The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

  “Look at you,” she says to Peter. “I see so much of your father in you.” She gazes at him with an intensity that turns Peter to glass. His past opens up to her, the present boy on the verge of shattering under the strain, though she won’t let that happen. Then she blinks, and there’s only kindness.

  “Come in, come in,” she says.

  Peter’s here, at last, in the place where his father grew up. The ornate woodwork, the wide floorboards. A staircase that belongs on the Titanic. The side of the house facing the shore is all glass, an unbroken, sweeping view of the lake and the long slope of the hill from the house down to the water. It jogs Peter’s memory of Sylvie’s wedding. He can still see the huge tent, the lanterns, the stage, the dance floor; the tables with white tablecloths he hid under and climbed on. The house was brighter then, in better shape, but he realizes that he never went inside, and neither, to his knowledge, did his father. They’re all standing in the kitchen now, drinking lemonade. Muriel uncorks a litany of irrelevant family news. One of the Andersons was promoted to a managerial position in an insurance company. Another went to Buenos Aires last month. Her drink warming in the glass while her free hand waves in the air. Sylvie punctuates Muriel’s speech with just the right interjections—how nice, I see, that’s wonderful—then gives Peter a sideways glance. She knows he can’t wait for it to be over. He’s grateful to her for not calling attention to it. But she gets Muriel to wrap up the visit fast, follows them out with a large bag of gardening tools slung across her back, a lopper in one hand, a pole pruner in the other.

  “You still do all that yourself?” Muriel says.

  “Of course,” Sylvie says.

  “You know, you can get someone to help you. It’s so much to maintain.”

  Peter is angry on Sylvie’s behalf. Muriel has started to annoy him. But Sylvie smiles instead, that same small, unreadable gesture.

  “I love it,” she says. “I really do.” And then, when Muriel’s already in the car, to Peter: “Come back sometime and visit, whenever you want.” She drops her guard all the way down for a second, not a trace of deception, of politicking. So unlike the rest of the family for a second, and Peter feels a little guilty for not wanting to be there. He doesn’t quite see that Sylvie’s way ahead of him, as she always will be. She knows he’s not ready to grasp all their family history. It’s a rocket that curves high in the air, then explodes into a million pieces. He’s not ready to see everything he’s involved in, by association, either. But that will change, she knows, and if she lives to see it, she might just tell him whatever he needs to know.

  “Well?” Rufus says, when Peter comes back. “How’d it go? How’d you like the family?” He feels bad for not being able to keep the sarcasm out of his voice when he knows his boy so well, knows when there’s too much kicking around in his son’s head to let him speak. They never get around to talking about it.

  Four times between 1986 and 1994, Peter leaves and comes back to his father. He stays away for longer and longer every time. First he just goes somewhere else in West Africa; that’s where he picks up his French. Then across Central Asia to China. To Indonesia. To Central America by ship; he disembarks in Colón, Panama, works his way across the isthmus. He hears the stories of the revolutions, the things people did to survive them, the things people are still doing to carry them out, even if they lost. Teaching math to kids in my village, a Guatemalan man with a quiet voice and hair slicked back beneath his hat says to him, this is my revolution. He writes a story about this man that ends up in a local activist English-language paper. Another story he writes, about a dispute on a finca in which unpaid workers take over a plantation and end up under siege from police, even as they win a court case, appears in a left-wing magazine in the United States. He meets other journalists working in the country, who see something in him and pass his name along; he’s the guy who’ll get the stories other people won’t get. That’s when he gets his first wire service pieces. He also gets a bit of the leftist politics that it’s hard to leave Latin America without. He feels an urge to do something, anything, to not walk through his entire life looking the other way. He’s tempted to stay; in a weird way, the tin shacks, the roads covered in mud and paper, the loud, rattling buses, are as close to home, to belonging somewhere, as he’s ever felt. But then he starts to worry about his father. He’s always worried about him, though Rufus never says anything to make him think anything’s wrong. I’m in Cairo now, Rufus says. What a marvelous place. But Peter doesn’t believe it, feels all the more right for not believing when it’s 1994, he’s gone back to his father, and they’re leaving again, only four months into their stay, in a car Peter still isn’t sure they own.

  In 1994, Rufus’s idea, like I said, is to drive from Cairo to Casablanca. There’s a David Lean movie in his head about it, Peter thinks, one where it’s their lone car racing on a highway through the Sahara, because his father still falls for the romanticism, even after he’s lived in Africa so long. But the highway itself is dusty and dry; the car’s filthy before they leave the city. There’s traffic. They almost can’t see out the windows. Then there are the long, long delays at the border between Egypt and Libya, Libya and Algeria, while the guards try to square Rufus and Peter’s obvious Americanness—maybe you can never lose it, no matter how hard you try—with the fact of their non-U.S. passports. Rufus loves it. He never quite says this to Peter, but he’s at his happiest like this, like it was when Peter was a kid. The two of them skating across the surface of the world, houses and trees and people standing with blue plastic buckets by the side of the road just blurs in their eyes. His son is all he needs, all he wants.

