The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  “I promise you, Jamie,” their father said. “They’re going to build that pipeline. Close to a billion dollars, they’re saying it’s going to cost. But once the tankers start cruising out of Valdez”—he pronounced it Val-deez, like a local, like he’d been born and would die here—“we’re going to be raking in profits like you read about. The Arabs can twist the screws all they want then because the United States of America will be a self-supporting nation. We won’t need their Middle Eastern oil. We’ll have Alaskan oil.”

  “Three years,” Jamie said. “Three years you’ve been selling me this crap. Three years since they struck oil and it’s still sitting there, untapped. Three years and they haven’t even so much as ordered the pipe. Haven’t moved a single shovelful of land for the pump at Valdez. What makes you think I can wait for all this to get done?”

  “What else are you gonna do?” asked their father, sighting with the rifle barrel over the back field. “Hunt caribou?”

  But Jamie had had another plan, a plan he’d told the twins about one night in May of the following year. In the winter, the cold and the darkness made them a wild-eyed bunch; they’d stayed away from each other, had spent the long nights in separate rooms, which was difficult in the log house, kitchen and living room separating the bedrooms on the first floor, the little attic under the eaves where Jamie slept always quiet with his absence or, when he returned, his deep soundless sleep of adolescence. The twins tried to make do, tried to make snowmen, but in February the thermometer did not rise above zero for the entire month, and they’d watched the frost collect on the glass of their bedroom window, secure in the relative warmth, though they could still see their breath and wore four layers under their parkas. The breakup had come in May, and with it a new flourishing—the first arrivals at the airports and on the highways were like the circus rolling into town, freaks from Texas and California in cowboy hats and fur coats, wide sunglasses that hid half their face and long hair either parted in the middle or stacked up in afros. They waited in lines that stretched three blocks from the hiring hall, only to find that preference would be given to those who’d lived in Alaska for over a year. In November, while the twins had been steeling themselves for yet another winter, President Nixon had signed his approval to the bill. In January, when the world was locked in a bitter freeze so deep even the stars seemed frozen in place, Interior Secretary Morton had at last issued the long-awaited construction permit. Word had spread quickly and, by spring, the highways from the Yukon and north from Anchorage had brought them by the thousands. It was during these days that Max and Maddie had begun their long afternoon sojourns downtown, into the heart of the transforming city, their father off at work in one of the makeshift office buildings or down in Anchorage, where he was flown twice a week in a single-engine Cessna, the head of public relations for such a large project always on the move, always with a group of investors or union officials or with a group of Indian kids in a nowhere school house, smiling and reading picture books. The twins knew their mother had resigned herself to this existence, locked in a log cabin nine months out of the year, swatting mosquitoes the size of rats and mindful of grizzly bears when she came out to the yard full of purple wildflowers, in a bikini, to get some sun on the rare days when it was warm enough and not raining in the summer. It was on one of these days—June, the temperature in the mid-sixties, which felt tropical up here, the fireweed in bloom and the sun high over the main street of Fairbanks, with its false fronts hiding square concrete buildings, a weird assortment of freaks waiting in line for employment, smoking cigarettes on benches along Two Street, the whole place looking like the set, full of extras, of a Hollywood movie—that Maddie had leaned toward her twin brother and whispered something to him, and their dark faces, eyes like moles’ after the long winter in the cabin, had peered across the street to find their older half brother, Jamie, engaging in a shady deal in one of the alleys between the hot spots.

  He was selling fake ID cards. He’d explained it to them later, after he’d led them on a wild goose chase along First Avenue, toward a place where the river ducked under a narrow bridge for foot traffic. He’d leapt up just as they’d come over the bridge, where the last remnants of the snow still lingered. “A hundred bucks,” he said to them. “Each. I’ve already sold twenty today.”

  That was his plan to get out. He already had the money for the bus ticket and—since he was still only seventeen—one of these picture-less state-issued IDs he was hawking (picked up on the sly from sources he didn’t care to mention) would be used by none other than yours truly. “Only I’m not gonna use it at some fool employment office to get a job welding pipes in sixty-degree-below-zero weather. I’m going straight down to Anchorage and signing up for the Marines. Any luck I’ll be overseas in two months.”

