December 19, 1973
It was 12:30 in the afternoon when he woke up and got out of bed. He felt as though he had been on a huge bender. His head ached monstrously. His bladder was cramped and full. There was a dead-snake taste in his mouth. Walking made his heart thud like a snare drum. He was not even allowed the luxury of believing (for however short a time) that he had dreamed everything he remembered of the previous night, because the smell of gasoline seemed rubbed into his flesh and it rose, fulsomely fragrant, from the pile of his clothes. The snow was over, the sky was clear, and the bright sunshine made his eyes beg for mercy.
He went into the bathroom, sat on the ring, and a huge diarrhea movement rushed out of him like a mail train highballing through a deserted station. His waste fell into the water with a sickening series of jets and plops that made him groan and clutch his head.
He urinated without getting up, the rich and dismaying smell of his digestion’s unsavory end product rising thickly around him.
He flushed and went downstairs on his orange-wood legs, taking clean clothes with him. He would wait until the godawful smell cleared out of the bathroom and then he would shower, maybe all afternoon.
He gobbled three Excedrin from the green bottle on the shelf over the kitchen sink, then washed them down with two big gulps of Pepto-Bismol. He put on hot water for coffee and smashed his favorite cup by fumbling it off its hook. He swept it up, put out another, dumped instant Maxwell House into it, and then went into the dining room.
He turned on the radio and swept across the dial looking for news, which, like a cop, was never there when you needed it. Pop music. Feed and grain reports. A Golden Nugget ‘Cause You Dug It. A call-in talk show. A swap-shop program. Paul Harvey selling Banker’s Life Insurance. More pop music. No news.
The water for the coffee was boiling. He set the radio to one of the pop stations and brought his coffee back to the table and drank it black. There was an inclination to vomit with the first two mouthfuls, but after that it was better.
The news came on, first national, then local.
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On the city newsfront, a fire was set at the site of the 784
thruway extension construction near Grand Street in the early hours of this morning. Police Lieutenant Henry King said that vandals apparently used gasoline bombs to fire a crane, two payloaders, two bulldozers, a pickup truck, and the on-site office of the Lane Construction Company, which was entirely gutted.
An exultation as bitter and dark as the taste of his unsweetened coffee closed his throat at the words entirely gutted.
Damage done to the payloaders and bulldozers was minor, according to Francis Lane, whose company got a
substantial subcontracting bid on the crosstown extension, but the demolition crane, valued at $60,000, is expected to be out of service for as long as two weeks.
Two weeks? Was that all?
More serious, according to Lane, was the burning of the on-site office, which contained time sheets, work records, and ninety percent of the company’s cost accounting records over the last three months. “This is going to be the very devil to straighten out,” Lane said. “It may set us back a month or more.”
Maybe that was good news. Maybe an extra month of time made it all worthwhile.
According to Lieutenant King, the vandals fled the
construction site in a station wagon, possibly a late-model Chevrolet. He appealed for anyone who may have seen the car leaving the construction area by Heron Street to come forward. Francis Lane estimated total damage in the area of $100,000.
In other local news, State Representative Muriel Reston again appealed for . . .
He snapped it off.
Now that he had heard, and had heard in daylight, things seemed a little better. It was possible to look at things rationally. Of course the police didn’t have to give out all their leads, but if they really were looking for a Chevy instead of a Ford, and if they were reduced to pleading for eyewitnesses to come forward, then maybe he was safe, at least for the time being. And if there had been an eyewitness, no amount of worrying would change that.
He would throw away Mary’s floor-bucket and open the garage to air out the stink of gasoline. Make up a story to explain the broken back window if anyone asked about it.
And most important, he would try to prepare himself mentally for a visit from the police.
As the last resident of Crestallen Street West, it might be perfectly logical for them to at least check him out. And they wouldn’t have to sniff up his back trail very far to find out 237
he had been acting erratically. He had screwed up the plant. His wife had left him. A former co-worker had punched him out in a department store. And of course, he had a station wagon, Chevrolet or not. All bad. But none of it proof.
