Hamilton Stark

by Russell Banks

  Two miles beyond the church there was a large cleared field on the right and, at the far end of the field, a driveway that led from the road along the edge of the field to a white-painted metal gate and, a little ways farther, the house. The chief turned off the road onto the driveway and in a few seconds pulled up at the gate. Easing his bulk out of the car, he walked around to the gate and unlatched it, stopping for a few seconds to study the piles of trash, most of them half-buried in snow that lay in the field in front of the house. Shaking his heavy head with disbelieving disgust, he squeezed back into his car and drove through the gate, following the driveway to the front of the house, where he came to a stop behind Hamilton’s pale green Chrysler limousine.

  Shutting off the engine of his own car, a Plymouth station wagon with the standard blue bubble on the roof, the chief slid out, zipped up his storm coat, slowly approached Hamilton’s car from the driver’s side, and immediately saw the three bulletholes in the window, which caused him to unzip his storm coat and draw his revolver from the holster on his left hip. It was a smoothly executed series of moves. For a large man the chief was fast and balanced, and he practiced all his moves diligently in his free time. Poised on the balls of his feet, his head laid back and slightly to one side, and holding his revolver with his left hand, he switched off the safety and reached for the door handle with his right hand, slowly, as if he were trying to catch a butterfly without damaging its wings. He whipped open the door, shoving the snout of his gun down into the space where the driver’s head ordinarily would have been situated.

  Nothing. Empty. No blood on the seat. Slugs probably in the upholstery someplace—send the lab boys out to look for them later. Course, the slugs might be buried inside Ham’s body. Hit the bastard clean and fast, got the body out of the car right away so they could wipe it down, dumped the body in the trunk of the hit car, then took off to where they could drop it into some open water. The nearest open water would be the Atlantic Ocean, the chief figured. Kittery, Maine. This was going to be a tough case to crack alone, he thought grimly. He was going to need some help.

  Jamming his gun into the holster, he walked back to his own car and sat down in the driver’s seat. He slammed the door behind him and started the motor and the heater, after which he slid a few inches to the right of the steering wheel to a position on the seat from which he could operate the radio comfortably. He stretched out his legs, plucked the microphone from the hook, and barked into its face. “Hawk! Come in, Hawk! This’s Eagle! Come in, Hawk. This is Eagle, come in, Hawk!”

  After a few seconds of answering static, a high-pitched voice cried, “Hawk here, Eagle! Come in, Eagle!”

  “That you, Calvin?”

  “Sure is, Eagle. What’s up?”

  The chief scratched at the nest of curly blond hairs where his throat met his chest. “I’m over to the Stark place, where Ham Stark lives? You know the place?”

  “Sure. The place up on Blue Job Road, used t’ be his mother’s place—”

  “Yeah, yeah. Well, listen,” the chief interrupted. “I think there’s been some kinda trouble up here. Looks to me like there’s been a little shooting.” Suddenly, as if the bank of clouds had parted and the sun had come out, the chief became frightened. Terrified. His head was located in his car precisely where he supposed Hamilton’s head to have been when he had been shot. Whoever had shot Hamilton could as easily shoot his brother-in-law. The chief flopped down on the seat, his right cheek pressed flat against the cool upholstery, and went on talking into the microphone. “Look, Calvin, get over here right away, will you? Where the hell are you now, for God’s sake?” he puffed. He was lying on his side, facing the glove compartment, and it was difficult for him to breathe.

  “I’m over on Route Twenty-eight, on my way to that guy Yanoff’s, you know the guy, takin’ his goddamned dog home to him. Herb Kernisch says he seen it runnin’ deer last night and he’ll shoot it next time it’s out loose, you know Herb…”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure. How long will it take you to get here?” The chief was terrified. He’d walked into a trap. Shit, shit, shit. Those were rifle slugs for sure. Hit men from Boston. Probably Cosa Nostra. Mafia. Italian. They’d as soon kill him as pick a flower, and they could do it, too, the way he’d set himself up. They could pick him off from fifty yards, and all he had was his damned service revolver.

  “Oh… I dunno, twenty minutes, I guess, if I come straight over an’ don’t take this mutt back to Yanoff’s. I ain’t there yet.”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake, hit your fuckin’ siren an’ get the hell over here!” he cried into the mike.

  “You okay, Chief?”

  “Yes. Yeah, sure. Just get the hell over here, will you, Calvin?” The chief was sweating, and his eyes were darting wildly back and forth across the narrow slab of leaden sky that he could see from his position on the seat. It was everything he could see—a rectangle of low, dark sky—but he expected that any second even that would go black on him, as three soft-nosed slugs penetrated his large, soft body.

