The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  FOUR IN THE MORNING IN Anchorage, and George Benjamin Hill had not slept a wink, had not witnessed any fireworks, had been up all night trying to figure out what to do about the latest train wreck. A subcontractor had been caught trying to rush the project by falsifying X-ray inspections on the welds. Some he hadn’t even X-rayed at all, and others he’d certified despite deficiencies. Big Ben—as he was known by everyone on the project—had been called down to deal with the perpetrator and discuss options with a board consisting of Fred Madden, Chairman and CEO of Alyeska; Charlie Unger, Executive Vice President; and Harry Baker, a PR man. “No choice,” said Madden, stern faced, his mouth always twisted in a Texas frown. “Got to dig the whole pipe up.”

  Faces held in hands. Much sighing.

  “Do you have any idea,” asked Charlie, “how much that is going to cost?”

  “Fifty million was the estimate I got,” said Madden. “But that’s the least of our concerns. The deadline is what we need to worry about now. Only a year and a half to go. Big Ben. Baker. I’ve got enough shit to deal with. This faulty welds business is on you two assholes.”

  He’d left the building and walked down A Street to his hotel, avoiding the crowds gathered in anticipation of the fireworks. It was nine o’clock already; word of this most recent disaster in the pipeline project would no doubt hit the papers tomorrow morning, and Madden had already informed him of the press conference tentatively scheduled for three the following afternoon. There, the man they knew as Big Ben Hill would have to again do his best to patch the wounds that were always festering on the surface of this project, which was already 600 percent over budget and getting more out of control every day. If it wasn’t workers buried by avalanches, it was trucks sinking in muskeg; if it wasn’t people complaining about who they hired—not enough Indians, not enough Alaskans—it was people complaining they’d hired too many. And if it wasn’t state officials bitching about rumors of goldbricking, then it was the teamsters headed up by Randall J. Carr, demanding the most outrageous things Big Ben had ever heard of. And getting them!

  Big Ben had only ever been confronted by the legendary Randall J. Carr on one occasion, at a debate in Fairbanks two years ago regarding the clerical workers’ election for a bargaining representative and a place in one of the unions. Initially, CEO Madden had been scheduled to stand podium-to-podium with Carr, but he’d balked at the last minute, had asked Big Ben to take his place. Big Ben hadn’t been worried. Already in only five years of working in the oil industry, for Humble Oil, first as a refinery manager and then as PR director for the California branch of the company, he’d gone head-to-head with plenty of loudmouthed teamsters, had settled them down through the strength of his own personality. The idea of some document-waving crazy-faced Alaskan did not concern Big Ben. But this Carr was no half-assed amateur. A Los Angeleno by birth, he’d come north after the Second World War, had driven a truck and flown a plane. “I don’t know,” he’d said when they’d taken their positions at opposing podiums. “Seems to me like it’s hard to do collective bargaining when the employer doesn’t show up at the table. I know, Mr. Hill, that you consider yourself a reasonable representative. But could you, right now, even if you chose to, give these people what they want? Power’s like being a lady, Mr. Hill. If you have to tell them you are, you aren’t. Now all these people want is all any teamster and his family wants. They want a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work and freedom from foreseeable disaster.”

  It had ended in frustration, Big Ben frustrated because he knew he’d been outdueled. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he’d come into a room and not succeeded in becoming the one everybody agreed with. And it was frustrating for everyone else because, though they’d clearly won the debate, they knew nothing would come of it, because this nobody that Randall J. Carr had just finished dressing down in the VFW hall—“See what I’m saying, folks! You get ’em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow!”—this man from the Lower 48 with the stumped smile who was escorted down to a taxi afterward and driven off in silence was only a PR man. Not a decision maker.

  Big Ben walked the streets of Anchorage by night, listening to the first firecrackers and alert for sounds from dark corners. It was shady business, dealing with these teamsters up here. Six times in the past ten years, the federal government had had to indict the head of the Local 959 on charges such as extortion and embezzlement; each time evidence had been thrown out or disappeared or the case had dried up when a witness wound up in the hospital. Bodies had been found along the rivers from Eagle to Fort Yukon, half eaten by fish; others had been dropped all over the state, always made to look like an accident of the wilderness, the elements. Big Ben had adopted a manner of looking in all directions, even here in Anchorage, but especially in Fairbanks, where the cold drab streets seemed capable of hiding anything.