And if they did dig up proof, he supposed he would go to jail. But there were worse things than jail. Jail wasn’t the end of the world. They would give him a job, feed him. He wouldn’t have to worry about what was going to happen when the insurance money ran out. Sure, there were a lot of things worse than jail. Suicide, for instance. That was worse.
He went upstairs and showered.
Later that afternoon he called Mary. Her mother answered and went to get Mary with a sniff. But when Mary herself answered, she sounded nearly gay.
“Hi Bart. Merry Christmas in advance.”
“No, Mary Christmas,” he responded. It was an old joke that had graduated from humor to tradition.
“Sure,” she said. “What is it, Bart?”
“Well, I’ve got a few presents . . . just little stuff . . . for you and the nieces and nephews. I wondered if we could get together somewhere. I’ll give them to you. I didn’t wrap the kids’ presents-”
“I’d be glad to wrap them. But you shouldn’t have. You’re not working.”
“But I’m working on it,” he said.
“Bart, have you . . . have you done anything about what we talked about?”
“The psychiatrist?”
“Yes,”
“I called two. One is booked up until almost June. The other guy is going to be in the Bahamas until the end of March. He said he could take me then.”
“What were their names?”
“Names? Gee, honey, I’d have to look them up again to tell you. Adams, I think the first guy was. Nicholas Adams-”
“Bart,” she said sadly.
“It might have been Aarons,” he said wildly.
“Bart,” she said again.
“Okay.” he said. “Believe what you want. You will anyway.”
“Bart, if you’d only
“What about the presents? I called about the presents, not the goddam shrink. ”
She sighed. “Bring them over Friday, why don’t you? I can-”
“What, so your mother and father can hire Charles Manson to meet me at the door?
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Let’s just meet on neutral ground, okay?”
“They’re not going to be here.” she said. “They’re going to spend Christmas with Joanna.” Joanna was Joanna St. Claire, Jean Galloway’s cousin, who lived in Minnesota.
They had been close friends in their girlhood (back in that pleasant lull between the War of 1812 and the advent of the Confederacy, he sometimes thought), and Joanna had had a stroke in July. She was still trying to get over it, but Jean had told him and Mary that the doctors said she could go at any time. That must be nice, he thought, having a time bomb built right into your head like that. Hey, bomb, is it today? Please not today. I haven’t finished the new Victoria Holt.
“Bart? Are you there?”
“Yes. I was woolgathering. ”
“Is one o’clock all right?”
“That’s fine.”
“Was there anything else?”
“No, huh-uh.
“Well…”
“Take good care, Mary.”
“I will. Bye, Bart.” “Good-bye.
They hung up and he wandered into the kitchen to make himself a drink. The woman he had just talked to on the phone wasn’t the same woman that had sat tearfully on the living room couch less than a month ago, pleading for some reason to help explain the tidal wave that had just swept grandly through her ordered life, destroying the work of twenty years and leaving only a few sticks poking out of the mudflats. It was amazing.
He shook his head over it the way he would have shaken his head over the news that Jesus had come down from the sky and had taken Richard Nixon up to heaven upon wheels of fire. She has regained herself.
More: She had regained a person he hardly knew at all, a girl-woman he barely remembered. Like an archaeologist she had excavated that person, and the person was a little stiff in the joints from its long storage, but still perfectly usable. The joints would ease and the new-old person would be a whole woman, perhaps scarred by this upheaval but not seriously hurt. He knew her perhaps better than she thought, and he had been able to tell, strictly from the tone of her voice, that she was moving ever close to the idea of divorce, the idea of a clean break with the past . . . a break that would splint well and leave no trace of a limp. She was thirty-eight. Half of her life was ahead of her. There were no children to be casually maimed in the car wreck of this marriage. He would not suggest divorce, but if she did he would agree. He envied her new person and her new beauty. And if she looked back ten years from now on her marriage as a long dark corridor leading into sunlight, he could feel sorry she felt that way, but he couldn’t blame her. No, he couldn’t blame her.