The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  He counted off two twenties, walked back out to the car and pumped the gas, his eyes and mind still focused on his sister. She had talked all the way through Nevada, beginning with the story of this weekend past, getting distracted, half intoxicated still and not always making sense, but always making enough, coming around slowly—and, it seemed to him, reluctantly—to the story of the surprise visit from their mother, during whose telling she had seemed at intervals to attempt to make eye contact with him, gauging his response. And so perhaps—he thought now, watching her sleep or pretend to while the old dials on the pump turned—he should have waited before attempting to bring her around to what he’d wanted to talk about, should have hesitated before bringing up the letters sent to the post office box he’d hoped would still belong to her and the message contained in them, the message she herself had addressed in her replies (though she seemed unwilling to acknowledge them now). Perhaps he should have waited, for it was when he’d pushed too far that she had drifted back into herself, had disengaged the instant his voice had become aggressive. And now he wanted those early moments back, wished she would just sit up and start talking again, so he could brush the dust off and retrieve from wherever she was hiding the girl she’d been and that he’d hoped to find, a lesson he would have to remember: that he had to be patient, that he had to allow her to come around to it at her own pace.

  His change was resting on the glass countertop adorned with lottery advertisements when he went back inside to retrieve it, the two men having already forgotten him, engaged in distracted conversation. He paused at the chime of the door, looked out across the dark span of the lot toward the Buick, where it seemed he’d seen a shadow of movement, a shifting in the passenger seat. Was it Maddie? Turning in her seat to watch him, then ducking back against the window when he noticed? And what did it mean, this constraint of hers? Was it fear? Indecision? Or was it the beginning of something else—something like assent—that made her hide from him like this, stealing glimpses only when she thought they’d go undiscovered?

  He wasn’t back on the highway for more than thirty seconds when he saw a sign: WELCOME TO COLORADO. And then another: GRAND JUNCTION, 25 MILES. His sister was a silent form next to him again. She could sleep or fake it all she wanted. He knew it was in there, the anger he had felt in her letters and heard in her voice as she’d staggered off the path of the narrative he’d wanted her to pursue, had staggered into the delaying stories of all these years past, stories that had run her down and made her sleep, stories that he knew were a part of his letting her get there on her own. And if it meant having to listen to her recapitulate these twenty-four years in Vegas, if it meant having to suspend his own resentments in order to allow her to reconnect with hers, then that was what he had to do. The truth was that he had some difficult things to tell her, too. And that the telling could not come until he was certain—was completely certain—that she was with him. And so he watched her, waited, could feel the rightness of it all beginning to settle in with the comfort of the empty road after midnight, the blackened wall of night above the highway, just him and the wheel and the white and yellow lines leading them on through the harsh backdrop of the high plains. Grand Junction, 25 Miles. And then, Denver.

  In Denver, it would begin.

  Thursday

  JAMIE DIDN’T READ ROAD SIGNS, could sit for an hour with the atlas in his lap and still not know what he was looking at, the road for him an unknowable commodity like fate. He was never the wiser when GB took the detour outside Toledo, exiting the Ohio Turnpike with daylight dissolving beyond the wide, fenced-in fields, mist spanning a gray river and night coming on as they crossed the Michigan border. It was less than an hour out of the way, the town named as their next stop, and though he had never been there, GB could already feel his anticipation building, his anxiety thickening like a stench. Three days with his brother had put him on edge, had made him desperate for another voice, another sound besides the blustery wind that blew insistently between them in the front seat of the Stingray, the dog dozing on his brother’s lap, the sun lowering on another day that would have been breathtaking had it not been so dictated by road signs and traffic, so dimmed by aftermath.

