Roadwork

January 5, 1974

The thing that happened in the Shop ’n’ Save that day was the only thing that had happened to him in his whole life that actually seemed planned and sentient, not random. It was as if an invisible finger had written on a fellow human being, expressly for him to read.

He liked to go shopping. It was very soothing, very sane. He enjoyed doing sane things very much after his bout with the mescaline. He had not awakened on New Year’s Day until afternoon, and he had spent the remainder of the day wandering disconnectedly around the house, feeling spaced-out and strange. He had picked things up and looked at them, feeling like Iago examining Yorick’s skull. To a lesser degree the feeling had carried over to the next day, and even the day after that. But in another way, the effect had been good. His mind felt dusted and clean, as if it had been turned upside down, scrubbed and polished by some maniacally brisk internal housekeeper. He didn’t get drunk and thus did not cry. When Mary had called him, very cautiously, around 7:00 P.m. on the first, he had talked to her calmly and reasonably, and it seemed to him that their positions had not changed very much. They were playing a kind of social statues, each waiting for the other to move first. But she had twitched and mentioned divorce. Just the possibility, the eeriest wiggle of a finger, but movement for all that. No, the only thing that really disturbed him in the aftermath of the mescaline was the shattered lens of the Zenith color TV. He could not understand why he had done it. He had wanted such a TV for years, even though his favorite programs were the old ones that had been filmed in black and white. It wasn’t even the act that distressed him as much as the lingering evidence of it-the broken glass, the exposed wiring. They seemed to reproach him, to say: Why did you go and do that? I served you faithfully and you broke me. I never harmed you and you smashed me. I was defenseless. And it was a terrible reminder of what they wanted to do to his house. At last he got an old quilt and covered the front of it. That made it both better and worse. Better because he couldn’t see it, worse because it was like having a shrouded corpse in the house. He threw the hammer away like a murder weapon.

But going to the store was a good thing, like drinking coffee in Benjy’s Grill or taking the LTD through the Clean Living Car Wash or stopping at Henny’s newsstand downtown for a copy of Time. The Shop 'n' Save was very large, lighted with fluorescent bars set into the ceiling, and filled with ladies pushing carts and admonishing children and frowning at tomatoes wrapped in see-through plastic that would not allow a good squeeze. Muzak came down from discreet overhead speaker grilles, flowing evenly into your ears to be almost heard.

On this day, Saturday, the S amp;S was filled with weekend shoppers, and there were more men than usual, accompanying their wives and annoying them with sophomoric suggestions. He regarded the husbands, the wives, and the issue of their various partnerships with benign eyes. The day was bright and sunshine poured through the store’s big front windows, splashing gaudy squares of light by the checkout registers, occasionally catching some woman’s hair and turning it into a halo of light. Things did not seem so serious when it was like this, but things were always worse at night.

His cart was filled with the usual selection of a man thrown rudely into solitary housekeeping: spaghetti, meat sauce in a glass jar, fourteen TV dinners, a dozen eggs, butter, and a package of navel oranges to protect against scurvy.

He was on his way down a middle aisle toward the checkouts when God perhaps spoke to him. There was a woman in front of him, wearing powder-blue slacks and a blue cable-stitched sweater of a navy color. She had very yellow hair. She was maybe thirty-five, good looking in an open, alert way. She made a funny gobbling, crowing noise in her throat and staggered. The squeeze bottle of mustard she had been holding in her hand fell to the floor and rolled, showing a red pennant and the word FRENCH’s over and over again.

“Ma'am?” he ventured. “Are you okay?”

The woman fell backward and her left hand, which she had put up to steady herself, swept a score of coffee cans onto the floor. Each can said:

Good To The Very Last Drop

It happened so fast that he wasn’t really scared-not for himself, anyway-but he saw one thing that stuck with him later and came back to haunt his dreams. Her eyes had drifted out into walleyes, just as Charlie’s had during his fits.

The woman fell on the floor. She cawed weakly. Her feet, clad in leather boots with a salt rime around the bottoms, drummed on the tiled floor. The woman directly behind him screamed weakly. A clerk who had been putting prices on soup cans ran up the aisle, dropping his stamper. Two of the checkout girls came to the foot of the aisle and stared, their eyes wide.

He heard himself say: “I think she’s having an epileptic seizure.”

But it wasn’t an epileptic seizure. It was some sort of brain hemorrhage and a doctor who had been going around in the store with his wife pronounced her dead. The young doctor looked scared, as if he had just realized that his profession would dog him to his grave, like some vengeful horror monster. By the time he finished his examination, a middling-sized crowd had formed around the young woman lying among the coffee cans which had been the last part of the world over which she had exercised her human perogative to rearrange. Now she had become part of that other world and would be rearranged by other humans. Her cart was halffilled with provisions for a week’s living, and the sight of the cans and boxes and wrapped meats filled him with a sharp, agonized terror.

Looking into the dead woman’s cart, he wondered what they would do with the groceries. Put them back on the shelves? Save them beside the manager’s office until cash redeemed them, proof that the lady of the house had died in harness?

Someone had gotten a cop and he pushed his way through the knot of people on the checkout side. “Look out, here,” the cop was saying self-importantly. “Give her air.” As if she could use it.

He turned and bulled his way out of the crowd, butting with his shoulder. His calm of the last five days was shattered, and probably for good. Had there ever been a clearer omen? Surely not. But what did it mean? What?

When he got home he shoved the TV dinners into the freezer and then made himself a strong drink. His heart was thudding in his chest. All the way home from the supermarket he had been trying to remember what they had done with Charlie’s clothes.

They had given his toys to the Goodwill Shop in Norton, they had transferred his bank account of a thousand dollars (college money-half of everything Charlie had gotten from relatives at birthdays and Christmas went into that account, over his howls of protest) to their own joint account. They had burned his bedding on Mamma Jean’s advice-he himself had been unable to understand that, but didn’t have the heart to protest; everything had fallen apart and he was supposed to argue over saving a mattress and box springs? But the clothes, that was a different matter. What had they done with Charlie’s clothes?

The question gnawed at him all afternoon, making him fretful, and once he almost went to the phone to call Mary and ask her. But that would be the final straw, wouldn’t it? She wouldn’t have to just guess about the state of his sanity after that.

Just before sunset he went up to the small half-attic, which was reached by crawling through a trapdoor in the ceiling of the master bedroom closet. He had to stand on a chair and shinny up in. He hadn’t been in the attic for a long, long time, but the single bare 100-watt bulb still worked. It was coated with dust and cobwebs, but it still worked.

He opened a dusty box at random and discovered all his high school and college yearbooks, laid neatly away. Embossed on the cover of each high school yearbook were the words:

Bay High School…

On the cover of each college yearbook (they were heavier, more richly bound) were these words:

Let Us Remember

He opened the high school yearbooks first, flipping through the signed end pages (“Uptown, downtown, all around the town/I’m the gal who wrecked your yearbook/Writing upside down-A.F.A., Connie"), then the photographs of long-ago teachers, frozen behind their desks and beside their blackboards, smiling vaguely, then of classmates he barely remembered with their credits (FHA 1,2; Class Council 2,3,4; Poe Society, 4) listed beneath, along with their nicknames and a little slogan. He knew the fates of some (Army, dead in a car crash, assistant bank manager), but most were gone, their futures hidden from him.

In his senior high yearbook he came across a young George Barton Dawes, looking dreamily toward the future from a retouched photograph that had been taken at Cressey Studios. He was amazed by how little that boy knew of the future and by how much that boy looked like the son this man had come to search out traces of. The boy in the picture had not yet even manufactured the sperm that would become half the boy. Below the picture:

BARTON G. DAWES

“Whizzer”

(Outing Club, 1,2,3,4 Poe Society, 3,4)

Bay High School

Bart, the Klass Klown, helped to lighten our load!

He put the yearbooks back in their box helter-skelter and went on poking. He found drapes that Mary had taken down five years ago. An old easy chair with a broken arm. A clock radio that didn’t work. A wedding photograph album that he was scared to look through. Piles of magazines-ought to get those out, he told himself. They’re a fire hazard in the summer. A washing machine motor that he had once brought home from the laundry and tinkered with to no avail. And Charlie’s clothes.

They were in three cardboard cartons, each crisp with the smell of mothballs. Charlie’s shirts and pants and sweaters, even Charlie’s Hanes underwear. He took them out and looked at each item carefully, trying to imagine Charlie wearing these things, moving in them, rearranging minor parts of the world in them. At last it was the smell of the mothballs that drove him out of the attic, shaking and grimacing, needing a drink. The smell of things that had lain quietly and uselessly over the years, things which had no purpose but to hurt. He thought about them for most of the evening, until the drink blotted out the ability to think.

January 7, 1974

The doorbell rang at quarter past ten and when he opened the front door, a man in a suit and a topcoat was standing there, sort of hipshot and slouched and friendly. He was neatly shaved and barbered, carrying a slim briefcase, and at first he thought the man was a salesman with a briefcase full of samples-Amway, or magazine subscriptions, or possibly even the larcenous Swipe-and he prepared to welcome the man in, to listen to his pitch carefully, to ask questions, and maybe even buy something. Except for Olivia, he was the first person who had come to the house since Mary left almost five weeks ago.

