The Walkaway (5 page)

5

Dot and Gunther hadn’t stayed in a motel since buying the RV ten years earlier. He’d always loved motels though, ever since the first time he’d stayed in one. It was 1932, his first honeymoon, and he and his new bride were on their way to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Although they could have made Hot Springs by dusk, at three in the afternoon they’d stopped at a motor court. It was brand new and smelled of cedar, and ever since then that smell had always taken him back to that night. Gunther was twenty, his bride nineteen, and he was under the impression that it was her first sexual experience beyond a little heavy petting in the backseat of the used Ford he’d bought upon becoming engaged. The marriage hadn’t lasted six months—the range of her experiences was actually rather vast, and after they returned from Hot Springs she resumed collecting them with a variety of partners—but the sweet memory of that night in the motor court had persisted fifty-seven years, even with so many others seemingly irretrievable.

This room wasn’t bad, considering what it must have been like a couple of years back. It was clean, the bedspread cheap but new. The bathroom fixtures looked new, too, and there was a painting on the wall of a mountain lake. It wasn’t very skillfully painted, globs of bright color slapped on in what looked like a hurry, but he found his gaze repeatedly drawn to it, as if a fresh glance might reveal something he’d missed before.

For dinner he’d eaten most of a pepperoni pizza the man at the desk had helped him order, and he sat now on the bed watching the Shopping Channel with the sound off.

He was getting sleepy, and he crawled under the covers gratefully; he’d been afraid it would be one of those nights where he just sat up until dawn, barely able to close his eyes. As he lay there, feeling himself drift closer to sleep, he tried to picture Sally Ogden. He had a vague idea that she resembled her daughter, and he knew her face was there in his head somewhere, but he couldn’t call it forth. If he could, he might remember who she was.

At that moment Sally Ogden was on the phone with Loretta, who had been trying to get through to her for several hours while Sally chatted with her sister-in-law back in Cottonwood.

“I got my hair cut today,” she said. “Really short in back, a little more body in front.”

“Oh.” Sally didn’t like short hair on women, which seemed to her a waste of a natural feminine resource. She was certain most men felt the same way, but knew better than to say it.

“I thought Eric might even notice, but of course he’s not home.”

Sally was in a relatively good mood, and didn’t want to spoil it with a discussion of her son-in-law, so she pretended not to hear. “Look nice?”

“Three hours ago I thought it did. Now I think I just look like a fat lady with short hair.”

“Now quit that.” Sally hated to hear her talk that way, particularly since she outweighed her daughter by seventy pounds or more. She’d been considered quite attractive at Loretta’s age and size; of course, today you couldn’t turn on the television or open a magazine without seeing some young woman, skinny as a little boy, no tits or ass or curves of any kind, supposedly representing the feminine ideal. Seeing Loretta fall for such a pile of crap made her want to puke.

“Oh, hey. I almost forgot why I called you. Guess who I saw today? Gunther! What was his last name again?”

“Oh. Fahnstiel.”

“You don’t sound too excited.”

“I am. How’d he look?”

“Pretty good. He seemed a little confused, you know? I ended up giving him a ride to the barber shop.”

“That’s nice.” She could hear the enthusiasm in Loretta’s voice, but she couldn’t fake it in her own. She’d stopped wondering about Gunther a long time before.

“Did you guys have some kind of falling out or something?”

“No, sweetie, we didn’t, but, you know, time passes. Gunther’s a good man.”

“He seemed real interested in you.”

“That’s nice. Is he still married?”

“I didn’t ask. He was on foot when I ran into him.”

“That’s probably a good thing. He’s got to be pushing eighty, and he wasn’t the greatest driver forty years ago.”

“Wasn’t he the one who drove us when we moved to Cottonwood?”

“Listen, Loretta. I don’t want to talk about Gunther anymore, okay? I’m glad to hear he’s still kicking, but I don’t want to talk about those days.”

“Okay,” Loretta said, her tone just a shade higher than a whisper.

“Oh, shit, don’t get your feelings hurt. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“Why don’t you come over and spend the night? Give Eric something to wonder about when he comes home.”

