The Walkaway

by Scott Phillips

  “Just getting him in the ground was pleasure enough for me.”

  Tricia shot a disbelieving look at her grandmother. Surely she’d heard wrong.

  “Yeah, hard to see how it could’ve gotten any better than it already was just knowing he was dead.” They both chortled in a similar, furtive way.

  “What are you guys talking about? About Grandpa McCallum?”

  Dot and Sidney looked at each other guiltily, and Sidney drew in and let out a deep breath. “You never knew him, sweetie.”

  “You were glad when he died?”

  Sidney shrugged. “I don’t know about glad, exactly. I sure as shit wasn’t sorry.”

  “Listen, honey,” Dot said, putting her hand on her granddaughter’s shoulder. “We’re just kidding. Your grandpa had a lot of nice qualities, too.”

  “That’s a laugh,” Sidney said, which earned him a sharp look from his mother. “Okay, then, give me something nice to say. If you can honestly come up with one nice thing to say about the old bastard, I’ll say it right back to you.”

  “He loved that old hunting dog of his,” she said, after a long pause.

  Sidney nodded. “I guess he did.”

  Dot thought for a second, then chuckled again. “That’s about the best I can come up with.”

  “I got one,” Sidney said. “He was always kind to his drinking buddies.”

  “He never crashed his car into anybody else’s house but ours.”

  “Good with his hands when they weren’t shaking.”

  When the phone rang in the kitchen Tricia slipped out quietly to answer it. It was for her father, a woman’s voice she didn’t recognize, and she went back to the living room, happy for the chance to interrupt. “It’s for you, Daddy.”

  Tricia looked through the kitchen at her father as he picked up the phone and started talking, trying to make sense of this unprecedented lack of respect for poor dead Grandpa McCallum, about whom she had never before heard an unkind word. In fact, though, she hadn’t ever heard him discussed much at all; he’d died when she was in diapers, and she supposed the reason he didn’t come up much in conversation was sensitivity to Gunther’s feelings. Her grandmother turned to her, still laughing. “Sorry, sweetheart. I always tried not to talk that way in front of you kids.”

  “You’re full of surprises today, Moomaw,” Tricia said. On the way home from the mall Dot had insisted on stopping at St. Luke’s Catholic Church, where she went in and lit a candle for Gunther’s safe return home. It was the first time Tricia had ever been aware of any member of her family besides her crazy mother willingly entering a church.

  “Now keep your damn mouth shut about that business.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Well, don’t.” She was whispering now. “I don’t want Sidney to know, and I particularly don’t want Gunther to ever find out.”

  “I won’t say anything, don’t worry.”

  Sidney came back out of the kitchen. “This lady in College Hill got a weird phone message from the old man, thinks he might have been at her house. I’m gonna check it out.”

  “You call me, you understand? I don’t like sitting around waiting.”

  “I’ll call you, don’t get your bowels in an uproar. And don’t think I’m forgetting about the money.”

  When he was gone, Dot sat down at the kitchen table with her map, and when Tricia sat down next to her she didn’t seem to notice.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you’re looking for? Maybe I can help you find it.”

  Dot looked up at her. “You know how to read a map?”

  Sidney took the freeway east toward Loretta Gandy’s house, feeling guilty about talking the way he had in front of Tricia, then wondering what was the problem with them knowing the truth about his old man, dead before Danny and Amy were born and before Tricia had any idea who he was. They were all adults now, and God knew as tiny children they’d seen worse with their own mother.

  He couldn’t deny his share of responsibility there. It had been at his urging that Christine had first sampled some coke he’d reluctantly accepted in lieu of cash for a football bet from a customer, in violation of his own strict policy of cash up-front. He was head bartender then at a club called the Sporting Life, long since closed, and between his salary, his mostly undeclared tips, and his share of the gambling action he’d been making a good living, even with three kids to feed. Suddenly, though, it wasn’t enough.