But the man wasn’t a salesman. He was a lawyer. His name was Philip T. Fenner, and his client was the city council. These facts he announced with a shy grin and a hearty handshake.

“Come on in,” he said, and sighed. He supposed that in a half-assed sort of way, this guy was a salesman. You might even say he was selling Swipe.

Fenner was talking away, a mile a minute.

“Beautiful house you have here. Just beautiful. Careful ownership always shows, that’s what I say. I won’t take up much of your time, Mr. Dawes, I know you’re a busy man, but Jack Gordon thought I might as well swing out here since it was on my way and drop off this relocation form. I imagine you mailed for one, but the Christmas rush and all, things get lost. And I’d be glad to answer any questions you might have, of course.”

“I have a question,” he said, unsmiling.

The jolly exterior of his visitor slipped for a moment and he saw the real Fenner lurking behind it, as cold and mechanized as a Pulsar watch. “What would that be, Mr. Dawes?”

He smiled. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

Back on with the smiling Fenner, cheerful runner or city council errands. “Gee, that’d be nice, if it’s not too much trouble. A trifle nippy out there, only seventeen degrees. I think the winters have been getting colder, don’t you?”

“They sure have.” The water was still hot from his breakfast coffee. “Hope you don’t mind instant. My wife’s visiting her folks for a while, and I just sort of muddle along.”

Fenner laughed good-naturedly and he saw that Fenner knew exactly what the situation was between him and Mary, and probably what the situation was between him and any other given persons or institutions: Steve Ordner, Vinnie Mason, the corporation, God.

“Not at all, instant’s fine. I always drink instant. Can’t tell the difference. Okay to put some papers on this table?”

“Go right ahead. Do you take cream?”

“No, just black. Black is fine.” Fenner unbuttoned his topcoat but didn’t take it off. He swept it under him as he sat down, as a woman will sweep her skirt so she doesn’t wrinkle the back. In a man, the gesture was almost jarringly fastidious. He opened his briefcase and took out a stapled form that looked like an income tax return. He poured Fenner a cup of coffee and gave it to him.

“Thanks. Thanks very much. Join me?”

“I think I’ll have a drink,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” Fenner said, and smiled charmingly. He sipped his coffee. “Good, very good. Hits the spot.”

He made himself a tall drink and said, “Excuse me for just a minute, Mr. Fenner. I have to make a telephone call.”

“Certainly. Of course.” He sipped his coffee again and smacked his lips over it.

He went to the phone in the hall, leaving the door open. He dialed the Galloway house and Jean answered.

“It’s Bart,” he said, “Is Mary there, Jean?”

“She’s sleeping.” Jean’s voice was frosty.

“Please wake her up. It’s very important.”

“I bet it is. I just bet. I told Lester the other night, I said: Lester, it’s time we thought about an unlisted phone. And he agreed with me. We both think you’ve gone off your rocker, Barton Dawes, and that’s the plain truth with no shellack on it.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. But I really have to-”

The upstairs extension was picked up and Mary said, “Bart?”

“Yes. Mary, has a lawyer named Fenner been out to see you? Kind of slicktalking fellow that tries to act like Jimmy Stewart?”

“No,” she said. Shit, snake-eyes. Then she added, “He called on the phone.” Jackpot! Fenner was standing in the doorway now, holding his coffee and sipping it calmly. The half-shy, totally cheerful, aw-shucks expression was gone now. He looked rather pained.

“Mamma, get off the extension,” Mary said, and Jean Galloway hung up with a bitter snort.

“Was he asking about me?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“He talked to you after the party?”

“Yes, but… I didn’t tell him anything about that.”

“You might have told him more than you know. He comes on like a sleepy tickhound, but he’s the city council’s ballcutter.” He smiled at Fenner, who thinly smiled back. “You’ve got an appointment with him?”

“Why… yes.” She sounded surprised. “But he only wants to talk about the house, Bart-”

“No, that’s what he told you. He really wants to talk about me. I think these guys would like to drag me into a competency hearing.”

“A… what?…” She sounded utterly befuddled.

“I haven’t taken their money yet, ergo I must be crazy. Mary, do you remember what we talked about at Handy Andy’s?”

“Bart, is that Mr. Fenner in the house?”

“Yes.”

“The psychiatrist,” she said dully. “I mentioned you were going to be seeing a… oh, Bart, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said softly, and meant it. “This is going to be all right, Mary. I swear. Maybe nothing else, but this is going to be all right.”

He hung up and turned to Fenner. “Want me to call Stephan Ordner?” he asked. “Vinnie Mason? I won’t bother with Ron Stone or Tom Granger, they’d recognize a cheap prick like you before you even had your briefcase unsnapped. But Vinnie wouldn’t and Ordner would welcome you with open arms. He’s on the prod for me.”

“You needn’t,” Fenner said. “You’ve misunderstood me, Mr. Dawes. And you’ve apparently misunderstood my clients. There is nothing personal in this. No one is out to get you. But there has been an awareness for some time that you dislike the 784 extension. You wrote a letter to the paper last August-”

“Last August,” he marveled. “You people have a clipping service, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

He went into a harried crouch, rolling his eyeballs fearfully. “More clippings! More lawyers! Ron, go out and snow those reporters! We have enemies everywhere. Mavis, bring me my pills!” He straightened up. “Paranoia, anyone? Christ, I thought I was bad.”

“We also have a public-relations staff,” Fenner said stiffly. “We are not nickle-and-diming here, Mr. Dawes. We are talking about a ten-million-dollar project.”

He shook his head, disgusted. “They ought to hold a competency hearing on you road guys, not me.”

Fenner said: “I’m going to lay all my cards on the table, Mr. Dawes.”

“You know, it’s been my experience that when anybody says that they’re ready to stop screwing around with the little lies and they’re about to tell a real whopper.”

Fenner flushed, finally angry. “You wrote the newspaper. You dragged your heels on finding a new plant for the Blue Ribbon Laundry and finally got canned-

“I didn’t. I resigned at least a half an hour before they could pink me.”

“-and you’ve ignored all our communications dealing with this house. The consensus is that you may be planning some public display on the twentieth. Calling the papers and TV stations, getting them all out here. The heroic home owner dragged kicking and screaming from his hearth and home by the city’s Gestapo agents.”

“That worries you, doesn’t it?”

“Of course it worries us! Public opinion is volatile, it swings around like a weathervane-”

“And your clients are elected officials.”

Fenner looked at him expressionlessly.

“So what now?” he asked. “Are you going to make me an offer I can’t refuse?”

Fenner sighed. “I can’t understand what we’re arguing about, Mr. Dawes. The city is offering you sixty thousand dollars to-”

“Sixty-three five.”

“Yes, very good. They are offering you that amount for the house and the lot. Some people are getting a lot less. And what do you get for that money? You get no hassles, no trouble, no heat. The money is practically tax free because you’ve already paid Uncle the taxes on the money you spent to buy it. All you owe is taxes on the markup. Or don’t you think the valuation is fair?”

“Fair enough,” he said, thinking about Charlie. “As far as dollars and cents go, it’s fair. Probably more than I could get if I wanted to sell it, with the price of loans what they are.”

“So what are we arguing about?”

“We’re not,” he said, and sipped his drink. Yes, he had gotten his salesman, all right. “Do you have a house, Mr. Fenner?”

“Yes I do,” Fenner said promptly. “A very fine one in Greenwood. And if you are going to ask me what I would do or how I would feel if our positions were reversed, I’ll be very frank. I would twist the city’s tit for all I could get and then laugh all the way to the bank.”

“Yes, of course you would.” He laughed and thought of Don and Ray Tarkington, who would have twisted both tits and rammed the courthouse flagpole up the city’s ass for good measure. “Do you folks really think I’ve lost my marbles, then?”

Judiciously, Fenner said: “We don’t know. Your resolution to the laundry relocation problem was hardly a normal one.”

“Well, I’ll tell you this. I have enough marbles left to know I could get myself a lawyer who doesn’t like the eminent domain statute-one who still believes in that quaint old adage that a man’s home is his castle. He could get a restraining order and we could tie you up for a month, maybe two. With luck and the right progression of judges, we could hold this thing off until next September.”

Fenner looked pleased rather than disconcerted, as he had suspected Fenner would. Finally, Fenner was thinking. Here’s the hook, Freddy, are you enjoying this? Yes, George, I have to admit I am.

“What do you want?” Fenner asked.

“How much are you prepared to offer?”

“We’ll hike the valuation five thousand dollars. Not a penny more. And nobody will hear about the girl.”

Everything stopped. Stopped dead.

“What?” he whispered.

“The girl, Mr. Dawes. The one you were banging. You had her here December sixth and seventh.”

A number of thoughts spiraled through his mind in a period of seconds, some of them extremely sensible, but most of them overlaid and made untrustworthy with a thin yellow patina of fear. But above both fear and sensible thoughts was a vast red rage that made him want to leap across the table and choke this tick-tuck man until clocksprings fell out of his ears. And he must not do that; above all, not that.

“Give me a number,” he said.

“Number-?”

“Phone number. I’ll call you this afternoon and tell you my decision.”

“It would be ever so much better if we could wrap it up right now.”

