Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“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.”