The Death & Life of Red Henley

by Philip Wilding

  ‘Who’s that kid, the one in the corner of the picture?’ he asked, handing the officer the print.

  There was a moment then, the scratch of pen on paper, the incessant strike of typewriter keys, someone asked which interview room and someone laughed, a car backfired and the uniform flinched.

  ‘I think,’ said the uniform, bringing the picture close so that he might scrutinise it better, ‘that’s Robert Walker, it looks like Robert Walker.’

  Green looked squarely at him; the name had bounced harmlessly off him and rolled into a corner.

  ‘He was fucking that actress, sir, sorry, sir,’ said the uniform. ‘He’s always in the papers, he owns half the Upper West Side, looks like a real creep. What would he have been doing out there?’

  ‘What,’ said Green, ‘were any of them doing there?’

  Green spread the pictures out before him and then lifted his empty coffee cup and shook it at the officer.

  ‘Black, no sugar.’

  May 1961

  They were driving through the Tennessee countryside in a Buick Roadmaster that Walker had taken from the jungle of cars and pick-up trucks that, along with bivouacked shacks and tents, covered the ground from the front porch of the house and out towards the commune’s perimeter fence. A maze of dog-ravaged upholstery, broken rear-view mirrors, deflated tyres and mottled patches of rust were scattered across blue, red and black bodywork like patterns of eczema on skin. Children hid out and played among the high wheel arches of a flatbed truck, an old Chrysler was chipped and worn, a crow sat blinking on the car’s left fin as if waiting for a ride. Wheels sat heavily in grassy earth that had turned to mud and then dried out again; they were locked into place.

  Though that hadn’t stopped Walker roaring off the compound in the Roadmaster. He’d persuaded Bulley to clamber up into the tower and open the gate and then raced out, idled as Bulley had jumped down and turned his ankle, and then shot off as Bulley clung to the passenger seat, one trailing leg hanging outside the still open door. There was only a year between them, but it was the precipitous divide between being a kid and a teenage boy; Walker was thirteen and ripe with confidence, his eyes weren’t yet dead, but still flickered with longing, they made him inscrutable, one girl had told him he smouldered and he’d laughed in her face, he was only a boy and yet people were starting not to meet his gaze. Bulley adored him, he’d read about unconditional love and wondered if this was it.

  Bulley’s father was caught up in his new world, mistaking some parcelled-off land and a devoted following as the roots of an empire. Blue loved his son, but he was beyond him now, he was needed for the greater good, he had taken these people in, sheltered them from the storm, saved them in some way, so didn’t that make him their saviour? And so James’s father pored over his Bible and found meaningful parallels to his own life’s journey, all the while surrounding himself with concubines and estranging his flock, a flock already alienated by an outside world that could find no place for them. Each night an unknowing Blue would add to his own pyre, laying imagined branches and boughs across metaphorical tinder, raising it higher and higher until he was so above everything that he couldn’t smell the smoke let alone see the flames that were rising up to consume him.

  *

  Walker was gunning the engine of the Roadmaster, making the car drift in lazy circles on a piece of wasteland that they’d reached by driving through someone’s crops, Walker idly flicking on the windscreen wipers as ears of corn rose up and rained down on their bonnet and roof; they made a hollow sound as they hit that reverberated through the car’s interior. Bulley was both delighted and terrified by this turn of events. He felt his stomach lift and fall – and he wasn’t sure if it was excitement or fear that kept tipping him over into tingling shock – as the car spun around making the panorama an uneven blur of hedges, dirt, fields and sky. A rattling spray of loose stones peppered the car wing and Bulley instantly worried about the paintjob.

  ‘I don’t even know whose car this is,’ he said with something like wonder.

