The Corrections: A Novel (50 page)

When Denise was first introduced to Don Armour, he looked away and gave her a dead-fish handshake. When she worked at the far end of the drafting room, she could hear him murmuring things while the men around him chuckled; when she was close to him he kept silent and smirked fiercely at his tabletop. He reminded her of the smartasses who haunted the back rows of classrooms.

She was in the women’s room one morning in July when she heard Armour and Lamar outside the bathroom door by the drinking fountain where Lamar rinsed out his coffee mugs. She stood by the door and strained to hear.

“Remember we thought old Alan was a crazy worker?” Lamar said.

“I’ll say this for Jamborets,” Don Armour said. “He was a hell of a lot easier on the eyes.”

“Hee hee.”

“Hard to get much work done with somebody as good-looking as Alan Jamborets walking around all day in little skirts.”

“Alan was a pretty boy, all right.”

There was a groan. “I swear to God, Lamar,” Don
Armour said, “I’m this close to filing a complaint with OSHA. This is cruel and unusual. Did you see that skirt?”

“I seen it. But shush now.”

“I’m going crazy.”

“This is a seasonal problem, Donald. It’s like to take care of itself in two months.”

“If the Wroths don’t fire me first.”

“Say, what makes you so sure this merger’s going through?”

“I sweated eight years in the field to get to this office. It’s about time something else came along and fucked things up.”

Denise was wearing a short electric-blue thrift-store skirt that in truth she was surprised was in compliance with her mother’s Islamic female dress code. To the extent that she accepted the idea that Lamar and Don Armour had been talking about
her
—and the idea did have an undeniable strange headache-like residency status in her brain—she felt all the more keenly snubbed by Don. She felt as if he were having a party
in her own house
without inviting her.

When she returned to the drafting room, he cast a skeptical eye around the room, sizing up everyone but her. As his gaze skipped past her, she felt a curious need to push her fingernails into the quick or to pinch her own nipples.

It was the season of thunder in St. Jude. The air had a smell of Mexican violence, of hurricanes or coups. There could be morning thunder from unreadably churning skies, ominous dull reports from south-county municipalities that nobody you knew had ever been to. And lunch-hour thunder from a solitary anvil wandering through otherwise semi-fair skies. And the more serious thunder of midafternoon, as solid sea-green waves of cloud rolled up in the southwest, the sun shining all the brighter locally and the heat bearing down more urgently, as if aware that time was short. And the great theater of a good dinnertime blowout, storms crowded into the fifty-mile radius of the radar’s sweep like big spiders in a
little jar, clouds booming at each other from the sky’s four corners, and wave upon wave of dime-sized raindrops arriving like plagues, the picture in your window going black-and-white and fuzzy, trees and houses lurching in the flashes of lightning, small kids with swimsuits and drenched towels running home headlong, like refugees. And the drumming late at night, the rolling caissons of summer on the march.

And every day the St. Jude press carried rumblings of an impending merger. The Midpac’s importunate twin-brother suitors, Hillard and Chauncy Wroth, were in town talking to three unions. The Wroths were in Washington countering Midpac testimony before a Senate subcommittee. The Midpac had reportedly asked the Union Pacific to be its white knight. The Wroths defended their postacquisitional restructuring of the Arkansas Southern. The Midpac’s spokesman begged all concerned St. Judeans to write or call their congressmen …

Denise was leaving the building for lunch under partly cloudy skies when the top of a utility pole a block away from her exploded. She saw bright pink and felt the blast of thunder on her skin. Secretaries ran screaming through the little park. Denise turned on her heel and took her book and her sandwich and her plum back up to the twelfth floor, where every day two tables of pinochle formed. She sat down by the windows, but it seemed pretentious or unfriendly to be reading
War and Peace
. She divided her attention between the crazy skies outside and the card game nearest her.

Don Armour unwrapped a sandwich and opened it to a slice of bologna on which the texture of bread was lithographed in yellow mustard. His shoulders slumped. He wrapped the sandwich up again loosely in its foil and looked at Denise as if she were the latest torment of his day.

“Meld sixteen.”

“Who made this mess?”

“Ed,” Don Armour said, fanning cards, “you gotta be careful with those bananas.”

