The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  But the show was not so easily supervised as he’d imagined. They had the visual parts down. All outward appearances told a story of massive wealth and deals conducted in catered conference rooms. But the business itself was chugging along like an engine in Alaskan mid-winter, like a Cat in muskeg. It was the federal government, of course. The same monster that had gotten in his way so many times up north, that had done its best to interfere with every good idea every enterprising citizen ever had. With the limit they placed on the selling price, it was no surprise that honest, hard-working gas companies all over the Gulf Coast were going out of business, no wonder at all that they couldn’t even generate enough profit to make it worthwhile to continue exploration. Even the half-assed attempts the government had made in recent years to keep the industry alive—the too little, too late motions they’d made when they finally realized they were taking solid American companies and making them insolvent (the hiking of regulated prices to producers and legislation restricting the use of natural gas, eleventh-hour answers to a long-term problem)—even these attempts had not worked. In fact they’d made matters worse. For now even coal and oil were cheaper than gas. The government had taken what was once the most cost-effective energy option on the planet and driven all of its producers and deliverers to the brink of bankruptcy.

  It was into this quagmire that George Benjamin Hill had stepped in the late seventies when he’d signed on with GulfCorp—one of the largest pipeline companies in the country, with nearly two thousand miles stretching from New York to Florida. It was into this disaster of modern economics that he’d come directly from the Alaska Pipeline job with only one thing expected of him: To save the company. To save the industry. To figure out a way to keep natural gas a viable energy source.

  He was no economist. He hadn’t gone to school for ten years and didn’t have a half dozen letters attached to the back of his name. He hadn’t authored dissertations on the wealth of nations, but he knew how to get to the bottom of problems. He knew how to ask the right people the right questions and how to track down the ones in charge of the decisions. He knew how to make deals, had been doing it ever since the day he’d met the milkshake machine man outside that restaurant in San Bernardino, had been thinking outside the box ever since that afternoon at Dodger Stadium.

  He knew the first thing was to get the company out of its long-term deals with independent producers. He knew that in order to do it, he had to offer the producers something in return. Tell ya what: I’m not above letting y’all sell directly to the customers, provided y’all use our pipelines exclusively. He was no genius—except for when it came to compromise in a business setting, automatic with the idea of quid pro quo. How can I get my way while still making everybody else think I made them happy? With the money generated from this cost-cutting maneuver, he was more than happy to help out the competition by taking on their debt in return for a managing interest in their pipelines. His idea was to expand. Deregulation of gas prices was on the way—they’d been lobbying and negotiating and litigating for the last decade and a half—and when it did arrive, the company with the greatest pipeline system would win. He’d been presenting this idea to everyone at the company at every Monday morning meeting he’d attended since his arrival, had been pitching his plan to the CEO since his first week on the job, when he’d been told his mission with the company, had gone home and thought it over for an evening, and returned to work the following day with this plan already fully gestated.

  He’d rented a place downtown, a condo in one of the high-rise buildings from whose balcony he could see the window of his office, whose light he liked to leave on when he left (often late at night, and only to return two hours early the next morning to the illusion that he’d never left). He lay one night in bed—not alone—and looked out the sliding glass door to the light in the far-off window. He’d been explaining to the woman his plan, wondering why the board was giving him such a hard time, why the CEO couldn’t step in and assure them that he was right. “He can’t do anything like that,” the woman had said—her name was Beth, and she was with the company, was head of the development team and international exploration, had given a look to Big Ben as they’d eyed each other from across the board room that had told him he’d not lost his touch. Two weeks later, they’d run into each other in the parking lot beneath the building.

  He couldn’t remember how it had progressed from there; he only recalled that they’d been strangely without precaution as they’d marched out of the garage and into the hot afternoon, talking loudly, strangely devoid of remorse when they’d shoved their bodies against each other in his bedroom. She was a Texan, had learned to ride a horse before she could walk and played wide receiver on her high school football team after beating out the son of the head coach. She never told him her age, but he guessed her to be no more than thirty-five. A mature, noble face, a hard gaze that saw through the bullshit. She was married, of course—but then Big Ben had known this all along. Her husband was too wishy-washy, she’d said in bed that first night. Incapable of giving her either satisfaction or a child. Big Ben had enjoyed hearing her talk like this. He’d flipped her over on her belly and taken her again, her face jammed against the pillow. It was on a morning not long after they’d begun their affair—a Monday morning following a Sunday night in which she’d begged out of his requests that she join him—that he’d arrived at the office to find a memo on his desk from the CEO. He’d taken the elevator up, straightening his tie, had arrived to find him at his desk, his back turned: Albert Ventura Simonton, of the great Simonton Texas oil dynasty.

