IT IS NOT THE END DESTINATION OF A
VOYAGE THAT MATTERS; IT IS WHAT ONE DOES
AND SEES ON THE WAY THERE.
DOT ’N’ GUNTHER
So that’s why these damn things are so slow, Charlie thought, and he was about to move on when the RV chugged without warning into reverse and its rear ladder smashed into his face, knocking him backward onto the snow. A second later he felt the right rear tire going up against and then over his right arm, crushing it, and then over his chest, and his vision narrowed suddenly, going red and black around the rapidly closing border, and then it was gone.
“Jesus H. Christ, Gunther, you hit something big.” There was a second bump as the RV’s back wheels rolled over a large object.
“The hell I did,” he snarled back.
“Stop and let’s see what it is.”
Gunther resolutely ignored her and shifted into first. Again the RV lurched as it rolled forward over the thing.
“Goddamnit, stop. I’m getting out.” She opened her door and hopped out, hitting the snow at a slow run as the RV slowed.
“Woman, I’ve told you before not to get out before I bring this vehicle to a complete stop!”
She turned to Gunther, her voice rising. “Oh, mercy. Oh, Gunther, you better get out. You run him over.”
The young man lay on the ground behind the RV, the aura of blood on the snow beneath him expanding around his chest. She reached for his wrist and felt no pulse, then pulled his right eyelid back to check his pupils.
Gunther stumbled over to her and stood over him. “Is he dead?”
“He sure is.”
“Well, what the hell was the dumb bastard standing back there for?”
“Damned if I know.” She touched the collar of his overcoat. It was an expensive and warm-looking one, cut from some kind of thick, tweedy material. On his feet were a pair of highly shined burgundy wing tips. Dot’s eyes moistened. The young man wasn’t much older than her own son.
“What are we gonna do now?”
“Flag down those troopers, I guess, next time they pass.”
“Great. Just great. And I get into a whole shitload of trouble trying to explain how it happened. Lose my damn license, most likely.”
She reached into his pocket for his wallet. “Let’s see who he is. . . .” There was no wallet, but there was a set of keys.
“Looks like the wallet’s on his dashboard,” Gunther said.
He took the keys from her and unlocked the passenger-side door. He pulled the wallet from the dash. “Charles Lewis Arglist was his name, member of the State Bar Association. Visa, Mastercharge . . .” He pulled the satchel off the seat and peered inside. Plane tickets, a .22 caliber pistol, a bottle of Johnnie Walker, and more money than Gunther had ever seen in his life. He took in a deep breath, let it out slowly, then snapped the satchel shut and calmly carried it back to the RV along with the wallet.
“There’s a tarp up top of the microwave oven. Go get it.”
“What the hell for?”
He opened the satchel and showed her the contents. “We’re taking him with us.”
She stared at Gunther and the money for a moment, then turned her gaze back to the body on the ground. “Good God, he must’ve robbed a bank.”
“Hurry up and get the tarp before someone drives by and sees him. And get me the shovel so I can move this bloody snow off into those trees over there.”
Half an hour later they were back at the service station filling up. The day was beginning to clear, and there were isolated, small swatches of blue among the clouds. Dot had scarcely spoken a word since they’d wrapped the body up and hidden it in the luggage bay, which was fine with Gunther. They would head back down south until they got to his westward shortcut, which led after fifty miles or so to an old quarry road. The quarry had been flooded for years and would hide the young man’s body for many more. They’d continue west, and by the time they got where they were going and started spending a little of that money, Dot would have forgotten all about the young man.
He went inside and paid for the gas and got a couple of cups of coffee. The young woman behind the counter seemed cheerful enough, considering she was working on Christmas Day, and she wished him a happy holiday as he walked out.
“Do you think those troopers will remember us?” Dot asked as he started the engine back up.
