The Snake had closed his eyes, but now he looked at him seated there on the stool. One last long sip from the beer can before he crushed it in one hand and chucked it toward the cabin, the Snake’s finger on the trigger of the rifle. “Well?” the man said. “You gonna shoot that thing, or what?” Their eyes locking. He retrieved his suit coat from the clothesline, then reached forward and removed the rifle from the Snake’s hands, placed it back against the stool. “Come on then,” he said. “I got some more things to show you.”
They stepped back through the woods, descended the embankment to the winding path, but it had transformed. It was no longer a dirt and gravel trail but a wide railroad bed with the sound of a train whistle approaching, the man in the suit coat crouching there waiting, asking the Snake if he was ready. The train came rumbling in and they hopped up onto the splintery wooden floor of one of the freight cars as it passed, the man grasping the Snake’s hand to help pull him up. He lit another cigarette and rested on his haunches in the darkness of the dusty car while the Snake stared idly at the scenery that rushed by out the wide opening of the side of the train, a vista of high sweeping plains and distant mountains capped with snow.
“I brought you some pictures,” the man said, speaking loudly over the rattling clamor, a stack of Polaroids appearing in the Snake’s hands. “Beautiful, huh? The way the sun sets over those trees there? Well, those are all taken from this here horse ranch I been lookin’ at buying. Been thinking you might even want to come live with me there. You could learn to ride, learn to help around the stables. In the evenings we’ll play poker, just like in the old days. You see, I’ve stumbled onto something, my boy. I’ve stumbled onto that one thing I’ve been waiting to stumble on my whole life. Pretty soon you’re gonna be hearing my name associated with the biggest money-making operation of the twentieth century, something that’s gonna make that bit up in Alaska seem like a pittance, and I’m not above letting you kids have a piece of the pie.”
The Snake looked up, and his father reached forward and seized him by the forearm. “This is our stop.” And in the transitory moment that ensued the Snake realized this was not a freight train. This was the F Train, and they were coming above ground at 57th Street into the soot and splendor of an urban dusk, the shadows of Fifth Avenue rising around them in the grainy darkness. They were stepping along a familiar footpath that skirted the vocal bustle of the skating rink, past the chess and checkers pavilion, descending into the silence of the barren row of elms along the mall, last autumn’s leaves sweeping across the pavement and surrounding them in a wind-blown rustle. His father spoke and the Snake listened while they made their way over to the Bethesda Terrace and stood beneath the Angel of the Waters, while they climbed up to the bandshell and sat together in the darkened space beneath the columns, the platform empty but for the grazing pigeons, his father looking at him now with an intensity that made the Snake turn away, that made the Snake look down at his feet. His father saying, “All you gotta do, kiddo, is look me in the eyes and say, ‘All right, Dad,’ and it’ll be off to Nebraska.” Saying, “Ah, look at you,” with disgust when he did not receive the response he’d hoped for. And then standing and pacing across the moonlit bandshell saying, “I might’ve known. Got those stubborn eyes. Your mother’s eyes. Haven’t changed a bit, have you?” Saying, “Look, kid, what the hell else are you gonna do? For crying out loud, you’re barely alive as it is. Living in some God-awful place I can’t even imagine a son of mine living.” Stepping over and staring down at the Snake with hands on hips. “Look at me, boy. You look at me when I’m talking to you. Can’t you see I’m offering you a life where you don’t have to sign a sheet to come and go?”
