The Walkaway

by Scott Phillips

  “But you can’t tell me where the rest of the money’s been going?”

  “Not without a court order.”

  Ed thanked the man and went outside. He sat at the wheel of the rental car for a while and tried to imagine a way Gunther could have ended up with that much money without having done something very bad.

  Twenty minutes after leaving Sally’s house Gunther, still nowhere near the turnpike, passed by the old Riverside Zoo. He recalled walking there from his old bachelor’s studio when his daughters, still in their early teens, used to visit him on weekends; being in the neighborhood for what might be the last time he thought he’d swing past his old apartment, just for a quick look.

  The building was still standing. It had been new then, long and narrow with apartments on either side of a central corridor, made of blond brick with thick blocks of glass instead of bricks on the front end. Being halfway underground like Ray and Cal’s Barber Shop, the studio was always a little dark even in the daytime, its windows opening out at the level of the grass. There was another floor above his, and the building was full of people like Gunther: single, or single again, working odd hours, having just arrived in town or trying to get up the courage to leave. For him it was a place to hang his clothes and to sleep when he didn’t have a girlfriend who’d let him stay over; when he moved there in 1950 he was thirty-eight years old, and he’d already been married and divorced three times.

  He pulled away and circled the block, eventually braking in front of the zoo. He thought it had been replaced by a new one, but its buildings and cages appeared intact, and people were strolling through them in the warmth of the late evening. A row of enormous bird cages still stood to the right of the entrance, one of the tropical birds inside cawing frantically. Directly behind the cages had been the big redbrick monkey and lion house, and right in front of it the alligator pit, always his favorite part of the park. Fondly he recalled the old gator sunning himself in the circular trench with its hollow eyesockets, both eyes— so his daughters had assured him—lost to bottle caps thrown by wanton boys. During the warm months when it could be displayed outdoors it seemed never to move except to follow the sunlight, slinking from one end of its pit to the other, and he wondered now what possibly could have seemed amusing about such a spectacle. He almost felt like getting out to see if it was still there; instead he let slowly up on the brake and crept forward, his arm hanging out the window in the slight breeze.

  Three blocks up and to the left was Daisy and Ed’s old place, a small apartment complex built in the twenties; it was designed to look like a bunch of small houses attached side by side to one another, with a shared, sloping roof and flower beds and big windows looking out onto a central courtyard. It hadn’t changed much, as far as he could see. Lights were on in most of the apartments, and someone was playing “Stardust” on a piano.

  He’d first laid eyes on Sally Ogden here, at one of the loud, boozy parties Ed and Daisy used to throw before Daisy got religion. Sally drew his attention shortly after his arrival by flinging a drink at another guest, a tipsy woman who kept playing the first bars of “My Funny Valentine” very badly on Daisy’s upright piano, again and again, faltering every time at the key change.

  “Would it be too much to ask to cut that shit out?” Sally said just before emptying a full highball glass in the woman’s direction; Gunther was stunned both by the coarseness of the act and the beauty of the woman performing it. She looked like she belonged in a painting.

  While Daisy walked the weeping pianist home Sally turned on Gunther, whose inability to stop staring at her she misinterpreted as disapproval.

  “Yeah, well, you didn’t have to listen to ‘My Funny Goddamn Valentine’ twenty times in fifteen minutes,” she said.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You’re thinking it.”

  “I’m not thinking anything either.”

  Other people were, though; a tall, blond pinch-faced woman passed close by and murmured “bitch,” and Sally twisted her head around just long enough to spit “trash” back in her direction.

  She looked him in the eye. “I’ve had enough of this shit. You want to go down to Jack’s?”

  He’d never been to Jack’s but he was pretty much up for anything this woman wanted to do short of getting married. As they left the party he heard Ed Dieterle’s voice bellowing over the heads of the guests “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Now he sat in front of that same apartment building close to forty years later in a car he’d stolen from Sally’s son-in-law. In the Dieterles’ old apartment a big middle-aged man with a beard peered through the curtains at him suspiciously, and he noticed that whoever had been playing “Stardust” had stopped. He made a U-turn away from the curb and drove.

