Since the separation, this had become his existence. Days spent alone but for the old dog who was like a souvenir he couldn’t get rid of, afternoons filled by circuitous excursions across the city of Miami and its outskirts in the top-down Stingray, not exactly searching for anything but not exactly not searching, continuing south sometimes toward the Everglades or along the intracoastal waterway, all the way to Key West and back once. In a sort of manic daze they would drive all day, stopping only to fill up on gas or to answer the call of his nagging prostate or the dog’s watery bowels, and when the sun set he would allow the neon signs to lure him off the interstate, would settle onto a bed smelling of sanitizer in the blue light of the television for distracting marathons of former blockbusters and B movies, big budget flops and soft core porn at whose conclusion—toward dawn, with the dismal light of another perfect Florida morning foiled by the heavy curtains drawn tight, the room turned frigid by the rattling air conditioner—he would step into the bathroom and stare down this dour countenance he barely recognized, would confront again the persistent mystery of just what he was supposed to do with himself now.
Just months before, he’d had a life. He’d had a wife and a daughter, a cushy job crisscrossing Broward and Dade counties scouting high school baseball players that had allowed him to linger on old triumphs (also to dwell on old regrets)—a house at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac to come home to, a pillared wrap-around porch behind bougainvillea in the suburbs, in Coral Gables. His former father-in-law, the real estate baron, had found it for them some sixteen years ago now, had shown them the photos and dubbed it their dream home, had led them through the doors and stepped back while they’d stood—GB and Tammy—beneath the glass chandelier that hovered in the two-story entry flanked by formal living and dining rooms, their hopes leading them along the polished hardwood to a kitchen of granite countertops while their young daughter raced up and down the carpeted staircase. They had stood together looking out the bay window on half an acre of oleander and had both gotten caught up in the moment, Tammy hugging and thanking her father while he had fought back emotions he hadn’t felt in he couldn’t say how long, had found himself nodding his head—making it unanimous—that this ostentatious pre-fab was the perfect place for the three of them to make a life. The perfect place to raise Emma.
That was all gone now. The so-called dream home that had made them stand in awe of their own fortune and future together had been up for sale for nearly six months on that night he’d turned fifty in the motel room in Hialeah, well over a year now on this weekend he’d aborted even its memory and set out on this frantic odyssey toward a city to which he’d once vowed he’d never return. It had gone on the market and then off and then back on again at the advising of Tammy’s friend and co-worker Marc (an underling of her father’s who’d told them, separately, that it was the best way for them to “move on,” the best way for them to “pick up the pieces”)—the FOR SALE sign crooked on the unkempt front lawn, the dark windows and all that lay beyond having become like cold ash in his mind as this Sunday afternoon, so bright his eyes hurt from squinting, had given way to the lavender decay of dusk along the coastal plain of the Carolinas.
At times, he had overcompensated, had attempted to outpace his misgivings, the radio blasting while he yelled along to old favorites—“Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Magic Carpet Ride,” “Smoke on the Water” and “When the Levee Breaks”—floorings of the pedal beneath his baseball spikes turning them into a white streak in the passing lane while the hours and the big valleys of Virginia rolled on, the nation’s capital a luminous blur at midnight. Other times the car and the interstate had dissolved around them and these false assurances had vanished also, time and space stretching out and constricting and swinging back to catch up again, so that by the time the rain had arrived as they’d crossed the Delaware, by the time he’d peeled his ticket from the automated booth at Deepwater and waded out into the black boiling pool of the turnpike, wipers on high from Trenton to Brunswick, the tires of the eighteen wheelers creeping along in the right-most lanes stirring up a second storm more blinding than the first … by the time the intimate loneliness of the interstate at night had given way to the false dawn of city glow blooming a brown shade of pink beyond the backsides of night-slumbering strip malls, he had become little more than a presence looking down on himself from a point located high above the arc lamps. He’d become something like the uncertain hero of the previous summer’s most-talked-about blockbuster (which he had watched on that lonely night of his fiftieth birthday with an unwarranted interest, a desperate identification), two hours of superfluous plot suffered through in sympathy with the somber creature at its center only to discover—at the end, while he had lay on that bed smelling of sanitizer near dawn, trembling with cold while the dog looked up warily—that he’d been dead all along.
