The Walkaway (21 page)

“Excuse me, Miss,” he said, and the lady behind the bar laughed.

“Thanks, Mister. You get another beer on the house for that.”

“Thanks,” he said, though he didn’t think he’d finish the first one and wasn’t sure what he’d done to merit a second. “I was just wondering about the old car out front.”

“Oh, the Packard. That’s Dad’s.” She jerked her thumb toward the old man at the pool table.

“Holy shit. Jack Teaberry.”

She turned to yell out the pass-through. “Hey, Dad. Look who’s here.” The young woman had missed a shot, and Jack was now lining up his. Without answering his daughter he took his shot and missed. Only then did he deign to look up at his daughter in annoyance.

“What?”

“You got a visitor.”

“Long time no see,” Jack said, obviously puzzled to see him, and for a minute Gunther was afraid Jack would call the cops and have him hauled back to the home. “Didn’t even know you were alive. Let me finish this game here, then we’ll shoot some, you and me.”

Euchre had lasted less than an hour and a half, cut short by a losing streak so deep and persistent Sally could feel an outburst of pure yellow bile coming on. Reluctant to shock her card-playing friends, sweet grandmotherly types who mistakenly liked to think of themselves as a bunch of salty old broads, she had left early. Now she turned onto Control Tower Place and pulled into her driveway, nearly plowing into a shadowy figure who, moving into her headlights with an urgent wave, turned out to be her son-in-law. She stuck her head out the window.

“What are you doing here?”

“Son of a bitch stole my car.”

“Who?”

“The old guy they’re all looking for. I tracked him down here and he stole my fucking Volvo.”

“Don’t you use that language in my presence, Eric,” she said, though the word crossed her own lips a dozen times a day. “Did you call the police?”

“Not yet. Can I borrow your car?”

“You know perfectly goddamn well you can’t borrow my car, Eric.”

He turned, muttering “Fuck,” and headed back into the house. She followed and found that while his car was being stolen he’d helped himself to the Tanqueray.

“This old man who stole your car, you figure he hotwired it?”

“He took my keys.” He poured himself another small gin, and she didn’t say anything.

Maybe it was Gunther, then. He was a man of many and varied talents, often surprising ones, but hotwiring an ignition was certainly not among them. “What the hell happened to your head?”

He touched his purplish temple and winced. “Guy bushwacked me back at our house.”

“You fixing to call the police?”

He shook his head. “I’m gonna call Loretta, see if she’ll let me drive the Caddy.” He dialed, avoiding her gaze, and since the bottle was out she poured herself a gin. “Shit. Got the machine.”

“I’ll give you a lift home.”

He looked at her suspiciously for a moment, trying to figure out her angle, then he shrugged and took a swig of his own drink. “It’s twelve thousand dollars to whoever finds this guy.”

“That’s what I heard.”

“What was he doing here, anyway?”

Sally shrugged. “Looking for me, I guess.”

“You know him?”

“We used to hang around a few years ago. He ran into Loretta yesterday, maybe that got him to thinking.”

“Hang around?” He raised an eyebrow.

She was annoyed by his insinuating tone, but she didn’t really care what he thought about her. “I used to keep company with old Gunther. He was real nice to me a few times when things got shitty. And I mean they got real shitty, once or twice. And he always treated Loretta right, too.”

“So how come you didn’t marry him?”

“Lots of reasons, and none of ’em’s any of your goddamn business. Come on, let’s go before I’m too drunk to drive.”

She got up and he followed her to the garage, its door standing open and its light on. She pressed the button by the door and the garage door began to lift, revealing her car still sitting in the driveway.

“What were you doing in the garage, anyway?”

“I wasn’t in the garage,” he said.

Then she saw her storage boxes sitting open, the newspapers in a pile on the concrete floor. “Must have been Gunther, then.”

Eric stepped forward and picked up the newspaper on top of the stack. “Look at this. ‘NAB COLLINS SEX RING OPERATORS.’ ” He read silently for a second, then turned to Sally, startled. “Holy shit, it’s
you
.”

“You better fucking swear you won’t tell Loretta.”

“Sure thing . . .” It was the one with the photo of Sally being led away by Gunther’s jovial cop buddies. She hadn’t been able to make herself look at those old papers in years, but she couldn’t bear throwing them away either.

“Bring those papers into the kitchen. You’re going to have to get a taxi home, ’cause I need another drink.”

