The first time I saw Walter he was coming out of building across the street from my office. He looked nervous, the way he swung his head around one way and then the other as he locked the door and hurried up the sidewalk, pushing long, black strands of hair off his face and glancing over his shoulder repeatedly like he worried someone would see him.
When he returned a few minutes later, carrying a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette, he turned his head from side to side again before unlocking the door and slipping inside as quickly as he had come out.
I had never seen anyone go in or out of that building, which was no more than a wooden shack squeezed between two six-story office properties in a space so narrow it could have been an alley at one time. So later that day I asked Max about it. Max is an aging sculptor who owned the converted brick warehouse where I rented my first-floor office. He had lived and worked in the downtown neighborhood longer than anyone else and had a studio in the back where he welded massive pieces of steel into shapes he told me were all sexual.
“Hey Max, did someone move into that little building across the street?”
“Yeah, name’s Walter. An engraver. Old school. Does custom work on watches, guns and such. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. An engraver, you say?”
“Yeah. You know what that is?”
“Of course,” I said, though my imagination didn’t take me much further than a jewelry store. “But I never met one.”
“I’ll introduce you.”
“That’s okay, I was just curious,” I said, and I meant it. I didn’t want to meet the guy.
But Max thought everyone in the neighborhood should know each other and the next day pulled me from my desk and took me to Walter’s door. Walter opened up immediately and stepped out of the darkness, keys jangling in a hand he lifted to shade his eyes from the sun. He was short and stocky and wore black-framed glasses on a long, unshaven face that reminded me of a horse; thick black hair spilled out the top of a wrinkled white shirt buttoned halfway up his chest. He looked about forty.
Max made the introduction and left. I followed Walter inside. We stood close together in the cramped space, and as my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, I noticed him shuffling his feet and looking up and down and side to side and everywhere but at me.
“It’s a little tight,” he said suddenly and scrambled up a couple of steps to a small dais against the back wall. He perched on a stool behind a worktable and switched on a wide, metal lamp hanging overhead. He was calm then, his gaze resting on me while I looked around.
The front window was covered with old Venetian blinds that let a few slivers of light fall weakly across the floor. One side wall had a workbench with a rack above it holding hammers and other tools with tapered steel shafts and rounded handles shaped like mushrooms. A row of rifles lined the opposite wall, knives and swords beside them.
“Beautiful work,” I said, tracing a rifle’s intricate engravings with my fingertip, then asked how he learned his trade.
Looking down on me, his face half in shadows, he said he trained in Italy and Belgium when he was young and worked in the style of the old masters, using only a hammer, bruin and bulino. “All by hand, no power tools, lasers or acids. What about you?”
When I said I ran a small public relations agency, he smiled. “I don’t know what that is.”
I started to explain but stopped when I saw his eyes wander, then groped vaguely for something else to say. “Are you from around here?”
He said he wasn’t, said these days he lived on a small farm in Bucks County about twenty minutes south. I told him I lived on the hill, which is an old neighborhood of Victorian homes overlooking the city. He sat up and straightened his back when he heard that, and we looked at each other in an awkward silence.
“I have to get back for a call, but thanks for letting me see your shop,” I said finally and turned to leave.
“Back for a call,” he repeated like he knew I was lying.
I didn’t care. I just wanted to get out of there and was almost out the door when I heard him say, “Hey, uh…uh…”
“Carl,” I reminded him, and he asked if I was hiring, said his wife was looking for a job.
That surprised me, and I stumbled over my answer. “Not now, but maybe down the road, you know, depends. But I’ll talk with her sometime, that is, if she wants.”
—
The next morning I opened the door to a tall woman in her forties carrying a manilla folder. She wore a light cardigan over sloping shoulders and a loose-fitting skirt that reached her ankles. Her sandy hair fell in her face and she looked at me shyly over wire-rim glasses that slipped down her nose.
“Carl?”
“Yes?”
“Hi, I’m Janet, Walter suggested I come over and talk to you about a job.”
