The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  That was what his story reminded her of. The story of her brother paddling upstream on the Nation to the isolated two acres that had belonged until recently to his friend Beau Miller had made Maddie think of her own beaten-down odyssey along the debris-strewn streets beneath the overpass, crossing over into West Vegas, where she knew dozens of places where the party she’d abandoned—or tried to abandon, six months ago, twelve years ago—would still be going, even at three o’clock on a Tuesday morning, places where she could cop and pass out, where she could watch the dawn of a new day feeling nowhere close to forty-one years old, back in her famous twenties again, doing whatever the fuck she pleased with whomever the fuck she wanted, where she could suffer a poisonous breakfast from a garbage can and endure the verbal berating of a cabbie sick and tired of driving around smack heads, calling her all sorts of names and finally taking her directly to the Excalibur because she could not remember her home address, where she could at last come through the back doors after buzzing for ten minutes at the employee entrance, floundering at the rock bottom of her hardest relapse in her entire life, the hallways empty and labyrinthine, causing her to lose her way a dozen times before arriving at the main ball room to find a hundred-thousand people standing around on the floor, watching a movie, some in tears, some turning away from the crazy Hollywood spectacle of airplanes and explosions.

  When he was only twenty yards away—having made the slow walk up the worn path in the long quiet grass from the airstrip toward the door of the cabin (for there was no canoe trip, Maddie knew, there was no month-long, three-hundred mile trek, there was no crash but rather a routine two-hour solo flight in the Super Cub, which would no doubt have been easy enough to sell)—when he had come close enough to see the faint shadows beyond the glass, the front door opened and there she was, alone now, Lynk off in the back woods, playing. She looked at him from the border of the front door with something less than guilt, watching him come up the steps carrying her husband’s .30-30. And hadn’t she looked at him in much the same way? Lightheaded in the medieval décor of the Excalibur? Hallucinating? She had to be! Because on top of it all—on top of the inexplicable weekend that had left her relapsed and defeated, on top of the entire staff of the Excalibur watching this crazy movie on the clock, the patrons being distracted from the gaming tables (the ultimate faux pas!), on top of the silence that rose over the usually raucous floor and the cell phones people were pulling out of their purses and pockets with nobody telling them to stop it right there!—on top of all that, there was this man stepping across the floor who looked just like her twin brother. His face was in hers, mumbling something she couldn’t make out, the world turned mono, like an old recording played through a pillow.

  Lying on the floor in the gaming room—having fallen against one of the slot machines, her mouth dry and bilious—she had not yet understood what it must have felt like to watch from a thick window his approach along the river from the landing strip. She had not yet known what it meant to see him coming and know you were not prepared for what you may have unknowingly gotten yourself into. Standing now in front of the mirror in the bathroom of the motel room in Nowhere, Nebraska, seeing and recalling the intense focus of those eyes of his, she wished she’d read all those droning letters he’d written her. She wished she’d memorized them, word for word.

  KNEES UP, FEET RESTING ON the grimy silver bumper, Max Hill sat on the trunk of the Buick looking out over the swampy shallows of the Platte River, holding in his hands the shoebox that contained the instrument of his rage. He still couldn’t believe that old Jed Winters, whom he’d once thought some old smokestack of a fellow who could talk a good game but not walk the walk, as they said, had actually put him in touch with the sort of individuals who could provide him—in return for all the savings he’d managed to summon from selling his pickup and his DHC Beaver—with the weapon he currently sat contemplating amidst the mid-American swamp grass, watching the sandhill cranes making their flight south overhead.

  He leaned forward, placed the shoebox upon the earth, lid removed so he could study the progression from fuse to blasting cap, Tovex cast boosters to the ammonium nitrate and nitromethane mixture that was its heart. He reached into the front pocket of his light jacket and retrieved the package of dried-bark rolling papers and the little sandwich bag containing the sad excuse for medication he’d at last managed to obtain for his sister: an eighth of an ounce of low-grade marijuana being all the wife-beater-and-bandanna-clad boy at the apartment above the bar in the little college town along I-80 had been willing to part with. Even that much had taken some convincing, the kid a small-time upstart dealer who watched too much television, who’d told Max he’d start him off with an eighth for now and, if all went well, would remember him next time.