“Except Eric might not come home and probably wouldn’t notice I was gone if he did. I think I’ll just get in bed and watch the first part of Johnny Carson.”

Upstairs, as she undressed and got ready for bed, Loretta turned on the television news. She half-watched a report about local elementary school students sending money to support a little boy in Peru, then went into the bathroom to brush her teeth. She was rinsing and spitting, insulated from the sound of the television by the running water, when the newscaster read a brief message about Gunther, a photo of his grizzled face floating behind the anchor desk. Over the water she faintly heard the phone ring, but she ignored it, assuming it was Eric, and after ten rings it stopped.

Eleven miles away Sally sat holding the receiver and wondering what to do next. She debated calling the number the newscaster had given for anyone with information on Gunther’s whereabouts, but Loretta was the one with that. She told herself he’d be fine until morning, and she believed it. Senile or no, he was about the toughest bastard she’d ever met.

She hadn’t thought about him in a while, which was funny, because lately she’d been thinking about Wayne. The thoughts came unbidden, often in the context of something Loretta did or said, or one of the grandkids now that they were more or less grown. Especially the boy, Tate. He didn’t have much of Wayne’s personality in him; he wasn’t a liar, a thief, or a cheat as far as she knew, and he didn’t have the obsessive need to win at any cost that Wayne had. In his moments of triumph, though, he’d get a cocky, off-center grin that was pure Wayne, just like when she’d first known him in high school; at that age there didn’t seem to be anything screwy about Wayne either, at least not to her. President of the student council, captain of the track team and the debate squad, crack door-to-door salesman in the summertime, he looked to her like the biggest go-getter in town, the kind of kid people thought of as a future president of the United States or, even better, U.S. Steel.

They were married in 1940 after he got his business degree, and a year later he was assistant office manager in the sales division of Collins Aircraft, the youngest manager in the whole company. After Pearl Harbor he volunteered for the army over the company’s objections, and nothing was quite the same after that. He came home after the war a master sergeant and spent a year working at Collins, treating Sally like the only mistake he’d ever made and trying to think up better, faster ways to make money. She was two months pregnant with Loretta when he stunned her by quitting the job at Collins and reenlisting. Opportunities in the peacetime army were good for a man like him, he said, and he didn’t want her traveling in her delicate condition; he’d send for her once the baby was born. He never did, and though he dutifully sent half his pay home every month—at first, anyway—it was years before she saw him again.

A couple of weeks earlier she’d found a picture of him in his uniform, a hand-tinted 8-by-10 taken when he got home in ’46. She’d studied the portrait for a long time, trying to find some trace of the real man somewhere in the face of the friendly, smiling soldier.

She hoped he was burning in hell. What she’d done, she’d done for Loretta, and for the sake of having a little fun, a pretty scarce commodity for a woman with a small child and no husband around and a full-time defense plant job, and she wasn’t sorry for any of it. Not for one goddamn minute of it.

Gunther found himself standing next to the lake in the painting. It was all wrong, too much of a lake and not enough of a big rocky hole in the ground, and that mountain behind it should have been just a gently sloping rise, but he knew more or less where he was. It was dusk, the start of a warm summer evening, and he made his way around the shore and up a path through a clearing to the cabin: two bedrooms, a kitchenette, and a living room. A dim yellow light shone in one of the bedroom windows, and before he looked inside he knew what he’d see: Sally Ogden with her feet in the air.

And there she was, thirty years old again and making that loud, throaty sound of hers, a skinny little freckle-faced guy propping himself up on top of her with his skivvies around his ankles and Sally’s red fingernails on his hips, eyes rolled back in his head as he pumped away. Sally looked like she always did, like she was enjoying the hell out of herself.

Gunther wasn’t jealous. He just wanted to ask her a question, and he could wait until they were done. He admired her as he waited, her long black hair undone and splashing all over the pillow, her lovely soft belly, those legs that looked like they could have pinched the scrawny fellow on top of her in half if she wanted. Abruptly she turned to Gunther and looked straight at him as she cried out with unfeigned and unashamed joy.

