Roadwork

personally earmarked for an executive vice-presidency in this corporation. That would have paid thirty-five thousand a year to start. I hope they paid you more than that.”

“They didn’t pay me a cent.”

“Is that the truth?”

“Yes.”

“Then why, Bart? Why in the name of God?”

“Why should I tell you, Steve?” He took the chair he was supposed to take, the supplicant’s chair, on the other side of the big, Lucite-topped desk.

For a moment Ordner seemed to be at a loss. He shook his head the way a fighter will when he has been tagged, but not seriously.

“Because you’re my employee. How’s that for a start?”

“Not good enough.”

“What does that mean?”

“Steve, I was Ray Tarkington’s employee. He was a real person. You might not have cared for him, but you had to admit he was real. Sometimes when you were talking to him he broke wind or burped or picked dead skin out of his ear. He had real problems. Sometimes I was one of them. Once, when I made a bad decision about billing a motel out in Crager Plaza, he threw me against a door. You’re not like him. The Blue Ribbon is Tinkertoys to you, Steve. You don’t care about me. You care about your own upward mobility. So don’t give me that employee shit. Don’t pretend you stuck your cock in my mouth and I bit it.”

If Ordner’s face was a facade, there was no crack in it. His features continued to register modulated distress, no more. “Do you really believe that?” Ordner asked.

“Yes. You only give a damn about the Blue Ribbon as it affects your status in the corporation. So let’s cut the shit. Here.” He slid his resignation across the Lucite top of the desk.

Ordner gave his head another little shake. “And what about the people you’ve hurt, Bart? The little people. Everything else aside, you were in a position of importance.” He seemed to taste the phrase. “What about the people at the laundry who are going to lose their jobs because there’s no new plant to switch to?”

He laughed harshly and said: “You cheap son of a bitch. You’re too fucking high to see down, aren’t you?”

Ordner colored. He said carefully: “You better explain that, Bart.”

“Every single wage earner at the laundry, from Tom Granger on down to Pollack in the washroom, has unemployment insurance. It’s theirs. They pay for it. If you’re having trouble with that concept, think of it as a business deduction. Like a four-drink lunch at Benjamin’s.”

Stung, Ordner said, “That’s welfare money and you know it.”

He reiterated: “You cheap son of a bitch.”

Ordners’s hands came together and formed a double fist. They clenched together like the hands of a child that has been taught to say the Lord’s Prayer by his bed. “You’re overstepping yourself, Bart.”

“No, I’m not. You called me here. You asked me to explain. What did you want to hear me say? I’m sorry, I screwed up, I’ll make restitution? I can’t say that. I’m not sorry. I’m not going to make restitution. And if I screwed up, that’s between me and Mary. And she’ll never even know, not for sure. Are you going to tell me I hurt the corporation? I don’t think even you are capable of such a lie. After a corporation gets to a certain size, nothing can hurt it. It gets to be an act of God. When things are good it makes a huge profit, and when times are bad it just makes a profit, and when things go to hell it takes a tax deduction. Now you know that.”

Ordner said carefully: “What about your own future? What about Mary’s?”

“You don’t care about that. It’s just a lever you think you might be able to use. Let me ask you something, Steve. Is this going to hurt you? Is it going to cut into your salary? Into your yearly dividend? Into your retirement fund?”

Ordner shook his head. “Go on home, Bart. You’re not yourself.”

“Why? Because I’m talking about you and not just about bucks?”

“You’re disturbed, Bart.”

“You don’t know,” he said, standing up and planting his fists on the Lucite top of Ordner’s desk. “You’re mad at me but you don’t know why. Someone told you that if a situation like this ever came up you should be mad. But you don’t know why.”

Ordner repeated carefully: “You’re disturbed.”

“You’re damn right I am. What are you?”

“Go home, Bart.”

“No, but I’ll leave you alone and that’s what you want. Just answer one question. For one second stop being the corporation man and answer one question for me. Do you care about this? Does any of it mean a damn to you?”

Ordner looked at him for what seemed a long time. The city was spread out behind him like a kingdom of towers, wrapped in grayness and mist. He said: “No.”

