Walt

by Russell Wangersky

  I turned off the light. Stood there just long enough to watch the green afterimage of the light bulb filament fade from in front of my eyes. Closed the door.

  I walked home knowing it didn’t matter when Mary came home, looking up and seeing the big clouds piling up grey in the night sky with the moon caught up behind them, the moon lighting the edges white and then vanishing from sight completely.

  Knowing that, when she finally did come home, it wouldn’t matter whether it was early or late.

  Knowing inside, knowing precisely, that Mary had already departed.

  Chapter 47

  eggs

  coffee filters

  canned tomatoes

  bananas, apples

  masking tape

  and Fuck You

  You Cold Bastard.

  Mary’s handwriting. All of it clear and sharp.

  I didn’t keep that note. I won’t forget it, though.

  We shared buying the groceries the whole time we were married. We kept a notepad on the counter in the kitchen and the rules were unwritten and simple — if you noticed that we’d run out of something, you wrote it on the list and the next one who went to the store picked it up. And, to tell the truth, the person who actually went and got stuff was often whoever lost their patience and went first. It was like emptying the garbage: we just keep piling stuff in until the other person gave up, lugged it outside, and put a new bag in. At least then you got to have a little smile inside, for not having been the one to give up first. Small victories, but victories none the less.

  When I got that “cold bastard” note, the house was quiet, summer quiet, and there were fine little dust motes hanging and turning in the almost-still air, the sunlight angling down through the kitchen in that kind of full light that’s particular to June and early July here.

  The house was empty and ticking gently, occasional, offhanded clicks and metallic clangs now and then like the furnace was embarrassed to be shutting down for summer and heading south, the radiators suddenly losing their brassy winter confidence. There was muttering from somewhere in the cheap seats, bubbles caught in transit, brass and aluminum playing the expanding and shrinking game that has no visible sign, but plenty of audible tone.

  I still sometimes wake up from a sound sleep and think that I’m exactly, precisely there, that same room, that same day, that same hour. Then I look at my hands, my fingers, like I’m trying to be sure that I am still the same person I was before. I’m not sure. As if I could see proof in my own fingerprints.

  The white rectangle of the notepad on the table, the pen next to it as if it had been set down on top of the pad and then allowed to roll slightly away. I don’t want to keep repeating it, but every single word was important, like each one had its own particular weight both in what it meant, and in what it was tearing apart.

  The last five words were inked heavily on the paper. I turned the page and, on the back, felt the ridges with my fingertip where the ballpoint pressed down hard on the capital F, the capital Ys, the C, the B. I saw the corresponding dents on the next page.

  I don’t think she was right about what she wrote — but I know exactly why she’d feel that way.

  I can’t find that list now.

  I can’t even remember if I put it somewhere or threw it away all at once. I don’t know, maybe I lost it somewhere in the store.

  I honestly haven’t looked very hard.

  I didn’t see Mary again after that — it seems strange to say it, but it was like she found a way to simply extract herself from our genetic material, from the DNA of the house. Not many of her things were gone, but it was strangely as if she herself had vapourized.

  One moment, she was there, the next, she wasn’t — as definite a moment as the instant before a lightning bolt and the instant after, when the lawn furniture is all the same, the grass still the same length and the trees the same as they always are, the flash here and gone, but there’s a particular smell in the air like hot, wet metal.

  Not a trace anywhere in the house of where she might be going.

  I didn’t even bother to change the locks. There wasn’t really a point.

  Maybe she went back to Rabbittown, and then the gates closed behind her like she was a princess coming back to the hometown castle, the world outside just cut clean off.

  Or maybe she went west — you always hear about people who are heading out west for work, to change things or to forget things. I don’t know why the police won’t accept that sometimes people just like being missing.

  After I reported her missing, there was a while when her family wanted to make trouble for me. They wanted to get me in deep, I guess, just to show how angry they were about the whole thing.

  They told the police that even they didn’t know where she was, and there was a while when the police would come by and talk to me regularly, me standing there with the screen door held open while they stood on the pavement right by my door, the heat rushing out in the fall, in the winter, asking me again if I had heard from her, and of course I hadn’t heard anything. There was nothing to say.

  Ask Dr. Patterson. That’s what I told them.

  Her family took it further than that, too. I was in the store — I can even remember where, in the aisle with the cereal and the dairy, dealing with the regular occurrence of dropped yogourt — and her brother Terry came barrelling straight down the aisle and got right up in my face, like he’d done so many times before. I don’t know if he wanted to start a fight or whether he just wanted to get to me or what. He’s a big guy, works with the city on a road patching crew, so you can guess he’s pretty strong, with shovelling and raking the asphalt and with muscling that little steamroller they have down off the back of the truck and pushing it back and forth and everything.

  He had his finger out, poking it at me, but carefully, without quite touching my chest.

  “Where the hell is my sister?”