He switched off the radio. The song had ended, had been replaced by a less redemptive tune of a more recent vintage. The rain had abated, and in the vaporous stillness of its absence he paid his toll with one of his last twenties, ascended a steel viaduct in a vague arc toward the Holland Tunnel until another stronger impulse made him swerve hard and exit, a procession of blinking yellow stoplights splayed out across Jersey City’s bright landfill.
That morning—standing for the final time next to the FOR SALE sign on the front lawn at the dead end of their cul-de-sac in Coral Gables, listening to Marc talk about moving on and picking up the pieces—this flight toward far-off diversion had seemed inevitable, the required step to help him assemble some sort of salvation. Now, as he killed the engine where the asphalt ended and staggered out toward the worksite debris of a waterfront skyscraper on the make, as he stood beneath the weekend-silent tower cranes and the fifty-foot-tall Colgate clock looking out across the dark field of the Hudson toward the clustered gray totems of lower Manhattan, GB Hill found himself seized again by a fate he’d fought hard to escape, the recognition of a familiar curse in this rain-soaked pre-dawn portrait: that of all the days he might have finally allowed it to come to this—of all the Monday mornings he might have shown up here in search of a stranger he hadn’t heard from in twenty years at the urging of another he hadn’t seen in thirty—it was in perfect keeping with this life of his, and this plan of theirs, that he had happened upon this one.
HE’D WARNED THEM.
For sixty missions and more the Snake had been warning them, had filed reports with the appropriate superiors. Had anyone listened? When the ground beneath the city had shaken eight years ago with the half-ton payload in the delivery truck, had anyone looked back upon his report of the previous summer? Just twenty-one months ago (watching a new millennium dawn with the descent of a colored ball in Times Square from the shadows of the rocks in Central Park), the Snake had intuited that the moment was approaching, and yet had anyone bothered to follow up on the conspiratorial artifacts he had unearthed? It was like shouting into a long tunnel, urging the darkness and receiving no response but for the dull reverb of his own voice, his heartbeat a pounding that morphed in his ears, acquired an echo and a purpose, became the distant imminent footsteps of those he’d always known would one day come for him.
At seven o’clock on the morning of the eve of his vindication, the twenty-year veteran of the secret wars known only as the Snake was escorted from Rikers Island Penitentiary wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt and a long trench coat, was taken by taxi across the unmarked bridge into Queens. There he stood at the bus stop in sunlight prismed by drying rain puddles while a class of kindergarten students scurried around him. He’d been collared again on a disturbing the peace charge, though he hadn’t been disturbing a thing, certainly not whatever it was they called peace in this city—it was just his former bosses with the agency checking up on him, letting him know they still had him in their sights. They’d done it a dozen times in the lifetime that had passed since he’d gotten out of intel and straight into special ops, these quick collars to shake him up. You kne
w they were hard up if they were even giving the ground troops a rough time of it, if they were infiltrating the ranks of the silent army they themselves had set up on the hectic floor of the city. These last few weeks it had felt like Moskva, like Area 51 or nights in Hue, the tension like a bottle rocket set to go off, the whispers just out of reach but rising toward a cacophony that could only mean one thing.
