Son of Destruction (16 page)

Walker loves the predictability of computers. They stay where they’re put and do what they’re told and for every problem, there is a logical solution. All he has to do is work it out. Unlike people, computers present problems that can be solved.

He keeps the world at a distance. Walker buys most things he needs on the Web and finds the rest in all-night supermarkets that he knows will be empty at certain hours. He keeps his anger tightly controlled. And the. Ah. Incident? That was an anomaly! A freak accident that overturned him.

It scared him shit.

He doesn’t know who did what to who, really. He isn’t even sure what happened to her that night. Still, he lives with the risk. The weight of responsibility, which is why he avoids any circumstance that could possibly devolve into a confrontation, the unexpected friction of souls that might lead to . . .

Walker doesn’t know how it would come down. The path he’s set is lonely, but it’s safe.

It’s not his fault he fell in love with Lucy Carteret. And the rest? The rest is a source of constant pain to him.

Bad then, that Fort Jude’s quintessential drunk driver plowed into the back of Walker’s vintage Beemer outside the 7/11 tonight, just when he was feeling safe in life as he has defined it.

Rage kindled even before he found out who hit him.

Instead of lunging out of his car to confront the fool, Walker sat behind the wheel with his teeth locked, intent on defusing the encounter. Count down. Decompress. Get out and look at the damages. Don’t say any of the things you are thinking and whatever you do, make your face do something that looks like a smile. Take this dude’s license number, his insurance card and his contact numbers, and go. Stick to the particulars and if he’s at all belligerent, write off the damages and split before it gets any worse. Don’t argue, and whatever you do, don’t . . .

Before he could get his door open a mass thudded against the car like a side of meat, followed by a greasy face that slid down to his side window, mouthing apologies.

Careful Walker, don’t . . .

Don’t!

A drunk, he thinks, suppressing anger. Over time, he’s taught himself to keep his rage contained. It’s one of the conditions of his life.

A fucking drunk. It figured. What Walker hadn’t figured on was the rest. The drunk was wearing a face that he knew, even though time had morphed it into a red, bloated version of itself like a C.G. projection of the soul within: Brad Kalen.
Oh God
, he thought, even though he’s not sure he believes there is God.

Oh, God.

The gross, hulking drunk he remembered as a slick, arrogant kid looked right at him –
Was he that drunk? Have I changed that much?
– and did not see. Decaying Brad Kalen blinked as though Walker was just some guy, and they had no history. Rage flared but Walker locked his teeth and held his breath for as long as it took to damp the furnace. He still could have come away clean if Brad hadn’t pulled a mess of bills out of his pocket with his free hand. Grinning like a clown hired for a kids’ birthday party, he mimed Walker rolling down the window so he could shove money at him and buy his way out of whatever followed.

With a grunt he smashed the door open, hitting Kalen so hard that he fell on his back, flailing. That was his first mistake, if it was a mistake. Walker still isn’t sure where he is with this.

He could have cut his losses right then. He could have slammed the door on Kalen and scratched off, but he got out of the car, like,
Are you all right?
Shit, he even helped him up. The paper bag the drunk was clutching had turned into a mess of broken glass and leaking rum. Walker had to pry off his fingers, one by one. Then Kalen put his hands over his face and dragged them aside like a kid pretending to open a theater curtain, drawing little streaks of blood over his spreading grin.

‘Pike,’ he said, laughing as though there was nothing between them. ‘Awesome!’

Never mind what the two old enemies said to each other before Brad passed out. Remember, everybody knows everything about everybody who is anybody in Fort Jude, so Walker knew that Kalen was falling-down drunk out here in the boonies on the very night that he was scheduled to go bopping down town to the local swinery. He was supposed to be toasting the bride at some big party for his daughter – things Walker knows thanks to his fool brother Wade, who chose to rise in Fort Jude society and actually feel honored to be invited.

What he doesn’t know is what compelled him to lug the stupefied drunk around behind his car where they won’t be seen and stuff the filthy, reeking Brad Kalen into his crumpled trunk and slam the lid on him. Or why he turned the car and headed for the Fort Jude Club, planning to roll him out of the trunk and flee before the valet parking kids came out and found him. Nor does he know what in God’s name drove him to stop in Pine Vista before he made his delivery. Unless he does.

