The Walkaway

by Scott Phillips

  Dot’s expression didn’t change.

  “I think Gunther’s out looking for some money he thinks he hid somewhere.” He turned his attention to Tricia. “What were you looking for on that map?”

  “A rock quarry,” Tricia said.

  Dieterle got up. “Thank you, Tricia.” He kissed her on the top of the head. “You know what, sweetheart? This might be a little easier on your grandma if you weren’t in earshot.”

  “Oh,” she said. She stood. “I need to go to the store anyway.”

  A minute later Ed heard her car start, and he thought how funny it was that a woman her age, and about to start med school at that, hadn’t objected to being treated like a child.

  “He thinks that money’s still hid out there,” Dot finally allowed. “He doesn’t remember it went into the bank.”

  “What else is out there at the quarry?”

  “Nothing.”

  “There’s something out there that scares the bejesus out of you, or you would have told me about it first thing this afternoon. I’m going to find out what it is eventually, and you might as well save us both some grief and tell me now.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “You want to hear what I think? I think there’s a dead man by the name of Cavanaugh, and I think it was Gunther that put him there.”

  She was quiet for a few seconds, and she looked away from him. “That wasn’t it. It started with an A. He was a lawyer, I know that much. He had a Bar Association card in his wallet.”

  “So it’s true. I didn’t really think it was.” Ed looked nauseous. “He killed a man for the money he was carrying?”

  Dot stood up and slapped him across the face, then sat back down again. “Shame on you for even thinking that. It was an accident.”

  “How come he didn’t report it?”

  “Why do you think? Shit. Big bag full of dirty money and there we were, up to our asses in debt. Plus Gunther could’ve lost his license, running a man over like that.”

  Ed nodded. “Can I have a look at that map?” His throat sounded tight.

  She got it off the kitchen counter and handed it to him. As he spread it out on the table he touched his cheek where she’d hit him, and she reached out and touched it, too, for just a second.

  “Well, Jesus, Ed, I’m sorry I slapped you, but how the hell could you even think Gunther’d do something as wrong as that on purpose?”

  “Just lost my head for a second.” He grabbed a ballpoint pen and leaned down a couple of inches from the map, trying to remember how to get to that quarry. “Pullwell was the town . . .”

  Eric walked out of Sally’s kitchen door with the directions to the old quarry in his shirt pocket. She watched him go with something close to affection, and for a second he looked just like his son Tate. Same jumpy gait, same slouch, same way of tilting his head to the side when he walked. For a moment she worried about the boy, coming from this lout on the one side and from herself and Wayne a generation back on the other. Then she remembered that she used to think the same thing about Loretta, and she’d turned out pretty much okay.

  It didn’t occur to her until he was already out of sight that the engine she heard turning over was her own. She ran outside, appearing in front of the house just as he was shifting out of reverse and heading up the street.

  “You son of a bitch, you bring that back here!” she yelled, but he just stuck his hand out the window and waved. When he was finally out of sight she smashed her highball glass onto the asphalt, accompanying the attendant crash with a loud “Fuck!” She marched back inside, not caring who’d heard.

  He might at least have asked, she thought, pulling down another glass and filling it. Poor dumbass is going to drive all that way out there and find the burnt foundation of the cabin and jack shit else, be lucky if he doesn’t kill himself.

  She wondered about what he’d said, about Gunther coming over looking for a little action. But Gunther was married now, and he never was one to mess around behind your back. Course he was senile, so who knew if he even remembered he had a wife.

  Twenty years earlier, when she heard Gunther had finally married Dot McCallum, she’d stewed for days. It figured, though; the whole time he was with Sally she knew he still had a thing for Dot, who didn’t have half her looks. Dot held on to him by virtue of having broken his heart, and Sally had come along too late for that.

  She’d written him a few times after the move to Cottonwood, and he’d answered faithfully. When things got really bad once or twice and she’d broken down and asked him for money, he sent it immediately and refused repayment. But he never came to visit, and a few years later when she wrote to tell him she was about to marry Donald, offering him one last chance, he didn’t answer. There was no getting around the fact that without Gunther she’d likely have been put in jail. She would have lost Loretta to a foster family or the Children’s Home, maybe for good, but it was going to be a long fucking time before she stopped being pissed off at him.

