The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  He hadn’t seen Jasmine’s arrival. But he had heard what the cowboy called her, heard her cry as her body was sent reeling backwards into the hallway while Max rose onto his hands and knees, crouched in the corner, recovering his breath.

  That was when he’d seen the piece of rebar. Someone had used it as a prop to keep the window open, to let the cool night air into this stuffy moldy room. Max didn’t remember picking it up, but he remembered the moment of contact, the sound that had sent a shockwave along his spine and made the world mute. He remembered watching the body as it crumpled to the floor covered with dirty magazines and cigarette butts, its pockets still full of hundreds, face upturned with an expression so cryptic Max had to look away, the rebar settling on the bed and falling to the floor in slow motion. Turning then to find Jasmine helping Maddie up as the sound returned to the world, his sister already fighting and swearing and pushing. He remembered the colors and the pattern of the blanket they wrapped him in, the blood on the back steps as Jasmine tried to drag him out toward the dumpster in the deep blue light of morning, their eyelids crusty and their awareness dulled by the four o’clock dawn of a nightless evening. He remembered the car parked along the cindery street around the corner and down the block by the river, remembered Jasmine dragging the body in that rowdy hour before the bars closed, her struggle to lift it up and shove it into the trunk, which she then slammed shut. And now, years later, seated in a window seat in a 747 on a rainy runway in Juneau, with his DHC Beaver sold and a suitcase of cash on the floor between his feet, Max Hill remembered himself writhing in his hospital bed that night, desperate for more medicine to make the pain go away. He didn’t know where his mother was. But he knew where Maddie was. He’d seen the nurses coming down the hallway and watched them turn into the room across from his, had heard one of them mention the words that had hurt even more than his ribs, words that had told him his sister would never be the same again. With his body screaming, he’d rolled over and gotten out of bed. They’d told him not to move, had informed him that the jagged edges of his ribs were dangerously close to several vital organs. That if he wasn’t careful, he could stab himself to death with his own bones. But he didn’t care. He snuck across the hall and saw the shadow of his sister behind a veil, turned away, though when she saw him she rolled over and sat up, her black eyes flecked with light, her hair wild.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said. But only because she knew he wouldn’t go back, just as he knew she didn’t want him to go. And as he crawled into bed with her, he knew already that this was one moment they’d be stuck with forever. That this morning—the fifth of July, 1976—would be with them no matter where they went or what they did. Even after his mother and Maddie had deserted him, even after his father had at last seen the conclusion of the Alaska Pipeline portion of his life and settled into a holding pattern, waiting for what would come next … even after all this, Max Hill—who would be the only one of them to remain in Alaska, a place he hated to leave (even now, as the 747 lifted off into the night)—after all this, Max Hill would still look back on that morning in the hospital, the pallid sunlight seeping through the window blind and the veil, his sister’s bruised face against his shoulder, his own jagged ribs nudging at his vital organs, ready to puncture them at the slightest wrong move. Any move.

  Monday Evening

  THE SNAKE WAS IN HIS element.

  He was crisscrossing the five boroughs in his endless labors, trains and busses and a cab whose back door he’d pushed open at Broadway and the Avenue of the Americas, leaving the dark-skinned driver of ambiguous origin shouting at his back in a guttural language. He hid behind bushes at the park near the library, watched two NYPD cars meet next to a taxi stand, found the brown satchel he’d hidden in a hedgerow some months ago and threw on the sunglasses inside, the fake beard, a walking stick he’d adhered to a tree trunk with brown packing tape, limped along the concrete with the stick wavering in front of him. Excuse me, please, sir. Thank you.

  It was the only life he could imagine, this life that—in the long-term view—had begun nearly thirty years ago, when he’d abandoned the existence their father had attempted to carve for them out of the Alaskan wilderness and taken the bus to Anchorage, walked the dismal streets until he came to the recruitment office and, from there, within weeks, had been on a plane to Houston, Texas. The Snake could still recall—on days like this one, taking public transportation across the city that had grown to encompass his whole world, the city it had been his duty for so long to protect—that bus ride through the northern summer, could still remember the anxiety of a young man striking out on his own, something akin to hatred for his father though not precisely, something not quite like sympathy for the ones he’d left behind.

