Ordner answered quietly, “I want what everyone wants. Go home, Bart.”
He left without looking back. And he never went there again.
When he got to Magliore’s Used Cars, it was snowing hard and most of the cars he passed had their headlights on. His windshield wipers beat a steady back-and-forth tune, and beyond their sweep snow that had been defrosted into slush ran down the Saf-T-Glass like tears.
He parked in back and walked around to the office. Before he went in, he looked at his ghostly reflection in the plate glass and scrubbed a thin pink film from his lips. The encounter with Ordner had upset him more than he would have believed. He had picked up a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in a drugstore and had chugged half of it on the way out here. Probably won’t shit for a week, Fred. But Freddy wasn’t at home. Maybe he had gone to visit Monohan’s relatives in Bombay.
The woman behind the adding machine gave him a strange speculative smile and waved him in.
Magliore was alone. He was reading The Wall Street Journal, and when he came in, Magliore threw it across the desk and into the wastebasket. It landed with a rattling thump.
“It’s going right to fucking hell,” Magliore said, as if continuing an interior dialogue that had started some time ago. “All these stockbrokers are old women, just like Paul Harvey says. Will the president resign? Will he? Won’t he? Will he? Is GE going to go bankrupt with the energy shortage? It gives me a pain in the ass.”
“Yeah,” he said, but not sure of what he was agreeing to. He felt uneasy, and he wasn’t totally sure Magliore remembered who he was. What should he say? I’m the guy who called you a dork, remember? Christ, that was no way to start.
“Snowing harder, ain’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“I hate the snow. My brother, he goes to Puerto Rico November first every year, stays until April fifteenth. He owns forty percent of a hotel there. Says he has to look after his investment. Shit. He wouldn’t know how to look after his own ass if you gave him a roll of Charmin. What do you want?”
“Huh?” He jumped a little, and felt guilty.
“You came to me to get something. How can I get it for you if I don’t know what it is?”
When it was put with such abrupt baldness, he found it hard to speak. The word for what he wanted seemed to have too many corners to come out of his mouth. He remembered something he had done as a kid and smiled a little.
“What’s funny?” Magliore asked with sharp pleasantness. “With business the way it is, I could use a joke.”
“Once, when I was a kid, I put a yo-yo in my mouth,” he said.
“That’s funny?”
“No, I couldn’t get it out. That’s funny. My mother took me to the doctor and he got it out. He pinched my ass and when I opened my mouth to yell, he just yanked it out.”
“I ain’t going to pinch your ass,” Magliore said. “What do you want, Dawes?”
“Explosives,” he said.
Magliore looked at him. He rolled his eyes. He started to say something and slapped one of his hanging jowls instead. “Explosives.”
“Yes.”
“I knew this guy was a fruiter,” Magliore told himself. “I told Pete when you left, 'There goes a guy looking for an accident to happen.' That’s what I told him.”
He said nothing. Talk of accidents made him think of Johnny Walker.
“Okay, Okay, I’ll bite. What do you want explosives for? You going to blow up the Egyptian Trade Exposition? You going to skyjack an airplane? Or maybe just blow your mother-in-law to hell?”
“I wouldn’t waste explosives on her,” he said stiffly, and that made them both laugh, but it didn’t break the tension.
“So what is it? Who have you got a hardon against?”
He said: “I don’t have a hardon against anyone. If I wanted to kill somebody, I’d buy a gun.” Then he remembered he had bought a gun, had bought two guns, and his Pepto-Bismol-drugged stomach began to roll again.
“So why do you need explosives?”
“I want to blow up a road.”
Magliore looked at him with measured incredulity. All his emotions seemed larger than life; it was as if he had adopted his character to fit the magnifying properties of his glasses. “You want to blow up a road? What road?”
“It hasn’t been built yet.” He was beginning to get a sort of perverse pleasure from this. And of course, it was postponing the inevitable confrontation with Mary.
“So you want to blow up a road that hasn’t been built. I had you wrong, mister. You’re not a fruitcake. You’re a psycho. Can you make sense?”
Picking his words carefully, he said: “They’re building a road that’s known as the 784 extension. When it’s done, the state turnpike will go right through the city. For certain reasons I don’t want to go into-because I can’t-that road has wrecked twenty years of my life. It’s-”
“Because they’re gonna knock down the laundry where you work, and your house?”
“How did you know that?”
“I told you I was gonna check you. Did you think I was kidding? I even knew you were gonna lose your job. Maybe before you did.”
“No, I knew that a month ago,” he said, not thinking about what he was saying. “And how are you going to do it? Were you planning to just drive past the construction, lighting fuses with your cigar and throwing bundles of dynamite out of your car window?”
“No. Whenever there’s a holiday, they leave all their machines at the site. I want to blow them all up. And all three of the new overpasses. I want to blow them up, too.”
Magliore goggled at him. He goggled for a long time. Then he threw back his head and laughed. His belly shook and his belt buckle heaved up and down like a chip of wood riding a heavy swell. His laughter was full and hearty and rich. He laughed until tears splurted out of his eyes and then he produced a huge comic-opera handkerchief from some inner pocket and wiped them. He stood watching Magliore laugh and was suddenly very sure that this fat man with the thick glasses was going to sell him the explosives. He watched Magliore with a slight smile on his face. He didn’t mind the laughter. Today laughter sounded good.
“Man, you’re crazy, all right,” Magliore said when his laughter had subsided to chuckles and hitchings. “I wish Pete could have been here to hear this. He’s never gonna believe it. Yesterday you call me a d-dork and t-today… t-t-today…” And he was off again, roaring his laughter, mopping his eyes with his handkerchief.
When his mirth had subsided again, he asked, “How were you gonna finance this little venture, Mr. Dawes? Now that you’re no longer gainfully employed?”
That was a funny way to put it. No longer gainfully employed. When you said it that way, it really sounded true. He was out of a job. All of this was not a dream.
“I cashed in my life insurance last month,” he said. “I’d been paying on a ten-thousand-dollar policy for ten years. I’ve got about three thousand dollars.”
“You’ve really been planning this for that long?”
“No,” he said honestly. “When I cashed the policy in, I wasn’t sure what I wanted it for.”
“In those days you were still keeping your options open, right? You thought you might burn the road, or machine-gun it to death, or strangle it, or-”
“No. I just didn’t know what I was going to do. Now I know.”
“Well count me out.”
“What?” He blinked at Magliore, honestly stunned. This wasn’t in the script. Magliore was supposed to give him a hard time, in a fatherly son of way. Then sell him the explosive. Magliore was supposed to offer a disclaimer, something like: If you get caught, I’ll deny I ever heard of you.
“What did you say?”
“I said no. N-o. That spells no.” He leaned forward. All the good humor had gone out of his eyes. They were flat and suddenly small in spite of the magnification the glasses caused. They were not the eyes of a jolly Neapolitan Santa Claus at all.