The Death & Life of Red Henley

by Philip Wilding

  She’d seen girls come and go through the compound and Blue’s life, girls mired in grief or lust or both, who came scratching at his door; she heard voices outside of their window some nights, but they drifted eventually. She’d ask Blue about the ones who had gone before her sometimes and he’d tell her that the wind or the current had carried them away and then he’d quiet her with a kiss or wave her away as he pored over his work, a sermon or a dense ledger anointed with scrawled figures that he and Jakub would study as assiduously as they did their holy book. She thought they were a family, the shy, awkward boy she’d befriended when she first came here, little knowing that James Bulley would eventually lead her to Blue. James had reignited the girl in her, the youthful exuberance that had been snuffed out; she found it again among the car wrecks they ran through in the land surrounding the compound. She and James would sit atop an abandoned truck and watch distant planes describe oily arcs of fuel in thinning streaks smearing the sky. She was happy in that role, but astute enough to know when she had to evolve and play the part of the boy’s mother too, cook their meals, go to Blue’s bed. It was an assimilation of family, she understood that, though it was more family than she’d ever had before and even if it was a facsimile of what a family might be, it was still a part she was grateful for and happy to play. She knew its impermanence, but doesn’t every drowning man cling to the brief respite that is the passing piece of wood even though he knows the inevitable pull of the ocean floor awaits him? The roar of hope fills all our heads. We will all somehow beat the inevitable, transcend and be free; Blue will stop looking around him for the next thing, for someone new to sate his desires, he will settle, the moment will stay and expand and stretch into the future. Permanence was something Karen could only imagine and aspire to, though her dream that she would be Blue’s last wife was about to come true.

  *

  Karen was surprised to see James Bulley at their bedroom door. He looked more fitful than usual, more nuanced fear; clasped hands, fretful, darting eyes. She worried about him, he had grown in stature since Walker had arrived, even if he did follow his new friend around so dutifully, his was a subdued happiness, but she was glad he’d met someone. Blue had exploded when Bulley and Walker had driven one of the cars off the compound and ridden it into the countryside until they’d run out of fuel, but she’d found the naïveté of pushing the car on until the tank emptied endearing, as if neither boy understood the mechanism of the machine they’d taken; they literally didn’t know what made it tick. How could she ever understand that Walker was ready to push that car into a wall or over a precipice, had he found one? That he would have happily raced through a field of cattle just to feel the pain he caused, the tortured misunderstanding; the elongated fear. And now he was set to rev the engine into the red and drive it hard through her new family as deftly as if he’d caught them out on a lone road late at night with nowhere to run and with no witnesses. He was bearing down on the three of them, lights flooding the darkness, horns blaring.

  ‘James,’ she said, patting the bed next to her, ‘what’s wrong?’

  Walker had told him not to lunge, girls hated that shit, and so, with his insides a tangle of unhappiness and dread, Bulley stepped slowly forward. He wanted his father to come through the door then, slap him warmly on the back and ask him what the hell he was up to and in doing so unknowingly save him, but there was no one here, just him and her.

  ‘James?’ She was worried about him, he looked pale and, fearing he was coming down with something, she reached out and placed a hand on his forehead to check his temperature and Bulley, who had waited for her touch since she’d first come to the compound, since she’d first said hello to him, misread what she was doing and, disregarding completely what his new best friend had told him not to do, reached out for Karen and in that moment he pushed them to the edge, causing them both to fall forever into a well of darkness from which neither could ever return. He’d never kissed anyone before, he’d made tentative approaches to his pillow when he was alone, he’d regarded his rubbery features (as he saw them) in the mirror sometimes and pursed his lips in an approximation of a kiss and then he’d regard his tongue like it was a stranger, a foreign body he’d suddenly discovered in his mouth.

  His father often talked about throwing himself into things, to be in the moment, and so he did, literally leading with his head so that their skulls almost collided as Karen, now fully aware of his intentions, her thoughts flashing back to the unwanted fumblings of her teenage years, drew sharply back and his insistent forehead struck her on the shoulder, causing her to flinch and Bulley to cry out. They sprang back like two diners who had just discovered a finger in their food; it took Bulley a full second before he thought to open his eyes. Karen was standing by the picture window that looked out over the compound, she was composed, she didn’t want to alarm the boy, but she was searching desperately for Blue. The night was still now beyond the glass, unmoving and featureless, though below it the compound grounds were lit up like a party; she briefly found herself wondering if Blue were out there dancing with someone new, his hand set on the small of some stranger’s back. He’d told her that to think like that was a sin, but she lay in their bed some nights and those thoughts were all-consuming. She saw the way other women looked at him when he preached, how they shifted in their seats, as if by touching him then they could touch their God and if they could love him, then what – feel the true force of their Lord? And then while she thought these things, James Bulley was on her again, his voice a constant stream: an incoherent babble of pent-up longing and want.

  ‘But I love you, I’ve always loved you,’ he gasped, ‘Robert said this would all be all right, if only you’d …’ There was a moment of silence as Bulley searched for the word and she felt her balance shift, her weight go from one foot to the other. The word came to him as they started the long fall together.