  “Oh, you’ll remember,” Max had said, walking toward his car.

  Out here in the black night of a foreign land—the only light what little reflected in the ghostly shallows of the meandering river—he was killing his doubt, smothering his remorse, wondering if he would’ve been better off leaving his sister in Vegas after all. He had understood for days now that she didn’t feel the same way about things as he did, that she didn’t blame their father exclusively for the messes of their lives. Though how could she fail or refuse to see the connections between the life he’d exposed them to all those years ago in Fairbanks and the creature she’d become? Max Hill was no shrink, but to him it was clear that Maddie was the one person, if there was any, who should have been most angry, most prepared to strike back—for if he’d ruined Max’s life, he’d at least been able to enjoy a few years of something like happiness first, a few years of contentment out in the country, just the three of them, while Maddie’s life had been ruined at sixteen, and everything after had been one futile attempt after another to get back what had been lost. These stories of this woman, Michaela, of her shameful career, of the last decade spent struggling to make ends meet in that cavernous vacant apartment, this trip out into the desert with the so-called investigative reporter: these stories of hers that she’d allowed him to learn over the last four days had baffled him as to how he’d made such a mistake. He’d expected her to be even more ready than he was, had recalled with pride the violent tone of the letters he’d received from her detailing the destruction they could wreak together, sloppily written letters that had at times been almost illegible, though back then he’d attributed it to the blind fury with which she must have scrawled them.

  Now he understood. Having traveled across the dry basin and the high plains with her, he understood that the voice of those letters had been the voice of her addictions, all of them written in the deep fog of drug-induced mania and mailed off in the midst of multi-day benders. She didn’t even seem to remember writing them. Certainly not sending them. It was this powerlessness of hers that got to him, the vulnerability she’d fought hard to conceal all those years ago in the alley between the Flame Lounge and the French Quarter, in the hospital bed where they’d embraced, this vulnerability she’d had no choice but to allow him to see now, that had threatened to weaken his resolve and had made him run from her, tonight, gather himself here on this sweaty riverbank some hundred miles from their destination, thinking she was the one thing he had not accounted for, that she could be more powerful than that shoebox if she tried.

  For the last five minutes he had been sprinkling shake into the crease of the thin strip of bark, rolling it between his thumbs and forefingers. Now he lifted the joint to his lips and inhaled. Bunk. Couldn’t hold a candle to the river people’s rag. He moved to flip it toward the water but stopped, pinched out the cherry and placed it in his pocket, would offer it to her when he made it back to the motel.

  As he replaced the shoebox in the backseat, he pictured her, wished he could summon the courage to say to her the things he wished he could say and to have her return that long-ago intimacy, the intimacy he’d felt in the hospital that morning he’d held her close though it made his bones press h
ard against his heart. Was that all he’d needed all along? Was that all it would have taken? For someone to tell him no? For his little sister to step in and say to him: Come here, Max. Come here. I know. I know. But we don’t need to do this. We don’t need to do this. Was that all it would have taken to return him to the person he’d been, before Jasmine and Lyle Greeley, before Beau Miller and Alice Bates, before any of the letters he’d mailed off to his brothers and sisters?

  The Buick rumbled and started. Max adjusted the rearview mirror so that it showed him the shoebox in the back seat. The unnamed unpaved streets of Nowhere, Nebraska, stretched dust-parched before him, empty as sympathy, vacant as his heart on this Friday night spent murdering the yearning pulse of his doubt, the insistent murmur of a conscience.

  Saturday

  NINE O’CLOCK. HIS EYES OPENED on a painfully blue sky, bright swaths of clouds spelling Iowa. He’d been dreaming of Emma: not of the last time he saw her—not the vision of pale walls and cold steel cabinets that had haunted his memory for the last seven days—but of another time long ago, a time he’d forgotten until it had resurfaced in the form of this restless dream. Now he’d come awake in a cornfield, his sprawled body forming a broken angel in the pressed-down stalks, a crop circle in miniature, an interstate rattling somewhere nearby.

