The Walkaway (25 page)

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, stopping 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.

About the only thing in her life she was proud of, really, was the way Loretta had turned out. Part of that, of course, had been knowing when to keep her damned mouth shut, no matter how self-righteous and irritating Loretta got. Sally had kept her counsel for thirty-five years, and the girl had another guess coming if she thought she was about to start spilling now. With some regret she took one last look at the newspaper picture, carried the whole stack to the fireplace, and started a fire going. She wasn’t going to live forever.

Grunting, his clothes soaked through with cold, stinking water, Gunther hauled the young man out of the gravel pit. Once onshore, he set him down and listened to his breathing. The young man seemed not to have swallowed much water, for which Gunther was grateful. He’d known the man was trouble when he first heard him calling out in that kindergarten teacher voice, but he had no desire to kill anyone.

He lifted him over his shoulders with a grunt and carried him toward the big Pontiac. Gunther would have preferred it to the little foreign thing he’d been driving around that evening. He wondered where he’d picked the damned thing up, anyway. He vaguely remembered a side trip to Jack’s Riverside Tavern and wondered why he hadn’t borrowed Jack’s old car.

Thoroughly winded, he opened the door and shoved him onto the front seat. He wasn’t that young after all under the harsh, yellowish dome light; probably close to fifty, his head bruised like he’d been in a fight.

Gunther closed the door and trudged back toward the rise, pulling off his wet shirt. At the top he pulled off his pants and his shorts and shoes and socks and hung them from the branches of a tree to dry in the wind. Maybe later he’d build a fire, though he wasn’t sure he remembered how. He was bone tired, but he couldn’t lay down yet because he hadn’t done what he’d come here for. He couldn’t remember exactly what that was either, though he suspected it had something to do with the people in the cabin he’d been watching earlier in the evening. Gazing down in its direction now it was gone, even its foundations. He began to worry about the man lying unconscious in the car. The last time he’d been here bad things had happened; he was glad he hadn’t let the man drown, but he knew he couldn’t just leave him sleeping in the car.

He headed back down the slope one more time, his legs sore. The grass was soft beneath his bare feet, but he stepped carefully nonetheless. He had no handcuffs, so using the jackknife he found in his pocket he cut several lengths of string connecting a bunch of stakes along the ground and serving no useful purpose that he could see. It was thick as spaghetti, more or less, and with it he hogtied the man on the front seat of the car. Once he was sure the man was breathing more or less regularly and that his circulation wasn’t cut off, he closed the car door. Before walking back up to the rise he noticed he’d left the door to the foreign car open. Going over to close it he found a large plastic bag on the backseat; in it was a bedroll, and leaning across the back of the car was a shovel. He had no use for a shovel, but he took the bedroll with him to the top of the rise.

He laid out the bedroll and sat on it, not willing to go to sleep yet. He could stay awake for a long time, no matter how tired he was, and he hadn’t done whatever it was he’d come to do.

He watched the land below for a while, hearing several more unidentified plops in the water, thinking about the light of the moon and the tricks it played with color, how under it both cars appeared to be shades of gray, how the grass, lush and undoubtedly a very bright, yellowish green in daylight looked here like the fur of a white rabbit.

He turned at the sudden, prickling sensation on the back of his neck that someone was behind him. A few feet away, her features hidden from the moonlight by the spackled shade of the trees, stood a young woman.

Her sweet voice was soft and high, the way he remembered it.
“Komm, Günther, ’s ist Zeit zum Schlafengehen,”
she said, almost singing.

He yawned and nodded his assent, then climbed obediently into the sleeping bag and closed his eyes, feeling himself falling asleep to the sensation of a warm peck on his cheek and a gentle, feminine hand stroking his hair.

20

GUNTHER FAHNSTIEL
June 22, 1952

I heard Ogden’s car before he came through the first gate. He didn’t allow for how quiet it normally was out there, even with the rain coming down. From the top of the ridge I could hear everything that happened at night, right down to the conversations in the cabin, though I usually tried not to pay much attention to those. I was just there to keep the peace.

After I disarmed Ogden and left him and his buddy cuffed to the trees I walked down to the cabin and found four naked people dancing close to a scratchy old Paul Whiteman record. Sally wasn’t too pleased when I told her the weekend was over, that she’d have to give the fellows a rain check. I made a little joke about how it really was raining, but Sally didn’t laugh. From the ruckus she raised, poking her finger at my chest and shouting, you wouldn’t have thought me being the only person in the room with any clothes on was anything unusual. I out-shouted her and told her to pack up and get out and I wasn’t fucking around either. She didn’t back down exactly, but she did stop yelling.