The Snake had understood. He had understood it as his father stepped away in frustration, then paused and returned again for one last try. “Now look. Here’s the last thing I can do. Here’s my business card. You keep it with you, okay? Now what I’m trying to tell you is that I’ve—what are you doing? What—what the hell do you think you’re doing? Pick that up! I’m telling you, boy, to pick up that business card and—don’t you dare walk away from me!” But the Snake had known that it was all he could do, hopped down from the bandshell and felt himself receding through the levels of this waking dream, back across the park and then in the cramped odorous flush of the F train. Back across the infinite stretch of the continent beneath the quiet night whistle of the freight train to the solemn field behind the deserted cabin and back through the mist-shrouded woods where his father’s voice still filtered down from somewhere high up while the Snake kept his head down and tried not to listen: “Fine! If that’s the way it’s gonna be then the hell with you! I’ll be sure to let your brothers and your sister know! When they all come wonderin’ why I never contacted ’em, and when your brother GB comes running to me, wondering why the career I bought and paid for with my own connections is running out of steam, I’ll be sure to tell him he’s got you to thank! I’ll send them all away and tell ’em it was the fault of their crazy brother living in a halfway house in Hell’s Kitchen! I’ll tell ’em to come and look you up! I’ll tell ’em exactly where they can place the blame for their lonely, regret-filled, sorry excuses for lives!”
BY THE TIME THE SNAKE had stepped back across the green rusted metal bridge, traversed the neighborhood of vacant weedy lots to the residential streets with houses set far back from the roads, the first blue tinges of dawn had begun to light the eastern sky. But the Snake was still lost in what he’d seen, was still trying to situate that image of his father standing on the bandshell with the towers of Fifth Avenue in the background, a shadow in the moonlight berating the Snake for the mistake he’d just made. But at the time, it hadn’t seemed like a mistake. And that was what made it so difficult to understand now. What had he been doing in Central Park, when he should’ve been in Russia? Or in that vast underground bunker deep beneath the desert? If this scene summoned up from the deepest part of his mind was in fact some disjointed fragment of memory, and if it truly was the last time he’d seen his father, then who was that man who’d been assassinated at the dacha outside Moskva?
The Snake’s distraction had made him walk down the wrong street. He’d meant to walk one block further before turning left, but since the houses beyond the wide lawns were all so similar, he didn’t realize he’d made a wrong turn until he saw the suspicious vehicle parked along the road beneath the elms. A black SUV where you’d least expect to see one, parked as it was in front of a row of houses with long driveways and two-car garages. The Snake put a hand over the dog’s snout and ducked behind an old Volkswagen and watched. Crouched there in the street in the silent dawn, the moment of recognition that had almost grasped his mind vanished. Like a dream to the waking mind, it dissipated. Was not even a memory. He drew in his breath and darted across the street, commando-climbed a fence with the dog in one arm and then was racing across the backyards of this ordinary neighborhood, his resolve solidified.
He would not enter through the backdoor, which was no doubt being monitored, but through the bulkhead that led down into the basement. He wouldn’t tell GB they had to go, wouldn’t awaken him from his slumber on the couch. He would steal the girl’s car—the keys, in fact, would turn out to be right on the kitchen table, right next to GB’s, which he would use to get in the trunk for the knapsack and the bat bag. Of course the dog would have to come along with him now. He would leave nothing to give them any idea of his new understanding, would be on the road before his brother and their pursuers knew he was gone. Headed west with the sun. Ignoring the road signs. Who could trust them anyway?
Friday
FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON IN downtown Denver, and Maddie Hill was sitting on a bench outside Union Station, waiting for her brother. He’d driven them into town that morning from a hotel on the other side of the Rockies, traversing the Continental Divide at nine o’clock, emerging from the shady west to the bright world east of the mountains, had dropped her off and told her to get out whil
e he located a place to park, told her he’d find her later, after he’d taken care of something. That was two hours ago, and she hadn’t seen him since. “What do you have to take care of?” But he’d avoided her question in a way she’d already, in two days, become accustomed to. He’d been spastic, had put the car in gear the instant he’d dropped her at the curb, and she had stood on the sidewalk watching as the Buick disappeared down Wynkoop Street.
