They ate hamburgers again, slept in a single-floor motel room outside Victorville, and were at the county coroner’s office early the following morning, GB having drunk too much coffee again, having arrived with a twenty-four-ounce Styrofoam cup for his take-no-prisoners-I-want-the-truth-Goddamn-it conference with the coroner, whom he knew would take him aside and inform him—in a low voice, for these things always had to be handled gently—that it was not natural causes, that the death of his mother was not attributable to any of the things the people at the hospital might have tried to tell him, that it was not GB’s fault, but theirs. And so he could stop feeling so guilty about it. He could stop feeling guilty because it had been their intention all along to keep him away, these evil miscreants who ran this miserable excuse for a hospital. Instead, the coroner had led him back to the office with a look of relief. They’d performed the routine autopsy, had found all in keeping with the report submitted by the physician at the hospital, and were ready to release the body immediately. In fact, if Mr. Hill could just provide him with the name of the funeral home that would be performing the viewing, he could have Mr. Hill’s mother transported there by the end of the day, for a small fee of course.
GB had fought with him, had asked straight out what kind of a kickback he was getting for this, had begun ranting at the man while his daughter touched his shoulder and tried to calm him, the coroner looking downtrodden, telling GB that, believe it or not, Mr. Hill, your reaction is not an uncommon one. But I assure you with one-hundred-percent certainty that your mother did not commit suicide, but that she died of a heart attack, plain and simple, that she was an otherwise healthy sixty-year-old woman. Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Hill, and don’t think that I don’t know what it’s like to lose a mother and feel the guilt of maybe not having done all you could’ve while she was alive to let her know how you felt. But what you can do right now to make amends is take care of what’s left to take care of, maybe stand at her gravesite and introduce her to her granddaughter. That’s all you can do now, Mr. Hill. There, there, Mr. Hill, look at that. You’ve got a beautiful daughter who loves you, Mr. Hill. Yes you do. Now, Mr. Hill, if you don’t mind, the name of that funeral home, please?
And because this was a dream—because he’d been dreaming all of this while sprawled in a cornfield and was remembering it now pressing onward past Des Moines and into the first waves of the great collective agricorps, signs rising from fields to declare OMAHA, 65 MILES while the perfect grid of crops on either side ran off in diagonal rows toward oblivion; because he had been in the wrong town that morning and had wandered up and down the lone street of the village he didn’t recognize until it had suddenly occurred to him that there was more than one way out of a cornfield; because he had climbed again the low hill outside of town and seen in the distance the Stingray still parked in the lot of the bar of the night before, had trundled down the hill on the opposite side, across the fields and started up its engine; because of all these reasons and also because he was hungover and dry-mouthed and broke and disoriented and worn haggard by this week past, no longer with any clear notion of what he was doing aside from a deep burning need to arrive where he had set out to arrive—because of these confusing reasons and more, it had all become transposed, had become part of the same memory, the layout of the coroner’s office not the same as the one in California but instead more similar to the one in Florida, the one he had arrived at just one week ago today, the morning he’d slung a bare arm across the bed in the Flamingo Motor Lodge and picked up the ringing phone and heard those words that had made him bolt awake again—(“Am I speaking with Mr. George Benjamin Hill? And are you the father of a Ms. Emma Sinclair Hill?”)—the day he’d raced across Miami on a Saturday morning to find Tammy already waiting outside in the parking lot with Marc the real estate agent, had thrown his arms around her and taken in her sobs as she took in his and they stood one final time together waiting to go inside and claim her, waiting to go inside and identify their daughter, who’d been found at last behind a dumpster in some lonely lot in Little Havana, the victim of an overdose, dumped by strangers or friends, his lovely daughter for whom he’d bought milkshakes and tried to lay out a soft-as-cashmere carpet of a life, now a shapeless lump on a silver slab as they stood behind a glass partition and watched the coroner lift the white shroud to reveal, unmistakably, the beautiful unmarked face of the daughter who, all those years ago, had helped convince him to have his mother cremated, who had held his head in her hands while he had cried with the urn in his lap and ridden along with him to find a place to dump the ashes, who’d rode along as he’d driven out to San Bernardino to find and show her one by one the places they’d lived when he was little, the ball fields he’d once dominated, winding up high in the hills above the city parked next to a picnic bench above a white lake looking out with his daughter across the skyline and the hazy blur where the land met the Pacific Ocean.
