Time Out of Joint (17 page)

Four interstate trucks had backed up to the dock. Men wearing cloth aprons loaded up dollies with cardboard cartons of canned goods, mayonnaise bottles, crates of fresh fruits and vegetables, sacks of flour and sugar. A ramp composed of free-spinning rollers permitted smaller cartons, such as cartons of beer cans, to be slid from the truck to the warehouse.

Must be fun, he thought. Tossing cartons on that ramp and seeing them shoot down, across the dock and into the open door. Where somebody no doubt takes them off and stacks them up. Invisible process at the far end ... the receiver, unseen, laboring away.

Lighting a cigarette, he strolled over.

The wheels of the trucks had a diameter equal to his own height, or nearly so. Must give a man a sense of power to drive one of those interstate rigs. He studied the license plates tacked to the rear door of the first truck. Ten plates from ten states. Across the Rockies, the Utah Salt Flat, into the Nevada Desert ... snow in the mountains, hot glaring air in the flatlands. Bugs splattering on the windshield. A thousand drive-ins, motels, gas stations, signboards. Hills constantly in the distance. The dry monotony of the road.

But satisfying to be in motion. The sense of getting somewhere. Physical change of place. A different town each night.

Adventure. Romance with some lonely waitress in a roadside café, some pretty woman yearning to see a big city, have a big time. A blue-eyed lady with nice teeth, nice hair, fed by and created by a stable country scene.

I have my own waitress. Junie Black. My own adventure into the shady deals of wife-stealing romance. In the cramped environment of little houses, with the car parked under the kitchen window, clothes hanging in the yard, countless skimpy errands keeping her involved until nothing else is left, only a preoccupation with things to get done, things to have ready.

Isn’t that enough for me? Aren’t I satisfied?

Maybe that’s why I feel this apprehension. Anxiety that Bill Black will show up with a pistol and plug me for frolicking with his wife. Catch me entwined in the middle of the afternoon, among the washing and the lawn and the shopping. My guilt transformed ... fantasy of doom as a just payment for my transgressions. Trifling as they are.

At least, he thought, that’s what the psychiatrist would say. That’s what all the wives, having read Harry Stack Sullivan and Karen Horney and Karl Menninger, would declare. Or maybe it’s my hostility toward Black. Anxiety is supposed to be a transformation of repressed hostility. My domestic problems projected outward onto a world screen. And Walter’s model. I must want to live in the future. Because the model is a model of a thing in the future. And when I saw it, it looked perfectly natural to me.

Walking around to the front of the supermarket he passed through the electric eye, causing the door to swing wide for him. Past the check-out stands, in the produce department, Vic Nielson could be seen at the onion bin; he busily separated the unsavory onions from the rest and tossed them into a round zinc tub.

"Hi," Ragle said, walking up to him.

"Oh hi," Vic said. He continued with the onions. "Finished with your puzzle for today?"

"Yes," he said. "It’s in the mail."

"How are you feeling today?"

"Better," Ragle said. The store had few customers at the moment so he said, "Can you get off?"

"For a few minutes," Vic said.

"Let’s go somewhere we can talk," Ragle said.

Vic took off his apron and left it with the zinc tub. He and Ragle passed by the check-out stands and Vic told the checkers that he would be back in ten or fifteen minutes. Then the two of them left the store and crossed the parking lot to the sidewalk.

"How about the American Diner Café?" Vic said.

"Fine," Ragle said. He followed Vic out into the street, into the aggressive late-afternoon traffic; as always, Vic showed no hesitation at competing with the two-ton cars for the right-of-way. "Don’t you ever get hit?" he asked, as a Chrysler passed them so close that its tail pipes warmed the calves of his legs.

"Not yet," Vic said, his hands in his pockets.

As they entered the café, Ragle saw an olive-green city service truck parking in one of the slots nearby.

"What’s the matter?" Vic said, as he halted.

Ragle said, "Look." He pointed.

"So what?" Vic said.

"I hate those things," he said. "Those city trucks." Probably the city work crew digging up the street in front of the house had seen him go down to the Keitelbeins’. "Forget the coffee," he said. "Let’s talk in the store."