Ed Alberding, the most senior draftsman, had a body shaped like a bowling pin and curly gray hair like an old lady’s perm. He was blinking rapidly as he chewed banana and studied his cards. The banana, peeled, lay on the table in front of him. He broke off another dainty bite.

“Awful lot of potassium in a banana,” Don Armour said.

“Potassium’s good for you,” Lamar said from across the table.

Don Armour set his cards down and regarded Lamar gravely. “Are you joking? Doctors use potassium to induce cardiac arrest.”

“Οl’ Eddie eats two, three bananas every day,” Lamar said. “How’s that heart of yours feelin’, Mr. Ed?”

“Let’s just play the hand here, boys,” Ed said.

“But I’m terribly concerned about your health,” Don Armour said.

“You tell too many lies, mister.”

“Day after day I see you ingesting toxic potassium. It’s my duty as a friend to warn you.”

“Your trick, Don.”

“Put a card down, Don.”

“And in return all I get,” Armour said in an injured tone, “is suspicion and denial.”

“Donald, you in this game or just keepin’ that seat warm?”

“Of course, if Ed were to keel over dead of cardiac arrest, due to acute long-term potassium poisoning, that would make me fourth highest in seniority and secure me a place in Little Rock with the Arkansas Southern slash Midland Pacific, so why am I even mentioning this? Please, Ed, eat my banana, too.”

“Hee hee, watch your mouth,” Lamar said.

“Gentlemen, I believe these tricks are all mine.”

“Son of a gun!”

Shuffle, shuffle. Slap, slap.

“Ed, you know, they got computers down in Little Rock,” Don Armour said, never glancing at Denise.

“Uh-oh,” Ed said. “Computers?”

“You go down there, I’m warning you, they’re going to make you learn to use one.”

“Eddie’ll be asleep with angels before he learns computers,” Lamar said.

“I beg to differ,” Don said. “Ed’s going to go to Little Rock and learn computer drafting. He’s going to make somebody else sick to their stomach with his bananas.”

“Say, Donald, what makes you so sure you ain’t going to Little Rock yourself?”

Don shook his head. “We’d spend two, three thousand dollars less a year if we lived in Little Rock, and pretty soon I’d be making a couple thousand a year more. It’s cheap down there. Patty could work maybe half days, let the girls have a mother again. We could buy some land in the Ozarks before the girls got too old to enjoy it. Someplace with a pond. You think anybody’s gonna let that happen to me?”

Ed was sorting his cards with the nervous twitches of a chipmunk. “What do they need computers for?” he said.

“To replace useless old men with,” Don said, his plum face splitting open with an unkind smile.

“Replace us?”

“Why do you think the Wroths are buying
us
out and not the other way around?”

Shuffle, shuffle. Slap, slap. Denise watched the sky stick forks of lightning into the salad of trees on the Illinois horizon. While her head was turned, there was an explosion at the table.

“Jesus Christ, Ed,” Don Armour said, “why don’t you just go ahead and lick those before you put them down?”

“Easy there, Don,” said Sam Beuerlein, the chief of draftsmen.

“Am I alone in this turning my stomach?”

“Easy. Easy.”

Don threw his cards down and shoved off in his rolling chair so violently that the praying-mantis drafting light creaked and swayed. “Laredo,” he called, “come take my cards. I gotta get some banana-free air.”

“Easy.”

Don shook his head. “It’s say it now, Sam, or go crazy when the buyout happens.”

“You’re a smart man, Don,” Beuerlein said. “You’ll land on your feet no matter what.”

“I don’t know about smart. I’m not half as smart as Ed. Am I, Ed?”

Ed’s nose twitched. He tapped the table with his cards impatiently.

“Too young for Korea, too old for
my
war,” Don said. “That’s what I call smart. Smart enough to get off the bus and cross Olive Street every morning for twenty-five years without getting hit by a car. Smart enough to get back on it every night. That’s what counts for smart in this world.”

Sam Beuerlein raised his voice. “Don, now, you listen to me. You go take a walk, you hear? Go outside and cool down. When you get back, you may decide you owe Eddie an apology.”

“Meld eighteen,” Ed said, tapping the table.

Don pressed his hand into the small of his back and limped up the aisle, shaking his head. Laredo Bob came over with egg salad in his mustache and took Don’s cards.

“No need for apologies,” Ed said. “Let’s just play the hand here, boys.”

