Roadwork. Part 22

This was from the city council, and it was personal. It said: December 20, 1973 Mr. Barton G. Dawes 1241 Crestallen Street West M-, W-.

Dear Mr. Dawes:

It has come to our attention that you are the last resident of Crestallen Street West who has not relocated. We trust that you are experiencing no undue problems in this matter. While we have a 19642-A form on file (acknowledgment of information concerning City Roads Project 6983-426-73-74-HC), we do not yet have your relocation form (6983-426-73-74-HC-9004, blue folder). As you know, we cannot begin processing your check of reimburs.e.m.e.nt without this form. According to our 1973 tax a.s.sessment, the property at 1241 Crestallen Street West has been valued at $63,500, and so we are sure that you must be as aware of the situation's urgency as we are. By law, you must relocate by January 20, 1974, the date that demolitions work is scheduled to begin on Crestallen Street West.

We must also point out again that according to the State Statute of Eminent Domain (S.L. 19452-36), you would be in violation of the law to remain in your present location past midnight of January 19, 1974. We are sure you understand this, but we are pointing it out once more so that the record will be clear.

If you are having some problem with relocation, I hope you will call me during business hours, or better yet, stop by and discuss the situation. I am sure that things can be worked out; you will find us more than eager to cooperate in this matter. In the meantime, may I wish you a Merry Christmas and a most productive New Year?

Sincerely, {John T. Gordon} For the City Council JTG/tk "No," he muttered. "You may not wish it. You may not." He tore the letter to shreds and threw it in the wastebasket.

That night, sitting in front of the Zenith TV, he found himself thinking about how he and Mary had found out, almost forty-two months ago now, that G.o.d had decided to do a little roadwork on their son Charlie's brain.

The doctor's name had been Younger. There was a string of letters after his name on the framed diplomas that hung on the warmly paneled walls of his inner office, but all he understood for sure was that Younger was a neurologist; a fast man with a good brain disease.

He and Mary had gone to see him at Younger's request on a warm June afternoon nineteen days after Charlie had been admitted to Doctors Hospital. He was a good-looking man, maybe halfway through his forties, physically fit from a lot of golf played with no electric golf cart. He was tanned a deep cordovan shade. And the doctor's hands fascinated him. They were huge hands, clumsy-looking, but they moved about his desk-now picking up a pen, now riffling through his appointment book, now playing idly across the surface of a silver-inlaid paperweight-with a lissome grace that was very nearly repulsive.

"Your son has a brain tumor," he said. He spoke flatly, with little inflection, but his eyes watched them very carefully, as if he had just armed a temperamental explosive.

"Tumor," Mary said softly, blankly.

"How bad is it?" he asked Younger.

The symptoms had developed over the s.p.a.ce of eight months. First the headaches, infrequent at the beginning, then more common. Then double vision that came and went, particularly after physical exercise. After that, most shameful to Charlie, some incidence of bedwetting. But they had not taken him to the family doctor until a terrifying temporary blindness in the left eye, which had gone as red as a sunset, obscuring Charlie's good blue. The family doctor had had him admitted for tests, and the other symptoms had followed that: Phantom smells of oranges and shaved pencils; occasional numbness in the left hand; occasional lapses into nonsense and childish obscenity.

"It's bad," Younger said. "You must prepare yourself for the worst. It is inoperable. "

Inoperable.

The word echoed up the years to him. He had never thought words had taste, but that one did. It tasted bad and yet juicy at the same time, like rotten hamburger cooked rare.

Inoperable.

Somewhere, Younger said, deep in Charlie's brain, was a collection of bad cells roughly the size of a walnut. If you had that collection of bad cells in front of you on the table, you could squash them with one hard hit. But they weren't on the table. They were deep in the meat of Charlie's mind, still smugly growing, filling him up with random strangeness.

One day, not long after his admission, he had been visiting his son on his lunch break. They had been talking about baseball, discussing, in fact, whether or not they would be able to go to the American League baseball playoffs if the city's team won.

