The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  BY THE TIME HE WAS eighteen, the television was in his room. He watched it in the darkness of an early summer evening, his eyes black beneath blacker eyebrows, lying on his bed, his upper half propped against a stack of pillows with his head resting on the headboard, the black-and-white image throwing its eerie light over the room and his feet, which were clad in boots at the foot of the bed.

  The house was silent, had been silent for hours now while he watched the shows he’d watched so many times he could mouth the cryptic dialogue along with the actors. Jack Amberson had left them, had come home one night to confess to Molly of his indiscretions involving a waitress at one of the restaurants he serviced, had apologized and wept and sought forgiveness from Jesus for his tormented and hell-bound soul. He’d never meant for it to happen, he’d said, but now the poor young girl was pregnant and what could he do? He couldn’t do anything but go off with her, for the child she would bear would be his—truly his—and so in the eyes of the Lord would be owed a greater portion of Jack’s love and support. Molly had come at him with her ironing board. Jack had barely made it out the door and roared off in his Buick, leaving her collapsed in the painted-green front lawn with her folded-up domestic contraption while Georgie sat watching from the window, feeling something like relief to watch him leave, something like esteem at his willingness to go.

  He sat up, swung his legs off the bed, let his heavy boots plunk down on the floor, switched off the television, and stepped out into the warm, breeze-blown evening that smelled of smog and jacaranda. He opened the door of the T-bird he loved so well, started the noisy engine, and drove off along the wide, glinting streets of the valley. Friday nights were for cruising up and down the boulevards, stopping at the drive-in for a burger and a shake, smoking butts in the parking lots before driving into the hills at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains, taking the 18 up to Panorama Point and beyond, up to Crestline and Moon Lake for long nights with ladies just as wayward as the boys. They all wore white dresses or skirts, as if in contrast to the dark colors of the boys’ leather and denim, hair done up stiff with gel, everybody acting like they’d just stepped off the silver screen. He saw her first through a crowd of people, his friends and their girls all gathered at the burger joint while the newest Brando film played on the immense board at the base of the bare brown mountains in the distance, a pale image squared off in the foreground of a landscape so devoid of vegetation they might’ve been on the moon. He noticed her eyes at first, looking directly at him and then turning away, then back again. A vibrant, intense blue, as if she’d been drawn here, striking and in technicolor at the drive-in theater.

  Arrogance was his armor. He pursued girls with an intensity close to hate. He was an Okie. He could never forget this, no matter how hard he tried. He saw himself always from an outsider’s perspective, looked not at the girls he was attempting to woo but instead at himself attempting to woo them, wondered not what the girl was thinking but how the whole ceremony came off to the idly observant bystanders who witnessed his approach. This one looked like Grace Kelly, only sweeter. When she smiled, her lips pursed in a girlish way; she looked at him as she slurped up the last of her milkshake through a pink-and-white striped straw.

  They drove out to the lake at midnight, his T-bird hurtling along the ridgeline that overlooked San Berdoo all the way to the Santa Anas and, far beyond, through the haze, the skyline of Los Angeles, obscure and eager.

  “I bet you bring a lot of girls up here,” she said, the two of them looking out over the valley and the city. She’d already told him all about herself, had talked throughout the car ride because she couldn’t get anything out of him, had told him that her mother was a movie actress—“No one you would’ve heard of”—and her father a director. She’d smiled that puckered smile when he’d told her she should be in movies herself, had explained that she’d been in a few roles as a young girl, had gotten tired of it. The drama and the pressure. It was so shallow, the whole industry. Full of thugs and vapid starlets with reefer madness. Nobody cared about talent. All they cared about was money and favors. When she’d lost out on a role to the daughter of a known mobster, she’d vowed she’d never again act in a movie.

  “Now I do beauty contests.”

