The Walkaway Read online

  “Goodness gracious, Lester, this would be the most beautiful house if you’d only just clean the rest of it up like this room here,” the woman’s voice said.

  “Guess I’m used to it that way,” Gladwell answered like a man who’d heard the same observation once or twice before.

  “I’d even come early some Friday and help you. I bet I could talk Frieda and Sonya into it, too.”

  “Don’t believe I will, thank you kindly.” It was a firm refusal and she didn’t press it as he helpfully steered her right into my sightline on the other side of the bed.

  “When’d you get that Plymouth?” she asked him.

  “Long time ago, usually I got it in the barn.”

  “What you want me to do this time, Lester?” Lynn asked. She wasn’t bad to look at, with blond hair in a permanent wave and big tits and a face that wasn’t pretty exactly, but with a lopsided smile that seemed to suggest a good time could be had by all. She did look a little hard-ridden for her age, which I estimated at about thirty.

  “Strip down to your shorts and like that,” he said, his throat slightly constricted.

  She winked and started undoing her dress in back, undulating and shimmying her way out of it until it slid to the floor. She put her hands to her hips. “You want the slip on or off?”

  “Just your silkies and the other thing.” He cupped his hands in front of his chest, supporting a pair of apparently gigantic imaginary breasts.

  “My bra?” she asked, her slip going over her head. “You like to look at that, Lester?” She had on a pair of black panties with a matching brassiere and a white garter belt.

  He nodded. “Mm-hm.”

  “Shoes and stockings on?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “You want to see my titties, Lester?”

  “Not yet,” he said, looking straight at me, and I realized I was supposed to be getting shots of her stripping. I placed the lighter against the peephole and flicked it open and shut again with a click, not far enough to spark a flame.

  “You hear that, Lester?”

  “Uh-huh. I got mice in here. Gonna get me a cat one of these days. Okay, now let’s see them bosoms.”

  Five minutes later they were both naked and writhing on the bed, changing positions much too quickly to allow for any sort of satisfaction for either of them; ten seconds or so after each switch I’d click the lighter again, the snap of the imaginary shutter his signal to withdraw, turn her over, and try something new. After a click from my phantom Minox ended a very brief session of cunnilingus, he very gently held her hips and rolled her onto her stomach and removed a jar of petroleum jelly from the nightstand, at which point I decided I’d seen enough of these two lovebirds. What red-blooded reader of True or Argosy wouldn’t feel cheated when his brown 8-by-12 envelope arrived in the mail and out slid pictures of the old farmer’s scrawny buttocks pumping away at this tired harlot? Quietly I left the room and its stench behind and went downstairs, and as I got to the front door she began to moan, and as I stood there it progressed to a yell. I don’t know what he thought about my taking so much longer to get snapping on what he must have considered one of the most commercially viable positions of the afternoon.

  “Oh, my God, Lester, I’m so dirty I’m so dirty I’m so dirty,” I heard her cry as I opened the door, missing the dispiriting sight of Lester and Lynn violating Kansas state law. I hoped Lester wouldn’t be too disappointed about the pictures and drove back to town feeling pleased with the afternoon’s labors, hot air blowing through the open windows of the Plymouth. It was a long way back to town and the radio didn’t work so I watched the fields roll by, separated by rows of big old trees as wind breaks, the solid expanses of green occasionally punctuated by the appearance of a farmhouse. I felt a brief wave of nostalgia wash over me, though I’d never lived on a farm myself and never wanted to. Then I recognized that the pang I felt was for Japan, and I cursed my own greed and my shitty timing.

  A French soldier had approached me about getting some uniforms; I didn’t know what his racket was and didn’t want to either. I sold him the uniforms and had my own tailor fit the Frenchman out as a corporal and a couple of Japanese gangsters as privates and thought I was done with the whole business.