The bus driver was a foreigner with an earnest expression, quick to look away when the Snake leveled his eyes and stood rigid against the wall next to the handicapped platform. He took the busses because they weren’t as expensive as taxis, weren’t as personal as trains, which were like riding through a labyrinth with a piece of string trailed behind you. The Snake knew these roads and bridges and overpasses like nobody’s business, the city a crazy man’s diorama, steel and one-way glass and rust, steam off the stale rivers and a sun turned gold and gray. Some days he rode for hours, sat in stations all day long, lay down in moonlit parks just to hear the crunch of last autumn’s leaves. He’d wear his black trench coat, his hair sometimes long and sometimes short because of the wigs he carried in his pockets. Sometimes he took off his glasses and sported facial hair. Other days his eyes were blue like his mother’s. The coat itself could be turned inside out, straps pulled out of Velcro enclosures and—presto!—he was a backpacker in sneakers and striped ankle socks. But usually such theatrics weren’t necessary. This was NYC—which most of the time stood for Not Your Concern. Nobody paid attention except for those who were paid to do so. The bus growled along a pot-holed access road, mounted a ramp, and merged into airport traffic on the parkway. The Snake kept his face forward while monitoring, by use of the driver’s three mirrors, the crowd behind him, looking for familiar faces among the suits holding folded newspapers while, beyond the tinted windows of the bus, six lanes merged chaotically down to four.
In the short-term view, all of this, the collar on Central Park South, the night’s stay in Rikers, smelling shit and come in the holding cell of a hundred and twenty, even this Monday morning bus ride with the GCP backed up from the B-Q Expressway halfway to the Triborough, all of it had begun six months ago, when, contacted in the traditional way (an abandoned duffel bag on the marble wall behind the Maine Monument at Merchant’s Gate) the Snake had met his contact with the agency at a pizza parlor on 46th and Ninth. A slice of sausage pizza had been sitting on two paper plates in the booth in the corner; the Snake had sat down, folded the wide slice in half lengthwise, and taken a bite. He’d seen a man watching him from the phone booth beyond the counter. When the Snake pulled a napkin from the dispenser and placed it unfolded on his lap, the man had emerged from the shadows and come over to take a seat.
It had always begun like this. A meeting at some innocuous location in the heart of the city, a briefing as they marched uptown to the park, which was where the agency’s business was always conducted. Got something for you, Snake, the man in the suit coat had said that evening, a cold one in February, the snow still piled in heaps around the sidewalks and wrought iron, the wide swath of sky dull with the faint luster of the city. He’d reached into the pocket of his coat and retrieved a photograph taken from the corner of 31st and Seventh, a crowd of humanity emerging from Penn Station and filtering along the streets, a thousand headshots coming and going, though the Snake immediately picked out the face he’d been intended to pick out. She’d dyed her hair—it was bright red now—but the Snake could’ve recognized that face anywhere despite the overcoat with collar turned up and sunglasses. The Snake nodded. You want me to keep an eye on her, he’d said.
The man in the suit coat never paused, his voice a cool whisper. We need to find out what they’re up to, whom they’re working for this time. No one’s closer to her than you are. On the wide mall beneath the skeletal elms, he stopped walking and turned to face the Snake. If you get something, you know where to bring it. And he’d pulled on his fedora and stepped along the puddled paths of the Dene, headed east toward the gate at E. 72nd.
He hadn’t seen the man in the suit coat since, had done his homework and put his ear to the wall. In his room with a single window on the fifth floor of the brownstone walkup in the middle of Hell’s Kitchen (arranged and paid for by the Feds, a cover for his real operations), he’d pored through the dozen file cabinets full of notes taken over his ten years of service in this city—the file cabinets having come from the Columbus Branch of the New York Public Library, “donated” to him as a “token of good will.” (Strings had been pulled, in other words.) He’d frequented all the spots one could go if one wanted to get information, had kept his own meticulous notes in pocket-sized stenographer’s pads, had begun by scrutinizing the photo in early daylight of the station, had noted the time on the marquee and determined this to be the massive exodus of the Northeast Corridor train from Jersey.
