The Long Way Home

by Richard Chizmar

  It didn’t matter. He could still feel Jim Hall’s green eyes on him.

  THE MAN

  IN THE

  BLACK SWEATER

  The beer was gone. The fire was dying. A chill had crept into the autumn night air.

  “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

  The boy in the red hat spoke up first. He was drunk.

  “I killed someone once. A hit and run. I was speeding and it was an accident, but I could have maybe saved the girl’s life if I had called for help. Instead I got back into my car and left her there.”

  The man in the black sweater slid the knife out of his pants pocket. After three long years, he had found him.

  ODD NUMBERS

  Six ninety-three…six ninety-four…six ninety-five.

  I stop in front of the Redbox machine and tap the toe of my right shoe against the bottom of the unit. Three times. Not two times and not four times. Always three.

  I live three blocks from the corner of Hanson and Cherry Streets, which is where the local Rite Aid is located. The Redbox machine is tucked against the front left wall of the squat, brick building. Exactly six-hundred-and-ninety-five steps from the front door of my house. It’s another nineteen steps to reach the automatic doors leading inside the Rite Aid, but I’m not venturing inside today. I’m just here for a movie.

  I scan the selection of new titles and settle on an action-thriller. Friends find it strange that I like these kinds of movies, but I do. Handguns and head-butts and things that go boom; escapism at its very best. I find I can shut off my mind for a couple hours and just let myself be entertained.

  I slide my credit card back into my wallet, my wallet back into my pants pocket. I wait for the machine to spit out my movie and when it does, I grab it and turn to head for home—

  One…

  —and almost knock Old Lady Reeves right off her feet.

  “I’m so sorry,” I sputter, steadying her by one frail shoulder. I notice the dark brown wig she’s wearing has been nudged slightly off-center, but I don’t mention it.

  My eighty-three-year-old next-door neighbor readjusts the purse on her arm and smiles up at me. “It’s okay, honey. I shouldn’t have snuck up on you like that.” She glances at the movie in my hand. “Anything good?”

  I show her the title and she wrinkles her nose. “Not much of a story, but lots of gunfights and boobs. You’ll love it.”

  I crack up laughing, and she does the same—and the sound of our laughter in the cool autumn air does my heart good. I know I need to laugh more often.

  “You want a ride home?” she asks. “I’ll only be a few minutes inside.”

  “Thanks, but I’m enjoying the fresh air.”

  She straightens her purse again and starts shuffling toward the entrance. “Stop by tonight around dinnertime if you’re hungry. Making beef stroganoff.”

  My eyes widen. “That’s not fair! You know I’m on a diet!”

  Her voice takes on a teasing tone, and I want to chase her down and hug her. “I know no such thing, Mr. Bryant. I only know that I’ll be setting the table at six sharp. One plate or two, it’s all the same to me.”

  I groan. “I’ll be there.”

  “Very well. Dinner for two then,” she says over her shoulder, and I watch the electric doors swallow her away.

  “Dinner for two,” I mutter to myself, smile fading, thinking: Even number. Bad luck.

  I head for home, counting inside my head as I go.

  One…two…three…four…

  ****

  I’ve always liked numbers—and counting things.

  It started many years ago when I was a child. I can remember spending hours alone in my bedroom with my baseball card collection. Counting. Organizing. Memorizing batting averages and fielding percentages and earned run averages. And my coin collection; mostly just wheatie-pennies and buffalo head nickels, but I was obsessed with it for a number of years. My father always used to tell me: only a coin’s physical condition is more important than the number printed on it. Even then, I liked the simplicity of that statement.

  My natural love of numbers made school easy for me. I was always good at math. Formulas just made a weird sort of sense. The numbers were almost like letters, the complex equations like words that linked to form sentences. Doing math was kind of like reading for me. I remember telling the middle school counselor that one day and she just looked at me like I was talking gibberish. I never went back and talked to her again after that.

  But it wasn’t just math that it helped me with. When you get down to it, history is really just remembering stories and dates and all sorts of other kinds of numbers—the sizes of armies and navies, the dates of invasions and the anniversaries of events ranging from independence to assassination. English is merely more of the same, and poetry is nothing but numbers if you look at it in a certain light. Poetic formulas and patterns and iambic pentameters and weak syllables and so on. Even Einstein is known to have said, “Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.”

  Being good at numbers helped me get good grades, but it did so much more than that. It made other students acknowledge my existence and it made my teachers proud of me. It also made my mother smile that beautiful smile of hers and made her love me more.

  That’s how it started.

  Two twenty-three…two twenty-four…two twenty-five…

  ****

  The thing with odd numbers didn’t start until later when I got into high school. I don’t why it sprung to life when it did—there was no single catalyst, no one moment in time that I can remember—and I don’t know why it has become such an important part of my life. But it has.

  For the past thirty years, when I lock my door at night or when I leave the house, I always check the doorknob three times to make sure it’s locked. Always three—never two and never four. When I brush my teeth in the morning and at night, I always brush fifty-five strokes. Never less, never more. When I set my alarm clock, I never set it for a flat time such as 6am I always set it for 6:03am or 6:33am. When I fill up my gas tank, I always stop at an odd number. If my tank is full and the meter reads $58.46, I sneakily squirt fifty-four cents of gas into a nearby drain or right onto the pavement.

