The Death & Life of Red Henley

by Philip Wilding

  This occurred to Walker as he found himself deep in the woods alone and completely lost one night. He looked up to the sky as if the stars might somehow guide him, as if he were a captain at the helm of a tanker negotiating the channels of the sea below by the firmament above. Though the canopy above wasn’t a dome of stars, it was a thicket of branches and impenetrable boughs, the sky was a mystery even if he could have read and understood its glittering codes. He blundered on – climbing from his window had seemed inspired, he’d left home that way many times before now, skittering across the steep angle of tiles that led to the flat roof above the kitchen and then lowering himself down before dropping with a soft thud onto the grass below. It wasn’t so different here, even if he’d had to negotiate a particularly pronounced drainpipe and had to suddenly latch on to a ledge like a cat that’s missed its footing. His heart was pumping hard by the time he reached the neatly cut lawns, the edge of the woods rising up before him like a warning as he slipped among them as deftly as an actor disappearing among a stage’s wings.

  Though no matter how forthright his intentions – to get away – his momentum could hardly carry him forward if he couldn’t see the path in front of him. Panic crept up his legs and curled around his thighs, slithering into his crotch and then deep into his stomach. He looked back for the lights of the schoolhouse, but all he saw were blacks and blues and purples layered in diagonals of fallen trees and the triangles of dense night that held them in place. His skin was slick with the humidity, but he imagined he could see his breath as the uneven, branch-strewn ground below him crackled and snapped with each footfall. He stopped running entirely when he almost collided with an oak that was wider than his father’s car; he looked up at it, but knew he had no idea of seeing where it might end. He sat dramatically down as if someone were watching; the forest floor was slick and he raised his hands to cover his head and began to cry. The tears came in hard, jagged spurts, his shoulders shaking with some imagined sorrow.

  Walker hadn’t cried since his mother had died giving birth to his stillborn brother (did that still count as giving birth, he wondered?). Her weakened heart giving out under the pressure of a traumatic protracted labour. His father and their doctor had tried to talk her out of trying for another child, but she insisted that she didn’t want Robert to grow up alone, as she had done. Walker imagined tiled walls and voices edgy with concern, the monitor slowing to a standstill, nothing left to bring its electronic beep to life. His father waiting for the inevitable cry that sounded someone, his son, being brought into being, but hearing only the silence, the snap of latex gloves, the low murmur of the indifferent machines. They buried them together, his stillborn sibling safe in his mother’s arms where Walker longed to be. It was the start of the divide between Walker and his father that would become a chasm. The son blamed the father for failing to talk her out of trying for a second child; in turn, the father blamed his son’s inability to thrive alone and therefore, by his actions, coerce his mother into trying to extend their family before ultimately snuffing it out. The only thing that could unite them, albeit briefly, was a family therapist who they both considered a complete idiot. ‘I should bang your heads together,’ he said once in a misguided and desperate attempt at levity. The room felt like it was filled with shadows. Walker’s father cleared his throat. ‘Try that and I’ll put you through the window,’ he said. It was the first time Robert had smiled in months.

  Robert Walker got to his feet, imagining his father telling him to get the hell up; his sudden surge of anger pushed him forward once more. His pants were wet; his shoes struggled to find purchase on the mud and greasy bark underfoot. He stepped forward, his hands reaching out for a branch or trunk, and almost fell forward as he suddenly found himself standing in a ploughed field, the soft dirt reaching up to his ankles. The darkness was so unyielding and impenetrable as to be enigmatic; he closed his eyes and then quickly opened them again, his hands out before him like a blind man whose cane has suddenly been kicked away. Open and then closed and then opened again. The countryside was nondescript in its darkness, the quiet held him in place; he felt he should march on like his father would have done, but to where?

