The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  Max wondered how many times Alice had heard these statistics and diatribes, how many times young Lynk had heard them. He wondered if his friend’s bombastic tirades ever translated to a different sort of violence. He wondered how his friend had come to be this way, what combination of causes and influences had led from his being an idealistic boy from the East to a self-proclaimed crusader for the state of Alaska. And he wondered—if three days with his friend were enough to make him happy to return to his lonely cabin in Circle—what it must be like to live with him, to raise a child with him. He’d once asked Alice about it. An afternoon Beau had gone out to retrieve more wood for the fire. This had been the previous winter, after a trapping trip they’d made together up the Kandik River and Max had spent three days snowed in at the compound along the Nation—the “compound,” as Beau referred to it, consisting of a tiny cabin and a pair of outbuildings tucked in a two-acre parcel of mostly wooded land only miles from the Canadian border. They had sat together at the table in the center of the main cabin drinking tea while Beau was outside with Lynk, the wind rattling the walls around them, the snow drifted in great dunes halfway up the window, the stove blazing hot and its glow reflecting on their faces, Alice telling him in a whisper what it was like. It was like walking around with a second head on your shoulder that never stopped shouting in your ear, never stopped telling you what to do, never stopped telling you everything you were doing wrong. You could ignore it but only for so long. You could look forward to the months it went away on trapping trips but then you spent those days in dread of its return. You could try to believe it every time it told you things would be different, but that just made you a fool. And you could pretend you didn’t see that your son was turning into just another version of him, that you’d soon have two of them to contend with. Alice looked at the fire and said that it was just like this: it was like sitting in a little cramped cabin and feeling the constant temper of that wind outside, raging and never giving you peace. Max had sat back in his chair, looked around at the cabin filled with Beau’s hunting and trapping equipment—the detritus of his half-finished schemes and distractions—and had realized then who his friend truly reminded him of.

  Now on their final night in the isolated foothills of the Brooks Range they broiled and ate two whole trout apiece, evening bathing the mountain lake in a cloak of blue shadow. Beau was the cook, would not allow Max to get up, had placed himself firmly in charge of the cooking duties the way he thought he was in charge of everything, including Alice. People like Beau needed a tagalong to bear witness to their bravado and exaggeration. They needed a sidekick who would keep his mouth shut and nod his head and laugh at the right moments. They needed a good woman to handle the hard work for them, a woman to take for granted and disrespect, a woman to ignore while she slowly grew hard and resentful under the cold stare of indifference, a woman who deserved better. After dinner and a smoke, Max appreciating the gathering darkness, the way it concealed his expression behind the dim red glow of his cigarette, it was time for bed. They lay wrapped in sleeping bags at midnight and, after a few attempts by Beau to have a conversation, Max heard his friend’s snores, and even those reminded him of his father.

  He’d tried to convince Beau of an alternate landing. Still, his friend had insisted, had brought the plane in low, the air in this tiny hollow between the trees and the mountains high above the Hundredmile being whipped up and spun, the landing gear striking the ground and the brakes whining. And when he climbed out of Beau’s plane and looked at the tiny strip of land on which his friend had set them down for no other reason than to give himself a shot of adrenaline, Max remembered the day he’d first arrived in Alaska, descending through icy mist to the runway at Fairbanks International, his father insistent despite his family’s trepidation and shock. Looking at the isolated ledge of earth on which his fellow Alaskan had set them down—Beau already out of the plane and whooping with the excitement of it all, Was that the shortest ground roll in history or what!—Max knew exactly what he’d known that morning they set down in Fairbanks, knew that they’d arrived at a place from which they could not all expect to escape.

  NEBRASKA WAS THE QUIETEST PLACE in the world. The high plains sang with loneliness. Friday night they spent in another dreary motel, two miles from the interstate, and Maddie felt so empty she locked herself in the bathroom. Max stood outside the door, asking what was wrong, what he could do, though when Maddie told him it seemed he didn’t know what to do with the answer. In the end, he’d agreed reluctantly, a few final questions and then his heavy footsteps creaking the warped flooring, the door closing behind him. Maddie listened until she knew he was gone, then stood and stared at her own reflection in the mirror.

