The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  “Look at it,” he said to her after they’d parked behind the largest stable, positioning the Buick between a ditch and a whitewashed fence, adjacent to the road but far enough so as not to be noticeable, the stable blocking the view of the car from the house. “If there was ever any doubt,” he said, “if you ever had any reservations about what we’re doing, all you have to do is look across that field. Look at it. He built himself a model of the White House on a three-hundred-acre horse ranch. Probably had the exact schematics shipped to the developer, right down to the furnishings in the Oval Office. This is what he built for himself while we wasted away with our ruined lives. Do you hear me, Maddie? Do you hear what I’m saying? If you had any doubt, if you wasted any time feeling like what we’re doing is wrong, tell me those doubts are gone. Tell me you’re ready now.”

  The night before, sitting on the toilet in Nebraska, she had heard the door of the motel room unlock and his hard steps across the floor, had heard him settling down right on the other side of the particle board. He’d spoken her name, the same voice and tone he’d used all those years ago in the cabin in Fairbanks when he couldn’t sleep, the way he’d keep her awake all night with his bizarre banter. He had slid the plastic baggie containing the marijuana he’d brought under the door, and she had picked it up and looked at it. All shake. Next came a packet of Zigzags. She had already started rolling the joint, her fingers shaking, when he said, “Can I tell you what happened? Can I finish the story I started?”

  The other day, he’d stopped with the journey down the Yukon, his arrival at Alice’s door to find her standing on the steps. It was August, he was saying now, and she could hear him rising to his feet and pacing across the creaking floor of the motel room. August of ’98, just three years ago. They’d been inside, he and Alice, the boy Lynk, now twelve, outside gathering firewood, when they heard something hovering and then descending over the compound. There was no mail delivery scheduled for today, and besides this was a helicopter, not a Cessna.

  Maddie closed her eyes and tried to picture it while she finished rolling the joint. Her hands were trembling as she tried to imagine the helicopter touching down on the airstrip two hundred yards away, the two men approaching along the riverbed, one with a federal government patch on his sleeve, Max and Alice on the stoop and Lynk standing off in the field, at the mouth of the woods, looking on with a stack of lumber in his arms. She retrieved her lighter and heard the paper of the joint sizzle as she smoked.

  “This your cabin?” said one of the men when they were within fifty feet, but Max didn’t answer. Neither did Alice. The men came closer, gave their names and titles, asked again. “This your cabin?”

  “It’s my cabin,” Alice said. “Belonged to me and my husband.”

  The two men looked back and forth between Alice and Max, turned to look at the boy, thirty yards off and still holding the lumber. “You got a deed of any kind?” said the government agent, and when his question received only silence, he went on. “Didn’t think so. See, according to our maps, this land belongs to the United States government. Was claimed twenty years ago and set aside as national preserved acreage. So you folks, I’m sorry to say, are living on borrowed time.”

  And that—Max said, as Maddie leaned her head back against the sink basin and closed her eyes—was when he had stepped forward, uncertain what he was going to say until the instant it came out of his mouth. “I was so angry, Maddie. I could feel it all slipping away, so I said to them, ‘Do you know who I am? Do you know who my father is? My father is George Benjamin Hill, the man who brought the pipeline to Alaska, the man who brought oil to Valdez, who ended unemployment and made millions for this state. I’m his son, and you’re not going to throw me off this land. I deserve it. It’s the least anyone can do for me.’”

  Maddie had opened her eyes and was looking at the bathroom door as if she could see through it to her brother, but the two men standing at the foot of the stoop in Alaska were accustomed to such rants. They stuck around for a few more minutes, saying they’d be hearing from them, that they were sorry but this was not the seventeenth century. You couldn’t lay claim to land anymore just because you happened to live there. “You’ll be hearing from us,” they said a final time to Max’s parting words, and then the helicopter was up and away, disappearing beyond the trees.

  “Is it true?” Alice had asked him later, and he’d sat her down in the cabin and tried to convince her, just as he tried to convince Maddie as she sat there in the bathroom, smoking the joint. But his words were confused. His words no longer made sense now that he’d told her he’d tried to capitalize on their father’s name, now that she knew he had tried to take advantage of the status he said he was trying to destroy. They were the words he’d heard all those years ago from Jed Winters, words he’d internalized but that had unraveled and decayed in his mind. It wasn’t about being owed, it wasn’t about asking what your country could do for you. It was about freedom. It was about the American dream and each generation being better off than the last, each having more land to spread out in and more money and resources with which to enjoy it. It was about coming of age in a place where your dreams were always at least attainable; where you would always at least be left free to pursue what future you sought by a government attuned to your struggles but not greedy for your riches. It wasn’t about having everything he wanted. But the government was supposed to never get in your way. If it did, and you knew a way to circumvent it, then it was your right to try. So Max had done just that. He wrote a letter to the Bureau of Land Management, told them who he was, told them who his father was, and did that change their opinion on these matters? Did that make them see that he had the right to remain on this land for as long as he damn well pleased?