Charlie had said: "I think if their pitching mmmmm mmmm mmmm pitching staff holds up mmmmm nn mmmm pitching mmmm-"

He had leaned forward. "What, Fred? I'm not tracking you."

Charlie's eyes had rolled wildly outward.

"Fred?" George whispered. "Freddy-?"

"G.o.ddam motherf.u.c.king mothersucking nnnnnn f.u.c.khole!" his son screamed from the clean white hospital bed. his son screamed from the clean white hospital bed. "c.u.n.tlickircg d.i.n.krubbing a.s.swipe sonofawhoringb.i.t.c.h- " "c.u.n.tlickircg d.i.n.krubbing a.s.swipe sonofawhoringb.i.t.c.h- "

"NURSE! " he had screamed, as Charlie pa.s.sed out. " he had screamed, as Charlie pa.s.sed out. "OH G.o.d NURSE! " "OH G.o.d NURSE! "

It was the cells, you see, that had made him talk like that. A little bunch of bad cells no bigger, say, than your average-sized walnut. Once, the night nurse said, he had screamed the word boondoggle boondoggle again and again for nearly five minutes. Just bad cells, you know. No bigger than your garden-variety walnut. Making his son rave like an insane dock walloper, making him wet the bed, giving him headaches, making him-during the first hot week of that July-lose all ability to move his left hand. again and again for nearly five minutes. Just bad cells, you know. No bigger than your garden-variety walnut. Making his son rave like an insane dock walloper, making him wet the bed, giving him headaches, making him-during the first hot week of that July-lose all ability to move his left hand.

"Look, " Dr. Younger had told them on that bright, just-right-for-golf June day. He had unrolled a long scroll of paper, an ink-tracing of their son's brain waves. He produced a healthy brain wave as a comparison, but he didn't need it. He looked at what had been going on in his son's head and again felt that rotten yet juicy taste in his mouth. The paper showed an irregular series of spiky mountains and valleys, like a series of badly drawn daggers.

Inoperable.

You see if that collection of bad cells, no bigger than a walnut, had decided to grow on the outside of Charlie's brain, minor surgury would have vacuumed it right up. No sweat, no strain, no pain on the brain, as they had said when they were boys. But instead, it had grown down deep inside and was growing larger every day. If they tried the knife, or laser, or cryosurgery, they would be left with a nice, healthy, breathing piece of meat. If they didn't try any of those things, soon they would be bundling their boy into a coffin.

Dr. Younger said all these things in generalities, covering their lack of options in a soothing foam of technical language that would wear away soon enough. Mary kept shaking her head in gentle bewilderment, but he had understood everything exactly and completely. His first thought, bright and clear, never to be forgiven, was: Thank G.o.d it's not me. Thank G.o.d it's not me. And the funny taste came back and he began to grieve for his son. And the funny taste came back and he began to grieve for his son.

Today a walnut, tomorrow the world. The creeping unknown. The incredible dying son. What was there to understand?

Charlie died in October. There were no dramatic dying words. He had been in a coma for three weeks.

He sighed and went out to the kitchen and made himself a drink. Dark night pressed evenly on all the windows. The house was so empty now that Mary was gone. He kept stumbling over little pieces of himself everywhere-snapshots, his old sweatsuit in an upstairs closet, an old pair of slippers under the bureau. It was bad, very bad, to keep doing that.

He had never cried over Charlie after Charlie's death; not even at the funeral. Mary had cried a great deal. For weeks, it seemed, Mary had gone around with a perpetual case of pinkeye. But in the end, she had been the one to heal.

