The Walkaway (22 page)

Loretta, seventeen at the time of the conversation, was shocked that such things could happen in Cottonwood, and more so that the lover in question was Mr. Fertig, still the principal of Cottonwood High School. The image of dour Mr. Fertig trysting with the reckless, hedonistic woman Norene had described was difficult to credit, and when she said as much Norene laughed.

“She wasn’t the only one either. He’s always got a little something going. Remember that math teacher, left last year? She was threatening to go away unless he left his wife and married her. Well, he sure called her bluff. She got on the bus, and he took up with the next in line.”

That was Miss Plunkett, a pretty brunette in her late twenties with a very nice figure whom most of the boys in Loretta’s class were very eager to please, little suspecting that her pleasure was coming nightly from stocky, bald Mr. Fertig. “How do you know all this about Mr. Fertig?” Loretta asked her.

Her face flushed a little, Loretta remembered, and she shrugged. “It’s a small town.”

It had indeed been a small town. Even now she still didn’t know exactly why they’d gone there; before they left Wichita she remembered her mother quitting her job at the plant, or was she fired? She wasn’t sure. There’d been no job waiting in Cottonwood, and work was certainly scarcer than it had been in the city, with all the aircraft plants working full steam on cold war production. Why had they moved a third of the way across the state to a town where they knew nobody at all, if not for a better standard of living?

She resolved to ask her mother about the move, and about her father, and about what really happened between her and Gunther. It was ridiculous that at the age of forty-two she still didn’t know anything about him but his name and rank, and if the old bat didn’t want to talk about him that was tough shit. The joint was all but gone now; all that remained was a piece of pointy, burnt paper with a few particles of leaf nestled in it. She lowered herself a little deeper into the bubbles and closed her eyes again, smiling to herself.

18

WAYNE OGDEN
June 21–22, 1952

It had been threatening to rain all afternoon but it hadn’t started yet, the clouds so dark you couldn’t tell from the sky what time of day it was. I sat watching traffic from the Plymouth for a while on Pine near Broadway, around the corner from the Crosley Hotel. After a while I got out and dialed the number from a phone booth.

“Hitching Post, Don speaking,” the bartender answered.

“Hey, Don, is Beulah there?”

“Just a sec. Who’s calling?”

“Otis,” I said, picking the name from the masonry above the door of an apartment building across the street.

“Just a second, she’s with somebody. Hey, Beulah.”

I hung up and walked over to the Crosley. I didn’t know if she knew anybody named Otis, but I’d established that she was a good ten to fifteen minutes away from her crib; even if the call sent her scurrying home I had the time I needed.

The lobby stank as I walked in, a smell of moldy carpets and un-emptied ashtrays and semicatatonic residents sitting in the split-seamed, piss-stained armchairs of the lobby all day long, and the night manager stood behind the front desk acting like it was the goddamn Hilton. From the malevolence of his glare I surmised that he’d seen me in Beulah’s company the other morning, though I hadn’t noticed him.

“I was wondering if you might be able to do me a favor.”

“That would depend, sir,” he said, and when he spoke he sounded just like Franklin Pangborn in the movies, and I could hardly keep from laughing.

I pulled a fifty-dollar bill out of my wallet. It was too much, I knew, but I couldn’t risk him turning down a smaller sum and forcing me to negotiate upward. “I’d like the key to Beulah’s room for five minutes.”

He looked at the bill as though it might be laced with poison, then grabbed it and handed me the key. Then he looked away like I wasn’t there.

The room was tidy, the bed made, and the floor swept. The glassine envelope was in the same spot behind the dresser, maybe a little lighter than the other day. I dropped it into my inside jacket pocket and left. I almost wrote her a note telling her I’d taken her heroin, but decided it would be more fun for her to discover the theft on her own.

I considered the fact that some seemed to be missing, and that got me wondering how and when Elishah got his daily shot of it. If she was already at work, she’d already supplied him with it, and I didn’t want that.

I drove to Lincolnshire Street with the windows open, enjoying the warm, humid air blowing past my face. I parked in front of Elishah’s house and went inside, and on the kitchen table I found a small envelope like the one I’d taken from Beulah’s room. There was a note with it:

Elishah,

Heres some for being a good boy.

Love
B

I took the drug and the note and left one of my own:

Dear inbred hillbilly imbecile,
You’re probably wondering where your
daily dose went. Getting sweaty yet?
Don’t go anywhere until you see me.

Your pal,
Sarge

I hoped he’d stay put when he got home and found his dope missing. If he didn’t, my job out at the quarry would be that much harder and more dangerous. If he did I’d nail his and Beulah’s and Sally’s asses to the wall all at the same time and have myself a good laugh.

