“Morning, Sergeant,” the man said.
“Morning.”
They studied their menus and the husband stretched, cracked his knuckles and yawned extravagantly.
“Edwin. Don’t yawn, and don’t crack your knuckles either. You’re in public.”
“I can’t help it, it’s the middle of the goddamn night.”
“Don’t curse either.”
He ignored her and stuck out his hand to shake. “Ed Brenner, Brenner Agricultural Insurance Company, Ventura, California.”
“Master Sergeant Thomas McCowan, United States Army. Pleased to make your acquaintance.” I was pleased with how smoothly the name came off my tongue. “What brings you folks to town?” I asked.
“Visiting her family. Mine’s up in Chicago.” The man didn’t sound happy about either fact. “How about you?”
“I’m on a ninety-day reenlistment furlough. Just came back to see the old hometown, spend a little time with the family.”
The conversation dried up when their food came and we were all three shoveling it in, and I didn’t speak again until it was time to pay the check. The counterman shook his head when I asked for it.
“Your meal’s taken care of, Sergeant.”
The couple smiled at me over their breakfasts.
“I can’t accept that, thanks—”
The man cut me off, as I’d expected. “Forget about it. It’s already taken care of. Now have a nice visit home.”
I pretended to consider it for a moment, then flashed my most charming grin. “Thanks. God bless you folks.” I picked up my hat, put it on, and walked out briskly without exactly marching.
Outside the station there were no cabs. Presumably they’d picked up whatever passengers there were on the four-fifteen and then dispersed; the next passenger train didn’t come in until half past six, so I went over to a pay phone and called for a cab. I stood waiting for it to arrive, feeling good about saving a little money on breakfast. I felt a little bad about old Chester, though; I thought I might give him a little change if he was still around, but he was nowhere to be seen.
The cabbie must have been cruising around downtown, because he was there in less than three minutes. He was a burly guy with hair on his neck and a particular slow, droll way of talking I hadn’t heard since I’d left this place. “Where you headed, Sarge?” Three days in the U.S. and I’d already had about a belly full of civilians calling me “Sarge.”
“The Hitching Post, out on Forty-ninth.”
“If you’re looking for a whore, I know where there’s better and cheaper.”
“I bet you do. The Hitching Post is where I’m headed.”
The driver shut up and headed west through downtown, then north. Hard to tell, driving through it at five in the morning with the sidewalks empty, but the main business district seemed not to have changed much, at least physically. The town’s population was about double what it had been before the war, though, and when we started heading north I could see where it had grown. Tract after tract of cheap houses that hadn’t been there when I left lined the road until we got well out of town and into the country.
I could see the neon sign for the Hitching Post half a mile before we got there; I remembered it from ’46, when I’d spent an ill-considered year back here as a civilian. The sign featured an immense caricature of an inbred moron with enormous feet, ears, and nose, wearing a torn straw hat and threadbare overalls, his gigantic, misshapen thumb hooked through a moonshine jug marked “XXX.” A single bucktooth jutted up out of his lower jaw, and another downward from the upper. An overwhelming proportion of the Hitching Post’s customers were yokels themselves, up from Arkansas or Oklahoma to work at the aircraft plants, but none of them seemed to mind, or to think that the sign referred to them in any way. The parking lot this morning had six or eight cars in it, and when I got out of the cab one of them lurched from its space and with a metal-buckling crunch hit another, parked a good fifteen feet away. I heard laughter from the first car as it roared away, the taxi following it at a timid distance back to town.
Inside, hillbilly music played on the jukebox, some yodeling hog farmer’s lament about a woman who’d walked away with some other, presumably nonyodeling hog farmer, and I took a seat at the bar. “What’s the best scotch you got?” I asked the bartender.
“Bourbon.”
