Son of Destruction

33




Walker Pike


Every time a siren sounds the vibration starts, deep in Walker’s belly. It turns him into a tuning fork, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him. It’s been this way for longer than he cares to remember. Going in to confront Lorna Archambault at twenty-one, he had no idea what he was, or that it would end in fire. He was young and so in love that he’d do anything. He met the perfumed monster smiling, even though she despised him.

How could he guess that he was the monster?

He didn’t know. He didn’t know!

Tonight he hears the sirens long before Nenna wakes Dan Carteret out of a sound sleep to stage her rescue from the scene on Coral Shores. Walker shudders as engines from North and Southside stations roar past the Flordana, screaming down Central Avenue toward Bayfront Drive and over the bridge to the island. Something’s ablaze out there. The sirens tell him it’s big. Good thing he’s parked here in front of the Flordana, praying – insofar as Walker prays – that the kid will sleep through the racket and stay inside. He does not want to go out to Coral Shores where the commotion is and he certainly doesn’t want the kid to go. Walker hates to see anything burn, won’t let Dan see. Or put either of them out there, where they can be blamed.

The trucks recede and Walker shakes himself, trying to unclench. Nothing to see now, Pike. Nothing to do here but sit behind the wheel, waiting. Stay until morning, just to be sure this new person in his life is safely stashed. Now that his son is here, it’s his duty to – he supposes it’s: protect, and if Dan wakes up and races out to chase fires, he’ll follow, and . . .

He doesn’t know what comes next, only that it’s important.

Yes, Walker’s been tailing him. When he left the warning on Carteret’s windshield today he thought his job was done, but it isn’t. He went home thinking, He’ll be fine, but that was a lifetime ago. Chaplin showed up at his house tonight. He looked like a carcass washed up on the beach, standing under the porch light leached of substance. ‘We have to talk.’

Walker didn’t want to. They did.

When it was done, Walker did what he had to. He came here. He’s been standing vigil ever since. Responsible.

Sad, square old Bob Chaplin came inside all shaky and diminished. God, that was weird. He begged Walker to hear him out, all, I alone am left, I alone am left to tell. It was hard for him, just being there. It was hard for Walker too, but he let Chaplin talk, and Chaplin brought it back. All of it.

Walker gritted his teeth and held back, even during the hardest part, because he must never even think what he’s thinking. He can’t go there. Correction: must not go there. Ever.

At the end, Chaplin choked out an apology for everything he’d ever done and the one grave thing that he had failed to do. Protect her. In a way, it released both of them.

It was the first time they’d ever sat down together, and in another life, in a different society, Walker thinks, he would have liked the guy.

As it was, they were alike, with Fort Jude society like a ditch between them. The grimy kid whose dad ran a failed body shop out on Pierce Point came into Northshore Elementary under deep cover. The Coral Shores kids thought he didn’t belong. When he shambled off the bus at Northshore Elementary in Pop’s flapping shoes and torn castoffs they laughed at him. They pointed, they mocked his walk. Hurt, he turned his back on them, even on Chaplin, who tried to make nice when they landed in the same advanced math class. Nobody gets to see the cluttered, filthy rooms where Pop raised him and his little brother. He’d die. The grilled windows. The chicken wire that kept them inside before Walker got big enough to look after Wade and strong enough to work in the body shop. Nobody. He turned away in a protective slouch, put on a scowl that hid whatever he was thinking.

To his surprise, compared to most of those kids he was pretty smart, but you hide smart because you know it will make them hate you. In classrooms he grabbed the last seat in the back, kept his head down, never raised his hand, solved math problems no problem, but he did it on paper only. Teachers knew he knew, but he wouldn’t go to the blackboard, so they stopped asking. They got along with Walker after they stopped trying to praise him. They never pressed because even adults were a little scared of him; by then he’d perfected the glare, growing up under deep cover. He graduated a year ahead of his class; nobody noticed, nobody cared.

Chaplin was just as smart, but he was better at dissembling. He knew how to please the people. In high school he was way too smart to show how smart he was, although Walker knew.

Once, they bumped into each other in Cambridge – the high school hero was at Harvard and Walker was on scholarship at MIT. Surprise. Tight smiles. Oh, it’s you. He could see Chaplin reassessing him. Grinning, he asked Walker to come back to Eliot House for a drink, but he refused.

In Cambridge, he was a new person. It made him wary of people who knew where he came from. More important: by then he had more important secrets to keep. In Cambridge he and Chaplin never mixed – they never would, but tonight they sat down as equals, although in real life Walker has the edge and Chaplin said as much, coming in. Failure humbled him, Walker thinks over coffee. He has nothing left to lose. When they got down tonight, talking in Walker’s beautifully spare, well-ordered living room, he and Bob Chaplin turned out to have more in common than he knew, because for all those years when Chaplin was being noble, he was in love with Lucy. They have plenty to talk about, but he let Chaplin do the talking.

