The Walk
Episode 3 of 3 of Four Minutes Ten by Marcy Loeb
Lonnie stopped talking because he was looking at Harlan Pardue.
He gave me the rest of it at seven that morning, sideways in the Blazer with the door open, and I am setting it down the way he gave it to me.
He was eighty one years old and he was on an army cot with two quilts over him and a bucket beside it. There was a space heater at the end of the cord and a case of bottled water. His right side had been gone since 2022. The phone was on the stud at the head of the cot, and the cord had been lengthened with a second cord and a strip of electrical tape, which is a thing a person does on purpose.
He could not tell the ambulance crew his name. He got hold of the paramedic’s sleeve and would not let go of it, all the way out to the rig.
Wade Pardue came out onto the trailer steps while they were loading and stood there in a coat, at four in the morning, and watched.
The sheriff’s version came together fast and it was a good version. Harlan had a stroke the night his wife died. The daughter in Mesa had a husband on dialysis and no room. Wade brought him home, and Wade was the kind of man who lets a thing slide for a month and then for a year, and by the end he had a father in an outbuilding and a check coming on the first that he could not afford to stop. Elder neglect, endangerment, a fraud count on the pension. Everybody said the same sentence about it, which was that it was sad, and everybody meant it.
I went home Thursday and slept four hours and woke at noon with the number in my head.
Four ten.
Because that part still had nothing to do with anything. Take the whole sad story, lay it out, and it does not tell you why eleven separate phone calls ended inside two seconds of each other. A man who cannot speak, dialing the only number a man with one working hand can dial, does not quit on a schedule.
So I drove out Egypt Hollow on Friday with a stopwatch on my phone. I had already worked it out before I started walking. The walking was so I would not have to say I had only thought it.
The set in the well house was a rotary, the handset hanging in a cradle screwed to the stud above the head of the cot. A man with one working hand can pull a handset down off a wall, because gravity does most of that. Putting it back takes a second hand or a shoulder under you, and he had neither. There is no button on a phone like that. There is no other way to end a call on one.
And the trailer knew every time he tried. Two phones on one pair means one bell circuit. When you dial a rotary the dial sends the number as pulses, and pulses ring every bell on the line, so anybody who grew up with an extension in the kitchen knows that sound, a phone half ringing while somebody down the hall dials out. Nine. One. One. He could not call for help without setting a bell going forty yards away, and he did it eleven times anyway.
Which made the four minutes and ten seconds a distance. Not a mechanism, not a timer, not a stuck pair. A bell, a light, a back door, a yard with a drop cord snaked through it, a well house, at the speed of a man with a bad knee.
I timed the walk twice. Four minutes and nine seconds, and then four minutes and twelve.
And the porch light. Lonnie had said it once with his mouth full and never knew he was saying anything, and I had heard it and written nothing down. That light was not on all night. It came on when Wade got up.
Eleven times, an old man got the handset off the wall with his left hand and dialed the three numbers and made the only sound he had left into it. Eleven times, a light came on across the yard. Eleven times, I sat nineteen miles away with my headset on and listened to somebody walk toward him, and then the line went dead and I typed the word CLEARED.
Wade never said one word about why. He did not have to. Harlan Pardue was the only person alive who was in that house the night it burned, and the insurance paid on it in August of that year, and he was the only witness in the state of Missouri who could not be asked a question.
They moved the old man to a facility in Clinton. I went in October. He had a window and a chair and his left hand worked fine, and he watched my mouth the whole time I talked, which took me a while to understand was him being polite.
Before I left I moved the phone on the nightstand over to the side the hand was on.
He knew how to dial.