‘None of it,’ said Walker, staring straight ahead, trying not to catch his father’s eye.
‘No, it never is, is it?’ said his father and at the next roadside garage he got out of the car and joined his driver in the front. ‘I call shotgun,’ he said without malice or warmth, and so Walker regarded the back of his old man’s head as America passed under their wheels, determined to one day smash it in.
*
‘Never did get my hands around his throat the way I always wanted to,’ said Walker. He’d been sitting alone for the best part of an hour, the tree worrying a damp patch through the pants of his suit. He’d wrestled with the old man a few times, gone for him when he had his back turned, but his father was strong throughout his body, taut legs, dense forearms, his fists were unrelenting, his knuckles blemishes of white when he tensed his hand, he wasn’t above throwing a punch at the boy when he got out of hand either. Two opposing forces, one clumsy and impassioned, the other cool and remote, the father weighing the oncoming storm that was his son with a detached air of superiority and a clean right hand that knocked him clear across their library and into a high stack of book-filled shelves that shuddered with the impact. A few fell to the floor: pick those up, the old man would say and then he’d be gone, leaving Walker bloodied and bowed.
‘Nice one, Dad,’ said Walker. It was nearly black in the woods then, even where some light might have once got in. He could hear his driver calling his name from the edge of the copse that made up the clearing, his voice etched with worry.
‘I’ll be out in a little while, go back to the car,’ Walker shouted, though not unkindly. He grown to at least admire and like his men – they’d do anything, they’d die for him, they had died for him.
When were things right? thought Walker, when were they good? He had a montage of images in his head that he didn’t quite trust, family time at their old house out by the beach – another thing sold, got rid of after the death of his mother – the family together when he was a kid, though his father didn’t appear in those memories so much. He was always away from home, always working; Walker had been raised by a string of nannies, each more exasperated than the last by his father’s abruptness and outbursts. His mother, always the calming influence in their homes, would appear gentle and serene and everything would slow and still. Even his father’s reddened features would soften, the lines on his forehead and around his eyes would smooth. Was that how it really was, thought Walker? Sometimes it seemed like an old film conjured out of his longing, he imagined It’s A Wonderful Life, if they’d cast James Stewart as a megalomaniac thug – his father would have torn an angel’s wings off his back, not helped him earn them. Or imagined a way he could package a deity somehow and sell him on to the world at a profit.
It was fully dark now, inside of Walker and out. He stood up with a groan and walked on further into the woods, easing past the giant timbers and the triangles of fallen trunks and the low-hanging branches. He was looking for a familiar light, but was surprised by how little his old school now gave off. He cut across the grass and stood on the lawn trying to pick out his old room and the window he climbed out of that night when he’d left for good and stumbled through the night and the forest and came upon the commune and James sitting up there alone in his tower, abandoned by his father to his fate, something Walker knew all too well and yet, thought Walker, I still had to make him my victim. I had to push life down on him hard.
Someone was walking towards him across the grounds; he was holding a flashlight and a dog on a leash. The swaying band of light played across the grass and the dog barked, but it sounded welcoming, it wasn’t a threat.
‘Can I help you?’ asked the man. ‘I look after the place while school’s out.’ The dog sat quietly, his tail making an occasional thumping sound as it hit the ground. ‘Did you get turned around, are you lost?’
I wonder what he thinks of me, thought Walker, out here in the middle of the night while dressed for a day job in some far-off city. And am I lost? I’ve been lost for the longest time, my friend. Some days I thought that getting back here to this school and that window might be the saving of me, I’d hear the voices of the other children who knew me echoing down through the years, but it’s just another empty building now, I couldn’t even get the term time right, I’m so far off the face of the planet, the ordinary seems extraordinary. I have no right or wrong, no moral compass, my centre: I guess it didn’t hold.