  He had been disturbed since leaving Sally’s by the Volvo’s failure to shift reliably, but he attributed the unpleasant sound coming from under the hood to the unfamiliar automatic transmission and left it at that. Now there was another noise, an alarming, high-pitched whine, and he noticed that the temperature gauge was edging into the red. He pulled over and looked down at the stick. P, R, N, D, D1, D2. He’d been switching back and forth between D1 and D2, unsure of which was the optimum setting.

  He was a few blocks west and north of the zoo now. A block away on the corner stood Jack’s; he could wait inside while the engine cooled off, and probably someone there would know the way to the turnpike.

  He sauntered up the sidewalk toward the tavern, feeling very much at home. Despite the day’s heat he could still see signs of yesterday’s shower; between the concrete blocks grew clumps of grass three or four inches high, and the lawns he passed were all thick and past due for mowing. He halfway hoped it would rain again before he went back to the home.

  Sticking out of the bricks above the tavern’s doorway was a dull and fissured yellow Plexiglas sign with red cursive letters so badly faded they were almost illegible even with the light on inside it: Jack’s River-bank Tavern. Approaching the door he saw as if in a dream the same old black Packard that had belonged to Jack back then, sitting fat and shiny next to the curb, and as he yanked open the battered old screen door its dry hinges let loose a grating metallic shriek.

  “Hey, there, stranger,” a lady of sixty or so called out to him from behind the bar. She had a deep, unnatural-looking tan set off with pinkish white eye shadow and lipstick, short hair bleached very blond, and stretched across her substantial bosom a tight blue T-shirt with glitter all over it that read WORLD’S SEXIEST GRANDMA. In her left hand, its nails long and lacquered the same color as her eyes and lips, she held a long, thin cigarette. “What’ll you be having?”

  He hadn’t really thought about it. He hadn’t had a drink in a long time, since before Lake Vista anyway. “What kinda beer you got?”

  “On tap I got Miller and Miller Light.”

  “Miller High Life?”

  “Genuine Draft. I got High Life in a bottle, though, if that’s what you want.”

  Gunther nodded and she pulled a bottle out of the cooler and set it down in front of him.

  “Seventy-five cents. You need a glass?” He shook his head no.

  He handed her a dollar, and when she gave him his quarter back he dropped it into a jar marked TIPPING ENCOURAGED.

  “Thanks,” she said, then returned to a conversation with a woman at the end of the bar.

  He took a swig and set the bottle back down and slushed the beer around in his mouth. It was blander than he remembered, although he might have been remembering some other brand, or even another type of beverage entirely.

  Across the pass-through behind the bar he saw a man his own age playing pool with a woman in her twenties. He was nattily dressed, with a bow tie and suspenders and a neatly trimmed beard, and he frowned thoughtfully at her every shot.

  “Excuse me, Miss,” he said, and the lady behind the bar laughed.

  “Thanks, Mister. You get another beer on the house for that.”

  “
Thanks,” he said, though he didn’t think he’d finish the first one and wasn’t sure what he’d done to merit a second. “I was just wondering about the old car out front.”

  “Oh, the Packard. That’s Dad’s.” She jerked her thumb toward the old man at the pool table.

  “Holy shit. Jack Teaberry.”

  She turned to yell out the pass-through. “Hey, Dad. Look who’s here.” The young woman had missed a shot, and Jack was now lining up his. Without answering his daughter he took his shot and missed. Only then did he deign to look up at his daughter in annoyance.

  “What?”

  “You got a visitor.”

  “Long time no see,” Jack said, obviously puzzled to see him, and for a minute Gunther was afraid Jack would call the cops and have him hauled back to the home. “Didn’t even know you were alive. Let me finish this game here, then we’ll shoot some, you and me.”

