In truth, Jakub and Blue were in a power struggle, not dissimilar to imagined wolves feasting on frozen Inuit in the glacial north; they were two alpha males locked in a fight for supremacy. The commune was generating a steady if relatively meagre income, but everyone was expected to contribute – money, goods, fuel – and it all went upwards to Blue, bypassing Jakub in the process. Blue had the biggest room in the main house, his pick of the young women that came through too, those who were keen to graduate from sleeping in their car or tent to a real bed with pillows. Jakub found himself more and more guilty of the cardinal sins: covetousness, lust, gluttony – he even entertained murderous thoughts, saw himself standing over Blue, the hammer in his hand raised again and again. Praise him, he thought among the imagined blood, the dream of splintered bones: thy Lord’s will be done.
‘Jakub wanted to keep the last girl after my father had finished with her, but dad wouldn’t let him,’ said Bulley uneasily; he didn’t want to expose his father’s behaviour, his business, but he wanted approval from Walker, he wanted to be liked. Bulley was shaking his head, he felt sick, sick that he had somehow betrayed the confidence of his father – at least he hadn’t related the arguments he’d heard raging through the house at night when his father and Jakub would sit and drink and talk about the future of the world they’d built.
Bulley would listen – he had no choice – to the two of them through the wall. ‘Look at our Eden, Adam and Steve!’ And there’d be laughter, but soon there’d be fighting and shouting, chairs thrown, tables going over. Bulley would lie still and wait for the final, thudding retreat down the stairs, the full point to their conversation. The front door to the house would swing open and stay that way, inviting the sounds of their gated world in; there’d always be a radio playing, the call and response of voices, someone would be gunning an engine uselessly and then a dog would bark and then, eventually, there’d be a bark in return and then the compound would settle like those dogs had settled and the night would finally fall around them.
‘We’ll get back to the compound,’ said Walker; it was as reassuring a tone as he could muster. He almost reached out and touched Bulley on the shoulder.
Bulley wasn’t even sure he wanted to be in the compound anymore, but it was his sanctuary, no matter how unnerved he was, at least he almost always felt safe, even with his father roaming the halls or praying loudly in the next room, invoking his God. His father and his house were blessed and when he was there with his father it was truly how he felt.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ said Walker as if it had just occurred to him. ‘When we get back, and we will get back, I think you should talk to Karen and tell her how you feel.’
Bulley’s face became red and flushed with panic.
‘Not that you’re in love with her …’
‘I’m not in love with her, I’m not!’ Bulley could feel the panic liquefying his insides, pushing them around.
‘I know you’re not, buddy!’ said Walker and this time he did lay a reassuring hand on Bulley’s shoulder and he drew him closer. He lowered his voice as if he were sharing a confidence.
‘I think you should tell her how you feel, all that discomfort, the unhappiness, why you’re shy around her. I bet she’s shy too, you’re both in the same bad way; she feels guilty that you can’t be friends anymore too. And you were so close, right?’
Bulley nodded dumbly. He’d already forgotten about the light racing out of the sky. He couldn’t see the darkness now even though it was standing right next to him, waiting to cover him up, like the ever-expanding, blinding whiteness of the snow that had once taken Inuit elders away. Bulley was staring into the void, and he didn’t even know it, one step away from the eternal blackness. Walker looked at him the way you might look at someone that you’re about to kiss for the first time, expectant, a mixture of longing and want, fear and trepidation.
Then the truck broke through the moment, its headlights piercing the dusk, an explosion of light in the gloom. The driver was leaning out of the window; they both recognised him from the compound.
‘There you are, your father’s about going crazy.’
They’d been rescued, his father had been worried about them, Bulley brightened; he felt himself bristle, get taller somehow. Then the familiar pull of dismay: the strong down-current that suddenly pulled his kite from the sky and crashed it into the side of a hill.
‘He wants to know what the hell happened to his Roadmaster.’
And Bulley could only point to the long stretches of greens and blacks that now made up the fields behind him, the car too was in the past now.