  Walker gave him a sideways glance, his fist pushing down through the gears, his foot pumping hard on the accelerator. The back end of the car tried to race away then and Bulley thought they might tip sideways or pull off into the sky; the sound the engine made was startling, as if the cogs and the teeth of the machine were turning in on themselves, eating their own. Bulley realised that Walker was trying to destroy the car, or destroy them. He saw the bird-filled trees at the edge of the field and imagined all those eyes there trained on them, these two boys and this roaring car going nowhere endlessly, the sound of strained machinery funnelling up into the air.

  ‘Who cares whose car it is?’ asked Walker, pushing up through the gears again, his words almost lost to the whine of the engine. ‘Isn’t it your father who’s always saying that we’re unified, that we’re a collective, a family with one shared goal?’ He was sneering, but Bulley found himself nodding; it was what his father preached, absolutely.

  ‘But you can drive,’ said Bulley as the car straightened up violently, wavered a little and then pulled off sharply down a narrow road, the back end shuddering and then true.

  ‘My old man has loads of cars, a garage full, and I know where he keeps the keys,’ said Walker, his face an exercise in concentration, the tip of his tongue jutting out over the corner of his lower lip; it made him look impossibly young. Bulley couldn’t help himself.

  ‘But isn’t it illegal to drive? You’re not much older than me.’

  ‘Your father,’ said Walker, choosing to ignore the question completely, ‘is a bit like mine; they both preach the same kind of self-serving bullshit.’

  Bulley was appalled, but consumed by the idea; he needed to know more.

  ‘My dad writes words and dialogue for the ages,’ said Walker. ‘Do you know what that means?’

  Bulley, unsure, shook his head.

  ‘That’s what he calls it anyway,’ Walker said as he took a corner at speed, mounting the bank and spinning the car’s wheels; for a moment they lifted into the air and Bulley’s stomach stayed there long after the car had crashed back down to earth. Some cows looked up from the next field over; there was no one else for miles.

  ‘I heard him talking about it to his friends one night,’ said Walker; he looked completely disgusted. ‘A dialogue for the ages, what a prick. You know what he really is?’

  Bulley did not, but he wasn’t sure that Walker was even talking to him anymore.

  ‘He’s a fucking salesman. He thinks his gift is God-given, but all he does is take the lies he’s made and puts them in the mouths of other men and then they feed those lies to other men, more powerful men, and then they tell those lies to the world, so the whole world believes these things my father has said, they take them as read, as gospel. He’s like a virus; he’s a disease.

  ‘I’ve caught that disease now.’ Walker looked furious, wild.

  ‘But that’s not what they call it, he’s come up with a new name for it, he’s given it a brand, a global brand, but it’s a taint, it’s just a stain.’ Walker looked miserable. ‘I’ve got my dad’s stain, you’ve got yours, like this God your father keeps talking about – man is made in his image and we’re made in their image, we are our father’s sons, we carry their traits, their features, we’re doomed to carry their sins.’

  Their car, as if mirroring Walker’s demeanour, was now going slowly out of control. Walker was crying, the weight of his father’s world pushing him slowly down into his seat. Bulley was so scared that all he could do was stare hard out of the window and hope Death wouldn’t come for him. He sat petrified and waited for the inevitable pitch and crushing roll of the car as it came free of the earth’s gravity and tumbled into the nearest field. He imagined cows scattering and hoped that they didn’t hit anything, he didn’t want to destroy a living thing; he didn’t want to accrue any more sin.

  But the final full stop to the violence of Walker’s rhetoric was unexpected solace as the e
ngine spluttered, the orange needle of the fuel gauge fell listlessly sideways towards the zero and the Roadmaster made a hiccuping sound, jolted a little and then rolled silently to a complete stop. Walker lifted his astonished hands off the wheel. The anger and violence had been sucked out of the air; they were suddenly in a vacuum that contained only goodwill.

  ‘Where,’ said Walker with a smile, surveying the empty fields that rolled endlessly away around them, ‘the hell are we?’

