The Walkaway (2 page)

“Excuse me,” she said. With her hair fluffed and dry, it took him a second to place her as the woman he’d been ogling back at Ray and Cal’s. She was prettier than he’d thought before, more carefully made up than most of the women he saw lately. Since he found large women attractive anyway, he appreciated the fact that they often worked extra hard to look nice, although in her case he thought she might have overdone it a little around the eyes. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you back there.”

“That’s okay,” he said, surprised that he rated an apology. “Didn’t mean to stare.”

“The thing is, after you left? When you said I reminded you of somebody?”

“Probably my imagination.”

The woman looked at him doubtfully. “Is your name Gunther?”

“Who’s asking?”

“My name’s Loretta Gandy. It used to be Loretta Ogden.”

The first name meant nothing to him, but the second resonated somewhere in the back of his mind.

“Sally Ogden’s my mom,” she added.

The name gave Gunther a jolt, though he wasn’t sure why. It was a good bet, though, that this Sally was the woman she put him in mind of, and he relaxed a little. “Oh.”

“Do you need a lift? I’d be glad to give you one.”

“Which way you headed?”

“Whichever way you need to go.” She unlocked the passenger door and pushed it open, sliding back into the driver’s seat.

“Thanks a lot,” he said, and as he got in the first few warm drops of rain started falling, spotting the reddish dust on the windshield. She set the wiper to the slowest speed, smearing the drops into mud and necessitating a shot of wiper fluid as they pulled out.

“Harry’s Barber Shop, on Cowan and Second.”

She nodded and continued westward on Douglas, and for a while they were silent, though it seemed she was waiting for him to say something. Since he didn’t know what she was expecting, he kept his counsel.

“So, don’t you want to know how my mom is?” she finally asked.

“Sure,” he said, though who she was might have been a more pertinent question than how.

“Well, pretty good, at least as good as you can expect. She buried old Donald last year.”

“Was he dead?” He was instantly sorry he’d said it, but the old censoring mechanism had never been too sharp to begin with; now it seemed to be completely shot. She held her breath for a second, then looked over at him with her mouth wide open, stunned. He was about to apologize when she let out a loud laugh like a seal barking.

“That’s a good one. Guess you didn’t have any reason to like him much, huh?”

He guessed that he probably hadn’t; the list of people he liked much was a short one.

“They moved back to town five years ago. I’ve been here since college. I don’t think she ever sees any of her old friends.”

“Probably they didn’t like Donald,” he said, not knowing who Donald was.

“Probably. He was pretty good to her, though, you got to give him that.”

“I guess you do.”

“You were, too. She always said so.”

He turned away from her to look at the passing streets, and she suspected he was trying to hide a tear. In fact, he was just trying to figure out what it was he was supposed to have done for this Sally. In an odd, indirect way it seemed to Gunther to be connected to his money and where he’d left it.

Gunther recognized Harry’s Barber Shop when he saw it. The front of the building faced the street corner, and an uneven old sidewalk bisected a triangular lawn a week past mowing time from the intersection of the sidewalks along Cowan and Second Streets, in a mostly residential neighborhood. Inside a lone, elderly barber stood bathed in ghostly, greenish fluorescent light, looking out a picture window at the sprinkling. By now the sky was so dark Loretta had put her headlights on. “Here we are. Cowan and Second. That must be Harry in the window.”

“Must be. Thanks for the ride.” He tried to think of something else to say. “Give my best to your mom.” He pushed the door open slightly.

“Hey, Gunther . . . ?”

He pulled the door almost shut.

“How are you fixed for money?”

“I got plenty of money. I just can’t get to it, that’s the problem.”

“The thing is, I know Mom owed you some money, ’cause I’ve heard her talk about it. . . .”

He couldn’t tell if she was lying or just nervous about offering him money; in either case he normally would have been insulted. But right now he needed money badly, and he was certain he’d be able to pay it back in a timely manner. “Maybe so, it’s hard to remember. Don’t worry about it.”

She pulled open her purse and dug excitedly through it. “No, no, Mom’d never forgive me if she knew, now hold on . . .” She pulled out a billfold and took out a pair of hundred-dollar bills, then a business card. She wrote something on the card, then handed it to him along with the bills.