June 1980
Detective Green sat back, the spread of papers before him, drawing a mental line from a fire in the Tennessee countryside to a SoHo basement and the near-impossible reaches of the Upper West Side. People moved to the city all the time, he was a case in point; Californian kid, sunburnt shoulders, bleached hair, someone who had become as grey as the bricks of the buildings that surrounded him. But this felt like Walker and Bulley were fleeing from something, racing away as far as they could until the land ran out from under their feet. Blue was long gone, he’d died in prison, his voice was silenced forever, but the records showed that he’d killed a man, his best friend, torched his own compound, blown his world to pieces. Green understood that fleeting madness, that self-destructive streak, but what he didn’t understand was why. But he did know where to find Bulley, and Walker was uptown somewhere, a very public tyrant in some glass tower. Green felt like a rope ladder had suddenly dropped out of the sky inviting him to pull himself, twisting and swaying, up towards the light.
Summer Solstice 1980
My name is Rose Henley and I didn’t mean to die then, I was only twenty-five.
Look at all the se people, they’ve no direction; they feel a sense of togetherness as they move forward, unified as a group, but that’s not belonging. I found out how to belong, I found a place to be.
My father wanted only one thing, the one thing I wasn’t: a son. He dressed me in boy’s clothes in the hope that I would grow into them as a man. As he lay dying in the hospital he tried to tell me he was sorry, but I didn’t want his apology, I wanted his love. I caught the football s , basketballs and baseballs he threw for me, I cha sed with him through the fields, I fell from trees we climbed and as I lay there gasping in the long grass of those years – I’d catch his expression as he happened upon me lying there, taking me in from my Converse sneakers up, the disappointment in his eyes as he reached my soft hands and my thin forearms, my girlish wrists, my pretty face ; my features did nothing short of devastate him.
*
Lo ok at Detective Green there among the smoking ruins of my things. Me trying to bring life to bricks and mortar and to will that warehouse to live , only to meet my fate among the broken pieces of a thing that could not be. Green breaks his own rules briefly and touches my hair as it frames my face to reveal the bruising there, the mark that is partly the broken blood vessels beneath my skin and partly the black soot that covered the piece of wood I was beaten to death with.
Green is as furious as he is handsome as he bends down to stare into my mute face ; there is a recklessness to him that he pushes deep inside so that it won’t unbalance his thinking, so that he might alway s see clearly, so that he always get s his man. He wears his unsolved cases lik e rags ; failing to solve a crime is a stain on his skin, a nother new tattoo of disappointment.
Look at Green there now : it’s late at night and he’s seated alone in his office, old files piled up on his desk, investigations that became dead ends ; he stares at the words, the reports, the testimony of witnesses , the pictures of a crime scene. A body pulled from a suitca se, shrunken and squared ; the girl at the side of the road, her shirt and skirt torn, a leg splayed, an arm reachin g out as if she’s still falling. P oor Henry Willow , who was mine for a while, caught up in a tree, twisted and broken, bones piercing his skin, as if his insides wanted out , and there’s my
case file and there I am in the shadows, the pale light making me look monochrome. Green runs his thumb along the photograph and for a moment I imagine his hand against my skin once more before the bag envelops my body, the long zipper closing tight to bargain me away from that life to whatever this is.
I met Green once; I touched him on the wrist as I was handing out flyers on a street corner to bring people into our church. I felt the warmth in him, the warmth he didn’t see in himself. He was riven with pain; it crackled through him, the anger and sadness was his misplaced life force. His face was kind though, his thin smile always questioning ; he didn’t want me to see him throw the flyer away, he had goodness to him mired in all that rage, but it was never allowed to surface . There we were, briefly, on that corner, I wanted to stop and talk to him, but he was forever pushing on, he couldn’t be stopped. The next time he saw me I was as cold and unmoving as stone, another body found somewhere off the highway. I wish he’d recognised me, but his gaze never lingered long enough, shifting, focusing and refocusing , trying to figure out what might have left me for dead there . Death sent him racing through life, harried him on, running ever faster, black dogs nipping at his heels.
