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A selection from The Walkaway
by Scott Phillips
available in bookstores everywhere

Gunther wanted a haircut. Today was the day the barber went around at Lake Vista giving all the old men their free haircuts, but he wasn’t there to take advantage of it. If he’d been thinking about it he would have stayed around another day; as it was, he had become so preoccupied by the missed haircut that he decided he had no other choice but to part with the three-fifty or four dollars or whatever a haircut was up to by now. Wincing at the thought of spending the money, he touched his right hand to the back of his neck and wondered if he could put it off. He pinched a lock between his thumb and forefinger to get a sense of its length. No, a haircut was the first order of business. Another week and it’d start to curl.

Walking west up the street, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his clothes damp and heavy with sweat, he saw very little that was familiar to him; most of the buildings he remembered had either been torn down entirely or taken over by new businesses. He was slightly cheered to see Ray and Cal’s battered old barber pole rotating placidly on the rough orange brick wall next to what had always been Simmons’s watch repair shop, but was occupied now by a forlorn and unhygienic-looking frozen yogurt store. He watched the barber pole turn for a minute, its red-and-blue stripes faded to pink and baby blue, then yanked open the door and stuck his head through into the yogurt shop for a moment, startling the morose teen manning the counter. The boy regarded him with mute wonder, as though the arrival of a potential customer was the most puzzling development of his day so far.

Gunther looked the place over disapprovingly, the sweat on his face and neck and in his hair going cold in the breeze from the ancient box air conditioner buzzing and rattling in the window behind the counter. The yogurt store couldn’t have been there long, but, with its bare walls and cracked Formica countertop left over from the repair shop, the air inside it was already thick with failure. He knew that there would be no point in asking the kid what had become of old Simmons, so without a word he slammed the door shut and descended the half flight of concrete steps to the barber shop.

Inside was way too bright. Half a story underground, Ray and Cal’s had always been gloomy, even by barbershop standards. Now the dark wood panelling had been pulled down, the walls painted a pale shade of yellow, and the dim incandescent lighting overhead had been replaced with fluorescent tubes mounted around the frames of the mirrors. Two women and one young man were stationed behind the chairs. All three of the customers were women, their clothes protected by shiny, dark gray plastic sheets. Gunther had never seen a woman in Ray and Cal’s before. All six of them looked at him expectantly, and the young man’s eyes narrowed.

“You’re going to have to leave now, okay, sir? I’m very sorry,” he said, stepping out from behind his chair and, for the benefit of the women, making a show of taking charge of the situation.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m very sorry.” He was young, maybe thirty, maybe less, and when he put his hand on Gunther’s shoulder, Gunther removed it calmly and deliberately. His eyes locked on the young man’s, gauging his resolve. The young man took a step away from him without making another attempt.

“Where’s Ray and Cal? I need a haircut.”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about, sir. Now, as I said, you’re going to have to go.” The young man’s voice was artificially low and soothing like a goddamn orderly’s, and the tone made Gunther want to smash him one right in the snotlocker.

“Wait a sec, Curt.” The older of the two lady barbers spoke up. Her face was pretty and her eyes friendly, but her graying hair was shaved close on the sides like a man’s, and the combination made Gunther vaguely uneasy. “Ray passed away a couple of years ago, sir.”

“Oh. Sorry to hear that.”

“Cal’s still around, though, out at the Masonic home.”

“Cutting hair?”

“I don’t think so. Just living there.”

“What do you know. So it’s a beauty salon now, huh?” He looked the young man up and down. He didn’t seem to Gunther like a fairy, but you couldn’t really tell anymore just by looking.

“No, sir, it’s unisex,” she said, and the word threw Gunther off for a second. “I’ll be glad to cut your hair if you like. I’m almost done here and my two-thirty cancelled on me.”

The woman sitting in the chair in front of her stared at Gunther, in curiosity more than annoyance at the interruption of her haircut. He took a good look at her for the first time. A tall, plumpish woman of forty or forty-five with large, dark eyes, short, wet hair, and a lot of makeup. Her legs were so long they stuck out from under the plastic sheet a good six inches above the knee. She reminded Gunther of somebody he couldn’t quite place but was pretty sure he liked. He was staring back at her so intently he forgot to answer.

“Sir?” The lady barber’s voice was louder this time, but he still didn’t answer. He tilted his head to the left, trying to think of who she reminded him. One of the nurses? An old girlfriend, maybe, or a teacher from school? No, he never saw any of his teachers’ legs up that far, not in those days. She sure had long legs.