I put down half a buck. He poured me a shot and a beer chaser and I took a look around the room as I downed it. Eight guys, three of them dancing with three girls, all of whom I took to be pros. One of them, a short, thick-torsoed brunette, was practically humping her partner right there on the dance floor. Two more guys were seated at a table, and two more were playing pool. The eighth guy was sitting by himself, staring at the dancers, and I thought he was probably waiting for one of the girls to get free. The room was dark, most of the light coming from a mismatched set of table lamps strategically located from front to back. There were three ceiling fixtures but they’d been equipped with red bulbs and provided little more than what passed for atmosphere on Forty-ninth Street.
I turned my attention to my beer. There was a good chance one or more of these guys had come off the second shift at Collins, and if I didn’t act too interested I might be able to get one of them to spill a little.
“Well, looky there,” someone said behind me. “Looks like a war hero. Coming in here in uniform and all.” At the small of my back, in a pocket I’d paid a German civilian tailor to add to my Class A uniform trousers, I had a set of brass knucks. As I spun to face the speaker I surreptitiously pulled them on. Covering my right hand with my left, I found the loner standing a couple of feet away from me. He was loaded, and there are lots of ways to disarm a drunk without resorting to violence.
“Don’t want no trouble, now, Elishah,” the bartender said slowly and calmly.
“I don’t want no trouble either,” the man said. He sounded like he was from Arkansas maybe, or even Tennessee, though his accent was undoubtedly thickened with alcohol, and while my first impression of thinness still held, I saw now that he was wiry rather than scrawny. His nose had been broken more than once, and his teeth were fake. The pool tables were watching us now, and the dancing couples. I tried to judge their interest in him, and whether they’d come to his aid if a fight broke out.
I stood up and gestured with my head to the empty stool next to me, my left hand still hiding the knucks. “Sit down, buddy, and let me buy you a drink.” If there was trouble, I wasn’t going to get the information I wanted tonight.
“What you want to buy me a drink for, faggot?”
In this kind of place those were fighting words if ever there were; my options had narrowed to one.
“No sir, you misunderstood me,” I said in a very conciliatory tone. Then I suckerpunched him in the gut so hard I could hear the air rush out of his lungs, the brass digging deep into his entrails. All eyes were on the downed man for the moment, and I took advantage of it to slip the knucks off and into my front pocket. The pocket of a Class A uniform is too tight to conceal anything effectively, but putting them back into the hidden pocket would have been too conspicuous. In a few minutes I’d head for the john and make the switch there. Elishah rolled around on the floor, curled up in a ball with the dry heaves, and I looked up at the bartender first to make sure I wasn’t about to be eighty-sixed. The urge to finish what I’d started and kick the shit out of my floored opponent, starting with his face, was powerful, but I resisted. “Sorry about that.”
Around then I noticed the laughter of the other men. One of them was clapping.
“Yay, Sarge.”
The bartender rang a bell suspended over the backbar. “Congratulations, Sergeant, you just bought the house a round.” He started making drinks and pulling out beer bottles, and a couple of his drinking buddies helped the coughing, retching hillbilly into a chair at one of the tables. I pulled a ten-dollar bill from my sock and laid it on the bar.
“Keep ’em coming,” I told him.<
br />
The song was over now and one of the girls was sitting on the high bar stool next to me. She wore a short blue dress with a very low neck-line, and she leaned forward to let me get a good look. “You are a very handsome man.” She made it sound like she’d never seen a handsome man in the flesh before. “My name’s Beulah. You in town for long?”
“Depends,” I said. She had a remarkable figure, large breasts and wide hips accentuated by an extremely narrow waist, and her legs were long and nicely shaped. Her face, though, seemed to belong on another body altogether. Slightly walleyed, with a freakishly small nose and an equally tiny, seemingly lipless mouth over the biggest lantern jaw I’d ever seen on a woman, she’d caked on the makeup and piled her black hair in an elaborately woven mound atop her head in a valiant attempt to compensate. She was one of the homeliest women I’d seen in years, and yet it was all I could do not to start running my hands up and down her body right there at the bar. It had been close to a week since I left Japan and all the free pussy I could handle.