  The war in Vietnam was yet another mysterious component in their lives that the twins did not understand. “I thought it was over,” said Max, while Maddie remained silent, dark eyes set, chin like a chisel.

  “Hell no, it ain’t over,” said Jamie, stood up in the slushy land under the bridge, and handed them some cash from a thick fold concealed in his shirt pocket. “Now scram,” he said. “Get yourselves something to eat. I got work to do.”

  Only two months later, he’d told their father of his plan, had told him while they’d stood out in the yard in the echoing reverb of a gunshot, the rifle lowered in Jamie’s arms while his father told him he had to be joking, asked him what the hell he was thinking and pursued him into the house when Jamie shook his head and turned away, their father saying, “Don’t you dare walk away from me, boy!” which had induced a verbal altercation of new and epic proportions in the kitchen, curses and recriminations that had brought even Annabelle out of her dark hovel in the back bedroom on the first floor where she slept half the day, coming out only long enough to take bubble baths and then stand by solemnly, barefoot and wild-haired in a sleeping gown, rubbing herself down with Neosporin while the boy and his father’s voices raised in the kitchen, the boy with the bus ticket sticking out of the front pocket of his favorite flannel shirt—the same pocket where Maddie and Max knew he kept all those hundreds he’d use to get to Anchorage. It was now late June—and though the big work on the pipeline would not begin in earnest until the following spring, the work in Valdez had started, and every day in the streets and in the bars there was the murmur of anticipation, the shady dialogue of men claiming it would start any day now, the busses up to the camps in the north with the funny names—Dead Horse, Cold Foot, Old Man—for the heavy duty of laying pipe, the work that called for 7-12s (seven days a week, twelve hours a day, every third week off) but that paid as much as fifteen dollars an hour with time and a half for overtime and double time for holidays. Their father said Jamie was a fool to be giving this up. The military? The military didn’t pay! Private enterprise paid! “They want that pipe done in three years and are willing to pay whatever it takes to make it happen. In three years you could make two hundred thousand dollars, which you can invest and then figure out what you really want to do with yourself.” But Jamie would not hear it. The last thing he’d said, before marching out the door without even saying goodbye to the twins, who were out in their beds in the covered screened-in porch, was that he would never live in a world of his father’s making. That if it drove him crazy or killed him, he’d resist it always. Then he’d slammed the door, the only person in Alaska who was heading away from Fairbanks, hell-bent on a far-off war whose end everyone had been anticipating but him.

  Back in the cabin, Annabelle put her arms around her husband, but he nudged her away. She was getting Neosporin all over him. He came to the door of the room where the twins now pretended to sleep, took one step in as if contemplating soothing his loss with their proximity. Then he pirouetted and took off out the door into the yard for a cigarette, a faint red twinkling that the twins watched float in the darkness. “He’ll be back,” they heard their father whispering beneath a new moon and the towering w
oods. But he was wrong.

  WHEN THE FIREWORKS WERE OVER, Maddie heaved the half-emptied bucket of chicken out into the river, and they watched it float then sink while the swans clambered over it. They watched the birds come flying in from wherever they’d been hiding, as if they’d smelled the chicken from all the way up where the hills rose to the north on either side of the river, the land rolling on in a tundra of permafrost, bog, and black spruce. “Where to now?” Max said, and Maddie, wiping her lips with a damp napkin, said, “Back to the Flame.”

  They smoked cigarettes on the way, flicking ashes along the filthy streets. Max didn’t know why his sister was so obsessed with the Flame Lounge, why she seemed so captivated by the dancers who stalked out onto the stage naked as the day they were born and then lounged on the couches in the corners until one of the rugged men sauntered over and grabbed an arm. There was something reckless in Maddie, a constant desire to court trouble that Max did not quite understand, though he did admire it. She had not been like this in California, but then nothing had been the same in California, where they had spent their days roaming the halfhearted dog park or, at their most adventurous, sneaking into the night-shrouded construction site of the shopping mall down the street from their house. Here in Alaska, even in the endless daylight there was always a mysterious dark energy to be explored, and Maddie seemed to thrive on it, was always looking for a thrill.

