Son of Destruction

37




Walker Pike


‘What are you doing here?’

Blinking, Walker jerks to attention so smartly that his head bumps the glass. Is he drooling? God. A minute ago it was dark and he was asleep, and now he’s in his Beemer on the main drag of Fort Jude in broad daylight, across from the Flordana Hotel. Even though he’s parked in the shade, the heat’s piling up in the vintage car. Downtown Fort Jude on a Sunday is deader than a beached manatee, but his brother Wade is at the window on the passenger’s side, making a comic fish-in-a-fish-tank mouth on the glass. Walker rolls it down so they can talk. ‘What do you want?’

‘I said, what are you doing here?’

‘Oh. This.’ Walker comes back to himself in stages. ‘Waiting for a guy.’

‘On Central Avenue?’ This gives Wade such comprehension problems that he is blinking too.

‘Pretty much.’

‘On Sunday morning?’

‘Is that a problem for you?’

‘Dude, look at you!’ Wade is all dressed up today: white shirt with white-on-white striped tie, white handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket of his light-weight French blue suit. ‘Are you sleeping in your car?’

‘No.’ Countering his kid brother’s suspicion with suspicion, Walker squints. ‘What are you? Going to a funeral?’

‘It’s Sunday,’ Wade tells him. ‘I’m taking Jessie to church.’

‘Jessie.’ In high school Walker and Jessie had a history, but he’s not the only one of her men, and that’s not all he was to her. There’s something bigger between them. He trusts her. She trusts him. They’ll always be friends. Nice woman. He’s glad she’s happy now. ‘Nice.’

‘In case you haven’t noticed, I think we’re an item.’

‘So, cool!’

‘And in case you haven’t noticed, you’re parked in front of her hotel.’

‘I am?’ Walker hesitates just long enough to make it look as though this is a surprise. ‘I am.’ Then, ‘Church,’ he says thoughtfully.

Grinning, Wade touches the silver cross locked to the buttonhole in his lapel. ‘I’m getting elected head of the vestry today.’

He doesn’t envy Wade, but in a way he envies Wade. ‘Pop would be proud.’

For a second there, his staid younger brother shows a gleam of the old Wade sparkle. ‘Pop would be astounded.’

Where he hasn’t smiled in days, Walker breaks wide open in a grin. Put it to the lazy morning, the sunshine, the fact that soft as he is, tubby and out of shape, his baby brother cleans up real nice. And unlike his older brother, Wade Pike is happy now. ‘OK then, enjoy.’ Walker starts the motor.

‘I thought you were waiting for a guy.’

‘I am. But he said if he didn’t show up by ten, I should look for him in front of the Fort Jude Club.’

Wade says, ‘We don’t open until noon.’

‘We?’

His brother grins that insider’s grin. ‘I’m the next Commodore.’

‘Well, look at you.’ Walker takes off the hand brake and lets the car roll an inch or two, to let Wade know that talking or not, he has to go. ‘Better step back, you don’t want to crud up your suit.’

‘Noon sharp. For the champagne brunch.’ Even though the car’s moving, Wade sticks his head in the window to add, ‘When we all get out of church.’

‘Bye, Wade.’ Walker pulls away gradually, so his brother has time to jump aside. When he comes around the block again he sees Wade handing Jessie into that shiny Explorer he likes so much, What is it with these people and big cars. Jessie has the pocketbook with matching shoes today, Manolos, he thinks, take that, motherf*ckers. He sees that for Morning Prayer at the Fort Jude Episcopal Cathedral, his childhood friend from Pierce Point is elegant and subdued in silk. He also sees that Jessie’s body is sexy as ever and every man in that church will know it, no matter how carefully she pins up the front of her staid little dove grey wraparound dress, but nothing will come of it. They are, after all, in church.

He is struck by the way ritual keeps these people in place. Dates marked on every monthly calendar. Everything by the book.

Watching the Explorer go, Walker marvels at how sweet this is.

He loves this town in spite of itself because in Fort Jude at least, for some people, Sunday mornings are boring and predictable because the core society works hard to keep everything in place. They set store by ritual. The inevitability of certain things. People here rely on the power of shared history, ceremony and the continuity of the seasons to reinforce and support them, beginning with Buccaneers and Gators games in the fall and the Chamber of Commerce Harvest Festival on through the Christmas debutante ball and January Superbowl parties, relying on the predictability of meetings and fundraisers, cocktail parties and dances to keep them in place until baseball season starts for the Devil Rays and members gather for the big Easter egg roll at the Fort Jude Club, the first big event of the spring. In a subtropical city with no autumn, no dreary winters to mark the seasons, Wade’s friends use these events to signify the time of year as surely as church bells remind them that it’s Sunday again.

The Pikes’ position in this tight society was always marginal, predetermined by birth and signified by their location, clinging like sandspurs to the sandy tip of Pierce Point. His parents were peripheral personnel that the inner circle of Fort Jude might recognize on sight, but wouldn’t know, because in this town there are people you know, and people you don’t need to know. Walker saw it in the way they looked at him when he got off that school bus at Northshore, and if Wade wants to change that? Fine.

