Hamilton Stark

by Russell Banks

  It was mid-December, a blowy, snowy, Friday evening, cold enough that the wind crackled against the windshield of Feeney’s Dodge, and the snowflakes, dry and hard as salt crystals, blew against the car and swiftly away from it, finally settling in long, wind-carved drifts along the sides of the road and edges of the woods and against the buildings they passed, as they drove back from Pittsfield to Crawford.

  Feeney wanted a drink, had pulled a pint bottle of rye from the glove compartment as he drove, and poured a few ounces into his mouth, passing it across to Alvin when he had finished. Alvin silently recapped the bottle and replaced it in the glove compartment.

  “Whassamatta, doncha wanta leetle drinkee?” Feeney teased him. Looking over at his dark friend, Feeney grinned, showing his small, brown teeth, and he wet his thick lips like a horse.

  Alvin said no, explaining that he was tired tonight and just wanted to be out of the house, not out of his head, for chrissake.

  Feeney chuckled salaciously and asked for the bottle again. Alvin passed it to him.

  “You’re just pissed we didn’t scarf any quiffs at the fuckin’ movies,” Feeney said seriously, trying to be sympathetic. He noted the car’s rapid slide toward the side of the road and whipped the wheel to the left, spinning the vehicle back into line, just missing a two-foot snowdrift.

  “No,” Alvin said. “Nothing like that. It’s hard to get too down when you strike out with a batch of fuckin’ sixteen-year-olds giggling in the back of a fuckin’ small-town moviehouse. Besides, I really liked the movie,” he added. Picnic it was, with Alvin played by William Holden, Betsy Cooper by Kim Novak in a sexy lavender dress, the plot basically a brief, melancholy meeting between a hungry, lonely, trapped woman and a profound man, the meeting born in conflict between the characters, carried to tragic, compassionate fruition by sex and coincidence, resolved by the sad yet spiritually necessary departure of the man. “That’s my idea of a good movie,” Alvin said, half to himself.

  Feeney handed the bottle back to him. “You sure you don’t want a slug?” he urged.

  Alvin said no and continued staring out the windshield, the snow firing out of the darkness into the path of the car. Without looking, he put the bottle back into the glove compartment.

  They drove a ways farther in silence, through Crawford Parade, along the road to the Center, past the fairgrounds, with the river on their right, iced over, the ice whitened by the snow, following alongside the car as the vehicle wound a careful way home. Driving into the Center, they approached Feeney’s house, dark and dilapidated, like an old railroad hobo, and Feeney asked Alvin if he wanted to come in and have a drink and maybe watch some television or play some cards awhile. “Christ, it ain’t even eleven yet,” he said in a whining voice, pulling nervously at one thick eyebrow with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand while he steered the car with his other hand.

  “No thanks. I might’s well go on home. This snow’s starting to build up now and I’d probably have to walk if I stayed at your place. Nights like this, I start to thinking about my grandpa, y’know,” he added half-jokingly. But half-seriously, too, because it was true that he never remembered any of the stories of how the old man, his father’s father, had died, except on nights like this, when there was a hard, cold snow falling in drifts, and he remembered, pictured, a man he’d never actually seen stumbling home in the dark, drunk, angry, snarling at the wind and snow, and halfway home falling over a stone frozen into the dirt surface of the road, and tumbling off the road into a high drift, forgetting in that second of spinning collapse his anger, the hard, ancient center of his focus, coming softly to rest in the drift and letting go there, falling backward into sleep, at last—to be found there in the morning, rock-hard, with his hands and arms and legs extended, splayed, as if, when he had died, he’d been dreaming of swimming easily underwater, or as if he had been hurled to earth by a god. It was the reason Alvin’s father did not drink, or so his mother had told him.

  “Okay,” Feeney said slowly. “I’ll take you up the fuckin’ road. But hand me that bottle one more time, will ya?”

  Alvin once again retrieved the flat, brown bottle and passed it to his friend, who took a quick drink from it and blindly passed it back, bumping the bottle against Alvin’s beefy shoulder in the darkness, spilling rye whiskey down the front of his wool loden coat and over his lap. Alvin grabbed the almost emptied bottle from his lap and cursed. Feeney apologized thickly, and they drove the rest of the way to Alvin’s house in grumpy silence, passing no other car on the road, barely making it up the hill from the Center.