  It was no longer strange to the twins that they had become regular visitors to the Flame Lounge, despite the fact that they were only sixteen. It was because of Jamie that they had initially been introduced to this downtown area with its all-night bars full of racket and ruckus. He had often regaled the twins with stories of his adventures while the three of them sat in the screened-in porch, and in the months after he’d told them of his plans to leave with his money earned from the fake ID cards, he had on a few occasions let the twins walk downtown with him, where he would buy them something to eat. One night, after they’d eaten, Jamie had stood up, his eyes flashing strangely behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “I need a drink,” he said. “C’mon.” And then he’d led them down noisy Two Street in the ten o’clock dusk and stopped in front of the door to the Flame Lounge, beyond which the twins could hear the shouts and country western music blaring.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Maddie had said. “Max and I can’t go in there. We’re not old enough.” But Jamie had scoffed, had told them no one here gave a crap how old they were. “Besides, I’m not gonna let you drink anything.” It had turned out he was right. The bartender on duty had been happy to allow the kids to sit behind the bar while Jamie sat and sipped beers. They were not even the only kids in there; others could be seen crouched in the darkness, little urchins looking shocked while their pipeline fathers stood at the tables chugging beers and occasionally buying them a Coke. Jamie had taken them again the following night, and that was how Maddie and Max’s presence around the downtown area had come to be accepted, first showing up with Jamie and then, later, by themselves. “Don’t ever tell them who our father is,” Jamie had warned the twins on several occasions. “In this town, it’s better to stay anonymous.” And the twins had listened, would hide in the corners and observe as the country western bands played and the drunk pipeliners boasted of their exploits while stacking shot glasses into towers, watched as the welders wiped the bars with hundred-dollar bills because they could and then carelessly stuck them back in their pockets, watched as the intoxicated men staggered off to the juke box or over to the couches lined along the far wall where the working girls sat ready to be taken upstairs.

  Over time, Maddie had developed a relationship with one of the female bartenders, and when she was in charge the twins would help run drinks for a share of the take, would step around the bar taking cigarette orders for a small fee, which the arrogant quasi-rich welders would happily contribute. Maddie had also made friends with several of the working girls, some of them Athapaskan women with long black hair hanging to their hips, some of them young Texas girls dressed in boots up to their knees and little else. But the one Maddie had become closest to over the years was Jasmine, a black woman from Chicago who’d arrived in Fairbanks via Las Vegas the same summer Jamie skipped town, who’d watched from a corner of the bar when Maddie had made a risky dash for a hundred-dollar bill that had fallen from the billfold of a careless pipeliner. Jasmine had stepped across the floor while Maddie ducked among the stools and under tables, six-foot-tall stride making up ground, and Max had watched as she’d driven the high heel of one boot into Maddie’s hand just as she’d reached out to grasp the bill. He’d watched Jasmine’s slender fingers pick up the hundred, hand it back to the man who’d dropped it, a sharp-featured welder named Lyle Greeley who’d been showing off his new paycheck all night, and then march off with him toward the rooms at the back. Later, outside, while Maddie counted her take from the peanut-shell-strewn floor in the shade of a dumpster, Max had heard the click of heels again, had seen the tall woman standing in front of them, wrapped in a mink coat. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doin’ in there, little girl?” she said.

  “Fuck you,” Maddie said. “Mind your own fucking business.”

  The money was gone from her hand. Jasmine had snatched it away. And though Maddie fought to get it back, Jasmine dodged her attempts, jerking the money away from her again and again, back and forth. “Two fifty,” she said, and smirked. “Not bad. Here’s the hundred that stupid cowboy dropped on the floor.” She’d added the bill to Maddie’s take and tossed it back down at her feet. “I gotta tell you though, you keep hangin’ around a place like this, you’re gonna be sorry.”

  Maddie smiled her sweetest smile and raised her middle finger, its nail painted a deep rich red. “C’mon, Max.” And she took him by the arm and pulled him away.