“They didn’t look at our plates. They were just checking on a vehicle in possible distress. Later they’ll stop and see his car still sitting there and assume it was abandoned. I got most of the bloody part of the snow off to where it’s not obvious from the side of the road. Eventually it’ll turn into a missing-persons case, and they’ll never find him. The important thing to remember is, we have a whole lot of money. We can pay this thing off, and the mortgage, and if we’re careful, the rest will last us a long, long time.” He pulled the RV onto the turnpike heading south and put on a Christmas eight-track he’d found in the young man’s glove compartment.
Dot smiled, partially reassured. Gunther was sorry he’d run the young man over, but it had happened and there was no changing it. The one thing he was sure of was that he was never, ever going to let go of that money.
“What time you think we’ll get to the Garden of the Gods?” she asked.
“Five, six o’clock easy.” On the tape a choir sang “Good King Wenceslas,” and despite the unpleasant task ahead of him he felt more relaxed than he had since they’d left the house that morning.
Dot leaned back and closed her eyes, ignoring her coffee, and before they passed the young man’s empty car again he had faded from her fitful dreams, replaced by a beautiful satchel full of money.
1
A selection from The Walkaway
by Scott Phillips
available in bookstores everywhere
Gunther wanted a haircut. Today was the day the barber went around at Lake Vista giving all the old men their free haircuts, but he wasn’t there to take advantage of it. If he’d been thinking about it he would have stayed around another day; as it was, he had become so preoccupied by the missed haircut that he decided he had no other choice but to part with the three-fifty or four dollars or whatever a haircut was up to by now. Wincing at the thought of spending the money, he touched his right hand to the back of his neck and wondered if he could put it off. He pinched a lock between his thumb and forefinger to get a sense of its length. No, a haircut was the first order of business. Another week and it’d start to curl.
Walking west up the street, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his clothes damp and heavy with sweat, he saw very little that was familiar to him; most of the buildings he remembered had either been torn down entirely or taken over by new businesses. He was slightly cheered to see Ray and Cal’s battered old barber pole rotating placidly on the rough orange brick wall next to what had always been Simmons’s watch repair shop, but was occupied now by a forlorn and unhygienic-looking frozen yogurt store. He watched the barber pole turn for a minute, its red-and-blue stripes faded to pink and baby blue, then yanked open the door and stuck his head through into the yogurt shop for a moment, startling the morose teen manning the counter. The boy regarded him with mute wonder, as though the arrival of a potential customer was the most puzzling development of his day so far.
Gunther looked the place over disapprovingly, the sweat on his face and neck and in his hair going cold in the breeze from the ancient box air conditioner buzzing and rattling in the window behind the counter. The yogurt store couldn’t have been there long, but, with its bare walls and cracked Formica countertop left over from the repair shop, the air inside it was already thick with failure. He knew that there would be no point in asking the kid what had become of old Simmons, so without a word he slammed the door shut and descended the half flight of concrete steps to the barber shop.
Inside was way too bright. Half a story underground, Ray and Cal’s had always been gloomy, even by barbershop standards. Now the dark wood panel
ling had been pulled down, the walls painted a pale shade of yellow, and the dim incandescent lighting overhead had been replaced with fluorescent tubes mounted around the frames of the mirrors. Two women and one young man were stationed behind the chairs. All three of the customers were women, their clothes protected by shiny, dark gray plastic sheets. Gunther had never seen a woman in Ray and Cal’s before. All six of them looked at him expectantly, and the young man’s eyes narrowed.
“You’re going to have to leave now, okay, sir? I’m very sorry,” he said, stepping out from behind his chair and, for the benefit of the women, making a show of taking charge of the situation.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m very sorry.” He was young, maybe thirty, maybe less, and when he put his hand on Gunther’s shoulder, Gunther removed it calmly and deliberately. His eyes locked on the young man’s, gauging his resolve. The young man took a step away from him without making another attempt.
“Where’s Ray and Cal? I need a haircut.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about, sir. Now, as I said, you’re going to have to go.” The young man’s voice was artificially low and soothing like a goddamn orderly’s, and the tone made Gunther want to smash him one right in the snotlocker.
