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    Roadwork
    Roadwork
    Roadwork
    Ebook370 pages6 hours

    Roadwork

    By Stephen King

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Only Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachman, can imagine the horror of a good and angry man who fights back against bureaucracy when it threatens to destroy his vitality, home, and memories. “Under any name King mesmerizes the reader” (Chicago Sun-Times).

    Barton Dawes is standing in the way of progress when his unremarkable but comfortable existence suddenly takes a turn for the worst. A new highway extension is being built right over the laundry plant where he works—and right over his home. The house he has lived in for twenty years and where he created loving memories with his family. Dawes isn’t the sort of man who will take an insult of this magnitude lying down. His steadfast determination to fight the inevitable course of progress drives his wife and friends away while he tries to face down the uncaring bureaucracy that has destroyed his life. But before the city paves over that part of Dawes’s life, he’s got one more party to throw—and it’ll be a blast.

    What happens when one good (and angry) man fights back…and then some? This #1 national bestseller includes an introduction by Stephen King on “The Importance of Being Bachman.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateJan 1, 2016
    ISBN9781501141331
    Author

    Stephen King

    Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes the short story collection You Like It Darker, Holly (a New York Times Notable Book of 2023), Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. 

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    Reviews for Roadwork

    3.5/5

    473 ratings15 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a different kind of Stephen King novel, without supernatural elements. While some readers may be disappointed by the lack of supernatural twists, others appreciate the beautifully crafted narrative and the exploration of a descent into madness. The book resonates with readers who can relate to the themes of anger and resistance to change, particularly in the context of the current pandemic. Overall, it is regarded as a great book that offers an interesting and familiar story.

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Very thought provoking. Knowing now that King wrote it after his mother's death makes sense. I think you need to be a little older to appreciate the helplessness that the main character had. This book will stick with me for some time I think.
    • 2/5
      This is one of the five Bachman books (so far). Can be easily passed up.
    • 4/5
      While underrated and low key compared to most of King's work, Roadwork tells a beautifully crafted narrative of a man angry at the forces of the world he cannot control
    • 4/5
      Roadwork is different than most of Stephen King's novels in that it doesn't have any werewolves or any other worlds or dimensions.
    • 5/5
      If you haven’t encountered a Bachman book before and you’re expecting the King hoodoo, you’re likely going to come away from the book disappointed - as evidenced by a lot of the reviews here. The monsters in Bachman books are largely human, there’s no supernatural twist to it. All that being said, this is a great book. Watching the stubborn descent into madness is interesting. Of course, if you’re reading this after the corona pandemic has hit and you are American, this is going to feel like a pretty familiar story.

      I enjoyed this book greatly the 5-6 times I read it prepandemic, I found it less enjoyable post pandemic. I’ve seen too many people take themselves out while having no care who they took out with them in their quest to not accept the changes that would keep them and those around them safe. It’s been a wild few years.
    • 3/5
      This is about a guy who has had too much bad news and flips. His son died. He can't get over it. His relationship with his wife isn't the best. Road construction taking away his work and home. The man makes wrong decisions, but everyone seems to not be a good person in this story. Puts me in the mind of some real life situations so it's pretty much a downer. Makes everything seem pointless.
    • 2/5
      Roadwork is one of Bachman's books. Never been big on this alter ego of King. Richard or Dick just writes King but not as good. I'm well aware Bachman was a long-term idea and exists as a person who isn't King to King. So I'm not alone in believing he's a different person. Often Bachman is even regarded as a person who wrote these stories and King as an editor or such.

      Roadwork is a crawl. It drags on and on. We're traversing months with our main character who talks to a "Fred" who doesn't exist and "Fred" talks back to George. George is a bit hard to catch, as the whole book we have Barton George Dawes being called Bart. But in his head he talks to Fred. It is revealed somewhere, very briefly, that Fred is the middle name of his dead son, Charlie. So during this book he is having talks about guns and violence with his dead son. This often gets confusing because he calls other people Fred and often slips and says his reply to his son out loud, and to other people as well.

      These very confusing things aside, Roadwork is one of the least scary books to come from a horror writer. Barton spends his whole remaining life in the book refusing to surrender his house. Not only does everyone else move on and handle fine, or pack, but he puts a home over his marriage, his job, his friendships. Everything is less sacred to Barton than his memories of his son which he could still very likely pack up. These memories are even in the final scenes, things like his wife's favorite paintings and pictures are still up, Charlie's stuff remains. It's clear he had mementos he could have carried with him.

