowering his voice.

“When?”

“Pretty soon.”

“You can make an appointment this afternoon if you want to.”

“I don’t know any shr-any.”

“There’s the Yellow Pages.”

“That seems like a half-assed sort of way to pick a brainpeeker.”

She only looked at him and he looked away, uncomfortable.

“You’re angry with me, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Yeah, well, I’m not working. Fifty dollars an hour seems sort of high for an unemployed fellow.”

“What do you think I’m living on?” she asked sharply. “My folks’ charity. And as you’ll recall, they’re both retired.”

“As I recall, your father’s got enough shares in SOI and Beechcraft to keep the three of you on easy street well into the next century.”

“Bart, that’s not so.” She sounded startled and hurt.

“Bullshit it’s not. They were in Jamaica last winter, Miami the year before that, at the Fountainbleau no less, and Honolulu the year before that. Nobody does that on a retired engineer’s salary. So don’t give me that poorbox routine, Mary-”

“Stop it, Bart. The green’s showing.”

“Not to mention a Cadillac Gran DeVille and a Bonneville station wagon. Not bad. Which one do they use when they go to pick up their food stamps?”

“Stop it!” she hissed at him, her lips drawn back a bit from her small white teeth, her fingers gripping the edge of the table.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

“Lunch is coming.”

The temperature between them cooled a little as the waiter set their Andyburgers and French fries before them, added minuscule dishes of green peas and baby onions, then retired. They ate without speaking for a while, both concentrating on not drooling down their chins or in their laps. I wonder how many marriages the Andyburger has saved? he wondered. Simply by its one providential attribute-when you’re eating one you have to shut up.

She put hers down half-eaten, blotted her mouth with her napkin, and said, “They’re as good as I remember. Bart, do you have any sensible idea at all about what to do?”

“Of course I do,” he said, stung. But he didn’t know what his idea was. If he’d gotten in another double, he might have.

“Do you want a divorce?”

“No,” he said. Something positive seemed to be called for.

“Do you want me to come back?”

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Shall I tell you something, Bart? I’m worried about myself for the first time in twenty years. I’m fending for myself.” She started to take a bite of her Andyburger, then set it down again. “Did you know I almost didn’t marry you? Had that thought ever crossed your mind?”

The surprise on his face seemed to satisfy her.

“I didn’t think it had. I was pregnant, so of course I wanted to marry you. But part of me didn’t. Something kept whispering that it would be the worst mistake of my life. So I roasted myself over a slow fire for three days, throwing up every morning when I woke up, hating you for that, thinking this, that, and the other. Run away. Get an abortion. Have the baby and put it up for adoption. Have the baby and keep it. But I finally decided to do the sensible thing. The sensible thing.” She laughed. “And then lost the baby anyway.”

“Yes, you did,” he muttered, wishing the conversation would turn from this. It was too much like opening a closet and stepping into puke.

“But I was happy with you, Bart.”

“Were you?” he asked automatically. He found he wanted to get away. This wasn’t working. Not for him anyway.

“Yes. But something happens to a woman in marriage that doesn’t happen to a man. Do you remember when you were a child how you never worried about your parents? You just expected them to be there and they were, same as the food and the heat and the clothes.”

“I guess so. Sure.”

“And I went and got my silly self pregnant. And for three days a whole new world opened up around me.” She was leaning forward, her eyes glowing and anxious, and he realized with dawning shock that this recitation was important to her, that it was more than getting together with her childless friends or deciding which pair of slacks to buy in Banberry’s or guessing which celebrities Merv would be chatting with at four-thirty. This was important to her, and had she really gone through twenty years of marriage with only this one important thought? Had she? She had almost said as much. Twenty years, my God. He felt suddenly sick to his stomach. He liked the image of her picking up the empty bottle and waving it at him gleefully from her side of the road so much better.

“I saw myself as an independent person,” she was saying. “An independent person with no one to explain myself to or subordinate myself to. No one around to try and change me, because I knew I could be changed. I was always weak that way. But also no one to fall back on when I was sick or scared or maybe broke. So I did the sensible thing. Like my mother and her mother. Like my friends. I was tired of being a'8ridesmaid and trying to catch the bouquet. So I said yes, which was what you expected and things went on. There were no worries, and when the baby died and when Charlie died there was you. And you were always good to me. I know that, I appreciate that. But it was a sealed environment. I stopped thinking. I thought I was thinking, but I wasn’t. And now it hurts to think. It hues.” She looked at him with bright resentment for a minute, and then it faded. “So I’m asking you to think for me, Bart. What do we do now?”

“I’m going to get a job,” he lied.

“A job.”

“And see a psychiatrist. Mary, things are going to be fine. Honest. I was a little off the beam, but I’m going to get back on. I’m-”

“Do you want me to come home?”

“In a couple of weeks, sure. I just have to get things together a little and-”

“Home? What am I talking about? They’re going to tear it down. What am I talking about, home? Jesus,” she groaned, “what a mess. Why did you have to drag me into such a shitty mess?”

He couldn’t stand her this way. She wasn’t like Mary, not at all. “Maybe they won’t,” he said, taking her hand across the table.” Maybe they won’t tear it down, Mary, they might change their minds, if I go and talk to them, explain the situation, they might just-”

She jerked her hand away. She was looking at him, horrified.

“Bart,” she whispered.

“What-” He broke off, uncertain. What had he been saying? What could he possibly have been saying to make her look so awful?

“You know they’re going to tear it down. You knew it a long time ago. And we’re sitting here, going around and around-”

“No, we’re not,” he said. “We’re not. Really. We’re not. We… we… But what were they doing? He felt unreal.

“Bart, I think I better go now.”

“I’m going to get a job-”

“I’ll talk to you.” She got up hastily, her thigh bumping the edge of the table, making the silverware gossip.

“The psychiatrist, Mary, I promise-”

“Mamma wanted me to go to the store-”

“Then go on!” he shouted at her, and heads turned. “Get out of here, you bitch! You had the best of me and what have I got? A house the city’s going to rip down. Get out of my sight!”

She fled. The room was horribly quiet for what seemed like eternity. Then the talk picked up again. He looked down at his dripping half-eaten hamburger, trembling, afraid he was going to vomit. When he knew he was not, he paid the check and left without looking around.

December 12, 1973

He made out a Christmas list the night before (drunk) and was now downtown filling an abridged version. The completed list had been staggering-over a hundred and twenty names, including every relative near and distant that he and Mary had between them, a great many friends and acquaintances, and at the bottom-God save the queen-Steve Ordner, his wife, and their for Chrissakes maid.

He had pruned most of the names from the list, chuckling bemusedly over some of them, and now strolled slowly past windows filled with Christmas goodies, all to be given in the name of that long-ago Dutch thief who used to slide down people’s chimneys and steal everything they owned. One gloved hand patted a five-hundred dollar roll of ten-dollar bills in his pocket.

He was living on the insurance money, and the first thousand dollars of it had melted away with amazing speed. He estimated that he would be broke by the middle of March at this rate, possibly sooner, but found the thought didn’t bother him at all. The thought of where he might be or what he might be doing in March was as incomprehensible as calculus.

He went into a jewelry store and bought a beaten-silver owl pin for Mary. The owl had coldly flashing diamond chips for eyes. It cost one hundred and fifty dollars, plus tax. The saleslady was effusive. She was sure his wife was going to love it. He smiled. There goes three appointments with Dr. Psycho, Freddy. What do you think about that?

Freddy wasn’t talking.

He went into a large department store and took an escalator up to the toy department, which was dominated by a huge electric train display-green plastic hills honeycombed with tunnels, plastic (rain stations, overpasses, underpasses, switching points, and a Lionel locomotive that bustled through all of it, puffing ribbons of synthetic smoke from its stack and hauling a long line of freight carsBB1.0, SOO LINE, GREAT NORTHERN, GREAT WESTERN, WARNER BROTHERS WARNER BROTHERS??), DIAMOND INTERNATIONAL, SOUTHERN PACIFIC. Young boys and their fathers were standing by the wooden picket fence that surrounded the display, and he felt a warm surge of love for them that was untainted by envy. He felt he could have gone to them, told them of his love for them, his thankfulness for them and the season. He would also have urged them to be careful.

He wandered down an aisle of dolls, and picked one up for each of his three nieces: Chatty Cathy for Tina, Maisie the Acrobat for Cindy, and a Bafiie for Sylvia, who was eleven now. In the next aisle he got a GI Joe for Bill, and after some deliberation, a chess set for Andy. Andy was twelve, an object of some worry in the family. Old Bea from Baltimore had confided in Mary that she kept finding stiff places on Andy’s sheets. Could it be possible? So early? Mary had told Bea that children were getting more precocious every year. Bea said she supposed it was all the milk they drank, and vitamins, but she did wish Andy liked team sports more. Or summer camp. Or horseback riding. Or anything.

Never mind, Andy, he thought, tucking the chess set under his arm. You practice knight’s gambits and queen to rook-4 and beat off under the table if you want to.

There was a huge Santa Claus throne at the front of the toy department. The throne was empty, and a sign was propped on an easel in front of it. The sign said:

Why Not Join Him?

There was a young man in a denim jacket and jeans looking at the throne, his arms full of packages, and when the young man turned around, he saw it was Vinnie Mason.

“Vinnie!” he said.

Vinnie smiled and colored a little, as if he had been caught doing something a bit nasty. “Hello, Bart,” he said, and walked over. There was no embarrassment over shaking hands; their arms were too full of packages.

“Christmas shopping a little?” he asked Vinnie.

“Yeah.” He chuckled. “I brought Sharon and Bobbie-that’s my daughter Roberta-over to look on Saturday. Bobbie’s three now. We wanted to get her picture taken with Santa Claus. You know they do that on Saturdays. Just a buck. But she wouldn’t do it. Cried her head off. Sharon was a little upset.”

“Well, it’s a strange man with a big beard. The little ones get scared sometimes. Maybe she’ll go to him next year.”

“Maybe.” Vinnie smiled briefly.

He smiled back, thinking it was much easier with Vinnie now. He wanted to tell Vinnie not to hate his guts too much. He wanted to tell Vinnie he was sorry if he had fucked up Vinnie’s life. “So what are you doing these days, Vinnie?”

Vinnie absolutely beamed. “You won’t believe this, it’s so good. I’m managing a movie theater. And by next summer I’ll be handling three more.”

“Media Associates?” It was one of the corporation’s companies.

“That’s right. We’re part of the Cinemate Releasing chain. They send in all the movies… proven box-office stuff. But I’m handling the Westfall Cinema completely.”

“They’re going to add on?”

“Yeah, Cinema II and III by next summer. And the Beacon Drive-In, I’ll be handling that, too.”

He hesitated. “Vinnie, you tell me if I’m stepping out of line, but if this Cinemate outfit picks the films and books them, then what exactly do you do?”

“Well, handle the money, of course. And order stuff, that’s very important. Did you know that the candy stand alone can almost pay for one night’s film rental if it’s handled efficiently? Then there’s maintenance and-” He swelled visibly, “and hiring and firing. It’s going to keep me busy. Sharon likes it because she’s a big movie freak, especially Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood. I like it because all of a sudden I jumped from nine thousand to eleven thousand-five.”

He looked at Vinnie dully for a moment, wondering if he should speak. This was Ordner’s prize, then. Good doggie. Here’s the bone.

“Get out of it, Vinnie,” he said. “Get out of it just as quick as you can.”

“What, Bart?” Vinnie’s brow wrinkled in honest puzzlement.

“Do you know what the word 'gofer' means, Vinnie?”

“Gopher? Sure. It’s a little animal that digs holes-”

“No, gofer. G-O-F-E-R.”

“I guess I don’t know that one, Bart. Is it Jewish?”

“No, it’s white-collar. It’s a person who does errands. A glorified office boy. Gofer coffee, gofer Danish, gofer a walk around the block, sonny. Gofer.”

“What are you talking about, Bart? I mean-”

“I mean that Steve Ordner kicked your special case around with the other members of the board-the ones who matter, anyway-and said, Listen, fellas, we’ve got to do something about Vincent Mason, and it’s a delicate sort of case. He warned us that Bart Dawes was riding a rubber bike, and even though Mason didn’t swing quite enough weight to enable us to stop Dawes before he screwed up the waterworks, we owe this Mason something. But of course we can’t give him too much responsibility. And do you know why, Vinnie?”

Vinnie was looking at him resentfully. “I know I don’t have to eat your shit anymore, Bart. I know that.”