“You take this, and if she owed you more than that you call me, okay?”

“Thanks.”

He got out of the car and as she watched him marching up the sidewalk to Harry’s she worried that she hadn’t given him enough. She knew it had been hard for him to accept the money, and she was sure he’d never call to ask for more. This was likely her only chance to do something for him.

She rolled down the window just as he reached the door.

“Gunther?”

He turned and squinted at her, his hand braced perpendicular to his forehead to shield his eyes from the rain. Offering him more now would only embarrass him.

“Call, okay?”

He nodded, turned away, and entered the barber shop. As she drove away it struck her that no trace of a smile had crossed his face since she’d first seen him, an oddly endearing trait that accorded with her own vague memories and her mother’s occasional drunken anecdotes about him.

Gunther didn’t feel much like talking, but Harry couldn’t seem to stop. He went on for a while about the local triple-A baseball team, which Gunther thought had folded years ago, then moved on to the subject of his kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids. Having listed them all, he waxed philosophical about the business of barbering, and Gunther let it wash over him, enjoying the luxurious sensation of being in a real barber chair again. When Harry was finished cutting, he applied lather to the back of Gunther’s neck and sharpened a straight razor with a leather strop hanging from the counter.

“Why don’t you give me a full shave while you’re at it.”

“Sure thing. Not many go for a shave anymore, they got their Norelcos and their Brauns and they think that’s the same as a real shave.”

“Uh-huh.” The sight of the slightly curved blade jogged something. “Did you have an accident in here with that once?”

“It was no accident. You’re showing your age. That was in forty-seven.”

It was coming slowly into focus. It had been a big story at the time. “Some old-time vaudeville comedian, right?”

“That’s right, Jimmy Cavendish of Cavendish and Carlisle. He was from around here, raised on a farm outside of Shattuck.”

“Yeah, I remember him.”

“Carlisle played the hayseed and Cavendish was the city slicker, just the opposite of what they was in real life. They was big in vaudeville in the teens, then on Broadway, after that they made some movies. Last one they did had Martha Raye in it.”

Once he’d finished shaving the back of Gunther’s neck he brushed warm lather onto Gunther’s face and began carefully and systematically drawing the razor down at the side of the ear.

“He used to come back to see the family. His nephew Jack was a great friend of mine, we were in school together. I was just starting this place up, fresh out of the army, when Jack brings in his uncle for a haircut. His partner Carlisle had just died, and he was in kind of a funk. He wasn’t a young man anymore. Younger than you and me today, course, but remember back then a man of sixty was old.”

Gunther nodded. “Mm-hm.”

“Anyhow, right after I lathered him up he says in this real quiet voice, ‘I’m not going to make it to supper, Jack, tell your mother I’m sure sorry,’ and by God if he don’t grab the straight razor right out of my hand and slash it right across his throat.” He moved the razor quickly under his own chin to illustrate.

“Yeah, I remember now.”

“Cut so clean that for a second I didn’t think he’d really done it, then I seen the blood start coming in a straight line through the lather, pretty soon it was all over the sheet and everywhere. Bled to death right in this chair, and it was brand new at the time.”

“Huh.”

“I was scared it’d hurt business, but it sure didn’t. Put me on the map is what it did. Once I had the chair reupholstered I had all the business I could handle. I’m sure as hell sorry he killed himself, but he really did me a favor, doing it here in my shop.” Harry finished up the shave and pulled the sheet off of Gunther. “Still raining. Your daughter coming back to pick you up or what?”

“My daughters both live out of state. That was just somebody who gave me a ride.”

“Well, okay. How you getting home?”

“Don’t know.” He wasn’t sure where home was anyway.

“Well, you can sure sit it out in here. I close up at six.”

“Thanks,” Gunther said, and he sat looking out the window while Harry talked, not thinking about much of anything except the rain.