You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Referee, let’s extend this round thirty seconds. I’ve got this man on the ropes.

“No, I don’t think so. Please get out of my house.”

Fenner gave a smooth, expressionless shrug. “Here’s my card. The number is on it. I expect to be in between two-thirty and four o’clock.”

“I’ll call.”

Fenner left. He watched him through the window beside the front door as he walked down the path to his dark blue Buick, got in, and cruised away. Then he slammed his fist against the wall, hard.

He mixed himself another drink and sat down at the kitchen table to go over the situation. They knew about Olivia. They were willing to use that knowledge as a lever. As a lever to move him it wasn’t very good. They could no doubt end his marriage with it, but his marriage was in serious trouble already. But they had spied on him.

The question was, how?

If there had been men watching him, they undoubtedly would have known about the world-famous crackle-crackle-boom-boom. If so, they would have used it on him. Why bother with something paltry like a little extramarital boogie-woogie when you can have the recalcitrant home owner slapped in jail for arson? So they had bugged him. When he thought how close he had come to drunkenly spilling the crime to Magliore over the phone, cold little dots of perspiration broke out on his skin. Thank God Magliore had shut him up. Crackle-crackle-boom-boom was bad enough.

So he was living in a bugged house and the question remained: What to do about Fenner’s offer and Fenner’s clients’ methods?

He put a TV dinner in the oven for his lunch and sat down with another drink to wait for it. They had spied on him, tried to bribe him. The more he thought about it, the angrier it made him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fenner paused. He could almost hear Fenner thinking.

“All right. What else?”

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

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

“That’s all,” he said.

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

“Fuck you,” he said, and hung up.

January 8, 1974

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Because you have what I need.”

“I wish to God I didn’t.”

“Are you going to help me?”

“I don’t know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Only once,” he said.

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

January 9, 1974

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

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

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

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

He nodded.

“Just a moment, sir, please.”

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

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

Underneath the planet, in slightly smaller letters:

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

“That’s fine.”

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

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

$10,000

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

$4,250

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 10, 1974

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

Well we all need someone to cream on,

And if you want to, you can cream on me.

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

But hadn’t he enjoyed it?

The thought brought him up shop.

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

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

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

But even those things, as bad as they had been, had been new and somehow exciting, like the thought that he might be insane or going insane. The tracks through the interior landscape he had been strolling (or crawling?) through these last two months were the only tracks. He had explored himself and if what he had been finding was often banal, it was also sometimes dreadful and beautiful.

His thoughts reverted to Olivia as he had last seen her, standing on the turnpike ramp with her sign, LAS VEGAS… OR BUST! held up defiantly into the cold indifference of things. He thought of the bank poster: GO AWAY. Why not? There was nothing to hold him here but dirty obsession. No wife and only the ghost of a child, no job and a house that would be an unhouse in a week and a half. He had cash money and a car he owned free and clear. Why not just get in it and go?

A kind of wild excitement seized him. In his mind’s eye he saw himself shutting off the lights, getting into the LTD, and driving to Las Vegas with the money in his pocket. Finding Olivia. Saying to her: Let’s GO AWAY. Driving to California, selling the car, booking passage to the South Seas. From there to Hong Kong, from Hong Kong to Saigon, to Bombay, to Athens, Madrid, Paris, London, New York. Then to-

Here?

The world was round, that was the deadly truth of it. Like Olivia, going to Nevada, resolving to shake the shit loose. Gets stoned and raped the first time around the new track because the new track is just like the old track, in fact it is the old track, around and around until you’ve worn it down too deep to climb out and then it’s time to close the garage door and turn on the ignition and just wait… wait…

The evening drew on and his thoughts went around and around, like a cat trying to catch and swallow its own tail. At last he fell asleep on the couch and dreamed of Charlie.

January 11, 1974

Magliore called him at quarter past one in the afternoon.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll do business, you and I. It’s going to cost you nine thousand dollars. I don’t suppose that changes your mind.”

“In cash?”

“What do you mean in cash? Do you think I’m gonna take your personal check?”

“Okay. Sorry.”

“You be at the Revel Lanes Bowladrome tomorrow night at ten o’clock. You know where that is?”

“Yes, out on Route 7. Just past the Skyview Shopping Mall.”

“That’s right. There’ll be two guys on lane sixteen wearing green shirts with Marlin Avenue Firestone on the back in gold thread. You join them. One of them will explain everything you need to know. That’ll be while you’re bowling. You bowl two or three strings, then you go outside and drive down the road to the Town Line Tavern. You know where that is?”

“No.”

“Just go west on 7. It’s about two miles from the bowling alley on the same side. Park in back. My friends will park beside you. They’ll be driving a Dodge Custom Cab pickup. Blue. They’ll transfer a crate from their truck to your wagon. You give them an envelope. I must be crazy, you know that? Out of my gourd. I’ll probably go up for this. Then I’ll have a nice long time to wonder why the fuck I did it.”

“I’d like to talk to you next week. Personally.”

“ No. Absolutely not. I ain’t your father confessor. I never want to see you again. Not even to talk to you. To tell you the truth, Dawes, I don’t even want to read about you in the paper.”

“It’s a simple investment matter.”

Magliore paused.

“No,” he said finally.

“This is something no one can ever touch you on,” he told Magliore. “I want to set up a… a trust fund for someone.”

“Your wife?”

“No.”

“You stop by Tuesday,” Magliore said at last. “Maybe I’ll see you. Or maybe I’ll have better sense.”

He hung up.

Back in the living room, he thought of Olivia and of living-the two seemed constantly bound up together. He thought of GOING AWAY. He thought of Charlie, and he could hardly remember Charlie’s face anymore, except in snapshot fashion. How could this be possibly happening, then?

With sudden resolution he got up, went to the phone, and turned to TRAVEL in the yellow pages. He dialed a number. But when a friendly female voice on the other end said, “Arnold Travel Agency, how may we help you?” he hung up and stepped quickly away from the phone, rubbing his hands together.

January 12, 1974

The Revel Lanes Bowladrome was a long, fluorescent-lit building that resounded with piped-in Muzak, a jukebox, shouts and conversation, the stuttering bells of pinball machines, the rattle of the coin-op bumper-pool game, and above all else, the lumbering concatenation of falling pins and the booming, droning roll of large black bowling balls.

He went to the counter, got a pair of red-and-white bowling shoes (which the clerk sprayed ceremonially with an aerosol foot disinfectant before allowing them to leave his care), and walked down to Lane 16. The two men were there. He saw that the one standing up to roll was the mechanic who had been replacing the muffler on the day of his first trip to Magliore’s Used Car Sales. The fellow sitting at the scoring table was one of the fellows who had come to his house in the TV van. He was drinking a beer from a waxed-paper cup. They both looked at him as he approached.

“I’m Bart,” he said.

“I’m Ray,” the man at the table said. “And that guy"-the mechanic was rolling now-"is Alan.”

The bowling ball left Alan’s hand and thundered down the alley. Pins exploded everywhere and then Alan made a disgusted noise. He had left the seven-ten split. He tried to hang his second ball over the right gutter and get them both. The ball dropped into the gutter and he made another digusted noise as the pin-setter knocked them back.

“Go for one,” Ray admonished. “Always go for one. Who do you think you are, Billy Welu?”

“I didn’t have english on the ball. A little more and kazam. Hi, Bart.

“Hello.”

They shook hands all around.

“Good to meet you,” Alan said. Then, to Ray: “Let’s start a new string and let Bart in on it. You got my ass whipped in this one anyhow.”

“Sure.”

“Go ahead and go first, Bart,” Alan said.

He hadn’t bowled in maybe five years. He selected a twelve-pound ball that felt right to his fingers and promptly rolled it down the left-hand gutter. He watched it go, feeling like a horse’s ass. He was more careful with the next ball but it hooked and he only got three pins. Ray rolled a strike. Alan hit nine and then covered the four pin.

At the end of the five frames the score was Ray 89, Alan 76, Bart 40. But he was enjoying the feeling of sweat on his back and the unaccustomed exertion of certain muscles that were rarely given the chance to show off.

He had gotten into the game enough that for a moment he didn’t know what Ray was talking about when he said: “It’s called maglinite.”

He looked over, frowning a little at the unfamiliar word, and then understood. Alan was out front, holding his ball and looking seriously down at the four-six, all concentration.

“Okay,” he said.

“It comes in sticks about four inches long. There are forty sticks. Each one has about sixty times the explosive force of a stick of dynamite.”

“Oh,” he said, and suddenly felt sick to his stomach. Alan rolled and jumped in the air when he got both pins for his spare.

He rolled, got seven pins, and sat down again. Ray struck out. Alan went to the ball caddy and held the ball under his chin, frowning down the polished lane at the pins. He gave courtesy to the bowler on his right, and then made his four-step approach.

“There’s four hundred feet of fuse. It takes an electrical charge to set the stuff off. You can turn a blowtorch on it and it will just melt. It-oh, good one! Good one, Al!”

Al had made a Brooklyn hit and knocked them all back.

He got up, threw two gutterballs, and sat down again. Ray spared.

As Alan approached the line, Ray went on: “It takes electricity, a storage battery. You got that?”

“Yes,” he said. He looked down at his score. 47. Seven more than his age.

