Walker’s father had finessed the whole process, when he told the story, as he often did; the phrase ‘going forward’, he said that was one of his, while ‘paradigm shift’ was something he’d conjured up late one night while trying to unlock the way power was moving out from under one of his bosses’ feet as if it had suddenly been granted free will. The use of it the next day had made shareholders quizzical, but a journalist had scribbled it down and then called it in with his report and had set it free. It floated into the ether and then down into the subconscious before materialising on the tongues of others, a small yet important part that helped make up the jigsaw of modern language. Another tiny piece of the arsenal utilised by the business world to put their point across, to explain things to the layman, to make themselves heard in the headlines. This is how he worked; it was intangible, but such a powerful tool, and one that some men were willing to pay a high price for. Walker’s father was the first to suggest that information be ‘cascaded’, he drew ‘the bottom line’, he ‘sweated assets’ and ‘boiled the ocean’ (which never came to life the way he’d once hoped), but ‘touch base’ did, and from his day to this, people still ‘brainstormed’ – no one thought collectively once he’d come up with that – he imagined hemispheres moving at a glacial pace, lightning bolts flashing forth to impale the earth; it was his legacy, anyone could see that, it was hardly rocket science …
Once Walker’s forefather had made the move from big business to government high office, his political speeches were triumphant, polishing edicts to the nation until they vibrated and shone, the power of his words causing a frisson through adoring crowds. He made leaders legendary; their oratory skills confounded the opposition and made fools of non-believers. His only son carried his enigmatic gene; he founded building blocks in the lexicon that felt as if they’d always been there, holding things in place. And so they became the Walker bloodline, the family who would forever be remembered for naming the names. Moving silently behind the words that shaped the day, sugaring the pill, helping the medicine go down.
The struggle for power, the gruesome spectacle of war: frenetic images of toil and bloodshed and the battle’s cruel, shrieking maw; someone had to make sense of what people were seeing and feeling. Make it more palatable somehow. War had been with them forever, as had his family’s words to mask the endless horrors. As generation upon generation sent their young men to die, the Walkers looked on and labelled the carnage as a chemist might some innocuous-looking glass jars filled with silent poisons. ‘The Big Push’ came from their jotters and notes, as did the almost inevitable ‘The Big Show’, which made people think of a friendly vaudevillian haranguing a crowd, not teenage soldiers racing to their deaths or the bloody carnage of dead horses, legs twisted upwards like blackened trees after a storm. Soldiers went racing into the trenches as the ‘Black Hand Gang’, they learned how to ‘Bring Smoke’; as war moved into Vietnam and Korea, soldiers could be heard to ‘Embrace the Suck’, and as the nuclear age dawned in clouds the colour of dirty filings, the Walker family outdid themselves in an attempt to bring some grandeur to the kind of warfare that could disseminate toxins and horror in great belches of fear and noise. They talked of a ‘Broken Arrow’, a ‘Faded Giant’, the ‘Dull Sword’, an ‘Empty Quiver’; never once did they mention the smears nuclear weapons made of people, distilling them down to ragged shadows. Everything was played out in the ‘Theatre of War’, a phrase so bold and grandstanding that all his forefathers attempted to lay claim to its creation. Robert Walker would sometimes tell people that it was one of his when he tried to explain to them what it was he did, but it only heightened their confusion. He was, as he never tired of telling people, literally making history.
When it came to Robert Walker’s turn, he’d tried to resist his father’s words, even if they had made his family infamous, built their grand houses and bought them acres of land. He imagined he could bend the Walkers’ strangely attuned DNA to his own will. He would, he determined, bring life to new words and meanings that spoke only of love and happiness, things of joy and beauty; simply put, he’d let the light in. But, as it transpired, the world didn’t want to listen to phrases conceived to celebrate life and the living, they didn’t want to hear those words, it was as if they’d seen enough glory; they were, he realised, not afraid to stand in the sunshine alone, hear that they were loved, it was the dark spectre of incomprehensible, crushing power and the unassailable wreckage of conflict and war that they needed to be shielded from. They wanted something to save them from that, they didn’t want to see the long, bloody shadow of the irresolvable at their window, they’d rather a safety curtain of ideas and a mask of kind and comforting words no matter what lay beyond and, he thought finally, who could blame them?
