The Walkaway

by Scott Phillips

  “I like Rusty in the eighth.”

  Rex nodded. “Win?”

  “Five to win, five on an exacta with Prince o’ Chincoteague.”

  Rex noted the bets and replaced the notebook in his hip pocket. “Best of luck.”

  Eric could feel his head begin to swim, and he ordered his last margarita. When Freddy served it Eric gave him three of the four dollars he had left, slipping the leftover bill back into his shirt pocket; old Freddy sure as shit wasn’t getting a tip out of Eric Gandy.

  Dot sat watching the passing cross streets from the passenger window of her granddaughter’s car and mentally retraced as much as she could of the route to the quarry, but she’d been asleep for most of it. All she knew for sure was that it started out southbound on the turnpike, which is where she’d fallen asleep, and then once you got close there were a bunch of turns on a series of dirt roads.

  “Are you okay, Moomaw?”

  “I’m fine. What were you saying?”

  “Nothing, just talking about school.” Tricia was starting med school in the fall, and her intelligence mystified Dot as much as her sweetness; neither was in great supply at any recent point in her family tree. “I applied for a semester abroad program at the medical school in Heidelberg. That’d be in two years.”

  “Well, if you think that’d make you a better doctor.” Dot didn’t think it would; Tricia had spent one semester over there already, which she and Gunther had helped pay for, and that seemed like enough. “Nice that a girl can grow up to be a doctor now,” she said.

  “It’s not new. There’ve been women doctors since the turn of the century or before, even.”

  “Well, excuse me, miss, but I can promise you in my day it wasn’t considered an option.” She knew she shouldn’t be snapping at the girl, who’d been nothing but obliging to her since she’d shown up. Tricia kept driving and didn’t seem to notice. “I’m just real proud of you, is all, honey. Me and Gunther both. We’d always hoped we’d be able to help send you off to school, but with Gunther in the home now, you know. . . .”

  “Moomaw, that’s okay. I don’t think Daddy’s having any trouble coming up with it. I appreciate your wanting to help.”

  She was polite as hell and gracious, too, more traits that set her apart from the rest of the family. Must have skipped a couple or three generations, she thought, her own grandmother being the last such personality type to show up in the family line. If both the girls and the boy hadn’t looked just like Sidney when they were babies she would have suspected they weren’t his.

  God knew their mother was capable of such a thing. When the girls were about two and six years old and the boy four it had become clear to everybody that she wasn’t fit to care for them anymore, and she still remembered the day she was baby-sitting because Sidney had to work and Christine was off who knew where and little Tricia had found a drawerful of drug paraphernalia. “What’s this, Moomaw?” she’d asked, some kind of vile narcoticy-looking thing dangling from her six-year-old hand, all blown glass and rubber hoses. She’d read Sidney the goddamn riot act that evening when he got home, and though in her heart she was certain he would never use drugs himself, she certainly blamed him for looking the other way while his wife ran wild. By the time they split up for good, Christine had been arrested and was on probation, which according to Gunther she’d been lucky to get. Even then she couldn’t even stay sober for the custody hearing, all jumpy and irritable and unable to restrain herself from sassing the judge, who’d awarded Sidney full custody, with only monthly supervised visits for her. She reminded Dot back then of a doctor she’d once worked with who, it was whispered on the ward, had become addicted to amphetamines. She thought maybe it was cocaine Christine was using, though, since that seemed to be the drug everyone was talking about back then.

  “So what’s this book you’re looking for, Moomaw?”

  “Not a book. A map.”

  “Of what?”

  “The state. Or the county if they have one.”

  “What for?”

  She almost snapped at her again, then made herself answer nicely. “Just thought it might soothe me to look at a map.” In the distance she spotted Sears, at the far end of the mall and a full story higher than the rest of it, and she thought about how there used to be nothing out this far west of town but wheat fields and vacant lots, and how nice that had been.