2

WAYNE OGDEN
June 14, 1952

The train pulled into the station east of downtown at four-fifteen in the morning, which suited me fine. I hadn’t made any effort to adjust to American time; most of my business here would be at night anyway. At that hour the station was crawling with porters and railroad workers, passengers disembarking or boarding for the second half of the train’s eastward crossing, people manning the newsstand and the candy counter, an elderly midget hawking the early edition of the morning paper. I left my duffel bag at the baggage claim and stuffed the claim check in my pocket. “Twenty-five cents a day or part thereof,” the solemn attendant said as I walked away.

The coffee shop downstairs from the platform was open so I took a seat at the counter and grabbed a mimeographed menu from a little wire rack next to the napkin dispenser.

“Hey, Sarge,” a gaunt, rheumy-eyed old man said, taking the stool next to mine. “How about a little grubstake for a fellow vet?” He wasn’t too dirty, and he’d shaved recently, but his shirt collar was frayed and so were his cuffs. His pants had long, oval holes worn through above each knee, and his slight vocal tremor gave him away as a rummy, probably a step or two away from sterno. Clean as he was, he probably lived at one of the transient hotels a few blocks toward downtown, the last stop before permanent residence on the sidewalk.

I was about to tell him to go piss up a rope when the counterman came over. “All right, Chester, I told you for the last time. You bother the customers you’re back on the street. Out.”

“Chester’s eating with me,” I said. “I’ll have the KC strip and eggs, over easy. Give him whatever he wants.”

“Same as him, only scrambled.”

The counterman waited a second before writing it down, glared resentfully but powerlessly at me and then turned away to put the orders in.

“Look at him. He wanted to tell you where to shove it, but he’s still scared of noncoms.” Chester ran his fingers nervously through his hair, and I noticed how much of it was still dark. My first guess had been the Spanish-American War, but looking closer I could see he wasn’t much past fifty.

“AEF?” I asked.

“Yep. Belleau Wood.”

“So was my old man.” I was lying, but so was he, probably. “Thomas McCowan, Master Sergeant.” Another lie; this was the first time I’d used McCowan’s name, and I found that it amused me to introduce myself that way. McCowan would be apoplectic if he knew about it, even more so that I’d downgraded him from a lieutenant to my own lowly noncom status.

“Chester Bemis, Corporal First Class. Pleased to meet you.”

“You want to go get a drink after breakfast?”

Chester beamed. “You’re shittin’ me.”

“Not at all. I haven’t been around for a while and I wouldn’t know where to go myself. Comanche still open?”

“Sure is. Not this late, though. Inside the city limits they shut down at two. But you know the Hitching Post, out on Forty-ninth? They’ll be open.”

“Sounds good to me. Maybe we’ll go pick up on some whores afterward.”

“Fine with me, if it’s on your nickel. There’s usually a few hanging around the Hitching Post, if you’re not too particular.”

The counterman came back with coffee cups and filled them without addressing either of us, and we fell silent in his presence, Chester studying my uniform. When the counterman left again Chester leaned forward with his elbows on the counter.

“Quartermaster Corps, huh?”

“That’s right. You got a sharp eye.”

“I got fucking trench foot is what I got, almost killed me, thanks to the goddamn Quartermaster Corps.”

I knew what was coming, but I asked anyway. “How do you figure that?”

“Rubber goddamn boots. Every goddamn supply sergeant in Europe had ’em, but not on the front, not where men was fighting and dying in trenches full of pigshit and muddy water. The whole Quartermaster Corps can go fuck itself as far as I’m concerned.”

“Hey, buddy,” I shouted. The counterman came over slowly, a dishrag tossed over his shoulder. “I’ll be eating that second steak and eggs myself. Chester here just talked himself out of some free booze and pussy, too.”

“You hear that, Chester? Hit the pavement.”

He got up off his stool. “I’d rather eat shit by myself than steak and pussy with a supply sarge,” he said, but there was terrible regret in his eyes and a choke in his voice. He left without an argument, turning around once as if to apologize. He didn’t, though.

A couple of minutes later my two plates of steak and eggs came and I tore into the first, suddenly realizing how hungry I’d been. I’d awakened at midnight, and there was no food service on the train at that hour. It was a good thing Chester had come along; I was still ravenous when I finished the first plate, and as I started in on the second steak a middle-aged couple entered and sat down a few seats up from me. I’d seen them the day before in the dining car, elegantly dressed and looking out at the passing scenery rather than talking as they ate.