“You can cut lengths of fuse and splice them together and get simultaneous explosion, can you dig it?”

“Yes.”

Alan rolled another Brooklyn strike.

When he came back, grinning, Ray said: “You can’t trust those Brooklyn hits, boy. Get it over in the right pocket.”

“Up your ass, I’m only eight pins down.”

He rolled, got six pins, sat down, and Ray struck out again. Ray had 116 at the end of seven.

When he sat down again Ray asked: “Do you have any questions?”

“No. Can we leave at the end of this string?”

“Sure. But you wouldn’t be so bad if you worked some of the rust off. You keep twisting your hand when you deliver. That’s your problem.”

Alan hit the Brooklyn pocket exactly as he had on his two previous strikes, but this time left the seven-ten split and came back scowling. He thought, this is where I came in.

“I told you not to trust that whore’s pocket,” Ray said, grinning.

“Screw,” Alan growled. He went for the spare and dropped the ball into the gutter again.

“Some guys,” Ray said, laughing. “Honest to God, some guys never learn, you know that? They never do.”

The Town Line tavern had a huge red neon sign that knew nothing of the energy crisis. It flicked off and on with mindless, eternal confidence. Underneath the red neon was a white marquee that said:

There was a plowed parking lot to the right of the tavern, filled with the cars of Saturday night patrons. When he drove in he saw that the parking lot went around to the back in an L. There were several parking slots left back there. He drove in next to an empty one, shut off the car, and got out.

The night was pitilessly cold, the kind of night that doesn’t feel that cold until you realize that your ears went as numb as pump handles in the first fifteen seconds you were out. Overhead a million stars glittered in magnified brilliance. Through the tavern’s back wall he could hear the Fabulous Oysters playing “After Midnight.” J.J. Care wrote that song, he thought, and wondered where he had picked up that useless piece of information. It was amazing the way the human brain filled up with road litter. He could remember who wrote “After Midnight,” but he couldn’t remember his dead son’s face. That seemed very cruel.

The Custom Cab pickup rolled up next to his station wagon; Ray and Alan got out. They were all business now, both dressed in heavy gloves and Army surplus parkas.

“You got some money for us,” Ray said.

He took the envelope out of his coat and handed it over. Ray opened it and riffled the bills inside, estimating rather than counting.

“Okay. Open up your wagon.”

“He opened the back (which, in the Ford brochures, was called the Magic Doorgate) and the two of them slid a heavy wooden crate out of the pickup and carne d it to his wagon.

“Fuse is in the bottom,” Ray said, breathing white jets out of his nose. “Remember, you need juice. Otherwise you might just as well use the stuff for birthday candles.”

“I’ll remember.”

“You ought to bowl more. You got a powerful swing.”

They got back into their truck and drove away. A few moments later he alsc drove away, leaving the Fabulous Oysters to their own devices. His ears were cold, and they prickled when the heater warmed them up.

When he got home, he carried the crate into the house and pried it open with a screwdriver. The stuff looked exactly as Ray had said it would, like waxy gray candles. Beneath the sticks and a layer of newspaper were two fat white loops of fuse. The loops of fuse had been secured with white plastic ties that looked identical to the ones with which he secured his Hefty garbage bags.

He put the crate in the living room closet and tried to forget it, but it seemed to give off evil emanations that spread out from the closet to cover the whole house, as though something evil had happened in there years ago, something that had slowly and surely tainted everything.

January 13, 1974

He drove down to the Landing Strip and crawled up and down the streets, looking for Drake’s place of business. He saw crowded tenements standing shoulder to shoulder, so exhausted that it seemed that they would collapse if the buildings flanking them were taken away. A forest of TV antennas rose from the top of each one, standing against the sky like frightened hair. Bars, closed until noon. A derelict car in the middle of a side street, tires gone, headlights gone, chrome gone, making it look like a bleached cow skeleton in the middle of Death Valley. Glass twinkled in the gutters. All the pawnshops and liquor stores had accordion grilles across their plate glass windows. He thought: That’s what we learned from the race riots eight years ago. How to prevent looting in an emergency. And halfway down Venner Street he saw a small storefront with a sign in Old English letters. The sign said:

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

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

Coffee 15c

Tea 15c

All soda 25c

Balogna 30c

PB amp;125c

Hot Dog 35c

The other sign said:

All Drop In counter help are VOLUNTEERS and when you serve yourself you make them feel useless and stupid. Please wait and remember GOD LOVES YOU!

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

“Good. Can I get a cup of coffee?”

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

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

“Nothing to thank me for.”

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

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

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

“Who was she?”

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

Drake frowned at it without touching it.

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

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

“This is five thousand dollars,” he said.

“Yes.”

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

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

“Your wife agrees?”

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

“I see.”

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

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

“Why not?”

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

He did. “I’ve no plans that way.”

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

“This is not a whim,” he said firmly.

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

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

“Sums this large?”

“No.”

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

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

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

“Penance for what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re making sport of me.”

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

Instead, he got into his car and drove away.

January 14, 1974

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

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

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

January 15, 1974

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

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

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

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

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

“This is the last thing.”

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

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

“Who do you want found?”

“A girl in Las Vegas.”

“The fifteen’s for her?”

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

“Legitimate operations?”

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

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

“Don’t you have connections there?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Say no if you have to.”

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

“Yes.”

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

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

“I agree to that condition.”

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

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

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

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

January 16, 1974

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

January 17, 1974

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

“You sold the house,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“But you’re still there.”

“Only until Saturday. I’ve rented a big farmhouse in the country. I’m going to try and get my act back together.”

“Oh, Bart. That’s so wonderful. I’m so glad.” He realized why it was being so easy. She was being phony. She wasn’t glad or not glad. She had given up.” About the checkbook…”

“Yes.”

“You split the money right down the middle, didn’t you?”

“Yes I did. If you want to check, you can call Mr. Fenner.”

“No. Oh, I didn’t mean that.” And he could almost see her making pushingaway gestures with her hands. “What I meant was… you separating the money like that… does it mean…”

She trailed off artfully and he thought: Ow, you bitch, you got me. Bull’s eye.

“Yes, I guess it does,” he said. “Divorce.”

“Have you thought about it?” she asked earnestly, phonily. “Have you really-”

“I’ve thought about it a lot.”

“So have I. It seems like the only thing left to do. But I don’t hold anything against you, Bart. I’m not mad at you.”

My God, she’s been reading all those paperback novels. Next she’ll tell me she’s going back to school. He was surprised at his bitterness. He thought he had gotten past that part.

“What will you do?”

“I’m going back to school,” she said, and now there was no phoniness in her voice, now it was excited, shining. “I dug out my old transcript, it was still up in Mamma’s attic with all my old clothes, and do you know I only need twenty-four credits to graduate? Bart, that’s hardly more than a year!”

He saw Mary crawling through her mother’s attic and the image blended with one of himself sitting bewildered in a pile of Charlie’s clothes. He shut it out.

“Bart? Are you still there?”

“Yes. I’m glad being single again is going to fulfill you so nicely.”

“Bart,” she said reproachfully.

But there was no need to snap at her now, to tease her or make her feel bad.

Things had gone beyond that. Mr. Piazzi’s dog, having bitten, moves on. That struck him funny and he giggled.

“Bart, are you crying?” She sounded tender. Phony, but tender.

“No,” he said bravely.

“Bart, is there anything I can do? If there is, I want to.”

“No. I think I’m going to be fine. And I’m glad you’re going back to school. Listen, this divorce-who gets it? You or me?”

“I think it would look better if I did,” she said timidly.

“Okay. Fine.”

There was a pause between them and suddenly she blurted into it, as if the words had escaped without her knowledge or approval: “Have you slept with anyone since I left?”

He thought the question over, and ways of answering: the truth, a lie, an evasion that might keep her awake tonight.

“No,” he said carefully, and added: “Have you?”

“Of course not,” she said, managing to sound shocked and pleased at the same time. “I wouldn’t.”

“You will eventually.”

“Bart, let’s not talk about sex.”

“All right,” he said placidly enough, although it was she who had brought the subject up. He kept searching for something nice to say to her, something that she would remember. He couldn’t think of a thing, and furthermore didn’t know why he would want her to remember him at all, at least at this stage of things. They had had good years before. He was sure they must have been good because he couldn’t remember much of what had happened in them, except maybe the crazy TV bet.

He heard himself say: “Do you remember when we took Charlie to nursery school the first time?”

“Yes. He cried and you wanted to take him back with us. You didn’t want to let him go, Bart.”

“And you did.”

