Roadwork

Across the street, a large black dog was chained to the railing of a leaning brick tenement. A little boy was approaching it confidently.

He tried to cry out: Don’t pet that dog! Go get your candy! But the words wouldn’t come out. As if in slow motion, the pimp in the white suit and planter’s hat turned to look. His hands were full of candy. The children who had crowded around him turned to look. All the children around the pimp were black, but the little boy approaching the dog was white.

The dog struck, catapulting up from its haunches like a blunt arrow. The boy screamed and staggered backward, hands to his throat. When he turned around, the blood was streaming through his fingers. It was Charlie.

That was when he had wakened.

The dreams. The goddam dreams.

His son had been dead three years.

November 28, 1973

It was snowing when he got up, but it had almost stopped by the time he got to the laundry. Tom Granger came running out of the plant in his shirtsleeves, his breath making short, stiff plumes in the cold air. He knew from the expression on Tom’s face that it was going to be a crummy day.

“We’ve got trouble, Bart.”

“Bad?”

“Bad enough. Johnny Walker had an accident on his way back from Holiday Inn with his first load. Guy in a Pontiac skidded through a red light on Deakman and hit him dead center. Kapow.” He paused and looked aimlessly back toward the loading doors. There was no one there. “The cops said Johnny was in a bad way.”

“Holy Christ.”

“I got out there fifteen or twenty minutes after it happened. You know the intersection-”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s a bitch.”

Tom shook his head. “If it wasn’t so fucking awful you’d have to laugh. It looks like somebody threw a bomb at a washerwoman. There’s Holiday Inn sheets and towels everywhere. Some people were stealing them, the fucking ghouls, can you believe what people will do? And the truck… Bart, there’s nothing left from the driver’s side door up. Just junk. Johnny got thrown.”

“Is he at Central?”

“No, St Mary’s. Johnny’s a Catholic, didn’t you know that?”

“You want to drive over with me?”

“I better not. Ron’s hollering for pressure on the boiler.” He shrugged, embarrassed. “You know Ron. The show must go on.”

“All right.”

He got back into his car and drove out toward St. Mary’s Hospital. Jesus Christ, of all the people for it to happen to. Johnny Walker was the only person left at the laundry besides himself who had been working at the Blue Ribbon in 1953Johnny, in fact, went back to 1946. The thought lodged in his throat like an omen. He knew from reading the papers that the 784 extension was going to make the dangerous Deakman intersection pretty much obsolete.

His name wasn’t Johnny at all, not really. He was Corey Everett Walker-he had seen it on enough time cards to know that. But he had been known as Johnny even twenty years ago. His wife had died in 1956 on a vacation trip in Vermont. Since then he had lived with his brother, who drove a sanitation truck for the city. There were dozens of workers at the Blue Ribbon who called Ron “Stoneballs” behind his back, but Johnny had been the only one to use it to his face and get away with it.

He thought: If Johnny dies, I’m the oldest employee the laundry has got. Held over for a twentieth record-breaking year. Isn’t that a sketch, Fred?

Fred didn’t think so.

Johnny’s brother was sitting in the waiting room of the emergency wing, a tall man with Johnny’s features and high complexion, dressed in olive work clothes and a black cloth jacket. He was twirling an olive-colored cap between his knees and looking at the floor. He glanced up at the sound of footsteps.

“You from the laundry?” he asked.

“Yes. You’re…” He didn’t expect the name to come to him, but it did. “Arnie, right?”

“Yeah, Arnie Walker.” He shook his head slowly. “I dunno, Mr…?”

“Dawes.”

“I dunno, Mr. Dawes. I seen him in one of those examinin rooms. He looked pretty banged up. He ain’t a kid anymore. He looked bad.”

“I’m very sorry,” he said.

“That’s a bad corner. It wasn’t the other guy’s fault. He just skidded in the snow. I don’t blame the guy. They say he broke his nose but that was all. It’s funny the way those things work out, you know it?”

“Yes.”

“I remember one time when I was driving a big rig for Hemingway, this was in the early sixties, and I was on the Indiana Toll Road and I saw-”

The outer door banged open and a priest came in. He stamped snow from his boots and then hurried up the corridor, almost running. Arnie Walker saw him, and his eyes widened and took on the glazed look of shock. He made a whining, gasping noise in his throat and tried to stand up. He put an arm around Arnie’s shoulders and restrained him.