Oh shit, I thought, what did Walter say. I didn’t tell him there was an opening. What do I do now? I can’t send her away, not when I’ve met Walter, not when she looks so excited. So I asked her to take a seat and ran my eyes over her resume. She told me about her experience. When she finished, I said, “How about I start you with a part-time position. It will involve clerical and research work. I’ll get you all the details. You can start next week.”
As soon as she left, I knocked myself in the head a few times. It wasn’t that I couldn’t afford to hire her. After all, it was 1999 and dot.com start-ups sprouted like weeds, all fed by venture capital and all throwing money at firms like mine to generate publicity for them. But I was impulsive and knew my decision had something to do with Walter, like I was doing him a favor, and that didn’t make any sense at all.
Janet turned out to be a quick learner and pleasant in the office. Her first week went smoothly, and I was starting to feel good about my decision. Then Walter started showing up. At first it was the occasional visit, but soon he stopped in every day Janet worked. It was always the same: he knocked twice, opened the door halfway and poked his head through. “Hey, sorry,” he would say and wait for Janet to scurry out to the hallway where they talked in hushed tones.
One day my wife, Diane, was there when he came in. She flashed her big smile, the one that makes everyone feel welcome, and after we talked for a few minutes, Walter followed us outside and invited us to his farm on Saturday. I hesitated, but Diane agreed right away, and a few days later we packed our two youngest daughters in the car and went.
—
“Nothing fancy here, not like being on the hill,” Walter said when I walked into the kitchen. He splashed whiskey into four glasses lined up next to a butcher block, a meat cleaver and two freshly plucked chickens sprawled on its surface.
Before I could answer, he said, “Did you ever kill a chicken,” then picked up the cleaver and brought it down hard on the birds, splitting them down the back before separating the legs from the breasts.
“No,” I said, gripping my glass tightly, taking a step back and draining it. It burned on the way down and I wanted more.
“Janet holds them upside down, pinning their wings, then I cut their throats with a sharp knife,” he said, sweeping his fingers across his throat. “Quick and easy. Maybe I’ll show you sometime.”
Just then, Diane, Janet and the girls—our two and Walter’s daughter, Annie—came loudly into the kitchen. Walter refilled my glass, and everyone took their drinks outside. It wasn’t much of a farm: a large garden, pigpen with four pigs, and hen house with a dozen hens and a rooster, all scattered on five acres. We spent the rest of the day outside, all together, and that made it easier for me to be around Walter.
“They’re fun, we should invite them over,” Diane said on the drive home.
I sighed loudly.
“What, I thought you liked them?”
“It’s awkward with Walter. He makes me uncomfortable.”
“Really?”
“Yes. He’s always coming at me with shit about us living on the hill, like we have money.”
“We have money?” Diane laughed.
“Exactly.”
“Don’t pay attention, it’s probably his own insecurities.”
I didn’t answer.
“Good, we’ll figure out a day and time and have them over.”
—
Our house was large and sat on an old manicured property, and because we had six children, two each from previous marriages and two together, we needed every bit of the room. To us, it was a great home we bought at a low price and could fix up for years to come.
It symbolized something else to Walter. Maybe he got a whiff of past affluence from its size and Victorian style, or maybe it was the location, looming high above the city. Whatever it was, I didn’t like the way he smiled and nodded as he looked around on that first visit.
But Diane and Janet hit it off, talking like old friends, and soon the four of us were getting together on a regular basis. Sometimes it was with the kids and sometimes not, but usually it was Walter’s idea. Never mine. They brought over old records like Louis Prima and danced in our living room. They left the records behind. “For next time,” Walter would say.
I couldn’t let go of my apprehension. It wasn’t only the inane insinuations or the way his eyes jumped around nervously. There was something else, something I suspected we weren’t privy to, perhaps something that would concern us if we knew. I saw how Janet’s smile vanished when he was pushy, the way she took him aside and spoke to him quietly, almost like she was caring for a child, and it made me think Walter was troubled, probably more than most of us.
One day he asked if we wanted to buy one of their piglets and raise it on their property until it was big enough to slaughter. Diane and the girls jumped at the idea, but I said,“Absolutely not, I have enough going on without a pet pig.”