She was saying something disclaiming in a slightly wounded tone, but he was remembering the scene. The lady who kept the nursery school was Mrs. Ricker. She had a certificate from the state, and she gave all the children a nice hot lunch before sending them home at one o’clock. School was kept downstairs in a madeover basement and as they led Charlie down between them, he felt like a traitor; like a farmer petting a cow and saying Soo, Bess on the way to the slaughterhouse. He had been a beautiful boy, his Charlie. Blond hair that had darkened later, blue, watchful eyes, hands that had been clever even as a toddler. And he had stood between them at the bottom of the stairs, stock-still, watching the other children who were whooping and running and coloring and cutting colored paper with bluntnosed scissors, so many of them, and Charlie had never looked so vulnerable as he did in that instant, just watching the other children. There was no joy or fear in his eyes, only the watchfulness, a kind of outsiderness, and he had never felt so much his son’s father as then, never so close to the actual run of his thoughts. And Mrs. Ricker came over, smiling like a barracuda and she said: We’ll have such fun, Chuck, making him want to cry out: That’s not his name! And when she put out her hand Charlie did not take it but only watched it so she stole his hand and began to pull him a little toward the others, and he went willingly two steps and then stopped, looked back at them, and Mrs. Young said very quietly: Go right along, he’ll be fine. And Mary finally had to poke him and say Come ON, Bart because he was frozen looking at his son, his son’s eyes saying, Are you going to let them do this to me, George? and his own eyes saying back, Yes, I guess I am, Freddy and he and Mary started up the stairs, showing Charlie their backs, the most dreadful thing a little child can see, and Charlie began to wail. But Mary’s footsteps never faltered because a woman’s love is strange and cruel and nearly always clear-sighted, love that sees is always horrible love, and she knew walking away was right and so she walked, dismissing the cries as only another part of the boy’s development, like smiles from gas or scraped knees. And he had felt a pain in his chest so sharp, so physical, that he had wondered if he was having a heart attack, and then the pain had just passed, leaving him shaken and unable to interpret it, but now he thought that the pain had been plain old prosaic good-bye. Parents’ backs aren’t the most dreadful thing. The most dreadful thing of all is the speed with which children dismiss those same backs and turn to their own affairs-to the game, the puzzle, the new friend, and eventually to death. Those were the awful things he had come to know now. Charlie had begun dying long before he got sick, and there was no putting a stop to it.

“Bart?” she was saying. “Are you still there, Bart?”

“I’m here.”

“What good are you doing yourself thinking about Charlie all the time? It’s eating you up. You’re his prisoner.”

“But you’re free,” he said. “Yes.”

“Shall I see the lawyer next week?”

“Okay. Fine.”

“It doesn’t have to be nasty, does it, Bart?”

“No. It will be very civilized.”

“You won’t change your mind and contest it?”

“No.”

“I’ll… I’ll be talking to you, then.”

“You knew it was time to leave him and so you did. I wish to God I could be that instinctive.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Good-bye, Mary. I love you.” He realized he had said it after he hung up. He had said it automatically, with no feeling-verbal punctuation. But it wasn’t such a bad ending. Not at all.

January 18, 1974

The secretary’s voice said: “Who shall I say is calling?”

“Bart Dawes.”

“Will you hold for a moment?”

“Sure.”

She put him in limbo and he held the blank receiver to his ear, tapping his foot and looking out the window at the ghost town of Crestallen Street West. It was a bright day but very cold, temperature about 10 above with a chill factor making it 10 below. The wind blew skirls of snow across the street to where the Hobarts’ house stood broodingly silent, just a shell waiting for the wrecking ball. They had even taken their shutters.

There was a click and Steve Ordner’s voice said: “Bart, how are you?”

“Fine.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I called about the laundry,” he said. “I wondered what the corporation had decided to do about relocation.”

Ordner sighed and then said with good-humored reserve: “A little late for that, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t call to be beaten with it, Steve.”

“Why not? You’ve surely beaten everyone else with it. Well, never mind. The board has decided to get out of the industrial laundry business, Bart. The Laundromats will stay; they’re all doing well. We’re going to change the chain name, though. To Handi-Wash. How does that sound?”

“Terrible,” he said remotely. “Why don’t you sack Vinnie Mason?”

“Vinnie?” Ordner sounded surprised. “Vinnie’s doing a great job for us. Turning into quite the mogul. I must say I didn’t expect such bitterness-”

“Come on, Steve. That job’s got no more future than a tenement airshaft. Give him something worthwhile or let him out.”

“I handy think that’s your business, Bart.”

“You’ve got a dead chicken tied around his neck and he doesn’t know it yet because it hasn’t started to rot. He still thinks it’s dinner.”

“I understand he punched you up a little before Christmas.”

“I told him the truth and he didn’t like it.”

“Truth’s a slippery word, Bart. I would think you’d understand that better than anyone, after all the lies you told me.

“That still bugs you, doesn’t it?”

“When you discover that a man you thought was a good man is full of shit, it does tend to bug one, yes.”

“Bug one,” he repeated. “Do you know something, Steve? You’re the only person I’ve ever known in my life that would say that. Bug one. It sounds like something that comes in a fucking aerosol can.”

“Was there anything else, Bart?”

“No, not really. I wish you’d stop beating Vinnie, that’s all. He’s a good man. You’re wasting him. And you know goddam well you’re wasting him.”

“I repeat: why would I want to 'beat' Vinnie?”

“Because you can’t get to me.”

“You’re getting paranoid, Bart. I’ve got no desire to do anything to you but forget you.”

“Is that why you were checking to see if I ever had personal laundry done free? Or took kickbacks from the motels? I understand you even took the petty cash vouchers for the last five years or so.”

“Who told you that?” Ordner barked. He sounded startled, off balance.

“Somebody in your organization,” he lied joyfully. “Someone who doesn’t like you much. Someone who thought I might be able to get the ball rolling a little in time for the next director’s meeting.”

“Who?”

“Good-bye, Steve. You think about Vinnie Mason, and I’ll think about who I might or might not talk to.”

“Don’t you hang up on me! Don’t you-”

He hung up, grinning. Even Steve Ordner had the proverbial feet of clay. Who was it Steve reminded him of? Ball bearings. Strawberry ice cream stolen from the food locker. Herman Wouk. Captain Queeg, that was it. Humphrey Bogart had played him in the movie. He laughed aloud and sang:

“We all need someone to Queeg on,

And if you want to, why don’tcha Queeg all over me?”

I’m crazy all right, he thought, still laughing. But it does seem there are certain advantages. It came to him that one of the surest signs of insanity was a man all alone, laughing in the middle of silence, on an empty street filled with empty houses. But the thought could not still his humor and he laughed louder, standing by the telephone and shaking his head and grinning.

January 19, 1974

After dark he went out to the garage and brought in the guns. He loaded the Magnum carefully, according to the directions in the instruction pamphlet, after dryfiring it several times. The Rolling Stones were on the stereo, singing about the Midnight Rambler. He couldn’t get over what a fine album that was. He thought about himself as Barton George Dawes, Midnight Rambler, Visits by Appointment Only.

The.460 Weatherbee took eight shells. They looked big enough to fit a medium howitzer. When the rifle was loaded he looked at it curiously, wondering if it was as powerful as Dirty Harry Swinnerton had claimed. He decided to take it out behind the house and fire it. Who was there on Crestallen Street West to report gunshots?

He put on his jacket and started out the back door through the kitchen, then went back to the living room and got one of the small pillows that lay on the couch. Then he went outside, pausing to flick on the 200-watt yard light that he and Mary had used in the summer for backyard barbecues. Back here, the snow was as he had pictured it in his mind a little more than a week ago-untouched, unmarred, totally virgin. No one had foot-fucked this snow. In past years Don Upslinger’s boy Kenny sometimes used the backyard express to get up to his friend Ronnie’s house. Or Mary used the line he had strung kitty-corner between the house and garage to hang a few things (usually unmentionables) on days when it was too warm for them to freeze. But he himself always went to the garage by the breezeway and now it struck him as sort of marvelous-no one had been in his backyard since snow first fell, in late November. Not even a dog, by the look of it.

He had a sudden crazy urge to stride out into the middle, about where he set the hibachi every summer, and make a snow angel.

Instead he tucked the pillow up against his right shoulder, held it for a moment with his chin, and then pressed the butt plate of the Weatherbee against it. He glared down the sight with his left eye shut, and tried to remember the advice the actors always gave each other just before the gyrenes hit the beaches in the late-night war movies. Usually it was some seasoned veteran like Richard Widmark talking to some green private-Martin Milner, perhaps: Don’t jerk that trigger, son-SQUEEZE it.

Okay, Fred. Let’s see if I can hit my own garage.

He squeezed the trigger.

The rifle did not make a report. It made an explosion. At first he was afraid it had blown up in his hands. He knew he was alive when the recoil knocked him back against the kitchen storm door. The report traveled off in all directions with a curious rolling sound, like jet exhaust. The pillow fell in the snow. His shoulder throbbed.

“Jesus, Fred!” he gasped.

He looked at his garage and was hardly able to believe it. There was a splintered hole in the siding big enough to fit a teacup through.

He leaned the gun against the kitchen storm door and walked through the snow, never minding the fact that he had his low shoes on. He examined the hole for a minute, bemusedly prying up loose splinters with his forefinger, and then he went around and inside.

The exit hole was bigger. He looked at his station wagon. There was a bullet hole in the driver’s side door, and the paint had been seared off to show bare metal around the concave hole, which was big enough for him to stick the tips of two fingers in. He opened the door and looked across the seat at the passenger door. Yes, the bullet had gone through there too, just below the door handle.

He walked around to the passenger side and saw where the bullet had exited, leaving another big hole, this time with tines of metal sticking balefully out. He turned and looked at the garage wall opposite where the bullet had entered. It had gone through that too. For all he knew, it was still going.