  They’d manipulated his impatience. The Snake didn’t regret it, was as acclimated to his existence as he imagined the lawyers and the stock brokers he saw walking in their suits along Wall Street to be. But that didn’t mean there hadn’t once been a time when he might have pictured something different for himself. If the Snake could’ve gone back in time—an impossibility, though the US government was working on it, had been for the last forty years—if he could’ve gone back and talked to his seventeen-year-old self, stood on the banks of the Chena with that young man selling work cards to new pipeliners outside the French Quarter, he would’ve told him … Well, he didn’t know what he would’ve told him. Talking wouldn’t have worked. The seventeen-year-old boy who climbed the walls of an Anchorage motel for a week waiting for his paperwork to come through distrusted conversation. In their fractured family, the talking had always been done by their father, who was always trying to salvage some hare-brained idea about moving to the middle of nowhere to become billionaires. His seventeen-year-old self equated dialogue with lies. You couldn’t trust a word anyone said in this world; the more they talked, the bigger liars they were, the extent of their vocabulary directly proportional to their level of bullshitting. The seventeen-year-old boy hated speeches, found them fucking boring. Same with politics. Same with the people who were out protesting the war. The seventeen-year-old boy had known nothing about the history of the campaign in Vietnam, had known only that it had been going on since seemingly before he was born, that for as long as he could remember, young men had been mentioning it as an option. Not a great option, mind you, but for boys of a certain age like the Snake had been—he wasn’t going to college, had no interest—for boys of a certain age in 1973 it had seemed viable, a way of beginning a life if you could only manage to keep from getting killed.

  Basic in Texas was a slave camp on the sun. He’d thrived in a setting so impersonal, avoided eye contact and sat at tables in the mess halls with others whose blank stares told him they’d never bother him with an attempted conversation. He’d taken masochistic pleasure from a world so parched by hundred-degree days that his skin grew hard like a reptile’s, had shaved his head and all his body hair to let the sweat run its course and take away the itch, vomited more than he ate, slept every night like a corpse and woke without a thought in his head except casual dread for the day to come. The verbal berating did nothing to him. He was immune, obedient but aggressive and looking forward only to his commission, couldn’t wait for them to ship him overseas so he could leave behind this insulated world of formalities and inconsequence and be thrust into the beating heart of whatever violent upheaval was taking place. Not because of patriotism—that was all just verbiage he’d heard elsewhere, macho ventriloquism adopted to make him seem more with it (he didn’t even really know what a gook was, or where exactly Vietnam was located on a map)—but because of what it offered him, which was a way of placing himself on some dramatic stage where he could succeed or die trying with everyone watching. It had nothing to do with saving the world; it was about the world saving him through its severe power of adulation. It was why, when he found out about the end of the war—the peace pacts all signed, the armies on their way back home—he’d gone directly to his superior
officers, had scheduled a sit-down and come barging into the low-roofed Quonset hut on the edge of camp five minutes early, talking about “these recent events” with such vehemence that the corporal and his aide at last had to give up their façade of omniscience and ask exactly what recent events he was referring to.

  Why, the end of the war!