      He is entrenched in these memories and past that he discusses atrocities with Charlie, a child still in his mind. He locks everyone out. He refuses help. He allows himself to disintegrate to many depths. When his wife leaves for a bit, that seems to barely affect him. He sleeps with a woman he takes home named Olivia and then spends the aftermath regarding how she is tighter and nicer feeling than Mary, his wife. He feels no remorse and instead jerks off regularly.

      Each page is a repeating cycle. People try to help him and he shoves them away. His wife asks are they divorcing and he dodges her. She suggests therapy, but he lies and dodges her attempts to help. He begins doing illegal purchases, he dabbles in deals with the mob. He destroys equipment. Barton is far too old for this, but he's long gone.

      By the end, Charlie is the only reason he doesn't kill people with guns, and he would if Charlie's hallucinated words weren't in his head saying don't. Barton has thrown it all away, love, family, and friends, and in the end, he pulls the trigger on himself.

      I'm well aware that this book was King struggling with his mother's cancer, but the ending sure makes it feel as if this was an allegory for grief and struggling, the only way to not feel bad is to just not be. In many ways Roadwork is about shutting everyone away and dying. How King survived what really reads as a suicidal idealization mixed with no cure or fix and refusing medicine isn't the usual King message. Bachman's books often feel like their messages aren't in the right place.

      Furthermore, hitting this point for me. The post-death moments of Barton George Dawes... Everyone moves on, nobody really remembers the incident, his last moments. His interview. Life goes on without him. But to really nail that coffin too tightly to escape, Barton's death was meaningless. The roadwork was found to be unnecessary. He could have kept his home, his wife, his friends, all of it. His descent into madness due to the roadwork was entirely avoidable.

      Maybe had he done any other way it wouldn't have happened.

      Barton/George did everything to himself and pushed everyone away to bury himself in a hole that he didn't even need to bunker down in.

      Roadwork is depressingly pointless. Nobody really dies but off screen people, and our main POV. At the end of the book I found myself wondering if anything had really happened. Had Barton even existed, because in the lives of everyone but Mary, it really feels like he didn't at all.

      And everything could have been handled if therapy or intervention had been performed.
    • 3/5
      Roadwork is one of Bachman's books. Never been big on this alter ego of King. Richard or Dick just writes King but not as good. I'm well aware Bachman was a long-term idea and exists as a person who isn't King to King. So I'm not alone in believing he's a different person. Often Bachman is even regarded as a person who wrote these stories and King as an editor or such.

      Roadwork is a crawl. It drags on and on. We're traversing months with our main character who talks to a "Fred" who doesn't exist and "Fred" talks back to George. George is a bit hard to catch, as the whole book we have Barton George Dawes being called Bart. But in his head he talks to Fred. It is revealed somewhere, very briefly, that Fred is the middle name of his dead son, Charlie. So during this book he is having talks about guns and violence with his dead son. This often gets confusing because he calls other people Fred and often slips and says his reply to his son out loud, and to other people as well.

      These very confusing things aside, Roadwork is one of the least scary books to come from a horror writer. Barton spends his whole remaining life in the book refusing to surrender his house. Not only does everyone else move on and handle fine, or pack, but he puts a home over his marriage, his job, his friendships. Everything is less sacred to Barton than his memories of his son which he could still very likely pack up. These memories are even in the final scenes, things like his wife's favorite paintings and pictures are still up, Charlie's stuff remains. It's clear he had mementos he could have carried with him.

      He is entrenched in these memories and past that he discusses atrocities with Charlie, a child still in his mind. He locks everyone out. He refuses help. He allows himself to disintegrate to many depths. When his wife leaves for a bit, that seems to barely affect him. He sleeps with a woman he takes home named Olivia and then spends the aftermath regarding how she is tighter and nicer feeling than Mary, his wife. He feels no remorse and instead jerks off regularly.

      Each page is a repeating cycle. People try to help him and he shoves them away. His wife asks are they divorcing and he dodges her. She suggests therapy, but he lies and dodges her attempts to help. He begins doing illegal purchases, he dabbles in deals with the mob. He destroys equipment. Barton is far too old for this, but he's long gone.

      By the end, Charlie is the only reason he doesn't kill people with guns, and he would if Charlie's hallucinated words weren't in his head saying don't. Barton has thrown it all away, love, family, and friends, and in the end, he pulls the trigger on himself.

      I'm well aware that this book was King struggling with his mother's cancer, but the ending sure makes it feel as if this was an allegory for grief and struggling, the only way to not feel bad is to just not be. In many ways Roadwork is about shutting everyone away and dying. How King survived what really reads as a suicidal idealization mixed with no cure or fix and refusing medicine isn't the usual King message. Bachman's books often feel like their messages aren't in the right place.

      Furthermore, hitting this point for me. The post-death moments of Barton George Dawes... Everyone moves on, nobody really remembers the incident, his last moments. His interview. Life goes on without him. But to really nail that coffin too tightly to escape, Barton's death was meaningless. The roadwork was found to be unnecessary. He could have kept his home, his wife, his friends, all of it. His descent into madness due to the roadwork was entirely avoidable.

      Maybe had he done any other way it wouldn't have happened.

      Barton/George did everything to himself and pushed everyone away to bury himself in a hole that he didn't even need to bunker down in.

      Roadwork is depressingly pointless. Nobody really dies but off screen people, and our main POV. At the end of the book I found myself wondering if anything had really happened. Had Barton even existed, because in the lives of everyone but Mary, it really feels like he didn't at all.

      And everything could have been handled if therapy or intervention had been performed.
    • 2/5
      I was dreading this work as I'd heard that it is one of King's worst. I don't think it was as bad as I was expecting. I felt that the protagonist was a well-rounded believable individual- King is an excellent creator of fleshed-out characters and this is no exception. Why only two stars? It's so boring! I felt that the plot surrounding his son could've been a bigger part of the story. I also felt the ending as a bit 'meh'.
    • 2/5
      Every time I look at my list of Stephen King books I want to read, I whittle it down a little more and a little more. This one survived the stack, but I wish it didn't. Maybe because I liked the theme of it, like Rage and The Long Walk. Written around the same time too, and published under the Bachman pseudonym. Like Rage, there is nothing supernatural and it's about a guy getting his revenge Charles Bronson style. Or at least it was supposed to be.

      From the beginning there is a promise that this is going to end in tremendous violence. In a one-man standoff against the government, standing up for what he believes in. The little guy who won't be pushed off his land, who won't be evicted from his memories in the face of progress. But it takes WAY too long to get there. And then it's only fifteen pages at the end. The part you came to see is buried under overwritten prose, Maine catechisms, and wool-gathering. The book is more about the main character toodling around while he doesn't make plans to evacuate his place of work and home in lieu of a new freeway they are building. Not to mention the content is outdated now (the energy crisis, making a big deal of buying a TV, laundry facilities).

      The tension is so strung out by the end the climax sags like a Las Vegas showgirl's chest. The main character doesn't do anything but gripe and drink -- two Stephen King staples -- letting the time until 90,000 words are written expire. His wife leaves him, his friends abandon him. It brings up interesting issues, but I can recall at least two Star Trek episodes that dealt with this exact issue in a much more entertaining way.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      My least favourite of the Bachman Books collection it tells the story of a man and his home and the cities plans to build a highway over the top of his house. After losing his son to cancer and watching his life fall apart he is unable to leave the house that holds his only positive memories. He resolves to blow up his house and take himself out with it. He It is dark and desperate and aimed at an audience a little older than the other stories in the collection and is shown by the epilogue where we learn the only reason the road was going up was so because if they did not build something they would lose their budget......

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      I've enjoyed several King writing as Bachman Books, but this was just disappointing. I knew exactly what would happen from the start.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Roadwork is one of the scariest books Stephen King--originally using the Richard Bachman pseudonym--has ever written. It's unlike the vast majority of his work in that there is not a single monster, no aliens, nothing supernatural to make it so. Rather, the fear felt by the reader comes from the acute psychological discomfort of watching a formerly complacent and successful middle manager methodically lose his mind in the face of impending, inevitable change.

      The story opens with Burt Dawes, manager of a large commercial laundry outfit, purchasing some guns. As he does so, we are privy to the violent and disturbing conversation he's having inside his head. As is so often the case with Stephen King, who has no qualms about telegraphing the end early on, we know that this one is going to end badly, almost certainly with a bang. What we don't know is how moved we will be by that time, having become attached to this pathetic wretch of a man who can't come to terms with the ineluctable march of progress.

      The change Burt Dawes is grappling with is a freeway connector which is to be built through his town. Not only is the laundry he manages to be torn down to make way, but his own home is scheduled for the wrecking ball, as well. Burt knows that what's coming will come, yet rather than accept things and move on he refuses. At no point does he ever seem to believe that his refusal will halt the process, yet still, he will not make a move. And as he digs in at home and at work (where he's supposed to be closing the deal on a new facility), in the back of his mind violence is bubbling.

      Roadwork is sad and disturbing, and if King's introduction ("The Importance of Being Bachman") is to be believed, could only have come from the rainy day pen of his alter-ego.
    • 4/5
      In the early 1970s, during the height of the energy crisis, the government decides to extend a highway through an unnamed Midwestern city, claiming the right of Eminent Domain. Many homes will be torn down, businesses closed, people left hunting for jobs. And right in the thick of things is Barton George Dawes, tasked with trying to find both a new house for he and his wife and a new building for his company, an industrial laundry. But nothing goes smoothly for Bart, and the pressures to start over in a new place, the government's stepping in to take away what's his, and the too-soon death of his son to a brain tumor subtly start to take their toll on his psyche. He buys two guns, not sure what he plans on doing with them, but almost instinctually, he starts down a path pitting him against the new highway extension and the government and potentially destroying his once happy marriage.

      "Roadwork" is a slow-paced story, with a surprisingly likable anti-hero. When Bart first made his appearance, his purchasing the guns is fairly innocuous -- a man walking into a gun shop to buy something for his brother, an amateur hunter. But I could tell something was off kilter with him, something not quite definable but it made me want to continue reading, to find out what exactly he has in mind when he buys the guns. I empathized with him as he struggled with the impending loss of his home and his job, with his trying to come to grips with his son's death. He also acted honorably when picking up a female hitchhiker, offering her enough money to get to Las Vegas and declining her offers to sleep with him for it. I found myself liking him more and more so that, by the time I understood just what he had planned -- even knowing the potential outcomes -- I was cheering for him.

      For anyone who's never read anything by King because the horror factor keeps you away, this is a good novel to ease you into his work.
    • 2/5
      There's a freeway extension coming through. It will require the demolition of both Barton George Dawes' home and office, and that's something that Bart just can't let slide.

      The book is interesting and well written, but there's just something wrong with it. I think part of the problem is that the book is for the most part a drama, but there's this sort of thriller going on in the background. First thing Bart does is purchase a couple of guns while arguing with a voice in his head. Yet it's too far in the background. I guess I would have preferred the suspense elements of the book to be sprinkled more liberally through the entire narrative rather than surfacing from time to time only to submerge again while Bart's midlife crisis/breakdown continued.

      The writing is pretty impressive, considering Stephen King wrote so well about Bart's midlife crisis while he was such a young guy and the ending was pretty strong. Maybe I would have liked it better if it had started with the standoff and then was presented as a flashback. But then I would be making the book into something that it is not.

    Book preview

    Roadwork - Stephen King

    Prologue

    I don’t know why. You don’t know why.

    Most likely God don’t know why, either.

    It’s just Government business, that’s all.

    —Man-in-the-street interview concerning Viet Nam, circa 1967

    But Viet Nam was over and the country was getting on.

    On this hot August afternoon in 1972, the WHLM Newsmobile was parked near Westgate at the end of the Route 784 expressway. There was a small crowd around a bunting-covered podium that had been hurriedly tossed together; the bunting was thin flesh on a skeleton of naked planks. Behind it, at the top of a grassy embankment, were the highway tollbooths. In front of it, open, marshy land stretched toward the suburban hem of the city’s outskirts.

    A young reporter named Dave Albert was doing a series of man-on-the-street interviews while he and his co-workers waited for the mayor and the governor to arrive for the ground-breaking ceremony.

    He held the microphone toward an elderly man wearing tinted spectacles.

    Well, the elderly man said, looking tremulously into the camera, I think it’s a great thing for the city. We’ve needed this a long time. It’s . . . a great thing for the city. He swallowed, aware that his mind was broadcasting echoes of itself, helpless to stop, hypnotized by the grinding, Cyclopean eye of posterity. Great, he added limply.

    Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.

    Do you think they’ll use it? On the news tonight?

    Albert flashed a professional, meaningless smile. Hard to tell, sir. There’s a good chance.

    His sound man pointed up to the tollgate turn-around, where the governor’s Chrysler Imperial had just pulled up, winking and gleaming like a chrome-inlaid eight ball in the summer sunshine. Albert nodded back, held up a single finger. He and the cameraman approached a guy in a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves. The guy was looking moodily at the podium.

    Would you mind stating your opinion of all this, Mr. . . . ?

    Dawes. No, I don’t mind. His voice was low, pleasant.

    Speed, the cameraman murmured.

    The man in the white shirt said, still pleasantly, I think it’s a piece of shit.

    The cameraman grimaced. Albert nodded, looking at the man in the white shirt reproachfully, and then made cutting gestures with the first two fingers of his right hand.

    The elderly gentleman was looking at this tableau with real horror. Above, up by the tollbooths, the governor was getting out of his Imperial. His green tie was resplendent in the sun.

    The man in the white shirt said politely: Will that be on the six or eleven o’clock news?

    Ho-ho, fella, you’re a riot, Albert said sourly, and walked away to catch the governor. The cameraman trailed after him. The man in the white shirt watched the governor as he came carefully down the grassy slope.

    Albert met the man in the white shirt again seventeen months later, but since neither of them remembered that they had met before, it might as well have been the first time.