And in becoming the prism through which he let people see that light he somehow shaped himself; he was the conduit through which the evils of the world came, caught up in the bottleneck of his being, he was a filter that was slowly filling up with blood and a poisonous black that was harder to wash away with each passing year. No wonder his father had tried to cleanse himself; absolve himself of those collated sins. He and his father both carried the family taint; he thought of men who had once claimed to eat the sins of others and imagined someone gorging on the evil in his heart, the tar-like darkness that made up his being. Finally pushing their chair back with a sigh, complaining how they could eat no more, they were full, sated. How did you count the decades of lies he and his family had told? Did it matter that they had blunted war’s brutalities, dressed wounds with ribbons, embellished the horror; placed a bauble where a limb had once been? Of course it did and he could either be finally damned by it as his father once had or embrace this strange gift the gods had given him.
On taking control of his father’s company, he’d quickly changed its name to Snake Oil, and watched its share price buckle and fall sharply like a drunk trying to negotiate a flight of stairs. His advisors reacted badly, as did his investors; trade papers and the financial pages branded him an arrogant fool, but the ship steadied, as he knew it would, and he felt his company lurching forward into the new decade much as he had planned and hoped it would; insiders branded him a fool, but the public suddenly had an inkling of who he was, a maverick, a renaissance man; he was stepping out onto the stage and into the wider world in the hope that one day he might possess it.
June 1961
James Bulley remembered the flames and the voices calling for help. His father pulling him along by his hand, past the smell of burning, their home literally turning to dust, the oxygen being sucked out of the air, the feeling that at any moment his hair might turn to tinder and ignite around his head, giving him a halo of orange and red. Then suddenly they were outside, the crack of falling wood behind them; something combusted and blew inward, a window fell in on itself, glass shattered and someone screamed his father’s name and then the world exploded and inverted and he was suddenly twenty feet away from where he’d been standing with his leg caught up behind him. Something had happened to his thumb, it felt dislocated and useless, like it wasn’t his thumb anymore; something in his eye was making him blink. He sat up and a high, singing alarm went off in his head. Behind him their house was now a dirty black cloud tethered to a series of jagged, wooden spikes that looked like spindly fingers pointing at the sky. And then James’s father was standing over him, blood across his face and on one of his hands; he was screaming something, but the high-pitched keening in James’s ears made it impossible to hear him. His father grabbed at the boy’s wrist and then was suddenly jolted backwards and briefly out of sight; James watched confusedly as his father’s legs shot up in the air and then there was Jakub standing triumphantly behind his father, his clothes were smoking and he looked as though he’d been smeared with oil, his jaw was set at an odd angle, some of his teeth were missing. The whites of his eyes magnified against the burnt black of his skin.
Years later, James would remember the smell, he could feel it in h
is nostrils, taste the suddenly decaying flesh on his tongue; the charcoal of a barbecue brought it flooding back, sulphur conjured up the ghost of Jakub’s hair, a lick of flame at the crown that he hadn’t seemed to have noticed yet; the scent was overwhelming, nauseating yet sweet, putrid, the thick smell of steak, he imagined leather being held over a flame until it curled and smoked. Then his father was standing next to Jakub, he pulled his revolver from inside his jacket and placed it at Jakub’s temple and fired. The sound broke through the white noise that was now making up the inside of James’s skull, he imagined the bullet ricocheting inside Jakub’s head, spinning around like a rider on the Wall of Death and then Jakub was gone, a spray of blood described a wobbling arc, and then James was up, his father grabbing at him and dragging him into their car. His father was screaming.