He looked at Vinnie earnestly. “I’m not trying to shit you. What you do doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. But Chrissakes, Vinnie, you’re a young man. I don’t want to see him fuck you over this way. The job you’ve got is a short-term plum, a long-term lemon. The toughest decision you’re going to have is when to reorder Buttercup containers and Milky Ways. And Ordner’s going to see that it stays that way as long as you’re with the corporation.”

The Christmas spirit, if that was what it had been, curdled in Vinnie’s eyes. He was clutching his packages tightly enough to make the wrappings crackle, and his eyes were gray with resentment. Picture of a young man who steps out his door whistling, ready for the evening’s heavy date, only to see all four tires on his new sports car have been slashed. And he’s not listening. I could play him tapes and he still wouldn’t believe it.

“As it turned out, you did the responsible thing,” he went on. “I don’t know what people are saying about me now-”

“They’re saying you’re crazy, Bart,” Vinnie said in a thin, hostile voice.

“That word’s as good as any. So you were right. But you were wrong, too. You spilled your guts. They don’t give positions of responsibility to people who spill their guts, not even when they were right to do it, not even when the corporation suffers because of their silence. Those guys on the fortieth floor, Vinnie, they’re like doctors. And they don’t like loose talk any more than doctors like an intern that goes around blowing off about a doctor who muffed an operation because he had too many cocktails at lunch.”

“You’re really determined to mess up my life, aren’t you?” Vinnie asked. “But I don’t work for you anymore, Bart. Go waste your poison on someone else.”

Santa Claus was coming back, a huge bag slung over one shoulder, bellowing wild laughter and trailing small children like parti-colored exhaust.

“Vinnie, Vinnie, don’t be blind. They’re sugar-coating the pill. Sure you’re making eleven-five this year and next year when you pick up the other theaters, they’ll buck you up to maybe fourteen thousand. And there you’ll be twelve years from now, when you can’t buy a lousy Coke for thirty cents. Gofer that new carpeting, gofer that consignment of theater seats, gofer those reels of film that got sent across town by mistake. Do you want to be doing that shit when you’re forty, Vinnie, with nothing to look forward to but a gold watch?”

“Better than what you’re doing.” Vinnie turned away abruptly, almost bumping Santa, who said something that sounded suspiciously like watch where the fuck you’re going.

He went after Vinnie. Something about the set expression on Vinnie’s face convinced him he was getting through, despite the defensive emplacements. God, God, he thought. Let it be.

“Leave me alone, Bart. Get lost.

“Get out of it,” he repeated. “If you wait even until next summer it may be too late. Jobs are going to be tighter than a virgin’s chastity belt if this energy crisis goes into high gear, Vinnie. This may be your last chance. It-”

Vinnie wheeled around. “I’m telling you for the last time, Bart.”

“You’re flushing your future right down the john, Vinnie. Life’s too short for that. What are you going to tell your daughter when-”

Vinnie punched him in the eye. A bolt of white pain flashed up into his head and he staggered backward, arms flying out. The kids who had been following Santa scattered as his packages-dolls, GI Joe, chess set-went flying. He hit a rack of toy telephones, which sprayed across the floor. Somewhere a little girl screamed like a hurt animal and he thought Don’t cry, darling, it’s just dumb old George falling down, I do it frequently around the house these days and someone else jolly old Santa, maybe-was cursing and yelling for the store detective. Then he was on the floor amid the toy telephones, which all came equipped with battery-powered tape loops, and one of them was saying over and over in his ear: “Do you want to go to the circus? Do you want to go to the circus? Do you…”

December 17, 1973

The shrilling of the telephone brought him out of a thin, uneasy afternoon sleep. He had been dreaming that a young scientist had discovered that, by changing the atomic composition of peanuts just a little, America could produce unlimited quantities of low-polluting gasoline. It seemed to make everything all right, personally and nationally, and the tone of the dream was one of burgeoning jubilation. The phone was a sinister counterpoint that grew and grew until the dream split open and let in an unwelcome reality.

He got up from the couch, went to the phone, and fumbled it to his ear. His eye didn’t hurt anymore, but in the hall mirror he could see that it was still colorful.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Bart. Tom.”

“Yeah, Tom. How are you?”

“Fine. Listen, Bart. I thought you’d want to know. They’re demolishing the Blue Ribbon tomorrow.”

His eyes snapped wide. “Tomorrow? It can’t be tomorrow. They… hell, it’s almost Christmas!”

“That’s why.”

“But they’re not up to it yet.”

“It’s the only industrial building left in the way,” Tom said. “They’re going to raze it before they knock off for Christmas.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. They had a news feature on that morning program. ‘City Day.’”

“Are you going to be there?”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “Too much of my life went by inside that pile for me to be able to stay away.”

“Then I guess I’ll see you there.”

“I guess you will.”

He hesitated. “Listen, Tom. I want to apologize. I don’t think they’re going to reopen the Blue Ribbon, in Waterford or anyplace else. If I screwed you up royally-”

“No, I’m not hurting. I’m up at Brite-Kleen, doing maintenance. Shorter hours, better pay. I guess I found the rose in the shitheap.”

“How is it?”

Tom sighed across the wire. “Not so good,” he said. “But I’m past fifty now. It’s hard to change. It would have been the same in Waterford.”

“Tom, about what I did-”

“I don’t want to hear about it, Bart.” Tom sounded uncomfortable. “That’s between you and Mary. Really.”

“Okay.”

“Uh… you getting along good?”

“Sure. I’ve got a couple of things on the line.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” Tom paused so long that the silence on the line became thick, and he was about to thank him for calling and hang up when Tom added: “Steve Ordner called up about you. Called me right up at my house.”

“Is that so? When?”

“Last week. He’s pissed like a bear at you, Bart. He kept asking if any of us had any idea you had been sandbagging the Waterford plant. But it was more than that. He was asking all sorts of other things.”

“Like what?”

“Like did you ever take stuff home, office supplies and stuff like that. Did you ever draw from petty cash without putting in a voucher. Or get your laundry done on the company clock. He even asked me if you had any kind of kickback deal going with the motels.”

“That son of a bitch,” he said wonderingly.

“Like I say, he’s hunting around for a nice raw cob to stick up your pump, Bart. I think he’d like to find a criminal charge he could get you on.”

“He can’t. It’s all in the family. And the family’s broken up now.”

“It broke up a long time ago,” Tom said evenly. “When Ray Tarkington died. I don’t know anyone who’s pissed off at you but Ordner. Those guys downtown… it’s just dollars and cents to them. They don’t know nothing about the laundry business and they don’t care to know.”

He could think of nothing to say.

“Well…” Tom sighed. “I thought you ought to know. And I s'pose you heard about Johnny Walker’s brother.”

“Arnie? No, what about him?”

“Killed himself.”

“What?”

Tom sounded as if he might be sucking back spit through his upper plate. “Ran a hose from the exhaust pipe of his car into the back window and shut everything up. The newsboy found him.”

“Holy God,” he whispered. He thought of Arnie Walker sitting in the hospital waiting room chair and shivered, as if a goose had walked over his grave. “That’s awful.”

“Yeah…” That sucking noise again. “Listen, I’ll be seeing you, Bart.”

“Sure. Thanks for calling.”

“Glad to do it. Bye.”

He hung up slowly, still thinking of Arnie Walker and that funny, whining gasp Arnie had made when the priest hurried in.

Jesus, he had his pyx, did you see it?

“Oh, that’s too bad,” he said to the empty room, and the words fell dead as he uttered them and he went into the kitchen to fix himself a drink.

Suicide.

The word had a hissing trapped sound, like a snake squirming through a small crevice. It slipped between the tongue and the roof of the mouth like a convict on the lam.

Suicide.

His hand trembled as he poured Southern Comfort, and the neck of the bottle chattered against the rim of the glass. Why did he do that, Freddy? They were just a couple of old farts who roomed together. Jesus Christ, why would anybody do that?

But he thought he knew why.

December 18-19, 1973

He got to the laundry around eight in the morning and they didn’t start to tear it down until nine, but even at eight there was quite a gallery on hand, standing in the cold with their hands thrust into their coat pockets and frozen breath pluming from their mouths like comic strip balloons-Tom Granger, Ron Stone, Ethel Diment, the shirt girl who usually got tipsy on her lunch break and then burned the hell out of unsuspecting shirt collars all afternoon, Gracie Floyd and her cousin Maureen, both of whom had worked on the ironer, and ten or fifteen others.

The highway department had put out yellow sawhorses and smudge pots and large orange-and-black signs that said:

The signs would route traffic around the block. The sidewalk that fronted the laundry had been closed off, too.

Tom Granger tipped a finger at him but didn’t come over. The others from the laundry glanced at him curiously and then put their heads together.

A paranoid’s dream, Freddy. Who’ll be the first to trot over and scream j'accuse in my face?

But Fred wasn’t talking.

Around quarter of nine a new ’74 Toyota Corolla pulled up, the ten-day plate still taped in the rear window, and Vinnie Mason got out, resplendent and a little self-conscious in a new camel’s hair overcoat and leather gloves. Vinnie shot him a sour glance that would have bent steel nails out of plumb and then walked over to where Ron Stone was standing with Dave and Pollack.

At ten minutes of nine they brought a crane up the street, the wrecking ball dangling from the top of the gantry like some disembodied Ethiopian teat. The crane was rolling very slowly on its ten chest-high wheels, and the steady, crackling roar of its exhaust beat into the silvery chill of the morning like an artisan’s hammer shaping a sculpture of unknown import.

A man in a yellow hard hat directed it up over the curb and through the parking lot, and he could see the man high up in the cab changing gears and clutching with one blocklike foot. Brown smoke pumped from the crane’s overhead stack.

A weird, diaphanous feeling had been haunting him ever since he had parked the station wagon three blocks over and walked here, a simile that wouldn’t quite connect. Now, watching the crane halt at the base of the long brick plant, just to the left of what had been the loading bays, the sense of it came to him. It was like stepping into the last chapter of an Ellery Queen mystery where all the participants have been gathered so that the mechanics of the crime could be explained and the culprit unmasked. Soon someone-Steve Ordner, most likely-would step out of the crowd, point at him and scream: He’s the one! Bart Dawes! He killed the Blue Ribbon! At which point he would draw his pistol in order to silence his nemesis, only to be riddled with police bullets.

The fancy disturbed him. He looked toward the road to assure himself and felt a sinking-elevator sensation in his belly as he saw Ordner’s bottle-green Delta 88 parked just beyond the yellow barriers, exhaust pluming from the twin tailpipes.

Steve Ordner was looking calmly back at him through the polarized glass.

At that moment the wrecking ball swung through its arc with a low, ratcheting scream, and the small crowd sighed as it struck the brick wall and punched through with a hollow booming noise like detonating cannon fire.

By four that afternoon there was nothing left of the Blue Ribbon but a jumbled pile of brick and glass, through which protruded the shattered main beams like the broken skeleton of some exhumed monster.

What he did later he did with no conscious thought of the future or consequences. He did it in much the same spirit that he had bought the two guns at Harvey’s Gun Shop a month earlier. Only there was no need to use the circuit breaker because Freddy had shut up.

He drove to a gas station and filled up the LTD with hi-test. Clouds had come in over the city during the day, and the radio was forecasting a storm-six to ten inches of new snow. He drove back home, parked the station wagon in the garage, and went down cellar.

Under the stairs there were two large cartons of returnable soda and beer bottles, the top layer covered with a thick patina of dust. Some of the bottles probably went back five years. Even Mary had forgotten about them in the last year or so and had given up pestering him about taking them back for the refund. Most of the stores didn’t even accept returnables now. Use them once, throw them away. What the hell.

He stacked the two cartons one on top of the other and carted them out to the garage. When he went back to the kitchen to get a knife, a funnel, and Mary’s floor-washing pail, it had begun to spit snow.

He turned on the garage light and took the green plastic garden hose off its nail, where it had been looped since the third week of September. He cut off the nozzle and it fell to the cement floor with a meaningless clink. He paid out three feet and cut it again. He kicked the rest away and looked at the length of hose thoughtfully for a moment. Then he unscrewed his gas cap and slipped the hose gently in, like a delicate lover.

He had seen gas siphoned before, knew the principle, but had never done it himself. He steeled himself for the taste of gasoline and sucked on the end of the hoselength. For a moment there was nothing but an invisible, glutinous resistance, and then his mouth filled with a liquid so cold and foreign that he had to stifle an impulse to gasp and draw some of it down his throat. He spat it out with a grimace, still tasting it on his tongue like some peculiar death. He tilted the hose over Mary’s floor-bucket, and a stream of pinkish gasoline spurted into the bottom. The flow fell away to a trickle and he thought he would have to go through the ritual again. But then the flow strengthened a bit and remained constant. Gas flowed into the bucket with a sound like urination in a public toilet.

