The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

  Petey keeps turning around, looking out the back windshield. Then faces forward again and points at a truck in front of them.

  “Pass him,” he says.

  “He’s going faster than we are,” the driver says.

  “I don’t care. Pass him,” Petey says. His Ukrainian is getting shaky. “You can’t let anyone catch us.”

  The car roars, and the driver prays a little, out loud. He’s doing a Hail Mary, but Peter doesn’t understand enough of the language to know that. A wave of adrenaline and fear sweeps him up, and his thoughts get irrational. The headlights make him feel like the target, like the people chasing him can see him, and he wonders if he can get the driver to turn them off. If he won’t, maybe he’ll climb out onto the hood of the car and smash them with his shoe. He looks ahead at the red lights in front of him and thinks of an accident he heard about that everyone knows was an assassination, a head-on collision, on a road just like this, that no one walked away from. He’s sure he can see those oncoming lights in the distance, also going a hundred miles. That approaching car’ll swerve through all the vehicles in front of them and collide grille to grille, a dead hit. He wonders what two hundred miles per hour’s worth of velocity feels like, just how much of each car will be destroyed, or how much will be left of anyone that’s identifiable. I’m so fucked, Petey thinks. I’ve fucked up everything. It’s the most self-aware thought he’s had in a long time. And then: I never should have come here. Never should have brought Curly here, or met Madalina. Never should have left Cleveland.

  Maybe you’re laughing that Petey thinks that. We haven’t talked about this yet, but we should: Cleveland doesn’t deserve its reputation. The endless jokes. The Mistake on the Lake. What’s the difference between Cleveland and the Titanic? Cleveland has a better orchestra. And everyone seems to know about the Cuyahoga River. It’s true, the river’s been on fire, more than once, the last time in 1969. You can find the pictures if you want. And yes, it’s true that the mayor’s own hair catches on fire in 1972; it’s for a ribbon-cutting ceremony, except that, because it’s for the Materials Engineering Congress, the ribbon is a strip of metal and the scissors are an acetylene torch. Sparks happen.

  And yes, there’s a lot about the city that’s tragic. It’s all there in print, in newspapers and history books, photographs that don’t hide the way the place has looked sometimes. All that industry and all the ruins it leaves behind, all the burn marks from the riots in the sixties. It’s all true, but it can’t tear down what it is to visit the place, to see it for yourself. Stand on the sharp edge of the river valley overlooking the Cuyahoga, somewhere near where Lorain Avenue leaps across the river valley over the Hope Memorial Bridge. Look at the statues on it, the guardians of traffic, they say they’re called. Then see how bridge after bridge jumps the same wide space over the river, highways, local roads, train tracks. Look at the streets twisting beneath the gargantuan pylons, the tiny brick buildings beneath them. Look at the river twisting, contorting, doubling back, all the way to the pale lake, a swarm of seagulls over the green water. And then take a look at the center of the city on the opposite shore, the huge stone wings of Tower City, the sleek glass office buildings beyond it, the curving federal courthouse. It’s a giant monument to commerce, all of it, because Cleveland’s a city built to make money and a city that money built, built and took apart, again and again. It’s America unvarnished, America without reserve. When the country rose, Cleveland flew. When it declined, Cleveland crashed. And it’s so easy to write it off now, to keep the jokes about the burning river coming, but somewhere in the years the city is staggering toward are the pieces of our future, too, whether we know it yet or not.

  Do you see what I’m saying? Capitalism’s an animal, and it eats places like Cleveland, or maybe you could say it tries to eat Cleveland, but then Cleveland kicks at the animal’s teeth until it gets spat out. The people who live there are meat, and they know it. And in 1989, they can almost smell it, the blood in the air that signals a change, though into what, they’ve stopped trying to guess. 25th Street, in the neighborhood of Ohio City, is rough then, even for the people in the neighborhood. They don’t go over there for anything after dark unless it’s trouble. And that’s just what Petey’s there for when he runs into Curly Potapenko for the first time on the corner of Bridge Avenue and West 28th Street. There they are, two white kids looking for drugs.

