but he got out of the car, like, Are you all right? Shit, he even helped him up. The paper bag the drunk was clutching had turned into a mess of broken glass and leaking rum. Walker had to pry off his fingers, one by one. Then Kalen put his hands over his face and dragged them aside like a kid pretending to open a theater curtain, drawing little streaks of blood over his spreading grin.
‘Pike,’ he said, laughing as though there was nothing between them. ‘Awesome!’
Never mind what the two old enemies said to each other before Brad passed out. Remember, everybody knows everything about everybody who is anybody in Fort Jude, so Walker knew that Kalen was falling-down drunk out here in the boonies on the very night that he was scheduled to go bopping down town to the local swinery. He was supposed to be toasting the bride at some big party for his daughter – things Walker knows thanks to his fool brother Wade, who chose to rise in Fort Jude society and actually feel honored to be invited.
What he doesn’t know is what compelled him to lug the stupefied drunk around behind his car where they won’t be seen and stuff the filthy, reeking Brad Kalen into his crumpled trunk and slam the lid on him. Or why he turned the car and headed for the Fort Jude Club, planning to roll him out of the trunk and flee before the valet parking kids came out and found him. Nor does he know what in God’s name drove him to stop in Pine Vista before he made his delivery. Unless he does.
He was driving into town on Fourth Street, straight shot to the Fort Jude Club, but he failed to make the one zig-zag where Town Planning and Zoning gave Herman Chaplin his variance back in the Twenties, when he mapped out Pine Vista. Walker was driving in Fourth Street, not thinking, or trying not to think, when his body remembered what he has been working so hard to forget. He wasn’t on Fourth Street any more. The road narrowed. Curbstones gave way to pulverized oyster-shell shoulders and the asphalt road turned him out on the last red brick streets that marked the entrance to Pine Vista. He was entering territory he used to know. He stopped, but it was too late to turn.
Ahead, Herman Chaplin’s stone lions crouched, regarding him. Not judging, exactly. Just noting his presence. Guarding a neighborhood that never made it off the drawing board. Like certain other things.
Walker said goodbye to Lucy Carteret in front of those lions on that lost, terrible Thanksgiving in the year that changed his life. ‘Grandmother thinks I’m out with Bobby.’ She trailed her fingers across his cheek and said, ‘I’m sorry it has to be this way,’ and Walker groaned. In the silver twilight, the future hung between them like a veil. She walked between the cement brutes and went to Bob Chaplin’s house without looking back.
He followed on foot; he had to be sure. He waited in the bushes until the big car came for her, just as she said it would. Chaplin: what the old woman wanted for her. Walker will love Lucy Carteret to the grave but nothing he said or did back then would change that old bitch or touch her heart, not given where he comes from and who his people are. He and Lucy were doomed, and that was even before he and the vindictive old bitch collided – and Walker Pike became what he is.
He thought he’d gotten past it, but here he was. Again. Oh, shit.
Maybe Walker zoned out; maybe he has been heading back here all his life. Never mind. A quick K turn would put him back on track to dump this drunken bastard at the club without unnecessary detours, but Walker was smoked by the past. Foolishly, he lingered. He coulda-shoulda-woulda but then in a doppelgänger moment another car – Chaplin’s? – came heading out of the abandoned development.
Gulping air, Walker cut his lights and waited for it to pass.
Lucy, he thought, unless he said it aloud. Oh, Luce.
Like certain other things in his life, it was an accident, it just came out. He couldn’t help it. With Brad Kalen in the trunk and pressing duties elsewhere, Walker found himself back in Pine Vista.
Twilights in Florida are ambiguous; there’s no predicting when the day will drop off the face of the earth. The