He spat on the floor, rinsed the inside of his mouth with saliva, spat again. Better. It came to him that although he had been using gasoline almost every day of his adult life, he had never been on such intimate terms with it. The only other time he had actually touched it was when he had filled the small tank of his Briggs amp; Stratton lawn mower to the overflow point. He was suddenly glad that this had happened. Even the residual taste in his mouth seemed okay.

He went back into the house while the bucket filled (it was snowing harder now) and got some rags from Mary’s cleaning cupboard under the sink. He took them back into the garage and tore them into long strips, which he laid out on the hood of the LTD.

When the floor-bucket was half full, he switched the hose into the galvanized steel bucket he usually filled with ashes and clinkers to spread in the driveway when the going was icy. While it filled, he put twenty beer and soda bottles in four neat rows and filled each one three-quarters full, using the funnel. When that was done, he pulled the hose out of the gas tank and poured the contents of the steel pail into Mary’s bucket. It filled it almost to the brim.

He stuffed a rag wick into each bottle, plugging the necks completely. He went back to the house, carrying the funnel. The snow filled the earth in slanting, wind-driven lines. The driveway was already white. He put the funnel into the sink and then got the cover that fitted over the top of the bucket from Mary’s cupboard. He took it back to the garage and snapped it securely over the gasoline. He opened the LTD’s tailgate and put the bucket of gasoline inside. He put his Molotov cocktails into one of the cartons, fitting them snugly one against the other so they would stand at attention like good soldiers. He put the carton on the passenger seat up front, within hand’s reach. Then he went back into the house, sat down in his chair, and turned on the Zenith TV with his Space Command module. The “Tuesday Movie of the Week” was on. It was a western, starring David Janssen. He thought David Janssen made a shitty cowboy.

When the movie was over, he watched Marcus Welby treat a disturbed teenager for epilepsy. The disturbed teenager kept falling down in public places. Welby fixed her up. After Marcus came station identification and two ads, one for Miracle Chopper and one for an album containing forty-one spiritual favorites, and then the news. The weather man said it was going to snow all night and most of tomorrow. He urged people to stay home. The roads were treacherous and most snow-removal equipment wouldn’t be able to get out until after 2:00 A.m. High winds were causing the snow to drift and generally, the weatherman hinted, things were going to be an all-around bitch-kitty for the next day or so

After the news, Dick Cavett came on. He watched half an hour of that, and then turned the TV off. So Ordner wanted to get him on something criminal, did he? Well, if he got the LTD stuck after he did it, Ordner would have his wish. Still, he thought his chances were good. The LTD was a heavy car, and there were studded tires on the back wheels.

He put on his coat and hat and gloves in the kitchen entry, and paused for a moment. He went back through the warmly lighted house and looked at it-the kitchen table, the stove, the dining room bureau with the teacups hung from the runner above it, the African violet on the mantel in the living room-he felt a warm surge of love for it, a surge of protectiveness. He thought of the wrecking ball roaring through it, belting the walls down to junk, shattering the windows, vomiting debris over the floors. He wasn’t going to let that happen. Charlie had crawled on these floors, had taken his first steps in the living room, had once fallen down the front stairs and scared the piss out of his fumbling parents. Charlie’s room was now an upstairs study, but it was in there that his son had first felt the headaches and experienced the double vision and smelled those odd aromas, sometimes like roasting pork, sometimes like burning grass, sometimes like pencil shavings. After Charlie had died, almost a hundred people had come to see them, and Mary had served them cake and pie in the living room.

No, Charlie, he thought. Not if I can help it.

He tan the garage door up and saw there was already four inches of snow in the driveway, very powdery and light. He got in the LTD and started it up. He still had over three-quarters of a tank. He let the car warm up, and sitting behind the wheel in the mystic green glow of the dashlights, he fell to thinking about Arnie Walker. Just a length of rubber hose, that wasn’t so bad. It would be like going to sleep. He had read somewhere that carbon monoxide poisoning was like that. It even brought the color up in your cheeks so you looked ruddy and healthy, bursting with life and vitality. It-

He began to shiver, the goose walking back and forth across his grave again, and he turned on the heater. When the car was toasty and the shivering had stopped, he slipped the transmission into reverse and backed out into the snow. He could hear the gasoline sloshing in Mary’s floor-pail, reminding him that he had forgotten something.

He put the car in park again and went back to the house. There was a carton of paper matches in the bureau drawer, and he filled his coat pockets with perhaps twenty folders. Then he went back out.

The streets were very slippery.

There was patch ice under the new snow in places, and once when he braked for a stoplight at the corner of Crestallen and Garner, the LTD slued around almost sideways. When he brought the skid to a stop, his heart was thudding dully against his ribs. This was a crazy thing to be doing, all right. If he got rear-ended with all that gasoline in the back, they could scrape him up with a spoon and bury him in a dog-food box:

Better than suicide. Suicide’s a mortal sin.

Well, that was the Catholics for you. But he didn’t think he would get hit. Traffic had thinned almost to the vanishing point, and he didn’t even see any cops. Probably they were all parked in alleys, cooping.

He turned cautiously onto Kennedy Promenade, which he supposed he would always think of as Dumont Street, which it had been until a special session of the city council had changed it in January of 1964. Dumont/Kennedy Prom ran from Westside all the way downtown, roughly parallel to the 784 construction for almost two miles. He would follow it for a mile, then turn left onto Grand Street. A half mile up, Grand Street became extinct, just like the old Grand Theater itself, might it rest in peace. By next summer Grand Street would be resurrected in the form of an overpass (one of the three he had mentioned to Magliore), but it wouldn’t be the same street. Instead of seeing the theater on your right, you would only be able to see six-or was it eight?-lanes of traffic hurrying by down below. He had absorbed a great deal about the extension from radio, TV, and the daily paper, not through any real conscious effort, but almost by osmosis. Perhaps he had stored the material instinctively, the way a squirrel stores nuts. He knew that the construction companies who had contracted the extension were almost through with the actual roadwork for the winter, but he also knew that they expected to complete all the necessary demolitions (demolitions, there’s a word for you, Fred-but Fred didn’t pick up the gauntlet) within the city limits by the end of February. That included Crestallen Street West. In a way it was ironic. If he and Mary had been located a mile farther away, they would not have been liable to demolition until late in the spring-May or early June of 1974. And if wishes were horses, beggars would sit astride golden palominos. He also knew, from personal conscious observation, that most of the road machinery was left parked below the point where Grand Street had been murdered.

He turned onto Grand Street now, the rear end of the car trying to wander out from under him. He turned with the skid, jockeying the car, cajoling it with his hands, and it purred on, cutting through snow that was almost virgin-the tracks of the last car to pass this way were already fuzzy and indistinct. The sight of so much fresh snow somehow made him feel better. It was good to be moving, to be doing.

As he moved up Grand at a steady unhurried twenty-five, his thoughts drifted back to Mary and the concept of sin, mortal and venial. She had been brought up Catholic, had gone to a parochial grammar school, and although she had given up most religious concepts-intellectually, at least-by the time they met, some of the gut stuff had stuck with her, the stuff they sneak to you in the clinches. As Mary herself said, the nuns had given her six coats of varnish and three of wax. After the miscarriage, her mother had sent a priest to the hospital so that she could make a good confession, and Mary had wept at the sight of him. He had been with her when the priest came in, carrying his pyx, and the sound of his wife’s weeping had torn his heart as only one thing had done in the time between then and now.

Once, at his request, she had reeled off a whole list of mortal and venial sins. Although she had learned them in catechism classes twenty, twenty-five, even thirty years before, her list seemed (to him at least) complete and faultless. But there was a matter of interpretation that he couldn’t make clear. Sometimes an act was a mortal sin, sometimes only venial. It seemed to depend on the perpetrator’s frame of mind. The conscious will to do evil. Was that something she had said during those long-ago discussions, or had Freddy whispered it in his ear just now? It puzzled him, worried him. The conscious will to do evil.

In the end, he thought he had isolated the two biggies, the two hard and fast mortal sins: suicide and murder. But a later conversation-had it been with Ron Stone? yes, he believed it had-had even blurred half of that. Sometimes, according to Ron (they had been drinking in a bar, it seemed, as long as ten years ago). murder itself was only a venial sin. Or maybe not a sin at all. If you cold-bloodedly planned to do away with somebody who had raped your wife, that might just be a venial sin. And if you killed somebody in a just war-those were Ron’s exact words, he could almost hear him speaking them in some mental taproom-then it wasn’t a sin at all. According to Ron, all the American GI’s that had killed Nazis and Japs were going to be okay when the Judgment Trump blew.

That left suicide, that hissing word.

He was coming up to the construction. There were black-and-white barriers with round flashing reflectors on top, and orange signs that glowed briefly and brightly in his headlights. One said:

Another said:

Another said:

He pulled over, put the transmission lever in park, turned on his four-way flashers, and got out of the car. He walked toward the black-and-white barriers. The orange blinkers made the falling snow seem thicker, absurd with color.

He also remembered being confused about absolution. At first he had thought it was fairly simple: If you committed a mortal sin, you were mortally wounded, damned. You could hail Mary until your tongue fell out and you would still go to hell. But Mary said that wasn’t always so. There was confession, and atonement, and reconsecration, and so on. It was very confusing. Christ had said there was no eternal life in a murderer, but he had also said whosoever believeth in me shall not perish. Whosoever. It seemed that there were as many loopholes in biblical doctrine as there were in a shyster lawyer’s purchase agreement. Except for suicide, of course. You couldn’t confess suicide or repent suicide or atone for it because that act cut the silver cord and sent you plunging out into whatever worlds there were. And-

And why was he thinking about it, anyway? He didn’t intend to kill anybody and certainly he didn’t intend to commit suicide. He never even thought about suicide. At least, not until just lately.

He stared over the black-and-white barriers, feeling cold inside.

The machines were down there, hooded in snow, dominated by the wrecking crane. In its brooding immobility it had gained a dimension of awfulness. With its skeletal gantry rising into the snowy darkness, it reminded him of a praying mantis that had gone into some unknown period of winter contemplation.

He swung one of the barriers out of the way. It was very light. He went back to the car, got in, and pulled the transmission lever down into low. He let the car creep forward over the edge and down the slope, which had been worn into smooth ridges by the comings and goings of the big machines. With dirt underneath, the tendency of the heavy car to slip around was reduced. When he got to the bottom he shifted back into park and turned off all the car’s lights. He climbed back up the slope, puffing, and put the barrier back in place. He went back down.

He opened the LTD’s tailgate and took out Mary’s bucket. Then he went around to the passenger seat and set the bucket on the floor beneath his carton of firebombs. He took the white lid off the bucket and, humming softly, dipped each wick in gasoline. That done, he carried the bucket of gas over to the crane and climbed up into the unlocked cab, being careful not to slip. He was excited now, his heartbeat hurrying along, his throat tight and close with bitter exultation.

He splashed gas over the seat, over the controls, over the gearbox. He stepped out on the narrow riveted catwalk that skirted the crane’s motor hood and poured the rest of the gas into the cowling. Hydrocarbon perfume filled the air. His gloves had soaked through, wetting his hands and turning them numb almost immediately. He jumped down and stripped the gloves off, putting them into his overcoat pockets. The first packet of matches dropped from his fingers, which felt as distant as wood. He held onto the second pack, but the wind snuffed the first two he had scratched. He turned his back to the wind, hunched over the match folder protectively and got one to stay lighted. He touched it to the rest, and they hissed into flame. He tossed the burning matches into the cab.

At first he thought they must have gone out, because there was nothing. Then there was a soft explosive sound-flump!-and fire boiled out of the cab in a furious gust, driving him back two steps. He shielded his eyes from the bright orange flower opening up there.

An arm of fire ran out of the cab, reached the engine hood, paused for a moment as if in reflection, and then sniffed inside. This time the explosion was not soft. KAPLOOM! And suddenly the cowling was in the air, rising almost out of sight, fluttering and turning over. Something whizzed past his head.

It’s burning, he thought. It’s really burning!

He began to do a shuffling dance in the fiery darkness, his face contorted in an ecstasy so great that it seemed his features must shatter and fall in a million smiling pieces. His hands curled into waving fists above his head.

“Hooray!” He screamed into the wind, and the wind screamed back at him. “Hooray goddam it hooray!”

He dashed around the car and slipped in the snow and fell down and that might have saved his life because that was when the gas tank of the crane blew debris in a forty-foot circle. A hot piece of metal winged through the right window of the LTD, punching a stellated hole in the safety glass and sending out a drunken spiderweb of cracks.