  Petey and Curly eye each other with suspicion; they’re not there to be friendly, and they can see the differences between them right from the start. Curly’s an Ohio City kid. He remembers watching the Muhammad Ali-Chuck Wepner fight in 1975 on TV, and afterward his cousins Big Joe and Mark pinning him to the floor and shaving his head, though not before Curly knees Big Joe in the balls. Big Joe writhes and screams, and Mark stands up, nodding, a look of approval on his face. Nice shot. He remembers watching Wepner take hit after hit, a guy from Bayonne, New Jersey, versus the heavyweight champion of the world. Wepner never stands a chance, but there he is, under the lights, and he lasts so long. That’s us, Curly thinks, even then. He’s one of us. He hears his parents talk about how Ohio City’s slipped, how it’s like living somewhere after a war, or an epidemic, where people abandon their houses or torch them for the insurance money, and then looters come to salvage the copper. But he doesn’t see any of that. To him, Ohio City—the neighborhood all around them, from the edge of the Cuyahoga past the West Side Market and down Lorain Avenue to the highway exit, its low clapboard houses and its tight alleyways—are his world. It’s where he’s from, and he’s proud of it, though not of what he’s done. Petey, from Edgewater Avenue near the bluffs overlooking Lake Erie, doesn’t know a damn thing about Ohio City. But each of them recognizes something of himself in the other, the same toughness and vulnerability. The marks of a strong, volatile family, of not quite finishing high school. The same sense of shame, that their parents raised them better than this, that their grandparents would be so disappointed; the same anger that they should be forced to rise to their families’ expectations. The unsettling feeling hasn’t kicked in yet that they’re still showing themselves to be more like their own people than they know. Curly is there to buy crack, gets a shake of the head from Petey. Come here. Petey’s buying cocaine.

  By then, Petey’s already what you’d call a small-time crook. That beautiful boy in the crisp suit at Sylvie’s wedding is gone, or hiding. Even now, Muriel’s not sure just when it happens. He’s so sweet for the first few years of his life that it takes her years to realize that what she thought was just a streak of mischief in him is a lot more than that. He gets suspended from school twice by the time he’s twelve, both times for stealing other kids’ stuff. Then he takes his social studies teacher’s wallet, spends all the money in it in an afternoon. The school calls a meeting. Muriel repays the teacher on the spot, tries to apologize. The teacher takes the money, isn’t interested in the apology. Don’t you know what your son is really like? she says. Don’t you see the things he does? Muriel doesn’t say anything, and when the teacher realizes Muriel has no idea what she’s talking about—always trying to see the good in everyone has made her maybe a little too blind to the bad—a look comes over her face, a mix of pity and scorn, that almost makes Muriel cry. The principal sees that and takes a more diplomatic angle. It’s the same message, just trying to avoid tears. Look, I’m not telling you what to do with your son, he says. But I’m not sure this school is the best place for him. I’m not sure we can give him what he needs.

  And what is it that you think he needs? Muriel says. That’s in 1980.