  Alvin got out, said nothing, and walked through the snow to the house, stamped his feet noisily at the door, and walked in as Feeney drove off, the red taillights of his car swiftly disappearing behind high fantails of snow.

  His mother heard him come in. “That you, Alvin?” she called from the kitchen. “I was worried, with the snow and all…”

  “Yeah,” he said sourly. He was standing near a table lamp in the living room, holding part of his coat out in front of him as he studied the whiskey stains on it. “Shit,” he said in a low voice.

  “Will you come and have a cup of tea with me, son? I’m glad you came home early,” she called. Alvin could hear her get up from her chair and walk quickly, eagerly, to the cabinet over the sink for a cup and saucer.

  Oh, well, why not? he thought. Maybe she’ll know how to get the stain out of my coat. “Yeah, sure, I’ll have a cup of tea with you.” And he walked out to the kitchen, shedding his bulky coat as he entered the room.

  She stood next to the counter by the sink, pouring him a cup of tea. Picking up the cup and saucer, carrying it across the room by pinching the saucer between thumb and forefinger, she walked past her son, tiny next to his enormous size, and suddenly, as she passed, she groaned, “Oh-h, Alvin!” With an expression on her face that joined disgust with self-pity, she placed the cup and saucer on the table in front of him, sat down opposite, and petulantly pushed the sugar and milk at him.

  “What d’you mean, Oh-h, Alvin’?”

  “You know what I mean!” she exploded at him. “You! You’re what I mean! You’re what’s the matter. Look at you!”

  “You think I’m drunk?”

  “Think!” She kept stirring her spoon in the cup of tea, her hands shaking as she moved, her rage barely contained by the act. Her dark eyes glowered at him, her head twitching nervously from side to side, her feet tapping against the linoleum-covered floor. “You, you’re nothing but a bum, a drunken bum! That’s all! I don’t know why I even bother to … to hope. You’ll probably end up like your grandfather, the way you’re going now.”

  “Not that one again. Jesus. My grandfather. As if ending up like my father is an improvement. Anyhow, I’m stone sober, Ma,” he said quietly.

  “You’re a drunken bum! You smell like a brewery. You come in here smelling like a brewery, and then you have the gall to tell me how sober you are, and making cruel cracks about your father, too. You’re a drunken bum, no good for anything. And now you’re a liar, too.”

  “Ma, I am not!” he cried, and he stood up, facing her.

  She wouldn’t even look at him then, talked into her teacup instead and made him overhear her. “I work and I slave year after year, for what? For this? A drunk who can’t even speak kindly to me? A thankless bum who can’t say anything kind about his father?” She continued talking loudly at the teacup and about him, as if he were in an adjacent room, and he moved erratically away from the table, then back again, and finally grabbed her shoulder with one huge hand and shook her, which made her scream directly up at him, “Leave me alone! Don’t you touch me! Get away from me! You’re drunk!”

  At that instant his father came crashing into the room from the bedroom. The man was dressed in a wildly billowing flannel nightgown, he was barefoot, and the gray hair on his narrow head stuck out like a spiky crown. His face was knotted in fury, and as he rushed for Alvin, he roared, “You son of a bitch, I’ll
kill you! Raising your hand against your mother! I’ll kill you for that!”

  Alvin turned, releasing his mother’s shoulder, and caught the full force of his father’s rush. Falling backward, he broke his fall with one hand and tried to ward off his father’s punches with the other. The older man was swinging at him like a windmill gone berserk, hitting him on the head, face and shoulders, slamming him in the chest with his bony, naked knee, trying to keep him down on the floor while he beat him with his fists. Alvin reached behind him and knocked the cupboard door open, and with no conscious thought, or none that he would remember later, he reached into the cupboard, yanked out a large cast-iron skillet, and swung it at his father, hitting him squarely on the forehead. There was a thick, crunching sound, like that of an apple being broken in half by two strong hands, and the old man’s body went limp and collapsed on the floor.

