The Walkaway

by Scott Phillips

  It was a flattering snapshot, all right, but she didn’t need any help looking good. God, she was a pretty girl, maybe the prettiest he’d ever seen in person. Big sweet eyes and a wide smile that was smarty without suggesting any meanness, though you found out about that quick enough if you got to know her.

  He studied the photo closely, a black-and-white candid shot out at Lake Bascomb or someplace. Or maybe it was out at the quarry; it was hard to make out the background very well except that there was a blurred body of water surrounded by trees. It looked like about the right period for the quarry. Hell, he might have taken it himself, and he thought he remembered the blouse she was wearing, started thinking about unbuttoning it, about the way her breasts felt in his hand under the blouse through the silky fabric of her brassiere, and then about snaking his hand under the cup to the nipple. Her skin where it wasn’t tan was white as Niobara chalk, soft and smooth to the touch, and it was as though he could really feel it against his fingertips, the memory as vivid as his presence in Loretta’s kitchen. He realized that he once again had an erection, and he let his hand stray down just to make sure, without ever leaving that place where he was undressing Sally, and by the time she was wriggling out of her panties he was experiencing his second orgasm in the last twelve hours. It was a dry one this time, which came as something of a relief even if he was about to wash his clothes. Its aftermath felt good, loosening his stiff muscles and calming his brain, though he suspected a little sadly that it would be a while before his next one.

  When Sidney got back to the office he stopped at the stack of flyers on Janice’s desk. He was surprised by the vividness of the color; Gunther’s baseball cap shone a brilliant red against the light background, and his skin was only slightly ruddier than in real life.

  “Larry and Bill grabbed a few hundred each, they’re already putting them up all over town. I’m going to church tonight and I’ll give some away there, ask people to put ’em up wherever they can. And Mitch came by with a check for six grand.”

  “Good.” Sidney pulled out his checkbook and started writing. “I’m going out, I’ll probably end up at the Sweet Cage or at my mom’s. Can you make it to the bank with this? Probably ought to open an escrow account or something.”

  Janice took his check. “I already talked to Noah over at Bank Three about it, it’ll be set up by close of business this afternoon. And Ed Dieterle came by looking for you.”

  “Ed’s here? What for?”

  “What do you think? Looking for your stepdad.”

  He stepped out the door and went downstairs to his car, trying to understand what brought a seventy-five-year-old man four hundred miles from home in this kind of heat.

  When Ed walked in Howells was writing something down with his right hand and manipulating a sandwich with his left, all the while listening to someone on the phone balanced on his left shoulder.

  Ed wandered over to the wall and started looking at photographs. On the left end at eye level was a picture taken twenty-five years earlier at Howells’s bachelor party. The three of them were wearing Beatle wigs and Ed and Howells looked pie-eyed, but Gunther stared straight into the lens as though daring the photographer to find anything funny about him.

  Finally Howells hung up. “What’s the good word?”

  “None, so far. Hey, Lester, is Hank Neeland still working?”

  “Fell over dead last year.”

  “No kidding?”

  “No kidding. His wife asked him to go to Safeway and get some eggs, he collapsed right in front of the dairy case. Dead before he hit the ground.”

  “Jesus. Sorry to hear that. How about Connover?”

  “Retired, moved to Colorado.”

  “Shit. You remember who else worked on the Renata Forsythe killing?”

  “I did, a little bit. Not her case exactly, but the Kansas City guy got killed in her club the same time. Gerard.”

  “What’s your gut feeling about that money?”

  “Well, first of all, nobody ever conclusively proved there was any.”

  “Come on. What are all these scumbags killing each other over then, baseball cards?”

  “All right, I guess Vic Cavanaugh took it, or that lawyer, whatsisname. They’re the only two unaccounted for.”

  “You don’t think somebody might have killed them, too?”

  “Never found a body for either one, and the others were pretty much left to rot where they fell. Shit, that Gerard really stunk that place up. He’d been dead a couple days before anybody found him.” He set the last quarter of his sandwich down on its waxed-paper wrapper. “So what’s so damned interesting about that?”