The girls started yelling, “Please, please, please,” so I told Walter we’d think about it, and later I talked to Diane. “You see what’s happening, don’t you, the way he’s always looking for new ways to get our lives tangled up. I tell you, I never should have hired Janet. That’s what opened the door, that’s how it started.”
“My god, Carl, what’s wrong with you,” she shot back. “Lives get tangled up all the time, but it’s like you’re waiting for something bad to happen, like you’re scared of him. Are you?”
I opened my mouth to say something but nothing came out, and a few days later I handed Walter a few twenties and Diane picked out a piglet we later discovered had a bulging hernia. She named him Bubbles. The girls ignored the part about us serving Bubbles for dinner one day and behaved like they had a new pet. Soon we were making weekly trips to the farm.
When Bubbles reached the right size, Diane and I planned a pig roast in our backyard. Walter volunteered to take him to the butcher. He lent us a cooler to hold Bubbles after he was slaughtered. He said he would borrow a smoker from someone he knew. And the day before the pig roast, he helped me load everything in the back of his truck and bring it to our house.
“You going to be alright tomorrow?” he said.
I told him I would, but the next morning I almost vomited when I opened the cooler and looked down on the white, headless carcass. I had to walk away for a few minutes, then close my eyes and hold my breath before lifting him out and into the smoker.
Before I knew it, our backyard filled with guests mingling under a hot afternoon sun, and Diane sidled up to me as I finished quartering Bubbles on a six-foot length of butcher block I’d set up on sawhorses. “You did it, Carl. And check out Walter, he looks so happy.”
I scanned the yard and found everyone talking and laughing. Walter stood alone looking at me. He nodded his head and smiled. “Yep,” I said and began carving thick slices of pork.
“That’s nice, isn’t it?”
“The meat, yeah, looks great.”
“I meant Walter,” she said, poking her elbow in my side.
I smiled and kept slicing.
Everyone left before dark except Walter and Janet. They lingered in the driveway saying their usual long good-byes until finally I said, “I’m wiped out and really have to get to bed, but thank you for everything, Walter. I really appreciate how much you did for us.”
“No problem, I mean, you’re our best friends,” he said with pleading eyes. Beside him, Janet’s face fell. She pawed at the asphalt with her foot.
—
“Best friends, are you fucking kidding me,” I said when they drove off.
“I know, I know,” Diane said and laughed. “He was excited and got a little carried away. I don’t think they have many friends.”
“And why is that?”
“I don’t know, Carl,” she said, shaking her head. “Just don’t overthink it, okay? It was a great day and Walter was a big part of it. Can’t you leave it at that?”
“No, I can’t leave it at that because he won’t. What’s next, vacations together?”
“Stop exaggerating. Anyway, there’s nothing to be done about it now. They’re our friends.”
“That’s the point, Diane, they’re our friends. We’re trapped. And Janet sees it, I can tell she does. She knows what he’s doing and knows it’s messed up.”
“Leave her out of it. This is your problem with Walter. And if you’re that concerned then say something to him. Tell him to back off, you know, man to man and all that shit. I’m tired of listening to it.”
I stayed downstairs and had another drink when Diane went up to bed. I wasn’t sure what to do about Walter but knew I wouldn’t talk to him, knew I didn’t have the courage to look him in the eyes and say something that would hurt his feelings. I was never able to do that to anyone, not even when I was younger and wanted to end a romantic relationship. The words wouldn’t come out.
—
The months slid into winter, and Walter’s presence weighed on me. His neediness repulsed me. I couldn’t be in my office without thinking of him across the street in his cramped workshop. I cringed when I noticed his truck parked outside, heard his knock, or saw his face squeeze through the door. At night I lie awake running through scenarios where I told him to back off, saying things like, “Walter, this is the way it’s got to be,” and he would cry or lash out. He never took it well.
I began avoiding him. I spent more time outside the office and, despite Diane’s protests, turned down his invitations. I made all kinds of excuses and every time I did, I watched his eyes run around in their sockets trying to make sense of what was happening.