The two guys looked at each other and shrugged, then started getting dressed. One of them was a skinny little redheaded guy of about fifty or so, and the other was a big farmboy type with a double chin and skin trouble who didn’t look as old as that record they were playing. Word must have spread about what happened to guys who didn’t cooperate, because they left without an argument.

They’d only been there since about four o’clock in the afternoon, but the cabin already smelled like sex and whiskey and burnt beef, and Sally said she and Frieda needed to stay and clean up. When I told her she’d have to come back the next day and do it she got snappy and wanted to know what was the matter. I was still sore at her for not listening to me, so I just told her to get her ass in the car and let me take care of it.

I headed out toward Pullwell with the raffle winners ahead of me in a light-colored sedan. The car was all over the wet sandy road, and I sped up alongside with my wobbly Ford and motioned the redheaded guy to pull over.

“You,” I said to the kid next to him. “How much have you had to drink?”

“I don’t drink.”

“All right. You’re driving back to town.”

“The fuck he is,” the driver said. “This here’s my car, and I agreed to drive him out here ’cause he don’t have a car but I’ll be doublefuckin’-damned if I’ll let that cocksucker drive my car.”

“I didn’t ask if you wanted him to,” I said, and I opened the car door and yanked him out. The fat boy just sat there while I brought skinny around. “Now scootch on over there and drive the damn car.”

He did as he was told and I shoved skinny into the passenger seat. He mumbled something I didn’t hear, and I asked him to repeat it. He wouldn’t, though, and I sent them on their way.

Back on the road, going sixty and listening to the Ford’s frame rattle the whole way, I tried to think what to do about Ogden. We could have old Carswell file against him for trespassing, or we could get him for assault with a deadly weapon. I wondered if the joker he’d brought with him might cooperate and I tried to think where I’d seen him before. Probably a narcotics beef, judging by his skinny frame and haggard face.

The clock on my dash didn’t work but it was past three by the time I got to Ed’s house and I hated ringing the bell. Ed answered in pants and a shirt he was already buttoning, and in a minute Daisy appeared behind him in her nightgown scowling at me, arms folded across her chest. I pretended not to notice her.

Ed put on his shoes and pulled a raincoat from the rack next to the door and stepped outside. “Sorry, honey.”

She didn’t say a word, just closed the door on us.

“Goddamn Tommy. I can’t believe this guy gave ’em the slip.” We were almost to Pullwell now, and it was about four A.M.

“What’d you tell him to do?” I asked.

“Just follow Ogden around and pull him over and arrest him if he looked like he was coming out here. Shit. If I find out those guys were drinking I’m gonna tear ’em a couple of new assholes come Monday.”

“Sorry about waking Daisy.”

“She’ll get over it.”

I didn’t think she would, though. “Guess this’ll be the end of this whole deal,” I said, so he wouldn’t have to bring it up himself. “Ogden’s sure to spill soon as he gets charged.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Ed said. “Maybe we can still cut a deal with him. He leaves town peacefully, we won’t queer his deal with the army.”

Back at the quarry the first thing I noticed was Frieda’s Cadillac still there next to Ogden’s Plymouth. “Goddamn it, I told those gals to clear out of here.”

I killed the engine and we got out with our weapons drawn and approached the cabin. The lights were off and the door locked, so I busted it open. There was nobody there. I opened the west bedroom and found Frieda, who sat up and screamed.

Sally came out of the other bedroom. “What time is it?”

“I told you to get on out of here,” I said.

“Last time I looked you weren’t in charge of me, so we stayed to clean up.”

A lump in the bed next to Frieda moved and grunted. I pointed the gun at it.

“What’s that?” I asked, and a head came slowly up from under the sheets. It was Carswell.

“Howdy,” he said, grinning proudly.

“Goddamnit,” I said. “You’re supposed to be watching those two up there.”

“It’s raining.”

“They’re dangerous, I told you that.”

“They’re still handcuffed to them trees. They sure tried to get me to set ’em loose, but I didn’t. I seen them other fellas leave with you, thought I might come down and help the girls clean up.”

Sally pointed at the door and damn near spat. “You broke the fucking lock.”

“Gunther, where’d you say these men are?” Ed was standing behind me. He tilted his head toward the door.

The rain was still coming down, and halfway there I could hear the moaning of the thin one, and Ogden telling him for what sounded like the hundredth time to shut up. They were both sitting on the wet grass now, with their arms still wrapped around the trees. Their clothes were soaked right through.

“Please help me,” the thin one said in a hillbilly accent, his voice shaking. It was a nice warm night despite the rain but he sounded like he was freezing.

“Would one of you go to the car and get him his fucking heroin so he’ll shut up?” Ogden said.

“Possession of narcotics, Sergeant Ogden?” Ed said.