‘Ever had your heart broken?’ said Walker, though he was talking to himself now and didn’t pause to acknowledge the man’s brief nod. ‘I mean, truly broken? In a way that felt like there was never a way back? You carried the hurt and longing with you, as soon as you woke from sleep it was waiting for you and it followed you from room to room, sat at your shoulder as you sat. I had this friend once, he carried his hurt around as a bag of sins, it’s as real to him as I am to you.’
Walker sat heavily on the grass, causing the dog to step back and let out a low, keening whine. Walker’s hand went quickly up, but it was to pacify the dog, to show that he meant no harm to anyone. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt like that.
‘Do you want to come inside?’ asked the man; he was calmer now that Walker was seated on the ground. ‘I can make you tea.’
‘No tea,’ said Walker, ‘I just want to sit here and tell you something about myself and you’ll never have to see me again, I’ll disappear into those woods and that’ll be it. Would that be okay?’
The man nodded that it would and, as he squatted down, the dog sat back down too.
‘I’ve done terrible, unforgiveable things,’ said Walker, but quietly, as if hoping his delivery might soften the impact of those words. ‘I didn’t think there was any redemption for me, but I came back here,’ he spread his arms open wide, ‘where I failed people and put them in harm’s way.’ His gesture alluded to somewhere beyond the woods and the man looked that way as if staring in that direction hard enough might let him see the horrors that lay beyond.
‘I tried to be good once, but the world was indifferent, the actual entire world, imagine that,’ said Walker as the man wondered if he should call someone, think about getting help; he wondered if Walker had escaped from somewhere, but he could think of nowhere nearby that might house a man like this.
‘It started here and I thought that if I came back then maybe things might change,’ said Walker. ‘But men like me, we can’t change, I was made in my father’s image, and his name was fucking damnation.’ He knew how hopeless and deranged he must sound. ‘I thought there’d be some redemption for me in this world when I met Rose, I thought that was my way back, but it took me down a road that was darker and deeper than any one road I’ve ever known. Not even she could save me, she told me to my face: I was beyond redemption, I was sin incarnate, sin incarnate!’
He laughed maniacally and slapped the ground and the dog shifted nervously.
‘And she said I could never repent, that I couldn’t be saved, and you know what I did, I washed myself in those sins and I haunted her every step, and one night I lured her in and I followed her down to a place she imagined might be her sanctuary and I …’ Walker was crying now, the tears soaking into the rich cloth of his jacket.
‘And I came back here to repent, but it’s too late to repent now, it’s too late to forgive or be forgiven.’
The man and the dog were backing up, headed slowly back towards the school’s outbuildings. Walker was moving gingerly to his feet; for reasons he didn’t fully understand, he gave a small wave, calling out to the retreating figures: ‘Thank you!’
And then, as he had done so many years before, he disappeared among the trees, gone as quickly as a shadow obliterated by the light.
‘You okay?’ said his driver as Walker stalked across the fields towards his car.
‘How long can this place keep calling me back?’ said Walker, glancing back at the listless ghosts of his imagination that danced slowly through these fields and
trees.
‘Where to?’ asked his driver.
But Walker was quiet, waiting for the roar of the engine to begin.
September 1980
If Detective Green had been looking out of his window then, he might have wondered at the elongated limousine creeping down the street towards his door. Wondered at the figure inside as he inched down the rear window and looked up at the apartment block and directly at Green. What would Green have done then – checked his gun, called it in and ducked out of sight, or marched out to confront Walker as he exited his car? As it was, he was reading the newspaper – the headline, as was often the case, was making a line of concern across his forehead – and trying to calculate how many coffees he’d already had when the door buzzer caught him off guard. He assumed salesmen or a package for the apartment across the hall when he pressed the intercom with a gruff hello.
‘Good morning, Detective Green,’ said Walker; Green could tell he was grinning even through an intercom. ‘Wanna go for a ride?’ His tone was playful, playful in the way that a cat with a cornered bird is playful.
Green didn’t even answer; he simply reached for his jacket and gun and took the stairs two at a time.