He picked himself up, frosted with snow all the way down his front, and scrambled behind the wheel. He put his gloves back on-fingerprints-but after that, any thought of caution was gone. He started the car with fingers that could barely feel the ignition key and then heavy-footed the accelerator, “dragging out” they had called it when they had been kids and the world was young, the rear end of the station wagon whipping left and right. The crane was burning furiously, better than he ever would have imagined, the cab an inferno, the big windshield gone.

“Hot damn!” he screamed. “Oh Freddy, hot damn!”

He skated the LTD in front of the crane, the firelight sketching his face in twotone Halloween colors. He rammed his right index finger at the dashboard, hitting the cigarette lighter on the third try. The construction machines were on his left now, and he rolled down his window. Mary’s floor-bucket rolled back and forth on the floor, and the beer and soda bottles chattered frantically against one another as the wagon jounced across the gouged and frozen earth.

The cigarette lighter popped out and he slammed both feet down on the power brake. The station wagon looped the loop and came to a stop. He pulled the lighter out of its socket, took a bottle from the carton, and pressed the glowing coil against the wick. It flared alight and he threw it. It shattered against the mud-caked tread of a bulldozer and flame splashed gaudily. He pushed the cigarette lighter back in, drove twenty feet farther, and threw three more at the dark hulk of a payloader. One missed, one struck the side and spilled burning gasoline harmlessly into the snow, and the third arced neatly into the cab.

“Fuckinbullseye!” he screamed.

Another bulldozer. A smaller payloader. Then he came to a house trailer up on jacks. A sign over the door said:

He pulled the LTD up at point-blank range and threw four burning bottles at the large window beside the door. They all went through, the first shattering the glass of both window and bottle, dragging a burning drape in after it.

Beyond the trailer a pickup truck was parked. He got out of the LTD, tried the pickup’s passenger door, and found it unlocked. He lit the wick of one of his bombs and pitched it inside. Flames leaped hungrily across the bench seat.

He got back into his car and saw there were only four or five bottles left. He drove on, shivering in the cold, snot running from his nose, reeking of gasoline, grinning.

A steam shovel. He pitched the rest of the bottles at it, doing no damage until the last, which blew one of the tractor treads loose from its aft cog.

He probed the box again, remembered it was empty, and looked in the rearview mirror.

“Mother-fuck,” he cried, “Oh, holy mother-fuck, Freddy you cock-knocker!”

Behind him, a line of isolated bonfires stood out in the snow-choked darkness like runway landing lights. Flames were belching madly from the windows of the office trailer. The pickup was a ball of fire. The cab of the payloader was an orange cauldron. But the crane was really the masterpiece, because the crane was a roaring yellow beacon of light, a sizzling torch in the middle of the roadwork.

“Demofuckinlition!” he screamed.

A semblance of sanity began to return. He dared not go back the way he had come. The police would be on the way soon, maybe already. And the fire department. Could he get out ahead, or was he blocked in?

Heron Place, he might be able to get up to Heron Place. It would be a twenty-five degree angle up the slope, maybe thirty, and he would have to crash the wagon through a highway department barrier, but the guardrails were gone. He thought maybe he could do it. Yes. He could do it. Tonight he could do anything.

He drove the LTD up the unfinished roadbed, skidding and slueing, using only his parking lights. When he saw the streetlights of Heron Place above and to the right, he fed the car more and more gas and watched the speedometer needle climb past thirty as he aimed at the embankment. It was near forty when he hit the incline and shot up. About halfway the rear wheels began to lose traction and he dropped the transmission lever into low. The engine dropped a note and the car hitched forward. He was almost nose over the top when the wheels began to spin again, machine-gunning snow and pebbles and frozen clods of earth out behind him. For a moment the issue was in doubt, and then the simple forward inertia of the LTD-coupled with willpower, perhaps-carried it up onto level ground.

The nose of the car bunted the black-and-white barrier aside; it toppled backward into a snowdrift, making a dreamy sugarpuff. He went down over the curb and was almost shocked to realize that he was on a normal street again, as if nothing at all had happened. He shifted back to drive and settled down to a sedate thirty.

He was getting ready to turn toward home when he remembered that he was leaving tracks that plows or new snow might not obliterate for two hours or more. Instead of turning up Crestallen Street, he continued out Heron Place to River Street, and then down River to Route 7. Traffic here had been light ever since the snow had begun to come hard, but there had been enough to chew the snow covering the highway into a loose, churned-up mess.

He merged his tail with that of all the other cars that were moving east and inched his speed up to forty.

He followed Route 7 for almost ten miles, then back into the city and drove toward Crestallen Street. A few plows were out now, moving through the night like gigantic orange mastiffs with glaring yellow eyes. Several times he looked toward the 784 construction, but in the blowing snow he could see nothing.

About halfway home he realized that even though all the windows were rolled up and the heater was on full blast, the car was still cold. He looked back and saw the jagged hole in the rear passenger-side window. There was broken glass and snow on the backseat.

Now how did that happen? he asked himself, bewildered. He honestly had no recollection.

He entered his street from the north and drove directly to his house. It was as he had left it, the single light in his kitchen the only light shining on this whole darkened section of street. There were no police cars parked out front, but the garage door was open and that was just plain stupid. You closed the garage door when it snowed, always. That’s why you have a garage, to keep the elements off your stuff. His father used to say that. His father had died in a garage, just like Johnny’s brother, but Ralph Dawes had not committed suicide. He had had some kind of stroke. A neighbor had found him with his lawn clippers in his stiffening left hand and a small whetstone by his right. A suburban death. Oh Lord, send this white soul to a heaven where there is no crab grass and the niggers always keep their distance.

He parked the station wagon, pulled the garage door down, and went into the house. He was trembling from exhaustion and reaction. It was quarter past three. He hung his coat and hat in the hall closet and was closing the door when he felt a hot jolt of terror, as riveting as a straight knock of scotch whiskey. He fumbled wildly in his overcoat pockets and let out a whistling sigh when he felt his gloves, still soaked with gasoline, each of them crushed into a soggy little ball.

He thought of making coffee and decided against it. He had a queasy, thumping headache, probably caused by gasoline fumes and helped along by his scary drive through the snowy darkness. In his bedroom he took off his clothes and threw them over a chair without bothering to fold them. He thought he would fall asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow, but it was not so. Now that he was home, and presumably safe, staring wakefulness seized him. It brought fear like a handmaiden. They were going to catch him and put him in jail. His picture would be in the papers. People who knew him would shake their heads and talk it over in cafeterias and lunchrooms. Vinnie Mason would tell his wife that he had known Dawes was crazy all along. Mary’s folks would maybe fly her to Reno, where she would first pick up residency and then a divorce. Maybe she would find somebody to fuck her. He wouldn’t be surprised.

He lay wakeful, telling himself they weren’t going to catch him. He had worn his gloves. No fingerprints. He had Mary’s bucket and the white cover that went over the top. He had hidden his tracks, had shaken off possible pursuit just as a fugitive will throw off bloodhounds by walking in a creek. None of these thoughts brought him sleep or comfort. They would catch him. Perhaps someone on Heron Place had seen his car and thought it suspicious that any vehicle should be out so late on such a stormy night. Perhaps someone had jotted down his license plate number and was even now being congratulated by the police. Perhaps they had gotten paint scrapings from the Heron Place construction barrier and were now cajoling his guilty name out of some auto registration computer. Perhaps-

He rolled and thrashed in his bed, waiting for the dancing blue shadows to come in his window, waiting for the heavy knock on his door, waiting for some bodiless, Kafkaesque voice to call: Okay, open up in there! And when he finally fell asleep he did it without knowing it, because thought continued without a break, shifting from conscious rumination to the skewed world of dreams with hardly a break, like a car going from drive to low. Even in his dreams he thought he was awake, and in his dreams he committed suicide over and over: burned himself; bludgeoned himself by standing under an anvil and pulling a rope; hanged himself; blew out the stove’s pilot lights and then turned on the oven and all four burners; shot himself; defenestrated himself; stepped in front of a speeding Greyhound bus; swallowed pills; swallowed Vanish toilet bowl disinfectant; stuck a can of Glade Pine Fresh aerosol in his mouth, pushed the button, and inhaled until his head floated off into the sky like a child’s balloon; committed hara-kari while kneeling in a confessional at St. Dom’s, confessing his self-murder to a dumbfounded young priest even as his guts accordioned out onto the bench like beef stew, performing an act of contrition in a fading, bemused voice as he lay in his blood and the steaming sausages of his intestines. But most vividly, over and over, he saw himself behind the wheel of the LTD, racing the engine a little in the closed garage, taking deep breaths and leafing through a copy of National Geographic, examining pic-tures of life in Tahiti and Aukland and the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, turning the pages ever more slowly, until the sound of the engine faded to a fawaway sweet hum and the green waters of the South Pacific inundated him in rocking warmth and took him down to a silver fathom.

December 19, 1973

It was 12:30 in the afternoon when he woke up and got out of bed. He felt as though he had been on a huge bender. His head ached monstrously. His bladder was cramped and full. There was a dead-snake taste in his mouth. Walking made his heart thud like a snare drum. He was not even allowed the luxury of believing (for however short a time) that he had dreamed everything he remembered of the previous night, because the smell of gasoline seemed rubbed into his flesh and it rose, fulsomely fragrant, from the pile of his clothes. The snow was over, the sky was clear, and the bright sunshine made his eyes beg for mercy.

He went into the bathroom, sat on the ring, and a huge diarrhea movement rushed out of him like a mail train highballing through a deserted station. His waste fell into the water with a sickening series of jets and plops that made him groan and clutch his head. He urinated without getting up, the rich and dismaying smell of his digestion’s unsavory end product rising thickly around him.

He flushed and went downstairs on his orange-wood legs, taking clean clothes with him. He would wait until the godawful smell cleared out of the bathroom and then he would shower, maybe all afternoon.

He gobbled three Excedrin from the green bottle on the shelf over the kitchen sink, then washed them down with two big gulps of Pepto-Bismol. He put on hot water for coffee and smashed his favorite cup by fumbling it off its hook. He swept it up, put out another, dumped instant Maxwell House into it, and then went into the dining room.

He turned on the radio and swept across the dial looking for news, which, like a cop, was never there when you needed it. Pop music. Feed and grain reports. A Golden Nugget ‘Cause You Dug It. A call-in talk show. A swap-shop program. Paul Harvey selling Banker’s Life Insurance. More pop music. No news.

The water for the coffee was boiling. He set the radio to one of the pop stations and brought his coffee back to the table and drank it black. There was an inclination to vomit with the first two mouthfuls, but after that it was better.

The news came on, first national, then local.

On the city newsfront, a fire was set at the site of the 784 thruway extension construction near Grand Street in the early hours of this morning. Police Lieutenant Henry King said that vandals apparently used gasoline bombs to fire a crane, two payloaders, two bulldozers, a pickup truck, and the on-site office of the Lane Construction Company, which was entirely gutted.

An exultation as bitter and dark as the taste of his unsweetened coffee closed his throat at the words entirely gutted.

Damage done to the payloaders and bulldozers was minor, according to Francis Lane, whose company got a substantial subcontracting bid on the crosstown extension, but the demolition crane, valued at $60,000, is expected to be out of service for as long as two weeks.

Two weeks? Was that all?

More serious, according to Lane, was the burning of the on-site office, which contained time sheets, work records, and ninety percent of the company’s cost accounting records over the last three months. “This is going to be the very devil to straighten out,” Lane said. “It may set us back a month or more.”

Maybe that was good news. Maybe an extra month of time made it all worthwhile.

According to Lieutenant King, the vandals fled the construction site in a station wagon, possibly a late-model Chevrolet. He appealed for anyone who may have seen the car leaving the construction area by Heron Street to come forward. Francis Lane estimated total damage in the area of $100,000.

In other local news, State Representative Muriel Reston again appealed for…

He snapped it off.

Now that he had heard, and had heard in daylight, things seemed a little better. It was possible to look at things rationally. Of course the police didn’t have to give out all their leads, but if they really were looking for a Chevy instead of a Ford, and if they were reduced to pleading for eyewitnesses to come forward, then maybe he was safe, at least for the time being. And if there had been an eyewitness, no amount of worrying would change that.

He would throw away Mary’s floor-bucket and open the garage to air out the stink of gasoline. Make up a story to explain the broken back window if anyone asked about it. And most important, he would try to prepare himself mentally for a visit from the police. As the last resident of Crestallen Street West, it might be perfectly logical for them to at least check him out. And they wouldn’t have to sniff up his back trail very far to find out he had been acting erratically. He had screwed up the plant. His wife had left him. A former co-worker had punched him out in a department store. And of course, he had a station wagon, Chevrolet or not. All bad. But none of it proof.

