The Walkaway (24 page)

He muscled his way through to a narrow space at the bar, and one of several harried bartenders came immediately over and leaned forward, cupping her ear to hear Eric’s order. “Margarita, rocks. Is Rex here?”

She shrugged, either to indicate that she didn’t know or hadn’t heard; bolstering the latter hypothesis, she poured him a blended margarita from a pitcher. He took a swig anyway and dropped a twenty onto the bar, happy at least to be flush again. He pocketed the change when she slapped it down onto the wet bar, stiffing the Chimneysweep’s bar staff for the second time that day. He jumped at the touch of a finger on his shoulder and turned to see Rex.

Rex grimaced, squinting to examine the details of Eric’s injuries in the darkness. “You look worse than you did at lunchtime. What happened?”

“Fell down some stairs.”

“The fuck you did.”

“Hey, Rex, was that a quiniela or an exacta I bet this afternoon? On Rusty and Prince o’ Chincoteague?”

“Exacta in the wrong order. Too bad, the other way around paid pretty good.” He said it without consulting his little book, and Eric ignored the tiny voice that wanted him to ask Rex to double-check. “You’re not going belly up, are you, Gandy?”

“On one dog bet?”

“I keep hearing things. I was wondering if they were true or if people were just talking that way because they been seeing you drunk and dirty in the middle of the afternoon.”

At that moment Eric experienced a nauseous, urgent desire to escape the smoke and voices, and he set the drink down. “See you, Rex,” he said, and he hurried for the door without waiting for a reply.

Sidney sat exhausted at the bar of the Sweet Cage, sipping a club soda and wishing he was somewhere else. It was his least favorite kind of crowd, enthusiastic and noisy, with another bachelor party going on around stage one. Since they were spending money he couldn’t feel bad about it, but the old feeling that a fight might break out at any second made a knot in his stomach, despite his full awareness that he now paid others to deal with such eventualities. He was about to get up and leave when Francie Cherkas strode in past the doorman. She came straight over and threw her arms around him from behind, smelling of baby powder and lavender and something else, a perfume of some sort that grappled with the other two odors for primacy on Francie’s generous bosom, which was pressed hard against Sidney’s back and shoulder.

“Oh, Sidney, I’m so sorry about your dad, you must just be completely freaked out.” She had on one of her odd-looking ass-length wigs and a canary yellow pants suit with bell-bottom pants.

“He’s my stepdad.”

“Oh.” She nodded solemnly. “Hey, guess who I ran into in the Men’s Department at Dillard’s? Caroline.”

“That’s nice.”

“I don’t know, Sidney. Maybe you shouldn’t have let her slip away.”

“Maybe not,” he said, unwilling to argue the point with her. Caroline was an English teacher who, in the end, hadn’t wanted to share her life with a strip show promoter. They’d spent an evening at Mitch and Francie’s house once; Francie had on an avocado minidress circa 1974, and she served fondue and Cold Duck, the latter in jelly glasses with ice. If Caroline had a patronizing thought all evening she kept it to herself. “Isn’t it sweet that two such hard-to-match people managed to find each other,” she’d said in the car afterward. Sidney, who had known Francie when she was still turning the occasional trick to make ends meet, and Mitch when he was a forty-year-old virgin, kept his opinion of the union to himself.

“What are you doing here this late?” he asked. “Where’s Mitch?”

“It’s Culligan’s birthday, so we’re taking him around to all the clubs.”

At that moment Mitch pushed an extremely old man in a wheelchair through the door and grinned at the sight of Sidney. He nudged the chair’s occupant, who turned reluctantly from the dancer on stage two to look at Sidney and give a short wave hello. Mitch wheeled him over to Sidney, to the old man’s obvious discontent.

“Happy birthday, Culligan.” Culligan had been an obnoxiously faithful customer in the old days, and Sidney suspected that for him the worst aspect of old age and infirmity was the inability to get to the nudie clubs on a nightly basis.

Culligan pulled a five-dollar bill out of his shirt pocket with a shaky hand. “Gonna be a happy birthday in a minute when I get over there to the stage.”

“How old are you, anyway?”

“Seventy-nine.”

Sidney looked at him and wondered how he could be only two years older than Gunther. In this light his skin was the color of library paste in some places and of ripe strawberries in others. He couldn’t stand up anymore and he didn’t seem to hear too well, whereas all Gunther seemed to have lost was his mind.

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 not 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.