  He closed his eyes once again and felt the yielding earth beneath his feet; he toyed with the idea of heading back to school and climbing back into his bedroom, but felt the ghosts of the forests and knew he couldn’t go back that way again. He imagined dread behind every tree, the forest floor squirming with sudden life, alive in the mud the way he’d once seen ocean floors come to life on film, the sand stirred and the haunting jaws of some unseen creature snapping to life with the certainty of death at its lips. He opened his eyes the way one forces oneself awake from the clutches of a bad dream. He felt the cold air on his neck, loneliness overwhelming him. Then he saw the light in the distance, a mere speck of hope, but something to aim for. He felt stupidly idealistic and hopeless and far too young to be consumed by his own thoughts, he felt feckless and weak, his pale legs and arms were nothing he could rely on, suddenly he didn’t even trust himself to reach the light. He fought against the misgivings, sucked hard on the cold air and put his shoulders down and marched, a solitary figure quickly lost to the darkness; if someone had been watching from a distance they might have wondered where the little boy had gone.

  James Bulley was sitting on the perimeter of his father’s compound, high in one of the two towers that had been erected either side of the gate. The place reminded him of the toy fort he used to play with when he was much younger, the idea of which made him happy. He was wrapped in an old blanket and seated on a rocking chair that had once belonged to his grandmother. It was quiet; his father had long since retired to the main house with one of his new wives, a teenage girl called Karen, not much older than Bulley himself, they’d been friends briefly, playing among the tents and trucks and trailers that covered the compound like a living, breathing maze. Then she’d caught Blue’s attention and he wasn’t allowed to play with her anymore, he called her Miss Gable now and when she caught his eye they were polite like strangers are polite and blushed like they were covered in a mutual shame, as if they shared a terrible secret that was a burden to them both and if they should speak too often or spend too much time in the other’s company then the façade would shatter and their fine web of lies would unravel and the terrible truth would out like spilled guts. They weren’t to be trusted; more so, they were made to believe that they couldn’t trust themselves.

  Bulley was thinking about this and Karen and the soft sounds she made when she was in his father’s room, sounds he couldn’t comprehend, but that made him uneasy, he could feel the tops of his ears burning in shame, his face aflame as if he’d been dipped headfirst in sin, into the lake of fire, but he struggled uselessly when he tried to imagine why something going on beyond his father’s wall could make him itch so uncontrollably. He distracted himself by playing with his father’s unwieldy binoculars, which he’d hung around his neck as proudly as a general might display his medals, directing them across the expanse of black before him. The perimeter lights barely broke the unrelenting ridge of night, the soft edge of their powerful glare ballooned up on themselves, making little headway into the gloom, but sat impassively back, playing home to a myriad bugs and moths who bounced off the dense glass in a series of trembling arcs.

  Robert Walker moved so silently and quickly out of the shadows that Bulley couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t been standing just out of sight in a shroud of darkness all the time that he’d been seated there. Walker was stock-still, his features magnified hugely in the binoculars; when Bulley let them drop he was surprised to see a boy there staring up at the wall. He looked like he was searching for a way in. He walked deliberately to the spot below where Bulley was seated before he spoke. Bulley would think back to that meeting later, when his world was literally over, just a heap of smouldering ashes, and wonder if that was the precise moment of his undoing, if he’d been the one who had really let the darkness in
or had he just reached out across the divide and offered a hand, like his father had taught him?

  ‘I’m lost,’ said Walker.

  Everyone here is, thought Bulley, glancing back behind him at the disjointed shadows and shards of light that made up his home and the commune. Music drifted up from one of the trucks, then someone called out and it was quiet again. He looked up towards his father’s house, the top windows lit, and wondered why he was out here in the ever-cooling air, the uncomprehending and unquestioning guardian of his father’s estate. Why was he the last thing that stood between his father’s ambitions and the outside world? Perhaps, he thought, he’s testing me?

  Walker hadn’t moved, his gaze was unwavering, he spoke again, his voice was softer, but with no less resolution.

  ‘I’ve got nowhere to go,’ he said.

