The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  They’d spend Saturdays together, Max and Beau and sometimes Alice, who was a biology major, would take drives into the wilderness in the old pickup Max had bought off Sam Chainsaw, would bring along a case of Ruddy Hook, maybe some reefer, at most just the three of them, though Beau was always saying one of these days he’d get Alice to bring along a friend for Max. But she didn’t seem to have any friends, only Beau, who demanded from everyone merely that he be the center of attention at all times. Alice Bates looked nothing like Jasmine. But there was something in her that reminded Max of Jasmine. And she had the feel of an Alaskan, though Max knew that she was from northern Vermont; she’d looked to him, that first day, like some fierce creature of the woods, her face pinched-up and marten-like, the features sharp and converging on her pointed nose. She barely spoke to him for nearly a year, though they saw each other several times a month. Their relationship existed exclusively through Beau Miller, so much so that Max had been surprised when they’d exchanged one day what seemed to him a telling glance. In previous encounters, she’d tended to remain silent, the three of them sitting on some bluff overlooking a hundred acres of Alaskan hills and valleys, a low sun or a speckled ceiling of stars, little voices lost in the landscape. Beau Miller was full of crazy ideas: buying a Cessna Caravan and spending the summer making runs from Fairbanks to Anchorage for students fed up with their remote setting; lining the Chena north of town with traps and using the proceeds to pay for a D9 Caterpillar. Alice was the girlfriend who would listen to his stories and smile and nod and roll her eyes. It was on one of these nights—twenty-one years old, and Beau Miller explaining to them how he’d gotten all he could out of college, that he’d had enough of listening to old white guys talking about history and books and finance, that it was time for them to look for something bordering on true experience—that Max had noticed Alice looking beyond her boyfriend’s eyes and directly into his. It had only lasted a second—she’d stood and walked languidly in bare feet over to the fireweed-draped ledge of the bluff only moments later—but Max had remained still for a moment, noticing how her eyes had seemed to forge a new bond between them, had advanced their relationship in some subtle way.

  After college (after they’d dropped out; after they’d made and abandoned grand plans for the next stage of their lives) they’d gone their separate ways. Max had rented a cabin in Circle, a town of a hundred and fifty at the remote end of the last road leading north from Fairbanks, had trapped for three winters until he could afford the secondhand DHC Beaver with which he’d gotten himself into the mail-route business. He took off from a gravel runway north of Circle and flew a different course each day of the week, some of them north into the Brooks Range, some south and east along the towns in the foothills of the Alaska Range. He dropped off supplies in the wilderness for trappers, flew tourists across the savannas of the Yukon Flats for moose-watching excursions. It was an exhausting job, stressful, eighteen hours in the air some days, his routes taking him as far north as Kotzebue, as far south as Yakutat only two days later. But its benefits included a perch that let him see this grand land unfolding before him. On days he could avoid nasty weather, he’d fly four hundred miles without seeing a cloud, drove passengers and mail over tracts of wilderness so endless they were ethereal, the only human mark his own shadow on the treetops. And though he’d thought he’d found in this rusty cockpit and daily grind at fifteen thousand feet a place and a state of mind that could contain him and make him content, returning to his twelve-by-twelve cabin to make himself dinner and coffee and fall asleep before finishing them, waking for more long hours suspended in the atmosphere, looking down on the highest mountain range on the continent, he would later wonder if there hadn’t been some ulterior motive for his doing it. He would wonder if he wasn’t just delivering mail with the underlying hope that someday he’d notice in his cramped cargo hold a box, a bundle, a carton of materials, a giant crate commensurate to his old friend’s ambitions and bearing his name on the label. Or if what he’d truly wanted all along was what he ended up getting some years later, long after he would’ve told himself he’d forgotten them: tucked under a pile, almost obscured, requiring the unstacking of a heap of parcels and then a moment spent staring, in disbelief, at the small package, smaller than a shoebox, bearing her name.