  Alvin, dazed, dropped the skillet, stood up, heard as if from a great distance his mother screaming, “Alvin! You’ve killed your father! You’ve killed him!” and he ran from the house, grabbing up his coat as he ran.

  Outside, it was dark and snowing hard. The wind had dropped, and the snow was falling straight down, like a gauze curtain. For a few moments he ran, then walked—down the road to the town, then through the darkened town to the highway, where the first vehicle heading south, a truck, stopped and picked him up.

  “Where you goin’?” the driver asked from behind the red glow of his cigarette. He was a fat man a few years older than Alvin.

  “Boston. Tonight.”

  “Okay by me. Your old lady kick you out or something?”

  “Yeah,” Alvin said, instantly constructing a scene that would justify his words. “Yeah, I came home too late and too drunk once too often, I guess. And she flipped her fuckin’ lid. She’ll probably cool off in a few days if I leave her alone. You know.”

  “Yeah, they always do,” the driver said cheerfully as the truck picked up speed, plowing heavily, powerfully, through the falling, drifting snow.

  (Here ends the excerpt from the novel.)

  Chapter 5

  Back and Fill: In Which the Hero’s Ditch, Having Got Dug and the Pipe’s Having Been Laid Therein, Gets Filled; Including a Brief Digression Concerning the Demon Asmodeus, along with Certain Other Digressions of Great and Small Interest

  AN ANONYMOUS CALL TO THE CHIEF of the two-man Barnstead Police Department, the large, barrel-chested, crew-cut man named Chub Blount, who happened to be Hamilton Stark’s brother-in-law, brought the chief, as he preferred to be called, out to Hamilton’s house early one morning in February. The call had come in to the chief’s home around one A.M., waking the burly man from his peaceful, nearly dreamless sleep. His wife Jody, Hamilton Stark’s sister, punched her husband’s side with one of her sharp elbows and woke him.

  “Chub! Answer the phone!” she ordered crossly.

  “Whut, whut, what?” His hand clumsily groped for the telephone in the darkness above his face. Then he realized that the instrument was beside him on the night table, and at last he stopped its shrill ringing by picking up the receiver. “Yeah?”

  “Barnstead Police?” It was a man’s voice, hurried, thin, slightly overarticulated.

  “Yeah. This’s the chief.”

  “Good. There may have been a murder in your town. I thought you should know.”

  “Whut the hell… Is this Howie? Who the hell is this?” The chief sat up in bed and looked into the mouthpiece in the dark, as if trying to see who was talking into it at the other end of the line.

  “Who is it, Chub?” Jody impatiently snapped.

  “Never mind who this is. I just thought you might like to know that Hamilton Stark may have been killed this afternoon. You ought to look into it, that’s all.”

  “What kinda crap you handin’ me, pal? Hey, is this Howie? C’mon, Howie, is it you?”

  “What on earth is going on, Chub? Is Howie drunk?”

  “This is an anonymous phone call.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t believe you, pal. It’s Howie Leeke, I know your voice, Howie, and I don’t think it’s funny, I gotta get up in the fuckin’ morning and I don’t like getting pulled outa bed in the middle of the fuckin’ night to play games with a drunk.”

  “No, seriously, this is an anonymous phone call.”

  “Hang up, Chub.”

  “Howie, look, whaddaya doin’, pullin’ my chain like this in the middle of the fuckin’ night?”

  “You don’t seem to understand. I’m anonymous. I’m not Howie Leeke or anybody else, either. I’m anonymous.”

  “Chub, hang up on him.”

  “Bullshit you’re anonymous. It’s Howie.”

  “No, really. I’m dead serious. I think Hamilton Stark has been murdered.”

  “Chub, will you hang that thing up!”

  “Hey, Howie, ol’ pal, where’re you calling from? You calling me from a bar? You over the Bonnie Aire?”

  “Why? Why do you want to know that? I’m anonymous.”

  “Jesus, Chub, it’s one in the morning!”