He heard Harry the gun shop proprietor saying: So your cousin gut-shoots… this baby will spread his insides over twenty feet. And what would it do to a man? Probably the same. It made him feel ill.

He walked back to the kitchen door, stooped to pick up his pillow, and went back into the house, pausing automatically to stamp his feet so he wouldn’t track across Mary’s kitchen. In the living room he took off his shirt. There was a red welt in the shape of the rifle’s butt plate on his shoulder in spite of the pillow.

He went into the kitchen with his shirt still off and fixed a pot of coffee and a TV dinner. When he finished his meal he went into the living room and laid down on the couch and began to cry, and the crying rose to a jagged, breaking hysteria which he heard and feared but could not control. At last it began to trail off and he fell heavily asleep, breathing harshly. In his sleep he looked old and some of the stubble on his cheeks was white.

January 20, 1974

He woke with a guilty start, afraid it was morning and too late. His sleep had been as sodden and dark as old coffee, the kind of sleep he always woke from feeling stupid and cottonheaded. He looked at his watch and saw it was quarter past two.

The rifle was where he had left it, leaning nonchalantly in the easy chair. The Magnum was on the end table.

He got up, went into the kitchen, and splashed cold water on his face. He went upstairs and put on a fresh shirt. He went back downstairs tucking it in. He locked all the downstairs doors, and for reasons he did not wish to examine too closely, his heart felt a tiny bit lighter as each tumbler clicked. He began to feel like himself again for the first time since that damnable woman had collapsed in front of him in the supermarket. He put the Weatherbee on the floor by the living room picture window and stacked the shells beside it, opening each box as he set it down. He dragged the easy chair over and set it on its side.

He went into the kitchen and locked the windows. He took one of the dining room chairs and propped it under the kitchen doorknob. He poured himself a cup of cold coffee, sipped it absently, grimaced, and dashed it into the sink. He made himself a drink.

He went back into the living room and brought out the automobile storage battery. He put it behind the overturned easy chair, then got the jumper cables and coiled them beside the battery.

He carried the case of explosive upstairs, grunting and puffing. When he got to the landing he set it down with a thump and blew out his breath. He was getting too old for this sort of bullshit, even though a lot of the laundry muscle from the days when he and his partner had lifted four-hundred-pound lots of ironed sheets onto the delivery trucks, was still there. But muscle or no muscle, when a man got to be forty, some things were tempting fate. By forty it was attack time.

He went from room to room upstairs, turning on all the lights: The guest bedroom, the guest bathroom, master bedroom, the study that had once been Charlie’s room. He put a chair under the attic trapdoor and went up there, turning on the dusty bulb. Then he went down to the kitchen and got a roll of electrician’s tape, a pair of scissors, and a sharp steak knife.

He took two sticks of explosive from the crate (it was soft, and if you pressed it, you left fingerprints) and took them up to the attic. He cut two lengthy of fuse and peeled the white insulation back from the copper core with the steak knife. Then he pressed each bare wire into one of the candles. In the closet, standing below the trapdoor now, he peeled the insulation from the other ends of the fuses and carefully attached two more sticks, taping the fuse firmly to each so that the peeled wire wouldn’t pull free.

Humming now, he strung more fuse from the attic into the master bedroom and left a stick on each of the twin beds. He strung more fuse from there down the hall and left a stick in the guest bathroom, two more in the guest bedroom. He turned off the lights as he left. In Charlie’s old room he left four sticks, taped together in a cluster. He trailed fuse out the door and dropped a coil of it over the stairway railing. Then he went downstairs.

Four sticks on the kitchen counter, beside his bottle of Southern Comfort. Four sticks in the living room. Four in the dining room. Four in the hall.

He trailed fuse back into the living room, a little out of breath from going up and down stairs. But there was one more trip to make. He went back up and got the crate, which was considerably lighter now. There were only eleven sticks of explosive left inside it. The crate, he saw, had once contained oranges. Written on the side, in faded letters, was this word:

Beside the word was a picture of an orange with one leaf clinging to the stem. He took the crate out to the garage, using the breezeway this time, and put the box on the back seat of his car. He wired each stick of malglinite with a short fuse, then joined all eleven to a long length with electrician’s tape and strung the long fuse back into the house, being careful to slip the fuse into the crack beneath the side door that opened onto the breezeway and then relocking it.

In the living room he joined the house master fuse with the one that came from the garage. Working carefully, still humming, he cut another length and joined it to the other two with electrician’s tape. He payed this final fuse over to the battery and peeled the insulation from the end with the steak knife.

He separated the copper core wires and twisted each bunch into a little pigtail. He took the jumper cables and attached a black alligator clip to one pigtail, a red alligator clip to the other. He went to the storage battery and attached the other black alligator clip to the terminal marked:

He left the red clip unhooked, lying beside the post marked

Then he went to the stereo, turned it on, and listened to the Rolling Stones. It was five minutes past four. He went to the kitchen, made himself another drink, and went back to the living room with it, suddenly at loose ends. There was a copy of Good Housekeeping on the coffee table. There was an article in it about the Kennedy family and their problems. He read the article. After that he read an article titled “Women and Breast Cancer.” It was by a woman doctor.

They came at a little past ten, just after the bells of the Congregational Church five blocks over had rung in the hour, calling people to matins, or whatever in hell the Congregationalists called them.

There was a green sedan and a black-and-white police car. They pulled up at the curb and three men got out of the green sedan. One of them was Fenner. He didn’t know who the other two were. Each of them had a briefcase.

Two policemen got out of the black-and-white and leaned against it. It was obvious from their attitudes that they expected no trouble; they were discussing something as they leaned against the hood of the black-and-white, and their words came out of their mouths in visible white puffs.

Things stopped.

Stoptime, January 20, 1974

well fred this is it i guess put up or shut up time oh i know in one sense it’s too late to shut up i’ve got explosives strung all over the house like birthday decorations a gun in my hand and another one in my belt like fucking john dillinger well what do you say this is the last decision like climbing a tree i pick this fork then i pick that fork now this now that

(the men frozen in tableau outside in the hallway between seconds fenner in a green suit one foot six inches off the pavement as it steps forward good shoes clad in low fashionable rubbers if there is such a thing as fashionable rubbers his green topcoat flapping open like a crusading attorney in a tv lead-in his head is slightly turned slightly cocked the man in back of him has made some comment and fenner is cocking his head to catch it the man who has spoken has a white plume half out of his mouth this second man is wearing a blue blazer and dark brown pants his topcoat is also open and the wind has caught it stoptime has caught his topcoat in midflap and the third man is just turning from the car and the cops are leaning against their black-and-white with their heads turned to one another they could be discussing anything marriage or a tough case or the shitty season the musties had or the state of their balls and the sun has come through the scud overhead just enough to make a single twinkle on a single shell of one policeman’s assigned equipment said shell pushed through one of many little leather loops on said policeman’s belt the other cop is wearing shades and the sun has pricked out a compass point on the right lens and his lips are thick sensual caught at the beginning of a smile: this is the photograph)

I’m going ahead freddy my boy do you have anything you’d care to say at this auspicious moment at this point in the proceedings yes says fred you’re going to hold out for the newspeople aren’t you i sure am says george the words the pictures the newsreels demolition i know has only the point of visibility but freddy does it strike you how lonely this is how all over this city and the world people are eating and shitting and fucking and scratching their eczema all the things they write books about while we have to do this alone yes i’ve considered that george in fact i tried to tell you something about it if you’ll recall and if it’s any consolation to you this seems right right now it seems okay because when you can’t move you can give them their roadwork but please george don’t kill anybody no not on purpose fred but you see the position i am in yes i see i understand by george I’m scared now I’m so scared no don’t be scared I’m going to handle this and I’m in perfect control myself

roll it

January 20, 1974

“Roll it,” he said aloud, and everything began to move.

He put the rifle to his shoulder, sighted on the right front wheel of the police cruiser, and pulled the trigger.

The gun kicked crushingly against his shoulder and the muzzle jerked upward after the bullet had been fired. The large living room window burst outward, leaving only jagged hunks protruding from the molding like impressionistic glass arrows. The cruiser’s front tire did not flatten; it exploded with a loud bang, and the whole car shuddered on its springs like a dog that had been kicked while asleep. The hubcap flew off and rattled aimlessly on the frozen composition surface of Crestallen Street West.

Fenner stopped and looked unbelievingly at the house. His face was raw with shock. The fellow in the blue blazer dropped his briefcase. The other fellow had better reflexes, or perhaps a more developed sense of self-preservation. He wheeled and ran around the green sedan, crouched low, and disappeared from sight.

The policemen moved right and left, behind their own cruiser. A moment later the one wearing sunglasses bounced up from behind the hood, his service revolver held in both hands, and fired three times. The gun made an innocuous popping sound after the Weatherbee’s massive crack. He fell behind his chair and heard the bullets pass overhead-you really could hear them, and the noise they made in the air was zzizzz!-and bury themselves in the plaster above the couch. The sound they made entering the plaster reminded him of the sound fists made hitting the heavy bag in a gymnasium. He thought: that’s what they’d sound like going into me.

The cop wearing sunglasses was shouting at Fenner and the man in the blue blazer. “Get down! Goddammit, get down! He’s got a fucking howitzer in there!”

