Walkers (6 page)

Gil’s mother used to say that he
must have had a deprived childhood, to want to run a general store, but she
knew how happy he was, and that made her happy, too.

She stocked the shelves and kept the
store clean and even made quiches for the deli counter. Along the strip, Gil’s
father and mother were known as the ‘M&Ms’ – Mr and Mrs Miller.

Gil’s father was standing behind the
checkout, packing a week’s groceries for old Mrs Van Buren who lived on the
other side of the Santa Fe Railroad tracks. He was tall and big boned, like
Gil, with wiry grey hair and one of those husky-looking outdoor faces like
Lloyd Bridges. He wore a striped blue storekeeper’s apron with his name sewn on
to the pocket,
Phil.

‘Hi, Dad,’ said Gil.

‘How’re you doing?’ his father asked
him. ‘You’re back early.’

‘I didn’t feel like swimming, that’s
all.’

‘They closed off the beach, somebody
told me,’ said Phil Miller. ‘Did you want the barbecue-flavoured beans, Mrs Van
Buren, or the vegetarian?’

‘Yeah, I think somebody drowned or
something,’ Gil remarked.

‘There were ambulances and police
cars coming in from all directions,’ said Phil, reaching down for another paper
sack, and opening it out.

‘I heard that it was a girl,’ put in
Mrs Van Buren. ‘Some girl, drowned on the beach.

Nude, that’s what I heard.’

‘Taking dope, if you ask me,’ said
Phil. ‘They take dope, they swim, and they think they can swim all the way to
Japan.’

‘I guess we were just as crazy in my
day,’ said Mrs Van Buren. ‘In those days, of course, it was bootleg liquor. We
used to drive up and down the Pacific Highway in a De Soto CK Six, high as
kites on McNamara’s home-brewed whiskey, and see how far we could get without
putting our hands on the steering-wheel. First person to grab for the wheel was
a chicken.’

Phil laughed. ‘Why now, Mrs Van
Buren, I didn’t know you were a juvenile delinquent.’

‘You show me a juvenile who isn’t,’
said Mrs Van Buren, ‘and I’ll show you a juvenile who’s never going to get
anywhere in life, not anywhere at all.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Gil.
‘This girl only got as far as the beach.’

Phil glanced across at his son
questioningly. Gil was conscious that he had sounded as if he had known the
girl, or seen her. He deliberately changed the subject by rubbing his hands
together briskly, and saying, ‘Want me to slice up some ham, Dad?’

‘Sure thing, and maybe some of that
Italian salami, too, the dry salami.’

Gil walked between the shelves of
groceries to the back of the store, to the glass-fronted deli counter. He went
around it, ducking his head to avoid the plastic cloves of garlic which hung
from the ceiling, and through to the stockroom, where there was a washbasin and
a mirror. He washed his hands thoroughly, and dried them. In the mirror, his
face looked detached and expressionless, and not at all like the face of
somebody who had just witnessed a hideous death and a frightening accident.

Back at the counter, he hefted up a
large Maryland ham, covered in golden breadcrumbs and positioned it on to the
slicer. He switched on the motor, and began to slide the slicer backwards and
forwards, heaping up thin pink stacks of aromatic ham. His father had finished
with Mrs Van Buren, and came down to the back of the shop, wiping his hands on
his apron.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘some girl
came by, asking where you were.’

‘Some girl? It wasn’t Gina Chappell,
was it?’

‘I don’t know; I don’t know what
Gina Chappell looks like.’

‘Blonde, gappy teeth, very small
tits.’

His father grunted in amusement.
‘No, this wasn’t Gina Chappell. This one was tall, and dark, and I have to say
that she had very big -’ He left the word unspoken, but held out his hands as
if he were comparing the weight of two large cantaloupes.

Gil switched off the slicer, and
lifted the ham with a spatula. ‘Don’t know who that could have been.’

‘She seemed quite anxious to see
you. She said she’d have a cup of coffee down at the bookstore, and then she’d
come back.’