  Some of the locals, guys Big Ben had talked to when he’d first moved up here, businessmen who’d had to deal in the past with Randall J. Carr, told a story of how the famous union despot had gotten his way with just a piece of stationery. It seemed a young salesman was in town getting ready to pitch a new product at the gas refinery out Sitka way. This was back a few years ago now, maybe ’71 or ’72. The product was new to the market, the salesman an up-and-comer from Seattle, ready to take over the world and not afraid—or, in his naivete, not even aware—who his product might affect. He’d gotten two phone calls at his hotel in Juneau, neither of them very friendly, but it hadn’t made him worried. His company had set him up on the top floor looking down through the fog at the state capitol, a room that was an actual suite, a living room and kitchenette with a door leading into the bedroom, which is where he kept all his presentation materials, all rolled up in a tube and ready to be unfurled, ready to convince the people at the gas refinery that they were crazy to be paying a unionized group of workers a fat wage—$11.15 an hour plus $3.00 paid directly by the employer to the union to establish a pension fund—when they could eliminate 75 percent of their workforce merely by installing the computers and software this young man was peddling. The day of the scheduled meeting, the young man felt trepidation mixing with excitement. At breakfast, he’d seen the eyes upon him, had taken the elevator back up to his room next to a man in a suit with a black tie and sunglasses, who’d stood completely still and watched him get off and joined his hands in front of him as the door slid shut, though this was the top floor, and the man in the suit had ridden all the way up with him only to ride all the way back down. The young man stepped to the door of his suite, thinking: All I have to do is get my materials and get the hell out of here. Make my pitch, make the sale, then get a taxi to the airport and get the hell back to Seattle. But when he arrived at the door it was slightly ajar. He walked in to find the venetian blinds pulled, the whole room in darkness, a cool rain pattering on the balcony. At the foot of the door to the bedroom was a folded piece of stationery, as if a matron of the hotel had placed it there. The young man, shaking, went over to the piece of paper, picked it up, and read it:

  Open this door and you’re dead.

  That was the end of the sales trip. The young man had made his way back to Seattle, was fired from his job, and lived happily ever after. The folks at the gas refinery were not so pleased. They solicited another company, who recruited another salesman, whose remains were never found.

  This was all rumor, of course. And Big Ben would never have believed it, might have forgotten the story completely had he not been thinking of the press conference later that day, visualizing himself at a podium with a set of crosshairs trained on his forehead, if he’d not been reminded of the story by the slow elevator ride up to the seventh floor at six o’clock in the morning, having finally returned from his long walk along the dark streets of Anchorage. He was scared—had been scared for the last three years of his life, ever since they’d finally gotten the final clearance from Tricky Dick and set the project in motion. Before, despite all the words he’d spewe
d at his son, Jamie, despite all the salesmanship he’d heaped upon the boy in an attempt to get him to stick around Alaska and get rich off the largest domestic utilities project in history rather than marching off to the Far East to try to clean up the scraps of a war and maybe get killed in the process—despite all of this, Big Ben had known from the start that this was not the place for his family. Annabelle could barely bring herself to go outdoors. If it wasn’t too cold then the mosquitoes feasted upon her, a visible cloud forming around her body as they swept in and attacked. Big Ben had watched her slowly lose a part of herself throughout the long, cold winters, when an almost psychotic cabin fever set in. The kids were no better. They’d been smiling, happy Californians when they’d arrived here seven years ago, nine-year-olds ready for an adventure in the wild that had turned into a dismal existence in the bleak isolation of the interior. Seven years of their lives—it was not an unendurable period, but for children their age, it was enough. He’d seen the way this place with its frontier ways and misfit ideology had affected them, and yet the long exhausting hours had left him with no time to do anything about it. He’d known from the start that he’d plunked himself down in a place that he would never understand, that was as different from California as you could get, a place more like the Oklahoma of his childhood that he barely allowed himself to remember, where the world could dawn one day intent on making a dust storm that would uproot your life. He’d felt uncomfortable with the eyes of these people, the way even the most casual conversation was always steeped in the knowledge that you were from the Lower 48, that you would without doubt try to deal with uniquely Alaskan problems in a way that didn’t work up here, that you’d come in with a nice suit or a flashy outfit and soon enough be frozen solid against a tree with a black bear chewing out your innards if you didn’t learn the ropes quick.