Charlie had left scars on her, that was undeniable. Outwardly, she had all the scars. Mary before-and-after. Before, she would not take a drink unless she considered it socially helpful to his future. She would take a weak screwdriver at a party and carry it around all night. A rum toddy before bed when she had a heavy chest cold. That was all. After, she had a c.o.c.ktail with him in the late afternoon when he came home, and always a drink before bed. Not serious drinking by anyone's yardstick, not sick-and-puking-in-the-bathroom drinking, but more than before. A little of that protective foam. Undoubtedly just what the doctor would have ordered. Before, she rarely cried over little things. After, she cried over them often, always in private. If dinner was burned. If she had a flat. The time water got in the bas.e.m.e.nt and the sump pump froze and the furnace shorted out. Before, she had been something of a folk music buff-white folk and blues, Van Ronk, Gary Davis, Tom Rush, Tom Paxton, Spider John Koerner. After, her interest just faded away. She sang her own blues and laments on some inner circuit. She had stopped talking about their taking a trip to England if he got promoted a step up. She started doing her hair at home, and the sight of her sitting in front of the TV in rollers became a common one. It was she their friends pitied-rightly so, he supposed. He wanted to pity himself, and did, but kept it a secret. She had been able to need, and to use what was given to her because of her need, and eventually that had saved her. It had kept her from the awful contemplation that kept him awake so many nights after her bedtime drink had lulled her off to sleep. And as she slept, he contemplated the fact that in this world a tiny collection of cells no bigger than a walnut could take a son's life and send him away forever.

He had never hated her for healing, or for the deference other women gave her as a right. They looked on her the way a young oilman might look on an old vet whose hand or back or cheek is s.h.i.+ny with puckered pink burn tissue-with the respect the never-hurt always hold for the once-hurt-now-healed. She had done her time in h.e.l.l over Charlie, and these other women knew it. But she had come out. There had been Before, there had been h.e.l.l, there had been After, and there had even been After-After, when she had returned to two of her four social clubs, had taken up macrame (he had a belt she had done a year ago-a beautiful twisted rope creation with a heavy silver buckle monogrammed BGD), had taken up afternoon TV-soap operas and Merv Griffin chatting with the celebrities.

Now what? he wondered, going back to the living room. After-After-After? It seemed so. A new woman, a whole woman, rising out of the old ashes that he had so crudely stirred. The old oilman with skin grafts over the burns, retaining the old savvy but gaining a new look. Beauty only skin deep? No. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder. It could go for miles.

For him, the scars had all been inside. He had examined his hurts one by one on the long nights after Charlie's death, cataloguing them with all the morbid fascination of a man studying his own bowel movements for signs of blood. He had wanted to watch Charlie play ball on a Little League team. He had wanted to get report cards and rant over them. He wanted to tell him, over and over, to pick up his room. He wanted to worry about the girls Charlie saw, the friends he picked, the boy's internal weather. He wanted to see what his son became and if they could still be in love as they had been until the bad cells, no bigger than a walnut, had come between them like some dark and rapacious woman.

Mary had said, He was yours. He was yours.

That was true. The two of them had fitted so well that names were ridiculous, even p.r.o.nouns a little obscene. So they became George and Fred, a vaudeville sort of combination, two Mortimer Veeblefeezers against the world.

And if a collection of bad cells no bigger than a walnut could destroy all those things, those things that are so personal that they can never be properly articulated, so personal you hardly dared admit their existence to yourself, what did that leave? How could you ever trust life again? How could you see it as anything more meaningful than a Sat.u.r.day night demolition derby?

All of it was inside him, but he had been honestly unaware that his thoughts were changing him so deeply, so irretrievably. And now it was all out in the open, like some obscene mess vomited onto a coffee table, reeking with stomach juice, filled with undigested lumps, and if the world was only a demo derby, wouldn't one be justified in stepping out of his car? But what after that? Life seemed only a preparation for h.e.l.l.

He saw that he had drained his drink in the kitchen; he had come into the living room with an empty gla.s.s.

December 31, 1973

He was only two blocks from Wally Hammer's house when he put his hand into his overcoat pocket to see if he had any Canada Mints in there. There were no mints, but he came up with a tiny square of aluminum foil that glinted dully in the station wagon's green dash lights. He spared it a puzzled, absent glance and was about to toss it into the ashtray when he remembered what it was.