Gil smiled at his father, and
switched the slicer back on again. ‘Maybe it’s my lucky day. For the first time
in my life, a beautiful girl has come chasing
me’

‘She’s probably an officer of the
court, trying to serve you with a summons for all those parking tickets of
yours.’

‘Don’t shatter my illusions, Dad.’

Phil watched his son for a moment or
two, and then said, ‘Are you okay?’

Gil glanced up. ‘Okay? Why shouldn’t
I be okay?’

‘I don’t know. You look kind of
worried about something.’

‘Worried?’

‘Well, I don’t know. You look like
you’ve got something preying on your mind.’

Gil shook his head. ‘Nothing that I
can think of.’

But his father didn’t seem to be
satisfied. He stayed silent a little while longer, and then he said, ‘It’s not
like you, to miss out on your swim.’

‘ I jogged. The jogging was enough.’

‘Your leg isn’t hurting?’

‘My leg is fine. What is this, the
third degree? You’re going to beat a confession out of me with a Hungarian
salami?’

Phil laughed again, but without much
amusement. ‘I know you. I know you better than you know yourself. That’s
because you’re just like me. And when I’m worried about something, I behave
just like you. I laugh, but all the time it’s false. And that’s how
you’re
laughing. I knew something was
wrong the moment you walked into the store.’

‘God protect me from an
understanding father,’ said Gil. ‘Do you think that’s enough ham? There’s about
three and a half pounds there, in half-pound batches.’

‘That’s enough; you can always slice
some more later.’

Gil’s mother came in, carrying two
cartons of Coco-Puffs from the storeroom at the back. ‘Oh, Gil, I’m glad you’re
back. You can stack these on the shelf for me.’

Gil took the cartons, and carried
them around to the cereal display. His mother followed him, and stood beside
him. She was a small woman, still handsome at forty-four. Phil said she
reminded him of a statue, a Greek statue, not the one without the arms but the
other one, with the classic face and the classic figure. She was smiling as she
watched Gil cut open the cartons and take out the boxes of cereal.

‘Who’s the girl?’ she asked him.

‘You mean the girl who came around
looking for me?’

‘There’s another girl?’

‘Well, Dad told me about her, but I
don’t know who she is.’

‘She’s very pretty,’ said Fay
Miller, looking at her son closely to see if he was telling the truth.

‘That’s what Dad said.’

‘And you really expect us to believe
that you don’t know who she is?’

Gil slapped his hand over his heart.
‘Mom, believe me, I wish I did.’

About ten minutes later, Gil’s
friend Bradley came in. Bradley’s father ran a fishing-tackle store in Encinitas,
a few miles up the coast. Bradley was lanky and funny and almost invariably
wore Hawaiian-style beach shirts and Bermuda shorts. He and Gil had been
classmates in grade school, and although Bradley was now studying to be a
computer programmer, while Gil was taking business studies, they saw each other
practically every weekend and all through the summer vacation, and went
fishing, and swam, and told each other absurd jokes.

Bradley lifted the new issue of
Hustler
off the revolving rack and
appreciatively leafed through it. Gil’s father had made sure that his general
store had an adult magazine rack. He derived benign amusement out of watching
teenage boys pluck up enough panicky courage to buy themselves a copy of
Chic
or
Penthouse,
paying for it red faced and then rushing out of the
store as quickly as they could. The adult magazine rack was part of a general
store’s mystery and excitement, along with the strange bottles of Japanese
cooking ingredients, the lurid candies and the peculiar kitchen gadgets.

‘How’re you doing, Bradley?’ asked
Gil. He took a quarter from a small ginger-haired boy who had carefully been
counting out eight liquorice whips, and gave him a penny change.

‘Oh, bored, pretty much,’ said
Bradley. ‘Did you hear about what happened at the beach?’

‘Yeah, I heard. They’ve still got it
cordoned off. Jellyfish warning, that’s what they’re saying now.’

‘Oh, yeah?’