  Euchre had lasted less than an hour and a half, cut short by a losing streak so deep and persistent Sally could feel an outburst of pure yellow bile coming on. Reluctant to shock her card-playing friends, sweet grandmotherly types who mistakenly liked to think of themselves as a bunch of salty old broads, she had left early. Now she turned onto Control Tower Place and pulled into her driveway, nearly plowing into a shadowy figure who, moving into her headlights with an urgent wave, turned out to be her son-in-law. She stuck her head out the window.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Son of a bitch stole my car.”

  “Who?”

  “The old guy they’re all looking for. I tracked him down here and he stole my fucking Volvo.”

  “Don’t you use that language in my presence, Eric,” she said, though the word crossed her own lips a dozen times a day. “Did you call the police?”

  “Not yet. Can I borrow your car?”

  “You know perfectly goddamn well you can’t borrow my car, Eric.”

  He turned, muttering “Fuck,” and headed back into the house. She followed and found that while his car was being stolen he’d helped himself to the Tanqueray.

  “This old man who stole your car, you figure he hotwired it?”

  “He took my keys.” He poured himself another small gin, and she didn’t say anything.

  Maybe it was Gunther, then. He was a man of many and varied talents, often surprising ones, but hotwiring an ignition was certainly not among them. “What the hell happened to your head?”

  He touched his purplish temple and winced. “Guy bushwacked me back at our house.”

  “You fixing to call the police?”

  He shook his head. “I’m gonna call Loretta, see if she’ll let me drive the Caddy.” He dialed, avoiding her gaze, and since the bottle was out she poured herself a gin. “Shit. Got the machine.”

  “I’ll give you a lift home.”

  He looked at her suspiciously for a moment, trying to figure out her angle, then he shrugged and took a swig of his own drink. “It’s twelve thousand dollars to whoever finds this guy.”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “What was he doing here, anyway?”

  Sally shrugged. “Looking for me, I guess.”

  “You know him?”

  “We used to hang around a few years ago. He ran into Loretta yesterday, maybe that got him to thinking.”

  “Hang around?” He raised an eyebrow.

  She was annoyed by his insinuating tone, but she didn’t really care what he thought about her. “I used to keep company with old Gunther. He was real nice to me a few times when things got shitty. And I mean they got real shitty, once or twice. And he always treated Loretta right, too.”

  “So how come you didn’t marry him?”

  “Lots of reasons, and none of ’em’s any of your goddamn business. Come on, let’s go before I’m too drunk to drive.”

  She got up and he followed her to the garage, its door standing open and its light on. She pressed the button by the door and the garage door began to lift, revealing her car still sitting in the driveway.

  “What were you doing in the garage, anyway?”

  “I wasn’t in the garage,” he said.

  Then she saw her storage boxes sitting open, the newspapers in a pile on the concrete floor. “Must have been Gunther, then.”

  Eric stepped forward and picked up the newspaper on top of the stack. “Look at this. ‘NAB COLLINS SEX RING OPERATORS.’ ” He read silently for a second, then turned to Sally, startled. “Holy shit, it’s you.”

  “You better fucking swear you won’t tell Loretta.”

  “Sure thing . . .” It was the one with the photo of Sally being led away by Gunther’s jovial cop buddies. She hadn’t been able to make herself look at those old papers in years, but she couldn’t bear throwing them away either.

  “Bring those papers into the kitchen. You’re going to have to get a taxi home, ’cause I need another drink.”

  Loretta’s lonely Chinese dinner was eaten, her suspect sheets and bedspread drying downstairs. Another glass of cheap white wine in hand, she was watching an old “Dragnet” episode about LSD. She remembered watching it years ago with her roommate Ruth in their little duplex over by WSU, both of them giggling hysterically at the show and at Ruth’s boyfriend Evan, who was annoyed less by the laughter than by the fact that they were tripping and he wasn’t. She remembered thinking at the time that Ruth and Evan were like a couple marrying outside their religions; eventually one of them would convert the other or they’d split up.

