Son of Destruction (31 page)

Driven as he is, ambitious and highly competitive, Walker is happy to be surrounded by people who have just . . . let go. In a lot of ways, it’s a relief.

His . . . No. This Dan Carteret and that girl, Nenna Henderson’s daughter, have been inside the main building for a long, long time. Ten more minutes and he’ll be gnawing his wrists to keep from lapsing into a doze. Walker loves sleep, thinks about it, misses it and invites it, but he works so hard that he never has much time for it. Sleep is the one place in his life where it’s more or less safe.

Sleeping, he can let down his guard because whatever it is that drives him is quiescent, enclosed. Locked inside his skull. Then he can rest. Only then. The power or potential for destruction, whatever Walker Pike chooses to call the force that changed him forever, will lie dormant until he awakes. He can’t hurt anybody.

He’s in the zone when a tap on his windshield rouses him. It’s Jessie, still in that slinky dove gray silk she had on when he saw her going into church with Wade but the neckline’s looser, she undid a pin or took off a belt – something – he doesn’t know.

She comes around to the open window. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Visiting an old party.’

‘Who?’

‘Nobody you know.’

‘Then why are you alone?’

‘He can’t come out until they change his bag.’

But they’ve known each other for much too long. ‘I don’t think so,’ Jessie snaps, ‘it’s not like your dad’s in there.’

Your father wouldn’t be comfortable here.
His teeth clamp. ‘You remember! Yeah, I wanted to firebomb this place.’

‘But you didn’t. You hired Florence Rivers to take care of him.’

‘Damn near broke us. There was a lot of stuff missing after he died.’

‘Cheap at the price.’

‘She cleaned us out.’ Walker says thoughtfully, ‘We were so broke we had to plant him out in the boonies. Or let the city plant him.’

‘The boneyard.’

‘Public, the city calls it. It was sad. We did what we could afford. He went into Poinsettia Gardens, out by the Interstate. Probably right next to yours.’

‘You’d be right on that,’ she says, grinning, ‘if I’d ever had a dad.’

‘You told everybody he died in Vietnam.’

‘Unless I told them he was lost at sea.’ They fall into the rhythm like the old, good friends that they are. ‘You have to tell people something, you know?’

Walker grins. It’s been a long time since he’s been this easy with anyone. ‘Unless you don’t.’

‘Like you, Mr tight-mouth. Wade says you’re making a bundle in stuff so techy that he can’t get a grip on it.’

God, did she really make him laugh? ‘It’s just computers. That’s giant electronic brains to you.’

‘Why aren’t you off floating around on a yacht?’

‘Can’t swim.’

‘Son of a bitch, I miss you!’

‘Me too.’
Don’t explain it. Never explain.

‘Why don’t you ever come around?’

‘I can’t,’ he says, and that’s that.

Her voice drops into a new place. ‘I wish you had.’

Walker sees his whole life passing before his eyes, and it is over. ‘Oh, Jessie,’ he says with real regret, ‘Wade says you guys are getting close.’

‘He’s a good man.’ She can’t hide the sigh. ‘Yeah, we are.’

He does not say what he is thinking.
I wish it could be me.
With Jessie, he is never angry. They go back so far that he knows what she will and won’t do, and there’s so much between them that the main ingredient is trust. Right now she is listening. She’s listening hard, but Walker is too much what he is to risk it.

He will
not
mess up another life. He loves her, just not the way he loved Lucy, and it makes him generous. ‘Go for it, Jess. Enjoy your life.’

She says for both of them, ‘I am.’

‘You’ve been through a lot.’

‘So have you.’

‘Wade will take good care of you.’

Walker tried to relinquish the possibility; she’s trying too, but she’s still out there, waiting for something he can’t give. It’s hard, watching her face come to terms with the future she’s trying to project. ‘After a while you just want somebody to be there when you get old.’

‘You deserve the good stuff.’

‘We all do.’ Her tone lifts. ‘Wade and I are looking at a wonderful house in Coral Shores.’

‘Coral Shores. Where everybody who is anybody . . .’

‘They’re nice people, Walk.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘And you won’t be a stranger, will you.’ Statement, done deal, as far as Jessie’s concerned. ‘Sunday dinners, after we move in?’

‘I don’t know.’ Walker wants to tell her he’d love that – he would, but he’s much too conflicted to guarantee anything. His temper is such that he can’t be sure what will come down in any given situation. At bottom, he’s always aware of the potential and it makes him afraid, not for his own safety but theirs. Because of what could happen to people he loves if something comes down and they are standing too close. ‘I don’t think so.’ But this is Jessie. Like a dedicated artisan, he makes a smile for her. ‘But I’ll try.’