*
Walker’s car was black and sleek like slow-moving tar, it was strangely soundless, easing through small, unhurried junctions and towns, its featureless bulk reflected in the façades of the strip malls it passed; a man looked up from his haircut and newspaper and followed its progress as it filled his window, a boy on a bicycle pulled up next to it at a red light and tried to peer in through its darkened windows. Walker let the boy’s face get as close to the glass without actually touching it as he could and then rapped sharply on the black oblong of glass and watched the kid jump quickly back, his bike almost lost underneath him as he fell into the next lane.
‘Shame there was nothing coming the other way,’ sighed Walker as their car pulled away.
It was quiet then, the light in the car had changed; there was more of it, it was less intermittent, there were fewer buildings blocking the sky, they were past the city and heading – Green guessed – north.
‘It’s illegal to abduct a cop, you know?’ he said, but Walker just grinned.
‘You got into this car happily enough, we’re just two old buds going for a ride uptown,’ said Walker.
‘If you thought you could arrest me for anything right now then I’d be face down in this stuff’ – he indicated the carpeted floor of the car – ‘cuffed up and you reading me my rights. If anything happens though, don’t shoot my driver; he’s just a working stiff, like you.’ A thin smile. ‘Why did you get in the car though? Did you think I’d spill my guts to you, that we’d have a happy little dénouement somewhere over the George Washington Bridge? I’d tell you who killed Rose, who strung Hank up like a bauble, why Alejandro had to fly…’ He mimed throwing a paper aeroplane into the air.
‘That you’d lead me away in chains and that Rose could rest forever and you, you could move on with your life?’
‘Where are we going?’ said Green, much to Walker’s delight.
‘Where is anyone going, really? Oh, don’t you hate that shit, when people come up with that sort of crap? Where is my life leading, what does any of this mean, who am I? You’re a fucking speck on the earth’s surface, you count for nothing, to paraphrase Bogie in Casablanca, you don’t even amount to a hill of beans. I bet you want to break those people’s fingers – I do.’ He stared across at Green.
‘I bet you want to break my fingers. I tried dealing with those people once, you know? Tried telling them the truth, showing them the light. Pearls before swine, Green. Pearls before fucking swine.’ Walker was suddenly quiet, staring hard at the shaded world outside.
‘Anyway, to answer your question, my dear Detective Green, we are going for a drive. I want to show you something, but I want to tell you something first, something about Rose.’
He looked at Green, who looked away; now it was his turn to let the suburban streets fill his eyes, he focused hard on a car that was turning left, staring at its tail light until it stopped blinking. A helicopter’s whirring fan of blades came into vision in a corner of the muted sky and he put himself aboard, above all of this. In his mind’s eye, Walker’s car was suddenly a distant, slow-moving oblong far below.
‘There’s nothing out there,’ said Walker. ‘All the answers are in here.’ And without looking at him, Green knew that he was pointing towards his own chest. And then as he turned to face him, perhaps to agree that the answers were all locked up inside and sometimes it was better that way, boxed up and forgotten like old pieces of lost luggage, Walker was suddenly close enough to kiss him, his could feel his breath on his face, see the way his eyelashes curled almost girlishly, the thin, broken spokes of red running through the white of his right eye. And then Walker pushed a hypodermic needle of clear liquid precisely and adeptly into Green’s neck, like a man who had done this sort of thing many times before, and even as Green grabbed Walker’s face and tried to rip his nose off and get his fingers into his eyes, he was already stumbling towards an oblique darkness, the daylight sliding ceaselessly away.
*
Green came to with the instinctual feel of a caged animal; he thrust his elbows out at sharp right angles, brought his knees quickly up and waited for the first punch or kick to come, but it was quiet. It was still, there was a smear of blood on his face and he recognised the pinch of pain across the bridge of his nose; someone had beaten on him a few times while he’d been under. He sat up with a groan, patting himself down – no wallet, no gun.