“Jesus!” Arnie cried. “He had his pyx, did you see it? He’s gonna give him the last rites… maybe he’s dead already. Johnny-”

There were other people in the waiting room: a teenage kid with a broken arm, an elderly woman with an elastic bandage around one leg, a man with his thumb wrapped in a giant dressing. They looked up at Arnie and then down, self-consciously, at their magazines.

“Take it easy,” he said meaninglessly.

“Let me go,” Arnie said. “I got to go see.”

“Listen-”

“Let me go!”

He let him go. Arnie Walker went around the corner and out of sight, the way the priest had gone. He sat in the plastic contour seat for a moment, wondering what to do. He looked at the floor, which was covered with black, slushy tracks. He looked at the nurses’ station, where a woman was covering a switchboard. He looked out the window and saw that the snow had stopped.

There was a sobbing scream from up the corridor, where the examining rooms were.

Everybody looked up, and the same half-sick expression was on every face.

Another scream, followed by a harsh, braying cry of grief.

Everyone looked back at their magazines. The kid with the broken arm swallowed audibly, producing a small click in the silence.

He got up and went out quickly, not looking back.

At the laundry everyone on the floor came over, and Ron Stone didn’t stop them.

I don’t know, he told them. I never found out if he was alive or dead. You’ll hear. I just don’t know.

He fled upstairs, feeling weird and disconnected.

“Do you know how Johnny is, Mr. Dawes?” Phyllis asked him. He noticed for the first time that Phyllis, jaunty blue-rinsed hair notwithstanding, was looking old.

“He’s bad,” he said. “The priest came to give him the last rites.”

“Oh, what a dirty shame. And so close to Christmas.”

“Did someone go out to Deakman to pick up his load?”

She looked at him a little reproachfully. “Tom sent out Harry Jones. He brought it in five minutes ago.”

“Good,” he said, but it wasn’t good. It was bad. He thought of going down to the washroom and dumping enough Hexlite into the washers to disintegrate all of it-when the extract ended and Pollack opened the machines there would be nothing but a pile of gray fluff. That would be good.

Phyllis had said something and he hadn’t heard.

“What? I’m sorry.”

“I said that Mr. Ordner called. He wants you to call back right away. And a fellow named Harold Swinnerton. He said the cartridges had come in.”

“Harold-?” And then he remembered. Harvey’s Gun Shop. Only Harvey, like Marley, was as dead as a doornail. “Yes, right.”

He went into his office and closed the door. The sign on his desk still said:

THINK!

It May Be A New Experience

He took it off the desk and dropped it into the wastebasket. Chink.

He sat behind his desk, took everything out of the IN basket and threw it into the wastebasket without looking at it. He paused and looked around the office. The walls were wood-paneled. On the left were two framed degrees: one from college, one from the Laundry Institute, where he had gone during the summers of 1969 and 1970. Behind the desk was a large blow-up of himself shaking hands with Ray Tarkington in the Blue Ribbon parking lot just after it had been hot-topped. He and Ray were smiling. The laundry stood in the background, three trucks backed into the loading bay. The smokestack still looked very white.

He had been in this office since 1967, over six years. Since before Woodstock, before Kent State, before the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, since before Nixon. Years of his life had been spent between these four walls. Millions of breaths, millions of heartbeats. He looked around, seeing if he felt anything. He felt faintly sad. That was all.

He cleaned out his desk, throwing away personal papers and his personal account books. He wrote his resignation on the back of a printed wash formula and slipped it into a laundry pay envelope. He left the impersonal things-the paper clips, the Scotch tape, the big book of checks, the pile of blank time cards held together with robber bands.

He got up, took the two degrees off the wall, and threw them into the wastebasket. The glass covering the Laundry Institute diploma shattered. The squares where the degrees had hung all these years were a little brighter than the rest of the wall, and that was all.

The phone rang and he picked it up, thinking it would be Ordner. But it was Ron Stone, calling from downstairs.

“ Bart?”

“Yeah.”