In his mind Olivia's voice said: Synthetic mescaline. Product four, they call it. Very heavy stuff. Synthetic mescaline. Product four, they call it. Very heavy stuff. He had forgotten all about it. He had forgotten all about it.

He put the little foil packet back into his coat pocket and fumed onto Walter's street. Cars were lined up halfway down the block on both sides. That was Walter, all right-he had never been one to have anything so simple as a party when there ought be a group grope in the offing. The Principle of the Pleasure Push, Wally called it. He claimed that someday he would patent the idea and then publish instructional handbooks on how to use it. If you got enough people together, Wally Hamper maintained, you were forced into having a good time-pushed into it. Once when Wally was expounding this theory in a bar, he had mentioned lynch mobs. "There," Walter had said blandly, "Bart has just proved my case."

He wondered what Olivia was doing now. She hadn't tried to call back, although if she had he would probably have weakened and taken the call. Maybe she had stayed in Vegas just long enough to get the money and had then caught a bus for where? Maine? Did anyone leave Las Vegas for Maine in the middle of winter? Surely not.

Product four, they call it. Very heavy stuff.

He snuggled the wagon up to the cuff behind a sporty red GTX with a black racing stripe and got out. New Year's Eve was clear but bitterly cold. A frigid rind of moon hung in the sky overhead like a child's paper cutout. Stars were spangled around it in lavish profusion. The mucus in his nose froze to a glaze that crackled when he flared his nostrils. His breath plumed out on the dark air.

Three houses away from Walter's he picked up the ba.s.s line from the stereo. They really had it cranked. There was something about Wally's parties, he reflected, Pleasure Principle or no. The most well-intentioned of just-thought-we'd-drop-bys ended up staying and drinking until their heads were full of silver chimes that would turn to leaden church bells the next day. The most dyed-in-the-wool rock-music haters ended up boogying in the living room to the endless golden ga.s.sers that Wally trotted out when everybody got blind drunk enough to look back upon the late fifties and early sixties as the plateau of their lives. They drank and boogied, boogied and drank, until they were panting like little yellow dogs on the Fourth of July. There were more kisses in the kitchen by halves of differing wholes, more feel-ups per square inch, more wallflowers jerked rudely out of the woodwork, more normally sober folk who would wake up on New Year's Day with groaning hangovers and horridly clear memories of prancing around with lampshades on their heads or of finally deciding to tell the boss a few home truths. Wally seemed to inspire these things, not by any conscious effort, but just by being Wally-and of course there was no party like a New Year's Eve party.

He found himself scanning the parked cars for Steve Ordner's bottle-green Delta 88, but didn't see it anywhere.

Closer to the house, the rest of the rock band coalesced around the persistent ba.s.s signature, and Mick Jagger screaming: Ooooh, children- It's just a kiss away, Kiss away, kiss away Every light in the house was blazing-f.u.c.k the energy crisis-except, of course in the living room, where rub-your-peepees would be going on during the slow numbers. Even over the heavy drive of the amplified music he could hear a hundred voices raised in fifty different conversations, as if Babel had fallen only seconds ago.

He thought that, had it been summer (or even fall), it would have been more fun to just stand outside, listening to the circus, charting its progress toward its zenith, and then its gradual fall-off. He had a sudden vision-startling, frightening-of himself standing on Wally Hammer's lawn and holding a roll of EEG graph paper in his hands, covered with the irregular spikes and dips of damaged mental function: the monitored record of a gigantic, tumored Party Brain. He shuddered a little and stuck his hands in his overcoat pockets to warm them.

His right hand encountered the small foil packet again and he took it out. Curious, he unfolded it, regardless of the cold that bit his fingertips with dull teeth. There was a small purple pill inside the foil, small enough to lie on the nail of his pinky finger without touching the edges. Much smaller than, say, a walnut. Could something as small as that make him clinically insane, cause him to see things that weren't there, think in a way he had never thought? Could it, in short, mime all the conditions of his son's mortal illness?

