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.
Epilogue
The WHLM newsteam won a Pultizer Prize for their coverage of what they called 'Dawes' Last Stand' on the evening news, and for a half-hour documentary presented three weeks later. The documentary was called 'Roadwork' and it examined the necessity-or lack of it-for the 784 extension. The documentary pointed out that one reason the road was being built had nothing to do with traffic patterns or commuter convenience or anything else of such a practical sort. The municipality had to build so many miles of road per year or begin losing federal money on all interstate construction. And so the city had chosen to build. The documentary also pointed out that the city was quietly beginning a litigation against the widow of Barton George Dawes to recover as much of their money as was recoverable. In the wake of the outcry the city dropped its suit.
Still photographs of the wreckage ran on the AP wire and most of the newspapers in the country carried them. In Las Vegas, a young girl who had only recently enrolled in a business school saw the photographs while on her lunch hour and fainted.