  On his way to Dot’s house Sidney passed the old Riverside Zoo and decided to stop. Gunther had always loved the zoo; Sidney remembered clearly how put out he’d been when the new one opened outside town, and it seemed like a decent bet he might end up here. He parked on the street and walked in; there were a few people milling around in the shade of the big old trees, but he saw no one he could ask about putting a few flyers up. He went over to the old monkey and lion house and taped one to its padlocked front door. It was an imposing brick building decorated with ornate masonry. Inside it was bare concrete with cages on either side: monkeys to the right, lions to the left, all gone for decades.

  Turning away from the door an odd memory fragment surged forward: he was about five years old and a couple of teenage girls were fussing over him while their dad talked to his mom. He was someone she knew from work, and Sidney reluctantly went along with the girls to look at the bear cages, terrified his mother would forget and leave without him.

  He taped a flyer to each outer wall of the now-empty bear cages and went back to the car. Slowly, hanging his left arm out the window, he drove through the neighborhood to his mother’s house, thinking about the girls. Delighted at the prospect of a few minutes’ worth of baby-sitting experience, they tried hard and failed to cheer him up. He vaguely recalled that their father had bought him some popcorn afterward, at their insistence, which he’d eaten in the car on the way home, and that his mom had asked him not to tell his dad who they’d seen at the zoo.

  There was nobody in his mother’s living room when Sidney walked into her house, the sudden cold of the air in her front room stinging his eyes and chilling his sweaty shirt, and checking the wall thermostat he found it set to fifty-eight degrees, forty-five or fifty degrees cooler than the air outside. I’d love to see their electric bills sometime, he thought, and then it struck him.

  He made a furtive check of the rooms of the house before he found the note from Tricia on the kitchen counter:

  Daddy:

  Took Moomaw to Towne West for a change of scene. Back soon.

  Love

  Tricia

  Five minutes later he was going through their bank statements and bills, and while he saw no indication whatsoever of what was paying the balance of Gunther’s nursing home bill, he noted that they hadn’t been paying a mortgage for a long time, and that the paperwork on the sale of their RV indicated that they had owned it outright on the date of sale.

  In the living room he heard the front door open, and his first instinct was to replace the paperwork and deny everything, but instead he called out “I’m in here.”

  Tricia and Dot appeared in the doorway, and he still had a bank statement in his hand. He stared straight at her, daring her to lie about it or yell at him for digging into her private business. Instead of acting like she’d caught him at something, though, she folded her arms across her chest, her face as closed as he’d ever seen it, and said, “It’s the police pension, I already told you. You’re wasting your time.”

  As his bathwater ran Gunther rummaged through a cabinet next to the tub and found a bottle of Mr. Bubble, enough of which remained to produce copious suds. After scrubbing himself thoroughly he sat back in the warm, foamy water and relaxed until he sensed that the wash was done. He pulled a big, fluffy towel down from the rack and dried himself off, feeling physically and mentally better than he had in years.

  The wash cycle was indeed finished. Pleased at having got it right on the first try, Gunther opened the dryer and found to his dismay a dry load of lingerie. He debated for a moment what to do—unloading it would involve h
andling Loretta’s intimate garments, which seemed to him an indecent invasion of her privacy—and decided to throw his wash in with it. He slammed the dryer door shut and pushed the start button, then went back upstairs and started going through drawers to pass the time.

  In the boy’s room he found a baggie full of dope hidden under a bunch of Mad magazines, then put it back. He didn’t approve, exactly, but he didn’t think it was worth getting hysterical about either, the way Dot had done when she found a waterpipe at Sidney’s house a few years ago. He’d rather arrest a pot fiend than a drunk any day of the week; nobody high on reefer had ever taken a poke at him. Usually the worst that happened was they’d get to talking and couldn’t stop.