  Yes, I know there is medicine for this type of thing. I tried many different kinds for many different years, and none of them made the numbers inside my head disappear. So I’ve learned to live with them. In fact, I’ve learned to cherish them. They may extend the amount of time it takes me to travel from Point A to Point B, and they may clog my head at times with a spider-web of criss-crossing and hop-scotching patterns and formulas (a lot like math or poetry in that regard), but they also make my life more interesting and remind me of a time when life was happier and simpler and a whole lot safer.

  Five fifty-five…five fifty-six…five fifty-seven…

  ****

  When I was a junior in high school, I volunteered to keep game stats for the basketball and baseball teams. I enjoyed watching the games from the bench and was a natural at keeping records. The coaches couldn’t lavish enough praise on my detailed game reports and over time even the players learned to tolerate my presence. By the time I was a senior, one or two of them even grew to like me.

  At the Varsity Basketball banquet, team captains Frankie Johnstone and Dennis Smith—who would both be killed later that year in a head-on collision with a snowplow—called me up to the podium and presented me with an honorary Edgewood Rams jersey. My last name was stitched along the top of the back of the jersey, just like the real players, and centered underneath was the number 33.

  I had never told anyone—not even my mother—that my favorite number was 33, but they had somehow known. I remember staring at myself wearing that jersey in my bedroom mirror night after night once my parents had gone to sleep. I still have it. It’
s hanging upstairs in my bedroom closet right now.

  If 33 is my all-time favorite number, then 24 is my all-time least favorite. The biggest bully on both the basketball and baseball teams wore number 24. Riley Evander. As dumb as he was mean, and he was plenty mean.

  And then there’s this: my mother died on February 24. A heart attack while carrying in bags of groceries from the car. February, the second month of the year, the only month with twenty-eight days (two more even numbers for you) is an awful month. Nothing but filthy gray skies and ice-slicked highways and a hollow, aching loneliness. The number 24 is a bad number. It’s evil, like bananas and mushrooms.

  Six seventy-five…six seventy-six…six seventy-seven…

  ****

  “Six ninety-three…six ninety-four…six ninety-five.”

  No one can hear me, so I speak the final three numbers aloud as I mount the front porch of my house and reach for the doorknob.

  Before I can check the door, a car horn blares behind me on the street. I look and return a wave to my occasional poker buddy, Tim King, who lives on the next block. He toots a goodbye—three short bleats, thank you very much—and disappears down the street.

  My mind immediately catalogues and calculates the incident without prompting or warning. Old Lady Reeves. John Wagner. Tim King. That’s three “hellos” on the way home. At six hundred and ninety-five steps, that’s an average of one hello per every two hundred and thirty-one steps. And a little change left over. Odd numbers all. Good.

  I turn back to the house and tap my right shoe against the base of the door three times, while at the same time trying the doorknob three times before sliding my key into the lock.

  All is well, so I step into the foyer and close the door behind me, once again checking it three times to make sure it’s locked. Then, I go into the kitchen and grab a bottle of water from the fridge and stand in front of the big bay window, drinking my water and staring outside at the back yard. There’s a scattering of fallen twigs that need picking up and leaves that need to be raked, but I decide to watch my movie before it’s time to head next door for dinner. It’s Sunday, after all.

  I start for the family room.

  One…two…three…

  ****

  My alarm goes off at 6:33am Monday morning. It takes me just over a half-hour to shower (eleven steps from bedside to bathroom) and dress and fix myself a cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich. I lock the front door at 7:05am and check it three times. Seventeen steps from the front porch to my car parked in the driveway. All is well.

  The drive to work usually takes anywhere from twenty-five to forty-five minutes, depending on traffic. It takes exactly twenty-nine minutes today. During the first twenty-seven of those twenty-nine minutes, I listen to seven songs from the Elton John Greatest Hits CD in my car. The last two minutes I drive in silence. I never like to reach my destination in the middle of a song. It’s bad luck.

  When I pull into the Bender & Price Electronics employee parking lot at 7:37am, the lot is still mostly empty. I flip a wave to Henry at the front gate, steer around a gaping pothole marked by a pair of orange traffic cones, then turn left into the second aisle. I swing my car into parking spot number 33. I turn off the engine and allow myself a smile. It’s going to be a good day.

  ****

  I wash the dinner dishes by hand and leave them on the counter to dry. Then I wipe my hands with the towel hanging under the sink, triple-check the oven is turned off, and walk over to the bay window. Nine steps.

  Today hadn’t turned out to be a good day, after all. Still no word on the possible promotion. Still not a hint of recognition from the pretty new redhead in Accounting. And a flat tire on the way home.

  I notice a pair of cardinals fluttering in and out of the birdfeeder out back and decide it’s time for a refill. That usually cheers me up. My mother loved bird-watching when I was a boy, and she taught me volumes about the various species and their habits.