  She wasn’t dope sick. She wasn’t sick at all. And yet that was what it felt like, this debilitating, soul-poisoning sensation she’d felt coming on that night they’d driven west from Denver into the Rockies, the night Max had shown her, without question, what was to be the substance of this trip of theirs. Earlier—at nightfall, parked in the otherwise vacant back lot of the motel, behind a dumpster and illuminated by an amber-hued sodium lamp—he’d shown her what they’d stopped in Denver for, had revealed what the money contained in the suitcase with the bronze clasps had purchased, had unzipped a duffel bag retrieved from the trunk of the car and held it out in front of her.

  To Maddie, it had looked like a shoebox. It was a shoebox, oversized, the type cowboy boots would come in, its interior arranged in a spiral, walls lined with wrapped wire leading to a cluster of orange sausage-like tubes and a sack containing a slurry material with enough stored energy—once Max took the simple step of lighting the safety fuse—to blow an entire building sky high. It seemed Max’s old friend and mentor, Jed Winters, had finally outgrown his grumbling, had learned what had happened to Max and scheduled a sit down, had informed her twin brother who’d once dug for gold with her in the backfield outside Fairbanks of a place in Denver where a man could procure such a shoebox as this one if he knew the right people.

  So this is what they look like, Maddie Hill had thought, standing in the darkness of a motel parking lot: the hidden objects that had been exploding in parking garages and on city streets in Vegas for as long as she’d been there, the inconspicuous payloads that had been eliminating targets anywhere there was money and power to be gained or stolen, for as long as there’d been such things to argue over. It should have made her disappear, this man claiming to have once been her twin brother revealing this box that looked too small, or simple, to carry any weight, resting in the trunk of the blue Buick with the two of them looking in on it, a breeze blowing her loose hair across her face, unwilling to turn and look at him.

  There was no questioning now what his plans were. Not after the previous evening, when their trip west from Denver had ended as promised in the dark environs of the ski towns and protected wilderness, roads rising up along stone walls and treacherous corners to hidden driveways leading to secluded high-priced estates. The acquisition of the shoebox had sparked something in him, an enthusiasm that made him tremble as he’d parked the car at the bottom of a steep driveway, went around to the back and flipped up the trunk, appeared for her again in moments, dressed all in black from head to toe, a stocking cap that he pulled down over his face, a six-gallon gasoline container in one hand. It was not the first time she’d been involved in spontaneous trips that had turned unexpectedly dangerous, morbid, illegal. It was something one risked when she ran in the sort of crowd with whom she’d willingly gotten herself involved. In Vegas, vandalism was an easy hobby, arson a cheap thrill. They’d gone out in great bands to beat on tourists, steal their money, and leave them with only their plane tickets. She’d thought she could never feel scared, could never be intimidated. And why would you, when fear was an emotion just as arbitrary as love, just as capable of being turned into excitement or hate if you knew how. If you were strong. It was this part of her—the part that had been raised up in the Flame Lounge and th
e French Quarter and then the midnight glimmer of the Vegas strip—that had made her sit in the passenger seat and watch as her brother walked up the driveway toward the shadow she knew to be a house among the pines. It was this anti-voice inside her that made her get out of the car and step up the path—arms crossed over her chest in the cold—and stand behind a copse of trees as the house began to light up. She’d covered her eyes, had turned back and marched down the hill toward the car, climbed into the passenger seat and leaned over until her face was between her knees, had waited and then heard him scampering down the driveway, climbing in the driver’s side and urging her to look. She refused. It was not until he’d started the car and begun turning around that she raised her head and stared, the house ablaze in the clearing, the orange and red light conjuring her reflection on the window next to her.

