Big Wheels: A Tale of The Laundry Game
(Milkman #2)
by Stephen King
Rocky and Leo, both drunk as the last lords of creation, cruised slowly down Culver Street and then out along Balfour Avenue toward Crescent. They were ensconced in Rocky’s 1957 Chrysler. Between them, balanced with drunken care on the monstrous hump of the Chrysler’s drive shaft, sat a case of Iron City beer. It was their second case of the evening — the evening had actually begun at four in the afternoon, which was punch-out time at the laundry.
“Shit on a shingle!” Rocky said, stopping at the red blinker-light above the intersection of Balfour Avenue and Highway 99. He did not look for traffic in either direction, but did cast a sly glance behind them. A half-full can of I.C., emblazoned with a colorful picture of Terry Bradshaw, rested against his crotch. He took a swig and then turned left on 99. The universal joint made a thick grunting sound as they started chuggingly off in second gear. The Chrysler had lost its first gear some two months ago.
“Gimme a shingle and I’ll shit on it,” Leo said obligingly.
“What time is it?”
Leo held his watch up until it was almost touching the tip of his cigarette and then puffed madly until he could get a reading. “Almost eight.”
“Shit on a shingle!” They passed a sign, which read PITTSBURGH 44.
“Nobody is going to inspect this here Detroit honey,” Leo said. “Nobody in his right mind, at least.”
Rocky fetched third gear. The universal moaned to itself, and the Chrysler began to have the automotive equivalent of a pe tit mal epileptic seizure. The spasm eventually passed, and the speedometer climbed tiredly to forty. It hung there precariously.
When they reached the intersection of Highway 99 and Devon Stream Road (Devon Stream formed the border between the townships of Crescent and Devon for some eight miles), Rocky turned onto the latter almost upon a whim — although perhaps even then some memory of ole Stiff Socks had begun to stir deep down in what passed for Rocky’s subconscious.
He and Leo had been driving more or less at random since leaving work. It was the last day of June, and the inspection sticker on Rocky’s Chrysler would become invalid at exactly 12:01 AM tomorrow. Four hours from right now. Less than four hours from right now. Rocky found this eventuality almost too painful to contemplate, and Leo didn’t care. It was not his car. Also, he had drunk enough Iron City beer to reach a state of deep cerebral paralysis.
Devon Road wound through the only heavily wooded area of Crescent. Great bunches of elms and oaks crowded in on both sides, lush and alive and full of moving shadows as night began to close over southwestern Pennsylvania. The area was known, in fact, as The Devon Woods. It had attained capital-letter status after the torture-murder of a young girl and her boyfriend in 1968. The couple had been parking out here and were found in the boyfriend’s 1959 Mercury. The Merc had real leather seats and a large chrome hood ornament. The occupants had been found in the back seat. Also in the front seat, the trunk, and the glove compartment. The killer had never
been found.
“Jughumper better not stall out here,” Rocky said. “We’re ninety miles from no place.”
“Bunk.” This interesting word had risen lately to the top forty of Leo’s vocabulary. “There’s town, right over there.”
Rocky sighed and sipped from his can of beer. The glow was not really town, but the kid was close enough to make argument worthless. It was the new shopping center. Those high-intensity arc sodium lights really threw a glare. While looking in that direction, Rocky drove the car over to the left side of the road, looped back, almost went into the right-hand ditch, and finally got back in his lane again.
“Whoops,” he said.
Leo burped and gurgled.
They had been working together at the New Adams Laundry since September, when Leo had been hired as Rocky’s washroom helper. Leo was a rodent-featured young man of twenty-two who looked as if he might have quite a lot of jail-time in his future. He claimed he was saving twenty dollars a week from his pay to buy a used Kawasaki motorcycle. He said he was going west on this bike when cold weather came. Leo had held a grand total of twelve jobs since he and the world of academics had parted company at the minimum age of sixteen. He liked the laundry fine. Rocky was teaching him the various wash cycles, and Leo believed he was finally Learning a Skill, which would come in handy when he reached Flagstaff.
Rocky, an older hand, had been at New Adams for fourteen years. His hands, ghostlike and bleached as he handled the steering wheel, proved it. He had done a four-month bit for carrying a concealed weapon in 1970. His wife, then puffily pregnant with their third child, announced 1) that it was not his, Rocky’s, child but the milkman’s child; and 2) that she wanted a divorce, on grounds of mental cruelty.
Two things about this situation had driven Rocky to carry a concealed weapon: 1) he had been cuckolded; and 2) he had been cuckolded by the fa chrissakes milkman, a trout-eyed long-haired piece of work named Spike Milligan. Spike drove for Cramer’s Dairy.
The milkman, for God’s sweet sake! The milkman, and could you die? Could you just fucking flop down into the gutter and die? Even to Rocky, who had never progressed much beyond reading the Fleer’s Funnies that came wrapped around the bubble gum he chewed indefatigably at work, the situation had sonorous classical overtones.
As a result, he had duly informed his wife of two facts: 1) no divorce; and 2) he was going to let a large amount of daylight into Spike Milligan. He had purchased a.32-caliber pistol some ten years ago, which he used occasionally to shoot at bottles, tin cans, and small dogs. He left his house on Oak Street that morning and headed for the dairy, hoping to catch Spike when he finished his morning deliveries.
Rocky stopped at the Four Corners Tavern on the way to have a few beers — six, eight, maybe twenty. It was hard to remember. While he was drinking, his wife called the cops. They were waiting for him on the corner of Oak and Balfour. Rocky was searched, and one of the cops plucked the.32 from his waistband.
“I think you are going away for a while, my friend,” the cop who found the gun told him, and that was just what Rocky did. He spent the next four months washing sheets and pillowcases for the State of Pennsylvania.
During this period his wife got a Nevada divorce, and when Rocky got out of the slam she was living with Spike Milligan in a Dakin Street apartment house with a pink flamingo on the front lawn. In addition to his two older children (Rocky still more or less assumed they were his), the couple were now possessed of an infant who was
every bit as trout-eyed as his daddy. They were also possessed of fifteen dollars a week in alimony.
“Rocky, I think I’m gettin carsick,” Leo said. “Couldn’t we just pull over and drink?”
“I gotta get a sticker on my wheels,” Rocky said. “This is important. A man’s no good without his wheels.”
“Nobody in his right mind is gonna inspect this — I told you that. It ain’t got no turn signals.”
“They blink if I step on the brake at the same time, and anybody who don’t step on his brakes when he’s makin a turn is lookin to do a rollover.”
“Window on this side’s cracked.”
“I’ll roll it down.”
“What if the inspectionist asks you to roll it up so he can check it?”
“I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it,” Rocky said coolly. He tossed his beer can out and got a refill. This new one had Franco Harris on it. Apparently the Iron City company was playing the Steelers’ Greatest Hits this summer. He popped the top. Beer splurted.
“Wish I had a woman,” Leo said, looking into the dark. He smiled strangely.
“If you had a woman, you’d never get out west. What a woman does is keep a man from getting any further west. That’s how they operate. That is their mission. Dint you tell me you wanted to go out west?”
“Yeah, and I’m going, too.”
“You’ll never go,” Rocky said. “Pretty soon you’ll have a woman. Next you’ll have abalone. Alimony. You know. Women always lead up to alimony. Cars are better. Stick to cars.”
“Pretty hard to screw a car.”
“You’d be surprised,” Rocky said, and giggled.
The woods had begun to straggle away into new dwellings. Lights twinkled up on the left and Rocky suddenly slammed on the brakes. The brake lights and turn signals both went on at once; it was a home wiring job.