‘I’ll make landfill from their bones!’ Blue’s voice was reaching James like a radio signal that had travelled too far and was quickly waning. He watched his father strike the dashboard repeatedly with his open hand. His whole frame was shaking and he was driving like a man with a tornado filling the sky in his rear-view mirror. Until, quite suddenly, he pulled the car wildly over into a small side road and stilled. He turned in his seat and placed a hand gently on his son’s shoulder, he looked undone, diminished somehow, he looked like a boy himself, wearing a grown-up’s suit for a joke, his head shrunken, peeking out of the collar, the knot of the tie too wide. Not only had James’s father lost his congregation and people, he had, as he would later admit, finally lost everything, even his way.
*
His father, Blue, was raised between a commune in the Connecticut countryside and his father’s house in the suburbs of New Haven. He once said that he’d left the best part of himself on the road somewhere in between in the hope that neither his father or mother, in their battle to be the parent he’d come to rely on and, as they saw it, truly love, would snuff out the best of him if they got hold of it. At his father’s house his mother was a slut who’d taken up with vagrants, undesirables and goddamn hippies. While at his mother’s commune, his father was an uptight idiot who’d done nothing to make her ever want to stay at home; he was blinkered to what was really going on in the world, he was a fool.
It was all so much noise to the young Blue. He remembered the smells of the commune most clearly, the sweet odour of dope and the bitter rank of old sweat. One moment, he’d be standing with his father, who insisted on wearing a tie even at weekends, when he’d swap a regular shirt for a short-sleeved version so that he might relax, and then, literally hours later, Blue would be marooned in the half-light under a canvas awning, topless men and women milling around, touching his hair abstractedly, their pupils exploding in their heads, the bite of their sweat on his tongue. His mother had a new boyfriend, she’d introduce Blue to new people and then pull him close to tell him how she loved him, before, inevitably, telling him what was wrong with the world she’d chosen to leave behind. She used universal themes, talked of a wider world, but really she was talking about her husband, still standing there in their kitchen, looking nervously out of the window, wondering if his estranged wife was winning the battle for Blue’s heart and mind.
‘Is he happy, Blue?’ she’d ask, her breath hot, soured by whiskey, but then her tone would lighten, become quizzical. ‘How can he be happy there? Those people are dead inside.’ And then she’d lean back with a stoned grin, mistaking her pronouncement for something profound. Blue stood there mutely among the swirling colours and the dull, thudding bass, while on the other side of the marquee someone was approximating Dylan’s catalogue badly; Blue’s jacket was still buttoned, his small suitcase held securely under his arm, his glasses were set on the bridge of his nose, but a loop of bootlace around his neck made sure they weren’t lost if they ever came loose, and he’d wonder where he belonged in any of this. He fantasised about throwing himself from his father’s car as they thundered through the swells of greens and browns towards his mother’s new utopia; his father drove with a determination that bordered on the unhinged, he could see his dad working his jaw as he clutched the wheel, leaning forward in his seat like an athlete lunging for the finishing line. Blue imagined himself jimmying the door open and reaching for the air, gasping hard as he hit the floor and rolled, sunlight and tarmac, sunlight and tarmac, coming to a sliding halt like a baseball player reaching for home, a crumpled heap raising dust, with torn knees and scuffed skin, a disconsolate shoe sitting in the road behind him.
The young boy’s solace was unexpected and came from both arms of his disenfranchised family; at one point Blue liked to think that it was a very deliberate salvation his God had handed down to him. His father instilled faith in him the way a sergeant major might impress a particularly knotty drill command on his platoon. Each Sunday he was at home, Blue and his dad would sit in the same spot at the far end of the final pew in the church where his parents had married and experience the parables and lessons of the Lord drifting ever upwards to the joists and eaves of the long, brightly lit hall and then fall slowly downwards like feathers on warm air and settle on their heads and shoulders so that they might carry them and their message out into the world. In Blue’s alternate world too, among his mother’s friends and suitors, in among the dope plants and the free love, God was there, reading groups were common as was Bible study; even those, he’d later realise, who’d chosen to step outside of society still wanted some connection to the old world they’d left behind, a foot in the past; faith was their trail of breadcrumbs through the dark woods of the unknown if they ever needed to find a way back.