  Not unlike that barber last night. Gunther looked in the boy’s mirror at the haircut. Pretty sharp, he thought, though the shave was all gone to hell and back; he should have had another one that morning. There was no razor in the boy’s bathroom—presumably he was off at school somewhere—but Loretta would have to have one, wearing those short dresses like she did, and he headed for the master bathroom.

  The delicate pink razor was in the first drawer he opened, and he wondered if women used shaving cream on their legs or just soap, or some other mysterious feminine product entirely. In the big medicine cabinet he found an abundant supply of men’s toiletries: shaving cream, razors and blades, aftershave, cologne, deodorant, toothbrush and paste, athlete’s foot powder. Maybe her husband had died. No, she’d have pictures up. A boyfriend, maybe? It was a lot of stuff for someone who wasn’t a full-time resident, but if the husband was still around he didn’t otherwise leave much of a spoor. Gunther replaced Loretta’s razor in the drawer, inserted a fresh blade into the man’s razor, and lathered up. It wasn’t a really first-rate shave like last night’s, but it would keep him presentable until Loretta got there.

  Afterward he went back down to check the dryer. The cycle was done but the wash was still damp, his clothes and Loretta’s formerly dry undergarments intermingled in a way that, his cheeks burning, made him wish he’d been brave enough to take them out and put them into a basket. He hit the switch again and as the clothes started to spin he decided to play a little pool in the next room. The table, balls, and cues were all virtually without wear, and he marveled at the waste of money—it was a good table, sturdy as you’d find in a pool hall—as he racked up.

  He broke and began shooting stripes, knocking the straight shots right in and having a little trouble with his bank shot. Once he’d finished with the solids he racked up again, and before he had a chance to break a second time he heard the muffled sound of a door slamming upstairs. He moved to the bottom of the stairs and listened. Someone was in the kitchen, the footfalls too heavy for a woman.

  Holding the business end of the cue he crept as quietly as he could up the stairs, and at the top he heard the man, whoever he was, going up the other staircase to the second floor. Maybe it’s the son home from college, he thought. He tiptoed across the kitchen and over to the staircase, where he heard the man open the door to one of the bedrooms. He flattened himself against the wall of the stairwell and moved slowly up, thinking maybe it was the husband after all as he stepped into the master bedroom.

  But the man he found going through the dresser was clearly a transient. Dirty, sunburned, and moving like a drunk, Gunther could smell the booze on him halfway across the room. He wished he had his service revolver with him, but he gamely raised the cue and used his command voice for the first time in a very long time.

  “Hey!” The drunk turned, startled, and looked at Gunther. “You just broke into the wrong house, partner.”

  “I used the key. I live here.” Failing to take his own nudity into account when assessing the man’s reaction to him, Gunther took his uncertain tone of voice as evidence of a lie.

  “Uh-huh. Looks to me like you haven’t slept under a roof in a year.”

  “I had a rough night.”

  “You live here, huh? Show me some ID.”

  The drunk began improvising, always a bad sign. “I left it at a friend’s house.” With a move he no doubt meant to be a surprise, he moved in to grab the cue from Gunther, who surprised him with a solid blow across his left temple from the heavy end of the cue. The drunk crashed dizzily to his knees, his hands on his head, squinting at the pain.

  “Jesus! Who the fuck are you?”

  Gunther maneuvered to his flank. “Did you hear me? What are you doing here?”

  “I told you this is my house. . . .” He struggled back to his feet, one hand on the bed and the other on the carpet.

  “Lady owns this house is a friend of mine, and I’m damned if I’ll let a goddamn dirty bindlestiff like you waltz in here fresh off a fuckin’ boxcar and claim he’s her husband.”

  Gunther slammed the cue into his left kidney, and as the drunk went down again, eyes closed, he hit him hard in the right temple. He lay there, facedown on the carpet, and once Gunther verified that he was still breathing he dragged him over to the closet. He propped a chair against the door and took the cue back downstairs where it belonged.