  By the time the marriage was over she was shacked up with her connection, a squirrelly little guy who wore a big knit beret and thought he looked like a white Superfly. Shortly after she moved into his house he got busted and Christine along with him, and he ended up getting fifteen years. She ended up with four years’ probation, a sentence so light in comparison that many observers believed a deal had been struck. Her good fortune had not lessened her appetite for coke or love of a good time, however, and Sidney had been raising the kids by himself with barely a hello from her for almost five years when she abruptly decided she wanted them back. She’d married the owner of the very club where Sidney had scored that original packet of coke, and since she was living in a spacious home in a trendy suburb she thought she might as well have some kids to complete the picture.

  It might have worked if she’d bothered getting clean beforehand, but this judge liked her even less than the first one had, and Sidney’s lawyer hadn’t even had to bring up Christine’s status as a recent probationer or her new husband’s involvement in the coke trade. He’d had to work two shifts for a year after that to pay off his legal bills, though, and he resented every extra shift bitterly, popping white crosses just to stay on his feet. She was married to a fucking millionaire, but she wasn’t interested in supporting the kids financially unless she had custody.

  She had since gotten divorced again, joined NA, and found Jesus. For their sake and not hers Sidney told the kids they should be nice to her, which as far as he was concerned was more than she deserved. His small measure of revenge was his refusal to allow her to make amends to him, which she kept trying to do. She’d been trying to get him and the kids to attend family counseling sessions at the goofball Holy Roller church she belonged to. Tricia had attended a couple of sessions— Amy and Danny had refused categorically—and he’d gone to pick her up afterward, waiting outside the mobile home the church had set up next to it, watching people showing up at the church’s cinder-block main building. The session had been timed, he realized, to end just as a service was starting. Tricia came out of the mobile home, followed by Christine, and then a youngish man in a robin’s egg blue suit with a badly sculpted helmet of hair hurried out to beat Tricia to the car. Sidney rolled the window down and gave him the look he used to give troublemakers at the Sweet Cage, the look that usually preceded violent expulsion. The man nonetheless stuck out his hand, which Sidney ignored with childish satisfaction.

  “Mister McCallum? Jeff Lorrell. Tricia and her mom are fixing to attend services, I hope the change of plans doesn’t put you out too much. In fact we were sort of hoping you’d join them.”

  “Tricia,” Sidney yelled, and as she started to move forward the minister motioned her to stay back for a second.

  “Mister McCallum,” the reverend began, lowering his voice to an intimate near-whisper, “what I’m learning from these sessions is that part of the problem seems to be lack of involvement by the family in any church-based activities. Tricia tells me her and her brother and sister have never had any kind of religious training, is that right?”

  The reverend seemed unintimidated by the glare, but Sidney kept it up.

  “Tricia. You ready to go?” Tricia started to come again, but her mother was saying something to her and looking very emotional and she stayed behind to listen.

  “I think there’s a real need in your family, Sidney, that’s not being met.”

  “Don’t call me Sidney.”

  “Sorry. Mr. McCallum, I’m talking about the need for salvation.”
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  “Yeah, I pieced that together. Tricia, you want me to come back and get you when the tent show’s over?” Unlike her brother and sister, Tricia was softhearted enough to come to the counseling session for her mother’s sake, but he sensed she’d about hit her limit for the day, and Sidney wasn’t surprised when she kissed Christine on the cheek, raced to the car and dove in without a farewell to Pastor Lorrell. Sidney rolled his window up with Lorrell in the middle of a sentence and they drove away.

  “How was it?”

  “Shitty. He was trying to get me to forgive her, and I told him I already had a long time ago, and he wanted to know how come I wouldn’t join the church then, and he started talking about Mary Magdalene and how sinners could be forgiven, even the worst ones, and he was sort of calling Mom a whore.”

  “Hah!” For a second Sidney wished he’d gone after all.

  “And I told him again I’d already forgiven her, but he just kept coming back to the same thing: If I’d really forgiven her for being a coke slut then I’d join their weird little church.”

  “So how’d it end up?”

