The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  How many times had he imagined it? How often had he dreamed of returning to warn that brash insecure know-it-all with blond surfer’s hair who arrived in March of ’73 in the top-down Stingray for his first day of spring training in Port St. Lucie, Florida, dressed in wayfarers and a silk leisure suit, twenty-two and beyond reproach and wealthy as all get-out thanks to the signing bonus that had dropped out of the sky? How many times, in these years gone by, had he pictured himself, an aged ghost in white pinstriped rags arriving to deliver the sad truth: That these days of fame and regret were not the beginning, or the end, but the beginning of the end? That these dire, burdensome days—spent preoccupied not by the glory that seemed to await, but rather by what the old man, wherever he happened to be, might think of him now—were as close as he’d ever get to gratification?

  THE SKY ABOVE FORT LEE had deepened and cleared, the sun rupturing hugely over the tall banks across the water, and though high up in the city the light of this long day still plagued the commuters on the bridge trudging home toward Jersey, down here the world was in deep blue shadow and perfect silence. He had already unzipped the knapsack. Now, carefully, meticulously, he arranged its contents across the interior of the trunk, a dozen or so small stacks of lined notebook paper, stapled or clipped and filled to the margins with a scrawled child-like handwriting he could not make out unless he held it up to his face, studied the indecipherable marks that passed for words. The edges of the pages lifted slightly in the breeze that came off the water, the chill of the air harsh against his still-damp uniform as he reached into the baseball bat bag and retrieved the heavy item contained within, the hunting rifle procured months ago from a Miami pawn shop when he’d first felt this inevitability settling over him.

  All the way back across the city he had told himself that he was ready. Yes, he had entertained those thoughts of heading back to Miami, had even retrieved the tattered road atlas and retraced his path. But it had been little more than background noise, a disguise of hope hiding the ugly truth that he just needed to find somewhere quiet, somewhere peaceful and forlorn, and if he could find such a place then the rest would be easy. He hadn’t intended for the tour to end so shamefully. But what he had thought might be a remedy had turned quickly to something else. He’d been powerless against the memories and even worse had been the looks from the tour guide and the Midwesterners, their belittling gazes filling him with the same indignation that had arrived in the bar as the lunch crowd had filtered in and the barkeep’s expression had drifted toward the unsympathetic impatience of the city-dweller. The same resentment he’d somehow kept at bay throughout the previous forty-eight hours—the previous thirty years—turning to a simmer as the tour had led out into the astonishing sunlight of the left field grandstands where stood the shrine of famous Yankees, the names immortalized on the stone altars beyond the bullpens bringing a bile so bitter he’d had no choice but to spit it out, to harangue the confused Midwesterners with a scene so odd it must’ve seemed like part of the tour at first—until this strange man in a pinstriped uniform had begun howling about how by all rights he should have an altar of his own, how if not for his own fucking father he might’ve ended up in the Hall of Fame. For them the scene had concluded rapidly with the arrival of the rent-a-cops. But for him it had continued as he’d rattled north along the Harlem River and then west on the Cross Bronx, the fading orange blush of afternoon finding him at last on this dead-end lot beneath the city, his entire existence boiled down to just three simple alternatives: to go back, to keep going, or to finish this once and for all, right here on this apron of asphalt where no one would notice.

  He closed his eyes. The shining dampness had returned to his face and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. With the setting of this stage had come a kind of assurance. And yet something about this place—this city. Something about all those deliberate pauses and now this one, perched above the river with the dozen letters spread out like a dare in the trunk, the dog having come up to brush against his calf and looking up as if to say Where we goin’ now, boss? Something about every moment of this long morning into afternoon and now becoming evening had transformed his guilt and his shame, had awoken the other impetus that had propelled him along all these months and miles. Not just the love he had felt for his daughter, but also the disregard his own father had shown. To think of all he’d lost, and then to recall the way the old man had looked at him. The flash of his Zippo as he ignited a Camel and stood smoking with scorn and disapproval. The creak of the floorboards beneath his feet and the sound of his own voice—strained and juvenile, willful and deluded in the cobwebbed darkness of that long-ago shed—imploring the old man to understand that this bold plan of his, this ungrateful abandonment, was in fact his opportunity, his Alaska, his moment with his milkshake machine man. And hadn’t a wise man once told him there were two types of men in the world? Those who talked and dreamed and those who did? Hadn’t a wise man once told him there came a time in every boy’s life when he had the choice of sitting on his ass or getting up and doing something?