This morning the man, heavy and slow on his feet, looked exhausted, but the woman was cheerful and wide awake. He was wearing an expensive gray suit, well-cut, and she had on a brown silk dress with a diamond pin at the left shoulder. If it had been even a little cool I was certain she would have been wearing fur.

“Morning, Sergeant,” the man said.

“Morning.”

They studied their menus and the husband stretched, cracked his knuckles and yawned extravagantly.

“Edwin. Don’t yawn, and don’t crack your knuckles either. You’re in public.”

“I can’t help it, it’s the middle of the goddamn night.”

“Don’t curse either.”

He ignored her and stuck out his hand to shake. “Ed Brenner, Brenner Agricultural Insurance Company, Ventura, California.”

“Master Sergeant Thomas McCowan, United States Army. Pleased to make your acquaintance.” I was pleased with how smoothly the name came off my tongue. “What brings you folks to town?” I asked.

“Visiting her family. Mine’s up in Chicago.” The man didn’t sound happy about either fact. “How about you?”

“I’m on a ninety-day reenlistment furlough. Just came back to see the old hometown, spend a little time with the family.”

The conversation dried up when their food came and we were all three shoveling it in, and I didn’t speak again until it was time to pay the check. The counterman shook his head when I asked for it.

“Your meal’s taken care of, Sergeant.”

The couple smiled at me over their breakfasts.

“I can’t accept that, thanks—”

The man cut me off, as I’d expected. “Forget about it. It’s already taken care of. Now have a nice visit home.”

I pretended to consider it for a moment, then flashed my most charming grin. “Thanks. God bless you folks.” I picked up my hat, put it on, and walked out briskly without exactly marching.

Outside the station there were no cabs. Presumably they’d picked up whatever passengers there were on the four-fifteen and then dispersed; the next passenger train didn’t come in until half past six, so I went over to a pay phone and called for a cab. I stood waiting for it to arrive, feeling good about saving a little money on breakfast. I felt a little bad about old Chester, though; I thought I might give him a little change if he was still around, but he was nowhere to be seen.

The cabbie must have been cruising around downtown, because he was there in less than three minutes. He was a burly guy with hair on his neck and a particular slow, droll way of talking I hadn’t heard since I’d left this place. “Where you headed, Sarge?” Three days in the U.S. and I’d already had about a belly full of civilians calling me “Sarge.”

“The Hitching Post, out on Forty-ninth.”

“If you’re looking for a whore, I know where there’s better and cheaper.”

“I bet you do. The Hitching Post is where I’m headed.”

The driver shut up and headed west through downtown, then north. Hard to tell, driving through it at five in the morning with the sidewalks empty, but the main business district seemed not to have changed much, at least physically. The town’s population was about double what it had been before the war, though, and when we started heading north I could see where it had grown. Tract after tract of cheap houses that hadn’t been there when I left lined the road until we got well out of town and into the country.

I could see the neon sign for the Hitching Post half a mile before we got there; I remembered it from ’46, when I’d spent an ill-considered year back here as a civilian. The sign featured an immense caricature of an inbred moron with enormous feet, ears, and nose, wearing a torn straw hat and threadbare overalls, his gigantic, misshapen thumb hooked through a moonshine jug marked “XXX.” A single bucktooth jutted up out of his lower jaw, and another downward from the upper. An overwhelming proportion of the Hitching Post’s customers were yokels themselves, up from Arkansas or Oklahoma to work at the aircraft plants, but none of them seemed to mind, or to think that the sign referred to them in any way. The parking lot this morning had six or eight cars in it, and when I got out of the cab one of them lurched from its space and with a metal-buckling crunch hit another, parked a good fifteen feet away. I heard laughter from the first car as it roared away, the taxi following it at a timid distance back to town.

Inside, hillbilly music played on the jukebox, some yodeling hog farmer’s lament about a woman who’d walked away with some other, presumably nonyodeling hog farmer, and I took a seat at the bar. “What’s the best scotch you got?” I asked the bartender.

“Bourbon.”