"Whatever you want," Vic said. "I have to go back there anyhow, sooner or later." As they recrossed the street he said, "What have you got against the city? Anything to do with Bill Black?"

"Possibly," he said.

"Margo says that Junie showed up yesterday after I left for work. All dressed up. And saying something about an attorney."

Without answering, Ragle entered the store. Vic followed him. "Where can we go?" Ragle said.

"In here." With a key, Vic unlocked the check-cashing booth at the far end of the store, by the liquor department. In the booth Ragle found a pair of stools, nothing more. Vic shut the door after them and dropped down on one of the stools. "The window’s shut," he said, indicating the window at which the checks were cashed. "Nobody can hear us. What did you want to say?"

"It has nothing to do with June," Ragle said, on the stool across from his brother-in-law. "I have no sordid tale to tell you."

"That’s good," Vic said. "I don’t feel much in the mood anyhow. You’ve been different since the taxi driver carried you in the door. It’s hard to pin down, but Margo and I talked about it after we went to bed last night."

"What did you decide?"

Vic said, "You seem more subdued."

"I guess so," he said.

"Or calmer."

"No," he said. "I’m not calmer."

"You didn’t get beaten up, did you? In that bar."

"No," he said.

"That was the first thing that occurred to me when Daniels—the taxi driver—dumped you on the couch. But you didn’t have any marks on you. And you’d know it if you had; you’d feel it and you’d see it. I got beaten up, once, years ago. It was months before I got over it. A thing like that lasts."

Ragle said, "I know that I almost got away."

"From what?"

"From here. From them."

Vic raised his head.

"I almost got over the edge and saw things the way they are. Not the way they’ve been arranged to look, for our benefit. But then I was grabbed and now I’m back. And it’s been arranged that I don’t remember enough clearly for it to have done me any good. But—"

"But what?" Vic said. Through the check-cashing window he kept his eyes fixed on the store, the stands and registers and door.

"I know I didn’t spend nine hours in Frank’s Bar-B-Q. I think I was there ... I have an image of the place. But for a long time first I was somewhere else, and afterward I was somewhere up high, in a house. Doing something, with some people. It was in the house that I got my hands on whatever it was. And that’s as well as I can detail it. The rest is lost forever. Today somebody showed me a replica of something, and I think that in the house I saw a photograph of the thing, the same thing. Then the city brought its trucks around—"

He broke off.

Neither of them said anything, then.

Vic said, at last, "Are you sure it’s not just fear of Bill Black finding out about you and Junie?"

"No," he said. "That’s not it."

"Okay," Vic said.

"Those big interstate rigs out back," Ragle said. "They go a long distance, don’t they? Farther than almost any other kind of vehicle."

"Not as far as a commercial jet or a steamship or a major train," Vic said. "But sometimes a couple thousand miles."

"That’s far enough," Ragle said. "A lot farther than I got, the other night."

"Would that get you out?"

"I think so," Ragle said.

"What about your contest?"

"I don’t know."

"Shouldn’t you keep it going?"

"Yes," he said.

Vic said, "You have problems."

"Yes," he said. "But I want to try again. Only this time I know that I can’t simply start walking until I walk out. They won’t let me walk out; they’ll turn me back every time."

"What would you do, wrap yourself up in a barrel and have yourself packed with the broken stuff going back to the manufacturer?"

Ragle said, "Maybe you can make a suggestion. You see them loaded and unloaded all the time; I never set eyes on them before today."

"All I know is that they truck the stuff from where it’s made or produced or grown; I don’t know how well it’s inspected or how many times the doors are opened or how long you might be sealed up. You might find yourself parked off somewhere for a month. Or they may clean the trucks out as soon as they leave here."

"Do you know any of the drivers?"

Vic considered. "No," he said finally. "Actually I don’t. I see them, but they’re just names. Bob, Mike, Pete, Joe."

"I can’t think of anything else to do," Ragle said. And I am going to try again, he said to himself. I want to see that factory; not the photograph or the model, but the thing itself. The Ding an sich, as Kant said. "It’s too bad you’re not interested in philosophy," he said to Vic.