Casually, almost absently, he put the pill in his mouth. It had no taste. He swallowed it.

"BART!" The woman screamed. "BART DAWES!" It "BART DAWES!" It was a woman in a black off-the-shoulder evening dress with a martini in one hand. She had dark hair, put up for the occasion and held with a glittering rope spangled with imitation diamonds. was a woman in a black off-the-shoulder evening dress with a martini in one hand. She had dark hair, put up for the occasion and held with a glittering rope spangled with imitation diamonds.

He had walked in through the kitchen door. The kitchen was choked, clogged with people. It was only eight-thirty; the Tidal Effect hadn't gotten far yet, then. The Tidal Effect was another part of Walter's theory; as a party continued, he contended, people would migrate to the four corners of the house. "The center does not hold," Wally said, blinking wisely. "T. S. Eliot said that." Once, according to Wally, he had found a guy wandering around in the attic eighteen hours after a party ended.

The woman in the black dress kissed him warmly on the lips, her ample b.r.e.a.s.t.s pus.h.i.+ng against his chest. Some of her martini fell on the floor between them.

"Hi," he said. "Who's you?"

"Tina Howard, Bart. Don't you remember the cla.s.s trip?" She waggled a long, spade-shaped fingernail under his nose. "NAUGH-ty BOY. " "NAUGH-ty BOY. "

"That Tina? By G.o.d, you are!" A stunned grin spread his mouth. That was another thing about Walter's parties; people from your past kept turning up like old photographs. Your best friend on the block thirty years ago; the girl you almost laid once in college; some guy you had worked with for a month on a summer job eighteen years ago. Tina? By G.o.d, you are!" A stunned grin spread his mouth. That was another thing about Walter's parties; people from your past kept turning up like old photographs. Your best friend on the block thirty years ago; the girl you almost laid once in college; some guy you had worked with for a month on a summer job eighteen years ago.

"Except I'm Tina Howard Wallace now," the woman in the black dress said. "My husband's around here somewhere " She looked around vaguely, spilled some more of her drink, and swallowed the rest before it could get away from her. "Isn't it AWFUL, I seem to have lost him."

She looked at him warmly, speculatively, and Bart could barely believe that this woman had given him his first touch of female flesh-the soph.o.m.ore cla.s.s trip at Grover Cleveland High School, a hundred and nine years ago. Rubbing her breast through her white cotton sailor blouse beside "Cotter's Stream," he said aloud.

She blushed and giggled. "You remember, all right."

His eyes dropped in a perfect, involuntary reflex to the front of her dress and she shrieked with laughter. He grinned that helpless grin again. "I guess time goes by faster than we-"

"Bart! " Wally Hamner yelled over the general patty babble. "Hey buddy, really glad you could make it!"

He cut across the room to them with the also-to-be-patented Walter Hamner Party Zigzag, a thin man, now mostly bald, wearing an impeccable 1962-vintage pinstriped s.h.i.+rt and horn-rimmed gla.s.ses. He shook Walter's outstretched hand, and Walter's grip was as hard as he remembered.

"I see you met Tina Wallace," Walter said.

"h.e.l.l, we go way back when," he said, and smiled uncomfortably at Tina.

"Don't you tell my husband that, you naughty boy," Tina giggled. " 'Scuse, please. I'll see you later, Bart?"

"Sure," he said.

She disappeared around a clump of people gathered by a table loaded with chips and dips and went on into the living room. He nodded after her and said, "How do you pick them, Walter? That girl was my first feel. It's like 'This Is Your Life.' "

Walter shrugged modestly. "All a part of the Pleasure Push, Barton my boy." He nodded at the paper bag tucked under his arm. "What's in that plain brown wrapper?"

"Southern Comfort. You've got ginger ale, don't you?"

"Sure," Walter said, but grimaced. "Are you really going to drink that down-by-de-Swanee-Ribber stuff? I always thought you were a scotch man."