  The Volvo’s engine had cooled by the time Jack and Gunther finished shooting pool. Jack had been more than willing to reminisce about the old days, but he’d never been to the quarry himself and was no help with the directions, other than pointing him in the direction of the turnpike.

  As he swung around the curve in the river with both front windows lowered, warm breeze flowing through the front seat, he tried to remember Jack’s directions, reflecting that he probably would have had better luck with cars if he’d been driving an automatic all those years. He had it in D now, as Jack had suggested, and the damned thing seemed to be running okay. Cut over to Kellogg and then east all the way out of town, where the on-ramp was; it was a waste of time since he was going to be heading west, but damned if Jack knew anymore where another turnpike on-ramp was. He passed through downtown and then south until he hit Kellogg.

  The street had changed a lot since Gunther had last driven it; he wasn’t even certain he had the right road until Calvary cemetery rose up on his right. Albert Vance was buried there, and Gunther gave him a little wave as he passed it. “Don’t take any wooden nickels, Al.”

  Vance was buried on a cold morning in November of ’64 with a deep blue sky and hardly any wind. He was a popular guy, and it was a well-attended burial service. Gunther saw it now, cops in uniform and in dark suits and overcoats, and a fair number of their wives, and he could have named all the attendees if he’d been asked. The grass was almost white and crackled underfoot like straw, and the atmosphere was surprisingly light among the dead man’s colleagues, if not their wives or the other women present. Al had died screwing one of his numerous girlfriends, several of whom were present and eyeing each other nastily, jockeying for position as the Official Paramour of the Deceased.

  On reflection he could think of four other cops and two of their wives who were buried there, and off the top of his head he found that he could name seven local cemeteries and their street addresses, and at least two or three people he knew buried in each. His father and mother were in Hillcrest, farther north. His other mother, his real mother, was buried in a tiny cemetery a few miles outside Cottonwood. He hadn’t visited since shortly before his first marriage, and the thought filled him with remorse. He resolved to go there before he turned himself back in at the home. Who knew if they’d ever let him out again, even for a last, short trip to his mutti’s grave.

  He was off the highway part of Kellogg now, passing through a residential district on one side and a row of motels and used car lots on the other. On his left was Eastborough pond, a park with a tiny man-made lake where one night in 1969 a man had been arrested for screwing a duck. The story made it into the next afternoon’s Beacon, a tiny item on page three that nonetheless contained the phrase “unlawful sodomy with a duck,” a first for a family newspaper as far as he knew. The perpetrator’s name had kindly been left out of the story, and Gunther couldn’t quite call it up now. He remembered the man’s face, though, one of the scaredest guys he’d
ever seen booked.

  He wasn’t far from Lake Vista now, and he grunted at the sight of it in the distance. Maybe they’d get their security down tighter now; God knew lots of those old people couldn’t survive outside the place.

  On his left was a big discount store, its lights still burning and cars in the lot. There was a traffic signal ahead and he pulled into the lefthand lane and signaled. He’d be spending the night at the quarry; he’d need a tent and a bedroll, and now that he thought of it a shovel.

  He parked near the entrance, and stepping inside he thought he’d gone into the wrong place. The store had been there thirty years and he’d been in hundreds of times since then, once or twice for official reasons, but nothing about the cavernous, brilliantly lit building he found himself in was familiar. There was advertising everywhere, on the walls and on the shelves and even over the loudspeaker; where before there had been only a live clerk reading off what the hourly special was, professionally produced radio ads now alternated with hysterical, overwrought singing.

