The Corrections: A Novel (34 page)

Everywhere Alfred went in the Erie Belt’s hinterland he heard young Erie Belt employees telling one another, “Take it easy!”

“See ya later, Sam. Don’t work too hard, now.”

“Take it easy.”

“You too, pal. Take it easy.”

The phrase seemed to Alfred an eastern blight, a fitting epitaph for a once-great state, Ohio, that parasitic Teamsters had sucked nearly dry. Nobody in St. Jude would dare tell
him
to take it easy. On the high prairie where he’d grown up, a person who took it easy wasn’t much of a man. Now came a new effeminate generation for whom “easygoing” was a compliment. Alfred heard Erie Belt track gangs yukking it up on company time, he saw flashily dressed clerks taking ten-minute breaks for coffee, he watched callow draftsmen smoke cigarettes with insinuating relish while a once-solid
railroad fell to pieces all around them. “Take it easy” was the watchword of these superfriendly young men, the token of their overfamiliarity, the false reassurance that enabled them to ignore the filth they worked in.

The Midland Pacific, by contrast, was clean steel and white concrete. Crossties so new that blue creosote pooled in their grain. The applied science of vibratory tamping and prestressed rebar, motion detectors and welded rail. The Midpac was based in St. Jude and served a harder-working, less eastern region of the country. Unlike the Erie Belt, it took pride in its commitment to maintaining quality service on its branch lines. A thousand towns and small cities across the central tiers of states depended on the Midpac.

The more Alfred saw of the Erie Belt, the more distinctly he felt the Midland Pacific’s superior size, strength, and moral vitality in his own limbs and carriage. In his shirt and tie and wing tips he nimbly took the catwalk over the Maumee River, forty feet above slag barges and turbid water, grabbed the truss’s lower chord and leaned out upside down to whack the span’s principal girder with his favorite whacking hammer, which he carried everywhere in his briefcase; scabs of paint and rust as big as sycamore leaves spiraled down into the river. A yard engine ringing its bell crept onto the span, and Alfred, who had no fear of heights, leaned into a hanger brace and planted his feet in the matchstick ties sticking out over the river. While the ties waggled and jumped he jotted on his clipboard a damning assessment of the bridge’s competence.

Maybe some of the women drivers crossing the Maumee on the neighboring Cherry Street bridge saw him perched there, flat of belly and broad of shoulder, the wind winding his cuffs around his ankles, and maybe they felt, as Enid had felt the first time she’d laid eyes on him, that here was a
man
. Although he was oblivious to their glances, Alfred experienced from within what they saw from without. By
day he felt like a man, and he showed this, you might even say flaunted it, by standing no-handedly on high narrow ledges, and working ten and twelve hours without a break, and cataloguing an eastern railroad’s effeminacies.

Nighttime was a different matter. By night he lay awake on mattresses that felt made of cardboard and catalogued the faults of humanity. It seemed as if, in every motel he stayed in, he had neighbors who fornicated like there was no tomorrow—men of ill-breeding and poor discipline, women who chuckled and screamed. At 1 a.m. in Erie, Pennsylvania, a girl in the next room ranted and panted like a strumpet. Some slick, worthless fellow having his way with her. Alfred blamed the girl for taking it easy. He blamed the man for his easygoing confidence. He blamed both of them for lacking the consideration to keep their voices down. How could they never once stop to think of their neighbor, lying awake in the next room? He blamed God for allowing such people to exist. He blamed democracy for inflicting them on him. He blamed the motel’s architect for trusting a single layer of cinder block to preserve the repose of paying customers. He blamed the motel management for not keeping in reserve a room for guests who suffered. He blamed the frivolous, easygoing townspeople of Washington, Pennsylvania, who had driven 150 miles for a high-school football championship game and filled every motel room in northwest Pennsylvania. He blamed his fellow guests for their indifference to the fornication, he blamed all of humanity for its insensitivity, and it was so unfair. It was unfair that the world could be so inconsiderate to a man who was so considerate to the world. No man worked harder than he, no man made a quieter motel neighbor, no man was more of a man, and yet the phonies of the world were allowed to rob him of sleep with their lewd transactions …

He refused to weep. He believed that if he heard himself weeping, at two in the morning in a smoke-smelling
motel room, the world might end. If nothing else, he had discipline. The power to refuse: he had this.