Because this was a dream, it seemed if he only hoped hard enough, he could have those days back: the days before Emma had returned with him on the plane and had seemed—in his mind at least—to have aged right there on the seat next to him, was not the same girl by the time they’d arrived back in Florida. Or perhaps it was simply that the changes had come so quickly on the heels of that trip which, despite its tragic components—or perhaps because of them—had remained his most nostalgic memory, the image of her sipping milkshakes in the rental car one he’d clung to and been unable to dispel during that Saturday afternoon into evening when he’d sequestered himself in the darkest corner of the darkest dive bar in Miami, trying to discern what it was he was supposed to do next, so drunk by the time he’d come to the decision that he could barely remember parts of it now, could barely remember returning to the motel room sometime toward dawn to slip on the replica internet-purchased Yankees uniform with his old number 54 that he’d ordered for himself one blacked-out night at four in the morning, to awaken the dog from his little doggie bed and lead him around to the back of the motel to secure his leash to a rusted metal spigot, to take the dog’s head in his hands and promise someone would find him, that he’d end up with a sweet girl like Emma to take care of him, a final shake of his paw (a trick she had taught him one summer) before turning and making his way back out to the Stingray with his fingers in his ears so he wouldn’t hear the barking. Driving the memorized streets then through the gloomy dawn to arrive at their neighborhood, to arrive at their street that dead ended at a cul-de-sac, stepping up the carpeted stairs and along the glass-lined breezeway to the threshold of her room, where he’d placed the bat bag and the knapsack on the carpet and sat down cross-legged and looked in at its emptiness, sat with his head in his hands saying, “I’m sorry, Emma. I’m so so sorry. I tried so hard.” Reaching into the bat bag to retrieve from within the weapon he’d purchased when the first clues and leads to her whereabouts had run dry and the weeks had become months that had become unchanging seasons in that washed-out bright tropical world beyond the walls of filthy motel rooms, unzipping the knapsack and spreading the letters from his half brother Max around him as an excuse or an explanation, the cold barrel as it clicked between his teeth making him close his eyes and wait for the courage, the courage to pull the trigger and spread his brains all over the cream carpeting and the second-floor railing and the glass chandelier that was this home’s finest feature, to end this gnawing and devouring suffering with a final twitch of a muscle in his thumb, waiting and wishing and hoping and hearing then the sound of the front door opening, footsteps in the lobby and Marc’s voice echoing up, his wife’s new boyfriend trying to sell a young couple on the lie that their future together belonged in this house with its built-ins and its breezeway and all this glass and light that had sold him and Tammy so many years ago, the whispers of the young awestruck prospective buyers as Marc stepped over to the light switch and flipped it on, illuminating the glass chandelier and the two-story entrance and, beyond—standing now at the railing of the second story with a b
aseball bat bag slung over one shoulder and a knapsack over the other, dressed from cap to spikes in a pinstriped New York Yankees baseball uniform in front of the room of his daughter who was on her way to becoming nothing more than another urn he wouldn’t know what to do with—the silhouette of this house’s former owner.