  And so upon getting involved with Eric Gandy, a clean-cut, turtleneck-wearing, shorthaired juicer of the old school, she’d given up drugs of all kinds without acknowledging to him that she’d ever indulged in them. She remained drug-free until Eric discovered them himself in the mid-seventies, and when he imagined he was introducing her to the sordid thrill of pot smoking at the age of thirty, she let him think it was true.

  Now, watching Jack Webb’s earnest squint, she was overcome with an unexpected and intense desire to get high. It had been seven or eight years since she’d partaken, she guessed, around the time Eric stopped taking her to those kinds of social occasions. She had no idea where to buy any, nor whom to ask.

  Tate had some, though, up in his room. Shortly after his last visit home, she’d gone through his drawers with the intention of boxing up some of his old comic books and monster magazines to put in the attic, and there it was, a baggieful of weed. She wasn’t shocked or worried; mostly she was disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to empty the magazine drawers, since doing so would mean admitting she’d found the dope. She’d opened up the baggie for a sniff, and it had smelled good and fresh, though at the time the thought of firing some of it up never crossed her mind.

  Five minutes later she stepped through the sliding doors of the convenience store she used for last-minute emergencies. The man behind the counter knew her and smiled in greeting. He was old, maybe as old as Gunther, and that made what she was about to do feel unseemly at best.

  “Zig-Zag papers, please.” She couldn’t look him in the eye, and her face was hot.

  “Zig-Zags. What size?”

  “Double longs,” she said, and she looked up to see him still smiling in his friendly way. His white hair was slicked straight back, his nose gray from drinking, and she realized he didn’t give a shit whether she smoked pot or not. Unfortunately this did nothing to stem her embarrassment.

  He put a package of papers on the counter and rang it up. “I coulda guessed. Usually the ladies like ’em good and long.” He winked and her face got hotter.

  She paid him to the penny and turned to go. “See you,” she said. Her voice sounded high and squeaky to her, and she imagined she could feel his eyes on her rear end all the way to the car, but when she faced him again he was leaning on the counter the other way, reading the newspaper.

  Sally and Eric had polished off half the bottle of Tanqueray. “Even after I paid the girls their share, and Gunther, and the piece of shit shop steward, and the
old farmer who owned the land, I was still clearing a thousand bucks a month above and beyond my paycheck, pure profit.”

  “I always thought you guys were just scraping by when Loretta was little.”

  “Later we were.” Sally got up and poured herself another two fingers. “Want more?” she asked, already sloshing a little more into his glass. “That was a pretty good shot he got in to your head, looks like.”

  “He caught me off guard. I wouldn’t have thought such an old guy could pack that kind of wallop.”

  It didn’t surprise Sally. One Sunday at the cabin she’d blown the alarm whistle after a big redheaded fellow named Ricky Fast had decided he wanted a little backdoor action with Sonya Bockner. The other guy that weekend, a big talker by the name of Hal Waverly, stepped in between them, and Ricky picked him up and smashed him against the wall.

  “One more word out of you, Waverly, and I’ll brown-eye all three of you.” At that the intrepid Waverly had bolted, sprinting to the safety of the trees opposite the cabin, at which point Sally blew the whistle.

  Ten seconds later—she’d swear it hadn’t been any longer than that—Gunther was in the doorway, and then behind Ricky, gun drawn, and then Ricky was on the floor holding the back of his neck.

  “Get up.”

  He did as he was told, then swung at Gunther, who slammed his fist into Ricky’s big, soft gut. As he gurgled, sounding as if he were about to puke, Gunther crashed the butt of the pistol against his temple. Ricky went down with a yelp.

  “Weekend’s over. Pack up your shit and get out, all of you. Where’s the other one?”

  “He’s out there somewhere. Ricky here threatened to cornhole him.”

  “That what started it? Cornholing?”

  Sally nodded. “Wanted to do it to Sonya and she doesn’t go for that.”

  “I don’t blame her. All right, you go find your boyfriend and I’ll watch this bird.”

  She and Sonya left to find Hal. She didn’t know what Gunther had said to Ricky while they were alone, but he apologized to her and to Sonya, though not to Waverly, who steered carefully clear of him on the line after that.