  12

  GUNTHER FAHNSTIEL

  June 20, 1952

  The phone rang at eight A.M. and I let it ring ten or twelve times before I finally got up and answered. I was off duty until four P.M. and didn’t want to get up until nine, so I guess I didn’t sound too friendly.

  “This is Gunther, what do you want?”

  “It’s Ed. I need to see you this morning. How about Cliff’s?”

  “I’m off-duty, Sergeant.” It was going to be more grief about Sally and how I was wrecking my own life, and I didn’t want to hear it.

  “I got some bad news about a friend of ours. Real bad, maybe. I’ll see you there in half an hour.”

  He hung up on me, and I threw on a shirt from the clean clothes pile over the back of my easy chair and pulled on my pants from the day before. When I finally found my shoes I put them on and strolled out the door.

  I decided to walk; since I hadn’t bothered to shower or shave I’d still be there before he was. There was all kinds of traffic around the park, people headed for work in offices and stores, and I felt lucky for having a job that kept me outside so much of the time. The zoo wasn’t open yet, and walking by I saw the keepers feeding the animals and hosing the cages and sidewalks down for the day to come. School was out, so they had a lot of visitors, even on weekdays. Jack’s Packard was sitting outside the tavern, shined up as usual, and next to it was a shiny new Ford pickup truck with a bedful of construction materials. Jack stepped outside with a cigarette in his mouth.

  “You sure look like shit this morning,” he said. He was in his seersucker suit again.

  “You start that work already?”

  “I got a man looking the place over, taking measurements, but shit, how smart can he be? This’s a brand-new truck, here. Look at this. Got boards and a toolbox right there, unsecured and scratching the paint on the bed.”

  “It’s his truck, not yours.”

  “Of course you wouldn’t care. You’re not a detail man, Gunther, but I am, and I want my new place looking nice and new, not like I just took a goddamn sledgehammer and knocked down some plaster.”

  I moved along, and I could still hear him grumbling a couple of doors down, where a man sat on his front lawn next to the sidewalk in a chair, reading the paper.

  “Howdy, Mr. Blake,” I shouted, since he was hard of hearing. He was a veteran of the Spanish-American War, eighty-some-odd years old and married to a good-looking woman in her early forties. They had a son Ginger’s age who’d from the age of twelve or so started looking exactly like the old man, jug-eared with a nose like a gherkin, which put the lie to all the things people had said about Mrs. Blake’s honor and Mr. Blake’s virility.

  “Morning, Officer,” he shouted back, though I was in civilian clothes. He’d left the first three fingers of his left hand on San Juan Hill, and he held the front part of the paper delicately between his thumb
and pinkie. “Fucking Reds are taking over the whole cocksucking Orient and there’s nothing we can do about it. Not a goddamned thing.”

  “Hope you’re wrong about that,” I said, and didn’t stop. I liked Mr. Blake, but those loud conversations with him were hard to get away from, and I wanted to get to Cliff’s to read a little of the paper before Ed got there and started his usual speech about me ruining my life. Ed’s butting his nose into my business didn’t bother me as much as him treating me like a greenhorn and a moron. I tried not to be mad—I knew he was just trying to look out for me—but I couldn’t help it.

  I bought the morning paper from the man outside Cliff’s and took it inside. I sat down at the counter and started reading about the Korean situation that rankled old Blake so bad, the presidential election and a whole lot of other stuff that didn’t interest me much. I was just getting to the sports section when Ed walked in and stood behind me.

  “Let’s get a booth,” he said. There were eight of them, all empty except for the one in front. An old man sat there talking to himself over a cup of coffee the way he did almost every day. Sometimes when he went he’d let out a loud yell before he got up and left, and I never once saw him pay his check.

  I took my coffee over to a booth toward the back and we sat. “How’s Daisy and Jeff?”

  “Dandy. Listen. That Sergeant I saw out at Wesley?”

  “It’s not him, I already told you.”

  “It goddamn well is. I saw him last night at the Comanche, and he was getting real friendly with Amos Culligan.”