Of course there had been a scene. There had been a fainting husband and an ambulance siren bracing in the early morning. There had been nosy neighbors materializing at their windows and a conversation, or lecture, delivered by Marc in the shade of the fruit tree next to the FOR SALE sign, his wife’s new lover telling him that he understood. He truly did. That he couldn’t imagine what GB must be going through, but that his—Marc’s—responsibility was to sell this house. And wasn’t it really the first necessary step to their recovery when you thought about it—his and Tammy’s—to get this place sold and move on with their lives and pick up the pieces? But how the devil was he supposed to help them do that? How was he supposed to help them sell this goddamn house when it was haunted by a real live ghost reluctant to leave its rooms? Words that had stuck with GB during the resulting drive back across town only to find that the overweight Cuban ladies who passed for housekeeping had already descended upon his room at the Flamingo Motor Lodge, a laundry cart with cleaning supplies dangling off its handles blocking the entrance and nothing to do now but retrieve the dog and go, gas up at the Mobil across from the Orange Bowl and climb the expressway over the river toward the interstate, set out with only the dog and the knapsack and the baseball bat bag in the Sunday morning glow of that city of pastel and palm trees and memories on this manic odyssey to Manhattan and Michigan and now the dark shadows of Council Bluffs, a cluster of bridges over the wide brown Missouri, just hours from the conclusion of this journey that had shown him the world as he’d never seen it, that had made him think back to the girl Emma had been and the young woman she’d become and the adult she would never have a chance to be, the young girl whose up-beat gymnastics routine that last summer before she’d quit had been set to the tune of the old disco classic “I Will Survive” and had made him think there was nothing she could not accomplish, hours shackled to the interstates in the cramped leather of the Stingray that had made him review his own role in what had happened and understand what Tammy had meant, hours and days that had made him see now that even when he’d thought he had turned his life over to Emma, it had still been on his own terms, it had been only so long as she conformed to his idea of her, only so long as she agreed to remain nine years old. He had been ill-equipped to deal with an adolescent with her own problems, and so he had turned his back on her at the worst possible time: when it had first stopped being about him and had started being about her. He had driven her away, had provided with his own insecurities the motivation for her to turn on the father she’d thought would always be her biggest fan because she’d always been his. And so in his urgency to avoid becoming his father he had instead become something worse: a diluted form of him, less confrontational and demanding but just as distant, just as easily disrespected, just as ready a recipient of a conquering love turned to a brutal scorn.
It was in the car with Julia Nguyen, seeing again that arsenal of expressions of annoyance and disdain, that the bridge to these memories had begun to form in his mind. And it was in the bar of the night before that he had felt this new perspective pouring over him. After the sports shows had at last been replaced by a news broadcast that had made the kid who’d recognized him hours ago begin to stare with a new sort of scrutiny, after the ten minutes spent on the terrorist attack had given way to concerns that had seemed pressing beforehand, a whisper from the far end of the counter as the TV showed an aerial shot of a horse ranch, the voice somewhere between awe and disgust, rising and gaining the attention of the crowd of flannel-clad locals and even the bartender while the television image returned to the newsroom, where the beautiful anchor sat with the now infamous face in a box on her shoulder. “He’s your father!” the kid was saying. “You’re George Benjamin Hill the Second! Your father’s that fella in the news! That fella who’s goin’ to prison for the rest of his Goddamn, miserable, horrible, lyin’, cheatin’, greedy-piece-of-shit life!”
And though GB had defended himself, had informed them of this plan of theirs, had told all these drunk, bewildered strangers that he was on his way out there as they spoke, had explained himself until he was doing so to an empty room but for the bartender trying to close up, something about this long drive on another Saturday afternoon into evening remembering the dream that had come that night in the cornfield had made GB see now that neither prison nor patricide were the answer. That if he’d learned anything from his own stint at the shaky reins of fatherhood, it was that forgiveness—even if it wasn’t deserved (maybe most of all when it wasn’t deserved)—was the only thing that could make life worth enduring. That if what he was truly interested in was salvation, and that if anything good was to come of these four decades of failure and eighteen months of anguish, then the only thing he could do now was to try and stop it.
When the dream had at last faded, and when the last sunlight of this Saturday evening had given way to the low skyline of Omaha, he was standing at the counter of yet another gas station, getting directions. No need for a map. It’s easy enough to find. Follow River Road south of the city. Watch for the turn that says Billionaire Drive. You’ll know you’re going the right way from the television vans parked all up and down the road. You’ll see the house soon as you come around the last bluff. You’ll smell the horse shit a mile away.
3
“The Most Irresponsible Set of Actions by the Most Insidious Group of People the World Has Ever Known”
Saturday Night
THE OLD MAN WAS STRICKEN.