But his exercising of it went unthanked. The bed in the next room thudded against the wall, the man groaning like a ham, the girl gasping in her ululations. And every waitress in every town had spherical mammaries insufficiently buttoned into a monogrammed blouse and made a point of leaning over him.

“More coffee, good-lookin’?”

“Ah, yes, please.”

“You blushin’, sweetheart, or is that the sun comin’ up?”

“I will take the check now, thank you.”

And in the Olmsted Hotel in Cleveland he surprised a porter and a maid lasciviously osculating in a stairwell. And the tracks he saw when he closed his eyes were a zipper that he endlessly unzipped, and the signals behind him turned from forbidding red to willing green the instant he passed them, and in a saggy bed in Fort Wayne awful succubuses descended on him, women whose entire bodies—their very clothes and smiles, the crossings of their legs—exuded invitation like vaginas, and up to the surface of his consciousness (do not soil the bed!) he raced the welling embolus of spunk, his eyes opening to Fort Wayne at sunrise as a scalding nothing drained into his pajamas: a victory, all things considered, for he’d denied the succubuses his satisfaction. But in Buffalo the trainmaster had a pinup of Brigitte Bardot on his office door, and in Youngstown Alfred found a filthy magazine beneath the motel telephone book, and in Hammond, Indiana, he was trapped on a siding while a freight train slid past him and varsity cheerleaders did splits on the ball field directly to his left, the blondest girl actually
bouncing
a little at the very bottom of her split, as if she had to kiss the cleat-chewed sod with her cotton-clad vulva, and the caboose rocking saucily as the train finally receded up the tracks: how the world seemed bent on torturing a man of virtue.

He returned to St. Jude in an executive car appended to an intercity freight run, and from Union Station he took the commuter local to the suburbs. In the blocks between the station and his house the last leaves were coming down. It was the season of hurtling, hurtling toward winter. Cavalries of leaf wheeled across the bitten lawns. He stopped in the street and looked at the house that he and a bank owned. The gutters were plugged with twigs and acorns, the mum beds were blasted. It occurred to him that his wife was pregnant again. Months were rushing him forward on their rigid track, carrying him closer to the day he’d be the father of three, the year he’d pay off his mortgage, the season of his death.

“I like your suitcase,” Chuck Meisner said through the window of his commuter Fairlane, braking in the street alongside him. “For a second I thought you were the Fuller Brush man.”

“Chuck,” said Alfred, startled. “Hello.”

“Planning a conquest. The husband’s out of town forever.”

Alfred laughed because there was nothing else for it. He and Chuck met in the street often, the engineer standing at attention, the banker relaxing at the wheel. Alfred in a suit and Chuck in golfwear. Alfred lean and flattopped. Chuck shiny-pated, saggy-breasted. Chuck worked easy hours at the branch he managed, but Alfred nonetheless considered him a friend. Chuck actually listened to what he said, seemed impressed with the work he did, and recognized him as a person of singular abilities.

“Saw Enid in church on Sunday,” Chuck said. “She told me you’d been gone a week already.”

“Eleven days I was on the road.”

“Emergency somewhere?”

“Not exactly.” Alfred spoke with pride. “I was inspecting every mile of track on the Erie Belt Railroad.”

“Erie Belt. Huh.” Chuck hooked his thumbs over the steering wheel, resting his hands on his lap. He was the most easygoing driver Alfred knew, yet also the most alert. “You do your job well, Al,” he said. “You’re a fantastic engineer. So there’s got to be a reason why the Erie Belt.”

“There is indeed,” Alfred said. “Midpac’s buying it.”

The Fairlane’s engine sneezed once in a canine way. Chuck had grown up on a farm near Cedar Rapids, and the optimism of his nature was rooted in the deep, well-watered topsoil of eastern Iowa. Farmers in eastern Iowa never learned not to trust the world. Whereas any soil that might have nurtured hope in Alfred had blown away in one or another west Kansan drought.

“So,” Chuck said. “I imagine there’s been a public announcement.”

“No. No announcement.”

Chuck nodded, looking past Alfred at the Lambert house. “Enid’ll be happy to see you. I think she’s had a hard week. The boys have been sick.”

“You’ll keep that information quiet.”

“Al, Al, Al.”

“I wouldn’t mention it to anyone but you.”