  They lived even further out in the country than he’d expected, practically the bush, depending on your definitions, which were always hotly debated in local bars and post offices. Not far from the Canadian border, where a twenty-foot-wide swath of clear cut marked the north-south line of the 141st meridian for several hundred miles. Max had been flying since six o’clock on that late spring morning when he touched down in the remote makeshift landing strip tucked along a sandy bar high up on the Nation River, balloon tires jerking to a stop after a precipitous descent over dense spruce. Beau had his own plane, Max saw, though smaller—a Piper Super Cub crouched and hidden by brush and aspen at the far end of this shaded nook of the river at the base of a six-thousand-foot Alaskan hill, the sun this early in the year and the day having not yet climbed high enough in the southeastern sky to lend light to the clearing. Dawn came late to this silent ledge of land some fifty miles from Eagle, but evening would spread gorgeously over the glinting, crystal clear Nation. The mist was rising through the shade as he came up the mud path toward the cabin, a light on inside, a pair of shadows moving. Max saw a shotgun resting on the front porch—not a porch really, more like a warped ledge of wood—heard the door swing open, watched a shape emerge and paused his approach just before stepping up onto the stoop.

  With the sun splashing on the low hill beyond the river, Beau Miller squinted his eyes; there was a moment, Max thought later, when he must have appeared to his old friend as nothing but a dark shape of a man without features or definition, backdropped by uncertain morning light. But it didn’t take long for his eyes to adjust, and to Max’s surprise he’d recognized him almost immediately. He’d stepped down from the cabin door and taken Max’s hand and shook it. He’d known there would be someone new doing the mail route, had heard the news that their regular pilot had crashed into a mountain near Mount St. Elias, trying to find a route through the mist to Juneau. He’d known he’d be getting a new pilot one of these days, but he’d never expected the man to come right up onto his porch at eight o’clock in the morning. They were usually in a rush, the pilots, pressed for time, trying to beat some storm. They certainly never risked that dicey landing that required a controlled stall or close to it, usually just dropped the supplies from a couple hundred feet and off they went. But this one had not only dared the landing. He’d walked the two hundred yards along the rocky river bed from the airstrip to the front door, was now standing on the stoop.

  “I’m your new mailman,” Max had heard himself saying to his old college friend, the two of them sort of chuckling—two men in their late twenties now, no longer teenagers. When Max heard the footsteps inside the cabin, he looked over his friend’s shoulder and saw the pinched-up face and the blonde hair, tied back and a few shades darker now. He saw Alice Bates smile a confusing smile. He saw the bundle she carried on her shoulder. A little baby boy that he learned over bitter coffee they’d named Lynk.

  HE RETURNED JUST AFTER FOUR, a short burst of car horn startling her, making her turn to find him parked along the side of the road just thirty feet from the little bench in front of Union Station where she sat, his eyes trained on her through the windshield as he firmly nodded his head, once.

  She didn’t move. For the past hour, alone in an unfamiliar city, Maddie Hill had been forced into a rare introspective examination. She’d made up her mind to make up her mind. She hadn’t quite figured out what solution she’d arrived at yet, but it had seemed she was leaning toward abandoning him, making her way west back across Utah to Vegas, returning to her unoccupied apartment, finding a way to set her life straight or to let it spiral toward oblivion. She’d been saying it to herself for the past hour as the warm day in Denver b
loomed and settled toward evening: you have until he comes back here to make up your mind. She’d paced aimlessly, past the baseball field and then into Lower Downtown, which now advertised its trendy designation as LoDo on signs hanging from streetlamps. Years ago, when she’d visited this city as a teenager billowed on the winds of her own youth, this had been the part of the city the tourists avoided, the place where the murders and drug deals went down, where poverty stewed in dark alleys and shady tenements. Now it had been renovated, the abandoned buildings gutted and painted to house upscale restaurants and brew pubs, art galleries, and lofts in converted warehouse buildings. Still, she’d looked around at the bright facades on Market Street, the cool patios, full even now in the early afternoon on a weekday, and wondered at the fact that despite all they’d done to polish the grime from this newly thriving part of the city, they still had in their midst a killer.