“Hey Carl, everything okay,” he said once when he caught me on the street outside the office. “We haven’t seen you guys much lately. We didn’t do anything to offend you, did we?”
“We’ve been busy, what with the kids and work and all.”
“Annie keeps asking when she’ll see your girls. Let’s try to get together soon, okay?”
“I’ll talk to Diane,” I lied and hustled up the street, my heart pounding.
He wouldn’t relent. He and Janet even showed up one night uninvited as if nothing had changed. They said they were in the neighborhood. They brought a bottle of whiskey. They played Louis Prima and danced in our living room. They stayed and stayed, and I drank and drank, more than usual, enough so I didn’t feel anything. I laughed.
The next morning the music and dancing and laughter crawled back into my waking mind, and I felt my face flush hot. The heat spread quickly through my body with a stinging pain.
—
By the spring of 2000 a new problem emerged. The money flowing into dot.com start-ups had created a bubble that now burst. One company after another lost funding and slashed expenses. Some went belly up. Half my clients slipped away. My staff saw the writing on the wall and came to me with questions.
Everyone except Janet. She kept her head down, didn’t say a word, and soon the sight of her became as unbearable as Walter’s neediness—the way her hair hung sloppily in her face, the way her glasses slipped down her nose, the way she nodded and smiled and acquiesced to whatever I said.
One day I discovered she’d let some new business prospects slip away. “Jesus, Janet, how could you do that. We have to get some business in here. Don’t you know what’s happening?” It was the first time I’d spoken to her like that, and I didn’t apologize when I saw the hurt on her face.
The next morning Walter opened my office door loudly. It was early. I was alone. He took an uncertain step forward, his arms hanging stiffly at his sides. He glared at me.
“Where do you come off talking to Janet like that, Carl. I mean, she didn’t deserve that, no one does. Who do you think you are?”
I stood and faced him, the momentary shock pulsing through me like an electric current. I looked into his nervous eyes and took a deep breath. “C’mon Walter, I don’t think it was that bad. I simply pointed out what she did wrong. Nothing else. And it’s work, my business, so don’t get involved.”
Silence hung loudly in the room before he took a step back, lowered his head and said to the floor, “Well, it hurt her feelings, you know. She was crying last night.”
A week later I had no choice but to lay off most of my staff, including Janet, and tell Max I was closing my office and moving the business into my house.
“Hang in there, man,” Max said, hands on hips, head tilted to one side.
“I’ll be okay. The clients I have left will be enough without all the overhead.”
“What about Janet?”
“I let her go.”
“Figured as much. The way Walter is moping around. He’s a sensitive one.”
“Nothing I could do, Max.”
He narrowed his eyes and nodded. I wasn’t sure if that meant something.
At home I told Diane what Max said.
“Maybe he’s right, Walter is very sensitive,” she said. “Think about it, he never did anything bad. He’s just a quirky, nervous guy. And he likes us. I know he was clingy, but I think you worried about nothing.”
I sighed loudly, and she put her hand on mine. “You could always go over and see him. You know, talk it out. Maybe there’s something to salvage.”
I nodded but knew there wasn’t anything to salvage, and if there was, I wasn’t interested. All I ever wanted was to be rid of him. Yet, something deep inside clawed at me now, like a piece of our life, as painful as it had been, was missing.
—
A few months later, I ran into Walter coming out of a convenience store. He carried a cup of coffee in one hand and lit a cigarette with the other, taking the first drag deep in his lungs before lifting his head and blowing out a thin stream of smoke. It was a gray overcast day, the first time I’d seen him since our face-off.
“Hey, Walter,” I said cautiously. “How are you?”
“Hi,” he said, looking surprised, then dropped his head and walked slowly to his truck. He looked back once, and when he did, I felt an urge to follow him and apologize for the way things ended, to ask how he and Janet were doing. But I stayed where I was and watched him drive away.
Gary Kimball began writing as a newspaper reporter, later worked in public relations, and now writes fiction from his home in mid-coast Maine.
Euphony Journal 