The Last Long Walk Home
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The Last Long Walk Home
By Tom Upton
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Copyright © 2013 Tom Upton. All rights are reserved.
All characters in this book are imaginary. Any resemblance to actual person is purely coincidental.
THE LAST LONG
WALK HOME
John Townes had no hobbies. He had never been much interested in gardening, and assembling jigsaw puzzles usually gave him a headache. Any other hobbies seemed either unappealing or tedious or just plain stupid. So when he retired, he found that he had much time on his hands.
Between lunch and dinner each day, he started to take a walk. At first, this, too, seemed rather pointless. But in time, he learned to enjoy his walks; the exercise kept him fit, and seemed to help his digestion, which had been troublesome at times. It seemed he walked more and more each day, until he was away from the house for two, even three, hours. At first his wife thought that this was a bad idea. What if something happened to him? How would she know? But after he had returned each day, like clockwork before dinner, her worries faded away, and she was actually able to enjoy the peace of not having him around the house, through which he was prone to prowl like a caged animal if he had nothing to occupy him.
One spring day, he was walking down a main street. The sun warmed his back, and a soft breeze played with a wisp of his gray hair.
It was a fine day.
He stopped at a red light at the corner, and waited while cars passed this way and that before him. He wondered that there were so many people and that all of them seemed to have a purpose. And the cars passed in such an orderly way it was hard to imagine that accidents were possible. They were so quiet now-- so different from his first car, a Nash.
The light turned green, and he started across the street. He was struck by a strange feeling, then, just before he reached the opposite curb-- a sudden feeling of out-of-place-ness-- and he stopped in his tracks. He looked around. Nothing was familiar. The small deli on the corner he’d been approaching, the gas station he had just passed-- everything seemed foreign. He was still puzzling over it all, when the driver whose path he was blocking blew his horn.
John quickly shuffled to the safety of the sidewalk.
He briefly considered the possibility he had walked too far, that he had crossed over into one of the suburbs.
Whatever the case, he was completely lost and wasn’t sure which way to go. Any direction was as good as any other, he reasoned at length, and so he turned to his right and continued walking.
Sooner or later, he would see something he recognized.
***********
The houses looked all the same-- blocks lined with brick bungalows that seemed familiar and strange at the same time.
Draperies in the front windows were drawn shut. His wife would never have that. If the sun were shining brightly, like now, the draperies would always be open. “Let the light in,” she was fond of saying. “After you die, you’re in the darkness for a long, long time.”
At first he was panic-y, but soon he forgot that he seemed to be lost. The act of walking was somehow reassuring. If you’re moving everything is all right; it’s when you’re stopped, like a sitting duck, that you have to worry.
He shuffled along the newly laid sidewalks, murmuring to himself, remembering streets whose walkways were cracked and uneven and the sudden sharp impact of flesh on stone the time he’d fallen and broken his wrist and bloodied his forehead. The memory seemed so new he had to wriggle his wrist to assure himself that it had been a couple years since it had been in a cast.
“Yeah, years ago,” he muttered, and a woman who was watering her front lawn heard him and stared at him as he moved down the street.
Looked like Gene’s mother, that one, he thought of the woman. Oh, gosh, when was it she got killed? Just after the war-- that’s right. Hit by a drunk driver. Gene and I were wearing our uniforms at the wake, sure. Heck of a thing-- a guy coming back from the war-- not home a week yet-- seeing what he saw-- and thinking everything is going back to normal, then, bam, your mother gets run down. Sad-- so very sad.
He thought about the war often these days. Even now he glanced at the clear blue sky, and remembered the times he had seen the bombers, huge, hulking, gray, threading through the wispy white clouds. When the bombs hit the ground, it seemed the entire earth would shake. The tanks used to hop a meter off the ground, and when they fell back down their tracks would be embedded in the earth. Where had that been? Sicily? North Africa? No, that was Sicily, he was sure. North Africa-- that was different. It had been hot-- so very hot. And the bugs! You had to eat meals with one hand, and swat the bugs away with the other. He had been a cook then, and hadn’t marched much but rode in the cook wagon. He remembered, with great pride, the time he had made whipped cream in the desert so that the guys could eat it with their canned peaches. Imagine that, he thought. Whipped cream in the desert!
He must have said it out loud, too, because man, who had just parked his car at the curb, stopped to stare at him curiously, as though he’d hadn’t quite heard right.
“I made whipped cream,” John said, and the man frowned and shook his head, not understanding. People seemed so stupid these days. It irked John that more and more often people didn’t appeared to understand him. “Oh, mind your own business,” he grumbled at the guy, and continued walking.