Now the Snake saw the light in the window of his room and stopped in his tracks. He had arrived at his building in the center of Hell’s Kitchen and thought at first it was a trick, a mistake. Thought he could discern movement through the colored cloth he’d placed over the window months or years ago to keep his activities off display, to keep anyone with binoculars on a rooftop from spying. But who would leave the light on? An assassin would wait in darkness; an operative come to give him the latest news would likewise not give any indication of his being there. Which left only one option: the one rare and brilliant possibility that had pulled him along all these years doing whatever he could to help the cause, for it was the only way of keeping her memory alive. He was whispering to himself as he buzzed and came through the lobby, past the empty desk where the girl with the bone in her eyelid sometimes sat. The stairs were dark and located at the back of the building, emergency exits locked and alarmed to keep them in or the rest of the world out. He reached the fifth floor and let his eyes scan the corridor that stretched to his room, feeling the cold steel of the shank in his coat. The door was ajar, light seeping through the crack and falling across the hallway, and it reminded him, briefly, of a similar upper-story corridor in a cold building deep in the California desert, a memory that he pushed away.
He waited. Listening. Said something almost like a prayer. Holding the knife level, he stepped through the narrow crack of the doorway and saw, in the corner where the file cabinets formed a shadow, a figure seated cross-legged on the floor.
It was not her.
It was a man he didn’t recognize. The Snake readied his knife, but then he saw what he was wearing and recognized the number 54 on the back, remembered that night at the stadium in that unknown part of the city beneath the yellow halo of floodlights, the moment he had stood atop the dugout and hopped onto the warning track, had dodged a security guard at the pitcher’s mound and raced past a terrified shortstop on his way out to left field. He remembered his arrival, screaming—“I knew it! It’s a trap! I knew it! My own brother!”—throwing punches the man in the baseball suit had easily parried, putting him in a headlock long enough for security to arrive, a group of rent-a-cops dragging him away while “The Star Spangled Banner” rang down from the rafters (for this was New York City, and it took a whole lot more than some crazy field charger to delay a Yankees game), a face looking down at his as he twisted in the grasp of the rent-a-cops: the face of his brother GB, now sitting with his back to the Snake on the floor, turning his head at Jamie’s exhalation, standing and coming tentatively forward, ignoring the weapon the Snake still clutched. Then his arms were around him, the shank clattering upon the floor.
“Oh, brother,” he was saying. “It’s so good to see you. My life’s been a mess, brother. A true mess. Oh God, it’s been too long, Jamie.”
THEY HAD ALWAYS WARNED HIM it would arrive like this: masked in friendship. The agency had always told him to watch the hand that wasn’t hugging you, to make sure it didn’t hold a blade. But no one had ever told him it might look so haggard, so worthy of pity, so prepared to be dissuaded. Just as no one had ever told any of us that reunions are inevitably the victims of our visualizations, that years are hard things that cannot be reshaped and molded like memory, that the trajectories of our centrifugal lives had taken us to such remote desolate landscapes that a safe return was impossible, that pieces of each of us had been sacrificed along the way. No one had prepared any of us for how those first moments of arrival—moments we had each maybe dared to fathom in darkest solitudes, our arms around a stranger we once knew—might bring nothing but an undesired recognition, a flash in a mirror better off missed, a time capsule unsealed to reveal only the hard evidence of our prevarications.
Throughout the days to come, on interstates and in the dreary vistas of our minds, we all must have recognized it, we all must have confronted it in some irrevocable cellar of our souls, the futile submission of our explanations and scars to the only other person who could confirm or challenge them, the only other living creature who could validate or villainize or vindicate.
Had we really traveled so far merely with the hope of encountering some portal to the past that would finally allow us to forget? To forgive? Had GB really come all this way seeking only someone to talk him out of it?
If so, the Snake perceived in the suspicious ease of his brother’s embrace, he had come to the wrong place. For the peace or whatever passed for it in this city was about to be disturbed once and for all. And twenty years had taught the Snake that this halfway house in Hell’s Kitchen was not the place for happy endings.
2
Heartland
Wednesday
MAX HILL COULDN’T STOP LOOKING at his twin sister.