  ‘Reciprocate!’

  They went tumbling backwards together, the corner of the dresser came into focus as her head glanced off its edge and everything began to swim; she tried to push Bulley away, but he was too heavy with gravity against his shoulder and the fight had gone out of her. They two-stepped quickly backwards, like drunken dancers trying to maintain their equilibrium, and then the air was gone from the room, he felt the lights dim, the world actually spun and then there was a terrible final explosion of sound as they both embraced and went crashing through the picture window, a blaze of tiny shards of glass as fine as snowfall thrown into the air to signal this, their final reckoning.

  Blue heard the noise before he saw anything, the mesmerising crack of glass shattering somewhere above his head. He looked up and tried to make sense of what was just out of reach above him: his wife and son jutting out of the main window at the front of their house, James cradling Karen as if to secure her from falling, they looked like figureheads; he imagined some once proud ship scooped up from the sea in the funnel of a tornado and dumped on the land to come crashing through his home. He almost called out their names, but realised that their pose was unnatural, they looked broken and there was too much blood, but fear had given him a sudden stammer, and then he realised that James was trying to work Karen off the piece of glass that had pinioned her to the window frame. It had entered through the soft skin at the back of her neck, snagging a ringlet of hair. Jakub said something, but he only heard one word: monstrous. Blue was quickly past him and up the stairs and into the bedroom, the blood of both the boy and the girl already on his hands.

  ‘What did you do?’ But there was no answer that would ever satisfy him or this grisly scenario.

  Blue pulled them both gently inside, Jakub now screaming at his shoulder; Blue pushed Jakub violently back and both men, realising a struggle they’d both silently maintained since they’d built this compound together, suddenly fought hard in the enclosed space of the bedroom. James Bulley sobbed on the floor next to them, his hand cut from the jutting pane of glass that had bisected Karen’s lip and br
oken two of her bottom teeth. Jakub and Blue grunted, tussling in a headlock as they pressed up against the bed; it was as unexpected as it was farcical and James let out a gurgle of hopeless laughter among his sobs, the sound reaching both men as they struggled impotently for the upper hand while James could only sit and wonder how far they were from the shattered window, how far they were from falling too. His strangled laugh travelled through the air and reached them, giving them pause and allowing a brief glimpse of the absurdity of their reaction to what was happening around them; it shamed them into stopping. They fell apart as embarrassedly as if they’d been caught in bed together; Blue pushed Jakub hard in the chest, his eyes murderous, and Jakub let him, and then Blue took the scene in fully for the first time and did all he knew to do: call on his God, quietly at first and then strong and bold as if the Lord would come and clear away this mess his son had made of his bride and this room, but there was no saviour hiding beneath the covers or in the drapes, all that remained was the taint of lust, want, sin and death.

  And when his Lord refused to answer, Blue cleansed the room the only way he knew how: with fire. He collected the fuel that sat in regimented rows in the cellar and he covered every carpet and drape, sloshed the fuel down stairs, onto and into beds, books and bibles, the clothes he preached in, his zeal was uncontained; Jakub tried to stop him at the top of the stairs leading to the main hallway and he lashed out with the metal jerry can and Jakub, his jaw making a sound like an egg being stepped on, went up backwards into the air, tumbling down the stairs before scrambling through the main door below, one hand trying to hold his face together. ‘Right,’ said Blue, ‘right.’ And he busied himself with the task of destroying everything he’d ever built.

  July 1980

  The swollen bag of sins groaned and threatened to tip sideways, causing Bulley to almost lean forward to right it, but then he stopped himself as he took Green in. There was no artifice now, no composed veneer, Green was aghast, his lower lip strangely slack for a face usually made taut by years of thinly veiled dismay and downright distrust. It was as if he too had been caught up in that terrible night and now the memories of that evening and of that world were flooding in on him too. Bulley, however, chose to ignore the fury emanating from Green’s charged form, he still harboured thoughts of impressing the detective somehow, of befriending him, so he might find an ally who could yet help protect him from the world.

  ‘You killed her?’ said Green, the red behind his eyes now muted colours, the blue of sadness, the grey of dismay. He knew exactly what had happened, heard it clearly, processed that bloody bedroom, and yet his gut was a spiral of confusion. Part of him, as sometimes happened when he was picking over the bones of a case (all too literally sometimes), dared hope that he’d misread the report, that the child hadn’t fallen from the fire escape, someone hadn’t been pushed onto the rails in front of a subway train – fate, chance or circumstance had placed them there, not some hard shove in the small of the back, bargaining them away into the darkness of the tunnel, lit up by the beams that cut across the tracks. Alejandro had jumped into space, there had been no boot imprint across his back, he had chosen to escape the city the only way he knew how, but they were just lies Green told himself, a sleight of hand that would allow him to go on looking in the hope that he might see the good in any situation he found himself in. Green looked into Bulley’s face, imploring him silently to turn history inside out, take Karen away from the window, leave the pane of glass intact, the rushing night stilled outside; no raised voices, no violence that was only to be met with even more violence. But like those police reports with their stories of lives being undone, in neat margins, double-spaced tragedies he pored over so often in black ink, they were vivid; unyielding markers set in time, stories of death given brief life on the page. Bulley had killed a girl, his father had razed their home and the home of hundreds of others to the ground to, what, absolve them of their sins?