  “What do you think about Gunther’s boy Sidney buying the place right after?”

  Howells shook his head. “Doesn’t mean anything. He’s the one found Gerard, and hell, he was pretty much scared shitless. Anyway, he’s Gunther’s son. Stepson, rather.”

  “Where do you think he got the scratch?”

  Howells shrugged and picked his sandwich back up. “That partner of his, Cherkas, he was a banker before.”

  “You know this Cherkas character?”

  “I stop into the club now and then, just to make sure everything’s on the up and up.”

  Ed nodded. “Hey, I saw Rory. He seemed pretty good, considering.”

  “Yeah, considering.” Howells’s father had been a policeman, and as a boy Lester had known Rory the way he was before his accident. He was the only cop of his generation who likely gave him any thought; in fact, probably the only on-duty cop who even remembered Rory at all. “I gotta make it down and see him. Maybe next weekend.”

  The phone rang and Howells picked it up and started talking again, and he nodded when Ed waved a silent good-bye.

  If the lunchtime hostess at Lupe’s hadn’t known Eric she never would have let him in. She strongly suggested a trip to the men’s room when he arrived, and once inside he was shocked at what stared back at him grimy and unshaven from the mirror, and the shift in dynamics between him and Loretta lost some of its mystery. After tucking in his shirt, washing his face, and combing his hair he looked passable, he thought; at least freshened up enough to be served alcohol.

  He’d been at the bar now for an hour, munching down chips and salsa and swigging crappy generic margaritas. At another restaurant he might have ordered a little food, but Lupe’s was part of a big chain and the burritos were worse than the prefabricated drinks. Eric signaled for his fourth margarita, all he had money for. As the bartender brought it to him he sensed a presence at his side.

  “Hey, Eric. How’s it going?”

  He looked up to see Skeeter Garcinich, a tall, cadaverish man who always looked hungry and angry at the same time. “Hey, Skeeter.”

  “You want to have lunch?”

  “Just had it,” he said. “Hey, can you lend me twenty? I’m stuck without my wallet and my checkbook.”

  Skeeter fished out a twenty and dropped it on the bar. “There you go, man. Think I might join you for one of them margaritas.”

  “How’s business?” he asked without really giving a shit. Skeeter had done a lousy job last time they’d worked together, and he wouldn’t be using him again no matter how low he bid or what he kicked back.

  “Can’t complain. How’s things going with the Trade Mart?”

  “Great. Still in the backing stage.”

  “Well, I’d sure like to be considered for the plumbing when it happens.”

  “Oh, yeah. You will be, don’t worry.”

  “You keep me posted.”

  “I’ll do that.” He swigged the margarita. Office workers now swarmed around the bar waiting for tables and Eric didn’t much want to be there anymore, particularly with Skeeter at his side pestering him about the Trade Mart. “Guess I’ll see you later.”

  Skeeter followed him out into the lobby. “I’ll be just about done with Quail Cove by the time you get going.”

  “Sounds perfect,” he said. How bad are you fucking
up the toilets in Quail Cove, he thought. As he reached the front door Skeeter called out to him, halfway through the open door of the dining room.

  “Hold on, man. Check this out. It’s Loretta. With a guy .”

  “It’s a business lunch.”

  Skeeter shook his long, narrow head. “They ain’t talking real estate, my friend. Take a look.”

  He looked in, around Skeeter. The dining room was full, the waitresses speeding from table to table to wait station in their low-cut South-of-the-Border uniforms. “I don’t see her.”

  “Over there, in the booth. Where the waitress with the monster tits is headed.”

  For a second he thought Skeeter had the wrong woman, then he recognized her underneath the new haircut he’d failed to notice when he was trying to get her to part with her car keys. He felt slightly dizzy, from the alcohol or the aftereffects of the heat or the impossible sight of his wife holding hands across a small table with the same yuppie asshole he’d seen in her office before.