  “Finally I said if that’s what it takes, then I guess I couldn’t forgive her.”

  “Good for you, honey. I’m proud of you.”

  “I was feeling a little sorry for her, then I thought, hey, she left me when I was eight. It won’t kill her to go to church all by herself.”

  “Moomaw?” Tricia was leaning against the doorjamb, half in and half out of Dot’s kitchen. “I don’t think we’re going to find anything as small as a rock quarry on this map, and even if it was there I wouldn’t know what to look for.”

  She was right; it looked to Dot like a big abstract painting with names and numbers and lines pasted in at random. “Don’t suppose I would either.”

  “Want to go to the WSU library? There’d be better maps and librarians who know how to read them.”

  “Maybe we should. You still got a library card?”

  “Don’t need one, we’re not checking books out. So are you gonna tell me what it’s about or not?”

  She was going to have to tell somebody, because somebody was going to have to drive her there, and she’d rather it was Tricia than Sidney. Before she made the decision there was a knock at the door and Tricia went to see who it was.

  “Uncle Ed!” Tricia’s voice rose to a squeal and Dot’s stomach got tight. “Moomaw! Uncle Ed’s here.”

  “He’s not your uncle,” she said quietly, and she stood and gave him a smile anyway as he stepped into the kitchen. Ed gave her a little hug and patted her consolingly on the shoulder.

  “Sit down, sit down,” he said. “What you looking at? A map?” He put his hand on the table to steady himself and leaned down to look at it. His sport jacket was off, but he was sweating hard. Those tiny, perfectly round blue eyes glistened and protruded like marbles from the orbits even while he was squinting at the green map.

  “You like something to drink, Uncle Ed?”

  “I sure would, sweetheart. Hot as the hinges of Hades out there.”

  Tricia opened the ice box and poured Ed a glass of iced tea. “You can cuss in front of me, Ed. I’m twenty-two.”

  “I never cuss, honey. Gunther’s pulling your leg if he ever told you any different.” He took the iced tea and drank half of it in a single swig. “That’s good, thanks. Jeepers, it’s hot out there. Nice and cool in here, though.” He looked around, trying to spot the source of the cold air. “You got central air?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Seems like I remember Gunther griping about the heat in the house.”

  “Didn’t have AC when we moved in, just central heat.”

  “Huh. When’d you put the condenser in?”

  “Eight, nine years ago. Sidney bought it for us,” she lied, knowing he was leading up to a remark about the expense of installing an air conditioner.

  “What do you know.” He peered up at a vent as if he were trying to figure out how the whole process worked, then turned to her. “How you holding up, Dot?”

  She shrugged. “Okay, I guess, considering.”

  “You got any idea what might have made him walk away like that?”

  “Well, he’s in the zombie ward of the goddamn old folks’ home, and he doesn’t want to be. How’s that for a start?”

  “Did he talk about wanting to get out?”

  She gave a little grunt. “How about every goddamn time I talk to him.”

  “Anything else? How’s his health?”

  “Apart from being half senile, pretty good. Blood pressure’s high but he’s medicated. Course he left his meds behind. No aches and pains to speak of, not compared to me anyway, or you either, probably.”

  “Money?” He said it casually and quickly, and she knew he’d been saving it for last.

  “Money’s fine.”

  “Moomaw, what were you just talking about with Daddy? The pension?”

  If it hadn’t been Ed standing there she would have snarled at the girl. “We were just discussing Gunther’s pension and mine.”

  “How much of the nursing home bill does it pay?”

  “All of it.”

  Ed nodded and didn’t pursue it any further. She knew he didn’t believe her; he had the same goddamn pension, after all, a captain’s and not a sergeant’s, and he knew just how far his own went.

  “You have any idea where Sidney might be? I was kind of hoping I might find him here.”

  “He was headed back to some lady’s house, she got a message from Gunther.”

  “You know where?”

  “Huh-uh. He was going to call here when he was done.”