  Maybe three weeks later I read in Stars and Stripes where someone had knocked over a bank in Osaka. There was nothing particularly original about the robbery, and had it happened in the States not much ink would have flowed, but it was the first modern bank job in Japanese history and the press there was all over it. So was the Criminal Investigations Division of the United States Army. There was disagreement among the various witnesses as to the nationality and descriptions of the robbers, but one element was consistent in all their accounts: they were wearing U.S. Army uniforms. As soon as I read that I started preparing for a possible hasty departure, and a couple of weeks after that Lieutenant McCowan showed up to ask me if I’d ever been approached about selling uniforms. I told him hell no, I would have reported it so fast it’d make your head swim, but McCowan didn’t look as stupid as I needed him to be. I was gone before he had a chance to come around again, leaving the party just as it was about to go into full swing. I was lucky, I guess, that I had a place to go and a goal to work toward.

  Finally I was off the dirt roads and on pavement, and getting close to town I pondered what to do with the rest of the day; for the first time in my life I was on no one’s schedule, not even my own. I decided to drive around and look at the old hometown in the rosy light of the setting June sun.

  For some reason I got stuck on the idea of seeing the house I’d grown up in. I hadn’t been inside it since high school; my mother moved shortly after I left home, and since then I’d had no urge to relive my childhood. When I pulled up in front of it there was a crewcut guy in Bermuda shorts mowing the lawn with a beer can in his left hand. He was about thirty, his limbs thin but with a gut billowing over the top of his shorts, and though the evening was mild as summer ones go in Kansas his face was red and dappled with tiny drops of perspiration. I lit one up, got out, and leaned on the side of the Plymouth, watching him for a minute until he finally noticed me and asked what the hell I was looking at.

  “Just waiting for you to stop for a second. I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  “So what do you want?”

  “I was just wondering if I could take a look inside. I lived here when I was a kid.”

  “You got another coffin nail on you, there?”

  I took out the pack of Luckys, lit one off my own and handed it to him. He took a deep long hit and I looked around the lawn. It was the color of a green olive in the shade and that of a green grape where the low sun hit it. He wasn’t friendly exactly, but he was glad to have an unexpected excuse to take a break. The job was about half done, the grass high enough to make pushing the mower a major physical effort. He swigged down his beer and beckoned me to follow him.

  Inside, naturally, it was smaller than I remembered. Shabbier, too, though that might have been due to the passing of the years and the neglect of subsequent residents rather than a failure of childhood memory. The front room was a mess, with magazines scattered all over the coffee table and the floor around it, mostly of the confessional or movie star scandal variety, and ashtrays awash with butts, divided pretty evenly between those with and without lipstick. I looked into the smaller of the two bedrooms, which had been mine, and found it full of ham radio equipment. My parents’ old bedroom was down the hall past the bathroom, and I asked his permission to look before I opened the door. It wasn’t much neater than the front room, and the unmade bed rested against the wrong wall, beneath a large wooden crucifix that would have appalled my rigidly Baptist mother. I closed the door and was about to thank him for his kindness and go when he called out from the kitchen.

  “You want a beer?”

  I went in and sat down at the table and he brought over two cans of Hamm’s. He opened his own and passed the church key to me.

 
“You aren’t Masterson’s son, are you?”

  “Never heard of him,” I said.

  “Landlord.” He seemed relieved. “He’s a prick with ears.”

  “Must have been the guy who bought it from my folks.”

  “Raised the fucking rent two years in a row, but you try and get him to fix the goddamn water heater and he’s nowhere to be found. Had a guy come out and fix it end of March, sent him the bill and he goddamn ignored it. I got half a mind to deduct it from the rent, except the cocksucker’d probably evict us.”

  “Can he do that?”

  “Shit, yes. Law’s completely on his side.”

  “I wouldn’t know, I’ve hardly ever been a renter. Been in the army since the war except for one year right after.”

  “Goddamn army. There’s sure times when I wish I’d never left.” He looked at his can of Hamm’s for a second, drained it, and went back to the icebox for a replacement. “You want another one?”

  “I’m doing okay, thanks.”

  As he closed the icebox I heard the front door open and a second later a woman’s thin voice tore through the air of the little house. “I thought I told you I wanted to see that fucking lawn mowed by the time I got home.”