  Two months later the helicopter had touched down again. Max had stepped out of the cabin and along the mud path by the river to meet them, his whole body trembling, hoping against his skepticism for an apology. A reassessment has been made. Instead they’d given him the new updated timeline for his eviction.

  “So that’s how my story ends,” Max had said to her, there in the motel room while Maddie stared at the joint and then dropped it half finished into the toilet. “They gave us one month to get off the land. Alice couldn’t do it. She blamed me. Said it was my fault for trying to talk tough, for trying to strong-arm them into letting us stay. It would’ve taken them years to get around to throwing us off if we’d just laid low, she said. You just don’t know when to quit, she said. Did I think they hadn’t been out there before? And even Beau—even Beau!—who couldn’t have a conversation about chicken feed without it becoming a rant against the federal government, even he had known when to keep his mouth shut and play along.

  “She threw me out, Maddie,” he said, his voice beginning to break for the first time. “And yeah,” he continued then. “Maybe she was right. Maybe I don’t know when to quit. Maybe I got greedy when I thought I deserved to not feel so alone. Maybe I should’ve spent the rest of my life by myself in that twelve-by-twelve cabin in Circle, Alaska, while he built a mansion modeled on the White House on a three-hundred-acre horse ranch. Maybe I shouldn’t—” But here he stopped. His voice had grown gradually to almost a shout but now she heard him crossing the floor again and standing on the other side of the particle board. “Maybe then I could’ve forgiven myself.”

  Of course she had understood this for what it was. The thin door between them, his theatrics all bundled up and presented in an attempt to convince her that his resolution was the only one, that the only way they could ever hope to purge the past was to blow a hole in the present. In some part of herself, she knew they’d been headed toward this moment her entire life. For over twenty years her brother had been allowing his anger to build, and now he was ready to burst like a firecracker over the plains. And yet as they made their way across the rest of Nebraska today she had taken apart his story and tried to put it back together. She had tried to decide where her lines were drawn. She had kno
wn that she could not do what he wanted her to do, but she did not know what she was going to do about it.

  Now she stood in the darkness in the dirt and gravel beneath the black wall of the stable on her father’s three-hundred-acre horse ranch with her hands in the pockets of her jeans as he opened the trunk, waiting as he gathered the blankets he’d heaped upon his cargo, telling her that she would have to be the one to help him, that his impatience had won out and, since it was obvious GB and Jamie weren’t coming, that they would have to do it themselves. Just like Aspen, he told her. And she stood there watching until she almost accepted it. Then she saw her brother reach into the trunk to remove the shoebox and the reality came washing over her again.

  “Max,” she said. But he kept digging in the trunk. “This is crazy, Max. It’s crazy.”

  He turned and looked at her for a long moment, his eyes staring from the slot in the ski mask he’d pulled on. For days she had been trying to imagine what his reaction would be, how he would respond if she did this. Now he stared so long that she wanted to look away, but she didn’t. When he spoke again his voice was low and harsh.

  “Crazy? You’re calling me crazy? Do you want to know what crazy is? Crazy is having a mistress and two children when you’re already married to one woman with two other kids. Crazy is moving your family up to a wild west town on the edge of the tundra for seven years and thinking nothing could possibly go wrong. Crazy is leaving your seventeen-year-old son alone in Alaska and letting your daughter move to Las Vegas and your wife run off to God knows where just so you can get them out of your hair so you can go off chasing some new business venture.” But Maddie had closed her eyes and felt it all building up inside her, felt everything that she’d ever wanted to say to her brother come out, and then they were shouting over each other about what crazy was. Crazy was bashing someone’s brains out with a piece of rebar. Crazy was deserting your brother for something he’d done when all he was trying to do was save you. Crazy was killing your friend just because you liked his wife and wanted his land. Crazy was becoming a whore and a drug addict just because you were too proud to ask for help. Crazy was writing letters to your siblings to try to convince them that what they needed to do was kill their father. Crazy was being so strung out on junk that you wrote your own letters back saying it was a good idea and could you come along?

  And at the end of it they both stood there, Maddie still in her jeans and tank top and coat and he in his black suit and ski mask. They stood furious, each waiting for the other to do something, but Maddie knew that she was done. She was done with him. She had to be. She didn’t even have the strength to argue any more. He was her brother; he always would be. But she was not willing to die with him or for him. She was not willing to spend the rest of her life in prison or on the run in the name of an anger she did not feel. It was easy to say that family conquered all, but Maddie knew that it did not apply in this family. Not anymore. The man behind that ski mask—he was not the same person she’d dug for gold nuggets with in the back field of the house in Fairbanks. He was not the boy she’d played hide and seek with in the construction pit across the street from their house in San Bernardino. And he was not the brother who’d come to sit with her in that hospital bed on the worst night of her life, the night she’d stayed awake until dawn wondering how in the world she would ever recover from this, how she could ever look at Max or her mother or herself in the same way again. And yes, perhaps it was her fault for sending those letters to him, even if she didn’t remember it. But that didn’t mean she didn’t have the right to change her mind. That didn’t mean he had the right to tell her what she did or didn’t want to do.