  “You going over there or what?”

  Clearly Skeeter expected him to go over and make some kind of a scene to save face, but he suddenly felt very drunk and tired, and Loretta had already bested him once that day. “Nah, I’m going home.”

  Skeeter couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Man, you know as soon as they leave here they’re gonna hop off somewhere for a fuckin’ nooner.”

  “Which I do about three times a week, Skeeter.” Including, a couple of years back, every Tuesday with Skeeter’s then-wife Lacey. “I gotta go.”

  As he pushed the heavy oak double doors open and stepped into the parking lot he patted the crisp twenty in his shirt pocket and decided to stop at the Chimneysweep, which was just a couple of blocks’ detour on his way home and so dark no one would see how dirty he was. It seemed like a good day to get shit-faced.

  Gunther was thoroughly impressed by the Gandy’s master bathroom, upon whose toilet he was now seated. The fixtures were new and shiny, the towels fluffy and thick and the same color as the wallpaper, and the tub looked big enough to float a canoe. Once he was done with the toilet and had his load in the wash he might just treat himself to a bath. He and the old woman had a nice house, and paid for, too, but this one had it beat all to hell. Expensive as Sidney’s house, he bet, but not as modern or uncomfortable. What Sidney needed was a wife to make that place more like this one, a real woman’s house. His best guess was that Loretta was divorced, as the only adult male on the kitchen wall photo gallery was clearly the little boy in the other pictures grown into a young man. From where he sat there wasn’t any sign of a man’s presence in the bathroom either.

  When he was finished he went straight downstairs to the basement. It was finished and somewhat more masculine in feel than the upstairs, and Gunther wondered if this was the lingering effect of an absent husband or if this was simply where he’d been banished. There was a pool table that looked like it didn’t get much use, a big screen TV, and a well-stocked wet bar. In the refrigerator were a couple of six-packs of expensive foreign beer, the same kind Sidney drank. He didn’t picture Loretta as a beer drinker, but then eleven of the bottles stood intact.

  The washer and dryer were next door in the utility room, which was finished to match the rest of the basement. Out of habit he emptied his shirt pocket before taking it off; in it were the receipts for the suntan lotion and the hat, as well as Loretta’s business card. Stripping naked he stuffed his clothes, including the hat, into the machine. He grabbed a box of detergent from a cabinet above the machine and poured out what seemed like about the right amount, then pulled the knob without bothering to reset the dial from its current position, figuring he’d probably get it wrong anyway. He was fairly proud of himself when he heard water running into the basket; he hadn’t done a load of laundry since before he and the old woman had got married, and even back then he’d usually sent it out.

  As the cycle got under way he looked around the utility room. Hanging on the off-white wall above a stack of plastic laundry baskets was a framed poster advertising some art show at some museum he’d never heard of. A painting of a bunch of apples and oranges in a bowl, it reminded him that he was hungry, so he climbed the stairs to get something to eat.

  For a minute he stood stark naked in front of the freezer, trying to decide what to make from the bewildering variety of frozen foods stocked in it. When he felt his scrotum begin to shrink in the frigid breeze, he grabbed a box of pizza rolls and set the oven to 450.

  While he waited for the oven to heat up the phone rang. After four rings the machine picked up, and he heard Loretta’s voice again saying they were out. Might as well have mentioned where the key was hidden and where the good silver was. If he knew how to record a new message he would have done it himself.

  “Hello? Eric? It’s Teresa. I really need to talk to you before I do payroll. If you get this before you come in give me a call.” There was a pause, and the woman sighed dramatically on the other end before she hung up.

  He found a cookie sheet, emptied the whole box of pizza rolls onto it and looked at the oven. He decided it was probably almost hot enough and stuck them in, then set the egg timer next to the stove to twelve minutes.