They’d spent the previous night in Grand Junction, a suburb without a city surrounded by mesas and high desert. If he’d been vociferous that first evening, something about the drive had changed her brother’s demeanor, had removed that glimmer of the boy she’d once known, who was quiet but impassioned, reserved until given a reason for excitement, who’d sat in a rickety stool at her bedside all Tuesday afternoon and evening while she’d drifted in and out of sleep in her empty apartment, bringing her tea and soup and listening with his bright eyes peering out of his sparsely bearded face. The traffic out of Vegas had been at a standstill, a hundred thousand tourists trying to evacuate, Interstate 40 closed down and necessitating detours north along I-15 across Utah. He’d relented at last sometime after two in the morning, had been saying all day that he wanted to get as far away from Vegas as possible before nightfall, through Utah by midnight, hoping they could avoid stopping until they were safely in Colorado. He hadn’t given any reason for this itinerary, hadn’t told her anything specific about where they were going, though in her heart Maddie knew—she knew that this highway they were on would lead eventually to Nebraska. The long ride had left him exhausted, made him crash headfirst against the pillow after they’d finally crossed the Colorado border and pulled off at the first exit, asleep in moments with his arms flung out at his sides, lying flat on his stomach above the covers and fully dressed in his flannel shirt and rugged jeans. She, on the other hand, was wide awake, had at last slept off the lingering effects of her weekend in the desert with Prince Dexter. She waited in the dim halo of the motel room lamp until his breathing had become a soft wheeze that passed for snoring, then opened the door and snuck outside into the fragrant late evening.
She had nowhere to go, and it was cold. She started walking along the embankment beyond the line of motel rooms but got a chill from the breeze blowing over the ghostly mesa and, wrapping her arms around herself, made her way over to the car that had brought them. Teeth chattering, her own slightly jaundiced reflection visible in the side window, hair messy, eyes like pissholes in the snow (as Michaela would’ve said), she placed her hands on either side of her face and peered into the backseat, saw the suitcase resting on the footboard, half tucked underneath the driver’s seat. Imitation leather, two combination locks with bronze clasps adjacent to the handle, three numbers each on a metal rolling dial. He’d told her it was nothing she had to worry about, just something to do with what he had to take care of in Denver before they continued east, a brief detour before they could get going. He might as well have told her the truth—might as well have told her it was enough money for her to go back to Vegas and do the job properly, enough money to make a relapse that would last until it killed her. Or enough money to vanish from that city for good, just like Michaela. But if he was evasive at times, he was abrasive at others, as if seeing her in person had fouled the plans he’d made, as if it had destroyed one half of his conception of the situation, had tempered the enthusiasm with which he’d come all the way from Alaska just to find her and bring her along on this vague trip he’d devised to save her from whatever it was he meant to save her from.
I didn’t know I needed to be saved. The little resolute voice in her head said this. She almost said it out loud. The real Maddie Hill—the Maddie Hill she had grown to know over the past two decades—certainly would not have hesitated. But in the presence of this adult version of her brother she had already changed, had noticed herself losing the edge that had always been a part of her and that she’d thought this last quarter century had done nothing to soften. As a sixteen-year-old girl in the lawless country, a pane of glass could not have separated her from a mysterious suitcase whose contents made her curious. She would have commandeered the handiest heavy object and smashed right through, striking the window until it yielded. She’d thought all this time had done nothing to soothe her—saw now that all these years in Vegas lounges and casinos and clubs had done a curious thing, had taken the young girl she’d thought she knew, the girl who never would have found herself in some motel in Grand Junction fucking Colorado (not unless it was her idea) and turned her, of all things, complacent. Had made her a wimp. Look at her: standing in the breeze in an empty parking lot at three in the morning, peering through the back window of a blue Buick.
Look at her: not even daring enough to break the glass.
IT WAS EARLY THE FOLLOWING morning, as they’d climbed the Interstate toward the Rockies, that he had told her he wanted to tell her a story. A story that he hoped would help her to understand. If she was willing to listen, that was.