  They’d made it out of the city just in time, had been right on the other side of the George Washington Bridge when it happened, headed west when everyone else was headed east along crowded interstates through a vision of swamps and refineries, dead factories in the ashy valleys of steel. They’d pulled off at a mountain rest stop from six lanes devoid of traffic, had returned ten minutes later to find Interstate 80 a parking lot, the mass exodus of the largest city in the country having caught up with them. The following hours had been an apocalyptic period complete with cars abandoned on shoulders with hazard lights flashing and no one inside, on and off ramps clogged and backed up a hundred yards with otherwise-conservative-looking men straddling guardrails holding signs reading THE END IS HERE, nothing to do but squeeze along the breakdown lane toward another rest stop where Jamie had remained in the passenger seat, sweating, his hair wild from their driving with the top down, dressed still in his gray Columbia sweatshirt and sweatpants with the long trench coat on top while GB in his baseball uniform paced the lot and wooded embankments with the dog on his leash, tried to reconcile exactly what it was they were supposed to be doing.

  Jamie was philosophical, deemed it all an appropriate metaphor, made GB pull into the drive-thru so he could order another orange soda. Lee Harvey Oswald had been seen in a bar the night before his big afternoon, talking unintelligibly of patricide. “Hey, why don’t you show me your gun?” he said again to GB—who’d told him repeatedly that he didn’t have one. “I can see it right there under your shirt. Don’t you think for a minute I don’t understand what you’re up to. There are several extremely convenient coincidences taking place here.” In the middle of the road, a man stood shouting into a cellphone; the siren of a police cruiser blared from somewhere behind them, stuck in the traffic and trying to push forward. “Only thing I haven’t figured out yet,” Jamie said, “is who you’re working for.”

  He didn’t actually sleep, GB had learned. When the daylight had at last crept behind the wild ridges that first night—headlights coming on in the shaded valleys along which they still moved at speeds below thirty—Jamie had closed his eyes sitting upright and drifted off for brief stretches, his arms changing positions, one leg crossing over the other, then lowering to the ground while the second leg came up to reverse the posture. He’d spend twenty minutes at a time in this state of limited consciousness, awake but not quite, and then speak out of nowhere the continuation of a conversation long since left behind—in some cases, a conversation GB did not recall at all. Throughout the following day, in the manic intervals between his restless slumbers as they’d crept across the Poconos, the narrow highway carved among the sheer hills with CAUTION: FALLING ROCK signs positioned at the base of steep cliffs, trekking then across the sparsely inhabited counties of north-central Pennsylvania, he’d received from his brother the long list of things they were not to come near—not in these troubled times when the Feds would be at their most guarded. Metal detectors and radios and microwaves, cell phones and anything that could be monitored, those big blue mailboxes on street corners, sewer grates. Anything that was in any way connected to some larger network or scheme was off limits for Jamie, had been—according to him—ever since he’d gotten out of the military. At the motel in a town called Clearfield, in a room with yellow wallpaper and green carpet and an old RCA with rabbit ears that received no cable, only the networks, GB had stared at the staticky images while Jamie stood at the far corner of the room, as far away as possible, the dog on the bed and looking back and forth between them. “You’re scared of televisions, too?” asked GB.

  “It’s not that I’m scared of them,” Jamie had said, his eyes taking on that narrowed look that seemed to foreshadow his sudden transitions in alertness. “It’s not at all that I’m scared. I’ve merely
learned over the years what their real purpose is. I’ve watched the agency and the federal government manipulate enough of my life already, thank you very much. I’ll pass on letting them manipulate the rest.”

  Five minutes later he was motionless, cross-legged on the bed with his head tilted back against the wall, and GB had spent the next half hour watching him instead of the television. The Agency. The CIA. It seemed Jamie truly did believe that he was in their employ—or once had been. GB hadn’t quite figured out the entire delusion, wasn’t even sure Jamie had it worked out to a definitive timeline. All GB knew for sure about the last thirty years of his brother’s life was what he’d been told by the man he’d hired back in 1983, in those months leading up to what he’d foreseen as his long-overdue retirement from baseball, when a decade of will and delusion had at last caught up with him and he’d begun to admit to himself just how empty his life might be if he ever up and quit this kid’s game that had sustained him for so long. So he had hired this man to track down his little brother Jamie, only to have the response correspond precisely with his surprise call-up, thereby instigating the phone call he wished he could take back and the tickets to the ball games, the naïve dream of a brotherly reunion though the man he’d hired had been quick to point out that the place where Jamie was living was no ordinary apartment building, that GB’s fears had come true and that the little brother who’d always seemed to him somehow incapable of adulthood, somehow not cut out for it, was living out his life in one of the countless formerly derelict tenements where they’d begun putting the wayward souls who’d previously inhabited the park benches and the railings along the walls of the Lincoln Tunnel. The mayor had initiated his new goals for cleaning up the city, said this man GB had hired back in the summer of ’83. Central Park had become a fairground of rape and drug abuse. A Beatle had been shot. A few years later the streets were devoid of beggars and madmen. Did anyone really think they’d all gotten jobs and moved out to the suburbs?

