The Walkaway

by Scott Phillips

  Culligan’s patience was gone. “Come on now, goddamn it, it’s my birthday and I want to tip the girls. Wheel me over there so’s I can see the tiger jump outta that gal’s snatch.”

  Mitch pushed Culligan toward the stage, and Francie blew Sidney a little kiss. As they made their way to a table to the side of stage two she drew a few admiring stares, which she acknowledged with little discreet waves of the top two joints of her fingers. Mitch Cherkas drank it all in and sat down between her and Culligan’s wheelchair, beaming, and he winked at Sidney like the luckiest man in creation.

  Over the alarmingly loud sound of “Eye of the Tiger” blaring over the PA in Tyfannee’s honor he heard his name being called, and turning saw the bartender holding the telephone and pointing to it. He went back into the office and picked up Dennis’s phone.

  “Hello?”

  “I need you over at your mother’s house right away.”

  “Hey, Ed. What’s up?”

  “Never mind, just get over here. I need your help.”

  He left with pleasure, as a loud whooping sound rose abruptly from the crowd to comment on some unusually lewd gesture on Tyfannee’s part.

  The old woman’s directions were for shit, naturally. Eric ended up getting off the turnpike in Mud Creek, just one exit before the Oklahoma border, and turning around. There wasn’t an exit for Pullwell anymore, if there ever had been. He drove halfway back to town and got off at Natterley, where there was an open gas station a few hundred feet from the turnpike booth. He put fifteen gallons into Sally’s Grand Am and went inside the convenience store, where a longhaired kid in a baseball cap sat behind the cash register. He took Eric’s money and returned his change without speaking a word or making eye contact.

  “Did there used to be a turnpike exit to Pullwell?”

  He still didn’t look up. “Exit’s at Jockstrap, right next to it.”

  “What?”

  “Gilstrap. Town full of assholes. We used to kick their ass every fucking fall, and after the game we’d kick it some more.”

  Gilstrap, just twenty miles south of town. He’d killed an hour and a half or more by missing it. “Shit. Back to the turnpike.”

  Now he looked up. “Fuck the turnpike, man, Pullwell’s up 83, you just go out Pike Street there, can’t miss it. You can blow up there doing a hundred, nobody’s gonna stop you.”

  He nodded. “Thanks.” He grabbed a six-pack of Coors from the wall cooler and set it down on the counter. “Guess I’d better get some for the road.”

  “Nuh-uh, no beer sales after midnight, sorry.”

  Eric pulled out a twenty. “How about you ring it up tomorrow and keep the change.”

  The boy nodded. “Who fucked up your face like that?”

  “This guy’s been fucking my wife, he ambushed me right in our bedroom. I’m going to Pullman to find him.”

  “Beat the shit out of him, man.”

  “That’s the general plan,” he said, opening the door.

  He headed slowly up Pike toward 83, trying to remember if he’d ever been in Natterley before. It looked like a lot of other shitty places, its downtown commercial district emptied out by some mall or mega-store on the outskirts of town or in the next one over. Half the store-fronts stood empty, with hopeless, perfunctory FOR LEASE signs posted on their glass doors, a few with dusty displays still standing inside, advertising goods no longer on offer. At a stoplight he looked into the window of a hardware store that had managed to stay in business. A single feeble row of fluorescent lights burned in the rear, backlighting the darkened merchandise in the front of the store. It was just like Stackley, where he’d grown up, and he found now that he couldn’t wait to get out of Natterley, Kansas, either.

  One stoplight farther down he passed another convenience store. Five or six teenagers sat out front smoking and drinking beer to the sound of heavy metal pounding out the open doors of a couple of pickup trucks. For laughs he punched his horn and flipped them off as he passed, and as they jumped into the pickups he floored it, wondering how fast old Sally’s Grand Am would go. He was a quarter mile up Pike pushing eighty when he caught sight of them in his rearview mirror, gaining steadily and noticeably. This hadn’t been a good idea, on balance, but with the window open the speed and the adrenaline combined with the violent airflow over and around his head to make him momentarily forget the pain in it. They were within an eighth of a mile of him, he guessed, probably less, when he saw the prowl car laying in wait not far from a sign marking the entrance to Highway 83. He poured it on a little harder and as the first pickup passed it the cop’s lights burst on, and before it was up to speed not one but both pickups had, to Eric’s amazement, pulled over obediently, and entering the highway he slowed down briefly to seventy-five, thankful for providence and the respect small-town teens evidently still held for local law enforcement.