  To remember the way his father had turned away, had dismissed and disowned him. And then to think of what he’d seen, what he’d suffered. To recall what he’d endured as they’d led him down a dark corridor into the cold sterile capsule of that Sunday morning. To think of all these things while the dog that was the only souvenir of the life he’d left behind in Miami looked up with such sad loyalty was enough to spin the revolving wheel of his emotions once more, enough to make what he’d almost done here seem not just a mistake. Enough to make him return the rifle to the bat bag, to reassemble the dozen letters and stuff them in the knapsack. To gather up this confused jumble and refine it into something else entirely. Something not quite like anger. Not quite like rage. But close enough.

  He slammed shut the trunk, helped the dog back up into the passenger seat. The Stingray’s big-block revved high in low gear as he climbed the switch-backed access road, rising up from the calm by the river. The Westside Highway had long since been dismantled, the elevated yellow steel monstrosity from his memory replaced by a street-level urban boulevard. Joggers and dog-walkers in the last amber brush of quitting time, giant faded advertisements and a series of stoplights that he followed all the way to 57th Street, made his way in zigzags along the one-ways of the west fifties while the nearby docked cruise ships waged low-pitched horn battles in anticipation of evening departures.

  He had wondered, during the rare moments of the previous day when he’d allowed his mind to stray this far forward, just how he might remember it. He had never imagined that as soon as he turned onto the correct street everything would lock into place in a moment of instant and complete recall, the place where the story of his baseball career had finally come to an end still here and mostly unchanged. The shambled gargoyles still gazing down from the crumbling corniced roof, a flurry of pigeons alighting and a place to park right out front. He had never imagined he might find himself so readily standing on this rugged stoop, looking up at this building that masqueraded as just another tenement, though the signs that it was something different were there for those who knew what to look for. No air conditioners jutting from the windows. No abrupt Juliet balconies with geraniums in terra-cotta planters catching sun. No mailboxes in the lobby. Instead, a low credenza with pamphlets beneath stone paperweights to keep them from blowing away each time the heavy doors swung open, turning this dingy anteroom into a wind tunnel.

  ROGERS HOUSE: A PLACE TO COME HOME TO. WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU HAVE NOWHERE TO GO.

  After this bright day circling the city in the Stingray, it took several minutes for his eyes to adjust to the dark interior of the cold lobby. Mahogany walls and marble flooring. A disused fireplace against the far wall. The sounds of the city shut out by those heavy doors that had swung closed behind him, leaving only the click of his spikes, the dog’s nails, and a voice. A voice coming through the air thick with age and dust that he tracked to a far corner of the room, where
the half-obscured figure of a young woman in a ski jacket had materialized behind a glassed-in booth.

  “May I help you, sir?”

  There was still the option of turning around, stepping through those heavy doors, and retracing his path back through the Holland Tunnel and from there along the southbound corridors of I-95. There was still the opportunity to accept his failures as his own and not the product of some concocted curse, still time to try to find some other way of coping that involved neither self-destruction nor the heaping of blame into long-abandoned corners of his life so he could douse it in his anguish and set it ablaze—still years and years to ponder and dwell and perhaps someday absolve. There was still time for all of this. But he knew also that he had come too far to turn back, that a decision had been reached and that something indistinguishable as courage or cowardice was in control now. And what would he have done with himself, anyway, if and when he ever arrived back in Miami? What do people do? he’d wanted to ask Marc on that Sunday morning they’d stood next to the FOR SALE sign on the front lawn of what had been his and Tammy’s dream home. How am I supposed to move on? How can I ever pick up the pieces—he’d wanted to shout at that bright unforgiving Florida sky—when these fragments of a life, this car and this dog, this knapsack and this baseball bat bag, this pinstriped uniform and this plan if it can be called such, are all I have left?

