“Fuck them,” Jack said angrily. “Ellen wouldn’t join their goddam club if they crawled up the street on their hands and knees. I got her her own car. A used Buick. She loves it. Should have done it two years ago.”
“How’s the house?”
“It’s fine,” Jack said, and sighed. “The electricity’s high, though. You should see our bill. That’s no good for people with a kid in college.”
They shuffled. Now that Jack’s anger had passed, the shamefaced grin was back on his face. He realized that Jack was almost pathetically glad to see someone from the neighborhood and was prolonging the moment. He had a sudden vision of Jack knocking around in the new house, the sound from the TV filling the rooms with phantom company, his wife a thousand miles away seeing her mother into the ground.
“Listen, why don’t you come back to the house?” he asked. “We’ll have a couple of six-packs and listen to Howard Cosell explain everything that’s wrong with the NFL.”
“Hey, that’d be great.”
“Just let me call Mary after we check out.”
He called Mary and Mary said okay. She said she would put some frozen pastries in the oven and then go to bed so she wouldn’t give Jack her cold.
“How does he like it out there?” she asked.
“Okay, I guess. Mare, Ellen’s mother died. She’s out in Cleveland for the funeral. Cancer.”
“Oh,
“So I thought Jack might like the company, you know-”
“Sure, of course.” She paused. “Did you tell hib we bight be neighbors before log?”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t tell him that.”
“You ought to. It bight cheer hib ub.”
“Sure. Good-bye, Mary.”
“Bye.
“Take some aspirin before you go to bed.”
“I will.”
“Bye.”
“Bye, George.” She hung up.
He looked at the phone, chilled. She only called him that when she was very pleased with him. Fred-and-George had been Charlie’s game originally.
He and Jack Hobart went home and watched the game. They drank a lot of beer. But it wasn’t so good.
When Jack was getting into his car to go home at quarter past twelve, he looked up bleakly and said: “That goddam highway. That’s what fucked up the works.”
“It sure did.” He thought Jack looked old, and it scared him. Jack was about his age.
“You keep in touch, Bart.”
“I will.”
They grinned hollowly at each other, a little drunk, a little sick. He watched Jack’s car until its taillights had disappeared down the long, curving hill.
November 27, 1973
He was a little hung-over and a little sleepy from staying up so late. The sound of the laundry washers kicking onto the extract cycle seemed loud in his ears, and the steady
Freddy was worse. Freddy was playing the very devil today.
Listen, Fred was saying. This is your last chance, my boy. You’ve still got all afternoon to get over to Monohan’s office. If you let it wait until five o’clock, it’s going to be too late.
Sure it doesn’t. But right after work Monohan is going to feel a pressing need to go see some relatives. In Alaska. For him it means the difference between a forty-five-thousand-dollar commission and fifty thousand dollars-the price of a new car. For that kind of money you don’t need a pocket calculator. For that kind of money you might discover relatives in the sewer system under Bombay.
But it didn’t matter. It had gone too far. He had let the machine tun without him too long. He was hypnotized by the coming explosion, almost lusted for it. His belly groaned in its own juices.
He spent most of the afternoon in the washroom, watching Ron Stone and Dave run test loads with one of the new laundry products. It was loud in the washroom. The noise hurt his tender head, but it kept him from hearing his thoughts.
After work he got his car out of the parking lot-Mary had been glad to let him have it for the day since he was seeing about their new house-and drove through downtown and through Norton.
In Norton, blacks stood around on street comers and outside bars. Restaurants advertised different kinds of soul food. Children hopped and danced on chalked sidewalk grids. He saw a pimpmobile-a huge pink Eldorado Cadillac-pull up in front of an anonymous brownstone apartment building. The man who got out was a Wilt Chamberlain-size black in a white planter’s hat and a white ice cream suit with pearl buttons and black platform shoes with huge gold buckles on the sides. He carried a malacca stick with a large ivory ball on the top. He walked slowly, majestically, around to the hood of the car, where a set of caribou antlers were mounted. A tiny silver spoon hung on a silver chain around his neck and winked in the thin autumn sun. He watched the man in the rearview mirror as the children ran to him for sweets.
Nine blocks later the tenements thinned to ragged, open fields that were still soft and marshy. Oily water stood between hummocks in puddles, their surfaces flat, deadly rainbows. On the left, near the horizon, he could see a plane landing at the city’s airport.
He was now on Route 16, traveling past the exurban sprawl between the city and the city limits. He passed McDonald’s. Shakey’s, Nino’s Steak Pit. He passed a Dairy Freez and the Noddy-Time Motel, both closed for the season. He passed the Norton Drive-In, where the marquee said:
He passed a bowling alley and a driving range that was closed for the season. Gas stations-two of them with signs that said:
It was still four days until they got their gasoline allotments for December. He couldn’t find it in himself to feel sorry for the country as a whole as it went into this science-fiction-style crisis-the country had been pigging petroleum for too long to warrant his sympathy-but he could feel sorry for the little men with their peckers caught in the swing of a big door.
A mile farther on he came to Magliore’s Used Cars. He didn’t know what he had expected, but he felt disappointed. It looked like a cut-rate, fly-by-night operation. Cars were lined up on the lot facing the road under looped lines of flapping banners-red, yellow, blue, green-that had been tied between light standards that would shine down on the product at night. Prices and slogans soaped on the windshields:
and
and on a dusty old Valiant with flat tires and a cracked windshield:
A salesman wearing a gray-green topcoat was nodding and smiling noncommittally as a young kid in a red silk jacket talked to him. They were standing by a blue Mustang with cancer of the rocker panels. The kid said something vehement and thumped the driver’s side door with the flat of his hand. Rust flaked off in a small flurry. The salesman shrugged and went on smiling. The Mustang just sat there and got a little older.
There was a combination office and garage in the center of the lot. He parked and got out of his car. There was a lift in the garage, and an old Dodge with giant fins was up on it. A mechanic walked out from under, holding a muffler in both grease-gloved hands like a chalice.
“Say, you can’t park there, mister. That’s in the right-of-way.”
“Where should I park?”