  They don’t know that guerrillas invaded the Atlas Asni hotel in Marrakech and shot two Spanish tourists dead, or that three young French Muslims from the slums of Paris will be charged for the attack. As a huge manhunt continues, the network they’re a part of will seem ever bigger, and more than thirty men will see the insides of courtrooms in Morocco and France, be jailed or slated to be executed. But Morocco points its finger at its neighbor, too, right from the start, accuses Algeria of funding the whole thing. Then the border’s really shut down, and reader, it will still be closed years later. So Rufus and Peter find the gate between Morocco and Algeria lowered. Two mustachioed border guards lounging outside the customs office, machine guns lying across their laps, looking at the dusty Peugeot as it drives up. They don’t even act like they’re going to stand up.

  “Turn around,” Peter says.

  “Why?” Rufus says. “We need to know what’s going on.”

  “Not from them.”

  Rufus nods, puts on the brakes, and backs up. The wide cafés along the road are all empty. Only two are still open, one playing faint raï from a tiny radio, which a man with a broom turns off as soon as he sees them.

  “The border is closed,” the man with the broom says to them, in French.

  “We don’t speak French,” Rufus says in Arabic. Peter doesn’t correct him.

  “The border is closed,” the man says again, in Arabic.

  “Why?”

  The man with the broom takes in Rufus’s accent, squints at them. It’s too much to explain.

  “The border is closed,” he says again. “Go back. And get out of this country.” He knows how hostile he sounds, but he’s trying to save them.

  They stand in the road for a minute, the car idling. Peter leans against the hood, stares at the metal. His father walks in front of the car, looks at the border again, back at the road they came down. Then turns back to his son, smiling.

  “Looks like Casablanca’s out,” he says. “It’s just us again.” And Peter takes a good, long look at his father. I can’t do this anymore, he thinks to himself. I just can’t.

  “No, Dad,” he says. “It’s just you.”

  Rufus’s smile leaves him.

  “I’m not going with you this time,” Peter says. �
�Or any time.”

  “Please,” Rufus says. “Just come.”

  “Why? For the next scheme that gets us tossed out of somewhere? The next plan that falls through?”

  “No,” Rufus says. “Because I’m your dad and you’re my boy.”

  “Tell me what the hell our lives mean, Dad,” Peter says. “Tell me why we keep running.”

  Rufus has been protecting his boy so much, doing everything in his power to make sure that no harm comes to him. And it goes beyond sheltering him from the dark heart of his family, way beyond the bits of instability in his own life that Peter could see. A few times over the years, when Rufus has known that trouble is coming for them—because a deal he’s tried to make goes bad, because they just aren’t where they’re supposed to be—Rufus has put his son to bed, then stayed awake in a darkened alley two blocks away with a gun across his lap, waiting for the intruders to come. A couple times, he’s been able to talk it out with the silhouettes who appear around the corner. Most times, though, it has ended with bullets. To their legs, their arms. A couple times, their chests, their heads, when he’s known there’s no other way out. It’s then that he’s understood his own father the most, loved him and hated him, almost as much as he hates himself and what he’s become. He’s promised himself he’ll spare Peter all of that, but it’s getting harder and harder to do that and still keep him close. He doesn’t know how.

  “You sound just like your mother,” Rufus says.

  “That’s just it, Dad,” Peter says. “I wouldn’t know.”

  The father is joking. The son isn’t. It’s just the first of a lot of things Peter says that day that he promised himself never to say. He knows he’s breaking that promise even at the time, feels like the thoughts he held in for years have turned into bullets. All through this last visit, all across the highways of North Africa, it’s like he’s been carrying a loaded gun around, pointed at the back of his father’s head, and now he’s taking every shot he has. Even if the first shot is fatal, he’ll pull the trigger until he’s empty. It’s rage, rage as he’s never felt in his life, and a part of him is shocked that he can be so cruel. But it doesn’t stop him from doing it. I wish you’d left me with her, he says. Sometimes I wish I’d never even met you.

  And he’s on the first plane out. Rufus takes him to the airport. Peter won’t let him get out of the car; he jumps out almost before it stops, grabs his bag from the backseat in one quick motion. His father waits by the curb, waves at his boy, but Peter doesn’t see it, because he doesn’t turn around, doesn’t look back. Just keeps walking until he’s in the building and sure his father’s gone.

  It’s August 1995. The street to Peter’s apartment in Granada is always dark. There’s a lamp mounted to the wall just two buildings down from his, but the bulb went out before Peter moved in and nobody’s replaced it. It’s quiet around here; the shouts from partyers and car horns feel far away. Peter’s less drunk than he was, but still more than he wants to be. He smacks his lips, still feels like he’s had a shot of Novocain. He fumbles with his keys for too long, drops them, fumbles again, and is in at last. He climbs the swaying stairs to the second-floor landing, screws with the keys again. In his apartment, the mattress on the floor is unmade but not messy. Neat stacks of papers line the wall. His suitcase is propped open, half out of the closet, the laundry in a canvas bag beside it. He can smell the dishes in the sink, flicks on the shuddering neon light in the kitchen. There are six new messages on his answering machine, piled on top of four old ones. The first three are from his editor. One’s from an English student of his. He likes her. She’s pretty and has a voice that turns upward in unexpected places, a sly intelligence and dark humor that’s so soaked into her Spanish that it seeps into her blocky but effective English. In the past few lessons, she’s managed to tell jokes, laugh at some of his. He tells her the old line that you know you’re fluent in a language when you can argue with a cabdriver. He would ask her out, except that she’s already engaged, to a man she’s been dating for almost four years. They met when she was twenty. Peter has never met his student’s fiancé, but admires him for knowing, even then, the kind of woman she was and would become; for knowing that he wouldn’t do any better. In the last year, Peter has met a few women who have struck him, within minutes, as amazing people. I’m engaged, they all say. Of course you are, Peter thinks.

