His one-man bookkeeping office had been on the second floor for thirty-seven years, looking out diagonally across the intersection onto Union Station. He didn’t marry my mother until he was past fifty; his first wife had, luckily for me, died of a botched appendectomy a couple of years before, and he was dead himself of heart failure before I graduated high school. Until this afternoon’s visit to my childhood house I couldn’t remember the last time he’d come to mind.
The office was occupied by a firm by the name of Cuthbertson Imports. What they imported wasn’t clear looking inward through the glass of the door, but the room looked much the same as it had during my father’s tenancy. In the diffuse glow of the streetlamp outside it even appeared that the large desk against the east wall was his own, and perhaps it was; I couldn’t remember moving it out after he died.
At the foot of the stairs the stew bum raised himself up onto his elbow as I pushed past him onto the sidewalk. “Peg?” he blubbered, his voice full of hope.
“Sorry, no,” I said.
“Fuck ’er,” he growled, then rolled back over.
I was almost to the car when a scrawny little guy crossed my path. “ ’Scuse me, sir, I was just hoping you could see your way clear to letting me have a quarter.”
“Sure thing, Chester.” I opened my wallet and pulled out a ten-dollar bill, and he looked at me real hard, trying to figure out how I knew his name.
“That’s funny, I’m pretty good at faces. . . .” His voice drifted off as he got a good look at the ten spot, which would have paid his seventyfive -cent room for a week with enough left over for a real pants-pissing bender and a meal afterward.
“What was that you said the other night, something about you’d rather eat shit than steak and pussy?”
“Oh,” Chester said. “The supply sarge.” He nodded and turned away, looking heartbroken.
“Hey, Chester, come back.” I really did want to give him that sawbuck.
“No sir.”
“I got ten bucks here for you.”
“I meant what I said, Mister.” He walked away with his head down, and it got to me. I caught up to him and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Chester, come on, take the ten, I’m in a rare generous mood.”
He shook away and kept walking.
“How are you going to feel tomorrow morning waking up with the screaming meemies and knowing you turned down ten simoleons?”
He ignored me. When I put my hand on his shoulder again he tried to shake it off, and I spun him around to face me. Without really planning to, I backhanded him across the face, and he fell backward into the plate-glass window of a shoe store, which vibrated ominously but didn’t break.
“Big man, beating up an old drunk half your size,” he said, rubbing his cheek, and I grabbed him by the front of his shirt and backhanded him again, hard this time, my hand in a fist. I did it again and again until my knuckles were sticky, and then I let him drop to the pavement. I jaywalked over to Union Station and washed the blood off my hands in the men’s room, then went to one of the phone booths and had the operator connect me with St. Francis.
“Better get an ambulance over across Douglas from Union Station,” I said. “There’s an old guy here’s had the piss taken right out of him.”
I crossed the street to my car and went back to the hotel. I read until seven in the morning, then I went to sleep.
15
Gunther was in the backseat of a cab wearing a pair of gold wire-framed sunglasses he’d found in a kitchen drawer. The cabbie called him Mr. Gandy, and the first thing he said after Gunther gave him Sally’s address was ask if he’d heard about the old man who’d escaped from the rest home the day before.
“I heard all about it,” Gunther responded. “They said on TV he’s so senile he can’t talk in whole sentences.”
Sally lived in a new subdivision out west that Gunther hadn’t ever heard of whose street names all had to do with aviation, or more precisely with airports: Windsock Lane, Runway Terrace, Tarmac Road. Sally’s ranch-style house was on a cul de sac called Control Tower Place. A light was on in the entryway and a single lamp was visible through the living room curtains even though the sun was still up. He paid the cabbie and rang the doorbell, and receiving no answer went around back. Before he started looking for the key he tried the door and found it open. The carelessness of it irritated but didn’t surprise him, and he stepped into Sally’s kitchen to the sound of central air blowing full blast.
“Anybody home?”
There was no answer. The kitchen was neat and the house new, though not as nice or homey as her daughter’s. He opened the refrigerator and after a moment’s browsing pulled out a cold chicken, intact except for a missing wing and leg. He sat down at the kitchen table and started eating it with his fingers, pulling it apart piece by piece and gnawing it down to the bone. When he had eaten all the meat he pulled the traces of the sweetbreads from the bones and popped them into his mouth, and then he stood up to wash his hands.
He started down a hallway lined with photos, including lots of pictures of Loretta and her two kids and several of an old fat woman with a slightly crooked nose who, on close examination, turned out to be Sally. In two or three of them she was posing with a man slightly older than she was, thin and dyspeptic looking, wearing glasses with lenses so thick you could hardly see what his eyes looked like. He wondered how it had been, being married to Sally; not a happy thing to contemplate, though maybe she’d calmed down a little bit passing seventy.
At the end of the hallway was the master bedroom, neatly made up, and he started going through its cabinets and drawers. At the bottom of her dresser he found a framed photograph of Wayne Ogden in his army uniform, his face hand-tinted an artificial pink and his eyes bright blue. He was a little surprised to find the picture around, even hidden, although he supposed she’d kept it for the child’s sake. No reason she had to know her old man was a louse.