  Wandering toward where the sporting goods section used to be, he found instead a couple of dozen standing racks with brassieres of various colors, textures, and sizes hanging above matching panties. He reached out automatically to feel the leghole of one pair that reminded him of Sally’s, high-waisted, white, and satiny in texture. He rubbed the fabric between his thumb and forefinger. Sometimes she wore black and sometimes white, never red, gray sometimes, he thought, and sometimes a very light brownish color. His first wife Imogene had liked nice lingerie but tended to come home lacking the bottom half of a matching set. Jean, his second wife, wore nice underwear only on special occasions like his birthday and New Year’s Eve; the rest of the time it was plain cotton, purely functional and arousing as tent canvas. Number three, Mildred, habitually wore bra, panties, garter belt, and stockings to bed—sometimes a gartered girdle instead of the belt— under a nightgown. He found that titillating until he realized she didn’t mean it to be; they were married for nearly three years and in that time he never once saw her completely naked. Once he blundered into the bathroom and found her sitting in the bathtub wearing her brassiere, and it began to dawn on him that he was married to a madwoman.

  Then there was Dot. He tried to think what she wore underneath but couldn’t picture it. In fact, he couldn’t picture Dot at all for the moment, which troubled him.

  He was still enjoying the smooth feel of the garment on his fingertips and was considering bringing it up to his face when he heard the pleasing sound of girlish laughter behind him.

  “Can we help you find anything, sir?” asked one of two giggling shopgirls. They wore identical green vests and neither one looked older than twelve.

  “Bivouac.”

  “What?” asked the other, and they both erupted in a giggling fit. He waited for it to subside before answering.

  “Need bivouacking gear.”

  The first one started laughing again but the second worked hard to maintain her composure. “We don’t stock those. You might try Frederick’s of Hollywood, down at the mall, though.”

  He had only a vague idea what that was but he knew it couldn’t be right, so he simplified the request. “I need a tent and a bedroll. And a shovel.”

  “A bedroll? You mean like a sleeping bag?”

  “Yeah. Tent, sleeping bag, shovel.”

  “Oh. Sporting goods for the first two, hardware for the shovel.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Way down in the corner,” she said.

  Gunther no longer heard the giggling when he got to sporting goods, though he sensed it was still going on. He took the cheapest sleeping bag they had at thirty-five dollars. Tents started at seventyfive and he decided he didn’t need one, but as long as he was in sporting goods he picked up a seven-dollar jackknife and put it into his pocket, intending to pull it out and pay for it when the time came. The shovel was only ten, and when he checked out the woman at the register gave him an odd look, trying to place him. She didn’t say anything, though, and he got out to the car without incident and loaded his purchases in the backseat; the jackknife was still in his pocket, forgotten and unpaid for.

  Gil Stratmeyer, thirty-nine years old, he thought as he closed the door and started the engine. Lived at 1136 Lasserman. Wife’s name was Lorraine. That was the guy with the duck, and twenty years later he could call it up just like that. The name had a joke attached to it. Someone had asked if the duck was a drake or a hen, and Ed piped up without hesitation:

  “Shit, it was a hen. Nothin’ queer about Gil Stratmeyer,” he’d said, and even the poor depraved duckfucker laughed a little.

  I’m sharp as a tack. There’s no way in hell I belong in the old folks’ home, Gunther thought as he got back onto East Kellogg, and a minute later he pulled onto the turnpike.

  Eric swung Sally’s Grand Am into a space in front of the Chimneysweep. Above the door was an old plastic sign with a crude rendering of a deranged-looking man in a top hat, his head and a wildly bristled brush sticking out of a chimney on a rooftop. There were only six cars in the lot, which seemed like a poor tally for a Friday night. When he pushed his way through the door, though, he found it smoky, packed, and loud. Either the drunks were carpooling or the surrounding neighborhood supplied a large portion of the Chimneysweep’s customer base.

  He muscled his way through to a narrow space at the bar, and one of several harried bartenders came immediately over and leaned forward, cupping her ear to hear Eric’s order. “Margarita, rocks. Is Rex here?”