  He’d felt all of this distrust, had known that it would take every ounce of his ability to make acquaintances, and that even if he were successful, there would be someone else he’d pissed off. Still, he might never have made the final connection between his own life and that young salesman’s story were it not for the dim corridor leading back to his hotel room, the faint light spilling from the sparingly placed wall sconces creating pockets of nearly complete darkness amidst halos of visibility, through which he stepped to the end of the hallway, where—unbelievable! No! It couldn’t be! He almost laughed when he first saw it, when he still thought it was just a trick of his eyes. Then he started trembling so hard he could barely move.

  On the crimson paisley carpeting of the hallway in front of his room, on the early morning of the day he was scheduled to make a press conference regarding the future of the Alaskan pipeline operation, he found a little piece of stationery, folded in half.

  He didn’t read it. Couldn’t bring himself to look at it. Didn’t want to know what brutal message they’d crafted. Instead he marched back downstairs, found a couch in a hallway beside the emergency exit, and holed up for four hours. He awoke startled, a pay phone ringing. He thought he was back in Los Angeles, at Union Station, on the morning after he and his father had arrived at eleven at night and slept on benches with the Packard parked outside because they couldn’t afford a hotel room, preparing for what his father had called a long day. Our first in the city, he’d said.

  It was already noon, the press conference scheduled to go off in three hours. He was supposed to be there by now, so they could all meet and discuss what would be said. What angle they’d take. But instead of heading right over, Big Ben borrowed a razor from the front desk, shaved and fixed his hair in the bathroom mirror, walked two blocks up the hill to a men’s shop and purchased a two-hundred-dollar suit. If I’m going to be assassinated today, he said to himself, I’m at least going to look good doing it. If they’ve decided I’m important enough to kill, then God damn it, I’m not going to let them down. Outside, dressed up and sweating, he looked at himself in a glass storefront, superimposed over a sign reading WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO NON-ALASKANS! He looked good. Much younger than forty-five, which was what he would turn that fall, which was already winter here in the forty-ninth state.

  At the scene of the press conference, they straightened his tie, polished his face, made him appear bright and unconcerned with this minor inconvenience regarding the faulty welds. These sorts of things happened all the time, he told the audience, looking out at flashbulbs and waiting for the one that would end his life. So certain was he of his pending execution that he grew impassioned at places he should have remained solemn, chuckled at moments of gravity. He looked out and realized that half the crowd members were pensive, the other half openmouthed. Somehow, he came across with just the right amount of savoir faire, just the right amount of reverence, his cadences and responses to the questions just measured enough that he was able to convince himself that he had saved his own life, that he had looked down the barrel of a rifle with a telescopic lens into the heart of a man being paid to kill him, and had touched some sacred place that had made him lower the weapon and join the applause. The response of his superiors was different: rolled lips and nods. Madden displayed his ever stoic nature, and it was Charlie Unger who finally took Big Ben aside, put one hand on his back. “We sure appreciate it, Ben. We sure do. Especially with what you’ve got goin’ on back in Fairbanks.”

  Big Ben shook his head, dumbfounded.

  “We understand you need to get going,” said Madden. “We’ve got a Cessna ready to take you out of Merrill Field if you want. Probably be quicker anyway.”

