Roadwork (33 page)

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 un-house 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 that 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.

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.

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 disgusted 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 go 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 malglinite.”

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 blow-torch 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. Cale 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 carried 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 also 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 plasic ties that looked identical to the ones with which he secure 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.

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: