Roadwork - Stephen King [6]
"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-
I '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 corner, hearing the bus pull away behind him with its tiger purr. Then Johnny Walker passed him, headed out for his second pickup 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 nuthatch," Stone said darkly. "And switching over it's gonna be worse than a Polish