  “Ten-four, Eagle.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Ten-four.” He looked for his hat, the white Stetson he’d bought last spring at the police chiefs’ convention in Dallas. It was on the floor in front of him, getting dirty. He retrieved it and started brushing it clean with his hand. That goddamned Ham Stark, he fumed, as he brushed his hat with his thick fingertips. Getting me into this. Why does he always have to … whatever it is he does. I ought to just get the hell out of here, drive off and forget the whole thing. Not even mention it to anyone. Not even Jody. Except that Calvin’s already on his way over here. He knows. Shit. Never should have called him. Jesus Christ, why don’t things go right for me? Shit, shit, shit. Who the hell made that phone call last night, anyhow? That’s who probably did it, got me into this in the first place. He studied his hat. It was white again, sparkling white, without even a bruise of dirt from the floor.

  Taking a long-handled plastic windshield scraper from under the seat and sticking the wide end into his hat, the chief slowly raised his hat above him, hoping that, if they shot at it, they would miss. But no one shot. Silence. He held the hat in what he assumed was plain view for a minute, joggled it temptingly, and then slowly sat up beneath it, took the hat off the scraper, and squared it on his head, checking himself out in the rear-view mirror. He tried a little smile, the one that started with a sneer and ended there too, the smile he used to answer backtalking out-of-state speeders. He’d started practicing it when state troopers caught Ethel Kennedy, the murdered senator’s wife, speeding on Route 93 on her way home from a ski weekend at Waterville Valley. The smile looked good. Tough, smart, mean. A smile that said he’d seen it all, seen it all twice last week.

  How the hell had Hamilton got himself mixed up with Mafia hit men? the chief wondered as he settled back into his seat to wait for Calvin. Ham was a plumber, for Christ’s sake, a pipefitter. Not a bookie or something. Maybe he was mixed up with a woman of some kind. Maybe this time the bastard went too far, got himself involved with a woman who belonged to someone who’d kill him for it. Serve the bastard right. Serve him right if some tough little wop in a three-piece suit kicked him in the nuts three or four times and then shot him in the face. Some women a man has to steer clear of. The chief thought of his own wife, Jody, her long, angular body, her grim mouth and flat voice. He studied the house in front of him, and as he hoped, forgot his wife. It was a nice place, he observed, a handsome white house, square, well kept, large but not too large, situated well off the road, with the mountain behind it and the valley in front. No wonder Ham was so attached to the place, he thought.

  The house was a two-hundred-year-old, traditionally proportioned Cape, with an ell at one end that was connected to a small barn Hamilton had converted into a garage. Behind the house was another, larger barn, several outbuildings, and then the woods. Behind the woods was the mountain. The main house and the small barn had been built by Josiah Stark, and the place had remained in the
hands of the Starks until now, which of course was a mightily significant fact about the place. But not to the chief. He could see only that it was a solid-looking, attractive and well-kept place, and that alone made it desirable. Oh, he knew that Hamilton had been born and raised in the house, and he imagined that that, too, probably made it desirable, at least to Hamilton. I can see why the bastard wanted the place so bad, he conceded. But I’ll never know why he couldn’t wait for his mother to die first. Never.

  Though the chief had been a visitor to the house for decades, though he had courted and eventually married a woman who had been born and raised there, and though afterward for years he had visited his in-laws there, nevertheless, whenever he saw or thought of the house, he remembered only one event, a single night, the night Hamilton had taken possession of the house. Here is how it happened.

  Or rather, here is the version of what happened that was generally accepted as the truth, accepted by all but one of the participants in the events of that monstrous evening, accepted as well by the townspeople of Barnstead, and accepted by hundreds of others who were told the story only because it could be said to have a certain universal “human interest,” or because it was an example of horrid behavior, say, or of long suffering, or of a bizarre turnabout.

  At any rate, almost any native of Barnstead, New Hampshire, the librarian, perhaps, or the town clerk, visiting a cousin named Mattie in Daytona Beach, Florida, might look up from her knitting and say, “Well, if you want to talk about your bizarre turnabouts, here’s one for the books.” Or, “If you think that’s one of your long-suffering parents, let me tell you about Alma Stark…” Or, “Now, that’s horrid, all right, but I can tell you something so horrid, Mattie, that it’ll make you never want to have a son.” And this is what she’d say:

