The Walkaway (27 page)

23

At the Emergency Ward Gunther had trouble walking, and Sidney stuck his arm under the old man’s to help him. He was still big, about Sidney’s size; he was walking better by the time they got to the entrance and unaided by the time they approached the admissions desk, where they stood behind a young man with a nosebleed.

“I can’t wait my turn, I’m fucking bleeding to death,” he said.

“Sir, you’re going to have to wait your turn. Please go and sit down and I’ll call you when it’s time.” The admissions clerk was a slender black woman who was clearly accustomed to repeating this phrase many times on a daily basis, but she seemed to be wearying of the young bleeder’s presence.

“This is the fucking Emergency Ward, people come here because they can’t wait. It’s nine-thirty in the morning, how backed up can you be?”

“Sir, please go sit.” She looked around him at Sidney. “Yes sir?”

“Just a goddamn minute here, I’m not done talking to you.”

“Yes you are,” Sidney said.

“What did you say to me?” the young man said.

“I said if you don’t go sit down like she said right now your nose isn’t gonna be your only bleeding orifice.” He said it in a calm way, his facial muscles frozen into his most threatening bouncer’s stare, and the young man retreated and sat down as far as he could from the admissions desk.

“Thank you so much. How may I help you?” the woman asked.

A few minutes later as they sat side by side, Sidney filling out an insurance form the clerk had given him, Gunther patted him on the knee. Sidney looked over and was surprised to see him beaming at him with pride. “You’re a good boy, Sidney,” he said, very intelligibly, but that was all he managed to get out before a doctor was finally available to see him.

Tricia had been delighted to be the interface between the hospital personnel and her family, helpfully translating the medical terminology for her grandmother and her dad, asking the doctors questions no one else in the family would think to ask. She was aware, though, that her grandmother and Ed had more to discuss out of her earshot. It had annoyed her last night, being ordered out of the house like a child when serious matters were to be discussed, but her grandmother’s emotional well-being as well as Gunther’s very life seemed to be at stake, and so she had cheerfully trotted off for an aimless drive lasting an hour or so. Now she wanted to know what the hell was going on, but she couldn’t bring herself to be insistent or impertinent with her elders.

“Mind if I take your girl to lunch?” Ed said to Gunther.

“Okay,” he said, and pointed to Tricia. “She’ll stay.” He looked at her with such tender supplication it almost broke her heart. Poor Gunther, she thought, without that poker face you’re defenseless. She nodded, and Ed walked out with Dot.

“You want to watch TV, Gunther?” Tricia said.

He shook his head.
“Ich hab letzte Nacht deine Oma getroffen.”

“Wie, bitte?” She’d never been able to get Gunther to speak more than a few perfunctory phrases of German before. It embarrassed him, she thought, but if he was having a change of heart it was fine with her.

He repeated himself, slowly, and she listened with great care.

“Meine Oma? Meine Grossmutter?” she said.

He nodded. “Ja. Meine Mutti.”

His accent was unfamiliar to her, but not incomprehensible. Had he told her once that his mother was from Hamburg? “Deine Mutti.” She nodded and sat down to listen to whatever he cared to tell her.

Ed and Dot were seated in the corner, away from everyone else. Dot had finished her hamburger and fries, and now that Gunther was safe she no longer saw Ed as an adversary.

“I talked to Rory’s boy this morning about taking up the slack on Rory’s bill out at Lake Vista,” he said. “He squawked a little, but he’ll pony up. He’s got plenty of dough, and he’ll just be making up the difference on the government’s share. I’ll shame him into it if he drags his feet.”

Dot shook her head. “Poor fella. I don’t begrudge him that money, it’s not like he even knew about it. I just don’t understand why Gunther felt like he was responsible for his upkeep.”

Ed’s face was as blank as Gunther’s used to be when he answered. “Guess we’ll never know.”

Between dealing with hospital admissions, his mother, and the weaselly little fucker from Lake Vista, Sidney was exhausted. He didn’t want to go to sleep yet, though, and at eleven in the morning he headed for the hospital cafeteria for his sixth cup of coffee.