And if they did dig up proof, he supposed he would go to jail. But there were worse things than jail. Jail wasn’t the end of the world. They would give him a job, feed him. He wouldn’t have to worry about what was going to happen when the insurance money ran out. Sure, there were a lot of things worse than jail. Suicide, for instance. That was worse. He went upstairs and showered.

Later that afternoon he called Mary. Her mother answered and went to get Mary with a sniff. But when Mary herself answered, she sounded nearly gay.

“Hi Bart. Merry Christmas in advance.”

“No, Mary Christmas,” he responded. It was an old joke that had graduated from humor to tradition.

“Sure,” she said. “What is it, Bart?”

“Well, I’ve got a few presents… just little stuff… for you and the nieces and nephews. I wondered if we could get together somewhere. I’ll give them to you. I didn’t wrap the kids’ presents-”

“I’d be glad to wrap them. But you shouldn’t have. You’re not working.”

“But I’m working on it,” he said.

“Bart, have you… have you done anything about what we talked about?”

“The psychiatrist?”

“Yes,”

“I called two. One is booked up until almost June. The other guy is going to be in the Bahamas until the end of March. He said he could take me then.”

“What were their names?”

“Names? Gee, honey, I’d have to look them up again to tell you. Adams, I think the first guy was. Nicholas Adams-”

“Bart,” she said sadly.

“It might have been Aarons,” he said wildly.

“Bart,” she said again.

“Okay.” he said. “Believe what you want. You will anyway.”

“Bart, if you’d only

“What about the presents? I called about the presents, not the goddam shrink.”

She sighed. “Bring them over Friday, why don’t you? I can-”

“What, so your mother and father can hire Charles Manson to meet me at the door? Let’s just meet on neutral ground, okay?”

“They’re not going to be here.” she said. “They’re going to spend Christmas with Joanna.” Joanna was Joanna St. Claire, Jean Galloway’s cousin, who lived in Minnesota. They had been close friends in their girlhood (back in that pleasant lull between the War of 1812 and the advent of the Confederacy, he sometimes thought), and Joanna had had a stroke in July. She was still trying to get over it, but Jean had told him and Mary that the doctors said she could go at any time. That must be nice, he thought, having a time bomb built right into your head like that. Hey, bomb, is it today? Please not today. I haven’t finished the new Victoria Holt.

“Bart? Are you there?”

“Yes. I was woolgathering.”

“Is one o’clock all right?”

“That’s fine.”

“Was there anything else?”

“No, huh-uh.

“Well…”

“Take good care, Mary.”

“I will. Bye, Bart.” “Good-bye.

They hung up and he wandered into the kitchen to make himself a drink. The woman he had just talked to on the phone wasn’t the same woman that had sat tearfully on the living room couch less than a month ago, pleading for some reason to help explain the tidal wave that had just swept grandly through her ordered life, destroying the work of twenty years and leaving only a few sticks poking out of the mudflats. It was amazing. He shook his head over it the way he would have shaken his head over the news that Jesus had come down from the sky and had taken Richard Nixon up to heaven upon wheels of fire. She has regained herself.

More: She had regained a person he hardly knew at all, a girl-woman he barely remembered. Like an archaeologist she had excavated that person, and the person was a little stiff in the joints from its long storage, but still perfectly usable. The joints would ease and the new-old person would be a whole woman, perhaps scarred by this upheaval but not seriously hurt. He knew her perhaps better than she thought, and he had been able to tell, strictly from the tone of her voice, that she was moving ever close to the idea of divorce, the idea of a clean break with the past… a break that would splint well and leave no trace of a limp. She was thirty-eight. Half of her life was ahead of her. There were no children to be casually maimed in the car wreck of this marriage. He would not suggest divorce, but if she did he would agree. He envied her new person and her new beauty. And if she looked back ten years from now on her marriage as a long dark corridor leading into sunlight, he could feel sorry she felt that way, but he couldn’t blame her. No, he couldn’t blame her.

December 21, 1973

He had given her the presents in Jean Galloway’s ticking, ormolu living room, and the conversation that followed had been stilted and awkward. He had never been in this room alone with her, and he kept feeling that they should neck. It was a rusty knee-jerk reaction that made him feel like a bad double exposure of his college self.

“Did you lighten you hair?” he asked.

“Just a shade.” She shrugged a little.

“It’s nice. Makes you look younger.”

“You’re getting a little gray around the temples, Bart. Makes you look distinguished.”

“Bullshit, it makes me look ratty.”

She laughed-a little too high-pitched-and looked at the presents on the little side table. He had wrapped the owl pin, had left the toys and the chess set for her to do. The dolls looked blankly at the ceiling, waiting for some little girl’s hands to bring them to life.

He looked at Mary. Their eyes caught seriously for a moment and he thought irrevocable words were going to spill out of her and he was frightened. Then the cuckoo jumped out of the clock, announced one-thirty, and they both jumped and then laughed. The moment had passed. He got up so it wouldn’t come around again. Saved by a cuckoo bird, he thought. That fits.

“Got to go,” he said.

“An appointment?”

“Job interview.”

“Really?” She looked glad, “Where? Who? How much?”

He laughed and shook his head. “There’s a dozen other applicants with as good a chance as me. I’ll tell you when I get it.”

“Conceited.”

“Sure.”

“Bart, what are you doing Christmas?” She looked concerned and solemn, and it suddenly came to him that an invitation to Christmas dinner and not to some new year’s divorce court had been the thing on her lips inside. God! He almost sprayed laughter.

“I’m going to eat at home.”

“You can come here,” she said. “It would be just the two of us.”

“No,” he said, thoughtfully and then more firmly: “No. Emotions have a way of getting out of hand during the holidays. Another time.”

She was nodding, also thoughtfully.

“Will you be eating alone?” he asked.

“I can go to Bob and Janet’s. Really, are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Well…” But she looked relieved.

They walked to the door and shared a bloodless kiss.

“I’ll call you,” he said.

“You better.”

“And give my best to Bobby.”

“I will.”

He was halfway down the walk to the car when she called: “Bart! Bart, wait a minute!”

He turned almost fearfully.

“I almost forgot,” she said. “Wally Hammer called and invited us to his New Year’s party. I accepted for both of us. But if you don’t want to-”

“Wally?” He frowned. Walter Hammer was about their only crosstown friend. He worked for a local ad agency. “Doesn’t he know we’re, you know, separated?”

“He knows, but you know Walt. Things like that don’t faze him much.”

Indeed they didn’t. Just thinking about Walter made him smile. Walter, always threatening to quit advertising in favor of advanced truss design. Composer of obscene limericks and even more obscene parodies of popular tunes. Divorced twice and tagged hard both times. Now impotent, if you believed gossip, and in this case he thought the gossip was probably true. How long had it been since he had seen Walt? Four months? Six? Too long.

“That might be fun,” he said, and then a thought stuck him.

She scanned it from his face in her old way and said, “There won’t be any laundry people there.”

“He and Steve Ordner know each other.”

“Well, yes, him-” She shrugged to show how unlikely she thought it was that him would be there, and the shrug turned into an elbow-holding little shiver. It was only about twenty-five degrees.

“Hey, go on in,” he said. “You’ll freeze, dummy.”

“Do you want to go?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.” He kissed her again, this time a little more firmly, and she kissed back. At a moment like this, he could regret everything-but the regret was far away, clinical.

“Merry Christmas, Bart,” she said, and he saw she was crying a little.

“Next year will be better,” he said, the phrase comforting but without any root meaning. “Go inside before you catch pneumonia.”

She went in and he drove away, still thinking about Wally Hammer’s New Year’s Eve party. He thought he would go.

December 24, 1973

He found a small garage in Norton that would replace the broken back window for ninety dollars. When he asked the garage man if he would be working the day before Christmas, the garage man said: “Hell yes, I’ll take it any way I can get it.

He stopped on the way at a Norton U-Wash-It and put his clothes in two machines. He automatically rotated the agitators to see what kind of shape the spring drives were in, and then loaded them carefully so each machine would extract (only in the laundromats they called it “spin-dry") without kicking off on the overload. He paused, smiling a little. You can take the boy out of the laundry, Fred, but you can’t take the laundry out of the boy. Right, Fred? Fred? Oh fuck yourself.

“That’s a hell of a hole,” the garage man said, peering at the spiderwebbed glass.

“Kid with a snowball,” he said. “Rock in the middle of it.”

“It was,” he said. “It really was.”

When the window was replaced he drove back to the U-Wash-It, put his clothes in the dryer, set it to medium-hot, and put thirty cents in the slot. He sat down and picked up someone’s discarded newspaper. The U-Wash-It’s only other customer was a tired-looking young woman with wire-rimmed glasses and blond streaks in her long, reddish-brown hair. She had a small girl with her, and the small girl was throwing a tantrum.

“I want my bottle!”

“Goddam it, Rachel-”

“BOTTLE!”

“Daddys going to spank you when we get home,” the young woman promised grimly. “And no treats before bed.”

“BAWWWWTLE”

Now why does a young girl like that want to streak her hair? he wondered, and looked at the paper. The headlines said:

SMALL CROWDS IN BETHLEHEM PILGRIMS FEAR HOLY TERROR

On the bottom of page one, a short news story caught his eye and he readit carefully:

WINTERBURGER SAYS ACTS OF VANDALISM WILL NOT BE TOLERATED

(Local) Victor Winterburger, Democratic candidate for the seat of the late Donald P. Naish, who was killed in a car crash late last month, said yesterday that acts of vandalism such as the one that caused almost a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of damage at the Route 784 construction site early last Wednesday, cannot be tolerated “in a civilized American city.” Winterburger made his remarks at an American Legion dinner, and received a standing ovation.

“We have seen what has happened in other cities,” Winterburger said. “The defaced buses and subway cars and buildings in New York, the broken windows and senselessly marred schools of Detroit and San Francisco, the abuse of public facilities, public museums, public galleries. We must not allow the greatest country in the world to be overrun with huns and barbarians.”

Police were called to the Grand Street area of the construction when a number of fires and explosions were seen by

(Continued page 5 col. 2)

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 UWash-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 go 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 burns. 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.”

“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 Christsake 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 straggle. 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 tang 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 Barney 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 Hammer 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 outta 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.”

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 righton.”

“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 sched-uled 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,

[John T. Gordon]

For the City Council

JTG/tk

“No,” he muttered. “You may not wish it. You may not.” He tore the letter to shreds and threw it in the wastebasket.

That night, sitting in front of the Zenith TV, he found himself thinking about how he and Mary had found out, almost forty-two months ago now, that God had decided to do a little roadwork on their son Charlie’s brain.

The doctor’s name had been Younger. There was a string of letters after his name on the framed diplomas that hung on the warmly paneled walls of his inner office, but all he understood for sure was that Younger was a neurologist; a fast man with a good brain disease.

He and Mary had gone to see him at Younger’s request on a warm June afternoon nineteen days after Charlie had been admitted to Doctors Hospital. He was a good-looking man, maybe halfway through his forties, physically fit from a lot of golf played with no electric golf cart. He was tanned a deep cordovan shade. And the doctor’s hands fascinated him. They were huge hands, clumsy-looking, but they moved about his desk-now picking up a pen, now riffling through his appointment book, now playing idly across the surface of a silver-inlaid paperweight-with a lissome grace that was very nearly repulsive.

“Your son has a brain tumor,” he said. He spoke flatly, with little inflection, but his eyes watched them very carefully, as if he had just armed a temperamental explosive.

“Tumor,” Mary said softly, blankly.

“How bad is it?” he asked Younger.

The symptoms had developed over the space of eight months. First the headaches, infrequent at the beginning, then more common. Then double vision that came and went, particularly after physical exercise. After that, most shameful to Charlie, some incidence of bedwetting. But they had not taken him to the family doctor until a terrifying temporary blindness in the left eye, which had gone as red as a sunset, obscuring Charlie’s good blue. The family doctor had had him ad-mitted for tests, and the other symptoms had followed that: Phantom smells of oranges and shaved pencils; occasional numbness in the left hand; occasional lapses into nonsense and childish obscenity.

“It’s bad,” Younger said. “You must prepare yourself for the worst. It is inoperable.”

Inoperable.

The word echoed up the years to him. He had never thought words had taste, but that one did. It tasted bad and yet juicy at the same time, like rotten hamburger cooked rare.

Inoperable.

Somewhere, Younger said, deep in Charlie’s brain, was a collection of bad cells roughly the size of a walnut. If you had that collection of bad cells in front of you on the table, you could squash them with one hard hit. But they weren’t on the table. They were deep in the meat of Charlie’s mind, still smugly growing, filling him up with random strangeness.