He’d rode out one late May afternoon, donned a suit left over from his days with the agency, and took a train across the river to Newark, a bus out through the gritty suburbia to West Orange, where he made his way up the hill along Prospect Avenue to the seventies-style bi-level that sat above a suburban ravine. He’d stepped right up the cracked sidewalk intending to knock on the front door, intending to assume some innocuous persona, as he’d done a thousand times in similar situations, had heard instead as he approached the sound of voices murmuring from the rear of the house. Through the low branches of a Jersey pine in the side yard he observed them: a small crowd of perhaps two dozen standing on the back lawn, picnic tables and paper plates and plastic cups, low-voiced discussions centered around baseball and local politics, two liters of soda half emptied and growing warm on tablecloths and coolers with beer cans on ice in the grass. In the near corner was a grill from which the smell of meat and charcoal lifted lazily, hot dogs and hamburgers, potato chips and pretzels, casseroles and pasta dishes in great serving bowls with a few insects buzzing around them, a handful of children racing here and there while the adults stood in awkward crowds or sat on benches, picking away at their food and nodding at what a nearby person was saying.
He’d waited in the ramble alongside the ravine until only a few stragglers remained, drinking beers on lawn chairs in the shade. He snuck around to the front door, picked the lock, and stepped through the shadowy gloom of the unlit house at dusk, the kitchen with its outdated cabinetry, the dining room unused though extensively decorated, the living room embraced by an old couch and love seat of green-and-yellow paisley, a coffee table with knickknacks and photographs he dared not touch. He went upstairs, felt his way along the claustrophobic hallway, and searched the cramped rooms for some sign of her, dark bedrooms with small windows slightly open and looking down on the neighborhood, on the backyard where a few voices still lingered, on the brown ravine that revealed itself now as a disused railroad bed six tracks wide, a far-off view across the lowlands of Newark and beyond. At the end of the hall, in a particularly dismal sitting room with a daybed and bookcases, he watched the last daylight disappear from the wall and lifted the dusty triptych in its old-fashioned frame from the cloth-draped end table next to a decrepit recliner, carved a finger through the dust and looked at her, all sepia-toned and smiling from the cradle of a maple tree, wearing a striped sweater on a boardwalk with the sea breeze blowing her hair across her face, seated candidly on a couch staring intently away from the camera, a look of inscrutable intensity.
So the reports were false after all: she was not dead.
On the cold bench at Penn Station in Newark, waiting for the train to take him back across the river, the Snake had tried to put it together, had leafed back through the materials he’d assembled in the manila folder that he’d brought along, intending to show the family. Instead he had only become more convinced that they’d gotten to them, had no doubt filled their heads with lies that had made of her a villain, a pariah. Riding through the barren landscape as the train approached the tunnel, the Snake wondered what lies they’d told his family, wondered what had happened to the letters he
’d long ago sent, lengthy epistles he’d taken weeks to compose, poring over every word in his room and in the back stacks of the library, logging on to the donated computers looking over both shoulders as he sought addresses, only to wait and hear nothing, responses not forthcoming and memory slowly fading until he was barely able to recall their faces, barely able to remember their names. It was at times like this, lonely moments riding endless pathways across this city that had long ago become something more than his home, something almost like his prison, that the Snake came as close as he ever did to getting beyond it. This veil that had folded over him and clouded his thoughts, altered his observations—moments when the chaos took on familiar patterns, when the chiming components of the city seemed to rise into a clattering harmony, moments when the world’s reflections seemed to merge and double and find meaning on a larger plane—it was at these moments that he always seemed to come as close as he ever did to reaching out and grasping it, whatever it was.
The train had long since descended into the tunnel beneath the river, turning the glass next to his face into a ruddy mirror that he peered into, watching the distorted bodies of his fellow passengers as they turned the pages of newspapers, rested weary heads against rattling windows. Now, as the train emerged into the station, the light filtering down from the platform lamps killed his reflection and replaced it with another face. Just ten feet away from him, separated by the span between railcars, sunglasses and a beret and the same plaid overcoat he’d seen in the photograph, her hair dyed again. Peroxide blonde.
The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill Page 5