She hadn’t aged. Not according to his memory. Seated in the passenger seat of the blue Buick he’d procured via his own vague Vegas connections, dozing now as the flat, featureless country of pink rocks and purple dusk spread before them—all curled up with her face toward the door, the flat blade of her cheek outlined by shadow—she was the same girl she’d been twenty-four years ago when she’d packed up and left him for a life in Las Vegas that had forced him to forget her. They were in eastern Utah, a hundred miles outside Grand Junction, where he’d planned to spend the first night of this trip east, the brief swatches of forest and national park land that had colored this afternoon spent on a clogged interstate having given way to a nocturnal landscape with nothing to catch the eye, no trees and no color. The next stage of his plan would not begin to go into effect until they reached Denver, and he’d hoped to use this long drag across Utah to explain to her exactly what he meant to do.
Instead, he’d become her caretaker. He’d been amazed, paralyzed by how different it was. Setting foot in this foreign world he’d disdainfully called the Lower 48 for the past thirty years had been like climbing a ramp from a potholed two-lane road through a tunnel of trees onto a futuristic highway of lights and levitation. This was not his America. He felt no connection to the people who lived like this, surrounded by concrete and steel and tinted glass, their hopes for the future nesting in the lap of a government as random and irresponsible as a slot machine. He had never owned a credit card, never had a car payment or a gas bill. His first pickup he’d bought in return for chum salmon from a river Indian named Sam Chainsaw. In the cabin where he’d lived with Alice and Lynk—the cabin in the country, which was what they called the interior portion of Alaska between the Yukon and Charley Rivers—he’d had no television, no electricity, had carved out a living minus these mind-numbing influences. The result was a body built for heavy work, a tight barrel of a body that looked out of place here, dressed in a flannel shirt and old jeans, a suitcase full of cash on the seat next to him in the taxi he’d taken from the airport to the south end of the Strip, where he’d stepped out into this atmosphere that felt unreal, stood under catwalks pulsing with pedestrians with the handle of the suitcase gripped in his fist, the traffic trudging ahead in a river of lights.
His discovery of her most recent place of employment had been lucky. Or inevitable. For though the never-ending torrents of tourists made it seem like a global capital, Las Vegas was not a big town—not by their standards. Starting at the southern end of the Strip and working his way north, the Excalibur was only the second resort on the left, and it was in its tawdry main game room that he had spoken with a man who’d told him sure, he knew her, hadn’t seen her in three days though, hadn’t seen her since she’d left her shift on Friday night, a shift that had ended, according to some, with her saying she wouldn’t be coming back. So who could say? She’d been working as a serving wench, after all. A what? A serving wench. In the Tournament of Kings show. Not so much a joust as a rock concert. Say, this your first time in Vegas, pal? Where you staying? Oughta check it out if you’re gonna be around a few days …
He had stepped outside into the early morning light, had stood on the sidewalk beneath the catwalks and looked up at the fabr
icated New York skyline clustered across the street and tried not to imagine what this last quarter century of her life must have been like. He had heard all the stories. There were a surprising number of people who lived in Alaska who’d once lived in Vegas, but his vision of it all had been distorted by the staleness of Fairbanks, as if two places so different could not possibly exist on the same planet. And if Vegas were so much more extravagant then, well, perhaps it couldn’t be so miserable. Perhaps with all the lights and action there could be no corners shadowy enough to hide anything so terrible as what she had already gone through.
It was impossible for him to stand here amidst this glitter and not think of it again. Impossible not to recall those days in the aftermath of that night at the hospital, the anger and betrayal Max had felt when he’d understood that he would never see Jasmine again, that she had made off with the hundreds in the cowboy’s pockets, her fee for cleaning up their mess, or at least the part of it she could. It was impossible not to dwell on those days they’d returned home sore and damaged and medicated to find their entire lives changed, a new silence full of avoidance and denial pervading the cabin as the summer gave way to autumn, as their mother grew even more cold and distant beneath the weight of their secret. Max had sought refuge in Maddie but had found her sullen, a hard shell of independence developing over the course of the claustrophobic winter with its endless nights and the unbearable cold. By spring their conflict had crumbled like the breakup and spilled down upon them, the arguments in the main room of the cabin becoming more and more irrevocable, harsh, and vicious in a way that had, on a few occasions, made their father drag Max out into the yard and shove the rifle into his hands, made him smoke cigarettes and drink beers and commiserate as they took turns firing at invisible targets in the distant woods. An obvious attempt to win some sort of favor though the conversations were stilted, forced.
