They’d moved out. Some of them all at once and then the rest one at a time, while she’d been searching for anyone to fill the place of the first group. How long ago had this been? Weeks? Months? It had been twelve years ago. She was too tired to do it, too exhausted to show the place, paying the entire rent and drying up her meager savings, hawking her possessions to supplement a nonexistent income and making ends meet through other means left unsaid. Life had become something worse than a chore, a tedious bout with demons more powerful than she could have imagined years ago when this city had been nothing if not fun, when Michaela had come into her life just after their mother had left for the final time, when she had ruled the world or at least their little stage at The Pal, all of it having come to a head on this weekend past in a series of lousy deals so unbelievable that she hadn’t been at all surprised to see her brother approaching across the casino floor, like the last shocking hit in the craziest hand of hold ’em ever dealt. She’d informed him of all this while drinking the tea, her words slurred though she seemed to have come around a bit, eyes red and miserable, body running down quickly with the confused energy of the telling, Max watching from across the room, seated on a wooden stool he’d brought up from the kitchen.
When he was satisfied that she was asleep, Max Hill stepped back out into the evening heat, walked along the gritty road on the edge of town to a closed-down auto shop where he found a pay phone, unfolded a slip of paper he’d been carrying in his pocket, and dialed the number, letting it ring until a voice at the other end finally responded, alarmed or just surprised. “Who’s this?” He’d assumed the deal was off. “Haven’t you seen what the hell’s goin’ on, guy?” But he’d given Max the directions, had told him the car would be out past Henderson in the foothills of Lake Mead, keys behind the left front tire. And there it was, the taxi driving past the spot where the blue Buick sat inconspicuously parked on the shoulder, Max telling the driver to stop a mile down the road and then walking back, climbing into the driver’s seat and pausing for a moment, listening to the quiet rush of the desert.
He was preparing. Rewinding and replaying again the stories he’d been telling himself for years, searching for encouragement, finding justification in the details. If their father had been a different man—a man who had wanted to help his children along rather than giving thanks when their own muddled decisions swept them out from under his feet, if he’d actually listened to and attempted to empathize with them rather than making hasty assumptions based on what little they were willing to tell him—he might not have charged off (the day after his son had told him of his teenage intentions) to the admissions office at the university at Fairbanks; he probably would have held off before pulling strings with his network of connections to come up with the free ride for his lukewarm son; and he certainly might’ve at least told the boy that he himself was planning to leave Alaska as well. He’d already by that point told Annabelle. He’d already told Maddie. But he had been unable or unwilling to tell Max. So it was Max’s sister who had told him that wet day in June, just days before she was scheduled to go away, her bags all packed. They’d walked out into the nine o’clock sun and along the dirt road into town, down to the banks of the river and the same concrete structure they’d sat on years before, watching the pyrotechnics of the national holiday cascade from the sky. The Kentucky Fried Chicken was closed down. Everything in Fairbanks was closed down, including half the bars the twins had once frequented when they were younger. What remained was a ghost town just like in the movies: storefronts empty, the breeze blowing a rickety tune along Two Street, where the French Quarter still operated out of its unremarkable spot between the closed-down check cashing store and the alley.
That late winter and early spring—their last together—Max Hill had spent mostly away from the tense scenes at the cabin on Fireweed Hill, trying to unearth his own sense of identity. When he’d reached the legal drinking age he’d begun heading out to the bars—not the ones downtown that had become notorious during the seven-year stretch of the pipeliners—but the smaller places where the real denizens of Alaska dwelled, the haunts of those after whom he had chosen to fashion himself. Long before he’d delivered his spontaneous and irrevocable decision—irrevocable because he knew his father would equate indecisiveness with cowardice—he’d been working on a plan, one that would take him in a direction so much the opposite of his father’s and his sister’s that he would be able to purge them from his life entirely. It had been not even a year since the disappearance of the Texas pipeliner had made rumors swirl in the raucous rooms of the Flame Lounge and the French Quarter, the talk that had driven Max away from the crowds on Two Street to confront and come to terms with what he’d done. It had been less than a year since that night that had nearly destroyed them all, but it had been a period full of change. People didn’t necessarily remember Max Hill because they didn’t necessarily remember his father, and so he was able that spring to create entirely new histories for himself. He was a widower prospecting for gold, a young man looking to earn his pilot’s license, hoping to learn how to run a trapline. There’d been all sorts of strange looks. There’d been laughter. Yet by Memorial Day, he’d found someone willing to take him on as a trapping assistant, to take him up in his mail plane and teach him to fly the Alaskan way, willing to lay the groundwork for the life Max Hill had somehow signed himself up for.
His name was Jed Winters, and he was from Ohio, but he’d lived up here for nearly fifteen years. In Ohio, Jed Winters had sold insurance, had gotten fed up with that life right quick, had said goodbye to his mom and pop and sis and come north with little more than the money in his pocket, had arrived in 1964, plenty of time to log the residency quota and get a job on the pipeline. But he’d refused.