  This was one month before she’d learn she’d been selected as a finalist in the Miss California pageant, three months before she’d board a plane bound for Atlantic City, so confident in her victory that when she didn’t win it—when she finished third behind Miss North Carolina and, of all people, Miss Oklahoma—it would throw her into a shiftless state of mind in which she considered herself already washed up at the age of eighteen, already having missed out on her dream, a state of mind that would make her give up her aspirations of marrying James Dean and settle for this odd-job-working former farm boy with olive skin and a unibrow. On the night she first met him, however, she was just being playful. She knew his type, was forcibly approached by three or four of them every time she stepped out her front door, had already divided the world into two types of men: those that desired her in silence and those that had the guts to come up and talk to her. She wasn’t even attracted to him at first—though he’d grown on her by the time they’d arrived at the lake and looked out over the valley. At first she’d responded just to his manner, his confrontational arrogance. He wasn’t from here, she knew. Too uptight. Even when he was driving his fancy shmancy car, he still somehow managed to look uptight. “We should get out,” she said. “It’s such a gorgeous night.”

  They walked to the picnic bench that looked out over the string of lights. Freeways and runways and a glistening rim she knew was the Pacific Ocean blending with the sky. “Now you know everything about me,” she said. “But what about you?”

  She wasn’t afraid of him. She knew that whatever success he must’ve had in the past—whatever history had given him the courage to approach her—was a product of the unease his silence would evoke. But she was a soon-to-be Miss California. She ate boys like him for breakfast. Chewed them up and spit them out. Most women might have worried at the way he clenched his fists all the time, the way his brow became an angry bracket over his eyes. But she touched his leg and encouraged him to confide in her, gave her best smile and waited.

  He was growing impatient with anticipation, too. Couldn’t wait to crush her small body against this picnic bench, to raise a flush on her cheeks with his urgent movement against her, to hear her making soft noises as he fought his way toward satisfaction. Now she wanted to hear his whole life story, for crying out loud! He didn’t mean to tell it to her. He started off by lying, trying to take on the identity of one of those heroes in his Westerns. He said he’d robbed a bank in Van Nuys and gotten away with it, but she laughed, which made him angry enough to tell the truth.

  “Fine!” he said. “You wanna hear it? My father drowned in a swimming pool he was getting paid thirty cents an hour to clean. My mother and two of my siblings died on Route 66 and are buried somewhere in the middle of New Mexico. My two older brothers got mowed down on Omaha Beach, and I ended up in a back bedroom in a house in the middle of the worst city in the world with a job cleaning the high school. I’ve learned one thing, though. I’ve learned how you can get out. I’ve learned to watch and wait for your one chance. And that’s what I’m doing now. I’m watching and waiting for my one chance.”

  She leaned toward him for the first time, causing him to part his lips and close his eyes. Finally, I’m gonna get to bang this broad! But she only gave him that puckered smile, touched his gelled but somehow still lank hair, and said through ambiguous laughter, “Oh, darling. You’re the one who oughta be in pictures!”

  He drove her home, unsatisfied, taking backroads into West Hollywood. He hadn’t even kissed her, had been unable even to talk to her after he’d spilled his guts as a last-ditch effort, only to have her laugh and think him melodramatic, or flat-out lying, or whatever her comment was meant to say. She didn’t let him drop her off at her house, but instea
d made him stop two blocks away, between Sunset and Santa Monica, saying she’d walk the rest of the way, which made him so angry he wanted to punch the steering wheel, wanted to reach up into the sky and pull down the gray sun that was just rising over the heights, to scorch this whole city out of existence.

  But he’d misunderstood her silence. He’d made an impression with his outburst, though she wasn’t yet ready to admit it. She’d never tasted defeat, and perhaps it was not until her failure at the competition in Atlantic City that she was able to understand the reality of what he’d told her that night by the white lake in the mountains high above the city of her birth. She must’ve felt something though, even then, when he dropped her off and she marched along the street, ready to disappear from him forever. Likewise, he must’ve been struggling with his simultaneous desires to kiss and kill her, for he realized only then the strangest thing about this night. His voice came to her, a cool sound out of the still-dark morning, an edge of laughter.