  “Well?” Big Ben had said, out of breath and anxious for what he assumed would be good news. Instead Albert hemmed and hawed and eventually managed to communicate the fact that he was leaving. He’d been offered another position. A few things had come together and he was going to DC to become a policy maker. It nearly made Big Ben fall over. If Albert was gone, who would succeed him? Why else would the boss ask you to come up to his office first thing in the morning to tell you he was leaving unless he meant to tell you something else, something like “You are the new CEO.”

  He sat down in the chair on the other side of the desk and listened to the jumbled speech whose conclusion he already knew would be the finalization of his promotion. But halfway through he began hearing unexpected twists. The board was uncertain Big Ben was the best man for the job. They weren’t sure he had the financial knowledge. He didn’t even have a real college diploma. What kind of message would they be sending their shareholders if they hired him over any of the dozen Harvard MBAs on staff? Big Ben began descending down a long corridor, still hearing the voice of the boss, still listening to every word though not fully comprehending because he’d already comprehended all he needed to comprehend. He wasn’t going to be promoted, and with one of the younger guys taking over, it would for all intents and purposes mean the exact opposite. For all intents and purposes, he was being demoted.

  He heard the apologies, waved them away as he sulked out the door, stood waiting for the elevator to arrive, realizing that he had nowhere else to go. He couldn’t face his office with its light that he’d kept burning for weeks, visible from his condominium window while he and Beth had planned a divorce and a life together. He had nowhere else to go, so he went to her office, came through the door to find her looking as business-like as always, her face already betraying something—some new expression that told him immediately he’d lost her, too. He tried to sit down, tried to explain why he needed to talk to her. Could they take a long lunch? But she shook her head. She turned away from him and said it. “I can’t see you anymore.”

  “No,” he whispered, stepping over to her and trying to force her to face him. “You can’t do this.”

  “I’m moving,” she said. “I’m moving to DC with him. My mind’s made up. I’m moving to DC with my husband.”

  Albert had won her back, had convinced her to come along with him, that the life they’d shared in Texas was
but a shadow of the existence they’d have in DC, where they’d have a place among the socialites of the world, where she could work as little or as much as she wished and they could finally focus entirely on having children.

  For Big Ben, it was another moment when he could have given up, could have called his days among the cutthroat business world over and rested on his laurels, retired and traveled, maybe track down and spend some time with his kids, maybe rebuild burnt bridges. Yet his pride and intense hatred of failure—of feeling that someone else had gotten the sweeter end of the deal, any deal—would not allow it. Instead of disappearing, he’d found himself reborn again, had rubbed the right elbows and latched on with another company—GulfCorp’s leading competitor, as a matter of fact, a company out of Omaha called E-Star, positioned on the cutting edge of exactly the kind of business he’d tried to get GulfCorp involved in. If twenty-five years previously he’d inhabited one persona when he’d met the ambitious milkshake machine salesman, now, the disheartening scene in the office of the man he’d thought he’d been groomed to replace sent him reeling up to be reshaped as another, galvanized and vengeful. Throughout his early incarnations of self, he’d had his family to tell and retell his stories to: the tale of the young Georgie Hill arriving in his grease truck at precisely the right instant. Alone, with not even a mistress save the nameless dozens who populated his evenings throughout the decade of the eighties, with no one to spill his resentments upon, he folded them up and carried them everywhere, wearing them like an extravagant suit, filling lulls at conventions and ribbon-cuttings with the story of how he’d latched on with E-Star, a second-rate company he’d transformed into the pride of Omaha, the corporate juggernaut smack dab in the center of the country.

  He hadn’t liked Nebraska at first. It had reminded him of Oklahoma, though it was colder and less dry than he recalled. He’d come here because this company was as dead set on the effects of deregulation as he was, agreed with his philosophy of growth, already controlled the major north-south pipelines connecting Texas to Iowa and most of the Midwest. But most of all was the fact that they still wanted an even larger share of the pie—were interested, in fact, in purchasing a certain pipeline company headquartered in Houston that was having severe financial difficulties. Big Ben had come to the decision that if he couldn’t control GulfCorp from Albert’s old seat in the top-floor office, then the next best thing would be to buy them out, to make the men who’d voted against him in those meetings suffer. Less than six months after he’d moved north, he’d done two things: he’d contacted a corporate raider he knew—a veteran of the investing game he’d bashed heads with during the pipeline years up north—and he’d developed a secret correspondence with an old friend still inside GulfCorp. He’d tipped off the raider and his group of investors; then he’d listened, through his insider, to the grumblings that resulted. GulfCorp was an easy mark for such an attack; with so many assets and so little debt, it was amazing they’d stayed out of this game as long as they had. (Part of it, in fact, was because of strings Big Ben, and Albert before him, had pulled.) Through the eyes and ears of his insider, he’d sat back and listened to the intensified staff meetings, had listened to the infighting and indecision when other raiders joined the party, listened as finance specialists went to the board with balance sheets that foretold gloom. In order to avoid the unpleasant fate of payouts to half the investing firms in the US—in order to make the company “sharkproof”—there was nothing for them to do but grow rapidly and take on huge amounts of debt.

