Son of Destruction

40




Walker


It’s not unpleasant, sitting here in the car outside Golden Acres, although after a day spent stalking, he’s sick of being in the car. Grief has taught him patience; he’ll live. He always does.

Meanwhile, it’s pretty out here on the bay, at a point that’s a little too close to the end of the world, given the function of this place. Low-lying Spanish stucco apartments and a handful of cottages sit in the landscape like Herman Chaplin’s dream community compressed by the exigencies. Some people say he started this miniature village as a demo model, some say the grand old entrepreneur was planning an amusement park, but the compound went up so long ago that nobody is sure. When the Methodists bought the property from Herman’s estate, several problems were solved. Fort Jude society had a place to stash its frail and unpredictable parents when they got too old or too crazy to take care of themselves. They were installed at Golden Acres well before the likes of Wallace Pike came to town with his pregnant wife and first-born son – not crazy yet, but there were intimations. Generations of oldsters had passed through by the time Anna Pike ran away from her husband and, with Pop the way he was, six-year-old Walker understood he was in charge of everything, including Wade.

Pop was good enough at what he did, running the garage and taking care of the bills, but daily life dumbfounded him. By the time Walker was old enough to worry, he thought that sooner or later, he’d have to make the money so Golden Acres could deal with Pop. When the old man set the shop on fire in Walker’s first year at MIT, he and Wade checked into it, even though old Wallace swore it was an accident. He was erratic, forgetful. You never knew.

Walker came down from Cambridge during term to scope the place, and this was after he’d vowed never to come back to Fort Jude. He and Wade went around with the girl from the front office; she was new. Golden Acres looked pleasant enough, with an activities director and a pianist in the dining room every Sunday. They even had a little pool. There were parties in the Health Center for every hundredth birthday, of which there seemed to be a lot. You could see they took good care of people, photos of hundredth birthday parties lined the halls. Fragile guests posed for the photographer in wheelchairs and on walkers, all dressed up and smiling bravely in their party hats. The aides and social workers Walker met were all nice enough, but when they met the director, everything changed. Odd that in an establishment depopulated by death on a regular basis, there were no vacancies. Walker was still in college but he was already earning, and Pop was slipping fast. Together he and Wade could cover it somehow, but the woman in charge took one look at them and said with the nicest smile, ‘Your father wouldn’t be comfortable here.’

It’s a cool afternoon for April and Walker has the windows down. He is parked in a spot the shade will protect until late afternoon. As Sunday is the world’s official visiting day no matter what the institution, he won’t be noticed in this crowd. Everybody in town seems to be out here, visiting somebody from the generations that went before – and there are several degrees of age from the look of it, from hale but vacant-looking grands who got struck sick or stupid too early in life on up to the wispy great-greats, skeletal old people with only a few white hairs left standing on their pink heads. Considering where he is right now and where he’s followed Dan Carteret so far today, and considering how close he’s come to being seen at every stop the kid has made, Walker finds this parade of residents extremely peaceful. Nice old couples just about his age come past, pushing old parties in wheelchairs or supporting elbows so their shaky friends and relations can totter along the walks with blissed-out smiles. The visitors all come out of the building headed for the choice benches overlooking the water, but nobody seems to mind when their charges cut out, homing in on the first available place to sit down.

Some visitors from the outside world have brought gift baskets and some go by carrying flowers. As the afternoon flows past, Walker watches as the young and healthy run out of conversation and begin picking at the contents of the baskets, proffering food they’ll end up eating themselves, nibbling out of sheer nervousness. Nobody wants to admit that fruit and candy are nothing to passengers on the long slide to the exit interview. They are beyond being interested in food. They’re beyond being interested in much of anything, and it is this that Walker finds so restful – the absence of striving. Ambition went to sleep in these old people before they lost it, or consciously relinquished control, turning over the pressure of responsibility to whoever checked them into this place.

Driven as he is, ambitious and highly competitive, Walker is happy to be surrounded by people who have just . . . let go. In a lot of ways, it’s a relief.

His . . . No. This Dan Carteret and that girl, Nenna Henderson’s daughter, have been inside the main building for a long, long time. Ten more minutes and he’ll be gnawing his wrists to keep from lapsing into a doze. Walker loves sleep, thinks about it, misses it and invites it, but he works so hard that he never has much time for it. Sleep is the one place in his life where it’s more or less safe.

Sleeping, he can let down his guard because whatever it is that drives him is quiescent, enclosed. Locked inside his skull. Then he can rest. Only then. The power or potential for destruction, whatever Walker Pike chooses to call the force that changed him forever, will lie dormant until he awakes. He can’t hurt anybody.

He’s in the zone when a tap on his windshield rouses him. It’s Jessie, still in that slinky dove gray silk she had on when he saw her going into church with Wade but the neckline’s looser, she undid a pin or took off a belt – something – he doesn’t know.

She comes around to the open window. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Visiting an old party.’

‘Who?’

‘Nobody you know.’

‘Then why are you alone?’

‘He can’t come out until they change his bag.’

But they’ve known each other for much too long. ‘I don’t think so,’ Jessie snaps, ‘it’s not like your dad’s in there.’

Your father wouldn’t be comfortable here. His teeth clamp. ‘You remember! Yeah, I wanted to firebomb this place.’

‘But you didn’t. You hired Florence Rivers to take care of him.’

‘Damn near broke us. There was a lot of stuff missing after he died.’

‘Cheap at the price.’

‘She cleaned us out.’ Walker says thoughtfully, ‘We were so broke we had to plant him out in the boonies. Or let the city plant him.’

‘The boneyard.’

