running paternalistic bastards, but they had a sense of place, Vinnie. You don’t get that out of a cost accountant’s report. If they were alive and someone told them that the highway commission was going to bury the laundry in eight lanes of composition hot-top, you would have heard the scream all the way down to city hall.”
“But they’re dead,” Vinnie said.
“Yeah, they’re dead, all right.” His mind suddenly felt flabby and unstrung, like an amateur’s guitar. Whatever he had needed to say to Vinnie had been lost in a welter of embarrassing personal stuff. Look at him, Freddy, he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. He doesn’t have a clue. “Thank God they’re not here to see this.”
Vinnie didn’t say anything.
He gathered himself with an effort. “What I’m trying to say, Vinnie, is that there are two groups involved here. Them and us. We’re laundry people. That’s our business.
They’re cost accountant people. That’s their business. They send down orders from on high, and we have to follow them. But that’s all we have to do. Do you understand?”
“Sure, Bart,” Vinnie said, but he could see that Vinnie didn’t understand at all. He wasn’t sure he did himself.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll speak to Ordner. But just for your information, Vinnie, the Waterford plant is as good as ours. I’m closing the deal next Tuesday.”
Vinnie grinned, relieved. “Jesus, that’s great.”
“Yes. Everything’s under control.”
As Vinnie was leaving, he called after him: “You tell me how that German restaurant is, okay?”
Vinnie Mason tossed him his number 1 grin, bright and full of teeth, all systems go. “I sure will, Bart.”
137
Then Vinnie was gone and he was looking at the closed door. I made a mess of that, Fred. I didn’t think you did so badly, George. Maybe you lost the handle at the end, but it’s only in books that people say everything right the first time. No, I frigged up. He went out of here thinking Barton Dawes has lost a few cards out of his deck. God help him he’s right. George, I have to ask you something, man to man. No, don’t shut me off. Why did you buy those guns, George? Why did you do that?
Thump, the circuit breaker.
He went down on the floor, gave Ron Stone the salesmen’s folders, and when he walked away Ron was bawling for Dave to come over and look at this stuff, might be something in it. Dave rolled his eyes. There was something in it, all right. It was known as work.
He went upstairs and called Ordner’s office, hoping Ordner would be out drinking lunch. No breaks today. The secretary put him right through.
“Bart!” Steve Ordner said. “Always good to talk with you.”
“Same here. I was talking to Vinnie Mason a little earlier, and he seemed to think you might be a little worried about the Waterford plant.”
“Good God, no. Although I did think, maybe Friday night, we could lay out a few things-”
“Yeah, I called mainly to say Mary can’t make it.”
“Oh?”
“A virus. She doesn’t dare go five seconds from the nearest john.”
“Say, I’m sorry to hear that.”
Cram it, you cheap dick.
“The doctor gave her some pills and she seems to be feeling better. But she might be, you know, catching.”
“What time can you make it, Bart? Eight?”
“Yeah, eight’s fine.”
That’s right, screw up the Friday Night Movie, prick. What else is new?
“How is the Waterford business progressing, Bart?”
“That’s something we’d better talk about in person, Steve.”
“That’s fine. ” Another pause. “Carla sends her best. And tell Mary that both Carla and I . . .”
Sure. Yeah. Blah, blah, blah.
138
November 22, 1973
He woke up with a jerk that knocked the pillow onto the floor, afraid he might have screamed. But Mary was still sleeping in the other bed, a silent mound. The digital clock on the bureau said:
4:23 A.M.
It clicked into the next minute. Old Bea from Baltimore, the one who was into consciousness-raising hydrotherapy, had given it to them last Christmas. He didn’t mind the clock, but he had never been able to get used to the click when the numbers changed.
4:23 click, 4:24 click, a person could go nuts.
He went down to the bathroom, turned on the light, and urinated. It made his heart thump heavily in his chest. Lately when he urinated his heart thumped like a fucking bass drum. Are you trying to tell me something, God?
He went back to bed and lay down, but sleep didn’t come for a long time. He had thrashed around while he slept, and the bed had been remolded into enemy territory. He couldn’t get it right again. His arms and legs also seemed to have forgotten which way they arranged themselves when he slept.
The dream was easy enough to figure out. No sweat there, Fred. A person could work that circuit breaker trick easy enough when he was awake; he could go on coloring in some picture piece by piece and pretending he couldn’t see the whole thing. You could bury the big picture under the floor of your mind. But there was a trapdoor. When you were asleep, sometimes it banged open and something crawled up out of the darkness.
Click.
4:42 A.M.
In the dream he had been at Pierce Beach with Charlie (funny, when he had given Vinnie Mason that little thumbnail autobiography he had forgotten to mention Charlie-isn’t that funny, Fred? No, I don’t think it’s too funny, George. Neither do I, Fred.
But it’s late. Or early. Or something.)
He and Charlie were on that long white beach and it was a fine day for the beach-bright blue sky and the sun beaming down like the face on one of those idiotic smiley-smile buttons. People on bright blankets and under umbrellas of many different hues, little kids dibbling around the water’s edge with plastic pails. A lifeguard on his whitewashed tower, his skin as brown as a boot, the crotch of his white Latex swim trunks bulging, as if penis and testicle size were somehow a job prerequisite and he wanted everyone in the area to know they were not being let down. Someone’s transistor radio blaring rock and roll and even now he could remember the tune: But I love that dirty water,
Owww, Boston, you’re my home.
Two girls walking by in bikinis, safe and sane inside beautiful screwable bodies, never for you but for boyfriends nobody ever saw, their toes kicking up tiny fans of sand.
Only it was funny, Fred, because the tide was coming and there was no tide at Pierce Beach because the nearest ocean was nine hundred miles away.
139
He and Charlie were making a sand castle. But they had started too near the water and the incoming waves kept coming closer and closer.
We have to build it farther back, Dad, Charlie said, but he was stubborn and kept building. When the tide brought the water up to the first wall, he dug a moat with his fingers, spreading the wet sand like a woman’s vagina. The water kept coming.
Goddam it! He yelled at the water.
He rebuilt the wall. A wave knocked it down. People started to scream about something. Others were running. The lifeguard’s whistle blew like a silver arrow. He didn’t look up. He had to save the castle. But the water kept coming, lapping his ankles, slurping a turret, a roof, the back of the castle, all of it. The last wave withdrew, showing only bland sand, smooth and flat and brown and shining.
There were more screams. Someone was crying. He looked up and saw the lifeguard was giving Charlie mouth-to-mouth. Charlie was wet and white except for his lips and eyelids, which were blue. His chest was not rising and falling. The lifeguard stopped trying. He looked up. He was smiling.
He was out over his head, the lifeguard was saying through his smile. Isn’t it time you went?
He screamed: Charlie! and that was when he had wakened, afraid he might really have screamed.
He lay in the darkness for a long time, listening to the digital clock click, and tried not to think of the dream. At last he got up to get a glass of milk in the kitchen, and it was not until he saw the turkey thawing on a plate on the counter that he remembered it was Thanksgiving and today the laundry was closed. He drank his milk standing up, looking thoughtfully at the plucked body. The color of its skin was the same as the color of his son’s skin in his dream. But Charlie hadn’t drowned, of course.
When he got back into bed, Mary muttered something interrogative, thick and indecipherable with sleep.
“Nothing,” he said. “Go to sleep.”
She muttered something else.