Denise was leaving the women’s room after lunch when Don Armour stepped off the elevator. He had a shawl of rain marks on his shoulders. He rolled his eyes at the sight of Denise, as if at some fresh persecution.

“What?” she said.

He shook his head and walked away.

“What? What?”

“Lunch hour’s over,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”

Each wiring diagram was labeled with the name of the line and the milepost number. The Signal Engineer hatched plans for corrections, and the draftsmen sent paper copies of the diagrams into the field, highlighting additions in yellow pencil and subtractions in red. The field engineers then did the work, often improvising their own fixes and shortcuts, and sent the copies back to headquarters torn and yellowed and greasily fingerprinted, with pinches of red Arkansas dust or bits of Kansas weed chaff in their folds, and the draftsmen recorded the corrections in black ink on the Mylar and vellum originals.

Through the long afternoon, as the perch-belly white of the sky turned the color of a fish’s flanks and back, Denise folded the thousands of offprints she’d cut in the morning, six copies of each in the prescribed folds that fit in the field engineer’s binder. There were signals at mileposts 16.2 and 17.4 and 20.1 and 20.8 and 22.0 and so on up to the town of New Chartres at 74.35, the end of the line.

On the way out to the suburbs that night she asked her father if the Wroths were going to merge the railroad with the Arkansas Southern.

“I don’t know,” Alfred said. “I hope not.”

Would the company move to Little Rock?

“That seems to be their intention, if they get control.”

What would happen to the men in Signals?

“I’d guess some of the more senior ones would move. The younger ones—probably laid off. But I don’t want you talking about this.”

“I won’t,” Denise said.

Enid, as on every other Thursday night for the last thirty-five years, had dinner waiting. She’d stuffed green peppers
and was abubble with enthusiasm about the coming weekend.

“You’ll have to take the bus home tomorrow,” she told Denise as they sat down at the table. “Dad and I are going to Lake Fond du Lac Estates with the Schumperts.”

“What is Lake Fond du Lac Estates?”

“It is a boondoggle,” Alfred said, “that I should have known better than to get involved with. However, your mother wore me down.”

“Al,” Enid said, “there are
no strings attached
. There is
no
pressure
to go to any of the seminars. We can spend the whole weekend doing anything we want.”

“There’s bound to be pressure. The developer can’t keep giving away free weekends and not try to sell some lots.”

“The brochure said
no
pressure,
no
expectation,
no
strings attached.”

“I am dubious,” Alfred said.

“Mary Beth says there’s a wonderful winery near Bordentown that we can tour. And we can all swim in Lake Fond du Lac! And the brochure says there are paddleboats and a gourmet restaurant.”

“I can’t imagine a Missouri winery in mid-July is going to be appealing,” Alfred said.

“You just have to get in the
spirit
of things,” Enid said. “The Dribletts went last October and had so much fun. Dale said there was no pressure at all. Very little pressure, he said.”

“Consider the source.”

“What do you mean?”

“A man who sells coffins for a living.”

“Dale’s no different than anybody else.”

“I said I am dubious. But I will go.” Alfred added, to Denise: “You can take the bus home. We’ll leave a car here for you.”

“Kenny Kraikmeyer called this morning,” Enid told
Denise. “He wondered if you’re free on Saturday night.”

Denise shut one eye and widened the other. “What did you say?”

“I said I thought you were.”

“You
what?
”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you had plans.”

Denise laughed. “My only plan at the moment is to not see Kenny Kraikmeyer.”

“He was very polite,” Enid said. “You know, it doesn’t hurt to go on one date if somebody takes the trouble to ask you. If you don’t have fun, you don’t have to do it again. But you ought to start saying yes to
somebody
. People will think nobody’s good enough for you.”

Denise set down her fork. “Kenny Kraikmeyer literally turns my stomach.”

“Denise,” Alfred said.

“That’s not right,” Enid said, her voice trembling. “That’s not something I want to hear you saying.”

“OK, I’m sorry I said that. But I’m not free on Saturday. Not for Kenny Kraikmeyer. Who, if he wants to go out, might consider asking
me
.”

It occurred to Denise that Enid would probably enjoy a weekend with Kenny Kraikmeyer at Lake Fond du Lac, and that Kenny would probably have a better time there than Alfred would.