  Were they firing him? Was it that bad? Had he overestimated his delivery and the reaction of the crowd? But he couldn’t ask them. Big Ben had never been able to admit to a lack of understanding, had never been one to say he didn’t know precisely what was going on. All the way home on the Cessna, three hours in a noisy plane flying low over the Alaska Range, he wondered what it could be that they were talking about. He tried to piece together what it might have to do with the assassination attempt. He wondered what had been written on that piece of stationery.

  ANNABELLE SANCHEZ-HILL HAD BEEN NOT quite asleep when she heard the rustling outside the log cabin she abhorred in the town she hated like she’d never hated anything in her entire life. This was a state of consciousness she’d come to know well and practically look forward to—a state of mental exhaustion that nonetheless would never allow her to sleep, because her days were filled with such lethargy that her body was never ready to shut down. She’d stopped eating altogether, blamed it on an utter lack of activity, an inability to find anything worth spending calories on. And when she tried to actively participate in something, her state of malnutrition would leave her spent in only minutes. In California, she’d been a cheerful, energetic woman, a former college soccer player, petite but strong and thick-legged. In Alaska, she was a face behind the soiled glass of a frosted window in a cabin, so lonely she felt barely human, felt she should grow a beard and hair on her back, long claws for protection.

  For seven years now she’d lived here in Fairbanks—seven years of her one and only life spent barely making it through each time-consuming day. She couldn’t recall whether it was night or day when they’d first touched down at the airport in Fairbanks, because it had seemed to her that first month that it was always dark. They’d arrived in early winter, and even the vision of the aurora borealis, of which everyone back home had made her promise she’d send pictures, was not enough to startle her toward enthusiasm. She’d felt that first blast of arctic air when she got off the plane and prepared to settle in, to hole up in a protected place and not come out until he was ready to leave, or at least until spring. But spring was fleeting, summer nonexistent. She’d tried to spend an afternoon on the hammock in the back yard the first summer and ended up with more mosquito bites than the twins could keep track of—though they’d tried, flipping her over and running their little hands over her body, so bored they were ready to make a game of anything: “One hundred nine! One hund
red ten!” Their ability to adapt had made her feel even worse every time she complained, or, more often, when they’d ask her what was wrong and she’d say, “Nothing,” unable to describe what she was feeling and able to tell from their sad faces they knew she was lying. The only person to whom she’d been able to talk about it in the beginning was Jamie. He was obnoxious, quick to anger, and sometimes casually cruel to the twins, kind to them one moment and then aloof the next. But for some reason he’d been able to serve as an audience to her grief. She’d found it possible, on rare nights they spent alone together at the cabin, to sit down with him at the kitchen table—where they never ate as a family, only argued—to spill her guts about anything, and the teenager would listen, would do his best to make her feel better.

  That was why she’d kept his secret. He’d told her his plans to leave long before he’d done so, had asked her not to let anyone know, especially his father, and though Jamie himself had spilled the beans to nearly everyone involved, Annabelle had understood the importance of keeping his father in the dark. She still remembered her husband’s reaction when he’d finally learned that, despite everything Ben had told him, all the advice he’d given the boy and strings he’d pulled to assure him a lucrative position despite his utter lack of experience, Jamie was denying the opportunity and taking a bus to Anchorage to sign up for the Marines. Annabelle had seen him hurt before, had seen him devastated when GB had stayed behind, and though it had only lasted a single evening before the steadiness had returned to his eyes—an evening spent out in the field beyond the cabin in the dark, smoking and pacing—she’d in time come to believe that it had changed him. She’d waited in the kitchen for him to come back in—this man who’d ruined everything good about her life, who’d made her come up here to Alaska with him, claiming it would be only six months, maybe a year, only to have it drag on for seven—had waited for hours, only to be shrugged off as he made his way up the stairs toward the boy’s bedroom, where he gathered everything to be burned. And it was then—her only confidante off to the Marines, her husband blaming her for his loss—that she’d stopped eating. When she’d sunk to a hundred and five pounds, he’d decided that something had to be done. He’d pulled her out of bed and walked with her down to the car, past the front field where the twins were digging for gold nuggets. “C’mon,” he’d said to them. “Field trip. We’re taking your mother to the hospital.”