  The corporal had sat back in his chair, asked the aide to give them a few minutes alone, had crossed his legs and threaded his fingers together in his lap. This was the spring of 1973. The official treaty had been signed only months ago, but for all intents and purposes as far as the media had been concerned, the domestic and international media, the war had been over for years. It had been some time since they had seen boys like this PFC James Hudson Hill, though once upon a time, they’d been plentiful. They all seemed to come from out-of-the-way places, from hard childhoods without many friends in nowhere towns out in the country, one narrow street carved into a gulley between two mountainsides, the earth always wet from the runoff and the storefronts battered by the wind sweeping down through the pass, a gravel road for a young boy to walk up and down day after day and ponder a future that would blow a hole in the universe. They were always quiet, these lonely boys, didn’t talk about themselves so much as the others because they were always thinking, always dreaming, already living in their minds the life that rested at the far end of destiny. Yes sir, it had been some time since they’d seen this PFC James Hudson Hill’s type: boys barging into offices and asking what they could do, what role they could play, how they could get themselves shipped off someplace where they could perform the duties of a soldier. It had been a damn long time, and most of them were dead now. They’d been replaced by a hodgepodge of misfits, college dropouts, unlucky draftees, none of whom wanted to be here, all of whom were coming around to the military as a last resort. For these types of soldiers (and for the rest of the world, always ready to criticize when it was other people’s hands on the table; the same people who’d sure enough come running the instant they found themselves at the heart of some crisis) for all of them this war might have been over. For the idealists and the peaceniks burning flags in the heartland it might have been over. For the politicians and their delegates it might have been over. But for the real soldiers, the true warriors, it wasn’t over yet and never would be. Sure, we pulled out of Vietnam. January 27, 1973. Didn’t you see it, PFC Hill? Hell, the whole world was watching. We pulled right the fuck out and came hightailing it back to the US of A with our tails between our legs. Yessir, we pulled out and let them have their goddamn fucked-up bullshit country back.

  Only, you know what?

  In the frigidly air-conditioned office at the back of the nondescript Quonset hut in a far corner of the base outside San Antonio, Texas, PFC James Hudson Hill shook his head.

  “It’s not true,” the corporal said. “The war’s not over.”

  It was all a lie. Everything you read in the newspapers. Everything you saw on the TV. The troops hadn’t all come back. Most of them, that much was true. They’d come home to a country surreal with indecision. But not all of them. The corporal was pacing the room now, not nervously but dramatically, kept turning his gaze to form his thoughts, then seizing the boy with a stare of immense intensity.

  “Don’t believe it, PFC Hill. There’s still a war going on. And just because you can’t hear about it on the radio doesn’t make it less real. Fact is, that makes it even more of a war. No more of this honor and polite crap. No prisoners and no stories to bring home to Mom. What happens in Vietnam stays in Vietnam. You hear what I’m saying, PFC Hill? What I’m saying is this: while the world was watching all those troops coming home—those slackers who spent their whole tours drunk or stoned and catching VD—while the whole world was eating up that Kumbaya bullshit, the people who really know what’s going on were getting together on a new plan, a plan that would not be televised, that would do its work by nightfall, that would save the world in spite of itself with nobody the wiser. We’re halfway to Hanoi, PFC Hill. This war is still burning hotter than ever. And if you’re ready to go, we’re looking for a few good men. Sometimes, you know, it’s quality, not quantity, that gets it done. So what I’m asking, PFC Hill, is this.

  “Are you ready?”

  THAT WAS HOW IT HAD begun. A quarter century in the darkest annals of the unwritten history of the world had begun with the easy convincing of a not yet eighteen-year-old boy that his destiny lay with the United States government, with a secret base in the middle of the desert where only the best of the best got invited, a place that only the cream of the crop even knew about. So had begun a quarter century so guided by the whims of his superiors that looking back he couldn’t differentiate which of it was real and which of it he’d imagined. Had he really marched north from Da Nang along a scorched path across the earth, shooting at everything in sight, a thousand men armed to the teeth and nourished only by little red pills they received every morning that made their minds fortresses of conviction and the world a blood-red atmosphere of smoke and sightlines, crosshairs directed at any movement, the corpses of the fallen cut into pieces and worn as fatigues, No sleep till Hanoi! their battle-cry, coming across the fields and rice paddies with mortars screaming, a wave of destruction that left the whole sky and earth trembling, a corridor of evil stomped out by the most aggressive offensive since Alexander the Great, planes spreading napalm across the path of the infantry, PFC James Hudson Hill lugging a mortar on his back that had already scorched his skin and twisted it with scars, burning out foxholes and shredding the enemy with M60 fire, Hanoi a wreck of an outpost whose outskirts they came marching through, waiting for the battle to arrive, though there were no soldiers and hardly any citizens, charging like demons on command toward the capitol, PFC James Hudson Hill from San Bernardino, California, via Fairbanks, Alaska, pulling up a hundred yards away, ducking to set up his weapon, arranging his tripod atop a parked car whose driver had been shot at close range in the face with an automatic rifle, pulling a shell from his sack and dropping it in the tube, ducking away and covering his ears at the echo, opening his eyes to watch the projectile descend toward the building ahead of his fellow soldiers, his brothers, watching the mortar shell strike a direct hit through one of the top floor windows—then turning away from the heat, a great cloud of flame that encompassed the entire building and sent pieces of rubble soaring through the air as he dove through the window of the car, abandoning his mortar on the roof and curling up on the floor next to the executed civilian, hearing the approach of a great snarling destructive breath preparing to crash down upon him, a high-pitched whistle slicing beneath the roar before the world went black.