Sitting down he picked up an abandoned newspaper from an adjoining table. He was halfway through the racing results when he glanced up and saw the woman he’d met the day before, the one who thought Gunther had been at her house. He got up and moved to her table, leaving the newspaper behind.

“Loretta?”

She looked up at him, surprised. “Yes?”

“Sidney McCallum.” She continued to look expectant and puzzled. “Gunther’s stepson.”

“Oh.
Oh.
Sorry. Sorry, I was off in my own little world. Sit down.”

Sitting down he saw that her eyes were bloodshot and wet. “He’s going to be okay, more or less,” he said.

“Who, Gunther?”

“Yeah. You’re here to see him?”

“No. My husband.” She sniffed unselfconsciously, a loud, gurgling snotty sound that, like her laugh, fit her in a funny, outsized way. “You found him?” She brightened.

“Yeah, this morning. Doctor says it looks like he’s had a stroke. Actually this new guy thinks he may have had a bunch of small ones before this.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“At least now we can get him and my mom into someplace better where they can be together and where the medical care’s up to a twentieth-century level.”

“That’s good. I’ll come see him when he can have visitors, if that’s okay.”

“That’d be great.”

Her lip started quivering and her eyes teared up. “Poor old Gunther,” she said.

“I didn’t realize your husband was sick.”

“He was in an accident. He’ll be okay, they think. Head injuries, though, so it’s hard to tell.”

“Sorry. That must be tough.”

She shrugged. “That’s not why I’ve been crying.” She laughed and grabbed a napkin from the dispenser in front of her, dabbing her eyes. “I was just thinking what a bitch I am for being disappointed he wasn’t dead.”

Sidney took a big mouthful of hot coffee, forcing himself not to laugh along with her.

Sally woke up on her couch in a sitting position, the remnants of a fire still going in the fireplace. The grate was open and a stack of newspapers lay next to it waiting to be burned; she blearily recalled going back into the garage for more after burning the first batch.

Jesus, I’m lucky I didn’t burn the goddamn house down, she thought, getting back down onto her knees to poke more life into the fire. She went into the kitchen and put some coffee on, though the very thought of it made her head swim, then came back and started going through the pile. There was Wayne’s army paperwork, and the army’s side of her long correspondence trying to get Wayne’s death benefits; his being AWOL at the time of his death had complicated that to the point where she’d given up trying. She held on to a few items regarding Wayne’s parents and grandparents, thinking they might be of interest to Loretta or the kids, but all the rest of the paperwork and effluvia she’d been saving since Wayne’s mother died she tossed now into the fire: his high school and college diplomas, group photographs and war mementoes, and finally his letters.

Gunther had given her the letters after the business at the quarry, but she’d never had quite the nerve to read or destroy them. Now that she was going to do the latter she decided she might as well do the former, and she pulled one from its envelope. It was from her, written shortly after Loretta’s birth, and she winced at her clinging tone, at the supplications to either come home or send for her.

The next was a crumpled and resmoothed one from Cecil Wembly, a man she vaguely remembered from high school and maybe from Collins, too, and it was missing its first page. She had liked him, as far as she remembered, and was surprised to know that he and Wayne had corresponded, though not as much as she was at the letter’s contents:
qualities as friend and classmate. Therefore what I am about to set to paper does me great pain
.

Your wife, who as you know has taken a job on the assembly line at Collins, has been operating a prostitution ring right off of the factory floor!

Although management is quite well aware of this, her relationship with her union is such that we cannot take steps against her. You, however, are not beholden as we are to organized labor. As an old friend I implore you not to let this slide! Your honor and that of the Collins Aircraft company are at stake.

Your Friend,
(signed)
Ceece
Cecil N. Wembly

She got up and leafed through the phone book until she found it: Cecil Wembly, Sr., 364 Neapolitan Street in Augusta. She dialed the number and a woman answered.

“Wembly residence.”

“Hi. Is Cecil there?”

“I’m sorry, Cecil passed away five years ago.”

“Oh. Is this his wife?”

“I’m his widow,” the woman said crisply.