  “Okay. I’ll be on my way, I guess. Still lots to do. I’ll be in touch.”

  Tricia gave him a little kiss on the cheek, and he left the kitchen and headed for the front of the house.

  “Moomaw, you should say thank you,” Tricia said quietly.

  “He has his reasons.”

  “Moomaw! He came all the way up here to help us.”

  She stood up and peered into the living room as he opened the door to leave. “Ed?”

  He turned to face her, halfway out the door already. “Yeah?”

  “Thanks,” she said with as much enthusiasm as she could generate.

  He gave her a friendly little salute and left.

  When he opened the closet door Gunther found the drunk asleep. He pushed him with his foot and got no response. He put his head to his chest and determined that he was breathing regularly, then shook him again.

  “Hey. How’s the dryer work, Jasper?”

  If he knew it would be an indication that he was who he claimed to be, and then Gunther could ask him where Sally lived. Nothing suggested that the man had heard him, though, and he didn’t imagine this guy was much more familiar with domestic appliances than he was. He closed the closet door and replaced the chair.

  Downstairs he examined the dryer’s control panel carefully. Delicate. Cotton. High heat. That sounded like what he needed. He set it, turned it on, and went upstairs to the kitchen. He was hungry again, and before long he’d have to leave.

  He was halfway through his second olive loaf sandwich when a small black ring binder sitting on the kitchen desk next to the phone caught his eye. Sally’s address was under M for Mom; he copied it out slowly onto the pad of scratch paper and was about to tear it off when he realized that for the moment he had no pocket to put it into. As he took the last morsel of sandwich into his mouth he saw taped to a cubbyhole in front of him the Gandy family Christmas card, a recent one judging from the size of the kids. Standing behind them and next to Loretta was the drunk from upstairs, clean-shaven and dressed in a suit and tie and still looking like somebody who had no business with a nice girl like her.

  Downstairs he shot a little more pool until he heard the dryer shut itself off. He opened the hatch and pulled out his hat, almost too hot to hold on to, then gritted his teeth and unloaded, pulling his clothes out as quickly as he could and doing
his best not to touch hers at all. He was pleased with himself for having conquered the dryer, and as he put on the warm clothes he grappled with the transportation problem. He’d been lucky so far, but it wouldn’t last; he needed something reliable and anonymous. Maybe Loretta would lend him a car. He squirmed; something felt funny and hot against his nutsack. He unzipped his trousers, reached into his shorts and extracted, to his horror, a toasty pair of silky white women’s drawers, which he threw into the dryer with its mates, wiping his palms against each other in embarrassed chagrin.

  He climbed back up the stairs to the first floor. Outside he heard a car pull up and stop. He pulled the edge of the curtain and saw a black BMW parked out front with Sidney at the wheel.

  He took the stairs two at a time up to the bedroom, put the chair back in its proper place and opened the closet door. The drunk was still asleep, his mouth open and his tongue on the carpet, and Gunther closed the door from the inside.

  Downstairs the kitchen door opened and closed again. Loretta’s voice, indistinct, floated up, punctuated by the sound of high heels on the hard floor. Sidney’s voice filtered up, too, and his heavier steps now thumped alongside hers.

  “Eric?” Loretta’s voice echoed through the house.

  “Somebody had a big lunch,” Sidney said. On the counter were an empty box of pizza rolls, a loaf of bread, half a package of olive loaf, and an open jar of mayonnaise.

  “Probably my husband.” She turned the oven off, put the bread and mayo up and threw the box away along with the olive loaf, determined for Sidney McCallum’s benefit not to let loose a sigh of pained resignation.

  She led him to the living room, which was unoccupied. “He’d probably be waiting outside, but we keep a key over the door.”

  “You want me to check upstairs?”

  “Good idea, I’ll check downstairs while you’re at it.”

  When the bedroom door opened, he tensed up. It sounded like one person, though the carpet made it hard to tell if it was a man or a woman. The bathroom door opened, and Loretta’s voice came from downstairs.

  “Nothing down here.”