  Had that really happened? Or was it just more of the reality cooked up in the silver bunker in which he’d awake periodically, his head always aching, his mouth always dry, specialists in extensive outfits appearing to administer more pills, record his pupil size, test his urine, take hair samples, inspect his testicles, stick tongue depressors down his throat and cold steel tubes up his asshole. They’d told him he was five hundred feet below the surface of the Earth, in the largest bunker on the planet, a place where even the Soviet satellites couldn’t keep an eye on us, the loneliest corner of the country and tailor-made for such experiments, a place where some of the most amazing and unprecedented testing in the history of the human race was being done, where new technology was being proven every day, where the future was now. The year up there didn’t matter, was not his concern, because down here was a place outside time. It was a military base—a training facility, long pale corridors, slots on the doors into which cards were swiped to gain admittance, every word spoken in a code he was never able to fully crack. The exits were guarded. All movement, he learned quickly, was monitored by the little cards scanned every thirty feet. Color coding spoke of clearance. His was blue, which meant he had none. He was allowed to go only where he was taken. Sometimes he was blindfolded; sometimes he was forced to wear headphones playing white noise.
At the end of his strange excursions along the stark corridors he was placed alone in sanitized rooms with beds or pool tables and told to act normal. Take a nap. Shoot some stick. He’d sense something being pumped in through grates high up on the wall. Then he was lying on his back in his room, unable to determine how much time had passed because there were no clocks. He had no appetite, ate only when they led him through a line and heaped nourishment upon a tray and guided him to a table. With no sun, the order of days became confused. This was his life and everything beyond had ceased to exist. He was always tired. Always had a headache. The hours in between the moments when men in military uniform would appear at his door he’d spend lying in his bed in his room without a window, writing long letters to his older brother, to his half sister, letters he didn’t know where to send and wasn’t sure he would’ve wanted to even if they’d allowed him. When he’d first arrived, he’d attempted to get some news of them, had asked for newspapers, and though the nurses had told him they’d see what they could do, the MPs, when he’d mentioned it to them, said it wasn’t part of the agreement.

  He couldn’t recall making any such agreement. He couldn’t recall his arrival, except for the spotty imagery of a green military jeep, a desert landscape with cyclone fencing and guards holding M-16s, a sign reading Deadly Force Authorized. And yet from the beginning there had been an overarching sense of something cloistering, something protective and womb-like, a presence manifested occasionally by a familiar face seen from afar, a figure moving along the corridors at a distance. He had never found out her name. Names were guarded, identities sacred. Taboo. But it seemed to him that he already knew it, that it had become for him a word like hope, evocative of a freedom he could barely imagine anymore as the years revolved in this Moebius strip of an existence, in this tent of his own fears where he sometimes wondered if anything he witnessed was true. There she was, recognizable through the crowd when they’d line up for quarterly physicals, or peering through the glass pane in his door, which she’d unlock and enter, cloaked in a crimson robe that she removed as she crossed the room, letting it fall around her on the metal floor. And months or years later, when they’d at last set him free from that place, when they’d at last deemed him ready and sent him out on transcontinental flights on the vague missions for which he’d been training, she had continued to appear to him. At airports as he’d moved through customs, a slender figure beyond revolving doors, beneath signs in other languages, her face in adjacent taxis as he’d made his way through the old capitals of foreign countries the only thing that had strung the episodes of his life together.