“I’d gotten wise,” Jed Winters told Max Hill that first night they’d spoken in one of the outskirt bars where Max had pulled up a chair, already drunk. “I hadn’t come up here in search of money. If it was money I’d wanted, could’ve stayed down in Ohio, could’ve kept selling insurance.” He’d leaned forward, toward Max, in a way that first made the boy back up—but then, sensing something inviting about it, he’d crouched forward, put a hand on his beer glass, stared through it while Jed Winters spoke. “I knew I could’ve made big bucks on the pipeline. But I’d made a promise to myself when I left the Lower 48. I said I was only going to make as much as I needed. When I first got here, gold mining was the thing. Everyone and his pa had spent a thousand dollars on a sluice box. Alaska’s always been the land of misfits, a hundred lazy men for every one worth a grain of salt, like you and me. Instead of trying to find gold or oil, I learned how to make an honest living, learned how to get by on my own. That’s what this country was all about, you know. Once upon a time. Before it became saturated with commerce, the playground of corporations. Who wants to live in such a place? Once upon a time this country was started as a land where a guy could live the way he wanted to live. Now we’ve been coerced into a mainstream lifestyle. Most people have. Not yours truly. Punched my ticket and came out here. Haven’t spoken to anyone back in Ohio for years.” Jed Winters had been going on like this for nearly an hour while Max Hill had sat staring at and through his amber glass of beer. What he was saying had made sense to the boy, but anything would have made sense as long as it was contrary to what he’d been hearing all his life: that America was the land of the entrepreneur, that it all came down to money, that freedom was nothing without capital, and that that was how it should be, how it always had been and always would be.
“You’re not really going to stay here, are you?” his sister had asked him, the day they’d walked down to the Chena River and stood along the concrete barrier, balancing above the riverside in the twilight. But Max Hill had decided that he would. That if his father was a man who lived on bank loans and credit and wouldn’t face a problem unless it had a dollar sign attached to it, then Max would be the sort who lived on three hundred dollars a year. That if Fairbanks was what co
uld be called a city—with its weathered storefronts and great drifts of snow heaped along the empty streets—then he’d venture into the city only once a year on a snow machine to buy seventy-five pounds of flour, sugar, and ammunition. That if his sister insisted upon living in a place where the lights glared a thousand hues of neon, where great flamingoes and sphinxes stared down like extinct gods, and where every hotel room held a secret—if his sister insisted on turning such an about-face in her life, then he would turn himself even more fully to the wild haunted surroundings of his childhood, would come into the country as they said, would learn how to live with and against this half-million-square-mile monster. Still, the only way he could deal with the loss of her was to conjure up resentment—to put his sister in the category he’d long ago placed his father. He’d reimagined that moment on the murky banks of the Chena a million times in the quarter century that had followed, had altered his sister’s expression until he was able to make her turn vicious. In order to properly hate her—which was what he’d needed, all those years ago, to survive without her—he’d given her a moment of pure fury, a moment in which she’d shouted to him the words that had made him capable of banishing her.
“Fine then!” Maddie had said to him on their final meaningful night together. “Stay here! You deserve to be alone anyway! You try so hard not to be, but you’re exactly like him!” He’d heard these lines like religion in his ears, had come to believe them so fully, with such dependency, that it was still difficult—even now, halfway to Denver, the sun collapsing on her turned-away face in the front seat of the Buick procured from an acquaintance of an acquaintance—to convince himself that it was not true, that it was the collision of a quarter century of loneliness with the one person who might have made a difference, that it was nothing more than the well-honed product of his intense imagination.
THE CAR WAS A HEARSE, and she was the corpse, her brother the shrouded ferryman guiding her across the River Styx. A fitting end to the shittiest weekend ever.
The story of what Maddie Hill had been doing out in the desert since Saturday—the story that had led her to be in that disoriented state of mind in which he’d found her, high on so many substances even she couldn’t keep them straight—had in fact begun on the previous Friday night, when she’d stood among the palms outside the back entrance of the Excalibur after her four-to-ten shift, waiting for a taxi, and had seen a man dressed in a pink suit coat and fedora approaching across the sand-strewn lot. His name had been Prince Dexter—a nom de plume certainly, just like everyone else out here. He was tall and angular, a conspiracy theorist and tabloid reporter who’d made his name authoring exposés on the indiscretions of lesser-known Kennedys and a bludgeoned and strangled six-year-old beauty queen. More recently he’d focused on scandalous activities involving White House interns and had stumbled upon something else that was going to be big—something that was going to blow the lid off corporate America, something in which Maddie held a personal stake, hence here he was. These details he’d related in the moments after he’d avoided the fate most creeps who approached her suffered—avoided it by showing her, before she could speak, before she could reach into her purse, a photograph he presented like an amulet in the palm of his hand.