She had understood this immediately as a sort of apology. He’d awoken her just after seven, had shaken the bed and urged her to get up, a shirtless form in the sunlight coming through the window, whose curtain he had flung open. It was when she resisted—when she’d rolled away from him toward the wall (she’d only had maybe two hours of sleep, had stayed out eyeing that suitcase for what felt like hours)—that he had picked up the alarm clock from the nightstand between the beds and hurled it against the wall, a crash and a rattling as it tumbled to the floor in pieces, then silence. “Max, what the fuck?” She’d lifted her head and watched him, wide awake now, the blanket pulled up around her chin, as he marched into the bathroom and turned on the shower.
Later, he’d been contrite. Issued an awkward apology as they navigated the twisting roads around Vail Pass, the sun ascending and throwing sharp points of light and shadow across the jagged scenery. “That anger you saw this morning,” he said. “I hope you understand it wasn’t meant for you. I want you to know that I don’t blame you. I don’t blame Mom, either. Not anymore. You two did what you had to do.” For a time then his brooding had been disguised behind an array of strained smiles, but it had lasted only until she’d asked him again about the suitcase, and then things had returned to the way they’d been, Maddie turned away and looking only at his faint reflection, exhaling onto his image in the window until the condensation altered him, made him unreal, a construction of her own imagination that surprised her every time it spoke, every time his tense series of throat clearings emerged as a prelude. Then the voice: deeper than you expected from someone his size, a rasp at its edges as if from lack of use.
It was not his time at the university that he wanted to tell her about—though that was where the story began, where the series of circumstances and the styles of life he’d learned by the hand of their father and the words of Jed Winters had first begun to intertwine. The university in Fairbanks had provided him with room and board, a place to stay when he’d most needed it (the cabin had been no longer an option—not that he would’ve wanted it anyway—had been rented out by their father for an amount to be used in part by Max as a monthly allowance, but mostly for maintenance). The university at Fairbanks had provided him with a group of young people to be with (most of them from outside Alaska and therefore ignorant of the story of his father and the pipeline and his other secrets). Most of all, the university had provided him with an excuse to stay in Alaska, to stay in this place he’d come to think of, strangely, as his home. It had provided him with a way to start out a veteran of a world to which his peers were mostly newcomers. He’d found himself the subject, for the first time in his life, of an unusual sort of popularity. He was a boy who could make a good first impression. He’d seem lively, energetic, smart. Still, his college relationships came and went. Throughout those nearly four years, only two people had remained on a level of anything resembling his friends. But they were the reason why this story of his began at the university. Because that
was where he’d met Beau Miller. And it was where he’d met Alice Bates.
They’d met as freshmen. Max and Beau lived down the hall from one another. Beau was from a place called Amherst, Massachusetts. The first week they’d met, Beau had asked Max to show him around the city. He wanted to see the place through the eyes of someone who’d grown up here. It was the only way you could really get to know a place, he’d claimed—and Max had not missed out on the New England accent, the ruddy smile, the looks that were handsome without being the slightest bit attractive. His nose was hard and bent, his teeth not entirely white, his hair coarse and wild. Yet he had a way about him. Max had arranged to meet him the following day at the foot of the hill down from the dorms and had not been at all surprised to find his friend lying in a bed of leaves, the heavy wind from the night before having thrown down a rug of color though it was barely September, bundled up in L.L.Bean gear with a girl, similarly bundled, the bright shimmer of her yellow hair standing out against the orange and red and brown leaves, the bare tree trunks, the rugged bushes, the mostly earth-toned clothing. The girl turned and Max saw her small pinched-up face for the first time, took it initially as an indication that she was angry for his interruption. Beau stood up, brushed his pants, and from the careless way he didn’t reach forward to help up his companion, Max understood where he’d seen such facial features and mannerisms as belonged to his new friend before. The rough face and toothy smile, the arrogance. As Max met Beau’s lopsided smile with a close-mouthed one of his own, he knew he was looking at a face that would from then on remind him of Lyle Greeley.
The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill Page 21