  *

  In the school where his father had sent him, Walker had talked people around before now, he had a photographic memory and a mind that grabbed information the way a crane in a wrecker’s yard gets hold of a crashed car before compacting it down into an unrecognisable block. He’d disseminate these squares of compacted information and dazzle classmates and teachers alike, but it was by rote, he had no affection for the information he passed on, no feelings either way really, he was merely conducting the energy that ran through the words and numbers, the innumerable facts that when made whole conveyed an illusion of great understanding and knowledge. For all Walker cared he could have been constructing flat-pack furniture. He was playing a part, amazing and entrancing his peers and masters like a sideshow hawker; he was a conjurer, an illusionist with one eye on the exit.

  After he literally had left by the window that night, he did wonder briefly why the school had never come looking for him after he’d disappeared into the woods; he assumed they’d found him as worthless as he found himself, but the fact was that they had made a desperate call in order to trace him. They went back to the man who had placed him in their charge, Walker’s father. To the surprise of the school principal, one Mr David Else (who wore an academic gown deliberately traced with streaks of white chalk that he fancied made him stand out as he paced the school’s corridors), Walker’s father appeared to be a man quite removed and completely unsurprised by this recent turn of events.

  ‘Get away from you, did he?’ said Walker’s father distantly down the phone; he was far away both geographically and emotionally at that point.

  Else was frantic, he pictured lawsuits, his school and career in ruin, and he’d rather come to admire the young, always eloquent Walker – he’d imagined great things for the boy and the school if only he could have turned him to their way of thinking.

  ‘We’ll find him, I assure you, boys have run away before, they never get far, there’s nothing out here.’ He tailed off.

  Walker’s father was impassive, silent; Else mistook his quiet for brooding anger and it made him shrill with panic, but he did his best to remain outwardly calm, like a spooked cat might suddenly start to clean itself. But Walker’s father wasn’t seething, he had merely stopped listening, he had business to attend to, he was talking to his secretary, his hand over the receiver, his indefinable, elongated scrawl signing a sheaf of papers.

  ‘Mr Walker?’ said Else for the third time.

  ‘Let him go,’ said Walker’s father.

  ‘I’m sorry …?’ said the headmaster.

  ‘Call off your dogs or whatever it is you hunt with down there. Bloodhounds and blunderbusses, I’d imagine.’

  ‘I assure you we won’t be hunting the boy down with hounds …’

  Walker’s father stopped him. ‘I was being allegorical, playful,’ he said, sounding anything but. ‘You’re absolved of all responsibility, let him run. He’ll show up when he’s ready.’

  Else imagined a quiet ditch somewhere off the highway with the young boy’s broken body lying tangled at the bottom, stones and dirt in his hair.

  ‘But he’s just a child …’ said Else hopelessly. Walker’s father cut across him.

  ‘He stopped being a child the day his mother died.’ Then with all the forced kindness in his voice he could muster: ‘You’ve done all you can, Mr Else. He’ll be okay. As for the rest of us, that remains to be seen.’

  And with that Walker’s father placed the receiver back into its cradle; he was, he was almost certain, expected in a meeting soon. It might be something important.

  *

  Come in low over the hills and glide across the fields for a moment, your shadow caught as a black cross upon the land below. There they are, Walker and Bulley, two boys seen from the sky, moving slowly, traversing a field, clambering over wooden gates. A raven hopping along a wall to the right, keeping pace with the pair as if listening to their conversation. The Roadmaster was behind them now, Walker had insisted that they leave the doors of the car open, he had an idea that a family of foxes or rabbits could make a home in there. He imagined the glove compartment stuffed with yellowing grass, a vole living there as a safe and sleeping ball, the innards of the seats a refuge for coexisting wildlife; he saw the car become embedded in and then a part of the landscape. Walker often thought of the world overrun by the wild, the earth taking the cities back and consuming them. Man’s crippling footprint finally wiped clean, a new world teeming with life, nature taking her course. His father’s empire choked by vines, tree roots breaking through his meeting rooms, his underground garage filled with earth, his glass towers pulled down and snuffed out.