“Oh. My. God,” said the other lady barber, stifling a laugh. “The old bastard’s getting a hard-on.”

Gunther looked down and was surprised to see that this was so.

“All right, pal, enough’s enough. Let’s go.” Curt’s voice had lost its unctuousness, and Gunther resented him a little less for it.

“I’m going.” He turned and pulled the door open. “Sorry I was staring at you, ma’am. You look like somebody I used to know.”

No one spoke as he left. Once the door closed he stood for a minute or so at the foot of the concrete steps, waiting for his erection to go down. It was his first in a while and he was sorry to see it go.

A half mile or so up the road he stopped at a pay phone in front of a Stop ’n’ Rob. In the Yellow Pages under “Hair” he found a listing for Harry’s Barber Shop, which sounded like the kind of place where he’d be safe from any lady barbers or customers. It was in a residential neighborhood about two miles west, close enough to get there before the end of the afternoon if he hurried, so he tore out the page and started moving up the sidewalk again.

He thought about going inside the store for a soda, but his cash was tight and he hated to pay convenience-store prices. He wasn’t all that thirsty anyway. It was humid without being overwhelmingly hot, the sky was a dark, orangey gray. Sniffing the warm afternoon air he could smell rain before sundown. If he made it to Harry’s Barber Shop in time he might be able to wait out the storm there.

It felt good to be outside and unsupervised. Earlier he’d been thinking how much simpler things would be if he were in a car, but he was happy now to be on foot and decided he wouldn’t even mind being rained on a little, as long as there wasn’t any lightning.

Once he’d seen the body of a man who’d been hit, a golfer on the old municipal course; there was an appalling smell of cooked flesh to the duffer which had put Gunther off meat for a week or two. He had only been out to the golf course on official business one other time, two or three summers later, when a young couple had been run over by the greenskeeper’s assistant in the middle of the night. He was driving a watering wagon and they’d been lying on the fairway watching the stars, or so the couple had claimed. The fellow, one Harry Eberhardt, was extremely nervous, and Gunther had been eyeing him warily when Ed Dieterle, holding Harry’s driver’s license and the girl’s school ID, burst out laughing and handed them to Gunther.

“Here’s what loverboy’s so jumpy about.” Harry was twenty-three, and the girl was Miss Geneva Higgett, age seventeen. Harry’s nerves got worse when the night man for the afternoon paper showed up while they waited for the ambulance.

“Couldn’t rustle up a photographer at this hour. Grocery-store fire out on South Butell.” He shook his head regretfully at the sight of the sheepish lovers awaiting the ambulance, Harry in his street clothes and Geneva wrapped in a blanket, her arm sufficiently injured so that getting her summer dress back on had proved impossible.

The next day the afternoon paper had run the story—the more genteel morning paper didn’t mess with this kind of thing—gleefully insinuating that at least one of the stargazers had been unclothed at the time of the accident and that the young man’s injuries had been less severe than his female companion’s because she’d been on top of him when the wagon rolled over them. The city attorney had declined to press trespassing charges; Harry’s and Geneva’s names and addresses had been printed in the article, which he deemed sufficient punishment. Gunther, who hadn’t given the incident any thought in at least thirty years, wondered now if the girl’s father had given the little bastard the asskicking he deserved. He hoped so.

As he got closer to the center of town the proportion of familiar, intact landmarks began to increase. He passed a used-car lot where he’d once bought a Hudson Hornet with sixty thousand miles on it which had ground to a permanent halt less than two years later as a result, his third wife had insisted, of his never having changed its oil. Gunther had never known or cared much about cars, and he maintained that the newer models didn’t need their oil changed all that often. The ensuing fight had been one of the marriage’s last.

He wasn’t sure what had become of her after she remarried and he didn’t have to send her any more alimony. He didn’t know what had happened to his first wife either. The second one was the mother of his two daughters and they’d kept in touch over the years through the girls and the grandchildren. She lived up north somewhere, he thought, or maybe she was dead.

A couple of doors past the lot was a diner with thin plaques of fake marble mortared to its brick facade. Through the plate glass he saw a waitress he recognized, bored and loitering next to the cash register. She was a lot heavier now, her face gone round and slack with deep creases running from her nostrils to her mouth, but her hair was as thick and luxuriant and black as the last time he’d seen her. She gave a little start at the sight of him and beckoned him to come inside. He was eager to get to the barber shop before it closed for the day, but he figured he had time for a cup of coffee and to say hello.