  In 1983, Petey’s fifteen and away at a boarding school outside of Cleveland that says it’s all about discipline. That’s where he teaches himself how to forge driver’s licenses in the school’s printmaking studio, first for his friends, just to see if they work, then for himself, when he knows better what not to do. He learns fast that, as far as his circle of friends is concerned, because they’re
all underage, it’s still the Prohibition era, and they’re willing to pay—a lot—for alcohol, and not very good alcohol. The difference between alcohol and small amounts of mild drugs, then harder drugs, isn’t important to him. He’s getting more self-aware, understands that he has a knack that goes beyond teenage bravado in cutting deals with drug traffickers: his willingness to meet them, in cars parked in empty parking lots, in the back rooms of clubs nobody goes in. He can talk straight about the big game he’s chasing, meaning the kind of customer he wants. He wants to hook some future bankers and insurance executives on some pretty expensive stuff, and he wants to be the guy they keep coming back to, because they trust him not to sell them out, turn them in just because the police want to know. He argues straight for a better cut of the deal when the plan starts to work. By the fall of 1985, he’s about seventeen and cocky, making a pretty nice chunk of change and still able to convince himself that he isn’t doing anyone any real harm. He’s using a bit himself, doesn’t see the damage, just the blurry memories of nights in Cleveland with pounding music and sweaty limbs in the clubs in the old warehouses, nights ending in spins and shouts on the cobbled streets. He thinks that by selling just to his friends—well, friends and friends of friends, and maybe a few people he doesn’t know at all—he’s insulating himself from the things he sees on the news. Then two of those friends flip their car going around Dead Man’s Curve right at the shore of the lake, the sharp bend in the interstate Clevelanders are supposed to know cold, cold enough to tell any out-of-towners they know who drive through the place on their way from Boston to Chicago to watch out. The friends are both good and high when they crash; for a few hours, neither of them knows how he ended up in the hospital, until they come down. Then they tell the doctors everything. The police, too. They point their broken fingers right at Petey Hightower, whom the police have had their eye on anyway. They’re not stupid, after all. They know his pedigree. They’ve got a hunch about the things his grandfather did. They’ve been watching the rest of the family, too, because something is just not adding up about them. And Petey’s not as smart as he thinks he is. Though some of the authorities are annoyed; they’ve been learning about Petey for a while because he seems like the kind of kid who might lead them into something bigger, something that a tenacious detective can build into a case that makes a career and puts a bunch of guys away in prison for a long time. But the accident and the outcry around it, because these are rich kids involved, you understand, forces the authorities’ hand. They don’t have enough to threaten Petey with to get information out of him. And they have to go to court with what they’ve got instead of what they think they could get if they just had the time to let it play out.

  At Petey’s trial, for possession of cocaine with intent to sell, the state’s lawyer lays out the best evidence he can, argues for the biggest sentence he can. He doesn’t say it but he means it: We put away black kids for this all the time, and it ruins their lives. Why should the rich white kids get off for doing the same thing? But the defense’s job is easier. Petey’s been careful about one thing—hiding his money—so the police don’t have serious evidence beyond circumstantial testimony that he deals. The defense doesn’t mind indulging in a little low-grade character assassination to undermine what Petey’s friends say about him, digging up people who say they saw the two kids in the crash buying cocaine from someone in the bathroom of a nightclub who wasn’t Petey, crack from someone in Tremont. The argument even taps into some high school gossip, suggesting that the kids in the crash were angry at Petey for stealing their girlfriends and wanted to get him out of the way. Why not frame him for some drug offenses? That part of the story doesn’t stick; it’s pretty implausible, isn’t it, reader? The judge isn’t impressed and tells the defense to calm down. Tells him that this is a courtroom, not a cafeteria. But the prosecution’s lack of hard evidence isn’t good enough for a big conviction. It’s also Petey’s first offense, and he’s a kid, not even eighteen. The judge reminds Petey of this and takes him down a peg—it’s clear he doesn’t like Petey very much—and sentences Petey to nine months of rehabilitation. The state’s lawyer gives the judge an accusatory look. You let him off easy. The judge pleads his case. I’m on your side. But this case isn’t the one we wanted in the first place.

  The conviction, though, is the end of Petey’s formal education. The school’s expelled him, and his family ships him off to a facility in Cincinnati, close enough that they can check on him whenever they want, too far away for him to bother trying to get out. There’s nowhere for him to go. Petey’s surprised by this; he’s still a teenager, and not big on the personal responsibility thing in any case. He assumes that since he’s going to rehab, his family will treat him a little bit like he’s sick, like he’s suffering from impulses beyond his control. Part of him wants to wail like a small child; he has the balls to feel like he’s the victim of something, even if it’s himself. It all just got away from him. In hindsight, he can see the moments it happened, the thousand ways he got sloppy. The way he started selling to people he didn’t know as well. The things he sometimes just left out for everyone to see. He wants to be able to convince his parents that maybe he’s a little crazy, that he needs a lot of help. Don’t you see? I don’t know what I’m doing. His mother could be convinced, he knows, if he could divide her from Terry, but he has no idea how to do that. And Terry’s having none of it, makes arguments impossible right from the start. In the car on the way home from the trial, Petey says one word—Dad—and the man cuts him off.