Skirting certain matters. The ring. What did she do with the ring? The guilt. Where, exactly, that guilt should lie.

The ex-Harvard, ex-golden boy cradled his coffee, careful not to mar the polished teak table Walker designed and had made especially for this house. Grimacing, Chaplin talked about his failure – and not in a twelve-step way, although Walker noted the watery eyes and unsteady smile, the classic recovered-alcoholic’s way of putting things. He laid it to one spectacular mistake at Goldman Sachs, although they both knew his grief was lodged farther back and somewhere much deeper. Fort Jude’s golden boy was in mid-divorce when he messed up at the brokerage, he was fighting tooth-and-claw with Bethany and her lawyers, which skewed his judgment, and that was just before the crash. He jumped too fast on a major I.P.O., it tanked and he cost the firm their biggest client.

‘It’s like falling off a horse,’ Chaplin told him. ‘It shakes your confidence and day after day you have to get up and go out riding, but you’re scared. You seize up and everything you do from then on goes wrong.’

It was only the first in a string of wrong calls that unspooled and ruined him, and that was the end of Bob Chaplin, Goldman Sachs. Now, Walker could have warned the man off that particular transaction. When he isn’t working with the A.I. boys in public and private sectors, Walker Pike codes models of everything from stock market futures to burgeoning world wars. An intuitive coder, he’s a genius at projection.

As he is living his life alone in every sense, it’s what he does for fun. He could have warned Chaplin off that first I.P.O., and that just on the basis of what he has stored on his hard drive, which is only the beginning of what Walker knows. He could have warned Chaplin off a lot of things. He’s never been much of a drinker but Pop was, so he could have warned him never to take a drink just because he felt bad, which is what tipped Chaplin down the chute into blackouts, rehab and the remaining eight yards into A.A.

If life is a race and he used to think of Chaplin as running way ahead, Walker passed him a long, long time ago.

Funny, the fourteen-karat kid from the right side of town told Walker Pike more than he needed to know about his own life and about what went wrong with his marriage, and Chaplin did all that on the way to talking about the last night of houseparties in his drunken last year at Fort Jude High.

Because the mangrove patch at Land’s End was where their separate lives and this conversation had been heading from the beginning, Chaplin doubled back on the matter of that chaotic night at Huntington Beach. It hurts to know that polished failure that he is, Chaplin can tell Walker things he’d never have found out alone, because he shut himself up inside his head and locked all the exits a long, long time ago.

No matter how many models he runs on his powerful machine, Walker Pike was and always will be a terminal outsider.

‘That last night of houseparties,’ Chaplin said, underscoring the difference between them with a rueful, insider’s grin. ‘Oooh, man! You know what that’s like.’

‘No. I don’t.’

‘But you understand. Dude, you’ve gotta remember those parties.’

‘Not so much. Not invited.

‘Shit, everybody’s invited.’

Walker’s voice flattened. ‘Not everybody.’

‘Oh, shit.’ Like Walker, Chaplin has been brooding over the matter of that night. He was brooding long after the particles settled because unlike Walker he felt responsible for what happened. Walker wouldn’t know until Chaplin confessed to him, but the football hero blamed himself then and on and on, to this very moment.

‘You might as well know, I was in love with her. I thought I could tell her and she’d love me back, if I could only get her to come! Last party of the year, my last chance. Please try to understand.’

‘I’m trying.’

‘So it’s my fault she came out to the beach to spite that bitch grandmother. I begged. She had her own money by then, from her dad’s family. She had a new car so she could come and go when she wanted, and the hell with the queen of the Fort Jude Club. Did you know our moms were scared of her?’ Walker keeps his face so tightly closed that Bobby added, ‘You know, big old Lorna. Lorna Archambault?’

Tightening every thread in his body in a miracle of compression, Walker kept it all in. Regret. Rage. Everything that could send this encounter to the old, bad place. ‘Yeah.’

‘I begged Lucy to sneak out and come with me.’ Chaplin sighed. ‘I waited for hours before I gave up and the hell of it is, by the time she walked down on that sand in that silky white thing I was too drunk to take care of her!’

‘Not the first time,’ Walker said, too low for Chaplin to hear. He would get through this without hurting anybody; he had to. He gripped the arms of his chair and filled his head with white sound, through which Chaplin’s voice still came, but buffered. Remote.

‘I was so f*cking drunk!’ Chaplin was the dog, begging to be whipped.