  For years afterward, Big Ben had relished in this victory, amazed by nothing so much as how rapidly and effortlessly he’d managed to conceive and implement his plan. He could still recall the frosty early spring weather outside the office when he’d received the memo that his old company, the great GulfCorp of Houston, Texas, wanted to buy his new company. Even now, a full decade later, with all of it crashing down around him, he refused to recall with anything other than pride and pleasure the deal that had formed the mega-company in charge of 40,000 miles of pipeline from coast to coast and border to border with footholds in California, Texas, and Florida, a new reported debt of six billion dollars, a behemoth on the verge of changing business forever, a vast juggernaut in need only of a single driven man to guide it toward its destiny, a position he had known without the slightest doubt would eventually fall to him, that after all these years of waiting, the stage of history was cleared for him to step out onto it, that the spotlight at last shone blindingly from the rafters upon him.

  And he was right.

  BY THE TIME HE’D SAID goodbye to the office on the top floor of the tallest building in downtown Omaha, had stepped through the double doors for the final time to find his daughter—the surprise daughter who had given him a grandson—seated still in the hard chair beneath the Renoir in the corridor, by the time he had taken the elevator to the lower parking levels with the two of them, his grandson immersed in his handheld videogame and his daughter offering a reluctant assistance that he shook off resolutely—by the time George Benjamin Hill had slouched into the passenger seat of Amelia’s BMW (purchased by Jacob for their one and only anniversary) and risen from the garage into the street, it was evening, dusk having rolled in over the river, this part of the city abandoned.

  She was quiet in the driver’s seat, his daughter, having waited outside his corner office for the past hour—Two hours? Three? She’d become so quiet recently, a silence that had disturbed him, so accustomed was he to her previously fiery nature, solemn now behind the steering wheel as she drove them south along the surface streets, entered the on-ramp to the highway that would take them back to the horse ranch. So different from the manner in which she’d entered his life four years ago—the unexpected arrival of a daughter he never knew he had. Amelia June Simonton: an eighteen-year-old recent prep school graduate who was using what she called her gap year to travel the country, to track down her real father, about whom her mother had told her little until recently. It seemed Albert had died of a heart attack. So unsuccessful was his former boss’s transition to DC that his passing hadn’t even made headlines in the nation’s capital, let alone Houston, though he’d once been the city’s most generous philanthropist, and certainly not in Omaha, where Big Ben had just cashed in ten million shares of E-Star stock for a complete resodding of the three-hundred-acre horse ranch where he’d planned to retire like a cowboy, to conduct whatever consulting opportunities his reputation might bring him from the oval-shaped office in the white sandstone mansion he’d had built—because he could—based on the precise specifications of the most famous residence in the country, an immaculate modernized replica of the executive mansion, right down to the colonnade and portico, right down to the broad south lawn. The ultimate fantasy home in which he’d planned to awake alone each day, without the distractions of a family to deal with, without the obligations of his children—he’d tried to contact them, hadn’t he?—and spend the rest of his life on a perpetual ride off into the sunset like the heroes in those old westerns he’d once adored.

  Until she’d arrived at the office one morning, a strange whirlwind of a girl with pink hair. “This is Omaha? I was expecting more corn,” she’d deadpanned. They were on the top floor of the downtown high-rise. Before the secretary had rung him to inform them of her presence, he’d been enjoying a nice dish of caviar with a couple of his top men, eating their lunches off silver platters, discussing not business schemes (they’d already done that) but which of the sample upholsteries laid out on the floor were preferable for the new company jet.

  He’d nearly shot her, had nearly pulled the Browning Snub Nose he kept under his desk for just such a moment as this—an assassin barging through the doors. She was a hellion. Had more than a bit of her mother in her. When her hair wasn’t pink it was purple or blue or black or green. He suspected she took drugs but had no idea how to approach her about it, was stuck instead with this mercurial mystery of a girl who spent hours killing time in th
e courtyard of the high-rise, bobbing under headphones and smoking cigarettes she’d rolled herself, who’d grown up in the shadow of Capitol Hill amidst senator’s sons and punk rock coffee houses, who’d seen her father—her enabler—drop dead at the age of sixty-two and her mother wash her hands of her and move back to Texas with some oil baron (so she’d told Big Ben in one of her more lucid moments, in her grimy Audi on the way back to the horse ranch, where he’d said he supposed she could stay—though the next day when he woke and left for work with her still sleeping the sleep of teenagers, when he’d called everyone he knew in Texas, looking for Beth, she was nowhere to be found.)