  “Sir? May I help you?”

  The girl behind glass was Emma’s age. She looked out at him with a bored contempt he knew all too well, one pierced eyebrow raised as he approached tentatively, a specter in a Yankees uniform smelling of whiskey and wet dog, his haggard mutt on a leash and his face a gray mask beneath the pulled-down brim of his ball cap as he fought to form the words he’d been silently rehearsing all day, the most pivotal pitch of his life up to this point now ready to be delivered: words that came at last, thrust through cracked dry lips.

  “I’m here to find my brother.”

  SO WE WENT WITH HIM.

  From the sunbaked streets of San Berdoo to the end of the earth, we went with him. From sunny California to night-shrouded Fairbanks, Alaska, in search of oil—in search of something that had eluded him during those years in California, something we must have known, even then, with some part of our hearts, he would never find, a goal that had transformed and would continue to do so each time he approached it.

  From the westernmost edge of the continent to which he’d traveled with his own father, some thirty years previously, across desiccated fields of lost hope, we went with him even further, boarded a plane and stepped out into a land of month-long nights and days, the sun always low and striking, dime-sized as if we’d traveled outwards in the solar system. A cabin at the end of a dirt road with little furniture but a battered coal stove, a screened-in porch looking out on a field and a towering row of pines beyond which the little boom town crouched, a land of newfound wealth, and this transformed village its gateway, a place where a few months hard work—so they said—could make you set for life, or at least several years. Make a few bucks, invest it right, take an early retirement. The American way. I’m not asking you kids to love it here. God knows I’d rather be soaking up some sun in Southern California. All I’m asking is for you to give me a year or two. Just a year or two and then we’re out of here. Words spoken to those of us that remained in the large main room of the cabin huddled around the fire that first winter with the second wife he’d found to replace the first. All I’m asking for is a little bit of faith. You all know I just want what’s best for you and it turns out right now that’s Alaska. Is it ideal? Hell no. But is it something I’ve got to do? We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t … Because in the end, it all comes down to you kids. In the end, we’re here because of you.

  So we went with him. Followed him to that isolated end of the world with some small shard of hope left, found only the other thing husbands could drive their wives to, the other form of abandonment that could take our lives and seal them off like surrendered cabins in the wild.

  AT ONE O’CLOCK IN THE morning on the fifth of July, 1976—three years after their older half brother GB, whom they barely remembered, had signed the first of his ill-fated professional baseball contracts—a sixteen-year-old girl and her twin brother, dressed alike in denim and flannel, sat on the murky bank of the Chena River with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, watching fireworks crackle in the deepening dusk. At this time of night, Fairbanks was at its noisiest, a middle-of-nowhere outpost in central Alaska—mosquito-ridden and not especially pretty, with few mountains to speak of—with bars and bordellos serving the off-work pipeliners until five in the morning, closing down only long enough to rid the floors of the peanut shells and filth and satisfy state regulations before reopening at seven-thirty.

  The pyrotechnics shattered and rained down from the sky, the two kids sitting on the concrete half wall that protected the city from the spring breakup, eating the chicken purchased from the all-night store on Second Avenue (Two Street to locals and pipeliners) with the Chugach totem pole out front. Max was working on a wing while Maddie tore into a breast, the show coming toward the grand finale and reflecting on their soft, upturned faces, the light already beginning to return to the northern sky where the sun had set only one hour before. Maddie had bought the bucket of chicken with a hundred-dollar bill. Two bucks it would have cost in California, but it was four eighty here. She’d handed over the big bill like nobody’s business, and the taciturn Indian woman behind the counter had made her change without a second glance, assuming her to be the daughter of a pipeliner just paid. Maddie had found the hundred on the floor of the Flame Lounge, a bar and dance club into which they’d snuck hours earlier, ducking past the gathered men and women in the back alleys that separated it from the French Quarter, another dive. She’d had Max hoist her up and over the fence that divided the alley from the receiving area, then had gone around and let him in; they’d snuck through the kitchen and out into the main room, where the night had already been in full swing at nine o’clock, though outside the sun was still shining.