At that moment in her life, Maddie Hill had been clean and sober for six months, the longest she’d gone since freshman year of college, enrolled in an NA group that met at the Salvation Army shelter, headed up by a man named Henry Q who possessed some of the deepest, darkest war stories she’d ever heard, stories involving weeklong blackouts and hospitalized children later marched off into the resentful oblivion of foster care. Stories that made her own seem casual by comparison. In Vegas there was no way to be both clean and social. Once upon a time, Maddie had stalked long blocks of the Strip with strangers on a nightly basis; now for six months she had lived in a cocoon of self-preservation, had suffered the sad lonely freedom of recovery, going to meetings, going to work, talking to as few people as possible, absconding when she detected the movement of a chance conversation toward a potential social invitation, often calling for a cab from inside the Excalibur—not even certain she could endure the five minutes it would take to hail one from the curb—going directly home to punch her code into the double doors of her loft where she could hide until the next meeting.
With the simplicity of a photograph in the palm of an extended hand, Prince Dexter had coaxed her out of it, had walked with her along the Strip, brightened by the moon like a ripe orange above the black Luxor, her footsteps on the sidewalk cautious, eyes avoiding the faces of those passing her, wondering if they knew. Could they tell what a fine line she was walking? With the bait of a blurry picture of an old friend, Prince Dexter had sat her down in a moldy booth in the Denny’s across the street from the Stardust—a Denny’s (silly as it sounded) ripe with memories, whose old management and once-veteran waitstaff were long gone, replaced by teenage girls with pierced lips and a young busboy with two sleeves of tattoos and a spiked hairdo, who kept glaring at Maddie while Prince Dexter ordered them coffee and Grand Slams and, removing from a pocket of his pink suit coat a small tape recorder, asked Maddie to tell him everything she could remember about her friend Michelle Jones (a.k.a. Michaela of the once-famous M&M duo). Her friend whose body, after twelve years missing, it was his sad duty to inform her, had been found at the bottom of the lake where they’d once spent summer afternoons sunning, the excavation of a dredging project funded by the federal government and various ecological organizations, a mystery brought up from the blues and greens of that lake where you’d least expect to find one. Tahoe: whose depths caused anything dumped to sink to such a level that it never came back up, not without help. Michaela: a skeleton in a dredging sling, skull fractured by two gunshots twelve years ago.
At first, she’d been unable to speak, had sat with her head down, eyes focusing and unfocusing on the bottomless cup of coffee that she used to drink with two creams and four sugars, black and scalding now. Over the course of those twelve years since it had happened, Maddie had found ways of coping. She’d told herself lies. Had spent great amounts of time convincing herself that Michaela hadn’t “gone missing” or “disappeared” but had in fact left of her own accord, had gone back to Seattle maybe. Vegas in the eighties and nineties was no longer the Vegas of the fifties, with wise guys and hit men; it was no longer even the Vegas of the late seventies, to which she’d been introduced by the gruesome newscasts in the lounge of her dorm freshman year, stories of steel-shattering car bombs in parking garages, bodies found half-petrified out in the desert, shot three times in the heart and once in each eye and buried beneath mounds of rocks, the MGM catching fire one night and burning nearly to the ground. These days, if somebody disappeared in Vegas, you didn’t immediately assume they’d gotten themselves garroted and outfitted for cement shoes. Chances were they’d gotten married and gone off on a honeymoon; the next time you saw them they’d be fifty pounds heavier and pushing a stroller. Perhaps Michaela had simply met someone. Perhaps she’d simply abandoned Maddie, just like everyone else she’d ever made the mistake of loving.
They’d met at a party in the basement of the now-demolished 86 Club. 1979. The Strip still a gleam in a madman’s eyes, Maddie a middling and bored sophomore who’d gotten a job waiting tables at the Palm Room, Michaela a twenty-four-year-old dancer in town auditioning for the vacancy for the Lido de Paris show that ran every night of the week and twice on Saturdays. The 86 Club was located just down the street from the Stardust, the largest casino in the world and still under renovation, four restaurants and a convention center and a half dozen swimming pools in the shapes of constellations. The sparkling sign hovering over the Strip had caught Maddie’s eye during one of the long weekday walks after classes that had become her only antidote for the restlessness this city caused, west from her residence complex along the scorching blacktop between the library and the acres of desert that would soon be a basketball arena, north along Paradise Road with
its string of gas stations and hotels and fast food restaurants. The sparkling sign of the Stardust had risen out of the low darkness and pulled her in, had dressed her in a white outfit and sent her around to take the orders of the gentlemanly dinner patrons who returned without fail in the evenings transformed into flamboyant patriarchs flashing twenties, leaning over to ask when are you going to get a dancing gig, sweetheart?
The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill Page 14