  I’d sure like to live in a house again, he thought as he stood there waiting for the light on the oven door to go off. He’d spent the twenty-two years between his third and fourth marriages living in bachelor apartments and efficiency studios, sad dark rooms with Murphy beds and hot-plate kitchens he never used. He had a sudden flash of his old nightstand in one of those apartments, crowded with pictures of his daughters, of his mother and stepmother, and a good sexy one of Dot in her nurse’s uniform, looking sidelong at the lens with a sly, horny smile. She’d given it to him before he left for the war, though she was mad as hell at him for going, and years later when they got back together she was surprised to see that he’d kept it. That one was on the wall at their house, and the ones of his daughters and his stepmother, too, but he wondered what had become of the picture of his mother. Maybe his sister Gertrude had it, or one of his daughters. In the picture she was seated on a swing in a photographer’s studio before a painted garden backdrop, her head tilted so that her curls fell to her left shoulder, smiling sweetly and looking exactly as he remembered her, maybe because the photo was the main source for the memory. He was six years old when she died of the flu, right at the end of the war, only twenty-three and already the mother of three tiny children.

  Grethe had immigrated with her parents at fifteen, married Gunther’s father at sixteen, and given birth to Gunther three months after her seventeenth birthday. She didn’t know much English and never spoke it at home, and whenever Gunther thought of her he thought in the simple German of a small child. Just a few months after her death his little sisters wouldn’t speak it with him anymore, even with their father out of earshot. The elder Fahnstiel disdained the language of his parents, and after Grethe’s death he decreed that German was no longer to be spoken in his house. Gunther’s name was thereafter pronounced exclusively Gunn-ther in the American manner, a pronunciation he remembered his mother mocking. She had called him Günther, the vowel in its first syllable narrower and sweeter to his ear than anything in English; it was more than twenty-seven years before he heard that sound again, from a German woman trying unsuccessfully to trade a blow job for half a loaf of bread. He was an MP then, the war just over, and when she saw she wasn’t getting anywhere she asked him his first name.

  “Gunn-ther,” he had replied, though they were speaking German. Even to him it sounded strange in that context.

  She asked him to repeat it, and then spell it, and when he did she laughed. “Günther!” she said, and she sounded so much like his mother he went ahead and gave her the bread for nothing.

  Two years after Grethe’s death the family moved to Cottonwood, a slightly larger town thirty miles to the east, where his father, a stone-mason, had found a regular position with a chance for advancement. By then he
had remarried, and despite himself Gunther still thought of his stepmother Nellie as his mother most of the time; when he did think of Grethe it was with sorrow and shame at having allowed another to eclipse her in his affections. He was trying to remember the German word his mother had used to refer to his baby sisters when the egg timer went off, and looking in through the oven window he saw that the pizza rolls were leaking their sizzling insides onto the cookie sheet.

  Dot didn’t think she would feel much like eating, but when the time came she found that she was ravenous. She heated up the electric skillet and fried four strips of bacon, carefully removing them at just the point when the fat and lean parts were equally chewy, before the lard disappeared into the skillet and the meat got crumbly. She toasted and buttered two pieces of white bread and discovered that she had neither lettuce nor tomato in the fridge. She slapped a little mayonnaise onto the top slice and put the sandwich together, leaving it whole, and standing at the sink she ate it from the corner inward, washing down every other bite with a mouthful of iced tea.

  She lit a cigarette and wondered if there was any way she could find the rock quarry herself. How many of them could there be, after all, in this part of the state? She didn’t know how to go about looking for it, though. She’d awakened from an uneasy nap just as Gunther was getting back from hiding the money and the man they’d run over. Ten years gone by and she could still hardly stand to think about that, even knowing what she knew about the young man who’d stopped to help them that morning.

  There was a knock on the front door and it opened before she could ask who it was. Her granddaughter Tricia tossed her purse on the couch.

  “Hi, Moomaw. I thought you might like some company,” she said. Truthfully, Dorothy would have preferred to be alone, but she knew Tricia wouldn’t understand that. “Thanks,” she said. “You want a bacon sandwich?”

  Tricia smiled politely, or tried to; her expression was more akin to a grimace. “Actually, no thanks. Got anything lower fat?”