“Gunther!” She had him in a bear hug as soon as he got through the door. Feeling her warm and soft against him Gunther couldn’t help thinking that her increased girth was probably a good thing. “Good God, how long’s it been? Long time, seems to me. Hey, Jimbo, get out here and see who it is.” When she turned her face away from him to yell at the kitchen he snuck a glance at the nametag pinned to the polyester above her substantial left breast: IRMA. That seemed right.

A tiny, wizened man, who looked decades older than Gunther felt, came out of the kitchen scowling and wiping his hands. He brightened at the sight of Gunther and held out his hand.

“Well, I’ll be dipped in shit. What’s a penny made of, copper?”

It was only at the familiar salutation that he recognized the old man as the diner’s proprietor. He was about a foot shorter and thirty pounds skinnier than Gunther remembered him, as though a good part of his physical being had been siphoned off into Irma. “How you been, Jimmy?”

“I been getting older. Looks like you have, too.”

“Sit down and have something,” Irma said.

“Guess I got time for a cup of coffee,” he said, taking the stool nearest the register. The stools looked new, and in fact most of the fixtures seemed to have been replaced since he’d been there last. Shiny chrome along and behind the counter, new Naugahyde on the booths and stooltops, unscarred red and white checkerboard linoleum on the floor. He wondered where Jimmy had come up with the money for a remodel; there wasn’t another customer in the place.

“Have something to eat if you want.”

“I just had lunch,” Gunther said, though in fact he hadn’t eaten since breakfast: some fruit salad he could tell was from a can and part of one of those pressed sawdust oat muffins they gave the old folks to make sure they all crapped like clockwork.

She poured him some coffee. “I’ll make a fresh pot for you here in a sec. So how’s old Dorothy?” Jim went back into the kitchen.

“She’s fine,” he said.

“Give her my best. You’ll have to bring her in some time.”

“Yep.”

“So how long since we’ve seen you?”

“Since not long after I retired, probably.”

“So I guess that means you didn’t know Jim and I got married?” She held up her left hand, palm inward, to show off a wedding band and what looked to Gunther like a pretty expensive engagement ring. Jimmy must have been squirreling it away for years, unless he was just spending himself into the poorhouse out of love.

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks. It was a long time in coming, I’ll tell you that. Look, we even changed the name.” She held up a menu with JIM AND IRMA’S printed on the cover. “We had to throw out all kinds of menus and pens and guest checks marked Jim’s,” she said. He nodded, thinking it would have been more economical to keep using the old guest checks until they ran out.

“Here’s something else you don’t know about.”

Irma pulled a framed photo off the wall behind the counter and handed it to Gunther. It was a wedding picture with Jim and Irma surrounded by a bunch of kids, ranging in age from toddler to about ten.

“Nice looking bunch of kids.”

“Three of ’em are mine by my oldest daughter Nina, the others are Jim’s son’s kids. They’re all cousins now, is what I keep telling ’em. You got any grandkids?”

“Six, all of ’em grown,” he said, though it was a guess. It was something close to that, anyway. “One or two got kids of their own now.” He found himself distracted by the smell of frying onions.

“You don’t have a picture to show me, do you?”

He reached for his wallet and opened it, thinking he didn’t. Inside, though, were pictures of a little boy and girl of about five, taken separately, and another of the little boy, slightly older, with a girl of about two. There were also high school pictures of two other girls and another boy. He pulled them out one by one and gave them to Irma.

“The one girl’s my granddaughter Cynthia’s first; Cynthia’s expecting her second in November. The brother and sister are my other granddaughter Tammy’s. My grandson Steve isn’t married yet, but there’s nothing wrong with him. These three older ones are Tricia and Amy, and the boy’s Danny. They’re Dot’s boy Sidney’s kids. None of them’s done with school yet.” The litany of names and relationships had poured out so fast and effortlessly he wondered where it had come from. For the first time since he’d left it occurred to him that people might be worried about him. Well, he’d go back when he’d done what he set out to do and not before. The worrying couldn’t be helped.

Irma studied the photographs with great interest as she poured out his coffee cup and refilled it from the fresh pot. “They’re beautiful, Gunther.”

“Yeah.” He took a sip of hot coffee. It was the first caffeine he’d had in a long time, and he could feel himself starting to tense up a little by the time Jimmy came out from the kitchen holding a plate with a cheeseburger and fries on it.