One day, not long after his admission, he had been visiting his son on his lunch break. They had been talking about baseball, discussing, in fact, whether or not they would be able to go to the American League baseball playoffs if the city’s team won.

Charlie had said: “I think if their pitching mmmmm mmmm mmmm pitching staff holds up mmmmm nn mmmm pitching mmmm-”

He had leaned forward. “What, Fred? I’m not tracking you.”

Charlie’s eyes had rolled wildly outward.

“Fred?” George whispered. “Freddy-?”

“Goddam motherfucking mothersucking nnnnnn fuckhole!” his son screamed from the clean white hospital bed. “Cuntlickircg dinkrubbing asswipe sonofawhoringbitch-”

“NURSE!” he had screamed, as Charlie passed out. “OH GOD NURSE!”

It was the cells, you see, that had made him talk like that. A little bunch of bad cells no bigger, say, than your average-sized walnut. Once, the night nurse said, he had screamed the word boondoggle again and again for nearly five minutes. Just bad cells, you know. No bigger than your garden-variety walnut. Making his son rave like an insane dock walloper, making him wet the bed, giving him headaches, making him-during the first hot week of that July-lose all ability to move his left hand.

“Look,” Dr. Younger had told them on that bright, just-right-for-golf June day. He had unrolled a long scroll of paper, an ink-tracing of their son’s brain waves. He produced a healthy brain wave as a comparison, but he didn’t need it. He looked at what had been going on in his son’s head and again felt that rotten yet juicy taste in his mouth. The paper showed an irregular series of spiky mountains and valleys, like a series of badly drawn daggers.

Inoperable.

You see if that collection of bad cells, no bigger than a walnut, had decided to grow on the outside of Charlie’s brain, minor surgury would have vacuumed it right up. No sweat, no strain, no pain on the brain, as they had said when they were boys. But instead, it had grown down deep inside and was growing larger every day. If they tried the knife, or laser, or cryosurgery, they would be left with a nice, healthy, breathing piece of meat. If they didn’t try any of those things, soon they would be bundling their boy into a coffin.

Dr. Younger said all these things in generalities, covering their lack of options in a soothing foam of technical language that would wear away soon enough. Mary kept shaking her head in gentle bewilderment, but he had understood everything exactly and completely. His first thought, bright and clear, never to be forgiven, was: Thank God it’s not me. And the funny taste came back and he began to grieve for his son.

Today a walnut, tomorrow the world. The creeping unknown. The incredible dying son. What was there to understand?

Charlie died in October. There were no dramatic dying words. He had been in a coma for three weeks.

He sighed and went out to the kitchen and made himself a drink. Dark night pressed evenly on all the windows. The house was so empty now that Mary was gone. He kept stumbling over little pieces of himself everywhere-snapshots, his old sweatsuit in an upstairs closet, an old pair of slippers under the bureau. It was bad, very bad, to keep doing that.

He had never cried over Charlie after Charlie’s death; not even at the funeral. Mary had cried a great deal. For weeks, it seemed, Mary had gone around with a perpetual case of pinkeye. But in the end, she had been the one to heal.

Charlie had left scars on her, that was undeniable. Outwardly, she had all the scars. Mary before-and-after. Before, she would not take a drink unless she considered it socially helpful to his future. She would take a weak screwdriver at a party and carry it around all night. A rum toddy before bed when she had a heavy chest cold. That was all. After, she had a cocktail with him in the late afternoon when he came home, and always a drink before bed. Not serious drinking by any-one’s yardstick, not sick-and-puking-in-the-bathroom drinking, but more than before. A little of that protective foam. Undoubtedly just what the doctor would have ordered. Before, she rarely cried over little things. After, she cried over them often, always in private. If dinner was burned. If she had a flat. The time water got in the basement and the sump pump froze and the furnace shorted out. Before, she had been something of a folk music buff-white folk and blues, Van Ronk, Gary Davis, Tom Rush, Tom Paxton, Spider John Koerner. After, her interest just faded away. She sang her own blues and laments on some inner circuit. She had stopped talking about their taking a trip to England if he got promoted a step up. She started doing her hair at home, and the sight of her sitting in front of the TV in rollers became a common one. It was she their friends pitied-rightly so, he supposed. He wanted to pity himself, and did, but kept it a secret. She had been able to need, and to use what was given to her because of her need, and eventually that had saved her. It had kept her from the awful contemplation that kept him awake so many nights after her bedtime drink had lulled her off to sleep. And as she slept, he contemplated the fact that in this world a tiny collection of cells no bigger than a walnut could take a son’s life and send him away forever.

He had never hated her for healing, or for the deference other women gave her as a right. They looked on her the way a young oilman might look on an old vet whose hand or back or cheek is shiny with puckered pink burn tissue-with the respect the never-hurt always hold for the once-hurt-now-healed. She had done her time in hell over Charlie, and these other women knew it. But she had come out. There had been Before, there had been Hell, there had been After, and there had even been After-After, when she had returned to two of her four social clubs, had taken up macrame (he had a belt she had done a year ago-a beautiful twisted rope creation with a heavy silver buckle monogrammed BGD), had taken up afternoon TV-soap operas and Merv Griffin chatting with the celebrities.

Now what? he wondered, going back to the living room. After-After-After? It seemed so. A new woman, a whole woman, rising out of the old ashes that he had so crudely stirred. The old oilman with skin grafts over the burns, retaining the old savvy but gaining a new look. Beauty only skin deep? No. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder. It could go for miles.

For him, the scars had all been inside. He had examined his hurts one by one on the long nights after Charlie’s death, cataloguing them with all the morbid fascination of a man studying his own bowel movements for signs of blood. He had wanted to watch Charlie play ball on a Little League team. He had wanted to get report cards and rant over them. He wanted to tell him, over and over, to pick up his room. He wanted to worry about the girls Charlie saw, the friends he picked, the boy’s internal weather. He wanted to see what his son became and if they could still be in love as they had been until the bad cells, no bigger than a walnut, had come between them like some dark and rapacious woman.

Mary had said, He was yours.

That was true. The two of them had fitted so well that names were ridiculous, even pronouns a little obscene. So they became George and Fred, a vaudeville sort of combination, two Mortimer Veeblefeezers against the world.

And if a collection of bad cells no bigger than a walnut could destroy all those things, those things that are so personal that they can never be properly articulated, so personal you hardly dared admit their existence to yourself, what did that leave? How could you ever trust life again? How could you see it as anything more meaningful than a Saturday night demolition derby?

All of it was inside him, but he had been honestly unaware that his thoughts were changing him so deeply, so irretrievably. And now it was all out in the open, like some obscene mess vomited onto a coffee table, reeking with stomach juice, filled with undigested lumps, and if the world was only a demo derby, wouldn’t one be justified in stepping out of his car? But what after that? Life seemed only a preparation for hell.

He saw that he had drained his drink in the kitchen; he had come into the living room with an empty glass.

December 31, 1973

He was only two blocks from Wally Hammer’s house when he put his hand into his overcoat pocket to see if he had any Canada Mints in there. There were no mints, but he came up with a tiny square of aluminum foil that glinted dully in the station wagon’s green dash lights. He spared it a puzzled, absent glance and was about to toss it into the ashtray when he remembered what it was.

In his mind Olivia’s voice said: Synthetic mescaline. Product four, they call it. Very heavy stuff. He had forgotten all about it.

He put the little foil packet back into his coat pocket and fumed onto Walter’s street. Cars were lined up halfway down the block on both sides. That was Walter, all right-he had never been one to have anything so simple as a party when there ought be a group grope in the offing. The Principle of the Pleasure Push, Wally called it. He claimed that someday he would patent the idea and then publish instructional handbooks on how to use it. If you got enough people together, Wally Hamper maintained, you were forced into having a good time-pushed into it. Once when Wally was expounding this theory in a bar, he had mentioned lynch mobs. “There,” Walter had said blandly, “Bart has just proved my case.”

He wondered what Olivia was doing now. She hadn’t tried to call back, although if she had he would probably have weakened and taken the call. Maybe she had stayed in Vegas just long enough to get the money and had then caught a bus for… where? Maine? Did anyone leave Las Vegas for Maine in the middle of winter? Surely not.

Product four, they call it. Very heavy stuff.

He snuggled the wagon up to the cuff behind a sporty red GTX with a black racing stripe and got out. New Year’s Eve was clear but bitterly cold. A frigid rind of moon hung in the sky overhead like a child’s paper cutout. Stars were spangled around it in lavish profusion. The mucus in his nose froze to a glaze that crackled when he flared his nostrils. His breath plumed out on the dark air.

Three houses away from Walter’s he picked up the bass line from the stereo. They really had it cranked. There was something about Wally’s parties, he reflected, Pleasure Principle or no. The most well-intentioned of just-thought-we’d-drop-bys ended up staying and drinking until their heads were full of silver chimes that would turn to leaden church bells the next day. The most dyed-in-the-wool rock-music haters ended up boogying in the living room to the endless golden gassers that Wally trotted out when everybody got blind drunk enough to look back upon the late fifties and early sixties as the plateau of their lives. They drank and boogied, boogied and drank, until they were panting like little yellow dogs on the Fourth of July. There were more kisses in the kitchen by halves of differing wholes, more feel-ups per square inch, more wallflowers jerked rudely out of the woodwork, more normally sober folk who would wake up on New Year’s Day with groaning hangovers and horridly clear memories of prancing around with lampshades on their heads or of finally deciding to tell the boss a few home truths. Wally seemed to inspire these things, not by any conscious effort, but just by being Wally-and of course there was no party like a New Year’s Eve party.

He found himself scanning the parked cars for Steve Ordner’s bottle-green Delta 88, but didn’t see it anywhere.

Closer to the house, the rest of the rock band coalesced around the persistent bass signature, and Mick Jagger screaming:

Ooooh, children-

It’s just a kiss away,

Kiss away, kiss away…

Every light in the house was blazing-fuck the energy crisis-except, of course in the living room, where rub-your-peepees would be going on during the slow numbers. Even over the heavy drive of the amplified music he could hear a hundred voices raised in fifty different conversations, as if Babel had fallen only seconds ago.

He thought that, had it been summer (or even fall), it would have been more fun to just stand outside, listening to the circus, charting its progress toward its zenith, and then its gradual fall-off. He had a sudden vision-startling, frightening-of himself standing on Wally Hammer’s lawn and holding a roll of EEG graph paper in his hands, covered with the irregular spikes and dips of damaged mental function: the monitored record of a gigantic, tumored Party Brain. He shuddered a little and stuck his hands in his overcoat pockets to warm them.

His right hand encountered the small foil packet again and he took it out. Curious, he unfolded it, regardless of the cold that bit his fingertips with dull teeth. There was a small purple pill inside the foil, small enough to lie on the nail of his pinky finger without touching the edges. Much smaller than, say, a walnut. Could something as small as that make him clinically insane, cause him to see things that weren’t there, think in a way he had never thought? Could it, in short, mime all the conditions of his son’s mortal illness?

Casually, almost absently, he put the pill in his mouth. It had no taste. He swallowed it.

“BART!” The woman screamed. “BART DAWES!” It was a woman in a black off-the-shoulder evening dress with a martini in one hand. She had dark hair, put up for the occasion and held with a glittering rope spangled with imitation diamonds.

He had walked in through the kitchen door. The kitchen was choked, clogged with people. It was only eight-thirty; the Tidal Effect hadn’t gotten far yet, then. The Tidal Effect was another part of Walter’s theory; as a party continued, he contended, people would migrate to the four corners of the house. “The center does not hold,” Wally said, blinking wisely. “T. S. Eliot said that.” Once, according to Wally, he had found a guy wandering around in the attic eighteen hours after a party ended.

The woman in the black dress kissed him warmly on the lips, her ample breasts pushing against his chest. Some of her martini fell on the floor between them.

“Hi,” he said. “Who’s you?”

“Tina Howard, Bart. Don’t you remember the class trip?” She waggled a long, spade-shaped fingernail under his nose. “NAUGH-ty BOY.”

“That Tina? By God, you are!” A stunned grin spread his mouth. That was another thing about Walter’s parties; people from your past kept turning up like old photographs. Your best friend on the block thirty years ago; the girl you almost laid once in college; some guy you had worked with for a month on a summer job eighteen years ago.

“Except I’m Tina Howard Wallace now,” the woman in the black dress said. “My husband’s around here… somewhere…” She looked around vaguely, spilled some more of her drink, and swallowed the rest before it could get away from her. “Isn’t it AWFUL, I seem to have lost him.”