  “I can’t believe you think you have anything to say, Pete,” Terry says. “Why do you think I’d believe one word of it?”

  The words hurt, though it takes Petey months to settle on how to feel about it. One half wants to become a model of upright citizenship. Get a haircut, buy a new blazer and three ties. Finish school with the best grades, volunteer at nursing homes and soup kitchens. Go back to being the kind of kid who shares his dessert with a great uncle. The other half wants to tell his father and the rest of his family to go fuck themselves. The second half wins.

  He gets out of rehab at the end of 1986, just in time to turn eighteen and walk into his inheritance, the money from his grandfather Muriel set aside before he was born and gave to Henry to invest because she never imagined she’d have a son like Petey. He skulks around the house, not bothering to pretend to care about the possibility of finishing school or looking for a job. Terry doesn’t know what to do; being the kind of man he is, his love for his son pulls him in opposite directions. One wanting to hand him a job, give him something, anything to do. He could just call a friend for a position in a mailroom, on a construction site. Thanks. I owe you one. It’s still possible, Terry thinks, for a man to make himself. Eighty years ago, everyone did. Some of the rail barons around here didn’t have any schooling; they were just smart, creative, ruthless when they needed to be. They hopped from sales to real estate to railroads, put it all together to build the city as we know it while they laid out estates for themselves outside of it, mansions of plaster and dark woodwork, horse stables, wide fields, deluxe versions of the farms they’d bought up and converted to suburbs and apartment complexes. You could still do that around here, still do it anywhere. Once a man has the money and has made himself, the father thinks, no one cares what else he has. But Terry doesn’t want to hand Petey that kind of life. There are alarms in his head when he thinks of doing it, warning him that Petey would just squander it, squander whatever he has, and ruin Terry, too, if he were too involved. So Terry’s stuck, and it makes him irritable, because he’s not willing to face the guilt for having given up on his boy. He gets too impatient with Petey, too verbal about it, and at last there’s a fight that starts with screaming and moves to a broken window, a sign that maybe they should all back down, but they don’t. Instead, they have it all the way out.

  “You aren’t even my real father anyway,” Petey says, because he knows how much it hurts Terry when he sa
ys it. He’s expecting, then, the usual script. But I’ve raised you as if you were. How could you be so ungrateful when I love you so much. But this fight is different, because they’ve all reached the ends of their ropes.

  “You’re absolutely right,” Terry says. “I’m not. I’m Andrew and Julia’s father, and look at them. Such good kids. Those are mine. Your father ran off before you were born, and we haven’t heard from him since, have we? He doesn’t give a shit about you, just like you don’t seem to give a shit about us. You’re nothing like us, and do you know what? I’m glad. I’m glad, because it means I don’t have to live with the idea that the fuckup that you are is part of me.”

  Muriel cringes, like she’s been hit.

  “What did you say?” Petey says.

  Terry’s shocked. He can’t believe he let himself say something so hateful, and his shame smothers his anger.

  “I’m sorry, son,” he says.

  “Don’t use that word,” Petey says. “You don’t get to take back what you said.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  Now Petey’s just shaking his head. He wants to cry like a small boy, so that maybe his parents will comfort him, but he’s too proud to do it.

  “I’m never coming back here,” he says. “Never.” They watch him leave from the window, and something in the way the son’s walking makes Terry believe Petey was telling the truth.

  “Oh God,” Terry says. “What did I just do?”