He opened his eyes. His second erection in as many days was fading, and the front of his shorts were wet. There was a thin white line of light visible under the window shade and the digital clock on the desk read 6:17, as good a time to get up as any.

It seemed crazy now that he’d ever forgotten who Sally Ogden was, and it made him wonder if Dot hadn’t been right to put him into the home. He put his clothes on, wishing he’d thought to bring a change or two with him, and was dismayed to realize he couldn’t retrieve the question he wanted to ask Sally in his dream. From his shirt pocket he pulled a business card with Loretta Gandy’s picture on it in black-and-white above a business address and phone number, and her home address and phone scribbled on the back. It might embarrass her if he showed up at her place of work in his current state; better to go to her house and wait.

He walked out of the room and across the parking lot, leaving his door open. The ground was still a little wet from yesterday’s rain, but the sky was clear and blue with rosy tinges at the horizon, and the morning air was already warm and humid. As he passed the Stars and Stripes heading toward downtown he spotted the hooker from the night before, still on duty. She gave him a friendly three-fingered salute. “Hey there, Grandpa. You get a good night’s sleep?”

“Uh-huh. Your shift about over?”

“Yeah. I shoulda gone home a while ago. Guess I just wasn’t sleepy.”

“I bet you hardly ever are,” Gunther said.

“Hah. You got that right. Plus it was so nice out after that rain.”

“See you later.”

“Okay. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” she said, and as Gunther moved on he pondered what that could possibly include.

Dot had been awake since before dawn listening to the radio, drinking coffee, and smoking cigarettes. The news didn’t mention Gunther, which annoyed her, since the announcer droned on and on about some incomprehensible finance bill in the Senate or the Congress and how the president was expected to do this or that about it, and who gave a shit anyway? The DJ didn’t even know what it meant, she could hear in his voice that he was just reading it off a page. Next he gave the farm prices and last night’s baseball scores, and then he mentioned that the temperature at the airport was seventy, with today’s high expected at around a hundred and five and humid as a greenhouse. If you’re going outside today, he said, now’s the time to do it. She looked out the window and thought it looked nice out on the back porch, the morning light still soft and diffused and even a slight breeze stirring the branches. A little dewy, maybe, but she could put a towel down on one of the old metal chairs. She’d leave the door open so she could hear the phone.

Outside it was gorgeous. She sat at the little table, drinking from her mug and finding herself comforted a little. The mere absence of the sound of the country station was unexpectedly pleasant, and she realized that the DJ’s deliberately upbeat twang had been jangling her nerves.

She watched a robin pulling a worm up out of the ground and thought of Sidney, aged five or so, watching the same thing one morning and wanting to rescue the worm, running at the bird with his arms flailing and crying furiously, fists clenched, when the bird flew away with the worm in its beak.

He’d been a serious and solitary little boy, and he wasn’t much different as a man. His last girlfriend was gone now and Sidney hadn’t wanted to talk about why. Gunther had seen it coming, though, even with his memory gone south on him; she’s an educated person, he’d said, she wants someone she can introduce at her college reunion and say here’s my husband the dentist, or professor, or lawyer, not here’s my husband the nudie show tycoon.

The robin finished extracting the worm, then flitted into a tree in the yard behind hers where its nest must have been, and as she watched it go the phone rang. She was inside so fast she had it before the third ring. “Mrs. Fahnstiel? Dr. Mercer. Just checking in.” His voice was cheerful and soothing.

She looked at the clock. It was seven-fifteen in the morning, too early for any but an emergency call as far as she was concerned. “Mister Mercer. Where the hell were you brought up that you call people for no reason before eight in the morning?” That she’d been up since four forty-five was irrelevant; it was a question of manners.

Despite yesterday’s skirmish he’d clearly been expecting a friendlier greeting. “I’m sorry—”

“Sorry doesn’t cut the mustard. Call me when you get my husband back.”

She slammed the receiver down, then filled her mug and went back outside. It was a little warmer already, the sky a little bluer, and she wondered what Gunther was doing right then. The worst thing was the deep, gnawing suspicion she had that she knew where he was headed, and the impossibility of telling anyone about it, even Sidney. Especially Sidney.