  She shrugged, either to indicate that she didn’t know or hadn’t heard; bolstering the latter hypothesis, she poured him a blended margarita from a pitcher. He took a swig anyway and dropped a twenty onto the bar, happy at least to be flush again. He pocketed the change when she slapped it down onto the wet bar, stiffing the Chimneysweep’s bar staff for the second time that day. He jumped at the touch of a finger on his shoulder and turned to see Rex.

  Rex grimaced, squinting to examine the details of Eric’s injuries in the darkness. “You look worse than you did at lunchtime. What happened?”

  “Fell down some stairs.”

  “The fuck you did.”

  “Hey, Rex, was that a quiniela or an exacta I bet this afternoon? On Rusty and Prince o’ Chincoteague?”

  “Exacta in the wrong order. Too bad, the other way around paid pretty good.” He said it without consulting his little book, and Eric ignored the tiny voice that wanted him to ask Rex to double-check. “You’re not going belly up, are you, Gandy?”

  “On one dog bet?”

  “I keep hearing things. I was wondering if they were true or if people were just talking that way because they been seeing you drunk and dirty in the middle of the afternoon.”

  At that moment Eric experienced a nauseous, urgent desire to escape the smoke and voices, and he set the drink down. “See you, Rex,” he said, and he hurried for the door without waiting for a reply.

  Sidney sat exhausted at the bar of the Sweet Cage, sipping a club soda and wishing he was somewhere else. It was his least favorite kind of crowd, enthusiastic and noisy, with another bachelor party going on around stage one. Since they were spending money he couldn’t feel bad about it, but the old feeling that a fight might break out at any second made a knot in his stomach, despite his full awareness that he now paid others to deal with such eventualities. He was about to get up and leave when Francie Cherkas strode in past the doorman. She came straight over and threw her arms around him from behind, smelling of baby powder and lavender and something else, a perfume of some sort that grappled with the other two odors for primacy on Francie’s generous bosom, which was pressed hard against Sidney’s back and shoulder.

  “Oh, Sidney, I’m so sorry about your dad, you must just be completely freaked out.” She had on one of her odd-looking ass-length wigs and a canary yellow pants suit with bell-bottom pants.

  “He’s my stepdad.”

  “Oh.” She nodded solemnly.
“Hey, guess who I ran into in the Men’s Department at Dillard’s? Caroline.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “I don’t know, Sidney. Maybe you shouldn’t have let her slip away.”

  “Maybe not,” he said, unwilling to argue the point with her. Caroline was an English teacher who, in the end, hadn’t wanted to share her life with a strip show promoter. They’d spent an evening at Mitch and Francie’s house once; Francie had on an avocado minidress circa 1974, and she served fondue and Cold Duck, the latter in jelly glasses with ice. If Caroline had a patronizing thought all evening she kept it to herself. “Isn’t it sweet that two such hard-to-match people managed to find each other,” she’d said in the car afterward. Sidney, who had known Francie when she was still turning the occasional trick to make ends meet, and Mitch when he was a forty-year-old virgin, kept his opinion of the union to himself.

  “What are you doing here this late?” he asked. “Where’s Mitch?”

  “It’s Culligan’s birthday, so we’re taking him around to all the clubs.”

  At that moment Mitch pushed an extremely old man in a wheelchair through the door and grinned at the sight of Sidney. He nudged the chair’s occupant, who turned reluctantly from the dancer on stage two to look at Sidney and give a short wave hello. Mitch wheeled him over to Sidney, to the old man’s obvious discontent.

  “Happy birthday, Culligan.” Culligan had been an obnoxiously faithful customer in the old days, and Sidney suspected that for him the worst aspect of old age and infirmity was the inability to get to the nudie clubs on a nightly basis.

  Culligan pulled a five-dollar bill out of his shirt pocket with a shaky hand. “Gonna be a happy birthday in a minute when I get over there to the stage.”

  “How old are you, anyway?”

  “Seventy-nine.”

  Sidney looked at him and wondered how he could be only two years older than Gunther. In this light his skin was the color of library paste in some places and of ripe strawberries in others. He couldn’t stand up anymore and he didn’t seem to hear too well, whereas all Gunther seemed to have lost was his mind.