Like his mother, Blue envisaged some kind of heaven on earth. A plot of land and homes and people who might share in his vision – love, he thought, is truly all. Years later his father had finally succumbed to a heart attack, they’d found him with his fists clenched, his body tense; even in death, thought his only son when he’d got the call, he couldn’t leave go of his anger. It was as if his rage had throttled him inwardly; wound him so tight that there was barely room left for his heart to beat freely in his chest.
Blue’s mother had packed up and finally left them years before that. He and his father had travelled to see her one weekend and where her maze of tents and trailers had once been was just squares and rectangles of bleached grass and trash drifting into small mounds. His father stood among the silence and began to shout at the remote horizon. Then he stood very still and bowed his head, Blue watched a fat fly traverse the length of his back and then perch on his father’s shoulder as if too considering the now bare landscape that had swallowed up his mother and her friends. Blue’s mother had truly embraced the freedom that she always spoke of and had finally cast herself free of her moorings. Briefly, Blue imagined him and his father holding long ropes leading up to the basket of a low-hanging hot air balloon, his mother waving down to them and then lifting the ropes and throwing them back towards the earth, the heavy coils landing at their feet with a thud and then the balloon rising ever higher until it was just a black sphere set against the sun. Blue couldn’t see his mother anymore, but he kept on waving until his arm was tired and he lowered it slowly, feeling the blood coming back into the tips of his fingers; the gentle vibration tickled as he watched the colour creeping back into the palms of his hand.
*
He was still a relatively young man, but by now Blue had a congregation of his own; he’d travelled at first in order to spread the gospel and each time he moved on he discovered that he was taking people with him, entranced by his rhetoric; women were charmed by him, men wanted to befriend him, his benefactors were endless and for a while, buoyed by the generosity of others, he returned home and preached to some of the people he’d grown up around, but with his father’s death he decided to sell the home he grew up in to build a house for others. Settling on a plot of land in the Tennessee countryside he set about creating a commune where each man and woman might live freely, where they might be allowed to revel in their God, not meet with him each
Sunday, but spend their days at his side. So charismatic a preacher was he that some of his flock had followed him from his church in New Haven to start a new world in the fields and meadows of the South.
In Blue’s dreams, his God came to him in golden robes and spoke of a future bathed in glory, of a destiny that would see him seated at his Lord’s right hand, but first, he must fight the good fight. But the battle eluded him. Blue had imagined a higher ground, a spiritual quest, but as his congregation grew he spent his days mired among strangers who were also trying to find their path through life. His house became a refuge for drifters and the homeless, they looked to him for counsel, they wanted him to lead, but he was lost among them. The tents and trailers they brought with them became an ever-increasing dirty circle radiating out from the centre that was his home; as the sprawl continued so did the roaring in his head. He stood on his porch one morning and saw the irregular horizon that his view had become: broken tent poles, the scattering of TV aerials, a neon cross strapped to the front of a RV that blinked intermittently and haunted his peripheral vision at night like an elusive ghoul.
Blue walked to the very edge of his land with some of his men and began to erect a high wooden fence; he imagined the sins of the world washing up at his door and the tide being stemmed by his sturdy perimeter wall. What he didn’t yet know was that he was locking the evil in. Incubating the germ of unhappiness and self-doubt, bringing something into being that would eat at the very roots of his faith. Though, as he stood there and watched his men work, he could only embrace the idea of a far-off future of self-examination and understanding: he would lead and others would follow. And, finally, he’d found love among his flock and they were expecting their first child; he pretended not to care about its sex, but alone at night he prayed to his God and asked for a boy as he knelt among the lengthening shadows and felt the spirit filling him up, commanding him to do his Lord’s bidding. He filled his glass with whiskey and admired the new fence as it rose into the air, it seemed to touch the sky; he wondered how he could keep the world at bay while keeping his people by his side. He thought of John 3:35: The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands. He considered his legacy; he wanted an empire he could pass on.
The Death & Life of Red Henley Page 7