    PART ONE

    NOVEMBER

    Late last night the rain was knocking on my window

    I moved across the darkened room and in the lampglow

    I thought I saw down in the street

    The spirit of the century

    Telling us that we’re all standing on the border.

    —Al Stewart

    November 20, 1973

    He kept doing things without letting himself think about them. Safer that way. It was like having a circuit breaker in his head, and it thumped into place every time part of him tried to ask: But why are you doing this? Part of his mind would go dark. Hey Georgie, who turned out the lights? Whoops, I did. Something screwy in the wiring, I guess. Just a sec. Reset the switch. The lights go back on. But the thought is gone. Everything is fine. Let us continue, Freddy—where were we?

    He was walking to the bus stop when he saw the sign that said:

    AMMO HARVEY’S GUN SHOP AMMO

    Remington Winchester Colt Smith & Wesson

    HUNTERS WELCOME

    It was snowing a little out of a gray sky. It was the first snow of the year and it landed on the pavement like white splotches of baking soda, then melted. He saw a little boy in a red knitted cap go by with his mouth open and his tongue out to catch a flake. It’s just going to melt, Freddy, he thought at the kid, but the kid went on anyway, with his head cocked back at the sky.

    He stopped in front of Harvey’s Gun Shop, hesitating. There was a rack of late edition newspapers outside the door, and the headline said:

    SHAKY CEASE-FIRE HOLDS

    Below that, on the rack, was a smudged white sign that said:

    PLEASE PAY FOR YOUR PAPER!

    THIS IS AN HONOR RACK, DEALER MUST PAY

    FOR ALL PAPERS

    It was warm inside. The shop was long but not very wide. There was only a single aisle. Inside the door on the left was a glass case filled with boxes of ammunition. He recognized the .22 cartridges immediately, because he’d had a .22 single-shot rifle as a boy in Connecticut. He had wanted that rifle for three years and when he finally got it he couldn’t think of anything to do with it. He shot at cans for a while, then shot a blue jay. The jay hadn’t been a clean kill. It sat in the snow surrounded by a pink blood stain, its beak slowly opening and closing. After that he had put the rifle up on hooks and it had stayed there for three years until he sold it to a kid up the street for nine dollars and a carton of funny books.

    The other ammunition was less familiar. Thirty-thirty, thirty-ought-six, and some that looked like scale-model howitzer shells. What animals do you kill with those? he wondered. Tigers? Dinosaurs? Still it fascinated him, sitting there inside the glass case like penny candy in a stationery store.

    The clerk or proprietor was talking to a fat man in green pants and a green fatigue shirt. The shirt had flap pockets. They were talking about a pistol that was lying on top of another glass case, dismembered. The fat man thumbed back the slide and they both peered into the oiled chamber. The fat man said something and the clerk or proprietor laughed.

    Autos always jam? You got that from your father, Mac. Admit it.

    Harry, you’re full of bullshit up to your eyebrows.

    You’re full of it, Fred, he thought. Right up to your eyebrows. You know it, Fred?

    Fred said he knew it.

    On the right was a glass case that ran the length of the shop. It was full of rifles on pegs. He was able to pick out the double-barreled shotguns, but everything else was a mystery to him. Yet some people—the two at the far counter, for example—had mastered this world as easily as he had mastered general accounting in college.

    He walked further into the store and looked into a case filled with pistols. He saw some air guns, a few .22’s, a .38 with a wood-grip handle, .45’s, and a gun he recognized as a .44 Magnum, the gun Dirty Harry had carried in that movie. He had heard Ron Stone and Vinnie Mason talking about that movie at the laundry, and Vinnie had said: They’d never let a cop carry a gun like that in the city. You can blow a hole in a man a mile away with one of those.

    The fat man, Mac, and the clerk or proprietor, Harry (as in Dirty Harry), had the gun back together.

    You give me a call when you get that Menschler in, Mac said.

    I will . . . but your prejudice against autos is irrational, Harry said. (He decided Harry must be the proprietor—a clerk would never call a customer irrational.) Have you got to have the Cobra next week?

    I’d like it, Mac said.

    I don’t promise.

    You never do . . . but you’re the best goddam gunsmith in the city, and you know it.

    Of course I do.

    Mac patted the gun on top of the glass case and turned to go. Mac bumped into him—Watch it, Mac. Smile when you do that—and then went on to the door. The paper was tucked under Mac’s arm, and he could read:

    SHAKY CEA

    Harry turned to him, still smiling and shaking his head. Can I help you?

    I hope so. But I warn you in advance, I know nothing about guns.

    Harry shrugged. There’s a law you should? Is it for someone else? For Christmas?