Then her voice changes. ‘I don’t know if I ever thanked you for what you did.’

‘Please don’t.’ Brad Kalen. Fucking Brad fucking Kalen, with Jessie flattened in wet sand under the mangroves where the rich bastard dragged her one drunken night, bent on battery and humiliation. After the rape. Heedless and stripped right down to his hairy, brute arrogance, convinced they were alone. After he beat the crap out of Kalen, he should have turned him in. For all the good that would do. Old Orville’s money will get him out of anything – it always did. Then the part of Walker that he can not suppress pre-empts with:
If I’d had the power then . . .

But Jessie’s saying, ‘It changed a lot of things for me.’ She adds sweetly, ‘How I valued myself.’

‘You don’t need to thank me, it was a given.’ He pulled Jessie out of the sand and took her home crying; at the front door she hugged him and they never spoke of it again. Fucking Brad Kalen. Walker’s belly tightens and his fists clench. Yeah, he had to lay waste and pillage on the way to Jessie’s rescue. Years before he knew what he was. Is.

‘That’s not what Brad thought,’ Jessie says without inflection. ‘He said since I was everybody’s, he should get the biggest piece.’

‘I should have killed him.’ It would have prevented a lot of things. Walker is too distressed to number them, but the worst one ended in the release of the terrible power that changed his life. He grips the steering wheel, anchoring himself. It takes him a moment to realize that Jessie is still talking.

‘It made a tremendous difference to me.’ Framed in the car window, she bends down to make clear how important this is. ‘Like, all the difference in the world, and I never really thanked you.’

But Walker can’t keep on talking about it this way; the
ugly
inside him is simmering.
Shit,
he thinks.
And I hoped I was done with that.
Reaching up, he touches her face to get her attention. ‘I knew,’ he tells her. ‘I love you Jessie, but you’d better go.’

‘It’s OK.’ They know each other so well that he doesn’t have to explain. She knows he’s upset. ‘Wade and I came out here to see our old kindergarten teacher, remember old Mrs Earlham from Pierce Point?’

He doesn’t, but he needs to release her while he can still contain himself. If he doesn’t he’ll start ranting, and that is the best-case scenario. ‘OK then,’ he says nicely, ‘I’ll let you go. Tell her I said hey.’

‘You aren’t here to visit an old party, are you?’

He shakes his head.

‘I know you’re following the kid.’

‘You what?’

‘Dan Carteret, Lucy’s son.’

‘Who says?’

‘Somebody on Coral Shores saw you. Everybody knows. What do you want with him?’

‘I’m just following, it’s no big deal.’

‘He’s a nice kid,’ she says. ‘Just, whatever you do, don’t hurt him.’

Walker cries, ‘I’m here to protect him!’

‘Dear one, here’s Wade. I have to go. Oh, Walker, take care!’

‘You never know what you’re gonna get. Sometimes she’s all talkatalka, and the rest, she just stares.
You’re not leaving now.
’ Steffy pushes Dan into the room and closes the door as far as the institutional doorstop permits, giving it a kick to make her point. She peers into the Geri-chair where her great-grandmother is tipped back, apparently to help blood make it all the way up there to her brain. In spite of the touch of lipstick put on by an aide, she looks transparent, like what’s left after an insect sheds its carapace.

‘Oh.’ Dan has never seen anybody this old. ‘Oh!’

‘GRAMMY, ARE YOU IN THERE?’

Where she had been staring at the TV in its ceiling mount, old Mrs Henderson turns to see who yelled. She lights up like a paper lantern.

Triumphant, Steffy hisses, ‘See? She knows me. That’s why somebody has to come.’

‘Can she hear us?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Hello, Mrs Henderson.’

Just as suddenly, she lapses. All the lights go off inside.

Sighing, Steffy studies the lunch tray with its plastic dishes and plastic-looking food. ‘GRAMMY, YOU HAVEN’T TOUCHED YOUR CUPCAKE. HAVE A BITE.’

Dan turns to go.

‘LOOK, GRAMMY, IT’S CHOCOLATE. Sugar usually perks her right up.’ Steffy will say anything to keep him here. ‘When she gets going it’s a riot. Plus, you’re looking for something or somebody, right? Give her a minute to perk up, OK? She knows some amazing shit.’

‘She doesn’t look very perky to me.’