Nothing that met Sidney’s eye upon entering Harry’s barber shop seemed to predate 1965. The floor was a checkerboard of worn, mismatched linoleum, black squares marbled with mint green next to salmon ones accented with cream, with triangular patches of blackened grout where some of them were missing corners. On the wall was a photo of a serious young man and the legend THE JFK, which confused Sidney until he realized it was the name of a haircut; similar photos hung on the other wall, labeled THE CREWCUT and THE BUSINESSMAN.
The man in the chair was roughly the barber’s age, and both men looked at him with some annoyance as he walked in. “Go on, sit down, I’m almost done with old Clyde here,” Harry said.
“Actually I wanted to ask you about something.”
“I said I’ll be done in a few minutes.”
Sidney shrugged and took a seat. Harry was taking more time with Clyde’s cut than Sidney thought necessary, since all the hair the old man had left was a thin, yellowish white crescent that stretched from ear to ear around the back of his head. Most likely he came in once a week just for the conversation; Sidney seemed to have interrupted a discussion of the Russian situation.
“Shit, my daughter was telling me just the other day ‘Isn’t that great?’ like they’re our pals all of a sudden, a country with about half a billion Reds in it, just because they said so on the TV.” Clyde was ruddy complexioned with rheumy eyes, his voice surprisingly deep and strong.
Clyde shook his head in disgust and Harry pulled his scissors and comb away. “Damnit, don’t move your head. How many times have I told you that?”
“About once every two weeks since 1955.” Clyde grinned at Sidney, who smiled politely in return. “Anyway, it was your old pal Ronnie Reagan who started the whole thing, kissing up to that Gorbachev.”
“Don’t talk about Reagan, now,” Harry said as he whipped the sheet off of him. On the floor there wasn’t enough hair to sweep, and after Clyde left Sidney took the seat.
“How do you want it?” Harry wrapped the tissue paper around his throat and
threw the sheet over his clothes.
“I don’t know. Short.”
“How short?”
“Like that one.” He pointed at the wall. “The Businessman.”
“That’s a lot shorter than you got now. You sure? Won’t be curly if I cut it that short.”
“Change is good. I wasn’t really planning to get a haircut when I came in.”
“Oh, no?” Harry said without much interest, since as far as he was concerned the haircut had started as soon as the big man had sat down in the chair.
“I just wanted to ask you some questions. I’m Gunther Fahnstiel’s stepson.”
“I already told the cops everything and I don’t like to repeat myself. You still want a haircut?”
The old man was clearly a talker, and maybe he could get him to volunteer something, so Sidney nodded.
“Don’t move your head. A man once bled to death right in this chair.”
Marty Blaine worked in a brand-new office park off Kellogg, not five minutes from Lake Vista, and Ed listened carefully to Marty’s calls while ostensibly reading a month-old copy of Newsweek. He bullshitted and told jokes, but at the heart of each call was some sort of business transaction, a new policy or a renewal or a discussion of increased coverage, and each call was short. When he had finished with a fifth, he hung up and apologized.
“End of the week, you know, tying up a few loose ends.”
“That’s okay, Marty. You remember me at all?”
“Sure,” he said. After his old man’s accident the boy had been taken on as a group responsibility by Rory’s friends, a situation that lasted until the boy’s mother, having divorced her debilitated husband, remarried and made it known that cops weren’t welcome around the boy anymore. Ed doubted that Marty remembered him, particularly, but he was a good enough salesman to pretend.
Ed leaned back. “Just saw your dad this morning.”
“Oh. How’d he look?”
“Well, I hadn’t seen him since he lost his foot, so it was kind of a surprise.”
“That’s been a while. Diabetes.”
“Right after he moved into Lake Vista, if I’m not mistaken. What made you decide to move him?”
“The pension plan moved him.”
“Both times?”
He seemed to be calculating. “Yeah, he was in that place out on Twenty-first for a little while.”
“And nobody asked you either time?”
“They just called to let me know.”
“You remember who that might have been?”
“One of his old cop buddies, I don’t remember who exactly.”
Ed nodded. “I don’t mean to get too personal, but is anybody helping you out with him?”
“What do you mean, helping me out?”
“I don’t know how much you’re putting up a month, but Lake Vista’s a pretty expensive facility. . . .”
He shook his head. “I’m not paying anything. Pension fund pays it, and I think his veteran’s disability pays some.”
“Oh. Sorry, I guess I was misinformed.”
“Is that all you needed to know?”
“I guess it is.”
“Well, glad I could help.” He stood up and held out his hand, grinning. “It’s real good to see you, Ed.”
Ed shook his hand. “Go visit your dad,” he said.
Eric opened his eyes slowly, thinking he was hung over. No hangover he knew, though, could account for the pain on the outside of his head, both temples throbbing with every heartbeat and threatening nausea. The pain was asymmetrical, too, slightly higher up on the left side than on the right, and stronger. Glancing at the clock radio he was surprised at the lateness of the hour. His memories of the afternoon were vague after Lupe’s, but he remembered making a bet with Rex at the Chimneysweep.