  This made well over twenty-four hours that had passed since he’d last seen Jamie, a full day gone by since he’d last laid eyes on the boy whose dilapidated room in the halfway house had shamed but not surprised him, whose silence as they’d sat in the surreal living room of the woman they’d once called their stepmother should have made him cautious, should have made him remember exactly what he was dealing with. The night before, in a hazy roadhouse bar he could now barely visualize, he’d let his failure loosen like old skin and slip to the floor, had regaled a dozen flannel-clad locals with the story of his life and the week gone by until each of them had paid his tab and disappeared, leaving him at last with only a cratered moon-like barkeep orbiting at a safe distance and never with his back turned, who’d poured him a final drink whose golden surface in the frosted glass as he lifted it to his face was the last thing he recalled.

  In his ball playing days, GB Hill had never suffered from hangovers. Now he was being reimbursed for his luck all those years.

  He’d risen from his itchy tomb and brought himself to his feet, wishing he could temporarily remove his eyeballs to scoop out the pain that lay behind them. A path led from the place where the corn lay crushed in his outline to the mouth of the field, rose through high September grass to the summit of a low hill topped by a single sprawling oak tree, a swing fashioned from a plank and two cords of rope hanging from one aged limb. He sat on the swing and held his head, looked up and realized that in this low land west of Des Moines the slightest rise could become a promontory from which one could see for miles. Beneath him had spread the serene hamlet, yet now that he’d arrived, having stepped down through thickets to the main road, smelling his own repellent sweat, it was not at all as he’d remembered it. He didn’t recall any churches—only a concrete building with no windows on a dead-end street with a few faded fluorescent signs out front, a heavy door you had to push with all your weight just to open. In his lonely state of mind it had been exactly the kind of place he’d been looking for, the type of bar you could find in these little towns of the Midwest, or occasionally in the less-frequented neighborhoods of the cities back East, not much different from the one he’d found on the Upper East Side. He remembered coming in and sitting down, half returning the looks he’d gotten, the quick once-over they no doubt gave every stranger. Then another when they realized what he was wearing.

  The man at the bar hadn’t seemed too keen on talking to him. Not at first. Filled GB’s glass and slid it along the bar toward him. They were all staring at the television, a bored, pessimistic bunch, the dearth of entertainment caused by the cancellation of all sporting events having left them with only stale analysis and highlights, and so their low-voiced conversations had strayed from performance to the crime of the players’ salaries, the juice they were no doubt taking, how over half of them didn’t speak a lick of English anyway. GB had tried hard to listen, smirked along with them, tried to join in though it was more difficult than he’d thought it would be. How did one engage one’s self in a bar room bull session? He hadn’t wanted to play the ex-player card, but eventually he did, and someone—a young fellow, brown eyes and freckles and a mop of hair—had recognized the name, had heard the half-legendary story of GB Hill, the can’t-miss prospect turned head case, the fire-balling lefty who’d flamed out his first spring training, who’d disappeared for a while, had hung around the minors as an outfielder before being reincarnated just in time to receive his famously doomed cup of coffee with the Yanks in the mid-eighties. Most people who recognized GB’s name were these sorts: card collectors, old Strat-o-Matic devotees, Bill James disciples. Baseball fanatics who computed batting averages while they sweated atop tractors.

  “What else?” the kid had said, scratching his chin. “I know there’s something else I remember about you …”

  He’d faded into the background, had bought another drink for GB, and the remainder of the night was a blank corridor that now, seated at a window seat in the main street diner, sipping an iced tea with lemon that was already making him nauseous, a laminated menu that he couldn’t bear to look at on the checkered tablecloth before him, watching the little movements of this town as the people spilled from the hardware store and the grocery into the streets, he couldn’t bring himself to fathom. Had he really imagined it all? Then where was his car? There was no bar in this little farmland community. It was a dry town. So he’d been informed by a sparsely bearded man loading seed into the bed of a pickup truck next to the only stop sign at the only intersection, a man GB had thought was in his forties until he’d seen him up close, saw his bright eyes beneath the bill of his weather-worn ball cap that said he was no more than twenty-five.