  He could feel his pulse in his throat and the wind whipped through the car, billowing his shirt like a flag. He hadn’t known until he’d said it to the kid in the convenience store how badly he wanted to get back at Gunther. The twelve grand would be nice, too, but if kicking the shit out of the old bastard meant no reward it would be worth it. One way or another that senile piece of shit was going to be sorry he’d fucked with Eric Gandy.

  There was hardly another car in sight; every couple of minutes he’d pass one going the other direction, and he had yet to see one heading north with him. Accelerating again the Grand Am hit a hundred with ease, and he decided that called for a Coors. He punched a can open with one hand and chugged half of it. Leaving Natterley behind at a hundred and seven miles an hour, at the wheel of a car that wasn’t his, under a warm moonlit sky, a beer in his hand, he felt as excited and free as he had leaving Stackley twenty-five years earlier; now as then, anything seemed possible.

  Gunther had experienced no further problems or uncertainties regarding the location of the quarry after collecting his ticket at the turnpike on-ramp, and he spent the entire drive thinking about his first-grade classmates. Their names came back with startling clarity and in order, as if printed on a sheet of paper: Herbert Albright, Myrna Friedmann, Ronald Hillburn, Alfred Ohl, Alva Ridpath, John Schnitzler, Marie Tyler, Jakob Weschler, and Orma Wycliffe. Their faces stubbornly refused to appear in his mind, though, with the sole exception of Ora Johnson, whose picture had been in the Beacon once in the mid-thirties; she’d won twenty-five dollars in a baking competition with a fruit-free pineapple upside-down cake. It was only that adult face in the news photo that he now recalled, and apart from that incident in Ora’s early life he had no idea what had become of any of them.

  Their teacher’s face was stuck in his mind whether he wanted it there or not. Mrs. Holmes was a stout, humorless woman whose dislike for children was said to extend to her own, a decade or so older than the ones she taught. She was the one who had brought him the news that his mother was dead, calling him inside the schoolhouse during recess to tell him, and as he pulled up to the barbed-wire gate seventy-one years after that cold morning he felt a faint residual sting on his cheek where she’d slapped him for calling her a liar.

  The gate was still a simple barbed-wire affair and no trouble to get through, but preparations had clearly been laid for major changes. He drove the distance from the road to the clearing, parked next to where the cabin had stood and got out to examine the property. Chain-link fencing divided various sections of the property now, and the cabin’s charred foundation was gone altogether. Most of the land had been staked and parceled out, and he wondered if anyone could possibly be obstinate or greedy enough to try and build anything on this rocky, uneven patch of leaky ground. He trudged up the rise and stood in the copse of trees that had been his shelter in the old days as he watched over the cabin.

  The view was the same, somehow, despite the absence of even the cabin’s ghostly outline, and when he heard a loud glub from the water in the quarry he wondered if it had been stocked with fish. It was the sound of something coming up and n
ot being thrown in, maybe an air bubble. He didn’t think fish would survive long in that water, at least not any fish worth catching.

  He passed through the trees and looked out in the other direction, toward old Gladwell’s house, but in its place he saw four houses in various stages of construction, situated around an asphalt cul-de-sac. The trees that had surrounded the house were all gone with it, replaced by scrawny, twiggy things so thin they had to be tethered to stakes taller than they were. It would be thirty years or more before they provided anything like the shade those old trees had.

  So Gladwell was gone, the property subdivided and sold off, presumably for the benefit of nieces and nephews and cousins with no use for him when he was alive. It seemed a shame, tearing down such a beautiful, sturdy old house; then he remembered how he’d had to hold his breath against the stench from inside last time he’d been on its porch, and he wondered if they’d had any choice. Probably the smells had permeated the beams and studs from cellar to attic.

  He turned back and sat down in the middle of the trees, overlooking once again the quarry and its surrounding land, glad he’d come back to see it before it became completely unrecognizable. Probably they’d have to fill in the pit even if it wasn’t land they could build on, just as a safety consideration. He sat with his knees up and his ankles crossed and looked down. It was an odd feeling, being up there and looking down without the anxiety that used to accompany those weekends, the knowledge that at any minute he might have to barrel down there and coldcock some shithead who got out of line. Most weekends, though, that never happened. Usually it was just Sally and one of the other girls and a couple of guys having a two-day party, drinking and screwing and eating, without so much as an angry word being uttered.