  A nice-looking young woman with short blond hair, six or seven months pregnant, leaned against the frame of the kitchen door, barely registering my presence except as an explanation for her husband’s failure to complete his chore. She was dressed nicely, for an office job most likely, and she stared fiercely at my new buddy.

  “Hiya, honey, just sitting down for a beer,” he said with deliberate good cheer.

  “I can see that. What happened to the lawn?”

  “About half of it got mowed.”

  I stood up. “Sergeant Thomas McCowan, U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps. Sorry to have distracted your husband, but I lived here as a boy and I wanted to see the old place again.”

  “Great. Now you’ve seen it.”

  I was a little taken aback; the polite, apologetic soldier routine usually worked wonders with lady civilians. I was about to elaborate when the woman stomped out and into the bedroom, where the door slammed as loud as a cheap, lightweight one can.

  “Like I said, there’s times I wisht I’d stayed in the army. I better get back to mowing while we still got some daylight.”

  We went outside. The sun was very low, turning the house the color of a ripe peach, and he started pushing the lawn mower again. I got behind the wheel and sipped at the beer, considering where to go next. Sally wasn’t far from here; there wouldn’t be any harm in me driving casually by just to see the lay of the land. In the sideview mirror as I pulled away my new, nameless friend pushed away like Sisyphus.

  She lived in the same house I’d bought in ’46. The sun was lower and the pretty warm twilight was gone from the lawns, replaced by the cool blue shadows of the houses and the trees. Like my childhood home, ours looked shabbier than I remembered, and she’d painted it brown, something I never would have allowed. The chain-link fence appeared to be the same one I’d put in myself when we moved in, warped now and rusted in spots, and the lawn was spotted with dandelions and crabgrass, showing up dark green and tall against a field of sickly yellow.

  Parked in the driveway was a Cadillac convertible, a hatchet-faced slick in a houndstooth sport jacket dangling halfway out the driver’s side door, leisurely perusing the front section of the afternoon Beacon with one loafered foot on the cement. I didn’t want to stop, so I drove around the block for a second look. I thought he might be the cop Amos Culligan had mentioned, the former boyfriend who provided security on weekends, and if he was I wanted to get a good look at him. As I passed he looked up from his paper at the door and then at his watch, and shortly thereafter came a couple of short blasts from the horn. On my third pass a woman stepped out the front door and strolled toward the Caddy, dressed like a rube’s idea of a movie star in tight pants, a bright red scarf, and, despite the fading light, a pair of cat’s-eye sunglasses. Sally stood framed in the doorsill saying something to the back of the woman’s head and looking as ripe and lovely as I’d ever seen her.

  The pendular rolling motion of the glamour-girl’s ass looked at least semi-professional, as did the practiced smile she gave the man at the wheel; I was certain now that he was a boyfriend or a john and not a cop, at any rate not the cop in question. Getting into the passenger seat she turned back and said something to Sally, and by then I had passed the house again. I would have liked to swing past a fourth time, but that seemed unwise and I turned left at the intersection, heading west on Douglas, asking myself what she was doing with all that undeclarable income if she wasn’t spending it on home repair.

  There wasn’t much traffic downtown, and I made it to the Comanche before the last traces of pink and blue had drained from the sky. It was busier than I’d anticipated, though not like at midnight. Half of this crowd would be home and asleep by that hour, remainder still here and plastered. These slightly more genteel ladies were exhilarated by the notion that merely by being there with their beaux or husbands they were doing something naughty whereas the women who closed the place down mostly came with the intention of breaking one or two commandments. I vaguely hoped I might see Lena, and if I did I’d keep her reasonably sober.

  I didn’t see her, but I did see her friend, whose name I couldn’t recall. She was with the newspaperman again, and when I’d been served I took my glass over to their table.

  “You sure made an impression on Lena,” the girl said. She had a short hairdo and a sweet face that I suspected was misleading. “She won’t say what happened, but she sure looked like it was something good.”

  I contented myself with an enigmatic smile and took a sip of my drink.

  “Sorry, but I forgot your name,” the reporter said.

  “Tom,” I said.

  “Did you tell me you were in the army? In Japan?”

  “Just got out.”

