Roadwork Read Online Free PDF

of the morning. Johnny waved from the cab of his blue and white laundry van, and he waved back. It was a little after eight o’clock.
    The laundry began its day at seven when Ron Stone, the foreman, and Dave Radner, who ran the washroom, got there and ran up the pressure on the boiler. The shirt girls punched in at seven-thirty, and the girls who ran the speed ironer came in at eight. He hated the downstairs of the laundry where the brute work went on, where the exploitation went on, but for some perverse reason the men and women who worked there liked him. They called him by his first name. And with a few exceptions, he liked them.
    He went in through the driver’s loading entrance and threaded through the baskets of sheets from last night that the ironer hadn’t run yet. Each basket was covered tightly with plastic to keep the dust off. Down front, Ron Stone was tightening the drive belt on the old Milnor single-pocket while Dave and his helper, a college dropout named Steve Pollack, were loading the industrial Washex machines with motel sheets.
    “Bart!” Ron Stone greeted him. He bellowed everything; thirty years of talking to people over the combined noises of dryers, ironers, shirt presses, and washers on extract had built the bellow into his system. “This son of a bitch Milnor keeps seizing up. The program’s so far over to bleach now that Dave has to run it on manual. And the extract keeps cutting out.”
    “We’ve got the Kilgallon order,” he soothed. “Two more months—”
    “In the Waterford plant?”
    “Sure,” he said, a little giddy.
    “Two more months and I’ll be ready for the nut-hatch,” Stone said darkly. “And switching over ... it’s gonna be worse than a Polish army parade.”
    “The orders will back up, I guess.”
    “Back up! We won’t get dug out for three months. Then it’ll be summer.”
    He nodded, not wanting to go on with it. “What are you running first?”
    “Holiday Inn.”
    “Get a hundred pounds of towels in with every load. You know how they scream for towels.”
    “Yeah, they scream for everything.”
    “How much you got?”
    “They marked in six hundred pounds. Mostly from the Shriners. Most of them stayed over Monday. Cummyest sheets I ever seen. Some of em’d stand on end.”
    He nodded toward the new kid, Pollack. “How’s he working out?” The Blue Ribbon had a fast turnover in washroom helpers. Dave worked them hard and Ron’s bellowing made them nervous, then resentful.
    “Okay so far,” Stone said. “Do you remember the last one?”
    He remembered. The kid had lasted three hours.
    “Yeah, I remember. What was his name?”
    Ron Stone’s brow grew thundery. “I don’t remember. Baker? Barker? Something like that. I saw him at the Stop and Shop last Friday, handing out leaflets about a lettuce boycott or something. That’s something, isn’t it? A fellow can’t hold a job, so he goes out telling everyone how fucking lousy it is that America can’t be like Russia. That breaks my heart.”
    “You’ll run Howard Johnson next?”
    Stone looked wounded. “We always run it first thing.”
    “By nine?”
    “Bet your ass.”
    Dave waved to him, and he waved back. He went upstairs, through dry-cleaning, through accounting, and into his office. He sat down behind his desk in his swivel chair and pulled everything out of the IN box to read. On his desk was a plaque that said:
    THINK! It May Be A New Experience
    He didn’t care much for that sign but he kept it on his desk because Mary had given it to him—when? Five years back? He sighed. The salesmen that came through thought it was funny. They laughed like hell. But then if you showed a salesman a picture of starving kids or Hitler copulating with the Virgin Mary, he would laugh like hell.
    Vinnie Mason, the little bird who had undoubtedly been chirruping in Steve Ordner’s ear, had a sign on his desk that said:
    THIMK
    Now what kind of sense did that make, THIMK? Not even a salesman would