  Everyone’s got somewhere to go, thought Bulley, as he heaved on a rope and pulled the high gate back, even if this tumbledown haven was it.

  Walker’s black school uniform made him look like a disembodied head against the night and he appeared to unfold and form as he stepped forward and into the light. By the time he crossed the threshold of the commune he was reborn, tall and reassured. He took a startled Bulley by the hand, shaking it firmly. And then said something that surprised him.

  ‘You won’t be sorry you did this.’

  Walker was weaving between the cars, trucks and trailers and heading towards the house before Bulley had even finished securing the gate. Bulley chased after him, unknowingly caught up in his wake; from here on he would always be running to catch up.

  June 1980

  Some days it came down to this: poorly stacked piles of papers and photographs. Gruesome details whittled down to their essence, the very bones, the real heart of the matter, literally, sometimes, Green thought grimly. Words can’t hurt you, but these ones could and did: battery, intent to kill, bludgeoned, bloodstains, fractured, broken, disembodied, bloated, beaten, the victim’s throat, head, arm, ribcage, all had met with their fate and fate had been clutching a broken bottle, a handgun, a carjack, a piece of wood that had fallen from the ceiling of a burnt-out building, and fate had come out swinging.

  The photos were another freak show of life suddenly stilled, large black and white shots where the lack of colours did nothing to nullify the impact of the images. Sometimes Green would sit there and, though horrified, find himself marvelling at man’s ability to somehow compartmentalise their guilt and remorse over their actions and kick a ballpoint pen through the wall of another man’s ear and into his brain. He had talked to killers who crowed that they’d killed, jubilant at destroying two lives, one their own, but he wasn’t sure they knew that then, no one thinks they’re going to grow old, not least in a concrete cube that smells of your own shit and the sun on your face is a quickly fading memory.

  Some cops wanted revenge on the killers, but Green tried – and often failed, truth be told – to feel compassion for the ones caught on the spiteful hooks of circumstance and bad luck, motivated by loose, jangling nerves, striking out too hard, finding the right and wrong kind of contact with a brick in your fist in that one brief and awful moment, desperate to come out on top. Winning the battle and losing everything, Green thought, most people were brutish and dumb at times, it was just the difference between kicking in your TV in a rage or going over a pool table with a cue clenched in your fist, whaling away. As a drunk, he’d not been above settling things the way men sometimes did, rolling into the street, the sudden, furious explosion of broken glass, a gasp, a grunt: resolving things.

  Men, it was almost always men – the homicidal female was more imagined than realised, and then misplaced passion, deceit and fury usually played a part; he’d seen a lover run down with their own car, a boyfriend pushed through a glass door, his top lip and nose flayed into something incomprehensible and irreparable; another time, a pan of hot oil hoisted from the stove to sear the skin off one man’s face – he remembered the young woman’s testimony, calm and removed, consumed by quiet shock that she’d destroyed someone’s features, someone she once loved, someone whose face she’d once kissed, all in one enraged moment. At least, thought Green, telling himself lies as he sometimes did when he couldn’t fully face himself, I only tried to destroy myself; which wasn’t true, he’d been a portrait of unresolved anger many times, swinging wildly at strangers who often swung as wildly back. There was no self-preservation in Green then, he wanted to hurt them almost as much as he wanted to hurt himself. He didn’t think that was the case with this female killer who’d taken her husband’s face and life away, she’d lashed out in fear with the only thing to hand. She’d been frying food when the fight had developed, the husband had grabbed the back of her neck as they stood there screaming at the other, faces etched red with anger, and instinctively she’d grabbed the pan, let fly, and the hot oil washed his features away as surely and swiftly as a wave takes away an initialled heart carved in sand on the beach.

  Green’s bloody reverie was halted by another thick folder of documents landing heavily on his desk; he pulled a face as one tower of paper cascaded slowly forward and obscured the file he was poring over.

  ‘Sir, sorry,’ said the uniform standing over his desk.