She looked at him warmly, speculatively, and Bart could barely believe that this woman had given him his first touch of female flesh-the sophomore class trip at Grover Cleveland High School, a hundred and nine years ago. Rubbing her breast through her white cotton sailor blouse beside…

“Cotter’s Stream,” he said aloud.

She blushed and giggled. “You remember, all right.”

His eyes dropped in a perfect, involuntary reflex to the front of her dress and she shrieked with laughter. He grinned that helpless grin again. “I guess time goes by faster than we-”

“Bart!” Wally Hamner yelled over the general patty babble. “Hey buddy, really glad you could make it!”

He cut across the room to them with the also-to-be-patented Walter Hamner Party Zigzag, a thin man, now mostly bald, wearing an impeccable 1962-vintage pinstriped shirt and horn-rimmed glasses. He shook Walter’s outstretched hand, and Walter’s grip was as hard as he remembered.

“I see you met Tina Wallace,” Walter said.

“Hell, we go way back when,” he said, and smiled uncomfortably at Tina.

“Don’t you tell my husband that, you naughty boy,” Tina giggled.” ’scuse, please. I’ll see you later, Bart?”

“Sure,” he said.

She disappeared around a clump of people gathered by a table loaded with chips and dips and went on into the living room. He nodded after her and said, “How do you pick them, Walter? That girl was my first feel. It’s like 'This Is Your Life.'”

Walter shrugged modestly. “All a part of the Pleasure Push, Barton my boy.” He nodded at the paper bag tucked under his arm. “What’s in that plain brown wrapper?”

“Southern Comfort. You’ve got ginger ale, don’t you?”

“Sure,” Walter said, but grimaced. “Are you really going to drink that down-by-de-Swanee-Ribber stuff? I always thought you were a scotch man.”

“I was always a private Comfort-and-ginger-ale man. I’ve come out of the closet.”

Walter grinned. “Mary’s around here someplace. She’s kinda been keeping an eye out for you. Get yourself a drink and we’ll go find her.”

“Good enough.”

He made his way across the kitchen, saying hi to people he knew vaguely and who looked as if they didn’t know him at all, and replying hi, how are you to people he didn’t remember who hailed him first. Cigarette smoke rolled majestically through the kitchen. Conversation faded quickly in and out, like stations on latenight AM radio, all of it bright and meaningless.

… Freddy and Jim didn’t have their time sheets so I

… said that his mother died quite recently and he’s apt to go on a crying jag if he drinks too much

… so when he got the paint scraped off he saw it was really a nice piece, maybe pre-Revolutionary

… and this little kike came to the door selling encyclopedias

… very messy; he won’t give her the divorce because of the kids and he drinks like a

… terribly nice dress

… so much to drink that when he went to pay the check he bar all over the hostess

A long Formica-topped table had been set up in front of the stove and the sink, and it was already crowded with opened liquor bottles and glasses in varying sizes and degrees of fullness. Ashtrays already overflowed with filtertips. Three ice buckets filled with cubes had been crowded into the sink. Over the stove was a large poster which showed Richard Nixon wearing a pair of earphones. The earphone cord disappeared up into the rectum of a donkey standing on the edge of the picture. The caption said:

To the left, a man in bell-bottomed baggies and a drink in each hand (a water glass filled with what looked to be whiskey and a large stein filled with beer) was entertaining a mixed group with a joke. “This guy comes into this bar, and here’s this monkey sitting on the stool next to him. So the guy orders a beer and when the bartender brings it, the guy says, ‘Who owns this monkey? Cute little bugger.’ And the bartender says, ‘Oh, that’s the piano player’s monkey.’ So the guy swings around…”

He made himself a drink and looked around for Walt, but he had gone to the door to greet some more guests-a young couple. The man was wearing a huge driving cap, goggles, and an old-time automobile duster. Written on the front of the duster were the words

KEEP ON TRUCKIN”

Several people were laughing uproariously, and Walter was howling. Whatever the joke was, it seemed to go back a long time.

“… and the guy walks over to the piano player and says, ‘Do you know your monkey just pissed in my beer?’ And the piano player says, ‘No, but hum a few bars and I’ll fake it.’” Calculated burst of laughter. The man in the bell-bottomed baggies sipped his whiskey and then cooled it with a gulp of beer.

He took his drink and strolled into the darkened living room, slipping behind the turned back of Tina Howard Wallace before she could see him and snag him into a long game of Where Are They Now. She looked, he thought, like the kind of person who could cite you chapter and verse from the lives of classmates who had turners out badly-divorce, nervous disorders, and criminal violations would be her stock in trade-and would have made unpersons out of those who had had success.

Someone had put on the inevitable album of 50’s rock and roll, and maybe fifteen couples were jitterbugging hilariously and badly. He saw Mary dancing with a tall, slim man that he knew but could not place. Jack? John? Jason? He shook his head. It wouldn’t come. Mary was wearing a party dress he had never seen before. It buttoned up one side, and she had left enough buttons undone to provide a sexy slit to a little above one nyloned knee. He waited for some strong feeling-jealousy or loss, even habitual craving-but none came. He sipped his drink.

She turned her head and saw him. He raised a noncommittal finger in salute: Go on and finish your dance-but she broke off and came over, bringing her partner with her.

“I’m so glad you could come, Bart,” she said, raising her voice to be heard over the laughter and conversation and stereo. “Do you remember Dick Jackson?”

Bart stuck out his hand and the slim man shook it. “You and your wife lived on our street five… no, seven years ago. Is that right?”

Jackson nodded. “We’re out in Willowood now.”

Housing development, he thought. He had become very sensitive to the city’s geography and housing strata.

“Good enough. Are you still working for Piels?”

“No, I’ve got my own business now. Two trucks. Tri-State Haulers. Say, if that laundry of yours ever needs day-hauling… chemicals or any of that stuff…”

“I don’t work for the laundry anymore,” he said, and saw Mary wince slightly, as if someone had knuckled an old bruise.

“No? What are you doing now?”

“Self-employed,” he said and grinned. “Were you in on that independent trucker’s strike?”

Jackson’s face, already dark with alcohol, darkened more. “You’re goddam right. And I personally untracked a guy that couldn’t see falling into line. Do you know what those miserable Ohio bastards are charging for diesel? 31.9! That takes my profit margin from twelve percent and cuts it right down to nine. And all my truck maintenance has got to come out of that nine. Not to mention the frigging double-nickle speed-limit-”

As he went on about the perils of independent trucking in a country that had suddenly developed a severe case of the energy bends, Bart listened and nodded in the right places and sipped his drink. Mary excused herself and went into the kitchen to get a glass of punch. The man in the automobile duster was doing an exaggerated Charleston to an old Everly Brothers number, and people were laughing and applauding.

Jackson’s wife, a busty, muscular-looking girl with carroty red hair, came over and was introduced. She was quite near the stagger point. Her eyes looked like the Tilt signs on a pinball machine. She shook hands with him, smiled glassily, and then said to Dick Jackson: “Hon, I think I’m going to whoopsie. Where’s the bathroom?”

Jackson led her away. He skirted the dance floor and sat down in one of the chairs along the side. He finished his drink. Mary was slow coming back. Someone had collared her into a conversation, he supposed.

He reached into an inside pocket and brought out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. He only smoked at parties now. That was quite a victory over a few years ago, when he had been part of the three-packs a-day cancer brigade.

He was halfway through the cigarette and still watching the kitchen door for Mary when he happened to glance down at his fingers and saw how interesting they were. It was interesting how the first and second fingers of his right hand knew just how to hold the cigarette, as if they had been smoking all their lives.

The thought was so funny he had to smile.

It seemed that he had been examining his fingers for quite a while when he noticed his mouth tasted different. Not bad, just different. The spit in it seemed to have thickened. And his legs… his legs felt a little jittery, as if they would like to tap along with the music, as if tapping along with the music would relieve them, make them feel cool and just like legs again-

He felt a little frightened at the way that thought, which had begun so ordinarily, had gone corkscrewing off in a wholly new direction like a man lost in a big house and climbing a tall crrrrystal staircase-

There it was again, and it was probably the pill he had taken, Olivia’s pill, yes. And wasn’t that an interesting way to say crystal? Crrrrrystal, gave it a crusty, bangled sound, like a stripper’s costume.

He smiled craftily and looked at his cigarette, which seemed amazingly white, amazingly round, amazingly symbolic of all America’s padding and wealth. Only in America were cigarettes so good-tasting. He had a puff. Wonderful. He thought of all the cigarettes in America pouring off the production lines in Winston-Salem, a plethora of cigarettes, an endless clean white cornucopia of them. It was the mescaline, all right. He was starting to trip. And if people knew what he had been thinking about the word crystal (a/k/a crrrystal), they would nod and tap their heads: Yes, he’s crazy, all right. Nutty as a fruitcake. Fruitcake, there was another good word. He suddenly wished Sal Magliore was here. Together, he and Sally One-Eye would discuss all the facets of the Organization’s business. They would discuss old whores and shootings. In his mind’s eye he saw Sally One-Eye and himself eating linguini in a small Italian ristorante with dark-toned walls and scarred wooden tables while the strains of The Godfather played on the soundtrack. All in luxurious Technicolor that you could fall into, bathe in like a bubble bath.

“Crrrrrrystal,” he said under his breath, and grinned. It seemed that he had been sitting here and going over one thing and another for a very long time, but no ash had grown on his cigarette at all. He was astounded. He had another puff.

“Bart?”

He looked up. It was Mary, and she had a canape for him. He smiled at her. “Sit down. Is that for me?”

“Yes.” She gave it to him. It was a small triangular sandwich with pink stuff in the middle. It suddenly occurred to him that Mary would be frightened, horrified, if she knew he was on a trip. She might call an emergency squad, the police, God knew who else. He had to act normally. But the thought of acting normal made him feel stranger than ever.

“I’ll eat it later,” he said, and put the sandwich in his shirt pocket.

“Bart, are you drunk?”

“Just a little,” he said. He could see the pores on her face. He could not recall ever having seen them so clearly before. All those little holes, as if God was a cook and she was a pie crust. He giggled and her deepening frown made him say: “Listen, don’t tell.”

“Tell?” She offered a puzzled frown.

“About the Product four.”

“Bart, what in the name of God are you-”

“I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” he said. “I’ll be back.” He left without looking at her, but he could feel her frown radiating out from her face in waves like heat from a microwave oven. Yet if he didn’t look back at her, it was possible she would not guess. In this, the best of all possible worlds, anything was possible, even crnystal staircases. He smiled fondly. The word had become an old friend.

The trip to the bathroom somehow became an odyssey, a safari. The party noise seemed to have picked up a cyclical beat, IT SEEMED TO fade in and FADE OUT in syllables OF THREE AND even the STEREO faded IN and OUT. He mumbled to people he thought he knew but refused to take up a single thrown conversational gambit; he only pointed to his crotch, smiled, and walked on. He left puzzled faces in his wake. Why is there never a party full of strangers when you need one? he scolded himself.

The bathroom was occupied. He waited outside for what seemed like hours and when he finally got in he couldn’t urinate although he seemed to want to. He looked at the wall above the toilet tank and the wall was bulging in and out in a cyclical, three-beat rhythm. He flushed even though he hadn’t gone, in case someone outside might be listening, and watched the water swirl out of the bowl. It had a sinister pink color, as if the last user had passed blood. Unsettling.

He left the bathroom and the party smote him again. Faces came and went like floating balloons. The music was nice, though. Elvis was on. Good old Elvis. Rock on, Elvis, rock on.

Mary’s face appeared in front of him and hovered, looking concerned. “Bart, what’s wrong with you?”

“Wrong? Nothing wrong.” He was astounded, amazed. His words had come out in a visual series of musical notes. “I’m hallucinating.” He said it aloud, but it was spoken only for himself.

“Bart, what have you taken?” She looked frightened now.

“Mescaline,” he said.

“Oh God, Bart. Drugs? Why?”

“Why not?” he responded, not to be flip, but because it was the only response he could think of quickly. The words came out in notes again, and this time some of them had flags.

“Do you want me to take you to a doctor?”

He looked at her, surprised, and went ponderously over her question in his mind to see if it had any hidden connotations; Freudian echoes of the funny farm. He giggled again, and the giggles streamed musically out of his mouth and in front of his eyes, crrrrystal notes on lines and spaces, broken by bars and rests.

“Why would I want a doctor?” he said, choosing each word. The question mark was a high quarter-note. “It’s just like she said. Not that good, not that bad. But interesting.”