“Appreciate it. You’re a good friend and a good Christian. And I’ve got about four holes’ worth of daylight if I’m going to get that hedge pruned back.”

The Fairlane inched into motion, Chuck steering it into his driveway with one index finger, as if dialing his broker.

Alfred picked up his suitcase and briefcase. It had been both spontaneous and the opposite of spontaneous, his disclosure. A spasm of goodwill and gratitude to Chuck, a calculated emission of the fury that had been building inside him for eleven days. A man travels two thousand miles but he can’t take the last twenty steps without doing
something
—

And it did seem unlikely that Chuck would actually
use
the information—

Entering the house through the kitchen door, Alfred saw chunks of raw rutabaga in a pot of water, a rubber-banded bunch of beet greens, and some mystery meat in brown butcher paper. Also a casual onion that looked destined to be fried and served with—liver?

On the floor by the basement stairs was a nest of magazines and jelly glasses.

“Al?” Enid called from the basement.

He set down his suitcase and briefcase, gathered the magazines and jelly glasses in his arms, and carried them down the steps.

Enid parked her iron on the ironing board and emerged from the laundry room with butterflies in her stomach—whether from lust or from fear of Al’s rage or from fear that she might become enraged herself she didn’t know.

He set her straight in a hurry. “What did I ask you to do before I left?”

“You’re home early,” she said. “The boys are still at the Y.”

“What is the one thing I asked you to do while I was gone?”

“I’m catching up on laundry. The boys have been sick.”

“Do you remember,” he said, “that I asked you to take care of the mess at the top of the stairs? That that was the one thing—
the one thing
—I asked you to do while I was gone?”

Without waiting for an answer, he went into his metallurgy lab and dumped the magazines and jelly glasses into a heavy-duty trash can. From the hammer shelf he took a badly balanced hammer, a crudely forged Neanderthal club that he hated and kept only for purposes of demolition, and methodically broke each jelly glass. A splinter hit his cheek and he swung more furiously, smashing the shards into smaller shards, but nothing could eradicate his transgression with Chuck Meisner, or the grass-damp triangles of cheerleading leotard, no matter how he hammered.

Enid listened from her station at the ironing board. She didn’t care much for the reality of this moment. That her husband had left town eleven days ago without kissing her goodbye was a thing she’d halfway succeeded in forgetting. With the living Al absent, she’d alchemically transmuted her base resentments into the gold of longing and remorse. Her swelling womb, the pleasures of the fourth month, the time alone with her handsome boys, the envy of her neighbors all were colorful philtres over which she’d waved the wand of her imagination. Even as Al had come down the stairs she’d still imagined apologies, homecoming kisses, a bouquet of flowers maybe. Now she heard the ricochet of broken glass and glancing hammer blows on heavy-gauge galvanized iron, the frustrated shrieks of hard materials in conflict. The philtres may have been colorful but unfortunately (she saw now) they were chemically inert. Nothing had really changed.

It was true that Al had asked her to move the jars and magazines, and there was probably a word for the way she’d stepped around those jars and magazines for the last eleven days, often nearly stumbling on them; maybe a psychiatric word with many syllables or maybe a simple word like “spite.” But it seemed to her that he’d asked her to do more than “one thing” while he was gone. He’d also asked her to make the boys three meals a day, and clothe them and read to them and nurse them in sickness, and scrub the kitchen floor and wash the sheets and iron his shirts, and do it all without a husband’s kisses or kind words. If she tried to get credit for these labors of hers, however, Al simply asked her whose labors had
paid
for the house and food and linens? Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn’t need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly. In any rational accounting, his work canceled her work.

Perhaps, in strict fairness, since he’d asked her to do “one
thing” extra, she might have asked him to do “one thing” extra, too. She might have asked him to telephone her once from the road, for example. But he could argue that “someone’s going to trip on those magazines and hurt themselves,” whereas no one was going to trip over his not calling her from the road, no one was going to hurt themselves over that. And charging long-distance calls to the company was an abuse of his expense account (”You have my office number if there’s an emergency”), and so a phone call cost the household quite a bit of money, whereas carrying junk into the basement cost it no money, and so she was always wrong, and it was demoralizing to dwell perpetually in the cellar of your wrongness, to wait perpetually for someone to take pity on you in your wrongness, and so it was no wonder, really, that she’d shopped for the Dinner of Revenge.