    Yes, that’s just right, he said, seizing on it. I’ve got this cousin—Nick, his name is. Nick Adams. He lives in Michigan and he’s got yea guns. You know. Loves to hunt, but it’s more than that. It’s sort of a, well, a—

    Hobby? Harry asked, smiling.

    Yes, that’s it. He had been about to say fetish. His eyes dropped to the cash register, where an aged bumper sticker was pasted on. The bumper sticker said:

    IF GUNS ARE OUTLAWED, ONLY OUTLAWS

    WILL HAVE GUNS

    He smiled at Harry and said, That’s very true, you know.

    Sure it is, Harry said. This cousin of yours . . .

    Well, it’s kind of a one-upmanship type of thing. He knows how much I like boating and I’ll be damned if he didn’t up and give me an Evinrude sixty-horsepower motor last Christmas. He sent it by REA express. I gave him a hunting jacket. I felt sort of like a horse’s ass.

    Harry nodded sympathetically.

    Well, I got a letter from him about six weeks ago, and he sounds just like a kid with a free pass to the circus. It seems that he and about six buddies chipped in together and bought themselves a trip to this place in Mexico, sort of like a free-fire zone—

    A no-limit hunting preserve?

    Yeah, that’s it. He chuckled a little. You shoot as much as you want. They stock it, you know. Deer, antelope, bear, bison. Everything.

    Was it Boca Rio?

    I really don’t remember. I think the name was longer than that.

    Harry’s eyes had gone slightly dreamy. That guy that just left and myself and two others went to Boca Rio in 1965. I shot a zebra. A goddam zebra! I got it mounted in my game room at home. That was the best time I ever had in my life, bar none. I envy your cousin.

    Well, I talked it over with my wife, he said, and she said go ahead. We had a very good year at the laundry. I work at the Blue Ribbon Laundry over in Western.

    Yes, I know where that is.

    He felt that he could go on talking to Harry all day, for the rest of the year, embroidering the truth and the lies into a beautiful, gleaming tapestry. Let the world go by. Fuck the gas shortage and the high price of beef and the shaky cease-fire. Let there be talk of cousins that never were, right, Fred? Right on, Georgie.

    We got the Central Hospital account this year, as well as the mental institution, and also three new motels.

    Is the Quality Motor Court on Franklin Avenue one of yours?

    Yes, it is.

    I’ve stayed there a couple of times, Harry said. The sheets were always very clean. Funny, you never think about who washes the sheets when you stay at a motel.

    Well, we had a good year. And so I thought, maybe I can get Nick a rifle and a pistol. I know he’s always wanted a .44 Magnum, I’ve heard him mention that one—

    Harry brought the Magnum up and laid it carefully on top of the glass case. He picked it up. He liked the heft of it. It felt like business.

    He put it back down on the glass case.

    The chambering on that— Harry began.

    He laughed and held up a hand. Don’t sell me. I’m sold. An ignoramus always sells himself. How much ammunition should I get with that?

    Harry shrugged. Get him ten boxes, why don’t you? He can always get more. The price on that gun is two-eighty-nine plus tax, but I’m going to give it to you for two-eighty, ammo thrown in. How’s that?

    Super, he said, meaning it. And then, because something more seemed required, he added: It’s a handsome piece.

    If it’s Boca Rio, he’ll put it to good use.

    Now the rifle—

    What does he have?

    He shrugged and spread his hands. I’m sorry. I really don’t know. Two or three shotguns, and something he calls an auto-loader—

    Remington? Harry asked him so quickly that he felt afraid; it was as if he had been walking in waist-deep water that had suddenly shelved off.

    I think it was. I could be wrong.

    Remington makes the best, Harry said, and nodded, putting him at ease again. How high do you want to go?

    Well, I’ll be honest with you. The motor probably cost him four hundred. I’d like to go at least five. Six hundred tops.

    You and this cousin really get along, don’t you?

    We grew up together, he said sincerely. I think I’d give my right arm to Nick, if he wanted it.

    Well, let me show you something, Harry said. He picked a key out of the bundle on his ring and went to one of the glass cabinets. He opened it, climbed up on a stool, and brought down a long, heavy rifle with an inlaid stock. This may be a little higher than you want to go, but it’s a beautiful gun. Harry handed it to him.

    What is it?

    That’s a four-sixty Weatherbee. Shoots heavier ammunition than I’ve got here in the place right now. I’d have to order however many rounds you wanted from Chicago. Take about a week. It’s a perfectly weighted gun. The muzzle energy on that baby is over eight thousand pounds . . . like hitting something with an airport limousine. If you hit a buck in the head with it, you’d have to take the tail for a trophy.