  “Hey! By the way!” she heard him shouting. “What the hell’s your name?”

  And she stopped, puckered her lips—involuntarily, for the first time that night—and even almost half turned toward him as she called back softly in the quiet, six-in-the-morning street.

  “Mary,” she said. And stood for a moment, as if considering walking back to his car, which she could barely see now in the miasma of sunrise that grew glazed in the east. “My name is Mary.”

  NOW SHE WAS FAT. HER belly looked like a big barrel of worms. Georgie knew it was his offspring that made her look this way, but he wanted his slim-waisted wife back, wanted to be able to wrap his large hands around her waist and touch his fingers and thumbs together as he’d once been able to. Mary had been his mother’s name also. And in those early days he’d seen something of his mother in her, something of the pale-eyed strength of the woman who’d perished on Route 66 and been buried before he’d even known she was gone. But even his wife’s eyes had lost their luster. Her eyes were always red. She was always crying. And she’d said things lately that had made him come as close as he ever had to just walking out on her, the way Jack Amberson had walked out on Molly.

  The fight last night, for instance. GB had witnessed it and had run off rubbing his eyes. So sensitive, that boy. “Try coming west on Route 66 once!” he wanted to shout to his five-year-old son who had the benefits of a roof over his head, food on the table with unfailing frequency, and a mother who babied him all day long—all of this because Georgie had taken this horrendous job as a truck driver for a grease company.

  When they’d discovered she was pregnant the first time, they’d moved in with his adoptive mother. Her own parents had separated not long after she’d lost the pageant, as if they’d been hanging on for that decision before making theirs, hoping the money or the celebrity might bring a new sense of purpose to a marriage long since lacking. Her mother had moved back to New Jersey, abandoning her dreams of success, and her father had rented a cabin in the woods in the mountains of Washington state to resolve the series of missteps that had led from such promise as a young director to such resounding disappointment in middle age.

  Mary had chosen to stay on. She’d always lived in California, had never understood a place the way she did these wide valleys embraced by the mountains of the Spanish saints. She’d been to Florida, where her father was from, and had no desire to go back. Nor did she wish to check out Jersey with her mother, where she’d visited once and could remember only a handful of overweight aunts cooking pasta and silent, stern-eyed uncles playing bocce on the dead lawn. So she’d taken a room, against everyone’s wishes, in Silver Lake, with three other girls trying to make their names, had run into Georgie again at the drive-in and agreed—after some flirtatious negotiation—to another drive up into the hills, and six months later she was pregnant and living with Georgie at his adoptive mother’s house in San Berdoo.

  From there it had taken only another five months for Molly Amberson to realize that she had no business being there anymore, that even the idea of a grandson or granddaughter would be hollow. She and Mary simply could not get along. There was an obvious resentment that Molly carried with her, evident from the way she looked at Mary’s pregnant belly, and Mary resented Molly’s resentment. Plus, it was creepy, and so she would unwittingly instigate arguments with her comments. “I’m sorry, Molly, but is there something especially fascinating about me? Then why, I must ask, will you not stop staring at me?” It came as no surprise when Georgie had approached Molly one night just two months after the baby had been born and told her that the house was no longer big enough for all of them, that somebody had to move and that she knew as well as he did that he and Mary and young GB could not afford their own place. And did she really need all this space? Wouldn’t it be better put to use by him and his young family?

  In the end, Molly had martyred herself to it, as he’d known she would, and so that was how they’d ended up just the three of them living in the ranch-style house they never could’ve afforded unless it was handed over to them, the house where they’d hoped they’d settle in and be happy, a roof over their heads and a future worth imagining.