  I open an overhead cabinet, take out a brand new bag of birdseed, and head downstairs to the back door. Twenty-seven steps.

  Once outside, I zip up my jacket against the evening chill and count my steps as I make my way to the weeping willow tree that umbrellas the back portion of my yard.

  Eleven…twelve…thirteen…

  Somewhere in the neighborhood a car backfires and I can hear the hollow thumps of a basketball bouncing on a nearby driveway.

  Nineteen…twenty…twenty-one…

  The cardinals sense my approach and take off with a silent flap of scarlet wings.

  Twenty-five…twenty-six…twenty-seven…

  Two houses down and across the street, I hear Mrs. Cavanaugh calling in her boys for dinner. It’s a lonely, somber sound.

  Thirty-three…thirty-four…thirty-five…thirty-six.

  I stop abruptly at the base of the tree. Frowning, I quickly look back over my shoulder at the house. The kitchen light is on; otherwise the house is cloaked in darkness.

  Thirty-six steps.

  Instead of the usual thirty-seven.

  Something is wrong.

  ****

  Work the next day passes in a fast-forward blur of spread- and balance-sheets. Still no news about my promotion and still not even a sideways glance from the pretty redhead.

  Earlier in the morning, when I pull into the employee lot fifteen minutes early, I find a red pick-up truck parked in my spot and have to settle for number thirty-five. I don’t know it then, but it’s a sign of things to come.

  Now, after a thankfully uneventful drive home and a half-hearted attempt at dinner, I find myself standing just outside the back door to my house, staring at the towering weeping willow tree. I can stall no longer. I start walking.

  One…two…three…

  Deep breath. I’m sure it’s nothing. Just think of something happy.

  Seventeen…eighteen…nineteen…

  Probably just took bigger steps yesterday. It’s happened before, hasn’t it?

  Twenty-five…twenty-six…twenty-seven…

  I never take bigger steps, and I know it.

  Thirty-one…thirty-two…thirty-three…thirty-four.

  My heart feels like it’s going to burst out of my chest.

  Thirty-four steps.

  Two fewer than yesterday.

  Three fewer than all the days before.

  Shuddering, I look back over my shoulder—and I know.

  The tree is getting closer to the house.

  ****

  The alarm clock goes off at 6:33am—but I’m already awake. I have been for hours. I reach over and turn it off and swivel my feet off the bed onto the cold floor.

  I sit there for a long moment, massaging my temple, trying to think away the dream.

  I usually dream in formulas or equations. Floating numbers, like dust motes in a sun-splashed July bedroom, that somehow weave and vortex in and out of focus to eventually link and form a perfectly perfect pattern.

  But this dream is different…

  The tree is closer. Almost halfway across the yard now. Close enough to bend over with a creak of ancient wood and reach out with one long gnarled and twisted arm, its dry bark scraping against my bedroom window like skeletal fingers clawing to get in…

  ****

  Hump day at the office, and nothing is going right.

  Not only have I not heard another word about my phantom promotion, I think the vice-president avoided me this morning. In fact, I’m sure of it. I spotted him earlier in the break-room (thirty-one steps from my corner office to the break-room), but when I started to walk over to make small-talk about the upcoming Seahawks game, he ditched me and ducked out the back door.

  And then there’s Cynthia, the redhead from Accounting. She finally noticed me this morning—oh, she noticed me all right—but only because I tripped in my hurry to
chase down the VP and sloshed my glass of orange juice all over the front of her expensive sweater. I apologized several times, but I could tell she stopped hearing me after the first time. I could also tell by the disgusted look on her face that there would no second chance to make a decent impression.

  I have a bad feeling, and my bad feelings are usually right.

  I had one the night Frankie and Dennis got flattened by the snow-plow during my senior year in high school.

  I had one the day the Edgewood Senior Citizens’ Hall burned down and seven people died.

  I had one the night I lost my father.

  And I had a very bad feeling the day my mother passed away.

  It’s the numbers.

  I mentioned before that numbers are like letters to me; complex equations and formulas are like simple words and sentences.

  And they are everywhere.

  The world is filled with numbers. You see them everywhere you turn. License plates and billboards. Newspapers and magazines. Televisions and cellphones and computers and books.

  To most people numbers are just so much more eye-candy or mind-clutter. But, to me, they form patterns and pictures inside my mind. To me, they make perfect sense, and I often find it difficult to understand how others fail to detect and decipher them with the same ease and simplicity.

  I might see a total of seventy-seven numbers on license plates on my way to the grocery store one afternoon. Another two hundred and fifty-three numbers on various cans and cartons and other packaging while at the store. I may check out at register three and pay a total of $147.47 for my purchases. On the way home, I may stop at a total of five traffic lights and three stop signs.

  These numbers mean nothing to the average person. Random and overwhelming and meaningless. But, to me, they tell a story. Sometimes a good story; often times not so good. Sometimes they act as a warning.

  I wish I could leave work early today, but I know I can’t do that. Not with the promotion on the table and the stack of work on my desk.

  Instead, I stare straight ahead and try to focus on the numbers on my computer screen.