  The next message has more static than usual. The voice is high and anxious. He doesn’t know who it is. “Petey,” it says. “It’s me, Curly. I’m in Cleveland. I don’t know why you went to Spain, but you shouldn’t have used your real name. They know where you are, now, and they’re coming after you. You got to call me if you get this, but get out of there first.” The next message: “Petey, you got to call me and let me know you’re all right, all right? It’s Curly.” The next: “For God’s sake, Petey, call.” The next three messages are just the sound of someone hanging up the phone, the final message with a small groan first. Giving up.

  All at once, Peter’s stone sober. Something rises in him, the kid who knows how to get through shantytowns, from the slums of Mombasa to the musseques of Luanda. His father, decades ago, walking out of Cleveland with nothing and vanishing, coming back only to vanish again. His aunt Sylvie, who knows everything. His grandfather, that survivor, that bastard, crawling up his spine. He turns out the lights in the kitchen, looks toward the stairs, wonders if he’s remembered to close the outside door. Decides it’s too late to check now.

  Getting ready to run comes easy to him; he’s helped his father do it so many times. He goes into the bathroom and kneels down to reach under the sink. Taped to the underside is an envelope, right where he left it. Inside is twelve thousand nine hundred and twenty-three dollars in a mixture of cash and traveler’s checks, the last thing Rufus gave him before Peter left him in Algeria. The rest of your money, Rufus said. Peter also has a small blue book with a list of phone numbers in it, his passport, a folding knife with a small wooden handle. He packs three changes of clothes into a backpack. Breaks up the money, hides most of it in the packed clothes, then sticks a thin stack of the large bills in the pocket of his T-shirt, under a light jacket. He looks around the dark apartment, can’t see anything well, but in his mind, the kitchen light is on and he’s calm, just looking over everything one last time to make sure he’s not leaving anything behind he can’t live without. He isn’t. Then he locks the door, wedges a chair under the doorknob, opens the window, and waits, sitting on the mattress, leaning against the wall. If he smoked, now would be the time for a cigarette.

  He wants to be wrong about all of this. He wants no one to be coming for him. He wants to laugh about it in the morning. God, could I have been any more paranoid? But at almost one in the morning, he hears someone jangling with the lock at the bottom of the stairs who doesn’t have a key for it. So I remembered to close the door after all, he thinks. He rises, goes to the open window while he hears footsteps coming up the stairs. He’s perched on the sill by the time the intruder reaches the landing. Peter gives the situation one last chance to make him feel like an asshole. The lock rattles, rattles. Something snaps off in the keyhole and there’s what sounds like a low, short curse, though Peter doesn’t understand the language. Then there’s a loud crack—whoever’s on the other side of the door has put his foot to it—but Peter doesn’t wait to see if it opens. The alley outside his window is a skinny thing, just wide enough for two bicycles. The roof of the next building is just a floor below him. He’s never made the jump, but he knows he can do it. He lands hard and rolls, then has the good sense to hide on the roof, behind a chimney, instead of trying to run. He could never clear the roof without being seen, but if he hides, it’ll be as if he did. He crouches again, shifts his legs to get comfortable. Figures he can wait all the next day.

  It’s a clean getaway, in other words, clean enough that the man looking for him, who’s met Peter’s cousin Petey and has a photograph just to mak
e sure, never sees he has the wrong Peter Henry Hightower. Peter makes only one mistake—a mistake his cousin would also have made—in not erasing his messages while he had the chance. Which is how Curly Potapenko is dead within forty-eight hours, and how the body of this story is split open to spill way, way out. It’s just like I said: This is about way more than Peter, Rufus’s son; way more than Petey, Muriel’s boy. This story is about everyone, and dear reader: There is blood everywhere.

  Chapter 2

  The southern highway out of Kiev shoots across open fields, vast expanses of land, but Petey can’t see any of it. All he sees is what’s in the headlights—blurry pavement, white dashes blinking past like a strobe light. He’s in the backseat of a car that isn’t his. The car’s driver is nervous. He thought he was just picking up a tourist, but Petey’s been getting twitchier and twitcher, and now the driver’s going faster and faster to end this trip as soon as he can. The taillights of cars and trucks flutter by as they pass. The driver must be doing a hundred. The car’s engine is screaming; it wasn’t built to go this fast, and it’s not going to last much longer if he keeps it up.