Bradley opened up
Hustler’s
centre-spread. He was silent
for a very long time. Then he said, ‘Do you know something, it isn’t fair. It
just damn well isn’t fair. Some guy got paid for taking this picture.
Paid,
can you imagine that? And I
couldn’t get to see a girl like that with her legs wide open if I crawled all
the way to Mount Palomar and back pushing a rat’s turd with the end of my
nose.’

‘Well, that explains it,’ Gil told
him. ‘Girls like that don’t really go for guys who push rat’s turds up and down
mountains with the ends of their noses. Didn’t anybody tell you that? Your
social science teacher?’

Bradley swatted at Gil with the
rolled-up magazine.

‘Hey, you take care of that,’ warned
Gil. ‘Some jerk-off is going to want to buy that.’

‘I’d buy it myself, but I just
couldn’t stand the unfairness.’

Gil shook his head, and said,
‘You’re a real dork, sometimes, Bradley. I hate to think what the inside of
your brain is like.’

‘Listen, I have to tell you this
joke,’ said Bradley. ‘What do you get if you let an elephant walk across your
living-room?’

‘For God’s sake, Bradley, I don’t
want to know about that.’

‘No, come on, what do you get if you
let an elephant walk across your living-room?’

Gil sighed in exaggerated
exasperation. ‘I don’t know, Bradley. What
do
you get if you let an elephant walk across your living-room?’

‘You get a thick pile on your
carpet.’

Gil said, ‘I should throw you out of
here, right on your head, you know that?’ But then he turned around and there
she was, standing in the doorway, with the sunlight shining brightly behind her
so that Gil had to narrow his eyes to make out what she looked like. Bradley
turned around too, and was suddenly silent. Gil’s father had been quite right.
She was tall, almost as tall as Gil, and dark haired. Her hair was brushed and
clean and shining and it reached right down over her shoulders. Her eyes were
wide and her lashes were extravagantly long; her mouth was slightly parted as
if she were about to say something or as if she were about to kiss somebody.
She wore a tight white tee-shirt which clung to her overfull breasts, and it
was obvious from the way that the darker tint of her nipples showed through the
cotton that she was wearing no bra. She wore white rolled-up shorts and white
sandals, and that was all.

‘Gil Miller?’ she said.

Bradley whispered, ‘My wish has been
granted. Did she say Bradley Donahue?’

Gil looked the girl up and down,
trying to be steady, trying to be cool, but with an extraordinary tightness
around his heart.

“That’s –
‘
he began, in a choked falsetto. Then, much deeper, ‘That’s me.’

The girl stepped into the store, and
smiled at him. ‘My name’s Paulette Springer. I hope you don’t mind my
surprising you like this.’

‘Well, uh, no,’ said Gil, wiping his
hands on his denim shorts. ‘No, no. My folks told me you called by earlier. I’m
just sorry I wasn’t here.’

‘I know, you had to take Susan
Sczaniecka home. But that’s all right. I had a cup of coffee at the second-hand
bookstore. That’s quite a place, isn’t it? I bought a book called
De Sortilegio.’

Gil glanced at Bradley, but all
Bradley could do was look baffled.

Paulette came closer. Gil couldn’t
help noticing the tantalising sway of her breasts underneath her tee-shirt.
Close up, he could smell her perfume, which was like sweet-peas and roses and
something else altogether, something subtle and arousing and barely
perceptible, like the smell of a warm clean body.

‘I was hoping you could help me,’
she said.

‘Well, sure,’ Gil told her.
‘Anything, you name it.’

‘I’m writing an article for
San Diego
magazine about the different
things that get washed up on the beaches.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ Gil’s heart still felt
tight; in fact it felt tighter than ever.

‘I know it sounds silly,’ said
Paulette, ‘but actually it’s going to make a pretty interesting piece. You’d be
amazed what gets washed up. I mean apart from whales and driftwood and things
like that. There’s an old man who lives about a mile north of here, and he’s
furnished his whole cottage with chairs and tables and beds that were washed
right up on the beach.’

Gil drummed his fingers on the top
of the cash-register. ‘That’s pretty interesting. The only thing is, what does
it have to do with me?’