  She knew now what he meant to do, understood what she’d gotten herself into. Before the previous night’s journey, before she’d witnessed what he was capable of with her own eyes, she hadn’t been willing to look closely enough at what her brother had told her about Beau Miller, had been unable to scrutinize the accident that had taken place that had left Max marooned on the forested flanks of the Brooks Range, the Super Cub smashed up against a tree with its pilot impaled on the steering wheel. It was his bold landing that had cost him his life. As Max had predicted, there was not enough runway even for a Super Cub to take off, and when they’d attempted it, they’d gained a little altitude, had felt the engine buckle. Max’s own survival of the crash had been little noted, spoken of vaguely though the other details were intricate, the eyes staring up through the windshield, a corpse that would remain until some starving creature braved the wreckage to dine. “I tried to tell him,” Max had said to her in the Buick. And yet Maddie had been unable to look at him, unwilling to peek across the car to see his expression, to witness if it was the same she recalled from that night in the hospital bed when he’d tried to explain himself until she could take it no more and had told him to shush, those eyes of his so pleading and damaged. “I did it for you, Maddie.”

  He was alone, a hundred miles from Fort Yukon, but he had the snow machine. He still had all that muskrat meat stored in the coolers salvaged from the wreck. He had the vision of Alice, waiting three hundred miles away in the cabin on the Nation. Maddie could recall all of this now, staring down her own reflection in the bathroom mirror of a motel in Nowhere, Nebraska. She remembered how he’d told her of the long week’s journey he’d spent alone on the Chandalar, making his way back through the wilderness by snow machine with the coolers on a makeshift sled behind him. She remembered the way he’d spoken of it like some weird saga that even then had seemed improbable, full of adventures involving abandoned cabins and grizzly bears whose roars echoed on the hillsides, Alaska Natives watching from the banks as he rode the half-frozen river in late spring, abandoning the snow machine when he ran out of fuel and continuing on foot until he came across a canoe overturned at the confluence of the Yukon and the Porcupine, removed the dead hunter and patched it up and continued.

  She could recall all of this—though at the time of his telling it she’d still been caught up in her own story, still so briefly removed from the Sunday night effigy of the Burning Man celebration in Black Rock Desert, still trying to piece together what she remembered of that scene and what one thing had to do with the other. Still recalling Prince Dexter next to her on a blanket in an empty moonscape, one side of their bodies scorching from the bonfire, the other side near frozen in the desert night, Maddie having come to the end of this weekend-long ritual having felt—despite his promises—no fast-arriving truth coming over the blackened mountains that encircled this dry valley. She had found, at the end, only a lack of resolution that had left her no recourse (in the backwards thinking of the addict) but to take the acid, to snort the dust, to swallow the pills and watch Prince Dexter do the same, though she had already seen through his game, had begun to see through it in his car—his ostentatious boat of a car with a trunk like coattails and a front end like a siege machine, rattling north over the grumblings of a failing air filter on Saturday morning, six hours on Route 95 to 447 north through Nixon and Empire and Gerlach, past the Nightingales and the dry Winnemucca Lake and into the northern barrens where the heat bleached the land beige—had perhaps even known as early as in his room two blocks off the Strip, the night before, Prince Dexter naked on the bed but for the briefs he’d slipped on.

  Afterwards, he had lain above the covers, goose-pimpled from the air conditioning, and reminded her that it was this weekend, the famous or infamous desert festival where the photograph that had been the last taken of her friend Michelle Jones had placed her, the remote gathering of hippies and freaks and lovers in Black Rock Desert that Maddie had attended before though she never really remembered. He had been up on his elbows, his weight against her, ready to go again, prepared to convince her with what it seemed he imagined was a significant sexual prowess. But Maddie had already made up her mind that she would join him, had already determined that in a life such as hers there were few opportunities to come face-to-face with anything remotely resembling the truth, that it was crazy to deny even if it came packaged with a lousy lover who fashioned himself an investigative reporter when all he was—it had been clear to her, even then—was a gossipmonger. She didn’t care if they reopened the case, had long since killed such romantic notions, had lost so much faith in the concept of justice that it was nothing more than a word anyway.