  “Up to Blue Job Road, oh, maybe a mile, mile and a half from town, you’ve got the Stark place, which has been in the family since it was built, probably some two hundred years, though of course it’s lots different now, different from the way it was when it got built, because the Starks have always been hardworking and mostly in the building trades, the men, so they’ve fixed the place up quite a bit over the years—not so much the land, I mean, which is over five hundred acres, at least that’s what they always got taxed for, ‘in excess of five hundred acres’—no, they didn’t so much fix up the land as the house and barns, putting on a dormer here, a new porch there, sort of constantly renovating was how the Starks have always taken care of their place, so by the time poor Alma and Horace Stark were up in their seventies and their children were all grown and married—there were three, the son Ham and the daughters Jody and Sarah—well, by that time the place was all modernized, you know, with electricity and aluminum storm windows and a new oil furnace, and the plumbing was just about the best you could imagine, because Horace was a pipefitter, like his father, who died pretty young in a sad way, but that’s another story—anyhow, if there was one thing the Stark house was going to have, it was good plumbing. Oh, I guess Horace’d got to be about seventy or maybe seventy-one, and Alma was about the same age, when he got his first heart attack and had to retire from the pipefitting and stay in the house all the time, though of course he wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t stay in the house all the time, he was outside working on that place as soon’s he could walk again, no matter he couldn’t move half his face and couldn’t even talk right anymore, though he never talked much anyhow. But now he couldn’t even remember what you’d told him five minutes ago. Anyhow, all that man knew about life was work, work, work, and if he couldn’t keep on working, he was dead, so he kept on working, putting in the garden, shingling the barn roof, building fences, cutting firewood—just about anything needed doing around the place, and lots that didn’t need doing too. Poor Alma. She couldn’t keep that man in and down the way the doctor had told her to, ‘You keep that man in and down,’ he told her, and Horace’d never been the easiest man in town to live with anyhow, kind of cross all the time, not very talkative and then grouchy when he did talk, but after he got the heart attack he got even crosser, scowled all the time, even when he didn’t know you were looking at him. And because he couldn’t talk right anymore, he stopped talking completely, left it up to Alma to do the talking for both of them, wouldn’t even answer the telephone, would stand right there beside it and let it ring and ring and ring. He’d look at it like it was a design on the wallpaper or something. And the cost. Well, I know that heart attack of his cost them a pile of money, because Alma let me know with a few well-chosen words, she said, ‘It’s twice as expensive to be sick when you’re old,’ she told me one day, and I could have just cried for her, the poor thing. So proud, you know. But at least they owned the house clear and free, I told her, trying to comfort her, and at that time they did own the house clear and free, no mortgage, no debts of any kind, the way I heard it, so all they had to do was make do from month to month on Social Security, and I guess for a while that’s what they did. Then Horace went and got his second heart attack, this time one of your real strokes, and he had to have surgery this time, so when he come out of it he couldn’t even leave his chair without help from Alma, and all he could do now was sit in the living room in his rocker or his armchair, he liked to switch around, and watch the wrestling on television, a nice twenty-one-inch color set his son Ham, who was living over in Concord with his new wife, had bought him for Christmas. Ham was nice about that, the color TV, because he really didn’t have to, they already had a black and white, but when it come to the question of how they were going to pay all the doctor and hospital bills, Ham told his mother, who was now the only one capable of making a decision, he told her to borrow the five thousand dollars from the bank and take out a mortgage on the house to guarantee it. Now naturally there was no way that poor old couple was going to be able to make the payments on a loan that size, so the son, a pipefitter like his father, but young, of course, and making good money working heavy construction over to Concord, he offered to make the payments for them, but so’s he’d feel covered—that’s how he put it, so’s he’d feel covered—they should sign the deed of the house over to him, and he and his new wife would move into the house right off, ‘to help take care of Pa,’ he said. Now if you knew Ham’s wife, you’d know how likely that was—she was his second wife, a fancy New York City tap dancer, used to be one of those June Taylor Dancers on the Jackie Gleason Show? You’ve probably seen her on TV, but it’s hard to remember one from all the others. Anyhow, I can’t blame her, not after what I know now, but that’s how Ham put it: ‘Annie and I want to be able to help take care of Pa, and we can do it a lot easier if we’re living right there in the house with you,’ he told his poor old mother, who naturally was terrified by all those bills and by the idea of having to take care of a man who’d become practically a vegetable—no disrespect, but that’s truly what he’d turned into since the second heart attack, kind of leaning all the time off to one side there in his chair while he looked at the wrestling and the cowboy shows, which is what he liked the best, the wrestling and the cowboys, with the whole left side of him stiff as a door and the rest of him spastic as a cat with distemper. It was something horrible to see, so I used to go over there twice a week, to visit Alma and try to cheer her up some, and naturally I’d have to see Horace too, and even though he’d turned a lot sweeter, a whole lot, since the second attack and the operation, it was kind of sickening, if you know what I mean. I used to almost wish he was still all sour and grouchy, so he wouldn’t try to talk to me, because now when I’d go over to spend the afternoon with Alma, he’d try to talk and smile, but all he could do was make these pathetic moans like a cow and toothy kind of crazy-looking smiles, which I know must have embarrassed Alma so much that probably even she was wishing the old man would get cross and silent again. I don’t know, maybe Alma didn’t have any other choice, because after all, Ham was her son and she had to pay those bills; so anyhow, she agreed to sign over the house and take out the mortgage and let Ham make th