I left and headed for Sally’s house—my house, really. I knew from Culligan that Sally headed straight for the cabin after work on Friday, and that the child stayed at a baby-sitter’s house on those weekends when her mother was plying her trade. I walked around to the back door and, not surprisingly, found it unlocked. I hoped it wouldn’t be necessary to turn the goddamn place upside down to find her money. Where did she used to hide things when I was here in that short time between the end of the war and reenlisting? I had no sense now that I was returning home; I barely remembered anything about that year except feelings of panic and entrapment, and the primal urge to flee back to the bosom of mother army.

I started with the basement. It was a mess, boxes everywhere and useless old junk that should have been thrown out years before. I was astonished to see the old bicycle I used to throw the
Evening Beacon
from twenty years ago; she must have taken it from my parents’ house when my mother passed away. I thought of the telegram she sent me about Mother, assuming I’d be hightailing it home for the funeral—I had been in Japan less than a year, and she hadn’t quite got the message yet—and I could only imagine her shock at the telegram I sent back:

NOT COMING STOP DON’T CARE STOP SELL HER HOUSE
STOP SEND PROCEEDS HERE STOP WAYNE.

I didn’t really expect her to send me the entire proceeds from the sale of Mother’s house, but damned if she didn’t go ahead and do it; it was a great help in establishing myself within the hierarchy of the occupation forces, and I was grateful to her and Mother both for it.

In a large cardboard box sat my debate trophies, nine of them, ranging from a wooden plaque with a plate screwed to it for Honorable Mention at the 1934 Garden City Forensics Tourney to an elaborately engraved loving cup for the Grand Prize in the Regional College Invitational in Omaha in ’38, at the bottom of which lay strewn the constituent parts of at least three dead crickets. Another box contained framed photographs my mother had inexplicably saved: group photos of debate, track, and football teams, of seven years of student government, of the sales division of Collins Aircraft Company in February 1941. There was also a casual pose of myself in Italy with a couple of close army buddies, both of whose names I had forgotten, though I recalled plainly that one of them had an unpleasant and distinctive odor. The third box I opened contained yet more worthless memorabilia, and I found myself stupidly lingering over scrapbooks and photo albums when I should have been aggressively dismantling the house in search of my money.

After a while I got hungry and went upstairs and raided the icebox. My wife hadn’t left me with much to choose from in the way of protein—some slightly green-looking ham on a plate, a bowl containing three eggs that smelled ever so slightly of sulfur—so I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, poured myself a glass of milk and sat at the kitchen table in the dark thinking. In the old days she always seemed to have a banknote or two hidden away for small emergencies, maybe two dollars or five. Where did she keep it, in the kitchen somewhere? When I’d pulled out the knife to spread the peanut butter and jelly the drawer had stuck a little. I got up and tried it again, and it stuck at the same place. I yanked out the drawer, sending it skidding across the floor and the silverware flying in all directions. Kneeling, I pulled out the silverware tray and punched out the bottom of the drawer and found nothing. When I reached inside the cabinet where the drawer had been, I felt paper taped to the underside of the countertop, next to the drawer’s guide. I scraped at it with my fingernails, peeled it off and extracted a manila envelope, unsealed and filled with twenties and fifties and the occasional hundred-dollar bill, close to fifteen thousand dollars in cash. It was a greater sum by fivefold than I had anticipated finding, and I blessed the head of Cecil Wembly. I’d planned this detour home to defend my family’s honor and maybe pick up a little working capital, and instead I found myself with a decent-sized nest egg.

On top of that I had the whole weekend ahead of me; now I could indulge myself and settle at leisure my personal scores with Sally and with Elishah and Beulah.

Before stepping outside I looked around for neighbors and saw none; in fact I saw nobody at all until I got to my car and tossed the envelope into the backseat. Strolling over from a prowl car parked half a block up were two uniformed cops, the first I’d seen close up since I got back to the States, and my first thought was how ridiculous they looked. In my mind for a cop to be scary he had to have a double-breasted blue tunic with a big badge pinned to it over the heart, like the officers of my youth.

“Evening, Sarge,” one of them said. “How about a little ride? We need to talk about some things,” he said. He was big, red-faced, and stupid looking, his partner even more so.

“Muggy night,” the other one said. “They say it’s gonna rain.”

I thought the best thing to do was to pretend to be scared. “If this is some sort of shakedown, my money’s all back at the Bellingham Hotel,” I said with a lovely vibrato high in my throat, wondering what they’d do if they found out how much cash I’d just tossed onto the floor of the backseat.

“Cut the shit, Ogden.” The smaller of the two held open the driver’s door of my Plymouth and motioned me in. After I took the wheel the first one got into the backseat and the bigger and stupider-looking one slid in next to me.

“Now turn around and start heading west on Douglas.”

I pulled away from the curb into a U-turn and headed for Douglas. At least they hadn’t searched the car; my .38 was still in the trunk. Frisking me he’d missed the small of my back and the knucks hidden there, but against the two of them brass knuckles wouldn’t provide enough of an edge. They didn’t say much until we got to Hydraulic.