In the end, it had come down to a choice. Their mother was leaving. Her mind was made up and so was Maddie’s. They were leaving Alaska as soon as Maddie finished school, and though they said they hoped he would come with them, Max could also see the reluctance in their eyes, the way his mother now seemed to look at him the same way she looked at their father.
Standing alone in the uncertain light of Vegas dawn, rolling himself a cigarette and wondering how he’d ever thought he’d be able to track down his sister in this hellhole, Max Hill recalled the night they’d left. And he recalled the day only a week before that when he’d told them his plans to stay, just less than a year since the night at the hospital, his ribs healed though he would always feel a dull ache in his chest when the rain came, the four of them at the cabin that by this point was in a state of disarray, Maddie and Annabelle’s belongings half packed and lying around in a discreet clutter, an emblem of the confusion that had become the routine of their daily lives, which should have been colored by a new sense of completion—for the pipeline had at last been finished and all the checks approved, the pumps scheduled to be turned on in June and the first oil tanker set to embark from Valdez port as early as August. Their father had never spoken to them about what had happened—Max didn’t even know for sure how much he knew. He had been standing out in the back field with the rifle when they’d at last arrived home from the hospital in a taxicab, had charged over to ask Annabelle where the hell they’d been and then had followed her into the bedroom, where they had stayed with the door closed for hours. Max knew it was easier for him to hide whatever he was feeling behind his new greatest triumph, and so while Annabelle and Maddie inconspicuously packed and cleaned he would smoke and pace, by turns glum and indignant, indifferent and boastful, espousing guilt trips disguised in swagger regarding the pipeline and the profits it was raking in, as if any of them cared.
It was not until after the spring thaw that Maddie had informed Max of the plans that had eventually led her here, to this runway of glitz amidst a moonscape. She’d done it all on the sly, had applied without his knowledge, had taken the SATs in the near-vacant lunch room of the high school one Saturday morning while he slept, had sent off her successful scores and applied for early enrollment and filled out the financial aid forms, checking the box that said Check here if no one else can claim you as a dependent, just as the guidance counselor had told her to. Max had not done any of that, had become as a result of those confusing years the sort of boy who allows all talk of college and the future to drift off in the breeze. Their mother had been the one who’d had big plans for her little boy and girl, but now that she was leaving it seemed she’d given up on encouragement. His father had never been one to supplement her message of self-improvement, had labored obliviously under the supposed assumption that if either of them needed anything, they’d just ask. So when he’d heard of Maddie’s plans to go to Las Vegas, spoken to him on that night they were packed and ready to go, their father had rolled his lower lip and nodded. “Not bad!” Skinny and seventeen with a wispy excuse for a mustache, Max had watched his father in the main room of the cabin and suddenly understood. That despite all the posturing, deep down it was a relief. That beneath the arrogance and the antics, he was just pleased at the prospect of having them out of his hair.
“And you, Max?” he’d said. “What are you thinking you’ll do?”
Truth was, Max hadn’t been thinking about it at all. But he’d felt the need to answer, to be the sort of independent and on-his-toes son who would continue to have surprises up his sleeve. To seem unfazed and defiant against the looks he received from his mother and Maddie. “Me?” he’d said, in a voice that approached reproof, as if disappointed his father had to ask him in the first place. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here in Alaska. I’m never leaving.”
Now he was over forty, still unable to grow a mustache and walking aimlessly north from the famous WELCOME TO FABULOUS LAS VEGAS sign back toward the Excalibur. What a thing to have said. He hadn’t meant it, of course; or rather, hadn’t known he’d meant it. Would never have guessed it might actually come true, couldn’t have imagined he would be standing here some twenty-four years later searching for the sister he hadn’t seen since a cold spring day in Alaska, wandering this alien strip like a lost tourist, men coming over to hand him pamphlets advertising sex shows, looking up at the towering glamorous temples of greed clustered at the intersection of Tropicana and the boulevard.