“Depends on what?”
“I guess it depends on the kind of reception I get while I’m here.”
She laughed like that was the funniest thing anybody’d ever said and lit a cigarette. “Anybody beats the shit out of Elishah like that’s gonna get a pretty good one around this place,” she said. Urban upper Midwest, I guessed, harsh vowels and a nasal quality to the voice overall, maybe Detroit or Flint. I wondered how she’d ended up down here.
“I like to see a man in uniform. My husband was in the army,” she said. “Don’t worry, he’s dead.” She smiled coquettishly and leaned forward, placing her hand incidentally on my thigh and giving it a little squeeze. I followed suit, placing mine at the hem of her dress. Nobody seemed to care; one of the women punched in another hillbilly song on the jukebox, over which could be heard the howling denunciations of the wounded man.
“I’m off at six,” she said. “Maybe you’d like to come over and have a little party.”
“Maybe,” I said. Jesus, she was ugly, but when I looked at the body underneath the face I knew I was up for it. “Sure.”
Her hand moved up my thigh and touched my groin, then slid unexpectedly the other way, toward my front pants pocket. Before I knew what she was doing, she was waving the brass knuckles over her head.
“I knew it!” she cackled. “I fuckin’ knew it!”
Elishah’s friends started moving in to the bar. Once again I found myself reviewing my options. Since I didn’t have a car they seemed limited: take a beating or talk my way out of one. Before I could open my mouth I felt something hard collide with the back of my head, and I turned in time to see one of the other whores holding a pistol, and then someone turned me around and slammed a fist into my belly, and then someone was holding my elbows, and then came the first of the blows to my face.
I must have passed out for a minute, because I don’t know how we got into the parking lot. The next thing I remember is a kick to the ribs as I lay on the gravel, my right eye swollen shut, and the bartender stepping out the front door.
“You might as well know, I just called the sheriff. If you’re fixing to leave, do it now.”
I heard car doors opening and slamming shut, engines turning over, gravel crunching. Somebody kicked me again, most likely Elishah, then got into a car and drove away. After a few moments of silence I became aware that someone was watching me. I opened my eye again and saw a pair of blue high-heeled shoes two or three feet away. Beulah lowered herself to a squat, balancing with one hand down on the ground. Her short dress and slip rode up well past the tops of her stockings, and I saw in the dawn’s early light that she wasn’t wearing any underwear; funny how after all my years of pimping I was still so affected by the sight.
“I’m sure sorry it got out of hand like that,” she said. “But you ought to know better than to use brass knuckles in a fair fight.”
I murmured something that must have sounded like humbled assent.
“Good. Now you see? You’re all even-steven, and as far as we’re all concerned you’re welcome back here any time. Maybe some morning you’ll come home with me after all.”
She got up and walked back into the Hitching Post, and I managed to raise my head up from the jagged gravel. The neon idiot glowed like an inbred cartoon ghost against the still-dark sky to the west; for the first time I noticed that he had eleven fingers and the same number of toes, and I laughed a little through the pain. I felt my cash supply still in my sock, though they’d all seen that I kept my money there. It hadn’t been as bad a beating as I’d expected either; maybe they figured Elishah deserved what he’d gotten. I dragged myself to a sitting position and took a deep breath. I was pleased to confirm my suspicion that no ribs had been broken, and I let the breath out slowly. The air was cool and moist, and in the distance I heard a siren getting closer.
It was the first time I’d been home in six years.
3
Sidney McCallum sat in unwittingly menacing silence across from the director of the Lake Vista Elder Care Facility, listening to his mother piss and moan about lax security procedures and lawsuits. The director, a small, nervous man named Mercer, was considerably less afraid of the old lady’s threats of legal action than of Sidney suddenly diving across his desk and choking him to death, an option the bigger man, fists clenched and eyes angrily fixed on his Adam’s apple, appeared to be giving due consideration. When Sidney began absently smacking his right fist rhythmically into the palm of his left hand, the man’s blink rate increased perceptibly, as though a fan were blowing directly into his eyes.