  A killer? Had she really come to think of her brother that way? And why had this realization not sent her racing back toward Vegas?

  She’d traipsed down Blake Street and then right on 17th, waiting with the crowd that had grown as the day drifted toward quitting time. Once he’s back from wherever it is he’s gone, she’d thought to herself, that’s it. He’s not going to leave you alone again. Back in front of the station, she hesitated. Sat down on the bench with her face in her hands, and that was when she heard the soft bleat of the car horn, when she saw him looking at her through the sun-glazed windshield.

  The leather was hot, sticking to her body. He refused to turn on the air conditioner. At first she thought he’d gotten lost. Mixed up by the complicated cloverleaves. Or perhaps she’d been distracted, trying to catch a glimpse of the backseat without his noticing. It was a few minutes before she realized she wasn’t just imagining things, hadn’t been deceived by city traffic and the road signs that often belied intent. They were off the beltway, back on I-70, headed back toward the Rockies.

  “It starts tonight,” he said, for it was turning toward late afternoon, the suburbs blazing gold, his posture in the driver’s seat hurled forward, aggressive. “A place you’ve never seen before, I’m sure. A place he’d never let any of us be seen with him.” She turned his words over and over in her head, knowing that he must be talking about their father, for though he’d not come out and said what this trip was about—not that she could recall, at least, and not in so many words—he’d implied it, had shown her his anger, had let her hold it in her hands like some untamed creature, scowling and feral.

  “Have you ever been to Aspen?” he asked.

  “No,” Maddie Hill said. “Well, once. But it was—during college.”

  He looked at her, through her, watching her writhe with discomfort. “Neither has he. But that didn’t stop him from buying a little part of the place for himself.”

  Maddie looked at her brother, who now looked straight ahead. “He has a home there?”

  “It’s not a home,” said her brother. “None of his houses are homes. They’re investments.”

  And while she had him facing forward, she took the chance to turn her head, to look at the floorboard behind the driver’s seat.

  The suitcase was gone.

  HE HADN’T MEANT FOR IT to happen, Max Hill had told his sister as they descended the mountain roads that early afternoon. He hadn’t sought them out, hadn’t intentionally touched down his plane that day in the isolated clearing that would become his, hadn’t planned or anticipated any of the events that had followed. But they had happened. It had happened. Out in the country, with not another soul for a hundred miles, not a town or hospital closer than Fort Yukon or Fairbanks. Not that it would have mattered.

  They’d been trapping up at Beau’s spring camp, deep in the desolate wilderness of the northern Yukon Flats, fishing for grayling and char along the Chandalar and the foot of the Brooks Range, poaching on Alaska Native land, they may have been. Beau couldn’t say for sure because he never bothered to check. The federal government could go and bend itself over a fifty-five-gallon drum for all he was concerned. This was Alaska, he’d say, spreading his arms in the glazed morning with the fog dipping low over this swampy savanna devoid of anything but grass and low trees and rock, the sheer white face of the Brooks Range in the distance. This wasn’t Amherst, Massachusetts. This wasn’t Montpelier, Vermont, where Alice was from and where the same families had lived in the same colonial houses lining the town common since the days of Ethan Allen. If Beau wanted to set up camp and take some muskrat and beaver to fill his belly and his wallet, he was damn well going to. If someone else wanted to say it was their land, let them. If the federal government wanted to make a fuss, he’d introduce them to his associate. He patted his hip, from which dangled a Marlin 30-30 lever action.

  Beau had become a recessionist, had joined the Alaskan Independence Party, would threaten to shoot anyone who called him an American, said Alaska was a colony, just like the Caribbean, just like all those countries in Africa. “I’m on their radar,” he said. “They’re just looking for a way to take me out and steal my land. That’s why Alice and me are way up there by the border, so we can scootch right across when circumstances dictate. I want to watch them scramble to get the Canadians to do something about me. Ha! Then I’ll just pull right back over the border into Alaska. You think it’s hard for two counties or municipalities to cooperate? How about two countries?”