There were hushed voices beyond the door, as if the people speaking didn’t want to wake someone in the next room. He wondered where he was and suddenly thought about his father and imagined his home was near here, maybe in the next town over; he saw himself clambering out of a window and cutting across two or three fields, eventually hitching a ride to his father’s house, his dad’s surprised and elated face at the door inviting him into the kitchen, there were sandwiches and milk. Then he heard something he recognised but couldn’t quite place that brought him back to the now: the clicking of pool balls connecting and then rebounding gently off the table’s cushioned edge.
Sometimes after work, when he was still drinking, Green and his men would go to a bar the next street over from their precinct and play pool to shake off the ghosts of the day, but he found the game interminable, perhaps because it was a period of his life when if he was in a bar and he wasn’t drunk or getting that way, then it was no use of his time at all. That’s what Green was thinking as he gently pushed open the door to locate the source of the sound.
Walker’s father had a pool table and a snooker table at their home; each had its own room. Typical of the old man, thought Walker, aspirational old fuck, he thought snooker a more gentlemanly sport, but in truth, the snooker table lay under a sheet most of the time, like a piece of furniture in a long abandoned house. The pool table was where the young Walker and his friends would sometimes sit and play; he’d smoked his first cigar playing pool and drank whiskey socially, as opposed to sneaking shots from his father’s drinks cabinet. He liked the game even if he wasn’t especially good at it, while snooker had defeated him almost instantly – the table was too long and unwieldy, the reds always seemed so very far away, the coloured balls an impossible idea that would always remain just out of reach; the complicated cue rest a problem he could never resolve.
Whereas his father’s table had been pristine – one resolutely stubborn whiskey stain aside, his fault – the one Walker kept in this old bottling factory outbuilding was less so. The baize was torn and gummed over in patches; balls changed direction as if on a whim, the cushions were threadbare and worn. It had its own share of indeterminate stains, picked out by the strong overhead lights, an anomalous block in the middle of the factory floor, a few folding chairs set nearby. There was an old Chesterfield sofa off to one side, velvet and once red, now fading to white and pink, bleach
ed patches at its corners and arms. Some rusting hulk of machinery, part of a long forgotten production line, had been pushed up against one wall, the bottles that had once snaked rattling and shivering through its complex innards on an ever-rolling series of conveyer belts to be labelled and sealed had long been boxed up and sent off to cities across the country. The whistle had long since sounded on this place.
The furthest reaches of the room were dark, a square outline of thin light indicated a boarded-up window, some sunshine tried to reach in under a large metal loading door, but for the most part it was subdued, quiet. There was no sound from outside, and inside a radio played, set to a jazz station. Green could hear the Bill Evans Trio, it reminded him of being in his father’s kitchen on a Saturday morning, his dad working up his sermon, rifling through the papers for inspiration. He’d give anything to be back there now, miles from here, a lifetime of blood and violence gone, wishing that he’d chosen another path, any road but this. Green hadn’t felt fear for a long time – anxiety and panic when confronted by a stranger or a gun, yes, when he felt the room suddenly shift and tilt, but not this endless sinking feeling. He always imagined a dog was racing towards him, hungry jaws agape, sometimes he wished it had just been a dog; that would have been easier to take down. In those instances, his instincts saved him, he never stiffened, he strong-armed (Walker was right about that), he coerced, he battled; he won. Sometimes, he literally gunned people down. But here, with the sparse sound of piano keys and the gentle swing of a ride cymbal, the low hum of voices and the resolute clacking of pool balls and the anticipation of what might come next, this made him scared, this made him feel small and vulnerable.
Green pushed gently through the door and made himself flat against the wall like a cat creeping among the shadows. His blood was beating loudly inside his skull; he imagined Walker and his men could hear it all the way across the room. His internal conversation was a rapid stream of enforced calm – buzzwords, things his dad had said to him – and nonsensical babbling, he wondered if he were concussed. I’m rambling, he thought, trying to locate some long-lost words his therapist had taught him to control any environment he found himself in. Own the situation, he thought grimly, that’s the kind of bullshit phrase Walker and his family had built their empire on. What I am is furious, he thought, trapped and angry at having let myself get caught up like this.
The Death & Life of Red Henley Page 15