    I don’t know, he said, sounding dubious even though he had decided he wanted the rifle. I know Nick wants trophies. That’s part of—

    Sure it is, Harry said, taking the Weatherbee and chambering it. The hole looked big enough to put a carrier pigeon in. Nobody goes to Boca Rio for meat. So your cousin gut-shoots. With this piece, you don’t have to worry about tracking the goddam animal for twelve miles through the high country, the animal suffering the whole time, not to mention you missing dinner. This baby will spread his insides over twenty feet.

    How much?

    Well, I’ll tell you. I can’t move it in town. Who wants a freaking anti-tank gun when there’s nothing to go after anymore but pheasant? And if you put them on the table, it tastes like you’re eating exhaust fumes. It retails for nine-fifty, wholesales for six-thirty. I’d let you have it for seven hundred.

    That comes to . . . almost a thousand bucks.

    We give a ten percent discount on orders over three hundred dollars. That brings it back to nine. He shrugged. You give that gun to your cousin, I guarantee he hasn’t got one. If he does, I’ll buy it back for seven-fifty. I’ll put that in writing, that’s how sure I am.

    No kidding?

    Absolutely. Absolutely. Of course, if it’s too steep, it’s too steep. We can look at some other guns. But if he’s a real nut on the subject, I don’t have anything else he might not have two of.

    I see. He put a thoughtful expression on his face. Have you got a telephone?

    Sure, in the back. Want to call your wife and talk it over?

    I think I better.

    Sure. Come on.

    Harry led him into a cluttered back room. There was a bench and a scarred wooden table littered with gun guts, springs, cleaning fluid, pamphlets, and labeled bottles with lead slugs in them.

    There’s the phone, Harry said.

    He sat down, picked up the phone, and dialed while Harry went back to get the Magnum and put it in the box.

    Thank you for calling the WDST Weatherphone, the bright, recorded voice said. This afternoon, snow flurries developing into light snow late this evening—

    Hi, Mary? he said. Listen, I’m in this place called Harvey’s Gun Shop. Yeah, about Nicky. I got the pistol we talked about, no problem. There was one right in the showcase. Then the guy showed me this rifle—

    —clearing by tomorrow afternoon. Lows tonight will be in the thirties, tomorrow in the mid to upper forties. Chance of precipitation tonight—

    —so what do you think I should do? Harry was standing in the doorway behind him; he could see the shadow.

    Yeah, he said. I know that.

    Thank you for dialing the WDST Weatherphone, and be sure to watch Newsplus-Sixty with Bob Reynolds each weekday evening at six o’clock for a weather update. Good-bye.

    "You’re not kidding, I know it’s a lot."

    Thank you for calling the WDST Weatherphone. This afternoon, snow flurries developing into—

    You sure, honey?

    Chance of precipitation tonight eighty percent, tomorrow—

    Well, okay. He turned on the bench, grinned at Harry, and made a circle with his right thumb and forefinger. He’s a nice guy. Said he’d guarantee me Nick didn’t have one.

    —by tomorrow afternoon. Lows tonight—

    I love you too, Mare. Bye. He hung up. Jesus, Freddy, that was neat. It was, George. It was.

    He got up. She says go if I say okay. I do.

    Harry smiled. What are you going to do if he sends you a Thunderbird?

    He smiled back. Return it unopened.

    As they walked back out Harry asked, Check or charge?

    American Express, if it’s okay.

    Good as gold.

    He got his card out. On the back, written on the special strip, it said:

    BARTON GEORGE DAWES

    You’re sure the shells will come in time for me to ship everything to Fred?

    Harry looked up from the credit blank. Fred?

    His smile expanded. Nick is Fred and Fred is Nick, he said. Nicholas Frederic Adams. It’s kind of a joke about the name. From when we were kids.

    Oh. He smiled politely as people do when the joke is in and they are out. You want to sign here?

    He signed.

    Harry took another book out from under the counter, a heavy one with a steel chain punched through the upper left corner, near the binding. And your name and address here for the federals.

    He felt his fingers tighten on the pen. Sure, he said. Look at me, I never bought a gun in my life and I’m mad. He wrote his name and address in the book:

    Barton George Dawes 1241 Crestallen Street West

    They’re into everything, he said.

    This is nothing to what they’d like to do, Harry said.

    "I know. You know what I heard on the news the other day? They want a law that says a guy riding on a motorcycle has to wear a mouth protector. A mouth protector, for God’s sake. Now is it the government’s business if a man wants to chance wrecking his bridgework?"

    Not in my book it isn’t, Harry said, putting his book under the counter.

    Or look at that highway extension they’re building over in Western. Some snot-nose surveyor says ‘It’s going through here’ and the state sends out a bunch of letters and the letters say, ‘Sorry, we’re putting the 784 extension through here. You’ve got a year to find a new house.’