He was driving into town on Fourth Street, straight shot to the Fort Jude Club, but he failed to make the one zig-zag where Town Planning and Zoning gave Herman Chaplin his variance back in the Twenties, when he mapped out Pine Vista. Walker was driving in Fourth Street, not thinking, or trying not to think, when his body remembered what he has been working so hard to forget. He wasn’t on Fourth Street any more. The road narrowed. Curbstones gave way to pulverized oyster-shell shoulders and the asphalt road turned him out on the last red brick streets that marked the entrance to Pine Vista. He was entering territory he used to know. He stopped, but it was too late to turn.

Ahead, Herman Chaplin’s stone lions crouched, regarding him. Not judging, exactly. Just noting his presence. Guarding a neighborhood that never made it off the drawing board.
Like certain other things.

Walker said goodbye to Lucy Carteret in front of those lions on that lost, terrible Thanksgiving in the year that changed his life. ‘Grandmother thinks I’m out with Bobby.’ She trailed her fingers across his cheek and said, ‘I’m sorry it has to be this way,’ and Walker groaned. In the silver twilight, the future hung between them like a veil. She walked between the cement brutes and went to Bob Chaplin’s house without looking back.

He followed on foot; he had to be sure. He waited in the bushes until the big car came for her, just as she said it would. Chaplin: what the old woman wanted for her. Walker will love Lucy Carteret to the grave but nothing he said or did back then would change that old bitch or touch her heart, not given where he comes from and who his people are. He and Lucy were doomed, and that was even before he and the vindictive old bitch collided – and Walker Pike became what he is.

He thought he’d gotten past it, but here he was. Again.
Oh, shit.

Maybe Walker zoned out; maybe he has been heading back here all his life. Never mind. A quick K turn would put him back on track to dump this drunken bastard at the club without unnecessary detours, but Walker was smoked by the past. Foolishly, he lingered. He coulda-shoulda-woulda but then in a doppelgänger moment another car – Chaplin’s? – came heading out of the abandoned development.

Gulping air, Walker cut his lights and waited for it to pass.

Lucy
, he thought, unless he said it aloud.
Oh, Luce.

Like certain other things in his life, it was an accident, it just came out. He couldn’t help it. With Brad Kalen in the trunk and pressing duties elsewhere, Walker found himself back in Pine Vista.

Twilights in Florida are ambiguous; there’s no predicting when the day will drop off the face of the earth. The light was changing by the time he reached the Chaplin house.

A light went on upstairs. They’re home, Walker thought, sagging with relief. So I can go. OK then. Time to make that K turn and get going. But he couldn’t, quite. Instead he cut the motor and rolled into the long shadow of a utility shed. He had no idea what he was doing here. Maybe he just needed to think. With his captive halfway between out-cold and sleeping-it-off, he could sit here until he got strong enough to stop his inexorable slide into the past.

In fact, Walker’s heart was going downhill by noon today, long before Kalen recklessly rear-ended him and came out grinning as though there was no bad history between them.

Wade called. He’s sick of his brother’s love affair with Fort Jude society, so he let the machine pick up. ‘This just in. Jessie called, and she says . . .’ Wade’s voice filled the room; like everybody else in this town, he loved to beat those jungle drums. ‘She says a somebody Carteret just checked in at the Flordana. Young guy, she’ll tell me the rest tonight but, hey. Walker, he has Lucy’s eyes.’

Walker’s mouth dried out and his heart staggered. Stricken, he whirled in the beautiful space he had created, a soul circling the drain.
Fuck you, Wade. Fuck you for dropping this on me
.

Generally a strong person, Walker Pike plunged into grief for what was lost years before he even guessed what he was, or could conceive of becoming what he is. Grief drove him out of his perfect house, and although he never intended to come back to the Chaplin place, memory brought him here.

Don’t, Pike. Don’t be here. Get out of Pine Vista, fool
.

He was fixing to scratch off when the other car approached. He tracked the headlights, troubled when the driver slowed down in front of Chaplin’s house. Not Chaplin, nobody he knew, not expected here. The driver cut the motor and coasted past silently. He stopped in a sheltered spot just beyond the house, as if, like Walker, he wanted to watch without being seen.