“Okay, honey. I’m just calling to tell you your old man was a fucking louse.”

She hung up before the woman could respond, and burned the rest of the letters unread.

What, Dieterle wondered, was the idea of a skyline postcard from a place that barely had a skyline? He stood in line at the airport gift-shop waiting to pay for a couple of stuffed buffaloes for his granddaughters, looking over the rack of iconic prairie images, and was shocked to see an actual news photo of a tornado looming dark over a cluster of farm buildings with the caption
TWISTED GREETINGS
from the Great Plains
. He pulled the card down from the rack and examined the reverse and found that the tornado in the photo had killed eight people in 1982. He took them all and paid for them along with the buffaloes. Walking out he threw the whole batch into a trash can except one, which he stuck in his inside jacket pocket, intending to write the printers responsible and let them know exactly what he thought of their attempt at humor.

He was early for his flight, and the boarding area was empty except for a little spillover from a TWA flight at the next gate. He’d toyed with the idea of staying over just so he could get some sleep before he returned to Dallas, but he had nothing to do here, and everyone he would have wanted to see would be busy with Gunther’s medical situation for the next couple of days at least. He was glad anyway that he hadn’t had to waste his nonrefundable return ticket.

For a while he watched the crowd pass by, harried and grouchy and none of them sufficiently dressed up, in his opinion, for air travel. He didn’t know when he’d be back; maybe when Gunther was better he’d drive up and see him. Then, despite himself, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.

Tricia had left, but not before extracting a promise for more conversation in German. She’d seemed excited and pleased by what he’d told her, which wasn’t much. He was happy to talk, though, and in German it was easy.

He was alone with the old woman now, and she climbed up onto the bed with him, put her arm around his middle, and pulled herself close to him. He could smell her and feel the warmth of her body against his as she tried to explain things to him.

“You’re not even listening to me, are you?”

“Am,” he said, nodding, though he was having trouble following some of it. The gist of it, though, was they’d be together somewhere, and apart from that he didn’t give a rat’s ass what happened.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The towns of Cottonwood, Natterley, and Pullwell are fictional, and those familiar with the real city of Wichita will note that I have taken liberties with its geography and with the geology and topography of south central Kansas.

Though the characters in this novel are all fictional, the lottery described herein is similar to several real ones that operated at various Wichita aircraft plants after World War II. Michael Gebert first tipped me off to them via Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer’s fascinating pulp exposé U.S.A. Confidential; the late Jerry “Clyde Suckfinger” Clark, former head photographer for the
Wichita Beacon
, provided me with several amusing anecdotes about his former colleague Ernie Warden, the reporter who broke the story of the raffles for that paper. My grand-father Joe Mohr supplied others about the aircraft plants in the forties and fifties. I owe particular thanks to Jerri Kay Smith, News Librarian for the
Wichita Eagle
, who provided me with old
Eagles
from June 1952 and to my father, Lee Phillips, and my friend Ed Thomas, both of whom gave me firsthand accounts of occupied Japan.

Since my considerable ignorance extends to many fields, I am grateful to the following people for setting me straight before I wrote too far in the wrong direction: Innes Phillips, who explained the geology of Kansas rock quarries; Susan D. Snyder, who patiently corrected my misapprehensions regarding banking law; and Drs. Tom Moore and Lou Boxer, both of whom devoted time and energy to my questions about head-trauma cases and memory loss. My stalwart German translator, Karl-Heinz Ebnet, worked hard to provide me with certain German regional colloquialisms, circa 1910; Ken Hattrup kindly provided me with general information on the nursing-home industry, particularly regarding the housing and security needs of memory-impaired patients.

I owe thanks to everyone at Ballantine Books in New York and Picador Books in London, in particular to my long-suffering, stoic editors Dan Smetanka and Maria Rejt; thanks are also due to my friends Paul Marsh, Abner Stein, Dennis McMillan, Charles Fischer, Sylvie Rabineau, and Katherine Faussett. Finally, and especially, I would like to thank my agent and good pal Nicole Aragi for more than it would be practical to try to list here.