“That’s seasonal,” he said.
“I didn’t call about that anyway,” Magliore answered. “I called to say congratulations.”
“Congratuwhatchens?” He was honestly bewildered.
“You know. Crackle-crackle boom-boom.”
“Oh, you mean-‘
“Sssst. Not on the phone. Be cool, Dawes.”
“Sure. Crackle-crackle boom-boom. That’s good.” He cackled.
“It was you, wasn’t it, Dawes?”
“To you I wouldn’t admit my middle name.”
Magliore roared. “That’s good. You’re good, Dawes. You’re a fruitcake, but you’re a clever fruitcake. I admire that.”
“Thanks,” he said, and cleverly knocked back the rest of his drink.
247
“I also wanted to tell you that everything was going ahead on schedule down there.
Rumble and roar.”
The glass he was holding fell from his fingers and rolled across the rug.
“They’ve got seconds on all that stuff, Dawes. Thirds on most of it. They’re paying cash until they got their bookwork straightened out, but everything is righton.”
“You’re crazy.”
“No. I thought you ought to know. I told you, Dawes. Some things you can’t get rid of. ”
“You’re a bastard. You’re lying. Why do you want to call a man up on Christmas night and tell him lies?”
“I ain’t lying. It’s your play again, Dawes. In this game, it’s always gonna be your play.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You poor son of a bitch,” Magliore said. He sounded honestly sorry and that was the worst part. “I don’t think it’s gonna be a very happy new year for you either. ” He hung up.
And that was Christmas.
December 26, 1973
There was a letter from them in the mail (he had begun to see the anonymous people downtown that way, the personal pronoun in italics and printed in drippy, ominous letters like the printing on a horror movie poster), as if to confirm what Magliore had said.
He held it in his hand, looking down at the crisp white business envelope, his mind filled with almost all the bad emotions the human mind can feel: Despair, hatred, fear, anger, loss. He almost tore it into small pieces and threw it into the snow beside the house, and then knew he couldn’t do that. He opened it, nearly tearing the envelope in half, and realized that what he felt most was cheated. He had been gypped. He had been rooked. He had destroyed their machines and their records, and they had just brought up a few replacements. It was like trying to fight the Chinese Army singlehanded.
It’s your play again, Dawes. In this game it’s always gonna be your play.
The other letters had been form jobs, sent from the office of the highway department.
Dear Friend, a big crane is going to come to your house sometime soon. Be on the lookout for this exciting event as WE IMPROVE YOUR CITY!
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–
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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
reimbursement without this form. According to our 1973
tax assessment, 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 God 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 249
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 space 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-?”
“Goddam motherfucking mothersucking nnnnnn fuckhole!” his son screamed from the 250
clean white hospital bed. “Cuntlickircg dinkrubbing asswipe sonofawhoringbitch- ”
“NURSE! ” he had screamed, as Charlie passed out. “OH GOD 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 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.