The Walkaway by Scott Phillips Read Free Book Online Page B

cheese fingers coming.”
    She was very slender for a consumer of deep-fried cheese. Her immaculately made-up face was quite round, though, more noticeably so for being surrounded by a frothy blond semicircle of hair. He felt an urge to reach over and lightly caress its brittle, shellacked surface; aware that this would not advance his cause, he resisted and pressed on. “That’s not dinner, that’s just to keep people from getting shitfaced too quick.”
    “Be that as it may,” she said evenly, “they’re coming.”
    The need to urinate, which had been building in him for a good ten minutes, was suddenly too powerful to ignore, and he straightened up, gesturing at the men’s room.
    “I’m gonna hit the john, and when I come back I want to hear all about that story you did about the kids at that school, with the little kid in Africa they adopted with their allowance money.”
    “South America.”
    “That’s it.” He was already maneuvering through the crowd toward the men’s room, and by the time he got there what had seemed merely an urgent need had revealed itself to be an emergency situation. There was no one at either stall, and he unzipped with the speed and grace of a virtuoso and let loose his stream onto the minty urinal cake. On the back of the basin someone had pasted a 55MPH— PISS ON IT!! sticker, gray and tattered from long and steady use as a urinary bull’s-eye, and tiny flakes in its center shivered in the current.
    The comics pages were tacked up on a pair of cork bulletin boards at eye level above the urinals, and Eric reread the current episode of “Mary Worth” for the fourth time that evening. She was mediating between an estranged couple, the husband domineering and cruel, the wife addicted to pills because of it. “Mind your own business, you nosy old bitch,” he drawled into the ether, and the sound of a flush came from the sitdown stall, followed by the click of its latch unlocking. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a woman of about thirty-five push her way out of the stall. She stared brazenly at his prick, its flow momentarily interrupted, flaccid in his right hand.
    “Line in the ladies’ room. I didn’t feel like waiting.” He didn’t know her name, but she worked at an accounting firm with his friend Gary Halloran, and he remembered flirting with her at a Christmas party at Gary’s house a couple of years earlier. She’d had on a short white V-necked knit dress that night; tonight she was wearing a burgundy dress of more or less the same design but cut from a lighter-weight material and affording a still better view of her breasts.
    He put his organ back in its place and zipped up, more or less finished anyway. “Who likes to wait?” was all he could manage as she pushed the men’s room door open.
    “Let me know if you need a designated driver later,” she called to him as the door floated shut.
    When he got back to the table Lucy was gone, her change untouched on a small black plastic tray. The almost-full drink and full basket of cheese fingers on the table suggested a hurried exit, which most nights would have pissed him off; tonight, though, he had a better option to pursue.
    She was standing by the bar, openly watching him, and he decided that once he subtracted the undeniably arousing factor of his having seen Lucy on television, this woman did more for him than she did. She gestured to him, whatever her name was, jerking her head in the direction of the door. Eric nodded and signaled for the waitress, who brought him his tab. He paid it, then followed the woman to the front door, flush with victory. He hadn’t even had to buy her a drink.

4
    GUNTHER FAHNSTIEL
June 14, 1952
    I was in Jack’s Riverside Tavern for a beer after I got off duty. My knees hurt from eight hours sitting at the wheel of a prowl car and I didn’t want to listen, but Jack kept talking anyway.
    “I’m gonna buy the whole goddamn building, Gunther,” he said. “Take that empty