Don’t Look Back

Yours, Walter

And then – just in case she didn’t remember the full name of the man who had kidnapped her the summer she was fifteen and held her hostage for almost six weeks, just in case she might have another acquaintance on death row, just in case she had forgotten the man who had killed at least two other girls and was suspected of killing many others, yet let her live, just in case all of this might have slipped her mind – he added helpfully:

(Walter Bowman)

Chapter Two

1984

Walter Bowman was good-looking. Anyone who said otherwise was contrary, or not to be trusted. He had dark hair and green eyes and skin that took a tan well, although it was a farmer’s tan. He wasn’t a farmer, actually, but a mechanic, working in his father’s garage. Still, the result was the same, as far as his tan went. He would have liked to work with his shirt off on warm days, but his father wouldn’t hear of it.

He was good-looking enough that his family teased him about it, as if to make sure he wouldn’t get conceited. Yes, he was a little on the short side, but so were most movie stars. Claude, at the barbershop, had explained this to him. Not that Claude compared Walter to a movie star – Claude, like his family, like everyone else in town, seemed intent on keeping Walter in his place. But Claude mentioned one day that he had seen Chuck Norris at a casino in Las Vegas.

‘He’s an itty-bitty fella. But, then, all movie stars are little,’ Claude said, finishing up. Walter loved the feel of the brush on the back of his neck. ‘They have big heads, but small bodies.’

‘How little?’ Walter had asked.

‘The size of my thumb,’ Claude said.

‘No, seriously.’

‘Five seven, five eight. ’Bout your size.’

That was what Walter wanted to hear. If Chuck Norris was about his size, well, that was almost the same as Walter being like Chuck Norris. Still, he needed to make one small clarification for the record.

‘I’m five nine. That’s average height for a man, did you know that? Five nine for a man, five four for a woman.’

‘Is that the average,’ Claude asked, ‘or the median? There’s a difference, you know.’

Walter didn’t know the difference. He might have asked, but he suspected Claude didn’t really know either, and all he would get was Claude making fun of his ignorance.

‘Average,’ he said.

‘Well someone has to be average,’ said Claude, who was tall, but skinny and kind of pink all over – splotchy skin, pale, pale red hair, watery eyes that were permanently narrowed from years of staring at the hair that lay across his barber scissors. Everyone was always trying to put Walter in his place, keep him down, stop him from being what he might be. Even women, girls, seemed to be part of the conspiracy. Because, despite Walter’s good looks, he could not find a woman who wanted to go with him, not even on a single date. He couldn’t figure it out. Things would start out okay, he could get a conversation going. He read things, he knew things, he kept an interesting store of facts at his disposal. Claude’s Chuck Norris story, for example, became one of his anecdotes, although he added his own flourish, holding his thumb and forefinger out to show just how ittybitty Chuck Norris was. That usually got a laugh, or at least a smile.

But then something would happen, he could never put his finger on what, and the girl’s face would close to him. It was a small town, and it soon seemed there wasn’t a girl in it who would consider going out with Walter Bowman. And on the rare occasion when a new family moved in, one with daughters, someone must have told them something, because they didn’t want to go with him either.

Then, one day, on an errand for his father, he saw a girl walking down the road just outside Martinsburg. It was hot, and she wore shorts over a lavender bathing suit, a one-piece. He liked that she wore a one-piece. Modest. He offered her a ride.

She hesitated.

‘Wherever you’re going,’ Walter added. ‘Door-to-door service. Truck’s air-conditioning is so cold, you’ll need a sweater.’

It was cold. He saw what it did to her breasts when she got in. They were large for such a short girl, not that he let his eyes linger. He looked only once.

‘Where you going?’ he asked.

‘The Rite Aid,’ she said. ‘I want to buy some makeup, but my mother says I can’t. It’s my money, isn’t it?’

‘You don’t need makeup.’ He meant it as a compliment, yet she flushed, balled up her fists as if to fight him. ‘I mean, you’re lucky, you look good without it, but you’re right. It’s your money, you should be able to do with it what you want.’ He couldn’t quite stop himself. Maybe that was the problem, that he just couldn’t stop talking soon enough. ‘Although you shouldn’t buy anything illegal with it, drugs or whatever. Just say no.’