As he sat up the nausea started to build, and he held his breath and counted to ten. Just as he reached ten he had a vision, a memory of a horrifyingly lucid nightmare about being attacked by a naked old man wielding a pool cue. Christ only knew where that one had come from. He got up off the bed and looked down at himself. He needed cleaning up badly.
He showered and changed clothes and put some lotion on his sunburn, which was worse than he’d expected. Loretta kept an emergency twenty-dollar bill taped to the underside of a kitchen drawer, which would pay for a cab ride to Belinda’s; he’d get his wallet and car keys back, and they could head for the track. She seemed like the kind of woman who’d enjoy the races, and he could put a few more dollars on Rusty.
He verified the presence of the bill and called the cab company.
“Oh, it’s Mister Gandy,” the dispatcher said when he gave her the address.
“How’d you know who I was?”
“Recognized the address. Just sent a man out there an hour or so ago. Didn’t he get there?”
Shit. Had he ordered another cab and forgotten about it? “It got here, I just need another one.”
“Okay. He’ll be there in about ten minutes.”
He hung up and absently picked up Loretta’s address book, in which someone had emphatically circled his mother-in-law’s address and phone with a blue ballpoint pen. He went outside to wait for the cab without giving it any more thought.
The building that had been the Sweet Cage’s first home was on the way to the Stars and Stripes Motel, and approaching it Sidney decided to stop and put up a flyer; he was curious as to what the new occupants had done to the place to take away the stripjoint atmosphere. A new wooden sign hung where the old one had been: FIRST CHURCH OF THE END TIMES, REV. Q. LEFLIN, PASTOR.
A single car sat in the lot, a rusted Dart with bumper stickers plastered all over its rear. He parked next to it, studying the side of the building. It had needed work when the Sweet Cage moved out and it hadn’t happened yet; big chunks of plaster had fallen off and lay nestled in the weeds in the narrow strip of dirt between the building and the parking lot.
Pulling the front door open he had an odd feeling of comfortable familiarity, almost as though the building were welcoming him back. It was hot as hell inside, almost as bad as outdoors, and he wondered what had happened to the air-conditioning. He’d forced the landlord to install a new condenser two years before they moved out and even if it had broken down it was under warranty.
“Hello? Anybody here?”
Even without any lights on in the front room he could see that it was dirtier than it had ever been when it was a nudie bar. The carpet looked as if it hadn’t been vacuumed since the church took it over, and the dust on the linoleum around the stage was thick enough that someone had fingered a little cross in it with the words “Jesus Loves You” written above it like “Wash Me” on a grimy car. The only physical changes he could see were an enormous plywood cross held to the east wall with baling wire and a matching plywood lectern at the front of the old stage, both of which looked like they’d been made in a junior high school woodshop. They hadn’t even bothered to take out the bar.
A small man of indeterminate age in a short-sleeved white shirt, black tie, and black pants came out of the back room, apparently in use as an office again. He had close-cropped black hair and a somber demeanor, and he seemed nonplussed to see an outsider in the building. “Can I help you?”
Sidney held out one of the flyers. “I was wondering if you’d let me put this up on your bulletin board.”
The man looked at the flyer. “Okay.” He walked over to a water-damaged, tattered cork message board opposite the lectern and tacked it up. In the shadows it was barely visible from where Sidney stood.
“I used to work here, before it was a church. You know, that air conditioner on the roof is practically brand new.”
“Electric bill,” the man said. “Nothing in scripture says we have to be comfortable when we worship.”
“Would you mind if I had a look at the back room?”
The man held out his open hand and swept it back toward the office. “Be my guest.”
The offic
e was laid out startlingly as it had been ten years earlier. The desk was in more or less the same position, and his sense that the building was welcoming him back now felt sinister. The office was dark, with no light coming in from the painted-over window on the south wall. He ignored an urge to bolt and took a long, deep whiff. The odor was still there, faint but unmistakable; how did the preacher stand working in here?
“Ever notice a smell?”
“A smell?”
“In here. A funny smell.”
“No sir.”
He stepped out of the room and stood behind the bar. Replace the rough-hewn lectern and cross with a jukebox and it might be 1979, with Sidney on afternoon shift. It wouldn’t take much more than that for the display of genitalia to become the building’s central function again. The sensation of time travel brought with it an instinctive urge to straighten the place up before Renata showed up and started bitching, and he knew it was time to go.
“Thanks for putting the flyer up.”
“You’re welcome.” The minister, if that’s what he was, headed back to the office, apparently with no interest in making a convert of Sidney.
“Hey, Reverend.” The man turned back to him as he pulled out his wallet and took out a couple of twenties. “There’s a little something for the collection. Good luck.”
“Thanks,” the minister said, stuffing the money into his shirt pocket, and went back into the office as Sidney made his way to the front door in the stifling heat.
The Walkaway Page 19