"I was always a private Comfort-and-ginger-ale man. I've come out of the closet. "

Walter grinned. "Mary's around here someplace. She's kinda been keeping an eye out for you. Get yourself a drink and we'll go find her."

"Good enough."

He made his way across the kitchen, saying hi to people he knew vaguely and who looked as if they didn't know him at all, and replying hi, how are you to people he didn't remember who hailed him first. Cigarette smoke rolled majestically through the kitchen. Conversation faded quickly in and out, like stations on latenight AM radio, all of it bright and meaningless.

Freddy and Jim didn't have their time sheets so I said that his mother died quite recently and he's apt to go on a crying jag if he drinks too much so when he got the paint sc.r.a.ped off he saw it was really a nice piece, maybe pre-Revolutionary and this little kike came to the door selling encyclopedias very messy; he won't give her the divorce because of the kids and he drinks like a terribly nice dress so much to drink that when he went to pay the check he bar all over the hostess A long Formica-topped table had been set up in front of the stove and the sink, and it was already crowded with opened liquor bottles and gla.s.ses in varying sizes and degrees of fullness. Ashtrays already overflowed with filtertips. Three ice buckets filled with cubes had been crowded into the sink. Over the stove was a large poster which showed Richard Nixon wearing a pair of earphones. The earphone cord disappeared up into the r.e.c.t.u.m of a donkey standing on the edge of the picture. The caption said: WE LISTEN BETTER!.

To the left, a man in bell-bottomed baggies and a drink in each hand (a water gla.s.s filled with what looked to be whiskey and a large stein filled with beer) was entertaining a mixed group with a joke. "This guy comes into this bar, and here's this monkey sitting on the stool next to him. So the guy orders a beer and when the bartender brings it, the guy says, 'Who owns this monkey? Cute little b.u.g.g.e.r.' And the bartender says, 'Oh, that's the piano player's monkey.' So the guy swings around "

He made himself a drink and looked around for Walt, but he had gone to the door to greet some more guests-a young couple. The man was wearing a huge driving cap, goggles, and an old-time automobile duster. Written on the front of the duster were the words KEEP ON TRUCKIN'.

Several people were laughing uproariously, and Walter was howling. Whatever the joke was, it seemed to go back a long time.

" and the guy walks over to the piano player and says, 'Do you know your monkey just p.i.s.sed in my beer?' And the piano player says, 'No, but hum a few bars and I'll fake it.' " Calculated burst of laughter. The man in the bell-bottomed baggies sipped his whiskey and then cooled it with a gulp of beer.

He took his drink and strolled into the darkened living room, slipping behind the turned back of Tina Howard Wallace before she could see him and snag him into a long game of Where Are They Now. She looked, he thought, like the kind of person who could cite you chapter and verse from the lives of cla.s.smates who had turners out badly-divorce, nervous disorders, and criminal violations would be her stock in trade-and would have made unpersons out of those who had had success.

Someone had put on the inevitable alb.u.m of 50's rock and roll, and maybe fifteen couples were jitterbugging hilariously and badly. He saw Mary dancing with a tall, slim man that he knew but could not place. Jack? John? Jason? He shook his head. It wouldn't come. Mary was wearing a party dress he had never seen before. It b.u.t.toned up one side, and she had left enough b.u.t.tons undone to provide a s.e.xy slit to a little above one nyloned knee. He waited for some strong feeling-jealousy or loss, even habitual craving-but none came. He sipped his drink.

She turned her head and saw him. He raised a noncommittal finger in salute: Go on and finish your dance- Go on and finish your dance-but she broke off and came over, bringing her partner with her.

"I'm so glad you could come, Bart," she said, raising her voice to be heard over the laughter and conversation and stereo. "Do you remember d.i.c.k Jackson?"

Bart stuck out his hand and the slim man shook it. "You and your wife lived on our street five no, seven years ago. Is that right?"