She rolled her eyes. She was a girl, not as old as he had thought when he first picked her up. Maybe no more than fifteen, but she clearly considered herself more sophisticated than Walter. Was that it? Was that why girls like this were forever eeling away from him? There were some girls – plain, slow witted – who didn’t mind his company, but Walter couldn’t get interested in just anybody. He was good-looking. He should be with someone as good-looking or better-looking. Everyone knew that was how it worked. A beautiful woman could go with the ugliest man on the planet, but a man had to date above himself, or be shamed. He deserved someone special.

‘I smoke pot,’ this girl announced.

He didn’t believe her. ‘You like it?’

The question seemed to catch her off guard, as if that wasn’t the point, liking it or not liking it. ‘Yeah,’ she said, as if it were a guess. She probably didn’t know the difference between average or median either, although Walter did now. He had looked it up. He always looked things up when he didn’t know them. No one had to be stupid. Stupid was a choice. He was forever learning things. He knew all the US state capitals and he was working on world capitals.

‘What’s it like?’ he asked.

‘You don’t know?’

‘No, it’s not something I’ve gotten around to.’

‘You wanna find out? I got some in my purse.’

He didn’t, actually, but he wanted to stay in this girl’s company a while longer.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

‘Kelly. With a y, but I’m thinking of changing it to an i. There are three Kellys in my class at school. What’s your name?’

‘Walt.’ He had never called himself that, but why not try it out, change his luck. Within the hour, they were in a little cove off the river, and she was trying to show him how to smoke pot. She said he was doing it wrong, but he was doing it wrong on purpose, wanting to keep his wits about him. He didn’t believe in drugs or alcohol, but if he needed to pretend in order to spend time with this girl, Kelly, Kelli, whatever, he would. He found himself wishing she wore a two-piece. A one-piece, that wasn’t going to come off easily, it wasn’t something you could slip a girl out of, bit by bit. He knew he had to take it slow, but he couldn’t, he just couldn’t. She was lying on her stomach, on a long flat rock. He blew on her neck, thinking of Claude’s brush. She wrinkled her nose, as if a bug had landed on her. He tried to give her a back rub, but she shrugged his hand off. ‘No,’ she said. His hand returned, not to her shoulder blades this time, but between her legs. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Don’t.’ But she wasn’t quite as bossy and superior now. He tried to be sweet, kiss her neck, stroke her hair. He knew from magazines that foreplay was important to girls. But things just didn’t go the way they were supposed to. It was only later, when she was crying, that his mind began to catalog the possible outcomes – she would be his girlfriend, she would tell her parents, she would tell other girls, she might even tell the police, she was never going to stop crying – that he realized he had only one option.

‘How’d you get scratched up, Walter?’ his father asked at dinner that night.

‘Stopped to relieve myself on the side of the road, walked right into one of those prickly bushes along the highway,’ he said. If someone had seen his truck parked out on Route 118, that would explain it.

‘Sure took you a long time to find that fan belt.’

‘Like I said, I had to go all the way to Hagerstown, and they didn’t have one either. I ordered it.’

‘Coulda sworn Pep Boys in Martinsburg said they had what I wanted in stock.’

‘Nope, wrong size. People in those places, they’re just ignorant. No work ethic, no interest in customer service.’

That was all his father needed, and he was off to the races about the death of the small businessman.

By the weekend, the local news was full of stories about the missing girl, Kelly Pratt. She’d never get a chance to change her name now, Walter realized. A week went by, a month, a season, a year. He thought of her as Kelly Brat. He had showed her who was boss. It could have been nice, she shouldn’t have taken him down to the river to smoke pot, the pot was what screwed him up, he probably wouldn’t have been her first, and her just fourteen, according to the news stories. Slut. Druggie. The very fact that they never found her, that he didn’t get caught, that the police never came to speak to him, that no one came forward to say that they had seen Walter Bowman’s pickup parked on the hill above the river that day, that they never even searched near that part of the river – all those things proved he had been right to do what he did.

He found himself taking long drives on his days off, looking for other girls who might need a ride.

Chapter Three

‘Ha-ha,’ Peter marveled. ‘He actually wrote “ha-ha.”’

‘If it were an e-mail, if he had access to a computer, he probably would have put an emoticon there, the one that uses a semicolon to wink at you.’