“It’s his,” Ogden said.

“Your car,” Ed replied. “Doesn’t matter much if you say it’s his dope or not.”

“And would you open these bracelets? That idiot farmer tightened ’em up so bad when he left I can hardly feel my hands anymore.”

“You’re under arrest right now for narcotics possession, for assault with a deadly weapon, resisting arrest, attempted murder. I could go on,” Ed said. “We got a proposition for you. You never come back here and we don’t pass that arrest record on to the army.”

“That’d sure be it for my military career, wouldn’t it.”

“That’s the way we figure it.”

I watched the other fellow shivering and whimpering, and I’d just about drawn a bead on where I’d seen him before—not long after the war, in a shooting gallery raid—when I heard a loud crack and something slipping in the slick grass and coming down hard. Ogden was on top of Ed, the little tree snapped in two, sawn partway through with some kind of a file.

I drew and pointed my revolver at his head. He had the chain around Ed’s throat, choking him. Ed was sputtering and his face was red, and he was between me and Ogden.

“Let him go,” I said, and he didn’t answer. Ed clawed at the chain while I moved to outflank them. Ogden turned with me, and I thought about shooting anyway. Finally Ogden got up and dove for the slope, and I fired after him. I missed and started running after him but slipped on the grass and landed on my ass hard.

I fired again from a sitting position. Ed groaned and got up on his hands and knees and said something I couldn’t make out. I started to go after Ogden, but he grabbed my arm and repeated himself. This time I understood him.

“He’s got my gun,” he said.

I started running straight down to the cabin. The rise was open and unprotected, but no shots came. Then I spotted him among some good-sized rocks next to the quarry, halfway to the cabin, and when he saw me he raised Ed’s gun in my direction. I dropped to the ground but it didn’t provide much cover. Like a goddamned idiot I’d come out one free weekend with a scythe and cut the grass.

He fired once and skirted the edge of the water toward the cabin. I don’t think he was even trying to hit me, just keep me pinned down while he moved. I rose and ran and he fired again, and this time I could hear it hitting the ground behind me. He disappeared around the front end of the cabin and I heard screams, followed by Sally’s voice, more mad than scared.

“You son of a bitch, you’ve got a lot of balls showing up here—”

I was close enough to hear what I took to be the sound of the barrel of Ed’s revolver on Sally’s face, along with a yelp from her and another scream from Frieda. I didn’t hear anything from Wayne and I took that as a bad sign as I rounded the corner to the front of the cabin. I edged up to the door, thinking Wayne probably had the revolver pointed straight at it, and I crouched and poked my head in, almost down to the floor. The lights were out, but I saw Sally on the ground with her nose bleeding like hell and Wayne in the corner behind Frieda with his cuffed wrists around her throat, the barrel of the revolver pointed at her temple. I ducked back out, the gun went off and Frieda screamed one more time as the floor splintered where my head had been.

I doubled back to the room where Carswell and Frieda had been. The window was open and I was pretty sure it hadn’t been a minute before. Behind me I saw Carswell hightailing it for the rise, and Ed trotting toward me. I climbed in the window as quiet as I could and motioned Ed to go around front.

“Come on out now, Ogden,” I heard him yell as he got to near the front door. I landed on the bed as quiet as I could manage.

“Eat shit,” Ogden yelled back at him. I climbed down off the bed and crawled forward. Ogden still had Frieda and Sally was still on the ground. What I noticed and Wayne Ogden didn’t was that she had her hands on the handle of a big cast-iron skillet.

“I said come on out, Ogden, maybe we can still make a deal,” Ed shouted.

“What kind of fucking idiot do you take me for,” Wayne yelled back at him, and he shoved Frieda forward, pulling the hammer back at the same time. As soon as he was in front of her Sally rose up, the skillet in her hand, and I thought I heard bone crack when she brought it down on the back of his head. The gun went off wild and Frieda shrieked as she and Wayne tumbled forward past the porch and down with a splash into a puddle. He didn’t fight as she scrambled to get away from him.

“I’m deaf! I’m deaf!” she yelled, running away from us to the safety of her Cadillac.

I pushed past Sally, who dropped the skillet onto the floor, and I stood over Wayne, whose open eyes were rolled upward into the sockets. Ed picked up his revolver where Wayne had dropped it, and he was the one who went inside and comforted Sally and looked after her nose, which was bleeding pretty bad.

Wayne closed his eyes, then opened them again and looked up at me. The rain was making him blink and squint, and I pulled back the hammer just to see what he’d do. He smiled, and right then I could see this bastard dogging me the rest of my damned life, and Sally’s, too. He smiled because he knew I wasn’t the kind to finish him off on the ground like that.

He didn’t even have time to look surprised.