‘I saw.’

‘I loved her so much! It was my last chance to tell her, so I pulled her into that Jeep.’

Everyone has to sob out their story, Walker thought. Letting Chaplin talk was an act of mercy.

‘Beautiful girl, us guys puking drunk. What was I thinking?’ Chaplin wanted Walker to cry with him.

‘In hell,’ Walker said without explaining. He was at the beach that night, but for a different reason. Too late to protect her.

Then Chaplin told him a lot of other things: what happened before Walker caught up with them, what was said, and who . . . Walker would never show it, but it left him sick with anger. Clamped shut. It was unfair, really, letting the poor guy strip naked without giving anything back, but before everything, he had to keep control. There are things Bob Chaplin doesn’t know that Walker will never tell him.

There are things about Walker that nobody needs to know. That he struggles to keep hidden.

‘It’s OK,’ Walker said. ‘You can stop now.’ Please.

‘I was so wasted.’ Chaplin was bent on laying down his burden. At the end he looked relieved, like a Catholic coming out of Confession. As if he’d finally shaken off whatever sat on his head – monstrous, leaden. ‘Please try to understand.’

Grieved as he was, shaken and suffering, Walker overrode it. He stood, and Chaplin stood. Surprised, Walker found himself raising the blade of his right hand – not as weapon and not in warning, but as though to bless the man before he released him.

‘OK then.’ Then he let him go.

‘Oh, thank you.’ On the porch, Chaplain cried, ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t.’

It saddens him to think that men like Chaplin actually believe that there are things you can get off your back by confessing them, as though destiny is fair and open-handed. That he can get past what he did by giving it a name.

The poor sod believes there is in life an identifiable moment at which, when for good reason, everything goes bad.

Well, Walker is here to tell you that’s a crock of shit. Whatever is wrong within Walker Pike has been burning in there since the day he tumbled into the world, hopeful and unaware.

What happened with the old lady was inevitable.

He knows what he is and he fears it. The potential staggers him.

I’ve always been this way.

Knowing circumscribes his life in ways he freely acknowledges and does not resent. Walker is a solitary. He lives alone and walks shy of others’ lives. He stays out of their houses because it is important – not to keep his secret, but to keep them safe.

Please God, the kid will stay safe in his bed inside the Flordana tonight.

But when the last sirens die, just as the first EMS van comes back up on Central Avenue, he sees young Carteret come barreling out of the Flordana. Some kind of reporter, Bob Chaplin told him. Of course he chases fires, but the damn thing must be out by now. With a groan, Walker kicks his car into gear and coasts downhill as Carteret runs for the garage. He keeps the motor running while the kid goes inside. When the grate comes up and the rented car rolls out Walker falls in behind, gliding along behind.

He is here to follow, not stalk, Dan Carteret. He keeps pace, thinking as long as he stays in the shadows and keeps his distance, they’ll both be safe.

There is this with the kid, but there’s more.

If they see him, he may be blamed.

He goes over the bridge and along Coral Boulevard with his lights off, turning into a side street when the kid turns, parking at the corner so he won’t know. Out in the circle, people he knows by sight are kicking at the embers of Boyd Till’s pretentious, ruined house. He can smell the size and scope of the fire. Walker wants to see, he isn’t here to see, he is here to protect Dan Carteret, although he does not know why and could not say from what, exactly.

Much as he’d like to walk up to this decent, attractive kid who looks like him, much as he wants to clamp Carteret’s skull in his hands and pull him close, look in the eyes and see into his soul so he can confirm the likeness; much as Walker wants to grip the kid’s hands and sense the truth of him, he’ll keep a safe distance, and he must never, ever identify himself or tell Dan that he loves him, and he does. He may want to let his son know him and know everything about him, but the burden of knowledge that Walker Pike carries and has carried all these years must, at all costs, be contained.

It’s for Dan’s protection.

This is why he stays put when the kid finally comes back to his car – and not alone, which is a surprise. Dan comes back to the car with a woman Walker recognizes. That he knew, but not really, no big thing.

Keeping his charge’s tail-lights in sight, Walker follows the rented Honda to the house where Nenna Henderson – no, McCall – seems to live; he pulls past the Honda and stops in the shadow of the jacarandas two doors beyond Nenna’s house. He tilts his mirror, watching as Dan follows her inside.

When his son leaves here, Walker needs to see that he makes it safely to the next place. For reasons not altogether clear, he’ll wait here for as long as it takes, wondering what’s going on behind the Florentine façade and whether the sun will come up on the new day before he gets through doing whatever he’s doing in there, and comes back to his car.

Dan, he thinks. He lets the word out. ‘Dan.’