  It had not changed much in the years that had passed. It operated under different management now, different funding categories, used different terminology to express the goals and long-term criteria by which it achieved its grants; yet he’d recognized its stale musty feel as soon as he’d entered, had recalled the confounding rigmarole of bureaucracy the instant he’d begun his attempts to explain who he was to the impatient receptionist in the ski jacket, her look of cool cynicism accentuated by the pierced eyebrow not abating until he’d presented her—after stepping back out to the Stingray to locate his wallet in the glove box (the bright dying gleam of the city and then the harsh silent darkness of the lobby again)—with identification that had matched certain records on file.

  They’d fed him dinner: a bowl of tomato soup and a toasted cheese sandwich at a table of the sort found in middle-school cafeterias, a questionnaire on a clipboard placed in front of him, a few scraps in a plastic bowl for the dog, who’d inhaled the food and then settled down next to the old-fashioned heat register for a nap. In the lobby, he had paced tentatively while the receptionist had dug through file cabinets, pressed a button on her phone and carried on a low-voiced discussion. Ten minutes had passed. Then twenty. GB remembering that day all those years ago when his brother had come running across the floodlit field during the National Anthem, the first inning and then the second and then the third of the game that was supposed to be his debut spent instead in the bowels of Yankee Stadium, just him and a couple rent-a-cops restraining his brother and forcing him into a makeshift holding cell while he spewed wild tales of secret tunnels in the desert, red buttons in bottom shelves of ornate desks deep in the heart of the Kremlin. GB had been called sleepless into the manager’s office the following morning and given the news he’d known was coming, a discursive speech to which he’d listened quietly—shirtless, dressed in baseball pants and socks and stirrups, no spikes, knowing that it was for real this time—then stood and walked out into the chill morning and took the train from 161st Street into Manhattan, got off at Columbus Circle and walked the seven blocks to this halfway house that was his brother’s shoddy home.

  He’d been almost ready to give up when the voice had at last arrived at his back. “Mr. Hill?” A woman, perhaps in her sixties, extending a hand to shake, leading him beyond the lobby with its marble flooring and wainscoting, its stained glass and exposed roof beams, a partitioned hallway leading past offices bearing heaps of paperwork on donated desks to the room at the back corner where the soup and the sandwich and the questionnaire had been waiting. She’d returned ten minutes later with coffee and a confession, had sat down across from him at the table, eying the untouched questionnaire before placing it on the antique built-in credenza behind her. The girl with the ski jacket had gone home for the night, the front door was locked now—admittance was closely monitored after hours, she explained, though his brother would be here soon. She had sat silently for a moment as if searching his expression, then surprised him with the admission that she had almost been there, that Jamie had invited her to come to the game and so she had almost witnessed it herself. Surprised him further with the confession that she still remembered GB from his last visit, still recalled his face from some fifteen years ago—though she supposed it had not been your run-of-the-mill visit from a relative. The baseball uniform might have had something to do with it as well. A cursory retelling of that long ago day had followed, details that made GB stare into his coffee. For he had marched right through those heavy doors that day, stirred with anger and sidestepping their attempts to calm him, exuding a measured urgency that was more about what had happened to him than what had happened to his brother. At the rear of the building had been a tiny courtyard, and it was here that GB had found his younger brother Jamie, barged out to find him leaning far forward on a bench situated beneath an ancient crabapple tree. A light shower had stirred up, a soft pattering that, combined with the embracing brick walls of this little apron of garden, had seemed to keep out the sounds of the city and lace their voices with an echoing quality, a crispness—so that he remembered even all these years later the words he’d spoken in his attempt to confront his brother, who’d crouched forward and remained silent until GB turned to go back in the building. Then his head rose and he had spoken what at first sounded like an apology, only to morph into more of his crazy talk, words GB had tried, over the years, to forget. “It was fixed,” his brother had said, his head wet, rain dripping from his hair, a soiled image to accompany the impossible and yet nagging notion that had haunted him casually ever since—“Dad bought your way to the Majors. It was paid for by the kingdom of grease!”—the boy GB had sought out as a remedy still speaking as he’d turned to go back inside, stepped through the lobby and out the heavy front door toward the rest of his life. One last hesitation on the sidewalk, and then kill him in your mind.