  ‘Do you believe him?’ he asked Bulley, who was staring fearfully at the darkening sky. His father had always told him that he should live in the moment more, but he was forever regretting the past and the decisions he’d made, worrying over what was to come. Right now, he was petrified of the oncoming night and what it might contain.

  ‘Do you think about …’ Walker’s voice was level, almost compassionate as he began to very deliberately push the wedge down in between father and son, to slowly prise Bulley and his dad apart, so he might eventually stand between them and study their cracks and weaknesses, exploit the fissures in their skin and the fault lines in their make-up. He liked Bulley, but to undo Blue and his little empire he had to start unpicking the boy first.

  ‘That girl your dad’s fucking …’

  ‘His bride,’ said Bulley, flinching slightly.

  ‘His bride,’ said Walker carefully. ‘Weren’t you and she friends once, before your father spotted her and thinned her out from the pack?’

  Bulley nodded mutely; they had been friends and he still missed her. She cooked for her new family sometimes; the three of them would eat at the same table and he would redden when she passed nearby or spoke to him directly, or touched his arm. He sometimes thought she held his gaze for too long, as if she might still miss him too, but as his father had taught him, that was just sinful pride, no one was interested in a boy like him.

  ‘There have been other brides, plenty of others too, right? I’ve seen them come and go,’ said Walker.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’ said Bulley; he imagined evil over the far wall, trouble at the next gate.

  ‘How many, would you say?’ Walker persisted.

  ‘Three, four, they overlap sometimes,’ said Bulley.

  ‘And what happens to them after they’ve …’ Walker looked to the air for the word he was searching for. ‘Expired. Once they’re past their sell-by date, once they walk out of that gate – do you know?’

  ‘They leave, I guess,’ said Bulley. ‘I don’t know, they leave the compound, one of them stayed with Jakub for a while, that drove my dad crazy, they argued a lot then, but she left too eventually. I don’t know where to.’

  ‘Eskimos push their old people out, did you know that?’ said Walker. ‘When they’ve passed their usefulness, when they’ve got nothing left to give anymore, they have to go.’

  Bulley’s eyes were wide. ‘What happens to them?’ He was profoundly shocked.

  ‘They die,’ said Walker, weighing the words. ‘Exposure, I guess.’

  ‘Exposure?’ said Bulley uncomprehendingly.

  ‘It depends on the circumstances – sometimes they were killed,’ said Walker, ‘thrown into the sea, buried alive, abandoned. There are stories of people being left in the wilderness, or that a whole village might steal away in the night and leave the person sleeping there. But mostly,
I guess, they freeze to death; they’ve got nowhere to go, so they sit and they wait and the snow makes drifts around their bodies and they’re covered, they simply disappear into and become part of that white world.’

  Bulley stopped and wondered at people simply consumed by the snow, eaten up; he’d read about avalanches taking climbers and skiers away, but not people waiting there to be swallowed up by this beautiful, slow-moving death.

  ‘What happens to them?’ he said; he was blinking back tears.

  Walker was almost cheery. ‘The spring comes, there’s the thaw, and the animals take them, the circle of life. There’s not always room for everyone in this world.’ He made a small circle with his finger in the air.

  Bulley was dumbfounded; they walked in silence for a moment, but Walker wasn’t done turning the screw, he was digging in deep, excavating so that he might reach the foundations of Blue’s empire and rattle them loose.

  ‘What’s the story with Jakub and your dad?’

  Bulley was confused – all these people lying dead out there in the snow, their limbs being torn apart, their bones breaking in the jaws of wolves, and Walker wanted to talk about Jakub.

  ‘He helped my father set up the commune,’ said Bulley. ‘They literally built the place together, put up fences, closed the gate, erected the towers at the entrance. They were best friends from my father’s parish back in the north. But now my father says that Jakub’s sinned and Jakub says that my father’s lost his way, that he’s strayed too far from the path, that he can never come back again.’