FALLING, FAILING TO FIND (2009-11-10)

Walter didn't arrive at that spot easily. There was a great deal of soul searching, accompanied by a trip to the family physician for a complete physical before he was convinced this was the only possible outcome. When he found out there was nothing wrong with the boys bladder or other parts 'down there', that left a few possibilities. Just none that were something he would be able to deal with. Something he couldn't explain away or leave to his mother to handle, as he had most of the child rearing that had taken place in the Bunch household. He checked in shortly after finishing a couples shots and a beer at the lounge.

"The office," he'd say, followed by a laugh that could never be confused with anything joyous or cute. It was a "stupid bitch" sort of thing that punctuated any and every example of him getting it over on the old lady. Something to be expected, more than proud of. It was what a man, a real man, did. It came easily to Walter. he'd never really struggled with it. There were some things a guy has to do in life that are going to give him pause; those kinds of situations where he has to weigh his options before finally deciding which way he's going to go. Walter had faced that when it came to dealing with prisoners rolling through the Ardennes, Christmas Day, 1944. There was something for a real man to try getting his hands on, frozen solid and hungry as hell from a couple of days but nothing but bullets and army canvas to eat. They were pushing the SS, back.

"Tough bastards. Oh hell yeah, the toughest I've ever seen," he would add to any story told about his service during the war, whether or not anybody was listening. It didn't matter. They were that tough. People needed to know, even today, by god.

This decision, the thing with wee-wee boy, that was a whole lot simpler than the other. He hesitated for the time it took the boy's mother to pick him up and hug him close, telling him it wasn't a big deal.

"Just watch, baby. No one will remember. Really! I promise," she said. Another one them, mo matter how nice it was, she'd never be able to honor or keep things. It was a bald face lie and not the sort of shit she should be filling the lad's head with but no stopping. Not now. Not ever. She'd been doing it since he Noah had discovered the teat. Wasn't likely to stop now. What difference did it make?

What difference, indeed. They had this kid now with all the guts and smarts of a crippled raccoon on the highway. The damage was already done. Wasn't no way he had what it took to protect himself. Wasn't likely to ever get up or get on with his life. Like the coon, he was most likely going to die limping and lame just a few feet away from where he'd been set loose.

Walter beat him to the punch and wrote the little bastard off before the weakness slipped through the little kid's pores and onto Walt's own skin. Couldn't have that. He shivered.

It got to be something of a joke, a little something he saved up to use on the women he was putting the blocks to on the side. What was it about women? Didn't matter who they were he got pretty much the same reaction which woman he told his little "offspring" joke to. It was like they were secretly united in a pact designed to bend men into tight circles they could keep handy and using like napkin rings on the table when they entertained.

Even Doreen. She'd been spreading her legs for him almost three years, acting like a friend of a family and a good neighbor the whole time. She was naked, still sweating and wet down there because of him when he pulled the joke on her.

"Didn't your boy start school?"

"Who," he asked.

"Your boy," Doreen said.

"Oh. Oh goodness no. That. That isn't my boy. don't even be confused. My boy died. My boy died in a horrible snowstorm while we were on the way to the hospital. That thing running around the house now is just an experiment."

She was waiting for it, not believing him but letting him take this wherever it was he needed to go with it. No comment. No reaction.

"That's right. A little bit of science there. A miracle, for sure. She picked up the afterbirth and insisted on keeping it warm. Lo and behold."

He would usually punctuate that with his arms spread, palms turned to the sky. It was something he'd seen somewhere and it fitted the dramatic mood he was going for with the story. It was only funny with all of the hijinks.

But the women never laughed. he worked on the line for a good six years before giving up on it with the ladies. They were a little bit like the stone heads in pictures from Easter Island. Nobody had figured them out, yet. One thing was for sure, nothing in the world was going to make them laugh.

Ah, what the hell? She was a fun twist, taken in the right spirit and there wasn't nothing he was hoping to put together with her that hadn't already been put together a whole lot of times before. He was getting a little bit tired of her, anyway. It was just about time to get back out there and find another woman. At least, one more.

It didn't snow here. If it did, he'd have been struck by the way the season had changed, sneaking him right back up to Christmas and the mood that he always got into with that. There didn't seem to be any way around it. Always dark, always heavy and always coming at him just like this. Ambush, the way the Gerry's had done it at the Bulge. No warning but a person familiar with history probably could predicted it.

Not just the push of the German army into the forest around Bastogne, late in December of 1944. His mood, too. It was becoming something of a tradition. The kids and he were the only people in the whole god damned house surprised by it when it came. She knew. She knew and had been doing anything she could possibly do in preparation.

There were a whole lot of little day trips to Disneyland or weekends up to stay with her Momma in Bakersfield.

"So they can see the kids. They're growing so fast." She always gave an excuse like that but didn't need to. He wasn't aware of what his own mood was preparing to do and didn't really give a good god damned whether or not they were home when he got out of work and was finished with the bar. It was all just about the same for Walt.

He'd killed them. Not something he'd told anybody. Not the sort of thing you do tell anybody, right? There are a few things, random deeds and unexpected acts, in every man's life. These were things you never would've guessed he was capable of, much less that he had done. He made jokes about chasing skirts, joked about not liking the kids a whole hell of a lot. This was one area however, not open for discussion. Something he wasn't going to capture with a Brownie and mount under little tabs on a black page in a photo album.

Walter didn't need to. His memory was perfect. Unshakable. He couldn't, no matter how much time passed, forget that his get had leaked a gallon in his own pants, so this was something he wasn't going to forget.

He'd walked those four young Krauts, in their big gray wool overcoats and their proud silver SS insignia, shaped like lightening bolts, down into a little dell. He liked that word.

"Dell"

He'd looked it up a couple of times to be sure he was using it right. He was. This spot, a small wooded hollow, where he pulled them up short, just as they started climbing up the other side, slipping in the snow like they were going to be just fine as soon as they made the road up on the ridge, and he'd let loose. It was a perfect training film action, with measured three-round shots, spreading out like angry hornets and clipping the four kids, stinging like hell.

That was where the hornets analogy ended. It would take one hell of a wasp to damn near cut a grown German soldier into shredded little pieces, their front sides bursting like champagne bottles of guts trying to get the hell away from the bullets that were making little round dents on the other side where they entered.

He spent a little bit of time every year trying to guess what might have happened if he hadn't done it.

"Hell! Who knows?"

He didn't. He wasn't a fortune teller. He couldn't say with any certainty that holding them until they could be passed back into the rear would've accomplished anything. He couldn't say that his being ready to advance when the fog lifted and the American fighters started sweeping overhead, doing to great big Panzer tanks what he'd done to a couple soft bodies in gray wool.

It didn't really matter. It was done. And he never said a word about it. Not even in casual conversation.