  “Ha,” the girl said. “I suppose they’ve rolled out the red carpet for the reds already.” She laughed. “Ha! Red carpet, get it?

  He looked at her a little cockeyed. “What are you talking about?”

  “You ought to do more reading and less writing and you’d find some things out. The commies are taking over all our allies by democratic means, starting in Europe, and nobody’s going to do anything about it.” She gave him a significant look, then got up and wobbled toward the ladies’ room.

  “Jesus,” he said. “She’s a Bircher, but she’s a terrific lay. I’m just wondering how much I can take before I have to tell her she’s out of her fucking mind.”

  “Don’t tell her, just keep screwing her.”

  He nodded thoughtfully, as if the thought of fucking without intellectual communion was new to him. “Hey, since she’s gone I ought to tell you, that girl Lena’s married.”

  “Yeah, she told me that before she told me her name.”

  “Just thought you should know in case things turn ugly.”

  We didn’t have much else to say to each other. A few minutes later the girl came back from the bathroom. “Lena’s alone tonight at home,” she said. “I know she’d be happy to hear from you.”

  Maybe she would at that. At the very least I could get my ashes hauled again and it would kill a couple of the long hours before the weekend, when I could take care of my business and get out of this goddamned town forever.

  I drove straight over without calling. Lena let me in the kitchen door and I declined her offer of a drink as she led me to the divan in the living room.

  “Well, I’m having one,” she said, already several doses into her drunk for the evening. She was nude under her peignoir, which to her badly feigned consternation managed repeatedly to work itself open. “I like to feel a little loose when I’m socializing,” she said, stumbling back into the kitchen.

  “I’m loose enough already,” I said, which sent her into an idiotic, whooping laughing jag that made me glad she was out of my line
of sight. The prospect of spending the rest of the night sober in the company of this drunken thimblewit made me sick, and I resolved to screw her as quickly as possible and leave, just to get sex off my mind for the rest of the evening.

  I stood and moved over to where she was pouring herself three fingers of Old Grand-Dad into a highball glass, still giggling to herself. I came up behind her and slid my hands through the opening of the peignoir and cupped her breasts. She stopped laughing and let out a long, rapturous sigh, then grabbed my right hand and guided it down between her thighs. I worked my fingers there for a minute, letting her guide them exactly where she wanted. I looked up at the naked bulb in the ceiling fixture; she started bucking against the pressure of my hand and the next sound I heard was the kitchen door opening. Her eyes stayed closed, and mine met those of a man not much older than she was. He stared at us with his mouth open for a few seconds, holding the door open, and when she finally looked at him she didn’t stop moving or moaning. He didn’t look hurt or angry so much as stunned, and I pulled my hand away from her. He slammed the door from the outside and walked away.

  Now she pulled the peignoir shut and ran out the door after him. “Doug!” There was shrill, culpable disbelief in her voice, as though she’d just awakened from a dream of sex to find herself actually engaged in it. I didn’t hear Doug’s response as I picked up his copy of Procopius from the living room bookshelf and walked out the front door, though as I walked to my car I could still hear her apologetic gulps and hiccupping in the distance, carried through the moist air like the cries of a rutting animal. I got into the car and headed for the Bellingham, where I would spend the rest of the evening in the quiet, sage company of a good book.

  Approaching the tenderloin a few blocks east of Union Station it hit me that I wasn’t far from my father’s old office. It was at his insistence that I’d studied the classics in the first place, and The Secret History was one of his favorites (though I hated to think how disappointed he would have been to know I was lazily resorting to a translation). The block had been in decline in his last years there, and the slide had continued in his and my absences; in the doorway that led to the offices on the second and third floors lay a souse, marinating in a puddle of urine and flopsweat and snoring like a consumptive walrus. On one side of the door was a pawn shop, whose signage indicated it was now run by the sons of the man who’d owned it in Father’s time; on the other side was a discount leather goods store, the cheap valises and briefcases in its display window dusty and cracked. Grabbing the door handle I found it unlocked and made my way up the dark stairs, each creaking with its own ghostly timbre as if to warn my father’s hard-working shade of my arrival.