Son of Destruction

13




Walker Pike


It was funny and sad, watching the two old fuds out in their motor boat, idling a little bit too close to his house. Walker didn’t mind; they looked harmless enough until they hailed him, which drove him inside. He can’t be with people he knows. Walker knows them, all right, but he doesn’t know them well enough to predict what they’d say or do if he let them in, or what might come down if it went wrong.

In high school he had their faces by heart, but he wouldn’t have recognized either one if Stitch hadn’t broadcast their names. Von Harten. Coleman. The least of the fabulous five – football captain and four rich kids from the Fort Jude Club. In high school he hated them. Face it, in high school he envied them. Well, look at them now, bobbing in that crap boat in their floppy crew hats and nose guards and zinc oxide, probably because the wives said it was that or metastatic melanoma from exposure to the sun. Poor bastards, they never had a chance.

Walker’s mind usually travels on another plane but in a way it was gratifying, thinking at ground level, where he left these good old boys the night he left Fort Jude – forever, he thought. He never belonged, for which he’s always been grateful. He didn’t run with them in high school. He observed. An outsider then and an outsider now, Walker is a behaviorist. To him they’ve always been specimens from another culture because they acted so big and thought so small.

In a way, he’s sorry he didn’t wave back when Von Harten hailed him – they’re nice enough and sad, really, with one already dead. It would be fun to see. Too bad he couldn’t invite them to tie up on his dock and come up to the house for a beer.

He’d like these two old guys to see what the kid from Pierce Point made of himself with what little he was given, but it isn’t safe. Now, Walker Pike is safe enough in New York or London or any of the big cities where he does business, but he can’t let himself get close to anybody he knew growing up in Fort Jude. There’s too much backstory between them. Interface and there’s a chance that in spite of his best intentions, it will end badly.

Given the givens, Walker knows it was weird to build down here, when he fought so hard to escape. It’s the terrain. He was driving along the coast outside Cape Town with the crashing surf on one side and mountains rising at his back when he was leveled by homesickness, not for Fort Jude, for sandspurs and summertime heat mirages on blistering white sand. He came back to Florida for the sawgrass and mangroves in certain inlets and the creatures that fed among the roots, these horizons with thunderclouds at one end, and at the other, orange sunset and pink afterglow.

He’s rich enough to telecommute, so he built this place. He bought the plot and surrounding property on the water not all that far from Pierce Point, where he was so miserable as a kid. It’s risky, but heartbreak brought him back. It’s as good a place as any to be alone.

Too bad, Walker thinks, but I had to let them go. They were good old boys, Coleman and Von Harten; Chaplin was OK, although his feelings for Chaplin are ambiguous at best. The problem lies with the other two, whom he will not name. It’s too much like summoning demons. Name them and they show up. And everything goes to hell. Trouble is, he can’t say whether those two are the demon or he is, so. Sorry, Buck. Sorry, Stitch. Not today.

Even people you like may bring up things it’s dangerous for you to remember. First proof of the existence of . . . No. Don’t go there.

So Walker locked his door and dropped the louvered shutters, not because he’s scared of those two good old boys, same as they ever were, but because he’s scared of what he might do.

If.

That’s the problem. It was his problem back then, it’s his problem now and always will be.

The if.