“Hang a right and keep going,” the one next to me drawled.

“So how’s everything over at the Crosley?” the other one said from the backseat. “Got yourself a whore down there?”

“I was inquiring about a cheaper room than the one I have now,” I said.

“Crosley’s cheaper than the Bellingham, all right. Plus you got two, three harlots right there in the building so you don’t have to go out on the street looking.” They both thought that was funny.

“On the other hand, maybe the sergeant doesn’t like girls. Else why’d he hightail out on a swell piece of ass like that Sally?”

The bigger one whistled. “I’d give a year of my life for one night of that, Tommy.”

“Goddamn right,” Tommy said.

“What I hear is you can have a pretty good shot at a whole weekend of it for a two-dollar raffle ticket,” I said. “In fact, she’d probably throw you one for free if you asked her. They say she likes cops.”

Something hard hit me on the back of the head and I swerved into the lefthand lane for a second. “Watch your fucking mouth if you know what’s good for you, Ogden. Looks like somebody already gave you what for.”

“Yeah. Where’d you get the shiner?” the other one asked.

“Walked into a door.”

“The hell you did.”

“All right, that’s enough. Reason we’re here is we think you’re looking to make trouble for Sally,” Tommy said.

“What makes you think that?”

“You broke into her fuckin’ house!” the other one bellowed. “We could’ve arrested you for that, you know.”

“It’s my house. If you don’t believe me you can check with the registrar of deeds.”

“Fuck the registrar of deeds. You know goddamn well that ain’t your house anymore.”

“Listen, shithead,” Tommy said. “Things have changed since you left town. Fuck with Sally Ogden and you’re fucking with plenty of other people you shouldn’t be fucking with.”

“She’s my wife.”

“The fuck she is. You took off on her years ago.”

“I’m telling you we never got divorced.”

“And I’m telling you I don’t give a shit if you’re divorced or not. You stay the hell away from her and her house.”

We were heading out toward the city limits now. The businesses were few and far between, the houses even scarcer. This was land somebody ought to gobble up and develop, I thought idly. If I didn’t have an aversion to the place I might have looked into it myself.

“Turn up there at the sign,” Tommy said. “Rory, you got the key?”

There was a big metal sign to my left:

FARRIS AUTOMOBILE SALVAGE YARD

I turned in and Rory got out and unlocked the gate, pulled it open, and waved me in. I pulled ahead thirty feet or so, well away from Rory as he padlocked the gate back up. There were two Quonset huts, one straight ahead and one to my left, surrounded by a half-dozen or so auto bodies and a sea of cracked engine blocks; skeletal, rusted chassis; and stacks of bald tires, all of it ghostly yellow under the dim security lights. Leaning against one of the Quonset huts I recognized the frame of an Indian motorcycle like one I had owned briefly before the war, cannibalized for parts.

“Now we’re going to explain a few things to you about civilian life,” Tommy said. I watched Rory in the rearview finishing up with the gate and turning to walk back to the car. “Get out.”

“Now hold on a second, Officer. I have a proposition for you.”

“Don’t tell me to hold on a second, you piece of crap. You’re no sergeant here, you’re just a piece of shit civilian far as I’m concerned. Now get out the car like I fuckin’ told you to.”

“Take a look inside the envelope on the floor, there.”

Behind me I heard tearing paper, followed by Tommy taking in a deep breath. “Holy shit,” he said. “There must be a couple grand in here.”

I didn’t begrudge them the beating I was about to receive, but I by God was not about to let them take that money. It was mine; my wife earned it. Rory was six or seven feet behind the car, and with Tommy hypnotized at the sight of all that green I put the Plymouth into reverse and floored it. It was like hitting a moose; he thumped and fell backward, and I shifted into first, punched the gas, and dove out.

I hit the dirt painfully hard, scraping my face and palms, and scrambled for the shadows. The Plymouth rolled forward faster than I’d expected and crashed into the farther of the two Quonset huts. I could hear Tommy cursing and trying to get out from the backseat, and I was goddamned glad I’d bought the two-door instead of the four.

In a row next to the nearer of the huts were lengths of iron rebar sticking out of coffee cans filled with concrete. I grabbed a piece of rebar with both hands and ran to where Rory sat holding his head. His uniform cap lay next to him on the dust.

“Fuck,” Rory said, drawing the word out into two syllables, the second an octave and a half higher than the first. I felt the first few drops of rain on my face, and in the distance I heard the gentle rumbling of thunder as I lifted the coffee can and smashed it into Rory’s skull. The rebar made a lousy handle and I lost control of it at the last second, just before the wet, cracking sound of the impact of the concrete and tin against his skull. It wrenched out of my hands and spun off to the side as he fell onto his side with a pathetic wheeze. I heard no corresponding intake of breath but I wasn’t able to give it the attention I would have liked.