  Max had thought that would be the end of it, but Jasmine seemed to have seen something she liked in Maddie. She would come over to talk to the twins occasionally when she saw them doing cigarette runs, would try to get them to tell her who their father was. “Is it one of these asshole pipeliners? I already asked all the other girls and no one knows. You kids should be home getting ready for school, not hanging around a dump like this.” Yet she would smile and ask Maddie how much money she’d made that night, would turn to Max and say, “What’s cookin’, good lookin’?”

  “She’s just messing with you,” Maddie told him, but Max refused to believe it. He had already begun dreaming of ways he might persuade Jasmine to marry him, of ways he could purchase her a ring and convince her to settle down. He knew with some part of his mind that this was ridiculous, that she was just being nice and trying to look out for them, but he couldn’t help it. He would think about her constantly, would toss restlessly in his bed while Maddie slept her deep sleep next to him, and one night, he had told Jasmine he wanted to show her something. He had asked her to follow him upstairs, and when they’d gotten to one of the private rooms, Jasmine saying, “Whatever this is, it better be good,” he had showed her the money he had brought with him, had asked her if she’d do with him what she did with the other men. Jasmine had looked at him for so long, her face grown serious, that he thought maybe she didn’t understand what he meant. Then she turned away and shook her head, looked back at him and smiled. “You’re too young,” she said.

  “I’m sixteen!” Max had said, desperate. He had reached for her, but Jasmine held out her arm to stop him. “Like I said. The answer is no. You’re too young.” And then she had gone back downstairs, where Lyle Greeley was always waiting every third Friday with his paycheck held out in front of her and a fat cigar clenched between his teeth.

  Max Hill hated Lyle Greeley. That night, he had stepped outside and sat down in the dirty alley against the brick wall of the Flame. Had heard the sounds coming from the window above and had known what they were. But that wasn’t the only reason he hated Lyle Greeley. The real reason was what had happened just a couple weeks prior to the nigh
t they’d sat out on the river with the bucket of chicken, when he and his sister had exited the Flame into the eerie purple light of the summer solstice to find Lyle Greeley urinating against the concrete wall of the building, skipping the long bathroom line often a dozen deep. He’d seen them and didn’t stop, just began speaking with his back still turned to them. “There they are,” he’d said. “The famous twins.” He’d zipped up, turned to them and stepped in a wide half circle toward the back door, and the twins had circled against him, as if revolving around the same empty point in the cracked concrete. “I heard plenty ’bout you two. I’ve heard you do a lot more around here than just bring drinks and go on cigarette runs. Creepin’ around under the tables stealin’ folks’ hard-earned dollars and what not.”

  He paused at the back door, adjusted his wide-brimmed hat, took in each of them in turn. “I been keepin’ an eye on you two. I don’t like the way you talk to Jasmine. Make her feel like something she’s not. And you … you try to hide it, but I know exactly what’s going through that pretty little head of yours.” Maddie flicked her cigarette at him, and he deflected it easily. “I’m more than happy to do the initiating. I’ll pay you and everything. Pay you as much as I pay Jasmine. Whenever you’re ready, you just let me know,” he’d said, turning and making his way back inside. “I’m prepared to make you the richest little girl in Alaska.”

  Maddie had turned away, her face without expression, as if hiding something. “Let’s go, Max.” The anger that had been boiling up in her brother’s blood—her older brother, for he was all of nine minutes longer to the world—the desire to see Lyle Greeley’s face and that ridiculous cowboy hat smashed, had turned into an energetic pride in his sister. Even if she’d not spit in his face or called him a name, and even if he’d noticed her more pronounced silence over the weeks that had passed, the looks Lyle Greeley still angled her way and the broken, almost coy way she refused to return them—even if he could sense a new distance between them as he sat watching her watch the fireworks, watching her hurl the bucket of chicken out into the river for the half-starving Alaskan birds—even if he understood that something about his sister had changed, Max Hill chose not to accept it, chose to believe that this young woman sitting next to him was still the girl he’d always known.