“Told you I didn’t want anything to eat.”

“I was going to throw these fries out anyway, and you never used to come in here without eating a cheeseburger.” He set it down in front of Gunther, who was too hungry to be stubborn.

“Guess I’d hate to see it go to waste,” he said. He poured some ketchup onto the plate for the fries, then some more onto the onions on top of the patty and took a big bite out of it. Jimmy’s had never been his favorite burger in town, but this was better by a long shot than any he’d had since taking up residence at Lake Vista. Five minutes later the burger and fries were gone.

“You sure you don’t want something for dessert, Gunther? Piece of pie, maybe?”

“Guess I’d better not.” He took another sip of his coffee and got up off the stool. “Going to get my hair cut this afternoon.” He paid for the cheeseburger and the coffee, left a good tip for Irma and stepped back onto the sidewalk with five dollars in his pocket for the haircut.

A block west was a bar that Gunther knew from an armed robbery one afternoon in the late sixties during which the owner gunned down the would-be thief who, it had turned out, was armed only with a starter’s pistol. Gunther remembered shaking the man’s hand at the scene and congratulating him, both of them marveling at the poor dead shit-for-brains on the floor next to them who had tried to rob a bar in midafternoon on a Tuesday, when the till must have had less than twenty-five dollars in it.

Gunther was peering into the dark, empty bar through the glass pane set in its front door, trying to remember the owner’s name and coming up blank, when he heard the horn honking behind him. He turned to see a late-model silver Caddy pulling over to the curb, its passenger side window rolling effortlessly down. The driver scooted over to lean out the window.

“Excuse me,” she said. With her hair fluffed and dry, it took him a second to place her as the woman he’d been ogling back at Ray and Cal’s. She was prettier than he’d thought before, more carefully made up than most of the women he saw lately. Since he found large women attractive anyway, he appreciated the fact that they often worked extra hard to look nice, although in her case he thought she might have overdone it a little around the eyes. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you back there.”

“That’s okay,” he said, surprised that he rated an apology. “Didn’t mean to stare.”

“The thing is, after you left? When you said I reminded you of somebody?”

“Probably my imagination.”

The woman looked at him doubtfully. “Is your name Gunther?”

“Who’s asking?”

“My name’s Loretta Gandy. It used to be Loretta Ogden.”

The first name meant nothing to him, but the second resonated somewhere in the back of his mind.

“Sally Ogden’s my mom,” she added.

The name gave Gunther a jolt, but he wasn’t altogether sure why. It was a good bet, though, that this Sally was the woman she put him in mind of, and he relaxed a little. “Sure. That must be it, then.”

“Do you need a lift? I’d be glad to give you one.”

“Which way you headed?”

“Whichever way you need to go.” She unlocked the passenger door and pushed it open, sliding back into the driver’s seat.

“Thanks a lot,” he said, and he got in just as the first few warm drops of rain started falling. As they pulled out and the rain started to spot the reddish dust on the windshield she set the wiper to the slowest speed, smearing the drops into mud and necessitating a shot of wiper fluid.

“Harry’s Barber Shop, on Cowan and Second.”

“So don’t you want to know how my mom is?”

“Sure,” he said, though who she was might have been a more pertinent question than how.

“Well, pretty good, at least as good as you can expect. She buried old Donald last year.”

“Was he dead?” He was instantly sorry he’d said it, but the old censoring mechanism had never been too sharp to begin with; now it seemed to be completely shot. She held her breath for a second, then looked over at him with her mouth wide open, stunned. He was about to apologize when she let out a loud laugh like a seal barking.

“That’s a good one. Guess you didn’t have any reason to like him much, huh?”

He guessed that he probably hadn’t. The list of people he liked much was a short one.

“They moved back to town five years ago. I’ve been here since after college. I don’t think she ever sees any of her old friends.”

“Probably they didn’t like Donald.” He didn’t know who Donald was any more than he knew who Sally was, but at this point it seemed like a good bet.

“Probably. He was pretty good to her, though, you’ve got to give him that.”

“I guess you do.”

“You were, too. She always said so.”

He turned away from her to look at the passing streets, making her suspect he was trying to hide a tear. In fact, he was just trying to figure out exactly who this Sally was and what it was he was supposed to have done for her.

In an odd, indirect way it seemed to Gunther to be connected to his money and where he’d left it.