  He was sure as hell glad those days were gone. They hadn’t ended too well for Sally, though, and he felt bad it had taken so long for her to get back on her feet. He remembered the drive out to Cottonwood, trying hard to convince Sally’s little girl Loretta of what a wonderful place it was going to be. She hadn’t wanted to go and leave her little friends or her school or her baby-sitter, and Gunther felt worse about uprooting her than he did about any of the rest of it. He wondered what had ever become of the little girl; probably she’d ended up staying in Cottonwood, married to a local boy, maybe even the offspring of some forgotten cousin of his own.

  He heard the gurgling sound in the water again, and watching the water of the quarry something about the idea of construction going on there gave him a nervous feeling. He looked back toward the cabin at the sound of Sally’s raised voice, first angry and then scared, but there was no cabin, not even the blackened frame and busted chimney that had been there when he was out here last. He didn’t see the duckblind either, and wasn’t sure where it had been. Somewhere between the cabin and the edge of the water? He thought of the time he came out in the RV he’d just bought with the idea that a little travel would set Dot’s worried mind at ease. Instead it had got her fretting even more about their debts, and on their very first trip in it he’d backed over that poor son of a bitch with the briefcase. He didn’t feel as bad about that as he should have, and pondering the reason why he had the nagging sense that it had something to do with what had brought him back out here.

  When Sidney stopped in front of his mother’s house Ed Dieterle’s rental car was there and so was Tricia’s gray Subaru.

  Inside he stopped dead at the sight of Dot in tears. “What’s going on?”

  Tricia, cradling her grandmother on the couch, looked at him and shrugged. “I just got back. Nobody’ll tell me anything.”

  Dieterle stood up. “Come on, Sidney, we got a little drive ahead of us.” Dot didn’t say anything, but Sidney thought she looked relieved. “Don’t worry,” he said to her. “Ask Gunther if I know how to keep my mouth shut.” He turned to Sidney. “You, come with me. You up for an out-of-town drive?”

  “You’re the boss.” Sidney opened the door, motioning Dieterle to go ahead of him, and Tricia discreetly signaled that despite appearances she and Dot would be all right on their own. Sidney had his doubts; the last time he’d seen his mother cry he wasn’t more than seven years old.

  Loretta knocked on the kitchen door and let herself in. It was long past her own bedtime, but her mother was always up late. Sally stared at her from the kitchen table, head unsteady and eyes unfocused. “You’re lucky I don’t keep a gun in my kitchen drawer anymore, ’cause if I did I mighta just shot you dead for a burglar.”

  “Mom, if you were worried about burglars you’d lock your door.”

  “All’s I’m saying is don’t go walking into people’s houses unannounced. Never know who’s gonna blow you away out of sheer surprise.” Then she smiled. “Come on in, sit down. So what brings you all the way out here? Thought I told you I’d be playing cards tonight.”

  “It’s one-thirty in the morning!”

  “So it is. Usually you’re in bed before eleven.”

  “Wasn’t sleepy. How was your card game, anyway?”

  “I was playing shitty, and getting shitty cards, and I knew before long I was gonna start acting shitty, so I came home and found your shitty husband sitting here drinking my good gin.”

  “Eric was here?”

  “What did I just say? Yeah, he was here. Guess who else was here? Gunther.”

  “When?” Loretta asked, excited.

  “I don’t know, some time late afternoon, I was gone. He stole Eric’s car. And then Eric stole mine, the little cocksucker.”

  “What do you mean he stole your car?”

  Sally leaned forward. “You have a bad habit of taking what I just said and asking it back to me as a question. Quit it.”

  “You need a ride somewhere?”

  Sally rolled her eyes. “Now where would I be going this time of night?”

  Her mother’s snappishness brought back some of her earlier, stoned resolve. “The reason I came is I have some questions I want to ask you.”

  Sally shrugged. “Fire away. Want some Tanky Ray?”

  “No, thanks. I want to know what happened to my father.”

  “Dead. Next question.”

  “I mean why’d he stay away so long.”

  “Wish I knew the answer to that one myself. Next question.”