  These were the words Georgie always used; they were the words his father had used when Georgie was a young boy and they’d just arrived in California, and though he’d nodded at his father’s austere notions—and would even pass them along throughout his own sporadic career as a father, as if trying to convince himself—the simple idea of a roof over his family’s head and food on the table had always struck Georgie as pedestrian. Even on the trip out here, traveling west from Oklahoma to the coast, even when he’d watched his mother shivering beneath a frayed blanket, his father telling her that Buster and Debbie were getting better though they’d secretly buried them the day before, he’d felt not a sense of loss but the heightening of his own significance. Each tragedy that had befallen him, each rotten break and hard-fought victory had only served to reinforce the idea that he’d always harbored and kept hidden from others: that he was meant to be someone important, that he’d been endowed by his creator with certain unalienable etc., but that he’d also been granted an extra proficiency that would allow him, force him, to rise above his peers. And to make a pile of cash in the meantime.

  Therefore he’d never been satisfied with any of the manual labor jobs he’d bounced around in, though some of them had earned him decent money, all the best things for GB, some nice gifts for Mary. (The marriage, incidentally, had taken place in Las Vegas, the desert outpost they’d gone to visit the summer after GB was born when Mary had stumbled into a spot on a new television program billed to be the next great comedy. But it was canceled and the most tremendous depression of her life up to that point had settled in, and they’d been left only with memories of a few dull nights in Vegas and a wedding band on her finger that, without the income from Mary’s spot on the comedy, Georgie knew he could never have afforded.) This grease job was the worst of them all, though it paid the best. Every day at five in the morning, Georgie woke and drove his car—a regular green Ford now; the T-Bird had long since blown a transmission and been totaled—out into the desert beyond Victorville, where he’d punch a time clock and take the keys to the truck off the hook, find the clipboard with his name on it containing the paperwork assembled the night before by the dispatch manager.

  He was not just a deliveryman; he was also a salesman. When he arrived at the restaurants he would unload the vats of grease while the managers watched him sweating to beat hell. Then they’d lead him into their offices, sometimes air conditioned, sometimes not, occasionally ordering someone to go get Georgie a milkshake or a cola, and they’d sit and look over the figures from the previous month and last year and determine how much grease would be needed on the following week’s delivery. It was these visits with the restaurant employees that tired out Georgie the most: the condescending attitude the managers would take with him, the rotten owners who wouldn’t even offer him a drink, who’d ask hi
m—when he requested a glass of water—if he had his own cup.

  Georgie would glean their condescension from the most innocuous comments. And then, because he knew he was smarter than six of them put together, because his wife had been Miss California, because he’d known since he was eight years old that the world had something special in store for him, he would take it home and take it out on poor depressed Mary, who’d wanted nothing more than to become a movie star and had instead become housewife to a grease salesman.

  “You should just hear them, Mary. The way they say my name when I arrive. ‘Well, hello there, Mr. Hill, sir! How’s the daily grind treating you today? Is it hot enough for you?’ It makes me want to punch them in the face, Mares. Why can’t anyone see it? Why can’t anyone understand that this isn’t who I am? I’m not a truck driver! There’s … there’s something good waiting out there for me … Down the road, I mean. Don’t you think? Can you see it, Mary? Please tell me you haven’t lost your faith in me!”

  Had she ever had faith in him? It was something else that had brought them together. Never was there an agreement made between them that one day Georgie would pay the bills with some as-yet-unappreciated talent. Mary sat listening to his rants. Or not listening, her mind shutting down. And it was to these silences of hers that Georgie was most vulnerable. He’d watch her picking at a plate of food and infer all sorts of tales of woe. She didn’t love him anymore. Never had. Was having an affair with a movie star, was acting in blue movies, was hiding from her stupid husband the fact that their son was not his but Marlon Brando’s. He’d yell at her to speak to him and watch her fold up on herself, walk over to the sink, pick up a dish and—howling suddenly—turn and hurl it at him, always missing by a huge, anticlimactic distance, always scoring a direct hit on the adjacent object capable of creating the greatest disturbance. She’d knocked over vases and stand-alone liquor cabinets, had broken a glass table-clock and several centerpieces. But worst of all was the howl that made little GB sitting at his chair eating his peas cover his ears and kick his bare feet. She’d spin with her face toward the ceiling fan, open her mouth wide, and let loose with a sound that penetrated the core of his insecurities.