At four o’clock on the afternoon of the final attempt on his life, the seventy-year-old billionaire stood for the last time at the window of his office on the top floor of the tallest building in downtown Omaha, looking at the faded reflection of himself and his only grandson, trying to form words of wisdom and knowing that he would not be able to, knowing that he, George Benjamin Hill—grease-truck driver turned chairman of the board and (for the second time) acting CEO of the most successful company of the last decade of the twentieth century—would never again be able to communicate all he had meant to communicate.
The company was done, the whole building empty on this Saturday afternoon, the parking garage below vacant but for a single car, where in weeks past it would have been full, even on weekends. The sharks were in the water. His CEO (his son-in-law, until just weeks ago) had bailed. He’d recently engaged himself in a series of off-site meetings, with the managing directors, with the board, and later—after hours—with the CFO, all of whom had given him the same message. He didn’t know what it all meant, these terms and figures they’d thrown at him. He was no corporate finance expert. That had been Jacob’s job. He didn’t know the accounting requirements for an SPE or off-balance-sheet debt or the nitty-gritty of securitization or even what a boomerang was. He hadn’t been paid to know these things. They’d paid him to take a tiny pipeline company in the middle of nowhere and turn it into a national player. And that was what he’d done. He had fought for a quarter century with the United States government for the deregulation of gas delivery, had fought on the side of the people for democracy, for capitalism, had tried to earn the American populace the right to choose who would provide them with their energy, had finally felt that taste of success and now … Now it had come to this. His company bent over a board with the whole New York Stock Exchange reaming them from behind and every investment bank south of Canada lining up to take its turn, his name finally known to everyone in the United States of America but for all the wrong reasons.
Over the past week—a week that had offered him plenty of time for reflection despite all that had taken place in board rooms and conference rooms, in a plane thirty-thousand feet above the earth, in a hospital room in Tulsa, Oklahoma—he’d tried t
o comb back over the years in search of a turning point, some sign that the man who’d stood at the port of Valdez on the day the first hot oil from the frozen edge of the world had come pumping into a tanker at the end of its eight-hundred-mile voyage would wind up in the place he had. Those had been hard years—those years in Alaska. He’d escaped from that isolated world a wealthy but uncertain man, nearly fifty but still unsettled, another wife having left him and two children having set off in their own directions. At an age when he might have been thinking about retirement, he’d felt still in his apprentice years, having at last logged a great personal victory—for in its first year of activity the Alaska pipeline was said to have generated nearly a billion dollars in revenue—and now ready to do something even more unforgettable.
He’d put out feelers, knew his resume was impressive. He was not old; he was experienced. He practiced looking at himself in the mirror, memorizing ways of making his face look less like a grandfather’s and more like an esteemed elder’s. He stopped coloring his hair; instead he accentuated the gray until it was silver as stainless steel. He switched from cigarettes to cigars.
The first company to bite was a pipeline group out of Houston. He had not truly envisioned himself working for a company like GulfCorp, had thought himself done with the pipeline business until he’d met with the CEO in Houston, just off a plane from Alaska, a limo to pick him up at the airport, a car ride through the suburbs of a real city with no gray snow or muskeg to be seen. When he saw the skyscraper clustered among a dozen other skyscrapers—reflective glass windows and courtyards bordering busy city streets with restaurants and pubs and malls—he realized just how starved for civilization he’d been. When he saw the gilded lobby, the smartly dressed employees racing across a gleaming floor in thousand-dollar shoes, he understood he’d allowed his best years to drift away in a nowhere town two hundred miles from anywhere. When he rode the glass-lined express elevator from the courtyard to the top floor, when he came through a receiving room and into the office of the cowboy-hat-wearing CEO to whom he’d spoken twice on the phone, when he shook hands and exchanged pleasantries and realized that he was back among the difference makers, he realized also that it didn’t matter what was said in this interview. He was sold. The CEO would hire him, would be impressed, of course—everyone was always impressed by Big Ben—and he would leave with a handshake and an impression of where he’d be in five years: in that very office, high above Houston. Running the show.
The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill Page 26