I put down half a buck. He poured me a shot and a beer chaser and I took a look around the room as I downed it. Eight guys, three of them dancing with three girls, all of whom I took to be pros. One of them, a short, thick-torsoed brunette, was practically humping her partner right there on the dance floor. Two more guys were seated at a table, and two more were playing pool. The eighth guy was sitting by himself, staring at the dancers, and I thought he was probably waiting for one of the girls to get free. The room was dark, most of the light coming from a mismatched set of table lamps strategically located from front to back. There were three ceiling fixtures but they’d been equipped with red bulbs and provided little more than what passed for atmosphere on Forty-ninth Street.

I turned my attention to my beer. There was a good chance one or more of these guys had come off the second shift at Collins, and if I didn’t act too interested I might be able to get one of them to spill a little.

“Well, looky there,” someone said behind me. “Looks like a war hero. Coming in here in uniform and all.” At the small of my back, in a pocket I’d paid a German civilian tailor to add to my Class A uniform trousers, I had a set of brass knucks. As I spun to face the speaker I surreptitiously pulled them on. Covering my right hand with my left, I found the loner standing a couple of feet away from me. He was loaded, and there are lots of ways to disarm a drunk without resorting to violence.

“Don’t want no trouble, now, Elishah,” the bartender said slowly and calmly.

“I don’t want no trouble either,” the man said. He sounded like he was from Arkansas maybe, or even Tennessee, though his accent was undoubtedly thickened with alcohol, and while my first impression of thinness still held, I saw now that he was wiry rather than scrawny. His nose had been broken more than once, and his teeth were fake. The pool tables were watching us now, and the dancing couples. I tried to judge their interest in him, and whether they’d come to his aid if a fight broke out.

I stood up and gestured with my head to the empty stool next to me, my left hand still hiding the knucks. “Sit down, buddy, and let me buy you a drink.” If there was trouble, I wasn’t going to get the information I wanted tonight.

“What you want to buy me a drink for, faggot?”

In this kind of place those were fighting words if ever there were; my options had narrowed to one.

“No sir, you misunderstood me,” I said in a very conciliatory tone. Then I suckerpunched him in the gut so hard I could hear the air rush out of his lungs, the brass digging deep into his entrails. All eyes were on the downed man for the moment, and I took advantage of it to slip the knucks off and into my front pocket. The pocket of a Class A uniform is too tight to conceal anything effectively, but putting them back into the hidden pocket would have been too conspicuous. In a few minutes I’d head for the john and make the switch there. Elishah rolled around on the floor, curled up in a ball with the dry heaves, and I looked up at the bartender first to make sure I wasn’t about to be eighty-sixed. The urge to finish what I’d started and kick the shit out of my floored opponent, starting with his face, was powerful, but I resisted. “Sorry about that.”

Around then I noticed the laughter of the other men. One of them was clapping.

“Yay, Sarge.”

The bartender rang a bell suspended over the backbar. “Congratulations, Sergeant, you just bought the house a round.” He started making drinks and pulling out beer bottles, and a couple of his drinking buddies helped the coughing, retching hillbilly into a chair at one of the tables. I pulled a ten-dollar bill from my sock and laid it on the bar.

“Keep ’em coming,” I told him.

The song was over now and one of the girls was sitting on the high bar stool next to me. She wore a short blue dress with a very low neck-line, and she leaned forward to let me get a good look. “You are a very handsome man.” She made it sound like she’d never seen a handsome man in the flesh before. “My name’s Beulah. You in town for long?”

“Depends,” I said. She had a remarkable figure, large breasts and wide hips accentuated by an extremely narrow waist, and her legs were long and nicely shaped. Her face, though, seemed to belong on another body altogether. Slightly walleyed, with a freakishly small nose and an equally tiny, seemingly lipless mouth over the biggest lantern jaw I’d ever seen on a woman, she’d caked on the makeup and piled her black hair in an elaborately woven mound atop her head in a valiant attempt to compensate. She was one of the homeliest women I’d seen in years, and yet it was all I could do not to start running my hands up and down her body right there at the bar. It had been close to a week since I left Japan and all the free pussy I could handle.