  “Shaddup, Jody. Howie…”

  “Seriously, why do you want to know where I am? Are you going to try to trace the call? Go ahead, I’m calling from a public booth. It’s only a waste of your time, though, because I’m calling to give you an important message about Howie, I mean Hamilton Stark…”

  “Yeah, sure. Now listen up, Howie, whyn’t you tell me where’s that booth you’re callin’ from, you know, so’s I can come on over an’ have a drink with ya.” Covering the mouth-piece with his hand, he said to his wife, “I’ll get the bastard to tell me where he’s calling from, see, and I’ll send Calvin down there to pick him up for Drunk and Disorderly or Driving while Intoxicated. Teach that gabby bastard a lesson…”

  “Listen here, now, this really is an important message. I think you ought to drive out to Hamilton Stork’s place and look for him.”

  “Yeah, sure, that’s all I got to do is drive around lookin’ for that silly asshole. Now, c’mon, Howie, where ya callin’ from?

  I’ll come on down an’ having a drink with ya. How’s that?”

  “I’m not Howie Leeke. I’m trying to remain anonymous, and you’re not making it very easy for me, Mr. Blount.”

  “Okay, Howie, ol’ pal, thanks for the tip about Ham,” he drawled, reluctantly giving up the attempt to entrap his friend. “But one of these fine nights I’m goin’ to catch you drivin’ drunk or D and D, ol’ buddy, and when I do, I’m goin’ to hang your fuckin’ ass from a fuckin’ tree.”

  “No—”

  The chief cut him off and hung up the phone. He flopped down into the warmth of his bed, bumping against his wife’s bony knees and elbow as he squirmed back into the gully he had been sleeping in earlier, and quickly, with no further words, the two of them fell asleep.

  But the next morning after breakfast the chief remembered the call, and saying to himself, What the hell, I haven’t got anything better to do, he decided to drive out to his brother-in-law’s house. He hadn’t seen the man in several months, so they’d probably be able to think of things to say to each other, and what if the bastard had been murdered? It wouldn’t be a shock to anyone—there were plenty of people in the world, hell, in the whole state of New Hampshire, who would be happy to see Hamilton Stark dead. Hung up on a tree with flies clotted around his mouth and eyes. Down a well, green in three feet of water, his body swollen like a jelly doughnut and held there with concrete blocks. Tied to a tree, with KILL THE PIG carved into his chest, his boots filled and overflowing with the blood from the carving job they’d done on him.

  It wouldn’t be any great loss, as they say, but even so, it would be murder, Murder One, right here in Barnstead, New Hampshire, where there hasn’t been a genuine killing for several generations—not since the one over in Gilmanton, the one that woman wrote the filthy book about, Peyton Place. They should have burned that damned book. Maybe someone would write a book about this one, too. Killings up here are
unusual. A few accidental shootings, hunting accidents, suicides, that sort of thing, sure, but no real live killings, he thought as he drove out of town, along the river, and turned left at the Congregational church, the only church in town, onto the dirt road that led to the narrow end of the Suncook Valley, where, in the shade of Blue Job Mountain, Hamilton Stark lived.

  It was a cold, dark gray day, with the sour sky sagging down almost to the treetops. Along the sides of the narrow, winding road, the tin trailers and tarpaper-covered shacks seemed frozen into the several feet of old, leathery, late-winter snow that surrounded them, the vehicles outside and the leaning, dilapidated outbuildings scattered around them. Behind the dwellings and vehicles lay the woods, the dark, tangled third-growth pines and spruce—twisted, erratically spaced trees and groves laced together by the ruins of ancient stone walls and low, scrubby brush, a forest for squirrels and porcupines, creatures that run close to the ground or high above it.

  As he drove, the chief squared his Stetson on his head, checked himself in the rear-view mirror, and hated his brother-in-law. He had not forgiven him. Although of course he told everyone that he had forgiven him long ago, which usually made the listener shake his head with surprise and admiration, for many of the things that Hamilton had done to the chief—not so much to the chief himself as to his wife Jody and her mother Alma Stark—were generally thought to be unforgivable. The chief usually explained the generosity of his spirit by saying, “Look, hey, the bastard’s just not right in the head. I mean, what the hell, you don’t think the bastard’s happy, do you?” And no, no one thought for a minute that Hamilton Stark was happy, which proved the chief’s assertion that the bastard wasn’t right in the head. The chief liked being right, especially when he could prove it logically.