Him
, Walker thought, without knowing who he meant or why it was so disturbing.
Me.

He should leave, he couldn’t leave. OK then, wait the fucker out. A lurker had come into a place so specific to Walker that he could not bear to have him here.
When he goes, you can go
, he told himself. For years he’s tried to put all this behind him. He thought he had, but here he is. Tough as he is, driven and tightly controlled, Walker Pike understands why he’s here. Part of his past is hidden somewhere inside that house, a fixed destination point in his existential GPS. When she told him goodbye, Lucy left it here, like a magnet. He still felt the pull.

He slipped out of the car and sat down on the pine needles to wait. With Kalen passed out in the trunk, he could take his time. Hey, he was doing the asshole a favor. Let him sleep it off, wake up and get his shit together before you dump him in there among his people, no hard feelings, if you can manage that.

His domesticated brother was stoked about the extravaganza at the club: ‘Brad’s daughter is engaged, and
I’m invited
.’ In way it’s pathetic, how Wade hangs on what those surface-feeders think, maybe because it’s all on the surface.

And here you are, custodian of the so-called host. Wash the bastard’s face even if you despise him, comb his hair and get the vomit off his shirt. It’s his party, after all.

After a time, Walker saw Maggie and Al lock up the house and leave. Fine, he told himself. Now I can go.

Then the intruder’s car door fell open and Walker froze. The intruder got out of his Honda and headed for the house. Quick. Anxious, judging by the angle of the shoulders. Young, judging by the lean, unfinished look. Now Walker had to wait until the stranger finished doing whatever he came to do and left.

Then he could go.

Stupid, stupid. He fell into a tracker’s crouch and followed. Woulda-coulda-shoulda. The lurker snaked in through a back window and Walker groaned.
Yeah, right. And you thought you could control your life
.

He couldn’t leave until the creep came out.

In the still, dense night, lost years played behind Walker’s frontal bone like grainy film on a drive-in movie screen, scored by the dry needles of the Australian pines stirring in the wind: the look and feel of Lucy’s body that first time, the sibilant whisper of pine branches overhead. God he loved her. God he had no choice. He gave her his mother’s wedding ring, but that was much later, and in spite of forces marshaled against them. He can still see the way it looked, sliding onto her left hand.

Given what happened later he and Lucy were fated, but in his own way Walker is blind and persistent as a zombie: dead, but he won’t lie down. The night he pressed the ring on Lucy they were in such distress that he was never clear where she went afterward, or where she hid the ring. He loved her so much!

The son of destruction.
Walker backed out of her life to protect her, and he had to do it without telling her why; he had no choice. It destroyed him, but he would do anything to keep her safe. If only he’d been able to explain! He has spent his life since then researching the anomaly, meditating, trying to get to the truth of it. Years, with no answers. Years of grief.

Astounding need froze him where he stood, under the pines outside the Chaplin house. Whether out of need for the girl or the moment or who he used to be, Walker’s heart cried to heaven,
I want it back.

But they were gone: Lucy. The boy. Whatever they were to each other was beyond all retrieving and Walker knew it. The only thing he can hope to get back is the ring. Not that having it would make anything better; it’s just an object he wants to hold. So with Brad in the trunk and certain issues pending, Walker waited for the man in the house to finish what he was doing and go.

Time wore on.

What does he think he is
, Walker wondered.
Entitled? Taking his goddamn time.
It was hard at first, but he has schooled himself in patience over the years since then. The young man inside the house was nobody he knew, nobody he had any reason to hate. He had to wait.
OK then
, he told himself without affect.
For as long as it takes.

Squatting in the pine needles, he waited beyond waiting. Shut inside the trunk of the Beemer, Brad could damn well stew in his own fumes. Eventually he’d come to.
If I’m going to do this, I have to do it soon
.

Moving so slowly that he barely disturbed the air, Walker got to his feet. He circled the old stucco, looking in. The front rooms were seedy, but so richly furnished that he was struck by the disparity. The function of money and position in this town. He entered the house through the back window. In the kitchen he paused, absorbing the space.