“Who?” she demanded. “Who told you? Where did you get it?” Her face was changing, seeming to become hooded and reptilian. Mary as cheap mystery-movie police detective, shining the light in the suspect’s eyes-Come on, McGonigal, whichever way you want it, hard or soft-and then worse still she began to remind him uneasily of the H. P. Lovecraft stories he had read as a boy, the Cthulu Mythos stories, where perfectly normal human beings changed into fishy, crawling things at the urgings of the Elder Ones. Mary’s face began to look scaly, vaguely eellike.

“Never mind,” he said, frightened. “Why can’t you leave me alone? Stop fucking me up. I’m not bothering you.”

Her face recoiled, became Mary’s again, Mary’s hurt, mistrustful face, and he was sorry. The party beat and swirled around them. “All right, Bart,” she said quietly. “You hurt yourself just any way you like. But please don’t embarrass me. Can I ask you that much?”

“Of course you c-”

But she had not waited for his answer. She left him, going quickly into the kitchen without looking back. He felt sorry, but he also felt relieved. But suppose someone else tried to talk with him? They would know too. He couldn’t talk to people normally, not like this. Apparently he couldn’t even fool people into thinking he was drunk.

“Rrrrreet,” he said, ruffling the r’s lightly off the roof of his mouth. This time the notes came out in a straight line, all of them hurrying notes with flags. He could make notes all night and be perfectly happy, he didn’t mind. But not here, where anybody could come along and accost him. Someplace private, where he could hear himself think. The party made him feel as if he were standing behind a large waterfall. Hard to think against the sound of all that. Better to find some quiet backwater. With perhaps a radio to listen to. He felt that listening to music would aid his thinking, and there was a lot to thing about. Reams of things.

Also, he was quite sure that people had begun to glance over at him. Mary must have spread the word. I’m worried. Bart’s on mescaline. It would move from group to group. They would go on pretending to dance, pretending to drink and have their conversations, but they would really be observing him from behind their hands, whispering about him. He could tell. It was all crrrystal clear.

A man walked past him, carrying a very tall drink and weaving slightly. He twitched the man’s sport jacket and whispered hoarsely: “What are they saying about me?”

The man gave him a disconnected smile and blew a warm breath of scotch in his face. “I’ll write that down,” he said, and walked on.

He finally got into Walter Hamper’s den (he could not have said how much later) and when he closed the door behind him, the sounds of the party became blessedly muted. He was getting scared. The stuff he had taken hadn’t topped out yet; it just kept coming on stronger and stronger. He seemed to have crossed from one side of the living room to the other in the course of one blink; through the darkened bedroom where coats had been stored in another blink; down the hall in a third. The chain of normal, waking existence had come unclipped, spilling reality beads every which way. Continuity had broken down. His time sense was el destructo. Suppose he never came down? Suppose he was like this forever? It came to him to curl up and sleep it off, but he didn’t know if he could. And if he did, God knew what dreams would come. The light, spur-of-the-moment way he had taken the pill now appalled him. This wasn’t like being drunk; there was no small kernel of sobriety winking and blinking down deep in the center of him, that part that never got drunk. He was wacky all the way through.

But it was better in here. Maybe he could get control of it in here, by himself. And at least if he freaked out he wouldn’t-

“Hi there.”

He jumped, startled, and looked into the corner. A man was sitting there in a high-backed chair by one of Walter’s bookcases. There was an open book on the man’s lap, as a matter of fact. Or was it a man? There was a single light on in the room, a lamp on a small round table to the speaker’s left. Its light cast long shadows on his face, shadows so long that his eyes were dark caverns, his cheeks etched in sardonic, malefic lines. For a moment he thought he had stumbled on Satan sitting in Wally Hammer’s den. Then the figure stood and he saw it was a man, only a man. A tall fellow, maybe sixty, with blue eyes and a nose that had been repeatedly punched in losing bouts with the bottle. But he wasn’t holding a drink, nor was there one on the table.

“Another wanderer, I see,” the man said, and offered his hand. “Phil Drake.”

“Barton Dawes,” he said, still dazed from his fright. They shook. Drake’s hand was twisted and scarred by some old wound-a burn, perhaps. But he didn’t mind shaking it. Drake. The name was familiar but he couldn’t remember where he had heard it before.

“Are you quite all right?” Drake asked. “You look a little-”

“I’m high,” he said. “I took some mescaline and oh boy am I high.” He glanced at the bookcases and saw them going in and out and didn’t like it. It was too much like the beating of a giant heart. He didn’t want to see things like that anymore.

“I see,” Drake said. “Sit down. Tell me about it.”

He looked at Drake, slightly amazed, and then felt a tremendous surge of relief. He sat down. “You know about mescaline?” he asked.

“Oh, a little. A little. I run a coffeehouse downtown. Kids wander in off the streets, tripping on something… is it a good trip?” he asked politely.

“Good and bad,” he said. “It’s… heavy. That’s a good word, the way they use it.”

“Yes. It is.”

“I was getting a little scared.” He glanced out the window and saw a long, celestial highway stretching across the black dome of the sky. He looked away casually, but couldn’t help licking his lips. “Tell me… how long does this usually go on?”

“When did you drop?”

“Drop?” The word dropped out of his mouth in letters, fell to the carpet, and dissolved there.

“When did you take the stuff?”

“Oh… about eight-thirty.”

“And it’s…” He consulted his watch. “It’s a quarter of ten now-”

“Quarter of ten? Is that all?”

Drake smiled. “The sense of time turns to rubber, doesn’t it? I expect you’ll be pretty well down by one-thirty.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes, I should think so. You’re probably peaking now. Is it very visual mesc?”

“Yes. A little too visual.”

“More things to be seen than the eye of man was meant to behold,” Drake said, and offered a peculiar, twisted smile.

“Yes, that’s it. That’s just it.” His sense of relief at being with this man was intense. He felt saved. “What do you do besides talk to middle-aged men who have fallen down the rabbit hole?”

Drake smiled. “That’s rather good. Usually people on mesc or acid turn inarticulate, sometimes incoherent. I spend most of my evenings at the Dial Help Center. On weekday afternoons I work at the coffee house I mentioned, a place called Drop Down Mamma. Most of the clientele are street freaks and stewbums. Mornings I just walk the streets and talk to my parishioners, if they’re up. And in between, I run errands at the county jail.”

“You’re a minister?”

“They call me a street priest. Very romantic. Malcolm Boyd, look out. At one time I was a real priest.”

“Not any more?”

“I have left the mother church,” Drake said. He said it softly, but there was a kind of dreadful finality in his words. He could almost hear the clang of iron doors slammed shut forever.

“Why did you do that?”

Drake shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. What about you? How did you get the mesc?”

“I got it from a girl on her way to Las Vegas. A nice girl, I think. She called me on Christmas Day.”

“For help?”

“I think so.”

“Did you help her?”

“I don’t know.” He smiled craftily. “Father, tell me about my immortal soul.”

Drake twitched. “I’m not your father.”

“Never mind, then.”

“What do you want to know about your ‘soul’?”

He looked down at his fingers. He could make bolts of light shoot from their tips whenever he wanted to. It gave him a drunken feeling of power. “I want to know what will happen to it if I commit suicide.”

Drake stirred uneasily. “You don’t want to think about killing yourself while you’re tripping. The dope talks, not you.”

“I talk,” he said. “Answer me.”

“I can’t. I don’t know what will happen to your ‘soul’ if you commit suicide. I do, however, know what will happen to your body. It will rot.”

Startled by this idea, he looked down at his hands again. Obligingly, they seemed to crack and molder in front of his gaze, making him think of that Poe story, “The Strange Case of M. Valdemar.” Quite a night. Poe and Lovecraft. A. Gordon Pym, anyone? How about Abdul Allhazred, the Mad Arab? He looked up, a little disconcerted, but not really daunted.

“What’s your body doing?” Drake asked.

“Huh?” He frowned, trying to parse sense from the question.

“There are two trips,” Drake said. “A head trip and a body trip. Do you feel nauseated? Achey? Sick in any way?”

He consulted his body. “No,” he said. “I just feel… busy.” He laughed a little at the word, and Drake smiled. It was a good word to describe how he felt. His body seemed very active, even still. Rather (fight, but not ethereal. In fact, he had never felt so fleshy, so conscious of the way his mental processes and physical body were webbed together. There was no parting them. You couldn’t peel one away from the other. You were stuck with it, baby. Integration. Entropy. The idea burst over him like a quick tropical sunrise. He sat chewing it over in light of his current situation, trying to make out the pattern, if there was one. But-

“But there’s the soul,” he said aloud.

“What about the soul?” Drake asked pleasantly.

“If you kill the brain, you kill the body,” he said slowly. “And vice versa. But what happens to your soul? There’s the wild card, Fa… Mr. Drake.”

Drake said: “In that sleep of death, what dreams may come? Hamlet, Mr. Dawes.”

“Do you think the soul lives on? Is there survival?”

Drake’s eyes grayed. “Yes,” he said. “I think there is survival… in some form.”

“And do you think suicide is a mortal sin that condemns the soul to hell?”

Drake didn’t speak for a long time. Then he said: “Suicide is wrong. I believe that with all my heart.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

Drake stood up. “I have no intention of answering it. I don’t deal in metaphysics anymore. I’m a civilian. Do you want to go back to the party?”

He thought of the noise and confusion, and shook his head.

“Home?”

“I’ll drive you.”

“Would you? How would you get back?”

“Call a cab from your house. New Year’s Eve is a very good night for cabs.”

“That would be good,” he said gratefully. “I’d like to be alone, I think. I’d like to watch TV.”

“Are you safe alone?” Drake asked somberly.

“Nobody is,” he replied with equal gravity, and they both laughed.

“Okay. Do you want to say good-bye to anyone?”

“No. Is there a back door?”

“I think we can find one.”

He didn’t talk much on the way home. Watching the streetlights go by was almost all the excitement he could stand. When they went by the roadwork, he asked Drake’s opinion.

“They’re building new roads for energy-sucking behemoths while kids in this city are starving,” Drake said shortly. “What do I think? I think it’s a bloody crime.”

He started to tell Drake about the gasoline bombs, the burning crane, the burning office trailer, and then didn’t. Drake might think it was a hallucination. Worse still, he might think it wasn’t.

The rest of the evening was not very clear. He directed Drake to his house. Drake commented that everyone on the street must be out partying or to bed early. He didn’t comment. Drake called a taxi. They watched TV for a while without talking-Guy Lombardo at the Waldorf-Astoria, making the sweetest music this side of heaven. Guy Lombardo, he thought, was looking decidedly froggy.

The taxi came at quarter to twelve. Drake asked him again if he would be all right.

“Yes, I think I’m coming down.” He really was. The hallucinations were draining toward the back of his mind.

Drake opened the front door and pulled up his collar. “Stop thinking about suicide. It’s chicken.”

He smiled and nodded, but he neither accepted nor rejected Drake’s advice. Like everything else these days, he simply took it under advisement. “Happy New Year,” he said.

“Same to you, Mr. Dawes.”

The taxi honked impatiently.

Drake went down the walk, and the taxi pulled away, yellow light glowing on the roof.

He went back into the living room and sat down in front of the TV. They had switched from Guy Lombardo to Times Square, where the glowing ball was poised atop the Allis-Chalmers Building, ready to start its descent into 1974. He felt weary, drained, finally sleepy. The ball would come down soon and he would enter the new year tripping his ass off. Somewhere in the country a New Year’s baby was pushing its squashed, placenta-covered head out of his mother’s womb and into this best of all possible worlds. At Walter Hammer’s party, people would be raising their glasses and counting down. New Year’s resolutions were about to be tested. Most of them would prove as strong as wet paper towels. He made a resolution of his own on the spur of the moment, and got to his feet in spite of his tiredness. His body ached and his spine felt like glass-some kind of hangover. He went into the kitchen and got his hammer off the kitchen shelf. When he brought it back into the living room, the glowing ball was sinking down the pole. There was a split screen, showing the ball on the right, showing the merrymakers at the Waldorf on the left, chanting: “Eight… seven… six… five…” One fat society dame caught a glimpse of herself on a monitor, looked surprised, and then waved to the country.

The turn of the year, he thought. Absurdly, goose bumps broke out on his arms.

The ball reached the bottom, and a sign lit up on the top of the Allis-Chalmers Building. The sign said:

At the same instant he swung the hammer and the TV screen exploded. Glass belched onto the carpet. There was a fizz of hot wires, but no fire. Just to be sure the TV would not roast him during the night in revenge, he kicked out the plug with his foot.

“Happy New Year,” he said softly, and dropped the hammer to the carpet.

He lay on the couch and fell asleep almost immediately. He slept with the lights on and his sleep was dreamless.