  “How should I know?” I tried to keep my voice low, tried to be reasonable. “She left me. It’s not like she’s going to be reporting in or anything.”

  “Well, she’d sure as fuck tell us. And she hasn’t. No one’s heard a single goddamned word, and the last person who saw her was you.”

  I’m sure that’s not true.

  I mean, the second she left the house, someone had to have seen her, right? A cab driver, cop, I don’t know. Maybe they just didn’t know they’d seen her.

  If anyone were to see her now, they’d know it.

  The police had her face up on the news for weeks, me going through the wringer for not reporting her missing right away, so the fact is that she’s probably moved out of the province. She always made her own decisions — she’s headstrong like that — and if she wanted to go, she was just going to go. Maybe she got into some kind of trouble. I mean, she’s got a temper, and that doesn’t fly with everyone.

  I don’t know.

  Nothing to do with me, whether the Carters want to rage or foam or whatever else they might want to do.

  Like Terry.

  There was Terry and he was still talking — well, he was yelling — and I could see Morris, just over Terry’s shoulder, making his way down the row, angling toward us.

  Morris isn’t a big guy — but he’s got a uniform, black commando sweater with “Security” across the back in big block letters — and that seems to be enough to put the shoplifters off a little, and that’s really why we have him.

  He stands by the door out to the parking lot most of the time, doing his best to look like he’s on the ball. There are four or five of them that rotate shifts, and every now and then they catch someone with a shirt full of T-bones or something, even though the store hardly ever goes all the way through the court process if they catch you and you won’t plead guilty right away. Costs too much.

  Morris is one of the smallest of them, a wi
ry little guy who used to be in landscaping until his back gave out. He bends to one side like he’s still got a roll of sod balanced up there, waiting to unroll it on a patch of dirt somewhere or something.

  I was sure all it was going to take was for him to reach out and tap Terry on the shoulder and Terry was just going to haul off and flatten him, right there by the Cap’n Crunch, every one of those stupid captains grinning out from their boxes, holding up their little swords and staring at the fuss.

  Uniforms do different things to different people, and that’s good, because Terry took one quick look at Morris and the air went right out of him. He turned back to me and said, “Don’t think you and I are done, ’cause we’re going to be all over you until we find her.”

  Then he put his hand in behind a row of cereal boxes and just swept them completely off the shelf, the boxes bouncing with a hollow cardboard slap as they hit the floor, just something else for me to do, though at least none of them had burst open. And Morris looked at me with a “what the hell was all that about?” look, and I told him “it’s personal, nothing big,” and he slouched off to the door again to keep an eye on I don’t know what.

  I started picking up cereal boxes and putting them back. Not that it was really my job, but because it was sort of like it was somehow my mess.

  You can understand why it is I keep looking over my shoulder now.

  Not long after the racket in the store, two guys jumped me on the way home — never did see their faces and they didn’t say a word, completely quiet except for their breathing. I had been walking, looking at my feet, and they caught me by surprise and gave me a good, careful working over with their fists until they knocked me down and started with putting the boots in.

  Didn’t ask me for my wallet. Didn’t ask me who I was, and when one got tired, the other one would lay into me.

  After they were done, it took me another half hour to get home, and you know how people will say sometimes that they get up in the morning and everything hurts? I know exactly what that’s like, but I had to get up, because there was someone pounding on the door.

  First thing in the morning, and Scoville and Hill were at my door, and the short one said, “Heard something happened to you,” like it was all some kind of surprise, and did I “want to make a report?”

  I did make a report, not because they were going to catch anyone, but because I could waste their time and keep them sitting there in the living room just the way they kept coming back and wasting my time.

  The shorter one, he didn’t stop smiling once. It was an evil, hard little smile, and it didn’t look like he was even taking notes.

  And we both knew what he meant by that.

  Chapter 48

  (St. John’s, NL) — The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (RNC) is seeking the assistance of the general public who may have witnessed an assault in the area of McKay Street in St. John’s.

  On Thursday, August 28, two men are alleged to have assaulted another man at approximately 11:30 p.m., as the victim walked home. Nothing was taken in the assault, but the RNC has not ruled out robbery as the motive for the attack.

  The assault is believed to have occurred over a period of fifteen minutes.

  The RNC is continuing to search for the alleged assailants and is seeking the assistance of the general public.

  If anyone has any information pertaining to the incident, they are asked to contact the RNC at 729-8000 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477).

  “It still doesn’t take much to fuck up a court case,” Dean said, “so back off, Jim.”

  “It doesn’t take much for guilty guys to walk, either, even when you do everything right,” Scoville said.

  “What did you tell them?” Dean asked.

  Scoville spread his hands out, as if Dean were supposed to be looking for blotches of dirt there on his palms. “I was just up in Rabbittown, doing a follow-up interview like we’re supposed to, asked if they’d heard anything new, maybe mentioned a couple of things. Never said they should do anything about it. But it’s probably not bad to knock him a little off balance.”