e payments—he paid her a dollar, a single dollar bill, for the house, because when they signed it over there had to be some money change hands—and she also agreed to let him and his second wife Annie move into the house. They sold this little ranch over to Concord they’d owned and moved in that same week, going right to work fixing up the second floor entirely for themselves with a new bathroom and converting two of the little bedrooms up there into one ‘master bedroom’—that’s what he called it, a ‘master bedroom’—and his mother and father went on using their old bedroom and bathroom downstairs. That was when the big dormer in back of the house got put in too, because Ham and Annie wanted a view of the mountain from their ‘master bedroom.’ It wasn’t enough they already had a view of the mountain from the kitchen; no, they had to have one from their bedroom too. But of course all this time everyone, Alma too, thought that Ham was being kind to his mother and father. No one knew what he had in his head. No one knew that when the old man finally died, as he did that spring—very peacefully, thank heaven, just went to sleep and didn’t wake up again, just like his own father died, only that was in a snowbank and he was dead drunk at the time—anyhow, when Ham’s father finally died, no one knew six months later everything would blow up like it did. Ham went and put in a garden like his father had done every summer, and Annie got herself involved a little bit with the town, joined the Ladies’ Aid Society and so forth, and Alma seemed happier than I’d ever remembered seeing her, because everyone knew that Horace had been a difficult man to live with. He was so cross all the time, even as a young man. Anyhow, as fall comes on, Annie stopped going to Ladies’ Aid, and Ham was seen drunk a lot in town, and ever since he was a boy in high school, practically, he’s been nasty when he’s drunk, and he was being nasty all right, scrapping and fighting in the Bonnie Aire over to Pittsfield, wrecking his car one night by driving it dead drunk into the Civil War Memorial down to the Parade. So people started getting the idea that things weren’t going all that smooth at the Stark place. And they sure weren’t, as we later found out. What was happening was that Annie had decided she didn’t like living way out in the country with no one but her mother-in-law for company all day, and so she’d started nagging Ham about moving to Connecticut or someplace where she could have the kind of life she preferred, and like I said, I can’t really blame her. After all, being married to that man must have been no picnic, like they say, and since she was a big-city girl, a famous dancer and all, living way out at the end of a dirt road in an old house with an old woman must have been pretty boring for her. She was sort of a pretty woman then, and she was actually a nice woman when you got to know her, and she couldn’t help it if fate and Ham had put her in a place that could only be boring to a woman like that. So they did a lot of fighting, she and Ham, and one of the ways she got around being so bored and doing so much fighting was to take week-long trips down to New York City, where she stayed with her aunt in an apartment in the Bronx, she once told me. That made it easier for everyone, I suppose, probably even for Ham, though who can say what makes things easier for that man? Anyhow one night in October when Annie was down to New York, Ham came home drunk and late, around nine o’clock or so. Alma’d made supper for him, and so she was ticked off that he’d come in so late and drunk, and I guess she must have let it out a little, because he got to fighting back at her, yelling that this was his house and he’d come home when and how he damned well pleased to come home, and so forth, until finally she said, out of anger, you understand, not really meaning it, ‘All right, then, I’ll leave,’ and he said, ‘Fine.’ He went and phoned up his sister Jody, who thank God lives in town with her husband Chub, the chief of police, and Ham told Jody to come pick her mother up, she was moving out. Jody was shocked, naturally, but what could she do, so she drove up to the house and picked up her mother, who had refused to show that man any emotion over the thing and had gone right ahead and packed her bags, and Jody drove the old woman back down to the Center where she and Chub and their twin boys have a trailer, and lucky for everyone, it’s one of those two-bedroom trailers, so they had room for Alma. Then Chub went and called Ham and asked him what was going on, sort of man to man, and when Ham told him to mind his own GD business, Chub got mad—and he’s not the kind of man you want to get mad—so he hopped into his car and drove up to the house and stormed in, but when he got into the house he found Ham standing in the middle of the living room with a rifle pointed at him. I mean it. A rifle. Pointed right at Chub’s heart. That’s the kind of man Ham Stark is. Or was. I really wouldn’t know now, because I haven’t seen the man to talk to, even assuming I would talk to him, which of course I wouldn’t, for what, twelve years now, ever since that night…”