Roadwork Read Online Free PDF Page A

from the highway department.
    He stood looking down at it for a long time in the gray afternoon light that fell through the windows, and then put all the mail on the sideboard. He made himself a scotch-rocks and took it into the living room.
    Merv was still chatting with Lorne. The color on the new Zenith was more than good; it was nearly occult. He thought, if our ICBM’s are as good as our color TV, there’s going to be a hell of a big bang someday. Lorne’s hair was silver, the most impossible shade of silver conceivable. Boy, I’ll snatch you bald-headed, he thought, and chuckled. It had been one of his mother’s favorite sayings. He could not say why the image of Lorne Greene bald-headed was so amusing. A light attack of belated hysteria over the gun shop episode, maybe.
    Mary looked up, a smile on her lips. “A funny?”
    “Nothing,” he said. “Just my thinks.”
    He sat down beside her and pecked her cheek. She was a tall woman, thirty-eight now, and at that crisis of looks where early prettiness is deciding what to be in middle age. Her skin was very good, her breasts small and not apt to sag much. She ate a lot, but her conveyor-belt metabolism kept her slim. She would not be apt to tremble at the thought of wearing a bathing suit on a public beach ten years from now, no matter how the gods decided to dispose of the rest of her case. It made him conscious of his own slight bay window. Hell, Freddy, every executive has a bay window. It’s a success symbol, like a Delta 88. That’s right, George. Watch the old ticker and the cancer-sticks and you’ll see eighty yet.
    “How did it go today?” she asked.
    “Good.”
    “Did you get out to the new plant in Waterford?”
    “Not today.”
    He hadn’t been out to Waterford since late October. Ordner knew it—a little bird must have told him—and hence the note. The site of the new plant was a vacated textile mill, and the smart mick realtor handling the deal kept calling him. We have to close this thing out, the smart mick realtor kept telling him. You people aren’t the only ones over in Westside with your fingers in the crack. I’m going as fast as I can, he told the smart mick realtor. You’ll have to be patient.
    “What about the place in Crescent?” she asked him. “The brick house.”
    “It’s out of our reach,” he said. “They’re asking forty-eight thousand.”
    “For that place?” she asked indignantly. “Highway robbery!”
    “It sure is.” He took a deep swallow of his drink. “What did old Bea from Baltimore have to say?”
    “The usual. She’s into consciousness-raising group hydrotherapy now. Isn’t that a sketch? Bart—”
    “It sure is,” he said quickly.
    “Bart, we’ve got to get moving on this. January twentieth is coming, and we’ll be out in the street.”
    “I’m going as fast as I can,” he said. “We just have to be patient.”
    “That little Colonial on Union Street—”
    “—is sold,” he finished, and drained his drink.
    “Well that’s what I mean,” she said, exasperated. “That would have been perfectly fine for the two of us. With the money the city’s allowing us for this house and lot, we could have been ahead.”
    “I didn’t like it.”
    “You don’t seem to like very much these days,” she said with surprising bitterness. “He didn’t like it,” she told the TV. The negress songstress was on now, singing “Alfie.”
    “Mary, I’m doing all I can.”
    She turned and looked at him earnestly. “Bart, I know how you feel about this house—”
    “No you don’t,” he said. “Not at all.”

November 21, 1973
    A light skim of snow had fallen over the world during the night, and when the bus doors chuffed open and he stepped onto the sidewalk, he could see the tracks of the people who had been there before him. He walked down Fir Street from the comer, hearing the bus pull away behind him with its tiger purr. Then Johnny Walker passed him, headed out for his second pickup