“Wait a sec, Curt.” The older of the two lady barbers spoke up. Her face was pretty and her eyes friendly, but her graying hair was shaved close on the sides like a man’s, and the combination made Gunther vaguely uneasy. “Ray passed away a couple of years ago, sir.”
“Oh. Sorry to hear that.”
“Cal’s still around, though, out at the Masonic home.”
“Cutting hair?”
“I don’t think so. Just living there.”
“What do you know. So it’s a beauty salon now, huh?” He looked the young man up and down. He didn’t seem to Gunther like a fairy, but you couldn’t really tell anymore just by looking.
“No, sir, it’s unisex,” she said, and the word threw Gunther off for a second. “I’ll be glad to cut your hair if you like. I’m almost done here and my two-thirty cancelled on me.”
The woman sitting in the chair in front of her stared at Gunther, in curiosity more than annoyance at the interruption of her haircut. He took a good look at her for the first time. A tall, plumpish woman of forty or forty-five with large, dark eyes, short, wet hair, and a lot of makeup. Her legs were so long they stuck out from under the plastic sheet a good six inches above the knee. She reminded Gunther of somebody he couldn’t quite place but was pretty sure he liked. He was staring back at her so intently he forgot to answer.
“Sir?” The lady barber’s voice was louder this time, but he still didn’t answer. He tilted his head to the left, trying to think of who she reminded him. One of the nurses? An old girlfriend, maybe, or a teacher from school? No, he never saw any of his teachers’ legs up that far, not in those days. She sure had long legs.
“Oh. My. God,” said the other lady barber, stifling a laugh. “The old bastard’s getting a hard-on.”
Gunther looked down and was surprised to see that this was so.
“All right, pal, enough’s enough. Let’s go.” Curt’s voice had lost its unctuousness, and Gunther resented him a little less for it.
“I’m going.” He turned and pulled the door open. “Sorry I was staring at you, ma’am. You look like somebody I used to know.”
No one spoke as he left. Once the door closed he stood for a minute or so at the foot of the concrete steps, waiting for his erection to go down. It was his first in a while and he was sorry to see it go.
A half mile or so up the road he stopped at a pay phone in front of a Stop ’n’ Rob. In the Yellow Pages under “Hair” he found a listing for Harry’s Barber Shop, which sounded like the kind of place where he’d be safe from any lady barbers or customers. It was in a residential neighborhood about two miles west, close enough to get there before the end of the afternoon if he hurried, so he tore out the page and started moving up the sidewalk again.
He thought about going inside the store for a soda, but his cash was tight and he hated to pay convenience-store prices. He wasn’t all that thirsty anyway. It was humid without being overwhelmingly hot, the sky was a dark, orangey gray. Sniffing the warm afternoon air he could smell rain before sundown. If he made it to Harry’s Barber Shop in time he might be able to wait out the storm there.
It felt good to be outside and unsupervised. Earlier he’d been thinking how much simpler things would be if he were in a car, but he was happy now to be on foot and decided he wouldn’t even mind being rained on a little, as long as there wasn’t any lightning.
Once he’d seen the body of a man who’d been hit, a golfer on the old municipal course; there was an appalling smell of cooked flesh to the duffer which had put Gunther off meat for a week or two. He had only been out to the golf course on official business one other time, two or three summers later, when a young couple had been run over by the greenskeeper’s assistant in the middle of the night. He was driving a watering wagon and they’d been lying on the fairway watching the stars, or so the couple had claimed. The fellow, one Harry Eberhardt, was extremely nervous, and Gunther had been eyeing him warily when Ed Dieterle, holding Harry’s driver’s license and the girl’s school ID, burst out laughing and handed them to Gunther.
“Here’s what loverboy’s so jumpy about.” Harry was twenty-three, and the girl was Miss Geneva Higgett, age seventeen. Harry’s nerves got worse when the night man for the afternoon paper showed up while they waited for the ambulance.