  They were in the plane, Beau’s Super Cub, following the procession of lakes and creeks along the flood plain toward the foot of the Brooks Range, where Beau had suggested they spend this last week of May at a nameless lake he called the Hundredmile for its approximate distance from the Yukon, the mighty river that bisected interior Alaska, two thousand miles long and spanned by only four bridges. Their month on the Fiftymile had been good to them, two coolers full of muskrat pelts in the bi-level baggage compartment retrofitted in the rear fuselage, a supplement to the real trapping Beau had done in the winter, loading up on marten and lynx in the traplines he ran along the Nation and the Kandik. At home, Alice would take over, was spending this month they were away treating the skins with the animal’s brains, a process learned in the native village and which produced such high-quality hides that it had become their primary source of income. Beau would be hurled into rage if anyone suggested his woman was the one making the dough. He was the one who caught the animals, wasn’t he? He was the one who got up off his ass and ran the traplines alone at fifty degrees below zero. Could you see Alice out there? Ha!

  He was vitriolic today, even more boastful than usual on this cold spring morning, flying aggressively over the precipitous foothills and pointing out rivulets of land along the tributaries that spilled into the Hundredmile (“How ’bout there? You feel up for that?”), telling Max he felt the urge today to set this plane right down on a postage stamp, to dive in just above the treetops for a kamikaze landing that would bring your heart up to your throat, leave you gasping and so alive! For what was the use of living all the way up here if you weren’t willing to stick your neck out every once in a while?

  Above all else that he’d grown to despise about his friend, Max hated these landings. A month ago, they’d tucked themselves into a similar spot along the shores of the Fiftymile, touching down on a river bed speckled with sunlight and shade where they’d set up camp in a canvas tent and spent four weeks placing traps for the muskrats on the icy series of lakes, afternoons on snow machines making the rounds to clear the traps, late evenings boiling or roasting and devouring the delicious and hearty meat, drying the rest for later use and carefully stretching the pelts on wire wishbone stretchers. Up here, late April was the onset of spring, the days gradually growing toward the interminable lengths they’d take on in the summer, the air crisp and fresh with the smell of snowmelt but the lakes still vast white frozen fields, locked in shelf ice that would linger until late summer, the towering ridgelines to the north remaining snowcapped and impenetrable year-round.

  Mornings on the Fiftymile dawn
ed bright and frigid, the dime-sized sun creating enough glare to cause headaches by mid-morning. The two of them would be off early on snow machines or on foot, already laying siege to the muskrats when the first birdcalls colored the air and the blue light of dawn deepened the sky, Beau having already revved up his engine of protest, which could be triggered by nearly anything: a caribou stepping gingerly downhill over rocks toward a stream, a leave-behind from a previous adventurer, tire tracks. They didn’t see each other often, Max and Beau, and though Max had been coming on these trips to the spring camp for three years now, the conversation never changed. It was always Beau going on with the same old chatter about the government and independence, how they’d cheated Alaskans out of the only thing they had, which was land, Max never contributing, just listening, wondering why he insisted on ranting over such things, why he didn’t worry more about his own wife and son, wondering if he bored them with all this recycled banter, with the recitations regarding the 104 million acres of land the federal government had promised the state of Alaska in 1958, how they’d then taken 44 million of these acres off the table by giving them to the Indians in the Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, how they’d appropriated another 240 million for their own purposes, thereby leaving less than 90 million acres from which the people of the state of Alaska were free to make their so-called choice. A good decision hadn’t been made by the federal government in the state of Alaska since they’d voted to build the oil pipeline, and that had taken five years to get done, five years and a complaint from every group of tree huggers this side of the Rio Grande, each with some harebrained notion of protecting Alaska, protecting the land. As if Alaska were what needed protecting! Had these people ever been here? Had they ever actuallywitnessed real wilderness?