The Bachman Books

'Is that your name? Sharon?'

'No. I guess that was his wife's name.'

He pulled over to the curb.

'What are you doing?' she asked, instantly distrustful.

'Nothing much,' he said. 'This is part of going home. Get out, if you want. I'll show you something.'

They got out and walked over to the observation platform, now deserted. He laid his bare hands on the cold iron pipe of the railing and looked down. They had been undercoating today, he saw. The last three working days they had put down gravel. Now undercoat. Deserted equipment-trucks and bulldozers and yellow backhoes-stood silently about in the shades of evening like a museum exhibit of dinosaurs. Here we have the vegetarian stegosaurus, the flesh-eating triceratops, the fearsome earth-munching diesel shovel. Bon appetit.

'What do you think of it?' he asked her.

'Am I supposed to think something?' She was fencing, trying to figure this out.

'You must think something,' he said.

She shrugged. 'It's roadwork, so what? They're building a road in a city I'll probably never be in again. What am I supposed to think? It's ugly.'

'Ugly,' he echoed, relieved.

'I grew up in Portland, Maine,' she said. 'We lived in a big apartment building and they put this shopping center up across the street-'

'Did they tear anything down to make it?'

'Huh?'

'Did they-'

'Oh. No, it was just a vacant lot with a big field behind it. I was just six or seven. I thought they were going to go on digging and ripping and plowing forever. And all I could think . . . it's funny . . . all I could think was the poor old earth, it's like they're giving it an enema and they never asked if it wanted one or if there was something wrong. I had some kind of an intestinal infection that year, and I was the block expert on enemas.

'Oh,' he said.

'We went over one Sunday when they weren't working and it was a lot like this, very quiet, like a corpse that died in bed. They had part of the foundations laid, and there were all of these yellow metal things sticking out of the cement-'

'Core rods.'

'Whatever. And there was lots of pipe and bundles of wire covered with clear plastic wrap and there was a lot of raw dirt around. Funny to think of it that way, whoever heard of cooked dirt, but that's how it looked. Just raw. We played hide-and-go-seek around the place and my mother came over and got us and gave me and my sister hell for it. She said little kids can get into bad trouble around construction. My little sister was only four and she cried her head off. Funny to remember all that. Can we get back in the car now? I'm cold.

'Sure,' he said, and they did.

As they drove on she said: 'I never thought they'd have anything out of that place but a mess. Then pretty soon the shopping center was all there. I can remember the day they hot-topped the parking lot. And a few days after that some men came with a little push-wagon and made all the yellow parking lines. Then they had a big party and some hot-shit cut a ribbon and everybody started using it and it was just like they never built it. The name of the big department store was Mammoth Mart, and my mom used to go there a lot. Sometimes when Angie and I were with her I'd think of all those orange rods sticking through the cement down in the basement. It was like a secret thought. '

He nodded. He knew about secret thoughts.

'What does it mean to you?' she asked.

'I'm still trying to figure that out,' he said.

He was going to make TV dinners, but she looked in the freezer and saw the roast and said she'd fix it if he didn't mind waiting for it to cook.

'Sure,' he said. 'I didn't know how long to cook it or even what temperature. '

'Do you miss your wife?'

'Like hell.'

'Because you don't know how to cook the roast?' she asked, and he didn't answer that. She baked potatoes and cooked frozen corn. They ate in the breakfast nook and she ate four thick slices of the roast, two potatoes, and two helpings of the corn.

'I haven't eaten like that in a year,' she said, lighting a cigarette and looking into her empty plate. 'I'll probably heave my guts.'

'What have you been eating?'

'Animal crackers.'

'What?'

'Animal crackers.'

'I thought that's what you said.'