  She could feel the blood rising to her face, but she stayed calm. “All right. Why’d we move to Cottonwood?”

  Sally rolled her eyes. “Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, that was thirtyfive years ago.”

  “Thirty-six. There was no job waiting for you, we hardly had any money saved, we didn’t even know anybody there. Why Cottonwood?”

  “I felt like a change of scenery. Next question.”

  “Can’t you at least try to give me a straight answer?”

  “That’s as straight as you’re gonna get. All done?”

  Loretta just stared at her, and she knew that it didn’t matter how determined she was to get the truth out of her mother, it wasn’t coming. Finally she stood up.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, sit down. Don’t take it all personally. Have a drink.”

  “I’ll talk to you later.” Loretta got up and left. She sat outside in the Caddy for a while with the engine running, listening to Debussy on the classical station on the radio and enjoying the last vestiges of her buzz. Then she pulled out of the driveway and headed for home, thinking only about climbing into bed and getting some sleep, and not at all about her mother or her father.

  Once he’d managed to find Pullwell, Sally’s directions were perfect, and when Eric got to the first barbed-wire gate and found it hanging open he knew his hunch had been on the money; the old man was reliving his brief, glorious existence as King Pimp. The property was staked off for subdivision, with tiny red and white flags stuck in the mud in straight lines going off in all directions, but there was no heavy equipment on-site yet. The road was rutted and sloppy from yesterday’s rains, and after the second open gate he turned off his headlights and drove slowly, stoppin
g at the first sight of a rise topped with trees. This would be where the cabin used to stand. A hundred feet to the left sat his Volvo. He took the last can of Coors, popped it open, and drained it in a swallow, hardly even feeling drunk anymore as he stepped out of the car.

  “Gunther?” He tried to sound like a man trying to coax a whipped dog out from under a bed. “Are you there?”

  There was no answer, only the sound of crickets and frogs. In the distance he heard something plop in the flooded gravel pit, and he walked in the direction of the sound.

  “Gunther? Don’t be scared. I’m here to take you back home.” The whole plot was staked out, almost ready for the digging to start, and he had the vague notion that this was close to where Randy Kensington was putting up some houses. “Come on, how’d you like a ride back to the old folks’ home?” As the land rose he saw the flooded pit with the moon’s reflection glowing on its surface.

  Something went past his face and he stepped back. It continued low across the border of the pit before settling in the grass. A moment later another object flew two or three feet in front of him and landed eight or ten feet away and he walked toward it. As he leaned down for a closer look there was a terrific, sharp pain in the back of his head as the third projectile hit the base of his skull.

  “Fuck!” He touched his fingertips to the affected area, tears welling in his eyes. “Come out before I find you and beat the shit out of you.”

  He got no answer, and presently discovered that his feet were wet. The water was colder than he would have expected; his pants were now wet up to midshin. He was starting to feel dizzy, and the moon in the water below shone up onto his face, its own reflection distorted by his stumbling and splashing. All this he processed as the gradual slope of the bottom of the quarry steepened suddenly and gave way beneath his feet. He went under with his eyes open, finding the water below much darker than its brilliant surface would suggest.

  Sally stood thumbing through the old newspapers on the counter. Funny how they were still in such good shape, hardly brittle at all and barely yellowed. It was a lot farther in the past than it felt to her now, perusing the movie schedules and department store ads and classified ads, and of course the sensational front-page account of the love raffle sullying Collins Aviation’s pristine reputation as a morally upright place for Christian men and women to work. “Love was Prize in Collins Raffle,” shit. The whole goddamn thing was Sonya Bockner’s idea, one night when the two of them were sitting around drunk and horny, waiting for Glenn to get home. It was Sonya’s notion, too, that Sally be the one to run the operation, taking most of the risk and reaping most of the benefits. Now that she thought about it, it was probably Glenn who’d thought the whole thing up so he could watch Sonya getting screwed, peculiar fellow that he was. The Bockners had set the same thing up in KC a few years later and ran it themselves with no trouble from the law; just Sally’s luck to be the one the roof came down on. She looked again at the picture of herself with Sonya and Frieda and Lynn and Amos Culligan, sad as she often was for the loss of her looks and for the things the girl in the picture could have done if she hadn’t hooked up with a first-class prick like Wayne Ogden.