*
Green was briefly a father ; he calls that year of his life the great crash, not that he ever talks about it to anyone anymore. He was married, a new father who understood his father differently then, but after his baby had died, mysteriously and mutely one winter night, he couldn’t ever get past the surprise that you go on living long after the thing you truly loved has died, that the child in the ground didn’t reach up and pull you down ; he’d have gone happily into that disturbed earth if asked. He found the shock to his system unrelent ing, it rang out like a bell, disquieting him each time he thought the air had finally stilled . Life had changed in an instant, shattered into so many tiny pieces that it wasn’t even visible to the naked eye anymore.
So he moved on as best he could , pushing hard against life, but he knew when to pause; he knew when to reach out and stop so meone falling. Look at him cradling Rudy Porter in his arms, his tears running into Porter’s hair, imagining the polar bear sitting alone out on the tundra of ice, a blizzard picking up, the spray of freezing water matting on his skin. Death looming across from them b oth, the grotesque figure of Porter’s wife trapped in the limbo of her husband’s longing. Porter’s trembling form bent grotesquely by grief. For a moment it makes Green think of his wife and the family he once had , he wonders where they both are now, but he know what he must do and so Green is holding Rudy up, holding him together, holding on and holding on and holding on.
Green wants to unpick the evil that’s caught around the threads of hope that knit together to make up his world. His father tells him he should move away from the city, take himself out of that life and let it go. But each time Green sees a man like Henry Willow star-shaped and strung up in a tree, or Alejandro stuck hard to the earth , or Billy broken and bloody , he resolves to make things better, but he doesn’t know how ; he wants to stamp hard on evil and break its neck, but there’s so much wrong, it’s so unrelenting. He touches the nape of Alejandro’s neck, looking for where the life might have left him , and just then, like every blood – smeared scene he’s attended in these last few years, he embraces the horror, pulls it into his chest, inside of him, and makes it a part of his being. Men once ate sin s from the souls of others and that’s Green, he wants to consume the darkness in the world and carry it until he can bury it or send it into the stars ; that kind of thinking wasn’t so far from a world that Walker envisaged, but both he and Green were forever marked by the things they’d seen and the things they’d done and had done to them . But whereas Walker was happy to walk on and into the darkness, Green is forever pulling the other way. He wants the light to bleach the shadows, clean se the spirit, to save us all. And i n that way, he and I weren’t so different.
A man can unravel quickly. With his son dead, Green turned his back on his wife and, without knowing what he was doing or why, he stepped off into the black of his self-imposed oblivion and he kept falling, never reaching out to halt his descent or ask for help or to be saved. As time went on , instead of stepping back from work, he pulled longer shifts, stayed when he should have left, he stood over the body of strangers at crime scenes and cried while his men looked away and pretended not to hear his sobbing , he turned up once unannounced where they’d found an old woman who had bled ou t near an alleyway just feet from a busy street and he drunkenly fell through the yellow tape that was partitioning off the scene. An officer he didn’t know caught him and told him to pull himself the fuck together. But still Green went on falling, scattering evidence with his feet; collapsing and tripping into strangers who were stretching their necks to see the bloody scenes unfolding just out of sight ; suddenly Green was becoming the scene. By the time he’d stopped falling, his wife was gone and he was finally alone again, c rumpled and bunched up from the impact. He’d gone from years spent in indifferent solitude to real love and then lost it all again. Just as he’d found that love was all and had finally tried to embrace it, circumstance and the vagaries of chance tipped his hand and in losing love he had lost everything.
Imagine a re el with all the cotton unwound , a thicket of knots, impossibly and accidentally complex ; now imagine finding the end of one fine strand and slowly and delicately unpicking it for days and weeks until the straight line of fabric made sense again and could f inally be rewound until it sat around the tiny wooden drum, a small bow holding it precariously in place. That’s how he felt in those months : unspooled, a literal loose end , and then one day he was secured again and, he thought, safe.