  But he hadn’t. He had carried it with him like he’d carried all these other burdens—burdens he had struggled to explain while sipping his coffee without really explaining (for then he’d have to face them himself), burdens he had approached cautiously and then abandoned while the woman at the table confided in him how it had taken them some time to calm his brother down after GB had left. They had worried about him, had worried Jamie might one day leave and never return, were still worried about him. Leading him at last up the four flights of stairs, talking of his brother all the time, telling him how they could offer him a space but they couldn’t make him stay here, couldn’t make him take his meds, couldn’t make him do anything, not with the laws the way they were and the lawmakers more worried about reelection than doing what was right. Unlocking the door at the far end of the fifth-floor hallway and following him into the room that had been his brother’s home for who knew how many years now, its grimy linoleum floor ramped at the edges, its walls of gray paint over peeling wallpaper, a foam pallet on metal casters for a bed and a lone window loose in its casing, covered by a crimson sheet and looking down on an asphalt breezeway where that little gard
en had been, a single file cabinet pushed crookedly against the wall. GB stood in the empty center of his brother’s room beneath the dangling cord and repulsive light of a half-burnt-out ceiling lamp, removing his cap, rubbing his hands through his hair and explaining to the woman how things hadn’t exactly been easy for him either. How he’d been forced to give up on baseball after that summer of ’83. How he’d settled down in Florida with a wife and a daughter and tried to make a life.

  And how were they doing? the woman had asked, smiling and placing a hand on his shoulder—a polite, gentle, unremarkable woman trying to do good work in this hopeless place, offering him a diligent kindness he’d avoided then but longed for now, past midnight in the motel room in Pennsylvania, watching the news with the sound turned down on the old RCA, his brother cross-legged on the bed with his eyes closed, the dog curled up in his lap.

  They were doing fine, he’d lied. Just fine.

  OUTSIDE AKRON, THEY’D SEEN IT, rising above the trees beyond the exit ramp. It wasn’t the first time. You couldn’t go ten miles along any road in the US without seeing it—and of course GB had passed dozens during his trip up the Atlantic seaboard, lighting up the night from towers above the treetops and making him sometimes turn away and sometimes stare—but it was the first time either of them had seemed willing to admit it into the space between them, disregarding it on a principle broken now by necessity or just hunger.

  It was the cheapest place and they were broke, feverish from the previous day’s long haul and the unquiet night in the hard beds, the trip resumed in the early heat of the unseasonably warm morning with the country still reeling, that feeling of aftermath still hovering though they’d made good time through dreary river towns north of Pittsburgh, the dog curled up on Jamie’s lap while he struggled against the wind to read a newspaper procured from the motel lobby. A strange bond had formed that night in Pennsylvania. The dog had never been one to sleep on beds; even in the house in Coral Gables he had slept on Emma’s floor rather than in bed with her—yet the previous night the dog had remained with a head propped on Jamie’s leg throughout his intervals of quiet and gabbiness, even into the early hours when restlessness had driven GB out to the parking lot to sit and stare at nothing in the front seat of the Stingray. It had continued the following morning when he’d stood at the checkout counter, watching his brother in his sweatpants and long trench coat step out to the car with the dog and the Times while he handed over his Mastercard and practiced what he’d say if it was declined, looked around at the newspaper racks bearing on their front pages the same bleary photos, another rehash of the president’s speech two nights before on the television above the meager breakfast station, looking just as shocked as anyone else behind his podium.