Loretta’s lonely Chinese dinner was eaten, her suspect sheets and bedspread drying downstairs. Another glass of cheap white wine in hand, she was watching an old “Dragnet” episode about LSD. She remembered watching it years ago with her roommate Ruth in their little duplex over by WSU, both of them giggling hysterically at the show and at Ruth’s boyfriend Evan, who was annoyed less by the laughter than by the fact that they were tripping and he wasn’t. She remembered thinking at the time that Ruth and Evan were like a couple marrying outside their religions; eventually one of them would convert the other or they’d split up.

And so upon getting involved with Eric Gandy, a clean-cut, turtleneck-wearing, shorthaired juicer of the old school, she’d given up drugs of all kinds without acknowledging to him that she’d ever indulged in them. She remained drug-free until Eric discovered them himself in the mid-seventies, and when he imagined he was introducing her to the sordid thrill of pot smoking at the age of thirty, she let him think it was true.

Now, watching Jack Webb’s earnest squint, she was overcome with an unexpected and intense desire to get high. It had been seven or eight years since she’d partaken, she guessed, around the time Eric stopped taking her to those kinds of social occasions. She had no idea where to buy any, nor whom to ask.

Tate had some, though, up in his room. Shortly after his last visit home, she’d gone through his drawers with the intention of boxing up some of his old comic books and monster magazines to put in the attic, and there it was, a baggieful of weed. She wasn’t shocked or worried; mostly she was disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to empty the magazine drawers, since doing so would mean admitting she’d found the dope. She’d opened up the baggie for a sniff, and it had smelled good and fresh, though at the time the thought of firing some of it up never crossed her mind.

Five minutes later she stepped through the sliding doors of the convenience store she used for last-minute emergencies. The man behind the counter knew her and smiled in greeting. He was old, maybe as old as Gunther, and that made what she was about to do feel unseemly at best.

“Zig-Zag papers, please.” She couldn’t look him in the eye, and her face was hot.

“Zig-Zags. What size?”

“Double longs,” she said, and she looked up to see him still smiling in his friendly way. His white hair was slicked straight back, his nose gray from drinking, and she realized he didn’t give a shit whether she smoked pot or not. Unfortunately this did nothing to stem her embarrassment.

He put a package of papers on the counter and rang it up. “I coulda guessed. Usually the ladies like ’em good and long.” He winked and her face got hotter.

She paid him to the penny and turned to go. “See you,” she said. Her voice sounded high and squeaky to her, and she imagined she could feel his eyes on her rear end all the way to the car, but when she faced him again he was leaning on the counter the other way, reading the newspaper.

Sally and Eric had polished off half the bottle of Tanqueray. “Even after I paid the girls their share, and Gunther, and the piece of shit shop steward, and the old farmer who owned the land, I was still clearing a thousand bucks a month above and beyond my paycheck, pure profit.”

“I always thought you guys were just scraping by when Loretta was little.”

“Later we were.” Sally got up and poured herself another two fingers. “Want more?” she asked, already sloshing a little more into his glass. “That was a pretty good shot he got in to your head, looks like.”

“He caught me off guard. I wouldn’t have thought such an old guy could pack that kind of wallop.”

It didn’t surprise Sally. One Sunday at the cabin she’d blown the alarm whistle after a big redheaded fellow named Ricky Fast had decided he wanted a little backdoor action with Sonya Bockner. The other guy that weekend, a big talker by the name of Hal Waverly, stepped in between them, and Ricky picked him up and smashed him against the wall.

“One more word out of you, Waverly, and I’ll brown-eye all three of you.” At that the intrepid Waverly had bolted, sprinting to the safety of the trees opposite the cabin, at which point Sally blew the whistle.

Ten seconds later—she’d swear it hadn’t been any longer than that—Gunther was in the doorway, and then behind Ricky, gun drawn, and then Ricky was on the floor holding the back of his neck.

“Get up.”

He did as he was told, then swung at Gunther, who slammed his fist into Ricky’s big, soft gut. As he gurgled, sounding as if he were about to puke, Gunther crashed the butt of the pistol against his temple. Ricky went down with a yelp.

“Weekend’s over. Pack up your shit and get out, all of you. Where’s the other one?”

“He’s out there somewhere. Ricky here threatened to cornhole him.”

“That what started it? Cornholing?”

Sally nodded. “Wanted to do it to Sonya and she doesn’t go for that.”

“I don’t blame her. All right, you go find your boyfriend and I’ll watch this bird.”