"Sometimes I am," Vic said. "Not right now, though. You mean problems such as What are things really like? The other night coming home on the bus I got a look at how things really are. I saw through the illusion. The other people in the bus were nothing but scarecrows propped up in their seats. The bus itself—" He made a sweeping motion with his hands. "A hollow shell, nothing but a few upright supports, plus my seat and the driver’s seat. A real driver, though. Really driving me home. Just me."

Ragle reached into his pocket and brought out the small metal box that he carried with him. Opening it he presented it to Vic.

"What’s this?" Vic said.

"Reality," Ragle said. "I give you the real."

Vic took one of the slips of paper out and read it. "This says ’drinking fountain,’ " he said. "What’s it mean?

"Under everything else," Ragle said. "The word. Maybe it’s the word of God. The logos. ’In the beginning was the Word.’ I can’t figure it out. All I know is what I see and what happens to me. I think we’re living in some other world than what we see, and I think for a while I knew exactly what that other world is. But I’ve lost it since then. Since that night. The future, maybe."

Handing him back the box of words, Vic said, "I want you to look at something." He pointed out the check-cashing window, and Ragle looked. "At the check-out stands," Vic said. "The big tall girl in the black sweater. The girl with the chest."

"I’ve seen her before," Ragle said. "She’s a knockout." He watched as the girl rang up items on the register; as she worked she smiled merrily, a wide beaming smile of smooth white teeth. "I think you even introduced me to her, once."

Vic said, "Very seriously, I want to ask you something. This may sound like a nasty remark, but I mean it in the most important sense. Don’t you think you could solve your problems better in that direction than by anything else? Liz is intelligent—at least she’s got more on the ball than Junie Black. She’s certainly attractive. And she’s not married. You’ve got enough money and you’re famous enough to interest her. The rest is up to you. Take her out a couple of times and then we’ll talk about all this business again."

"I don’t think it would help," Ragle said.

"You’re seriously giving it a tumble, though, aren’t you?"

"I always give it a tumble," he said. "That particular thing."

"Okay," Vic said. "If you’re sure, I guess that’s that. What do you want to do, try to get hold of one of the trucks?"

"Could we?"

"We could try."

"You want to come along?" Ragle said.

"All right," Vic said. "I’d like to see; sure, I’d like to have a look outside."

"You tell me then," Ragle said, "how we should go about getting one of the trucks. This is your store; I’ll leave it up to you."

At five o’clock Bill Black heard the service trucks parking in the lot outside his office window. Presently his intercom buzzed and his secretary said,

"Mr. Neroni to see you, Mr. Black."

"I want to talk to him," he said. He opened the door of his office. After a moment a large muscular dark-haired man appeared, still in his drab coveralls and work shoes. "Come on in," Black said to him. "Tell me what happened today."

"I made notes," Neroni said, setting down a reel of tape on the desk. "For a permanent record. And there’s some video tape, but it hasn’t come through. The phone crew says he got a call from your wife at about ten o’clock. Nothing in it, except that he apparently thought he’d run into her at his Civil Defense class. She told him she had a date to meet a girl friend downtown. Then the woman who runs the Civil Defense class called to remind him that it was at two o’clock this afternoon. Mrs. Keitelbein."

"No," Black said. "Mrs. Kesselman."

"A middle-aged woman with a teen-age son."

"That’s right," Black said. He remembered meeting the Kesselmans several years ago, when the whole situation had been dreamed up. And Mrs. Kesselman had dropped by recently with her Civil Defense clipboard and literature. "Did he go for his Civil Defense class?"

"Yes. He mailed off his entries and then he dropped by their house."

Black had not been told about the Civil Defense class; he had no idea what its purpose was. But the Kesselmans did not get their instructions from anyone in his department.

"Did somebody cover the Civil Defense class?" Black asked.

"Not to my knowledge," Neroni said.

"It doesn’t matter," he said. "She gives it herself, doesn’t she?"

"As far as I know. When he rang the bell she opened the door herself." Neroni, at that point, frowned and said, "You’re sure we’re talking about the same person? Mrs. Kesselbein?"

"Something like that." He felt on edge. Ragle Gumm’s actions of the last several days had permanently upset him; the sense of the shaky, day-to-day balance that they had achieved had not left him with Ragle’s return.