When Wade Pike goes out now, they all know him. He’s one of the invited. The society tells him who he is, even as each occasion tells him what to do. The Fort Jude his brother fits into so smoothly is a complex living organism, a self-contained, self-sufficient unit, but it’s nothing Walker wanted, then or now.

It took Wade years to slip into the stream where he flows along with the others, serene and comfortable, perfectly safe. No matter what hopes or doubts or what burden of dread or private grief keeps pace with them, on Sunday mornings these people get up and dress nicely and go to church, where they can sit or kneel under colored light filtering in through stained glass windows, thinking whatever they’re usually too busy to think.

It makes life so simple, Walker reflects – lovely, in fact. Too bad I’m not that person.

He knows what he is.

Sometimes Walker wonders if the dead stay around, watching even though you don’t know it. He used to wake up screaming, with the old woman roaring around inside his head. Nightmare, he told himself. Vicious, revolting. Done, but now that Lucy’s dead, he has to wonder if these things are ever really done.

He wonders if Lucy’s spirit is out there, if it ever comes near enough to know how he feels, whether she knows all the things he wishes he’d said when he left her run on a loop, filling his head. Whether she understands now why he had to keep his secret, or how hard it was to keep from running back to hug her, so she’d know.

How do you explain to the woman you love that fate or physics or bad chemistry or a great psychic accident transformed you into a toxic avenger, a ticking bomb?

When he fell in love with Lucy Carteret it was forever, but look at the sorrow that brought down. When he left this town he thought it was forever, but even when you are unarmed but dangerous, you never know which things are forever or how much you can lose in a flash. Far as it was from Florida, Cambridge wasn’t far enough; he ran into Chaplin in Harvard Square in his troubled third year at MIT.

By then Walker was living two lives, ambitious and conflicted and in love.

—Bob Chaplin, imagine. Small world.

—Why, Walker, what are you doing in Harvard Square?

Chaplin was friendly; Chaplin had no idea what Walker Pike was hiding, his sweet life with Lucy in that wonderful, tiny room. Swift and intuitive – interested, Chaplin never guessed. They should have talked but Walker was with Lucy, which was intensely private, and they were pledged to keep it that way. He was busy reinventing himself, bent on protecting her, so he muttered politely and backed away from Chaplin and his old life in Fort Jude as if from the far side of a chasm he’d crossed safely.

Protective and cautious Walker, months before it all blew up.

He had no idea what was coming; who would? Nobody in his right mind could divine or even imagine such a thing. Then his life went up in flames and, sobbing, he left Lucy behind – no farewell, no warning, no explanation. A thing like that. How could he explain? He loved her so he left her in the middle of the night.

Love, he thinks, or prays, now that there’s a chance that Lucy’s spirit can hear him, I hope you can forgive me now that you know, but nothing happens, really, except raindrops on his windshield when the hotel sprinkler starts up.

A man like Walker has resources. A man like Walker knows how to disappear in the same big city without running away. The year he got his doctorate in computer science from UMass, Boston, not even Wade came to see them put on the hood and shake his hand. Wade didn’t know. With his life with Lucy destroyed, Walker did what he had to, losing himself in the stream of thousands driving to high tech jobs in the ring of glossy megaliths lining Route 128. Blending in. He reinvented himself as safe, boring, reliable, and up to a point, it worked.

Too bad things went wrong whenever he tried to start over with someone new.

Which he did once too often, because he was alone and grieving and afraid. He left Lucy to save her but he could not stop looking for her in other women’s beds. When they disappointed him: not-Lucy, the anger grew. The last thing he can allow back into his life is anger, so that ended that.

Picture Walker Pike: backing out of life.

He can’t get close to anyone. Not the way he is. For Walker, human contact beyond the simplest transaction is dangerous.

What he does for a living he can do anywhere, so at forty he doubled back on Pierce Point. Kicking off his shoes to walk in the sand where he dug as a kid, Walker considered. It was home. Lucy would never go back to Fort Jude; at the time it felt right. The sand here is, after all, what he came out of. He fit. Using profits from one of his software patents, he bought Pop’s garage back from the bank. He tore down the building and commanded a house where he might not be happy, but he could be content. Contractors built to his design. Brass fittings. Teak floors, everything perfect.

When things are good in his heart, which they aren’t right now, he can sit on his deck and watch sailboats and trawlers and fishermen go past on their way out into the Gulf. He loves the light on the water and the restless, panoramic skies; he loves feeling the people he grew up with living with their children in the growing city at his back, souls joined and familiar as the ganglia in his right hand.

Walker loves this place. He loves it even though unlike Wade he hates the society. They’ve always been different people. Wade’s a sweet, ordinary, even-tempered guy, while he . . .

Oh God, Walker thinks because at bottom what he is, is so terribly wrong. This is so awful. He never should have come home to this town!

Just then a shadow moves in the hotel courtyard. He snaps to attention. It’s the kid.