  Dean leaned back in his chair and rubbed his forehead.

  “Chief’s going to have a fit if any of this ever gets back to him. Think how it would look in the press. We’d be disowned, hung right out to dry. And our guy didn’t look any more off balance than he ever does.”

  “He’s got to know we’re onto him.”

  “I don’t think that matters. He doesn’t care what we know — he cares about what we can prove.”

  Scoville scowled. “Maybe we should bring him in, make him go over the whole thing down here, and maybe this time we can get him to slip up somewhere.”

  “Not going to happen. He won’t slip.”

  Scoville nodded resignedly.

  Dean looked up at the ceiling, the off-white ceiling that never seemed to change. He thought about the way things can shift all at once.

  “He can’t keep going like this. Something has to happen eventually,” he said.

  “You are a fucking optimist, Dean.”

  Chapter 49

  August 30 — The big news: I figured it out. He’s the guy from the grocery store — the cleaner. His shirt says his name is Walt — I took a chance getting close enough to read that. I don’t think he saw me though — if he did, he certainly didn’t react. They all have names on their shirts, and those uniforms — I don’t know if he really works for the store itself. Probably they contract a cleaning company, but I don’t know who it is or who to contact. Probably the store would be a good start. Or maybe the police — it would be great to let Constable Rick Peddle know just how wrong he was, even if I just get voicemail again. Three days and I’ll be gone anyway, so maybe I’ll call the store before I go. Just to give them a heads-up that there’s a stalker on their staff. I mean, he won’t be creeping me out any more, but maybe telling them about it will keep him away from the next woman. I’ll already be gone. I was at my parents’ last night, and what a fuss. You’d think I was leaving the planet, not the city. They said they’d take Bo, and then when I actually brought him over, Mom was all over it like she was going to back out, complaining about the litter box and where she was going to put it, and then Dad went off on one of those stories about what they used to do with unwanted cats when he was a kid, and I know it’s not about Bo at all, it’s that they’re just trying to put up any roadblock they can think of. I’m doing the last of the packing now: almost everything’s gone to Mom and Dad’s or else been given away, and Mom says she’ll come by with Dad afterwards and give the place a good going-over.

  Chapter 50

  Mango

  cilantro

  parsley

  bread

  peppers

  Sometimes you want to cook something different. Sometimes you’re just looking for a change. Sometimes that change walks right up to you and smacks you in the face.

  There are racks of magazines at the front of the store, and they’re always in a mess. People do two things with them: some pick them up and fling them on the belt, nonchalant like they’ve got better things to be doing when really they can’t wait to get home and dive in. Other people snatch them up right there at the checkouts, reading as much as they can while they’re waiting, like they were absolutely right in helping themselves, like it was a big free handful from the salad bar or a bunch of grapes they’re allowing themselves to finish before they even get to the lane with their toilet paper and onions.

  When the groceries are in the bags, it’s the freeloading readers who stuff the magazines back any which way, not really caring whether they’re in the right place or not. Sometimes they just leave them on the end of the checkout, a little more dog-eared and a little less likely to be purchased by anyone else.

  Eventually, I’m the one who puts them back in order, me or one of the stockers, but usually me.<
br />
  Glamour on Glamour, Good Housekeeping slapped right back onto itself, back into the same kind of order the magazine loves so much. Then there are the soft-papered tabloids, the ones no one admits to reading, the corners always curling down even before anyone’s gotten around to pawing them over, the ones with the big stark front page photo of someone’s cellulite sticking right out in your face. I guess you get to feel all right about everything in your own world when you’re looking down on someone else.

  So many of them.

  The food magazines with cake decorations and six-layer recipes that only the most seriously masochistic would ever bother to try. Glossy magazines, the pictures on the front always drawn from a collection of bright electric colours that hardly look like they could exist in the real world.

  Fashion and sex tips and cooking — all stacked up like their own particular set of commandments.

  I found that latest list right near the doors, and then I just happened to be cleaning up at the checkout, and it was yet another cooking magazine in the wrong place. Right on the cover, just like on the list, there was a grilled bread, mango, and pepper salad, and it didn’t look like it could possibly be all that hard. The way they have it on the cover, the way it all just stares right out at you, almost pornographic.

  I know, the whole idea just sounds stupid, me at home fighting with grilling bread and carving up mangos, but when I saw it there on the cover, the mango bright and slick-shiny in the camera lights, it just seemed like something worth doing. Worth trying; worth tasting.

  The list was already in my hand, a crumpled piece of lined yellow notepaper, just the corner of the page torn off, the words written in black Sharpie so that the ink had gone right through the paper and I could hold it up under my nose and still smell the solvents.

  Me, the magazine, the list, and a quick trip back through the store at the end of my four-to-twelve shift, few enough items so I could dart through the express lane, pay Sandy, who gets half a smile on her face when she looks at me and sees what it is I’m buying, and then I headed home.