  ‘At least you didn’t get my coffee,’ said Green; he was doing his best to be genial, but his features remained fixed, the unblinking eyes, the tightening lips, the jaw held in a way that suggested he was about to bite. The man in uniform took an involuntary half-step back, something he’d fret about later.

  ‘This just came in, it’s related to your case; the preacher, James Bulley.’

  ‘He’s got a record?’ asked Green, even though he was certain he didn’t, he’d chased those ghosts down. Still, his hand shot out across the table like a snake striking out at prey.

  ‘His father,’ said the uniform uncertainly. ‘Manslaughter, arson, sex with a minor.’

  Green’s features had resolved themselves into a look of pure incredulity. He felt like he’d just seen a magic trick resolve itself in front of his very eyes.

  ‘His father, what was he, America’s most wanted?’

  The uniform missed Green’s hopeless stab at humour. His voice, he hoped, reflected the severity of the situation, sombre, staid, straight-talking, there was work to be done.

  ‘He was a preacher, he had his own commune out of Tennessee,’ said the uniform; he paused, he felt like he were performing. ‘He burnt it down and shot someone on the way out, someone he worked with, his kid was there, he saw the whole thing, it’s in his statement.’

  ‘He fucking what?’ said Green, the folder open before him on the desk. More photographs, but this time ones Green had never seen before, pictures of things destroyed, the burnt-out wreck of a house, trucks and cars, some still consumed by the flames, a perimeter fence covered with graffiti and now partially destroyed, burnt away in sections. Someone was twisted and smeared with soot and mud, but still dressed as if for church, his legs bunched, the top of his head gone, his jacket eaten away; it looked like he’d had oil tipped on him, a smear of black across both shoulders and lapels, like he’d been grabbed by someone who’d neglected to wash their hands before they’d gotten hold of him.

  He looked at the uniform and indicated the broken figure in front of him.

  ‘Jakub Kornfell,’ said the uniform, peering over Green’s shoulder. ‘He headed up the commune with Blue, they were in business together, I guess.’

  Jakub’s wasn’t the only body broken and pushed down into the earth, mangled, thought Green, actually mangled. He imagined the sky falling in on these people as they looked to the heavens, hands clasped in prayer and then hell opening up behind them. There was another unidentified body, a girl as charred as meat left too long on a barbecue; her features were coal, the skin on her legs an inky black. The main house, much like the commune, was just an idea now, an old memory of what a building might have been.

  Green turned the page over and there was a headshot of A
lexander ‘Blue’ Bulley; his eyes were as wild as the recently singed hair on his head. He looked as if he’d been blown into the sky and had survived, his features too were a cruel blackface, like a clown on the wrong end of an exploding cigar, he looked beaten, a man consumed by grief at the graveside and on the verge of tears. Then there in the inside pocket of the folder, in among the other evidence, was James Bulley. Green regarded some shots of the surrounding countryside, the strange towers that stood either side of the dismantled gate, and there in the corner of the photograph sat two teenage boys wrapped in blankets. He recognised the young James Bulley instantly, thick glasses now minus one lens, his hair, like his father’s, high on his forehead, like it had been blown back by the explosion that had rocked the house to its foundations, his mouth an expressionless circle like he was still taking the whole apocalyptic mess in. Shock, thought Green, that kid should be in an ambulance, not wandering around a living, breathing horror story wrapped in nothing but a blanket. He flushed with anger and his eye was drawn to the kid next to Bulley, he’d almost edged out of the photo, taller, slight, adolescent yet already handsome, as if he were waiting for his body to catch up with his ambition. He wore his blanket as if it were a cape, set across his broad shoulders in perfect symmetry, and unlike Bulley he was meeting the lens of the camera head on, staring it down, defying its power to capture him. He didn’t look appalled or cowed by the world blowing up around him, he looked calm and controlled like he might have been expecting it. Green looked at the list of witnesses for names.