She and Sonya left to find Hal. She didn’t know what Gunther had said to Ricky while they were alone, but he apologized to her and to Sonya, though not to Waverly, who steered carefully clear of him on the line after that.

“Hey. You listening?”

“Sorry. I was thinking about something.” She was already drunker than she thought. “What were you saying?”

“I said, you think he might be headed out there?”

“Where?”

“To the cabin.”

“Isn’t a cabin anymore. Just an old flooded gravel quarry, no use to anybody.”

“What was he here for, then? Looking for a little action?”

“He’da been pretty disappointed once he got a look at me if that’s what he was after,” she said. “Anyway I don’t think that’s it.”

“Tell me where the quarry was.”

“There’s nothing there.”

“There’s twelve grand for whoever finds him.”

“You don’t need it that bad, do you?” She was kidding but his face closed up in a defensive way; Loretta hadn’t said anything to her about money troubles, but he might have hidden them from her out of pride or spite. “No kidding, I don’t see why he’d be going out there.”

“You’re not the senile one, he is. Now are you going to tell me?”

“All right,” she said, just to shut him up. “You take the turnpike down to Pullwell and get on the old State Highway 129.”

He grabbed a pen and a piece of scratch paper next to her phone and started writing.

Tate’s
MAD
magazines were stacked neatly in two piles in the bottom drawer of his dresser, organized chronologically and protected in polyethylene bags. Loretta was sure he hadn’t read them in years.

She took the bag from the drawer and into her bedroom, and after a couple of false starts rolled herself a surprisingly accomplished joint. It was long and thin, and she was careful not to overstuff it, factoring in a lowered resistance after such a long abstinence. Back in Tate’s room she put the baggie back in its place between June and July 1983, hoping she’d left no indication that it had been opened and some of its contents pilfered.

I owe my only son for part of a baggie full of dope, she thought, and decided that the place to enjoy her proudly constructed joint was the bath. In the master bathroom she discovered that Gunther had availed himself of the tub as well as of the washing machine. There was a ring of grime around the drain, and a wet towel on the floor next to the toilet. If her husband had done it she would have been angry, but as it was she cheerfully cleaned the tub and threw the towel into the hamper. Then she drew a hot bath and on a whim poured in some of the Mr. Bubble that Gunther had thoughtfully left out for her. It bubbled up pretty nicely, considering it had probably been in the cabinet for a decade. She lit a couple of candles and the joint, climbed into the tub and closed her eyes, taking a long, slow draw.

She could feel her muscles going slack in the hot water and bubbles, and within a couple of minutes she was giggling. Poor Tate must have panicked when he got back to school and realized he’d left it for her to find, never suspecting that the real danger in her stumbling upon it was that she might smoke it up.

She listened attentively to the running water, noting how different it sounded when the tub was all the way full, how rounded and deep the splashing was. With her feet she turned the faucet off and opened the drain for five seconds until the water level was just up to her sternum. Without the sound of the water she became aware of the steady monotonous drone of the air conditioner running, masking all the other small sounds until it hit its set temperature and kicked off again. Funny how that was a sound you hardly thought of once you got used to air-conditioning. They hadn’t had it the first few years in Cottonwood; they’d run fans and left windows open for crossdrafts, never really cut off from the sounds of the outdoors in the hot months. A few years later, when her mother married Donald, he’d installed a window unit like the one in the small apartment above his auto parts store, where he’d lived since his first wife Cora killed herself.

It had been years since she’d thought about Cora, who had once been a subject of lurid fascination for her. She was never discussed at home, nor was the fact that Donald had been married before, but Loretta heard adults furtively mention it, and in late childhood and early adolescence she spent many hours imagining Cora’s method of and motive for ending her life, even entertaining the thrilling possibility that Donald had done her in and made it look like a suicide. Eventually she got the story out of Donald’s sister Norene, who’d loathed the woman: Cora had been screwing the principal of the local high school, and she knew the principal’s wife was about to spill the beans, if she hadn’t already. So she swallowed a fistful of barbiturates with the full expectation, Norene was sure, of Donald coming home for lunch at noon in time to call for help; unfortunately the principal’s wife had phoned him that morning. Too angry to face Cora, he’d wolfed down a bowl of stew at the Jayhawk Lunchroom that day instead of going home, and by the time he teetered in the front door at midnight, drunk and ready for a fight, the pills had done their work. Norene wasted no sympathy or grief on her late sister-in-law. “It was the war, and there was hardly any men around anyway, and she decided one wasn’t enough for her. There weren’t many single women in this town crying over Cora.”