    It’s a goddam shame.

    Yes, it is. What does ‘eminent domain’ mean to someone who’s lived in the frigging house for twenty years? Made love to their wife there and brought their kid up there and come home to there from trips? That’s just something from a law book that they made up so they can crook you better.

    Watch it, watch it. But the circuit breaker was a little slow and some of it got through.

    You okay? Harry asked.

    Yeah. I had one of those submarine sandwiches for lunch, I should know better. They give me gas like hell.

    Try one of these, Harry said, and took a roll of pills from his breast pocket. Written on the outside was:

    ROLAIDS

    Thanks, he said. He took one off the top and popped it into his mouth, never minding the bit of lint on it. Look at me, I’m in a TV commercial. Consumes forty-seven times its own weight in excess stomach acid.

    They always do the trick for me, Harry said.

    About the shells—

    Sure. A week. No more than two. I’ll get you seventy rounds.

    Well, why don’t you keep these guns right here? Tag them with my name or something. I guess I’m silly, but I really don’t want them in the house. That’s silly, isn’t it?

    To each his own, Harry said equably.

    Okay. Let me write down my office number. When those bullets come in—

    Cartridges, Harry interrupted. Cartridges or shells.

    Cartridges, he said, smiling. When they come in, give me a ring. I’ll pick the guns up and make arrangements about shipping them. REA will ship guns, won’t they?

    Sure. Your cousin will have to sign for them on the other end, that’s all.

    He wrote his name on one of Harry’s business cards. The card said:

    HARVEY’S GUN SHOP

    Say, he said. If you’re Harold, who’s Harvey?

    Harvey was my brother. He died eight years ago.

    I’m sorry.

    We all were. He came down here one day, opened up, cleared the cash register, and then dropped dead of a heart attack. One of the sweetest men you’d ever want to meet. He could bring down a deer at two hundred yards.

    He reached over the counter and they shook.

    I’ll call, Harry promised.

    Take good care.

    He went out into the snow again, past SHAKY CEASE-FIRE HOLDS. It was coming down a little harder now, and his gloves were home.

    What were you doing in there, George?

    Thump, the circuit breaker.

    By the time he got to the bus stop, it might have been an incident he had read about somewhere. No more.

    •  •  •

    Crestallen Street West was a long, downward-curving street that had enjoyed a fair view of the park and an excellent view of the river until progress had intervened in the shape of a high-rise housing development. It had gone up on Westfield Avenue two years before and had blocked most of the view.

    Number 1241 was a split-level ranch house with a one-car garage beside it. There was a long front yard, now barren and waiting for snow—real snow—to cover it. The driveway was asphalt, freshly hot-topped the previous spring.

    He went inside and heard the TV, the new Zenith cabinet model they had gotten in the summer. There was a motorized antenna on the roof which he had put up himself. She had not wanted that, because of what was supposed to happen, but he had insisted. If it could be mounted, he had reasoned, it could be dismounted when they moved. Bart, don’t be silly. It’s just extra expense . . . just extra work for you. But he had outlasted her, and finally she said she would humor him. That’s what she said on the rare occasions when he cared enough about something to force it through the sticky molasses of her arguments. All right, Bart. This time I’ll humor you.

    At the moment she was watching Merv Griffin chat with a celebrity. The celebrity was Lorne Greene, who was talking about his new police series, Griff. Lorne was telling Merv how much he loved doing the show. Soon a black singer (a negress songstress, he thought) who no one had ever heard of would come on and sing a song. I Left My Heart in San Francisco, perhaps.

    Hi, Mary, he called.

    Hi, Bart.

    Mail on the table. He flipped through it. A letter to Mary from her slightly psycho sister in Baltimore. A Gulf credit card bill—thirty-eight dollars. A checking account statement: 49 debits, 9 credits, $954.47 balance. A good thing he had used American Express at the gun shop.

    The coffee’s hot, Mary called. Or did you want a drink?

    Drink, he said. I’ll get it.

    Three other pieces of mail: An overdue notice from the library. Facing the Lions, by Tom Wicker. Wicker had spoken to a Rotary luncheon a month ago, and he was the best speaker they’d had in years.

    A personal note from Stephan Ordner, one of the managerial bigwigs in Amroco, the corporation that now owned the Blue Ribbon almost outright. Ordner wanted him to drop by and discuss the Waterford deal—would Friday be okay, or was he planning to be away for Thanksgiving? If so, give a call. If not, bring Mary. Carla always enjoyed the chance to see Mary and blah-blah and bullshit-bullshit, etc., et al.

    And another letter 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

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