“All right,” he said softly. He looked at Ordner without animosity. “I didn’t do it to screw you. Or the corporation.”

“Then why? I answered your question. You answer mine. You could have signed on the Waterford plant. After that it would have been someone else’s worry. Why didn’t you?”

He said: “I can’t explain. I listened to myself. But people talk a different language inside. It sounds like the worst kind of shit if you try to talk about it. But it was the right thing.”

Ordner looked at him unflinchingly. “And Mary?”

He was silent.

“Go home, Bart, Ordner said.

“What do you want, Steve?”

Ordner shook his head impatiently. “We’re done, Bart. If you want to have an encounter session with someone, go to a bar.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Only for you to get out of here and go home.”

“What do you want from life, then? Where are you hooked into things?”

“Go home, Bart.”

“Answer me! What do you want?” He looked at Ordner nakedly.

Ordner answered quietly, “I want what everyone wants. Go home, Bart.”

He left without looking back. And he never went there again.

When he got to Magliore’s Used Cars, it was snowing hard and most of the cars he passed had their headlights on. His windshield wipers beat a steady back-and-forth tune, and beyond their sweep snow that had been defrosted into slush ran down the Saf-T-Glass like tears.

He parked in back and walked around to the office. Before he went in, he looked at his ghostly reflection in the plate glass and scrubbed a thin pink film from his lips. The encounter with Ordner had upset him more than he would have believed. He had picked up a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in a drugstore and had chugged half of it on the way out here. Probably won’t shit for a week, Fred. But Freddy wasn’t at home. Maybe he had gone to visit Monohan’s relatives in Bombay.

The woman behind the adding machine gave him a strange speculative smile and waved him in.

Magliore was alone. He was reading The Wall Street Journal, and when he came in, Magliore threw it across the desk and into the wastebasket. It landed with a rattling thump.

“It’s going right to fucking hell,” Magliore said, as if continuing an interior dialogue that had started some time ago. “All these stockbrokers are old women, just like Paul Harvey says. Will the president resign? Will he? Won’t he? Will he? Is GE going to go bankrupt with the energy shortage? It gives me a pain in the ass.”

“Yeah,” he said, but not sure of what he was agreeing to. He felt uneasy, and he wasn’t totally sure Magliore remembered who he was. What should he say? I’m the guy who called you a dork, remember? Christ, that was no way to start.

“Snowing harder, ain’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“I hate the snow. My brother, he goes to Puerto Rico November first every year, stays until April fifteenth. He owns forty percent of a hotel there. Says he has to look after his investment. Shit. He wouldn’t know how to look after his own ass if you gave him a roll of Charmin. What do you want?”

“Huh?” He jumped a little, and felt guilty.

“You came to me to get something. How can I get it for you if I don’t know what it is?”

When it was put with such abrupt baldness, he found it hard to speak. The word for what he wanted seemed to have too many corners to come out of his mouth. He remembered something he had done as a kid and smiled a little.

“What’s funny?” Magliore asked with sharp pleasantness. “With business the way it is, I could use a joke.”

“Once, when I was a kid, I put a yo-yo in my mouth,” he said.

“That’s funny?”

“No, I couldn’t get it out. That’s funny. My mother took me to the doctor and he got it out. He pinched my ass and when I opened my mouth to yell, he just yanked it out.”

“I ain’t going to pinch your ass,” Magliore said. “What do you want, Dawes?”

“Explosives,” he said.

Magliore looked at him. He rolled his eyes. He started to say something and slapped one of his hanging jowls instead. “Explosives.”

“Yes.”

“I knew this guy was a fruiter,” Magliore told himself. “I told Pete when you left, 'There goes a guy looking for an accident to happen.' That’s what I told him.”

He said nothing. Talk of accidents made him think of Johnny Walker.

“Okay, Okay, I’ll bite. What do you want explosives for? You going to blow up the Egyptian Trade Exposition? You going to skyjack an airplane? Or maybe just blow your mother-in-law to hell?”

“I wouldn’t waste explosives on her,” he said stiffly, and that made them both laugh, but it didn’t break the tension.