“On the up side, Mrs. Fahnstiel,” he said, “apart from his blood pressure your husband is in excellent health for a man of seventy-seven, and he’s not on any medications he can’t afford to miss for a few days.”
Sidney finally spoke. “He just doesn’t know what fucking year it is, is all.”
Mercer swallowed hard. “Those are, of course, the sort of patients who pose the greatest risk for elopement.”
“Elopement, shit. I can’t get into the memory-impaired ward without passing the front desk and signing in, same thing goes when I leave. How does a senile old man pull off a jailbreak like that?”
“Mr. Fahnstiel, this is one of the finest elder care facilities in the state. To compare it to a jail—”
“My name’s McCallum. Gunther’s her second husband,” he said, jerking his thumb at his mother. “Anyway, weren’t you supposed to be putting some kind of house-arrest bracelets on all the head cases?”
“These head cases, as you call them, are human beings, Mr. McCallum, and some of them have been reluctant to wear the devices,” he said with a hint of tension-induced vibrato. “We’ve found it’s better to let them get used to the idea gradually—”
“Listen,” Dorothy Fahnstiel said in a voice solid enough to stop Mercer mid-phrase. She leaned across the table. “It costs twenty-five thousand dollars every year to keep him in this shithole, and I have a right to expect better than this.”
Sidney turned to his mother and addressed her for the first time since their arrival. “The police pension pays twenty-five big ones a year?”
“Yeah,” the old woman said. “It’s a hell of a pension plan.”
Mercer slid his index finger down to the pertinent figure on the page before him. “Actually, the pension pays about a third of it.”
“Then who’s paying the other sixteen grand?”
“We’ll talk about it later,” the old lady snapped, and she stood up. “Come on, I want to be home in case he shows up.”
Mercer escorted them to the lobby, and as they passed the security desk outside the memory-impaired ward Sidney’s mother pointed at the nameplate on the desk and shouted “Security director! That’s a hot one.”
A tall man with a square face and slicked-back black hair that smelled of Brylcreem, the security director, gave no indication that he’d heard her.
A number of elderly residents and visito
rs stared at them as they crossed the spacious, leafy atrium to the front door. “That’s right, folks, I’m the old lady whose husband they let just up and walk out of here. He doesn’t know who’s president of the United States, but he was sharp enough to get past these assholes.” She shoved the door open with her shoulder and Sidney followed.
“Where’s the money coming from, Mom?” They were running across the parking lot, neither of them having come prepared for rain.
She failed to respond as he opened the passenger door and helped her into the seat. He crossed over to the driver’s side slowly now, letting the light, warm rain soak his hair and enjoying the smell that the rain seemed to draw from the asphalt, aware that any answer he might eventually get would be hard-won.
He turned the key and tried again. “I’m talking to you. Where’s that money coming from?” He backed out of the cramped space and cruised slowly through the parking lot.
“I told you, the pension.”
“I’m not Gunther, Mom. I don’t forget things people said five minutes ago. Pension pays a third of it, according to the doctor. Where’s the rest of it coming from?”
“Doctor,” she snorted. “That doctor crap is strictly for the rubes. Mercer’s a Ph. goddamn D. ‘He’s not on any medications he can’t afford to miss for a while.’ Well, how about his goddamn blood pressure meds? Mercer don’t know shit from shinola about medicine.”
“Where’s it coming from, Mom?” He pulled the big car slowly onto the street.
“Just take me home,” she snapped. “Did it ever occur to you that I might not want to talk about this right now?”
“I’m always offering to help you out with anything you need. You always refuse. And now I find out you got a sixteen-thousand-dollar-a-year nursing home bill—”
“Just take me home,” she said, and she sounded so tired and scared and sad that for once he let her have the last word and drove her home in silence.
The Walkaway Page 3