Roadwork - Stephen King [77]
"That might be fun," he said, and then a thought stuck him.
She scanned it from his face in her old way and said, "There won't be any laundry people there."
"He and Steve Ordner know each other."
"Well, yes, him-" She shrugged to show how unlikely she thought it was that him would be there, and the shrug turned into an elbow-holding little shiver. It was only about twenty-five degrees.
"Hey, go on in," he said. "You'll freeze, dummy."
"Do you want to go?"
"I don't know. I'll have to think about it. " He kissed her again, this time a little more firmly, and she kissed back. At a moment like this, he could regret everything-but the regret was far away, clinical.
"Merry Christmas, Bart," she said, and he saw she was crying a little.
"Next year will be better," he said, the phrase comforting but without any root meaning. "Go inside before you catch pneumonia. "
She went in and he drove away, still thinking about Wally Hammer's New Year's Eve party. He thought he would go.
December 24, 1973
He found a small garage in Norton that would replace the broken back window for ninety dollars. When he asked the garage man if he would be working the day before Christmas, the garage man said: "Hell yes, I'll take it any way I can get it.
He stopped on the way at a Norton U-Wash-It and put his clothes in two machines. He automatically rotated the agitators to see what kind of shape the spring drives were in, and then loaded them carefully so each machine would extract (only in the laundromats they called it "spin-dry") without kicking off on the overload. He paused, smiling a little. You can take the boy out of the laundry, Fred, but you can't take the laundry out of the boy. Right, Fred? Fred? Oh fuck yourself.
"That's a hell of a hole," the garage man said, peering at the spiderwebbed glass.
"Kid with a snowball," he said. "Rock in the middle of it."
"It was," he said. "It really was."
When the window was replaced he drove back to the U-Wash-It, put his clothes in the dryer, set it to medium-hot, and put thirty cents in the slot. He sat down and picked up someone's discarded newspaper. The U-Wash-It's only other customer was a tired-looking young woman with wire-rimmed glasses and blond streaks in her long, reddish-brown hair. She had a small girl with her, and the small girl was throwing a tantrum.
"I want my bottle!"
"Goddam it, Rachel-"
"BOTTLE!"
"Daddys going to spank you when we get home," the young woman promised grimly. "And no treats before bed."
"BAWWWWTLE"
Now why does a young girl like that want to streak her hair? he wondered, and looked at the paper. The headlines said:
SMALL CROWDS IN BETHLEHEM PILGRIMS FEAR HOLY TERROR
On the bottom of page one, a short news story caught his eye and he readit carefully:
WINTERBURGER SAYS ACTS OF VANDALISM WILL NOT BE TOLERATED
(Local) Victor Winterburger, Democratic candidate for the seat of the late Donald P. Naish, who was killed in a car crash late last month, said yesterday that acts of vandalism such as the one that caused almost a hundred thousand dollars' worth of damage at the Route 784 construction site early last Wednesday, cannot be tolerated "in a civilized American city." Winterburger made his remarks at an American Legion dinner, and received a standing ovation.
"We have seen what has happened in other cities," Winterburger said. "The defaced buses and subway cars and buildings in New York, the broken windows and senselessly marred schools of Detroit and San Francisco, the abuse of public facilities, public museums, public galleries. We must not allow the greatest country in the world to be overrun with huns and barbarians."
Police were called to the Grand Street area of the construction when a number of fires and explosions were seen by
(Continued page 5 col. 2)
He folded the paper and put it on top of a tattered pile of magazines. The washer hummed and hummed, a low, soporific sound. Huns. Barbarians. They were the huns. They were the