  “You’ll search a long time for a bar in this town, fella,” he’d said—gesturing up the single road with no sidewalks, pavement encroaching on yards and running past white houses with sloped dark-shingled rooftops, wide dormer windows looking in on cramped second floors beneath the eaves, a little business center with the hardware store and the diner. “Got a couple churches, though. Might wanna consider visiting one of them on your way out of town.” And the hefty thump of the seed bag in the truck bed. The slammed door. The old engine starting up.

  GB apologized to the waitress, laid down his last five dollar bill for the iced tea, and stepped back outside, thinking he’d just walk along this gravel-lined road until it ended, wondering if a church really might not be such a bad idea. It had been years since he’d attended one, and he wouldn’t even have known where to begin—didn’t even know if the doors would be open on a Saturday. Didn’t want to face the guilt of a priest or pastor’s countenance while, somewhere back a full day east, Julia Nguyen was no doubt still cursing his name, though she’d certainly made it home by now, would have had no trouble getting Dat or Annabelle or a friend to pick her up from the rest stop outside Michigan City, Indiana, where he’d left her, and take her back to her condo on the north side of Chicago. It had been his mistake to bring her along, to expose her to this. It had been his mistake (and Max’s) to think that a stop at Annabelle’s house, which Max had located through means to which GB was not privy, would have any relevance to this thing they were doing. It had seemed to them, during the dark months of this wayward plan’s formulation, that she could contribute something, that her presence would add fuel to the engine whose clattering din they’d mistaken for something significant. Instead they had found a woman irreconcilable with the one they’d known. Instead he had ended up driving across the upper Midwest with Annabelle’s daughter, who had awoken him on the living room couch Friday morning with the story of her missing car—the story of how she’d come downstairs and stood on the front porch, had looked up a
nd down the street, had come back in to find the keys no longer resting on the table where she’d left them. He was ashamed now to admit that he had encouraged it, was humiliated to acknowledge that he had told her he could use her help finding him and then had been pleased at the way it had made her seem to light up with enthusiasm. He was mortified now to confess that his first thought as he’d sat up on the couch had been not of his brother (missing now, with a car and, as he’d discovered later that morning, when they’d opened the trunk of the Stingray to throw Julia Nguyen’s trendy purse inside, the knapsack and the bat bag) but of this young woman who had appeared to him as if out of a dream, already dressed in her jeans and tank top and ready to go, though her hair was pulled up messily, her face still lined from her pillow.

  They’d gassed up on the way out of town, Julia Nguyen swiping her card and topping him off and becoming immediately inquisitive as they headed west along empty I-94 in the early morning hours, a trip she’d taken dozens of times and claimed to have once made to Chicago in under four hours, urging him to kick it up to ninety on a certain straightaway west of Jackson. He had felt her excitement growing next to him, a strange reaction for a young woman who’d awoke that morning to find her car stolen. Instead of concerned or angry she seemed rejuvenated, as if they’d embarked on an adventure she’d been seeking, the combination of speed and mystery making her almost ecstatic. There was a hushed energy in even the questions she asked him—questions that sounded like dialogue from those movies GB had wasted away hours in the motel rooms watching, questions about what they were into, about what they were really doing on this cross-country drive to see the world, as GB had spontaneously called it the night before in response to her father’s friendly but interminable questions. He had resisted and then begun to give her the same abridged version of the story he had given the barkeep back in Manhattan and the woman at the halfway house, finding himself enjoying her looks of excitement given in response to his retelling of the eighteen-hour blast up the East Coast at reckless speeds, GB allowing himself the opportunity to imagine the story as something far different than what it was, permitting himself to forget the details that had driven him and instead portraying it as some inevitable salvo against a moderate but largely overblown midlife crisis, telling her without further detail that they’d been on their way to Omaha to see their father, whom neither of them had seen in some thirty years and about whom—he could tell from her lack of response—Annabelle had told her nothing.