“I know,” he said. Mansey had come back in with his credit cards and was standing by the door, listening.
170
“And one of the kids who was yelling the loudest was the kid who finally got it. Luigi Bronticelli, his name was. A good Jew like me, you know?” Magliore laughed. “He went up to pat Mr. Piazzi’s dog one day in August when it was hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk, and he ain’t talked above a whisper since that day. He’s got a barbershop in Manhattan, and they call him Whispering Gee. ”
Magliore smiled at him.
“You remind me of Mr. Piazzi’s dog. You ain’t growling yet, but if someone was to pat you, you’d roll your eyes. And you stopped wagging your tail a long time ago. Pete, give this man his things.”
Mansey gave him the bundle.
“You come back tomorrow and we’ll talk some more,” Magliore said. He watched him putting things back into his wallet. “And you really ought to clean that mess out.
You’re racking that wallet all to shit.”
“Maybe I will,” he said.
“Pete, show this man out to his car.” ‘Sure.”
He had the door open and was stepping out when Magliore called after him: “You know what they did to Mr. Piazzi’s dog, mister? They took her to the pound and gassed her.”
After supper, while John Chancellor was telling about how the reduced speed limit on the Jersey Turnpike had probably been responsible for fewer accidents, Mary asked him about the house.
“Termites,” he said.
Her face fell like an express elevator. “Oh. No good, huh?”
“Well, I’m going out again tomorrow. If Tom Granger knows a good exterminator, I’ll take the guy out with me. Get an expert opinion. Maybe it isn’t as bad as it looks.”
“I hope it isn’t. A backyard and all . . . ” She trailed off wistfully.
Oh, you’re a prince, Freddy said suddenly. A veritable prince. How come you’re so good to your wife, George? Was it a natural talent or did you take lessons?
“Shut up,” he said.
Mary looked around, startled. “What?”
“Oh . . . Chancellor,” he said. “I get so sick of gloom and doom from John Chancellor and Walter Cronkite and the rest of them.”
“You shouldn’t hate the messenger because of the message,” she said, and looked at John Chancellor with doubtful, troubled eyes.
“I suppose so,” he said, and thought: You bastard, Freddy.
Freddy told him not to hate the messenger for the message.
171
They watched the news in silence for a while. A commercial for a cold medicine came on-two men whose heads had been turned into blocks of snot. When one of them took the cold pill, the gray-green cube that had been encasing his head fell off in large lumps.
“Your cold sounds better tonight,” he said.
“It is. Bart, what’s the realtor’s name?”
“Monohan,” he said automatically.
“No, not the man that’s selling you the plant. The one that’s selling the house. ”
“Olsen,” he said promptly, picking the name out of an internal litter bag.
The news came on again. There was a report on David Ben-Gurion, who was about to join Harry Truman in that great Secretariat in the sky.
“How does Jack like it out there?” she asked presently.
He was going to tell her Jack didn’t like it at all and heard himself saying, “Okay, I guess.”
John Chancellor closed out with a humorous item about flying saucers over Ohio.
He went to bed at half past ten and must have had the bad dream almost at once-when he woke up the digital clock said:
11:22P.M.
In the dream he had been standing on a corner in Norton-the corner of Venner and Rice Street. He had been standing right under the street sign. Down the street, in front of a candy store, a pink pimpmobile with caribou antlers mounted on the hood had just pulled up. Kids began to run toward it from stoops and porches.
Across the street, a large black dog was chained to the railing of a leaning brick tenement. A little boy was approaching it confidently.
He tried to cry out: Don’t pet that dog! Go get your candy! But the words wouldn’t come out. As if in slow motion, the pimp in the white suit and planter’s hat turned to look.
His hands were full of candy. The children who had crowded around him turned to look.
All the children around the pimp were black, but the little boy approaching the dog was white.
The dog struck, catapulting up from its haunches like a blunt arrow. The boy screamed and staggered backward, hands to his throat. When he turned around, the blood was streaming through his fingers. It was Charlie.