  ‘And where was Walker?’ asked Green, not sure where his own question was taking him.

  ‘I don’t know, I didn’t see him until the fire really started,’ said Bulley, as if he too had wondered why his friend hadn’t been there when he needed him most. Instead Walker came out of the flames later, like some ghoul who had waited until the buildings were buckling and windows were sucking and popping out of their frames. He appeared between two cars that they were trying to move away from the house so that they might save them, and Bulley remembered the slapping sound as Walker brought his palms down on the hoods of both vehicles as if starting a drag race. He didn’t look like a young man whose world was falling apart around him.

  ‘He asked me if I could feel the energy in the air,’ said Bulley dumbly, realising perhaps for the first time what his best and only friend had wrought. ‘He asked me if I could feel the transfer of power? I didn’t know what he meant, all I could see were the flames and my father moving beyond the windows, I just wanted him out of the house, the fire was everywhere.’

  He was quiet then, a young boy who never knew which one of life’s tripwires would upend him, how he had gone from longing to devastation in a few short hours, the never-ending noise, all this sin, all his fault. And then he was a sad, defeated man again, his back bent by life, caught in time in a SoHo basement, his father dead on the road behind him; his attempts to save others with his own church here in the city had only meant that death had been visited on him again and again. Red’s solitary and sad goodbye on the outskirts of the city, Alejandro snuffed out in the sky – what had led him here, dragging all this sadness in his wake?

  ‘Walker,’ said Bulley, and Green looked up sharply.

  ‘Walker brought me here, like cattle to the slaughter, he pushed me down the ramp to the killing floor, he let me go.’

  He looked so utterly distraught in that moment that Green tried to talk him around, to try and save him from himself. He could feel the maw reaching up for Bulley in that terrible moment of realisation and he leaned in to snatch him back.

  ‘He was your best friend, you were just kids in that compound,’ said Green. ‘You were part of a terrible accident, remember that, your father’s reaction had nothing to do with you; he lost his mind in that moment. I’ve seen it, I’ve seen people snap, they unravel, they just fall away and no matter how hard you try to reach for them eventually you find that there’s nothing left to hold on to, it’s just rags tearing in your hands and by then they’re so far out of sight that you can’t even see them anymore, you don’t even hear them land as they hit bottom.’

  Green stopped, imagining himself falling backward, but still reaching ever upwards for the light, the hands reaching back for him, and how he had once chosen to keep on falling and ignore those reaching out to help. He wondered if he’d even hit the ground yet – had he raised dust, pulled himself up and started the long walk back or was he still screaming through space, a burnt-out star only waiting to fade into oblivion?

  It was Bulley’s turn to stare. Green looked like he was suddenly engulfed in sheets of flames. Bulley could almost feel the heat on his face.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Bulley said. ‘What have you seen?’

  Green waved Bulley’s words away and stood more sharply than he might have liked, shaking off the ghosts that clung to him in strips. The basement made him feel like he was staked to the earth. He needed air, he needed the light.

  ‘Why don’t you walk with me?’ he said to Bulley, but it wasn’t a threat, just an invitation. He wanted to walk a little, the city was only getting hotter and he wanted to taste the more rarefied air uptown, the kind of air that Walker was used to taking in.

  June 1961

  Walker sat on the furrowed earth he’d once crossed when he’d come to the commune looking for sanctuary. Even from here he could hear the beams crack as the steep roof came apart in ragged sections like wet tissue paper, tall chimney pots crumbling inwards, ash pushing for the night sky as the roof deflated softly, almost mutely. Like a marquee coming down
after a wedding, he thought. Glass popped and exploded, which made him think of shattering the façade of his father’s house with the old man’s golf clubs; he allowed himself a smile. The shift of sounds was seismic, he imagined the earth might rupture open and swallow the place whole and take them all down into a very real hell, and not just something from one of Blue’s parables. There was shouting, confused voices; he’d expected divisive trouble, but not this happy mayhem.

  As soon as Karen and James had fallen through the window and then lay suspended there, he’d run as far and as fast as he could. It was instinctual – no one knew he’d done anything wrong, but he did; he thought they might recognise something in him, not so much the guilt colouring his features, but the happy exultation he now wore. He had pushed James as hard as he could towards Karen, eager to see the outcome of his meddling, to see how he could create and then coerce a situation to his own ends (it was his little experiment), and the results had outstripped anything he might have imagined or hoped for. Fleetingly, as he ran into the darkness and it embraced him and hid him away, he thought his father might actually be proud of him for once. He’d watched the old man unpick lives and careers in a single meeting, these newly desperate men looking haunted and ashen, a solitary box filled with their professional lives as they were herded towards the elevators and then they’d disappear behind the silent, steel doors and drop the thirty storeys or more into oblivion.

  ‘Out of sight …’ his father would say and then, as if the disappeared employee weren’t even worth the words, he’d wave the rest of the sentence away like so much expensive cigar smoke.