He raised his head a little more to see better and the cop in the sunglasses saw him do it and fired twice more. The bullets thudded into the wall and this time Mary’s favorite picture, “Lobstermen” by Winslow Homer, fell off the wall, hit the couch, and then went to the floor. The glass facing on the picture shattered.

He raised his head again because he had to see what was happening (why hadn’t he thought to get a kid’s periscope?), he had to see if they were trying to flank him which was how Richard Widmark and Marty Milner always took the Jap pillboxes on the late movies, and if they were trying to do that he would have to try to shoot one, but the cops were still behind their cruiser and Fenner and the guy in the blue blazer were dashing behind the green car. Blue Blazer’s briefcase lay on the sidewalk like a small dead animal. He aimed at it, wincing at the recoil of the big rifle even before it came, and fired.

CRRRACKK! and the briefcase exploded into two pieces and jumped savagely into the air, flapping, disgorging a flutter of papers for the wind to stir an invisible finger through.

He fired again, this time at the right front wheel of the green sedan, and the tire blew. One of the men behind the car screamed in soprano terror.

He looked over at the police car and the driver’s side door was open. The cop with the sunglasses was lying half in on the seat, using his radio. Soon all the party-goers would be here. They were going to give him away, a little piece for anyone who wanted one, and it would not be personal anymore. He felt a relief that was as bitter as aloes. Whatever it had been, whatever mournful sickness that had brought him to this, the last crotch of a tall tree, it was not his alone anymore, whispering and crying in secret. He had joined the mainstream of lunacy, he had come out of the closet. Soon they could reduce him to safe headline-SHAKY CEASE-FIRE HOLDS ON CRESTALLEN STREET.

He put the rifle down and scrambled across the living room floor on his hands and knees, being careful not to cut himself on the glass from the shattered picture frame. He got the small pillow and then scrambled back. The cop was not in the car anymore.

He picked up the Magnum and put two shots across their bow. The pistol bucked heavily in his hand, but the recoil was manageable. His shoulder throbbed like a rotted tooth.

One of the cops, the one without sunglasses, popped up behind the cruiser’s hunk to return his fire and he sent two bullets into the cruiser’s back window, blowing it inward in a twisted craze of cracks. The cop ducked back down without firing.

“Hold it!” Fenner bawled. “Let me talk to him!”

“Go ahead,” one of the cops said.

“Dawes!” Fenner yelled toughly, sounding like a detective in the last reel of a Jimmy Cagney movie. (The police spotlights are crawling relentlessly back and forth over the front of the sleazy slum tenement where “Mad Dog” Dawes has gone to ground with a smoking.45 automatic in each hand.” “Mad Dog” is crouched behind an overturned easy chair, wearing a strappy T-shirt and snarling.) “Dawes, can you hear me in there!”

(And “Mad Dog,” his face twisted with defiance-although his brow is greased with sweat-screams out:)

“Come and get me, ya dirty coppers!” He bounced up over the easy chair and emptied the Magnum into the green sedan, leaving a ragged row of holes.

“Jesus!” somebody screamed. “Oh Jesus he’s nuts!”

“Dawes!” Fenner yelled.

“You’ll never take me alive!” he yelled, delirious with joy. “You’re the dirty rats who shot my,kid brother! I’ll see some of ya in hell before ya get me!” He reloaded the Magnum with trembling fingers and then put enough shells into the Weatherbee to fill its magazine.

“Dawes!” Fenner yelled again. “How about a deal?

“How about some hot lead, ya dirty screw!” he screamed at Fenner, but he was looking at the police car and when the cop wearing sunglasses put his head stealthily over the hood, he sent him diving with two shots. One of them went through the picture window of the Quinns’ house across the street.

“Dawes!” Fenner yelled importantly.

One of the cops said: “Oh shut the fuck up. You’re just encouraging him.”

There was an embarrassed silence and in it the sound of sirens, still distant, began to rise. He put the Magnum down and picked up the rifle. The joyous delirium had left him feeling tired and achey and needing to shit.

Please let them be quick from the TV stations, he prayed. Quick with their movie cameras.

When the first police car screamed around the corner in a calculated racing drift like something out of The French Connection he was ready. He had fired two of the howitzer shells over the parked cruiser to make them stay down, and he drew a careful bead on the grille of the charging cruiser and squeezed the trigger like a seasoned Richard Widmark-type veteran and the whole grille seemed to explode and the hood flew up. The cruiser roared straight over the curb about forty yards up the street and hit a tree. The doors flew open and four cops spilled out with their guns drawn, looking dazed. Two of them walked into each other. Then the cops behind the first cruiser (his cops, he thought of them with a trace of propriety) opened fire and he submarined behind the chair while the bullets whizzed above him. It was seventeen minutes of eleven. He thought that now they would try to flank him.

He stuck his head up because he had to and a bullet droned past his right ear. Two more cruisers were corning up Crestallen Street from the other direction, sirens whooping, blue lights flashing. Two of the cops from the crashed cruiser were trying to climb the stake fence between the sidewalk and the Upslingers’ backyard and he fired the rifle at them three times, not firing to hit or miss but only to make them go back to their car. They did. Wood from Wilbur Upslinger’s fence (ivy climbed on it in the spring and summer) sprayed everywhere, and part of it actually fell over into the snow.

The two new cruisers had pulled up in a V that blocked the road in front of Jack Hobart’s house. Police crouched in the apex of the V. One of them was talking to the police in the crash cruiser on a walkie-talkie. A moment later the newest arrivals began laying down a heavy pattern of covering fire, making him duck again. Bullets struck the front door, the front of the house, and all around the picture window. The mirror in the front hall exploded into jumbled diamonds. A bullet punched through the quilt covering the Zenith TV, and the quilt danced briefly.

He scrambled across the living room on his hands and knees and stood up by the small window behind the TV. From here he could look directly into the Upslingers’ backyard. Two policemen were trying the flanking movement again. One of them had a nosebleed.

Freddy, I may have to kill one of them to make them stop.

Don’t do that, George. Please. Don’t do that.

He smashed the window with the butt of the Magnum, cutting his hand. They looked around at the noise, saw him, and began to shoot. He returned their fire and saw two of his bullets punch holes in Wilbur’s new aluminum siding (had the city recompensed him for that?). He heard bullets punching into his own house just below the window and on both sides of it. One whined off the frame and splinters flew in his face. He expected a bullet to rip off the top of his head at any moment. It was hard to tell how long the exchange went on. Suddenly one of the cops grabbed his forearm and cried out. The cop dropped his pistol like a child that has grown tired of a stupid game. He ran in a small circle. His partner grabbed him and they began to run back toward their crashed cruiser, the unhurt one with his arm around his partner’s waist.

He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled back to the overturned chair and peeked out. Two more cruisers on the street now, one corning from each end. They parked on the Quinns’ side of the street and eight policemen got out and run behind the cruiser with the flat tire and the green sedan.

He put his head down again and crawled into the hall. The house was taking very heavy fire now. He knew he should take the rifle and go upstairs, he would have a better angle on them from up there, could maybe drive them back from their car to cover in the houses across the street. But he didn’t dare go that far from the master fuse and the storage battery. The TV people might come at any time.

The front door was full of bullet holes, the dark brown varnish splintered back to show the raw wood underneath. He crawled into the kitchen. All the windows were broken in here and broken glass littered the linoleum. A chance shot had knocked the coffeepot from the stove and it lay overturned in a puddle of brown goo. He crouched below the window for a moment, then bounced up and emptied the Magnum into the V-parked cars. Immediately fire intensified on the kitchen. Two bullet holes appeared in the white enamel of the refrigerator and another struck the Southern Comfort bottle on the counter. It exploded, spraying glass and southern hospitality everywhere.

Crawling back to the living room he felt something like a bee sting in the fleshy part of his tight thigh just below the buttocks, and when he clapped his hand to it, his fingers came away bloody.

He lay behind the chair and reloaded the Magnum. Reloaded the Weatherbee. Poked his head up and ducked back down, wincing, at the ferocity of fire that came at him, bullets striking the couch and the wall and the TV, making the quilt shimmy. Poked his head up again and fined at the police cars parked across the street. Blew in one window. And saw-

At the top of the street, a white station wagon and a white Ford van. Written in blue letters on the sides of both was:

Panting, he crawled back to the window that looked out on the Upslingers’ side yard. The news vehicles were crawling slowly and dubiously down Crestallen Street. Suddenly a new police car shot around them and blocked them off, tires smoking. An arm dressed in blue shot out of the cruiser’s back window and began waving the newsmobiles off.

A bullet struck the windowsill and jumped into the room at an angle.

He crawled back to the easy chair, holding the Magnum in his bloody right hand and screamed: “Fenner!”

The fire slackened a little.

“Fenner!” he screamed again.

“Hold on!” Fenner yelled. “Stop! Stop a minute!”

There were a few isolated pops, then nothing.

“What do you want?” Fenner called.

“The news people! Down behind those cars on the other side of the street! I want to talk to them!”

There was a long, contemplative pause.

“No!” Fenner yelled.

“I’ll stop shooting if I can talk to them!” That much was true, he thought, looking at the battery.

“No!” Fenner yelled again.