Everything is in stasis here. Dan delivered Steffy as promised, and when she asked him to come up to the room it was clear that she needed it so he walked point, seeing her up the stairs and down terrible pastel halls lined with saccharine repros chosen to help people forget that they came here to die. He kept Steffy talking to cover the babble in the health care wing, which is where they are. They talked about her boyfriend Carter, but not really; they talked about why stain-proof flooring, why the wide bedroom doors; they talked about Nenna not at all. They jabbered, trying to blur the occasional outraged cry coming from rooms they passed, the spontaneous groan, but old voices knife into a sensitive nerve. Dan came inside Golden Acres because the girl needed it, but he can’t stay. He doesn’t have the time.

‘If she comes to, tell her I said hi.’

‘Give me a minute!’ Steffy’s fingers lock on his arm like teeth. She yanks him into the space between Mrs Henderson and the TV. She mutes the set. ‘That’s better, isn’t it, Gram? Dan,’ she says in her mother’s exact ceremonial voice, ‘this is Grammy Henderson.’

‘I don’t think she’s in there any more.’

‘Fuck she isn’t. Grammy!’ She ratchets up the volume. ‘Grammy, this is my friend Dan.’

‘Look, I really can’t . . .’

‘You have to! GRAMMY, THIS IS DAN.’

‘Hello, Grammy.’

‘Her name is Blanche.’

‘Hello, Blanche.’

Waiting, Dan is aware of life going on elsewhere – conversations hitting the same dead end in rooms all along the hall. Sudden, inadvertent cries. Half Fort Jude’s history is deposited here, stored inside of old people a lot like this one, who remember, but can’t explain. Did Steffy’s great-grandmother know the incendiary Lorna Archambault? God knows she’s old enough, but at the moment she is beyond speech. He can wait forever and never find out. He imagines every room in Golden Acres is like this one, dense with history, but history under lock and key.

In a city where everyone seems to know everything that goes on, these old parties have probably processed and stored all the information he needs. If age didn’t kill, they could tell him everything. Solve his life. Decades worth of answers are layered inside these old patients’ heads. Soon they will all be gone. Their random access memories are shot. Death will erase their hard drives and local funeral directors will deal with what’s left. He’s running out of time!
Talk to me.
What would he uncover if he could go from room to room, cracking secrets out of their shrinking heads?

Shit, Dan thinks. It’s just as well I didn’t come here for answers. Look at her!

Dressed in pink seersucker today, with knotted bones that used to be feet tucked into sheepskin booties that have never walked a step, Blanche Henderson stirs. There’s a button missing on the dress and someone has closed the neck with an oval brooch which, he notes uneasily, seems to contain human hair. Other people have the good grace to die off before they reach this age, but Grammy is still among them. Studying the husk of a woman who’s been around too long, Dan marvels.
How did you get to be so old?

Sensing his impatience, Steffy says, ‘Grammy?’

The old woman’s body has given up on her but the spark won’t let go, no matter how much she wants it to fly up.

Grammy’s in there somewhere, fixed on something only she can see. Great age has one compensation. Time and space are nothing to her. Dan has no idea how long it will take Grammy to get back from wherever she is roaming; she could be anywhere, wandering around in search of the white light or spinning her wheels on memory lane or excavating truths that at the time she didn’t recognize as such.

Is Blanche aware that Steffy has brought an outsider into the close, obscenely intimate space where – soon, if she’s lucky – she will die? Does she have any idea that Dan is willing her to speak so he can escape? He gnaws his lip until blood comes.

‘Hang on and I’ll get some cupcake into her.’ Patiently, the girl holds a sticky cube to her great-grandmother’s lips. Steffy tickles Grammy’s cheek until the mouth pops open. She slips in the cake like mail into a letter slot. ‘There.’

Like a vet giving a dog a pill, she strokes Grammy’s throat. It takes a long time for her mouth to move. They wait a long time for her to swallow. Watching for signs of life, Dan thinks:
Steffy’s right about the smell
. Then he thinks:
There
isn’t enough Lysol in the world
. Everything is desperately pretty in Grammy’s room. Pink eyelet curtains, matching dust ruffle, pink comforter and ruffled eyelet pillow shams that in no way obfuscate the fact that this is a hospital bed. Aqua walls. Above the bed hangs a framed repro of that pretty-pretty painting of a Southern belle at a piano; Dan thinks the dress comes in different colors according to which company supplies the repro, but he isn’t sure. Then the chair clanks into upright position and he jumps out of his seat.