“Couldn’t rustle up a photographer at this hour. Grocery-store fire out on South Butell.” He shook his head regretfully at the sight of the sheepish lovers awaiting the ambulance, Harry in his street clothes and Geneva wrapped in a blanket, her arm sufficiently injured so that getting her summer dress back on had proved impossible.
The next day the afternoon paper had run the story—the more genteel morning paper didn’t mess with this kind of thing—gleefully insinuating that at least one of the stargazers had been unclothed at the time of the accident and that the young man’s injuries had been less severe than his female companion’s because she’d been on top of him when the wagon rolled over them. The city attorney had declined to press trespassing charges; Harry’s and Geneva’s names and addresses had been printed in the article, which he deemed sufficient punishment. Gunther, who hadn’t given the incident any thought in at least thirty years, wondered now if the girl’s father had given the little bastard the asskicking he deserved. He hoped so.
As he got closer to the center of town the proportion of familiar, intact landmarks began to increase. He passed a used-car lot where he’d once bought a Hudson Hornet with sixty thousand miles on it which had ground to a permanent halt less than two years later as a result, his third wife had insisted, of his never having changed its oil. Gunther had never known or cared much about cars, and he maintained that the newer models didn’t need their oil changed all that often. The ensuing fight had been one of the marriage’s last.
He wasn’t sure what had become of her after she remarried and he didn’t have to send her any more alimony. He didn’t know what had happened to his first wife either. The second one was the mother of his two daughters and they’d kept in touch over the years through the girls and the grandchildren. She lived up north somewhere, he thought, or maybe she was dead.
A couple of doors past the lot was a diner with thin plaques of fake marble mortared to its brick facade. Through the plate glass he saw a waitress he recognized, bored and loitering next to the cash register. She was a lot heavier now, her face gone round and slack with deep creases running from her nostrils to her mouth, but her hair was as thick and luxuriant and black as the last time he’d seen her. She gave a little start at the sight of him and beckoned him to come inside. He was eager to get to the barber shop before it closed for the day, but he figured he had time for a cup of coffee and to say hello.
“Gunthe
r!” She had him in a bear hug as soon as he got through the door. Feeling her warm and soft against him Gunther couldn’t help thinking that her increased girth was probably a good thing. “Good God, how long’s it been? Long time, seems to me. Hey, Jimbo, get out here and see who it is.” When she turned her face away from him to yell at the kitchen he snuck a glance at the nametag pinned to the polyester above her substantial left breast: IRMA. That seemed right.
A tiny, wizened man, who looked decades older than Gunther felt, came out of the kitchen scowling and wiping his hands. He brightened at the sight of Gunther and held out his hand.
“Well, I’ll be dipped in shit. What’s a penny made of, copper?”
It was only at the familiar salutation that he recognized the old man as the diner’s proprietor. He was about a foot shorter and thirty pounds skinnier than Gunther remembered him, as though a good part of his physical being had been siphoned off into Irma. “How you been, Jimmy?”
“I been getting older. Looks like you have, too.”
“Sit down and have something,” Irma said.
“Guess I got time for a cup of coffee,” he said, taking the stool nearest the register. The stools looked new, and in fact most of the fixtures seemed to have been replaced since he’d been there last. Shiny chrome along and behind the counter, new Naugahyde on the booths and stooltops, unscarred red and white checkerboard linoleum on the floor. He wondered where Jimmy had come up with the money for a remodel; there wasn’t another customer in the place.
“Have something to eat if you want.”
“I just had lunch,” Gunther said, though in fact he hadn’t eaten since breakfast: some fruit salad he could tell was from a can and part of one of those pressed sawdust oat muffins they gave the old folks to make sure they all crapped like clockwork.
She poured him some coffee. “I’ll make a fresh pot for you here in a sec. So how’s old Dorothy?” Jim went back into the kitchen.
The Ice Harvest Page 15