  And so even when she’d seen his car—had heard the way that it, like his story, rattled along as if it might disintegrate at any moment—she’d been unwilling to revoke the benefit of the doubt she’d given him simply because she’d wanted to believe what he said, wanted to believe there might be an ending to the story of her friend Michaela. Even when they’d arrived at last at the desert city on the playa flat, lined with rows of RVs and hatchbacks and VW vans with psychedelic patterns painted on their sides, on their roofs, a camp of American refugees shirtless in the cooling evening, the setting sun throwing vanishing point shadows over the orange rocks where they danced like demons in firelight, she had fooled herself into believing it all. And though later—riding in the Buick with her brother, walking the streets of Denver deciding what role she was meant to play in all this—she would suspect Prince Dexter hadn’t swallowed any of the pills she’d thought he had (had more likely spit them out the instant she’d turned her head, had pretended to take them simply to encourage her) at the time she had felt that old chemical kinship, the mental crutch that had been the basis for so many relationships in her past, her trip rolling off the mountains with a pace almost audible, a great ringing chord from the loudest organ in the universe, the world reduced to a stainless steel pole in an empty room that she’d just begun to wrap her contorted body around when Prince Dexter had spoken up from the distant other side of the blanket and begun asking her the questions about her father.

  The fucker had pulled one over on her. The photograph was a fake, the story of Michaela and the body found in Lake Tahoe a lie, a not-so-elaborate fib constructed in order to make her feel more comfortable, to penetrate her considerable defenses, to get her to comment on the vague “big story” of which he’d spoken earlier. The “big story” that had nothing to do with a former stripper missing twelve years from Las Vegas but was instead the story of her father, George Benjamin Hill, whose rise from grease delivery man to fast food millionaire to oil magnate to gas commodities trader and member of the board of directors of a Fortune 500 company was legendary. Legendary, too, were the tales of the marriages and children he’d left behind. And though his contact with these peripheral inhabitants of his life was known to be limited, it had happened on several occasions over the years that individuals had shown up at Maddie’s place of employment, at the warehouse loft, asking for a brief interview; and though in the past she had always refused them—had thrown whatever was handy at them, had made gestures and spit on them—P
rince Dexter had managed to make it past this first line of defense, had known, somehow, the correct way to disarm her, to distract her with the cause of her last twelve years of solitude and loss, to sidetrack her thinking enough to make the story of her father worth revealing, worth opening her mouth and letting whatever wished to come out come out while he—suddenly alert, no longer feigning his own drug-induced stupor—retrieved from somewhere his miniature tape recorder.

  She’d awoke to find him gone, her body stretched out on the blanket at dawn, had hitched a ride as far as Tahoe with two young men on their way back to Palo Alto, curled up in the backseat of their hatchback beneath the gritty blanket to avoid the bright sun that burned the cool off the hard-crusted desert, five hundred miles along backroads and interstates on a Monday morning turning to afternoon, a two-hour layover outside Fallon at the largest trucker’s paradise between Denver and San Francisco where she sat in the ladies’ room and fought herself up from a meltdown. Watching the sun lower and then flatten against Mount Charleston from the passenger seat of an eighteen-wheeler, the night coming on and then brightening as they descended into the Las Vegas Valley, the ring of lights radiating out toward the mountains, feeling all of seventeen again in the cab of this truck with the driver she’d chosen for the way he’d seemed to avoid her at the truck stop when she’d at last emerged from the ladies’ room, unlike the others who’d eyed her hungrily from the little hallways leading back to the rest stations. A friendly enough if somewhat self-righteous old geezer with a long white beard who told her again and again during their trip south on the interstate that he’d seen her type before, had driven hundreds of girls over thousands of miles in this part of the country, girls going to LA or Frisco or Vegas, all of them with the same stories give or take a few miserable experiences, all of them running from something as simple as their folks, from something so complex they couldn’t put it into words, some of them illiterate, some just off scoring 1600 on their SATs, all of them in the passenger seat of his rig, listening to the pep talk he’d gotten damn tired of delivering because it never seemed to make any difference, never seemed to make any of them go home or call their folks or do anything that might actually help themselves. He’d held onto her wrist for just a moment, leaning across the cab as she climbed down into the parking lot of the gas station where she’d told him he could leave her, reluctant to let go, Maddie kissing her hand and blowing it toward him, stepping over to the phone booth and pretending to dig in her pockets for change long enough for him to direct his truck out of the lot and back along the access road toward the highway.