Bastard, he thought helplessly. Is it that important to you? You and Ordner and the rest of you bureaucratic bastards?

The firing began again, tentatively at first, then gaining strength. Then, incredibly, a man in a plaid shirt and blue jeans was running down the sidewalk, holding a pistol-grip camera in one hand.

“I heard that!” the man in the plaid shirt yelled. “I heard every word! I’ll get your name, fella! He offered to stop shooting and you-”

A policeman hit him with a waist-high flying tackle and the man in the plaid shirt crunched to the sidewalk. His movie camera flew into the gutter and a moment later three bullets shattered it into winking pieces. A clockspring of unexposed film unwound lazily from the remains. Then the fire flagged again, uncertainly.

“Fenner, let them set up!” he hollered. His throat felt raw and badly used, like the rest of him. His hand hurt and a deep, throbbing ache had begun to emanate outward from his thigh.

“Come out first!” Fenner yelled back. “We’ll let you tell your side of it!”

Rage washed over him in a red wave at this barefaced lie. “GODDAMMIT, I’ve GOTA BIG GUN HERE AND I’ll START SHOOTING AT GAS TANKS YOU SHITBIRD AND THERE’ll BE A FUCKING BARBECUE WHEN I GET DONE!”

Shocked silence.

Then, cautiously, Fenner said: “What do you want?”

“Send that guy you tackled in here! Let the camera crew set up!”

“Absolutely not! We’re not giving you a hostage to play games with all day!”

A cop ran over to the listing green sedan bent low and disappeared behind it. There was a consultation.

A new voice yelled: “There’s thirty men behind your house, guy! They’ve got shotguns! Come out or I’ll send them in!” Time to play his one ratty trump. “You better not! The whole house is wired with explosive. Look at this!”

He held the red alligator clip up in the window.

“Can you see it?”

“You’re bluffing!” the voice called back confidently.

“If I hook this up to the car battery beside me on the floor, everything goes!”

Silence. More consultation.

“Hey!” someone yelled. “Hey, get that guy!” He poked his head up to look and here came the man in the plaid shirt and jeans, right out into the street, no protection, either heroically sure of his own profession or crazy. He had long black hair that fell almost to his collar and a thin dark moustache.

Two cops started to charge around the V-parked cruisers and thought better of it when he put a shot over their heads.

“Jesus Christ what a snafu!” somebody cried out in shrill disgust.

The man in the plaid shirt was on his lawn now, kicking up snow-bursts. Something buzzed by his ear, followed by a report, and he realized he was still looking over the chair. He heard the front door being tried, and then the man in the plaid shirt was hammering on it.

He scrambled across the floor, which was now spotted with grit and plaster that had been knocked out of the walls. His right leg hurt like a bastard and when he looked down he saw his pants leg was bloody from thigh to knee. He turned the lock in the chewed-up door and released the bolt from its catch.

“Okay!” he said, and the man in the plaid shirt burst in.

Up close he didn’t look scared although he was panting hard. There was a scrape on his cheek from where the policeman had tackled him, and the left arm of his shirt was ripped. When the man in the plaid shirt was inside he scrambled back into the living room, picked up the rifle, and fired twice blindly over the top of the chair. Then he turned around. The man in the plaid shirt was standing in the doorway, looking incredibly calm. He had taken a large notebook out of his back pocket.

“All right, man,” he said. “What shit goes down?”

“What’s your name?”

“Dave Albert.”

“Has that white van got more film equipment in it?”

“Yes.”

“Go to the window. Tell the police to let a camera crew set up on the Quinns’ lawn. That’s the house across the street. Tell them if it isn’t done in five minutes, you got trouble.”

“Do I?”

“Sure.”

Albert laughed. “You don’t look like you could kill time, fella.”

“Tell them.”

Albert walked to the shattered living room window and stood framed there for a second, obviously relishing the moment.

“He says for my camera crew to set up across the street!” he yelled. “He say’s he’s going to kill me if you don’t let them!”

“No!” Fenner yelled back furiously. “No, no, n-”

Somebody muzzled him. Silence for a beat.

“All right!” This was the voice that had accused him of bluffing about the explosive. “Will you let two of our men go up and get them?”

He thought it over and nodded at the reporter.

“Yes!” Albert called.

There was a pause, and then two uniformed policemen trotted self-consciously up toward where the news van waited, its engine smugly idling. In the meantime two more cruisers had pulled up, and by leaning far to the right he could see that the downhill end of Crestallen Street West had been blocked off. A large crowd of people was standing behind the yellow crash barriers.

“Okay,” Albert said, sitting down. “We got a minute. What do you want? A plane?”

“Plane?” he echoed stupidly.

Albert flapped his arms, still holding his notebook. “Fly away, man. Just FLYYYYY away.”

“Oh.” He nodded to show that he understood. “No, I don’t want a plane.”

“Then what do you want?”

“I want,” he said carefully, “to be just twenty with a lot of decisions to make over again.” He saw the look in Albert’s eyes and said, “I know I can’t. I’m not that crazy.”

“You’re shot.”

“Yes.”

“Is that what you said it is?” He was pointing at the master fuse and the battery.

“Yes. The main fuse goes to all the rooms in the house. Also the garage.”

“Where did you get the explosive?” Albert’s voice was amiable but his eyes were alert.

“Found it in my Christmas stocking.”

He laughed. “Say, that’s not bad. I’m going to use that in my story.”

“Fine. When you go back out, tell all the policemen that they better move away.”

“Are you going to blow yourself up?” Albert asked. He looked interested, nothing more.

“I am contemplating it.”

“You know what, fellow? You’ve seen too many movies.”

“I don’t go to the movies much anymore. I did see The Exorcist, though. I wish I hadn’t. How are your movie guys coming out there?”

Albert peered out the window. “Pretty good. We’ve got another minute. Your name is Dawes?”

“Did they tell you that?”

Albert laughed contemptuously. “They wouldn’t tell me if I had cancer. I read it on the doorbell. Would you mind telling me why you’re doing all this?”

“Not at all. It’s roadwork.”

“The extension?” Albert’s eyes glowed brighter. He began to scribble in his book.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“They took your house?”

“They tried. I’m going to take it.”

Albert wrote it down, then snapped his book closed and stuffed it into his back pocket again. “That’s pretty stupid, Mr. Dawes. Do you mind my saying that? Why don’t you just come out of here with me?”

“You’ve got an exclusive,” he said tiredly. “What are you trying for, the Pulitzer Prize?”

“I’d take it if they offered it.” He smiled brightly and then sobered. “Come on, Mr. Dawes. Come on out. I’ll see that your side gets told. I’ll see-”

“There is no side.”

Albert frowned. “What was that?”

“I have no side. That’s why I’m doing this.” He peered over the chair and looked into a telephoto lens, mounted on a tripod that was sunk into the snow of the Quinns’ lawn. “Go on now. Tell them to go away.”

“Are you really going to pull the string?”

“I really don’t know.”

Albert walked to the living nom door and then turned around. “Do I know you from somewhere? Why do I keep feeling like I know you?”

He shook his head. He thought he had never seen Albert before in his life.

Watching the newsman walk back across his lawn, slightly at an angle so the camera across the street would get his good side, he wondered what Olivia was doing at that precise second.

He waited fifteen minutes. Their fire had intensified, but no one charged at the back of the house. The main purpose of the fire seemed to be to cover their retreat into the houses across the street. The camera crew remained where it was for a while, grinding impassively away, and then the white Econoline van drove up onto the Quinns’ side lawn and the man behind the camera folded the tripod, took it behind the truck, and began to film again.

Something black and tubular whizzed through the air, landed on his lawn about midway between the house and the sidewalk, and began to spurt gas. The wind caught it and carried it off down the street in tattered rifts. A second shell landed short, and then he heard one dunk on the roof. He caught a whiff of that one as it fell into the snow covering Mary’s begonias. His nose and eyes filled with crocodile tears.

He scurried across the living room on his hands and knees again, hoping to God he had said nothing to that newsman, Albert, that could be misconstrued as profound. There was no good place to make your stand in the world. Look at Johnny Walker, dying in a meaningless intersection smashup. What had he died for, so that the sheets could go through? Or that woman in the supermarket. The fucking you got was never worth the screwing you took.

He turned on the stereo and the stereo still worked. The Rolling Stones album was still on the turntable and he put on the last cut, missing the right groove the first time when a bullet smacked into the quilt covering the Zenith TV with a thud.

When he had it right, the last bars of “Monkey Man” fading into nothingness, he scurried back to the overturned chair and threw the rifle out the window. He picked up the Magnum and threw that out after it. Good-bye, Nick Adams.

“You can’t always get what you want,” the stereo sang, and he knew that to be a fact. But that didn’t stop you from wanting it. A tear gas canister arched through the window, struck the wall over the couch, and exploded in white smoke.

“But if you try something, you might find,

You get what you need.”

Well, let’s just see, Fred. He grasped the red alligator clip in his hand. Let’s see if I get what I need.

“Okay,” he muttered, and jammed the red clip on the negative pole of the battery.

He closed his eyes and his last thought was that the world was not exploding around him but inside him, and while the explosion was cataclysmic, it was not larger than, say, a good-sized walnut.

Then white.