A Bridge of Years (9 page)

A
chitinous whisper. The brush of metallic cilia on cold linoleum. The
sound of a razor blade stroking a feather.

He
didn't even try to call Archer. He was already late; he locked the
front door and climbed into his car.

Leaving
the house was like shaking off the influence of a long, hypnotic
dream. It lingered at the edge of perception and it influenced his
decisions. Because he was late he attempted a shortcut through
Belltower, only to discover that the through street he remembered
(Newcastle down past Brierley) had been widened and diverted to the
highway. He hadn't come this way before and the trip was
disorienting, a journey through the familiar to the jarringly new.
Here was Sea View Elementary on its green hillside, and the high
school a quarter mile south, similar buildings of salmon-colored
brick so substantial and so immediate in memory that it would not
have surprised him to see nine-year-old Doug Archer rush out to
launch a fusillade at the car. But the neighborhood newsstand had
become a video arcade and the Woolworth's had evolved into a
Cineplex. Once again, the world had changed while his back was
turned.

Declined,
his
father might have said. Like the earth itself, Barbara would have
reminded him. Debris clouding the atmosphere and melting the
icecaps. Barbara was one of the few individuals Tom had met who both
believed in the greenhouse effect and believed it could be
stopped: the precarious balance of the activist. Bad thermodynamics,
his father would have told her. You can delay a death but not make a
man immortal. The same was surely true for a planet: it didn't
improve with use. Things decline; the evidence was all around him.
The evidence was his life.

Maybe
so,
Barbara
would have said,
but
we can go down fighting.
She
had believed that half measures were better than none; that even an
ineffectual morality was useful in the decade of Reaganomics, the
homeless, and the video church. Her voice rang out in his memory.

She
was your conscience,
Tom
thought.

But
morality—the morality of weapons research or the morality of
selling cars—had a way of twisting out of his grasp. He was twenty
minutes late when he arrived at the lot, but there were no buyers
waiting and nobody seemed to notice the time; the salesmen were
clustered around the Coke machine telling jokes. Tom had clocked in
and was standing helplessly on the lot watching cars roar
past—thinking about Barbara, thinking about the house—when Billy
Klein, the manager, eased up behind him and draped an arm over his
shoulder. Klein was wide all over his body, big shouldered and big
hipped and broad in the face; his smile radiated predatory vigor and
automatic, fake heartiness—an entirely carnivorous smile. Tom
turned and took a blast of Tic-Tac-scented breath. "Come with
me," Klein said. "I'll show you what selling
really
means."

It
was the first time since his interview that he had been allowed into
Klein's sanctuary, a glass-walled room that looked into three sales
offices where contracts were written up. Tom sat nervously in what
Klein called the customer chair, which was cut an inch or two lower
than an ordinary office chair; troublesome deals were often T.O.'d to
Klein, who felt he benefited from the psychological edge of gazing
down from a height. "Strange, but it works. The salespeople call
me 'sir' and practically shit themselves bowing out of the room. The
customer looks up and he sees me frowning at him—" He frowned.
"How do I look?"

Like
a constipated pit bull, Tom thought. "Very imposing."

"You
bet. And that's the point I want to make. If you're going to work out
in sales, Tom, you need an edge. You understand what I'm saying?
Any kind of edge. Maybe a different edge with different
customers. They come in and they're nervous, or they come in and
they're practically swaggering— they're going to make a killer deal
and fuck over this salesman —but either way, deep down, some part
of them is just a little bit scared. That's where your edge is. You
find that part and you work on it. If you can convince them you're
their friend, that's one way of doing it, because then they're
thinking, Great, I've got a guy on my side in this terrifying
place. Or if they're scared of
you,
you
work on
that.
You
say stuff like 'I don't think we can do business with that offer,
we'd be losing money,' and they swallow hard and jack up their bid.
Simple! But you need the edge. Otherwise you're leaving money on the
table every time. Listen."

Klein
punched a button on his desktop intercom. Tinny voices radiated from
it. Tom was bemused until he realized they were eavesdropping on the
salesroom behind him, where Chuck Alberni was writing up a deal for a
middle-aged man and his wife.

The
customer was protesting that he hadn't been offered enough on his
trade-in, an '87 Colt. Alberni said, "We're being as generous as
we can afford to be—I know you appreciate that. We're a little
overstocked right now and lot space is at a premium. But let's look
at the bright side. You can't beat the options package, and our
service contract is practically a model for the industry."

And
so on. Focusing the customer's attention on the car he obviously
wants, Klein said. "Of course, we'll make money on the financing
no matter what happens here. We could practically give him the
fucking car. His trade-in is very, very nice. But the point is that
you don't leave money on the table."

The
customer tendered another offer—"The best we can do right
now," he said. "That's pretty much my final bid."

Alberni
inspected the figure and said, "I'll tell you what. I'll take
this to the sales manager and see what he says. It might take some
luck, but I think we're getting close."

Alberni
stood up and left the room.