  Together, they’d watched the little town—their home town, they guessed—change overnight, turning from a backward settlement of thirty thousand to a boisterous place more dangerous than LA and almost as interesting. They’d arrived in early winter of 1969 with no idea what to expect and had taken a cabin on Fireweed Hill, a ramshackle place constructed of pine board and tin that had shaken with the cold in the winter and teemed with mosquitoes in the spring. They could have purchased a more up-to-date place to live, but their father had said this would all be temporary, that there was no sense spending a bunch of money. He’d said it all throughout their first two years here, responding to the looks of the kids that ranged between confused alarm and terror, insisting that this was the place where they would truly strike it rich. “That bit with the fast food,” the twins had heard him explaining to their older half brother Jamie on the cold nights of their first summers here while they’d listened from the mosquito-proofed porch where they slept (canvas blinds zipped to keep out the sun), “that stuff was all small beans. We’re talking real money here, my boy. D’you know how much oil they’re talking about up there on the North Slope? They’re talking twenty-two billion barrels of original oil and thirty trillion feet of natural gas on top. Does that mean anything to you, boy?”

  “It don’t mean anything if they can’t get to it,” the twins heard their older half brother mumble, could see him out there sitting on the sink basin, lean and flannel-clad with a teenager’s semblance of a beard, thick lenses of his glasses obscuring his eyes or revealing them in distorted magnified flashes. He’d become so sullen and contentious in the past three years, ever since his brother had stayed behind in California while they’d moved up here with Annabelle, the twins’ mother, their father’s second wife. Jamie’s life had become one constant complaint about how he’d ever ended up in such a redneck dump in the middle of nowhere, a pack of smokes a buck and a quarter and a be
er—which he drank plenty of up here, though he was not yet seventeen—fifty cents, the temperature thirty degrees in September and thirty below throughout January, ice and snow melting in the spring into slush and mud and something worse called muskeg.

  Sometimes they’d go out into the back field with the rifle their father had bought when they’d moved up here and had set about teaching Jamie to shoot, though he himself was little more than an amateur. The shots would ring out in the evening after dinner, punctuating the discussions while the twins listened and watched from the windows, their father often still in his dress shirt and slacks though he’d remove his coat and tie and leave them hanging from the clothesline, Jamie slouching with the weapon, raising it suddenly and sighting across the far-off line of spruce, their father giving instructions that he never seemed to acknowledge, never seemed to obey. The sky crackled with the echo of the gunshot. Jamie glared across the field, then lowered the rifle and discharged the spent shell.

  “I heard what happened to that tanker you guys sent up around the Bering Sea,” he said. “Got caught up in the ice and nearly sank. In July! And it don’t look like they’ll ever get that pipeline built. Not with the jackoffs they’ve got working on it and the EPA. Too many environmentalists in the way. Can’t say I blame them that much.”

  “Those are just delays, my boy,” the twins heard their father say, watched him seize his teenaged son gently by the arm as he took the rifle, the way the twins had seen him seize any number of folks over the years, bringing them closer and lowering his voice, inserting an element of pleading into his normally even drawl. The twins had seen their father do this again and again, not only with their mother but also with state legislators and union delegates (they may not have known what these titles meant but were familiar with their father’s lingo). They had listened as he dispensed his practiced charm and had watched the other party’s eyes soften always, had heard the reluctant acquiescence in their voices when they at last spoke their agreement.