He had not noticed it at first, how the background hum of voices—ever-present, even at this early hour—had begun to change during his walk to the southern end of the Strip and back, had gradually taken on a quality of panic underlying the typical laughter and shouting, the boisterous intoxication. Max Hill had not noticed at first the taxis pulling over at the curbs, drivers’ eyes locked forward on their dashboards, on their radios, pedestrians approaching to knock on the windows when their raised arms were not acknowledged, people suddenly emerging from the casinos, from the ATM booths, from the monorail platform beyond the towers with distracted expressions, cell phones pressed to one ear with a palm covering the other. He had not understood what was happening until after he’d come back through the door of the Excalibur—having finished his cigarette and stubbed it out in the stainless-steel cylinder situated next to the entrance, a revolving door he’d shared with a hustling group who’d come bursting out into the street to stare up at the adjacent miniature replica skyline, as if to take comfort from its still being there. He had thought it was more of the twenty-four-hour mania that seemed an irreversible part of these neon lights and populous sidewalks, more of the symptoms of this America that was not his until he’d arrived again at the main ball room of the Excalibur to find the evidence right there on the big-screen television that typically played advertisements and self-promotional videos, places abandoned at gaming tables and slot machines, patrons huddling, whispering, gasping, even the waitresses in their skimpy medieval costumes with drinks balanced on their wagon-wheel trays having paused, the man who had only moments before told him what he knew of Max’s sister now
distracted, turning away from Max’s approach, everyone’s eyes locked on the spectacle that passed for entertainment, leaving Max so baffled that he had almost turned and stepped right back out the revolving door to hail a taxi back to the airport—or to call up his acquaintance and see if they could speed things up. He had almost determined that this side trip had been silly to begin with when he saw out of the corner of his vision a disturbance in the crowd, people resituating their feet to accommodate the passage of some crouched creature moving along the floor, a scene Max recalled from those days long ago in the Flame Lounge, watching from the darkness as his sister—at thirteen—crawled around the feet of the pipeliners, searched on the peanut-strewn floor for their dropped hundreds.
SHE WAS DELIRIOUS. BOMBED OUT of her mind on something stronger than anything Max Hill had ever put in his long, thin cigarettes that burned for twice the time. He had found her at the foot of a slot machine and helped her to her feet, guided her with hands under armpits to the empty ladies’ room when she’d gotten sick on herself. The last forty hours she had drifted in and out of sleep, had awakened restless and shouting out names Max had not bothered to attempt to understand, names Max had ignored as they’d made their way off the Strip by way of a noisy taxi ride through mounting confusion—voices on the radio confirming that there was a second plane, then a third and a fourth, the remote hope that it was just an accident shattered, their Mexican driver watching them like crazy people in the rearview. She had asked him a dozen times what he was doing here, squinting when she looked at him as if she had to peer through a fog. Max eventually managed to encourage her to supply something resembling an address that the cabbie was able to translate into a successful delivery out to the edge of the desert, the cab coming off the interstate onto a barren road carved into a world of creosote brush and alkali wash, mountains in the distance. Here they’d stood for ten minutes while she dug in her purse, searching for keys, at the base of a six-story steel rectangle that had once been a warehouse, that now featured a dingy lobby with a wall of mailboxes, a stark corridor leading to a bank of elevators and, beyond, a steel double door into whose key pad she punched a code as if she’d been doing it for decades, the one totally coherent moment she had before leading him into the hangar-like living space beyond, five stories of concrete and air, open aluminum staircases ascending at frightening angles without handrails, floating decks of grated fire-escape metal, rooms hovering on rooms and all of them empty, Max having to help her up a series of treacherous landings to her hanging tower of a bedroom beneath the tin roof, where he’d attempted, over the course of that Tuesday, to nurse her back to health. Her kitchen, near ground level, on a raised dais above a bathroom, was in shambles, as poorly stocked as any he might’ve expected from someone who lived like this. He’d watched a scorpion skitter across the metal floor as he rooted through the metal cabinets in search of anything palatable—in his cabin he would’ve given her beans and fresh moose and coffee brewed in a stained tin can—but finally settled on Honey Nut Cheerios he suspected were stale. No milk. In a bottom counter beneath the rusted sink he found a box of Tetley tea and brewed her a cup, exploring the flights of stairs while it steeped, in search of roommates, in search of anyone or anything that might reconcile the life of this unknown woman with her knotted hair and bruised arms to the girl he’d known, looking for the letters he’d sent, for anything that might confirm it was truly her, that he’d not stumbled upon some delusional look-alike, finding only spare rooms on platforms with dead cable wires snaking from the walls.
The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill Page 13