‘Public, the city calls it. It was sad. We did what we could afford. He went into Poinsettia Gardens, out by the Interstate. Probably right next to yours.’

‘You’d be right on that,’ she says, grinning, ‘if I’d ever had a dad.’

‘You told everybody he died in Vietnam.’

‘Unless I told them he was lost at sea.’ They fall into the rhythm like the old, good friends that they are. ‘You have to tell people something, you know?’

Walker grins. It’s been a long time since he’s been this easy with anyone. ‘Unless you don’t.’

‘Like you, Mr tight-mouth. Wade says you’re making a bundle in stuff so techy that he can’t get a grip on it.’

God, did she really make him laugh? ‘It’s just computers. That’s giant electronic brains to you.’

‘Why aren’t you off floating around on a yacht?’

‘Can’t swim.’

‘Son of a bitch, I miss you!’

‘Me too.’ Don’t explain it. Never explain.

‘Why don’t you ever come around?’

‘I can’t,’ he says, and that’s that.

Her voice drops into a new place. ‘I wish you had.’

Walker sees his whole life passing before his eyes, and it is over. ‘Oh, Jessie,’ he says with real regret, ‘Wade says you guys are getting close.’

‘He’s a good man.’ She can’t hide the sigh. ‘Yeah, we are.’

He does not say what he is thinking. I wish it could be me. With Jessie, he is never angry. They go back so far that he knows what she will and won’t do, and there’s so much between them that the main ingredient is trust. Right now she is listening. She’s listening hard, but Walker is too much what he is to risk it.

He will not mess up another life. He loves her, just not the way he loved Lucy, and it makes him generous. ‘Go for it, Jess. Enjoy your life.’

She says for both of them, ‘I am.’

‘You’ve been through a lot.’

‘So have you.’

‘Wade will take good care of you.’

Walker tried to relinquish the possibility; she’s trying too, but she’s still out there, waiting for something he can’t give. It’s hard, watching her face come to terms with the future she’s trying to project. ‘After a while you just want somebody to be there when you get old.’

‘You deserve the good stuff.’

‘We all do.’ Her tone lifts. ‘Wade and I are looking at a wonderful house in Coral Shores.’

‘Coral Shores. Where everybody who is anybody . . .’

‘They’re nice people, Walk.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘And you won’t be a stranger, will you.’ Statement, done deal, as far as Jessie’s concerned. ‘Sunday dinners, after we move in?’

‘I don’t know.’ Walker wants to tell her he’d love that – he would, but he’s much too conflicted to guarantee anything. His temper is such that he can’t be sure what will come down in any given situation. At bottom, he’s always aware of the potential and it makes him afraid, not for his own safety but theirs. Because of what could happen to people he loves if something comes down and they are standing too close. ‘I don’t think so.’ But this is Jessie. Like a dedicated artisan, he makes a smile for her. ‘But I’ll try.’

Then her voice changes. ‘I don’t know if I ever thanked you for what you did.’

‘Please don’t.’ Brad Kalen. F*cking Brad f*cking Kalen, with Jessie flattened in wet sand under the mangroves where the rich bastard dragged her one drunken night, bent on battery and humiliation. After the rape. Heedless and stripped right down to his hairy, brute arrogance, convinced they were alone. After he beat the crap out of Kalen, he should have turned him in. For all the good that would do. Old Orville’s money will get him out of anything – it always did. Then the part of Walker that he can not suppress pre-empts with: If I’d had the power then . . .

But Jessie’s saying, ‘It changed a lot of things for me.’ She adds sweetly, ‘How I valued myself.’

‘You don’t need to thank me, it was a given.’ He pulled Jessie out of the sand and took her home crying; at the front door she hugged him and they never spoke of it again. F*cking Brad Kalen. Walker’s belly tightens and his fists clench. Yeah, he had to lay waste and pillage on the way to Jessie’s rescue. Years before he knew what he was. Is.

‘That’s not what Brad thought,’ Jessie says without inflection. ‘He said since I was everybody’s, he should get the biggest piece.’

‘I should have killed him.’ It would have prevented a lot of things. Walker is too distressed to number them, but the worst one ended in the release of the terrible power that changed his life. He grips the steering wheel, anchoring himself. It takes him a moment to realize that Jessie is still talking.

‘It made a tremendous difference to me.’ Framed in the car window, she bends down to make clear how important this is. ‘Like, all the difference in the world, and I never really thanked you.’

But Walker can’t keep on talking about it this way; the ugly inside him is simmering. Shit, he thinks. And I hoped I was done with that. Reaching up, he touches her face to get her attention. ‘I knew,’ he tells her. ‘I love you Jessie, but you’d better go.’

‘It’s OK.’ They know each other so well that he doesn’t have to explain. She knows he’s upset. ‘Wade and I came out here to see our old kindergarten teacher, remember old Mrs Earlham from Pierce Point?’

He doesn’t, but he needs to release her while he can still contain himself. If he doesn’t he’ll start ranting, and that is the best-case scenario. ‘OK then,’ he says nicely, ‘I’ll let you go. Tell her I said hey.’

‘You aren’t here to visit an old party, are you?’

He shakes his head.

‘I know you’re following the kid.’

‘You what?’

‘Dan Carteret, Lucy’s son.’

‘Who says?’

‘Somebody on Coral Shores saw you. Everybody knows. What do you want with him?’

‘I’m just following, it’s no big deal.’

‘He’s a nice kid,’ she says. ‘Just, whatever you do, don’t hurt him.’

Walker cries, ‘I’m here to protect him!’

‘Dear one, here’s Wade. I have to go. Oh, Walker, take care!’