"You
see?" Klein said. "He's talking them up, but the
impression he gives is that he's doing them a favor. Always look
for the edge."

Alberni
came into Klein's office and sat down. He gave Tom a long, appraising
look. "Toilet training this one?"

"Tom
has a lot of potential," Klein said. "I can tell."

"He's
the owner's brother. That's a whole lot of potential right there."

"Hey,
Chuck," Klein said disapprovingly. But Alberni was very hot in
sales right now and he could get away with things like that.

Tom
said nothing.

The
intercom was still live. In the next room, the customer took the hand
of his nervous wife. "If we put off the cedar deck till next
year," he said, "maybe we can ante up another thousand."

"Bingo,"
Alberni said.

"See?"
Klein said. "Nothing is left on the table. Absolutely nothing at
all."

Tom
said, "You eavesdrop on them? When they think they're alone?"

"Sometimes,"
Klein said, "it's the only way to know." "Isn't that
unethical?"

Alberni
laughed out loud. Klein said,
"Unethical?
What
the hell? Who are you all of a sudden, Mother Teresa?"

He
clocked out at quitting time and took the highway to the Harbor Mall.
At the hardware store he picked up a crowbar, a tape measure, a
chisel, and a hammer. He paid for them with his credit card and drove
the rest of the way home with the tools rattling in his trunk.

The
northeastern end of the house, Tom thought. In the basement.
That's
where they live.

He
microwaved a frozen dinner and ate it without paying attention:
flash-fried chicken, glutinous mashed potatoes, a lump of "dessert."

He
rinsed the container and threw it away.

Nothing
for them tonight.

He
changed into a faded pair of Levi's and a torn cotton shirt and took
his new tools into the basement.

He
identified a dividing wall that ran across the basement and certified
by measuring its distance from the stairs that it was directly
beneath a similar wall that divided the living room from the bedroom.
Upstairs, he measured the width of the bedroom to its northeastern
extremity: fifteen feet, give or take a couple of inches.

In
the basement the equivalent measurement was harder to take; he had to
kneel behind the dented backplate of the Kenmore washing machine and
wedge the tape measure in place with a brick. He took three runs at
it and came up with the same answer each time:

The
northeastern wall of the basement was set in at least three feet from
the foundation.

He
pulled away storage boxes and a shelf of laundry soap and bleach,
then the two-by-four shelves themselves. When he was finished the
laundry room looked like Beirut, but the entire wall was exposed. It
appeared to be an ordinary gypsum wall erected against studs,
painted flat white. Appearances can be deceptive, Tom thought.
But it would be simple enough to find out.

He
used the chisel and hammer to peel away a chunk of the wallboard. The
wallboard was indeed gypsum; the chalk showered over him as he
worked, mingling with his sweat until he was pasty white. Equally
unmistakable was the hollow space
behind
the
wall, too deep for the overhead light to penetrate. He used the
crowbar to lever out larger chunks of wallboard until he was
ankle-deep in floury rubble.

He
had opened up a hole roughly three feet in diameter and he was about
to go hunting for a flashlight for the purpose of peering inside
when the telephone buzzed.

He
mistook it at first for some angry reaction by the house itself, a
cry of outrage at this assault he had committed. His ears were
ringing with the effort of his work and it was easy to imagine the
air full of insect buzzing, the sound of a violated hive. He
shook his head to clear away the thought and jogged upstairs to the
phone.

He
picked up the receiver and heard Doug Archer's voice. "Tom? I
was about to hang up. What's going on?"

"Nothing
...
I
was in the shower."

"What
about the videotape? I spent the day waiting to hear from you, buddy.
What did we get?"

"Nothing,"
Tom said.

"Nothing?
Nada? Zip?"

"Not
a thing. Very embarrassing. Look, I'm sorry I got you involved in
this. Maybe we ought to just let it ride for a while."

There
was a silence. Archer said, "I can't believe I'm hearing
this from you."

"I
think we've been overreacting, is all."

"Tom,
is something wrong up there? Some kind of problem?"

"No
problem at all."

"I
should at least drop by to pick up the video equipment—"

"Maybe
on the weekend," Tom said.

"If
that's what you want—"

"That's
what I want."

He
hung up the phone.

If
there's treasure here,
he
thought,
it's
mine.

He
turned back to the basement.

The
house hummed and buzzed around him.

Because
it was Monday, because she had lost her job at Macy's, because it was
a raw and intermittently rainy spring day—and maybe because the
stars or Kismet or karma had declared it so—-Joyce stopped to say
hello to the strange man shivering on a bench in Washington Square
Park.

The
gray, wet dusk had chased away everybody but the pigeons. Even the
nameless bearded octogenarian who had appeared last week selling
"poetry" on cardboard box bottoms had moved on, or
died, or ascended to heaven. Some other day the square might be
thronged with guitar strummers, NYU kids, teenage girls from uptown
private schools making (what they imagined was) The Scene; but for
now the park belonged to Joyce and to this odd, quiet man who looked
at her with startled eyes.