*
Green’s standing in my apartment , surrounded by my old things, h is disdain for my plastic Jesus is palpable; he’s wrinkling his nose, his hands pressed down on my dresser. He’s holding a photo of me, I’m a child, there are birds in the trees and a bleached – out sky behind me, I can hear their call, then my father’s voice telling me to look up, to hold my chin up, to stare into the lens, and I’m held there, the wind picking up behind me, the click of the camera’s shutter, a murder of crows taking to the air. I am there and then I am not, but in that moment I am forever there and my father is there and Green is a part of our world . He holds my photo up as if to get a better look, then he sighs as he replaces it gently on the dresser.
Though Detective Green loved his family, when he thinks back and tries to pull the memories together and make sense of them somehow, he can only wonder at what it was he thought he should have felt, but he was always wanting, he has a G od-shaped hole and will never know it, that’s the kind of thing I would have tried to tell him with a flyer in my hand, and he would have laughed at me. For a moment, when his baby had died, and his home was a box of shadows, he’d take himself drinking with men just like him, people who neither knew or cared about the other. Stilled collectively in the ir quiet solidarity, the mute understanding that they ’ d failed in different ways , burnt a final bridge, or reached the irrefutable point of letting go, they were beyond the physical now ; the act of doing . So they drifted, but ever downwards, dead leaves dreaming of the power of flight again, but they were merely falling, landing gently in places like those bars where the voices were low in the gloom . Strangers who didn’t want to see any more, especially the past , and the future was ne ver again going to be the promise of hope the young men in them might have once imagined. Green would walk home from those bars and wonder how and why happiness had deserted him and why he never thought that might happen, that perhaps he could have prepared for it in some way. But who can prepare for the darkness when they’re standing in the light? Who can be ready for the end when they feel like they’ve barely begun? Green would kneel at his bedside as if ready for prayer and lay his head on the bed and cry until he convulsed and the crying wore him into a fitful, troubled sleep. The morning was a release from the ongoing night and a reminder of the pain he was in, it was like an elbow in the ribs
each time he opened his eyes, gasping as he came up for air ; suddenly, home was a place to escape from not somewhere to be.
*
The men in my life were really no different from each other, though they’d balk to hear that, male ego is such a funny thing, they all wanted salvation, they all wanted to be saved. E ven Henr y , Henry and his small swell of belly and the expanding crown of skull that shone out among the thinning hair at the back of his head. He’d self-consciously reach for it sometimes as if the wind were threatening to blow some imagined hat from his head. Maybe it was a generational thing? My father had no time for vanity as far as I could see, though that might have been different in his younger years, he was tall, broad-shouldered, thick through his chest, his hair settled into something approaching a pompadour, if you saw a photo of him from back then you’d think him handsome, that isn’t his daughter talking, it’s the way it and he was. There was a photo in the hallway of our house that was quietly put away on the day after my mother died. I’d later find it among my father’s things, he looks strong, my mother pressed up against him. Her arm wrapped around him , he’s looking into the distance, but his eyes, even in black and white, are brimming with happiness and contentment, my mother’s smile is impossibly bright, I wish I’d grown up seeing that in her, in them both. Both their faces set in unremitting joy.
But I was telling you about Henry, he didn’t and wouldn’t, I’m not sure he could, face up to his ag e ing self. He’d stand there in front of my mirror, reflected in profile, tufts of hair rising like small plumes of smoke from both shoulders ; he went in at the ass and out at the belly, and he’d make a face as he saw himself, sucking it in like a man taking his last breath before going into the water and he’d talk about running and hitting the gym as these loose concepts , that if you talked about them enough then they could transform your life, your shape, your wellbeing, that they could slow down life, allow you to say stop somehow and have the universe listen. This most outwardly self-assured of men, who went i n for kisses too early, who touched too soon, came too fast, was already withered by age, but only in his head, his mind was filled with the dread of growing old. He’d talk about the onset of dementia, worry his bald spot until it enlarged and all the while not understand how so like a little boy he sounded.
The Death & Life of Red Henley Page 11