That was when he had wakened.
The dreams. The goddam dreams.
His son had been dead three years.
172
November 28, 1973
It was snowing when he got up, but it had almost stopped by the time he got to the laundry. Tom Granger came running out of the plant in his shirtsleeves, his breath making short, stiff plumes in the cold air. He knew from the expression on Tom’s face that it was going to be a crummy day.
“We’ve got trouble, Bart.”
“Bad?”
“Bad enough. Johnny Walker had an accident on his way back from Holiday Inn with his first load. Guy in a Pontiac skidded through a red light on Deakman and hit him dead center. Kapow. ” He paused and looked aimlessly back toward the loading doors. There was no one there. “The cops said Johnny was in a bad way. ”
“Holy Christ.”
“I got out there fifteen or twenty minutes after it happened. You know the intersection-”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s a bitch.”
Tom shook his head. “If it wasn’t so fucking awful you’d have to laugh. It looks like somebody threw a bomb at a washerwoman. There’s Holiday Inn sheets and towels everywhere. Some people were stealing them, the fucking ghouls, can you believe what people will do? And the truck . . . Bart, there’s nothing left from the driver’s side door up.
Just junk. Johnny got thrown.”
“Is he at Central?”
“No, St Mary’s. Johnny’s a Catholic, didn’t you know that?”
“You want to drive over with me?”
“I better not. Ron’s hollering for pressure on the boiler.” He shrugged, embarrassed.
“You know Ron. The show must go on. ”
“All right.”
He got back into his car and drove out toward St. Mary’s Hospital. Jesus Christ, of all the people for it to happen to. Johnny Walker was the only person left at the laundry besides himself who had been working at the Blue Ribbon in 1953Johnny, in fact, went back to 1946. The thought lodged in his throat like an omen. He knew from reading the papers that the 784 extension was going to make the dangerous Deakman intersection pretty much obsolete.
His name wasn’t Johnny at all, not really. He was Corey Everett Walker-he had seen it on enough time cards to know that. But he had been known as Johnny even twenty years ago. His wife had died in 1956 on a vacation trip in Vermont. Since then he had lived with his brother, who drove a sanitation truck for the city. There were dozens of workers at the Blue Ribbon who called Ron “Stoneballs” behind his back, but Johnny had been the only one to use it to his face and get away with it.
He thought: If Johnny dies, I’m the oldest employee the laundry has got. Held over for a twentieth record-breaking year. Isn’t that a sketch, Fred?
173
Fred didn’t think so.
Johnny’s brother was sitting in the waiting room of the emergency wing, a tall man with Johnny’s features and high complexion, dressed in olive work clothes and a black cloth jacket. He was twirling an olive-colored cap between his knees and looking at the floor. He glanced up at the sound of footsteps.
“You from the laundry?” he asked.
“Yes. You’re . . . ” He didn’t expect the name to come to him, but it did. “Arnie, right?”
“Yeah, Arnie Walker.” He shook his head slowly. “I dunno, Mr . . . ?”
“Dawes. ”
“I dunno, Mr. Dawes. I seen him in one of those examinin rooms. He looked pretty banged up. He ain’t a kid anymore. He looked bad.”
“I’m very sorry,” he said.
“That’s a bad corner. It wasn’t the other guy’s fault. He just skidded in the snow. I don’t blame the guy. They say he broke his nose but that was all. It’s funny the way those things work out, you know it?”
“Yes. ”
“I remember one time when I was driving a big rig for Hemingway, this was in the early sixties, and I was on the Indiana Toll Road and I saw-”
The outer door banged open and a priest came in. He stamped snow from his boots and then hurried up the corridor, almost running. Arnie Walker saw him, and his eyes widened and took on the glazed look of shock. He made a whining, gasping noise in his throat and tried to stand up. He put an arm around Arnie’s shoulders and restrained him.