  She tried one more time. “Max,” she said. “We don’t need to do this. We don’t need—”

  “No,” he said to her. “You don’t need to do this.” He reached into his pocket and threw the car keys at her. They hit her in the chest and fell to the ground. She paused, then leaned forward and picked them up.

  “I’m going in there,” he said, “and I’m going to do exactly what I told you I was going to do. I don’t care if there’s anyone in there or not. I’m going to set this thing down on his desk in the Oval Office and set the fuse and get the hell out. That ski chalet was just the first, Maddie. The vacation home in Florida’s next. Then the bungalow on the beach at Monterey. I’ve even heard there’s a resort in France. I’m going to destroy them all, the way he destroyed the only thing I held dear in my worthless, shitty life. That little piece of land in the Alaskan wilderness where I wasn’t bothering a soul.”

  “Max,” she said again, but he held up his hand to stop her. He was holding the shoebox in one arm and backing slowly away from her.

  “But what I want you to do is get in that Buick and drive away. And I want you to go anywhere in the world except for back to where you were. Promise me you’ll do that, Maddie.” He paused and stood for a moment, his body seeming to blend into the arriving darkness, and then he was gone, dressed all in black and barely visible, a living shadow sneaking toward the house by way of a ditch alongside the road, already fifty feet away by the time she understood what he’d said.

  She turned and walked to the car, slammed the door and put the keys in the ignition, but then she just sat there. She was thinking of all the times she should have tried to stop this. What if she had smashed the window in the parking lot in Grand Junction and made off with the suitcase? What if she had stepped into the train station instead of back into his car in Denver? But in some way she had never thought it would get this far. She had never thought that he would actually go through with it. And so what was she supposed to do now? Was she supposed to try to be a hero? Was she supposed to run into the house and wrest the shoebox from his grasp? This was no movie, and she was no action star. She could call the police, but they would never arrive in time, and even if they did she knew she could eventually be identified as an accomplice in the Aspen fire and go to prison. She understood his anger, and she had once felt something similar, but she didn’t feel it anymore, and she was not going to run into a house to argue with a man with a bomb in the name of a loyalty he had already betrayed.

  With her forehead resting against the steering wheel, Maddie Hill reached forward and felt the keys in her right hand. And that was when she saw the headlights in the side-view mirror, saw the car pull off the road and to the right of Buick, as if the driver wanted to get a better look at who was inside. She was out of the door in time to see the man crawling awkwardly from the convertible. It was a Corvette, and he was dressed in a pinstriped baseball uniform. He looked drunk.

  “Are you Maddie?” he said.

  “Where’s Max?” he said.

  “I’m here to stop this,” he said.

  THE SNAKE WAS SEETHING. CLUTCHING a 30.06 bolt-action rifle. He was barefoot and standing next to a sawhorse in a shed on the Mother Mary Ranch, the dog asleep at his feet next to the empty bat bag and the knapsack whose contents had led him here. The weapon gave him strength, conviction. But his body seemed to have become lost, a figure with a firearm in his hands but no history. He had arrived here straight from the womb of his confusion, not lacking in memories but rather a means of interpreting them. He had stolen a car, but then he had not known how to drive it. He had ditched it at a truck stop and begun hitching west, had hitched all day and through the night, going where the drivers happened to be going in a disturbed zigzag across the country, never staying long with one driver because he made them uneasy with his silence, made them change their minds next chance they got. “Think I’m gonna leave you off here, buddy. Gonna have to call it quits on you and your dog ’less you’re aimin’ to see Lake Superior.”

  At the truck stops he had checked the maps hanging from pushpins in the lobbies of the service plazas, had perched himself atop picnic tables with the dog resting on the bench seat beneath him and opened up the knapsack, rooted through the stacks of papers and found a map. He’d skimmed through the letters but had grown distracted by t
he people coming and going. The Snake had lived his entire adult life in the city, a place where a man like him could manage not to stand out, could go about his business in the anonymity it demanded. At the truck stops, it was difficult to blend in. The Snake had watched the eyes on him as he sat on the table with his map and papers spread out around him. To the truck drivers, he hadn’t said a word, had found that the best way to make tracks in this country was to keep your mouth shut, to let others think they were making the decisions. He’d take his place in the passenger seat next to the window, a view of the world to which he’d become accustomed, face pressed against the cold glass, the knapsack at his feet, the bat bag snug between his knees and the dog asleep against his leg, the engine of the rig firing up, the bearded driver letting it idle before steering his way out into the open pavement. The Snake pretended to be looking out the side window but would in fact watch the driver in the reflection of the windshield, keeping tabs on his movements, noticing the way they kept looking in his direction. When the truck drivers ducked their heads and tried to look him in the eyes, he turned away.

  It had been late morning by the time he’d found the driver on his way to Council Bluffs, well past noon when he’d been dropped off at the gas station just off the interstate, the truck driver leaning out the window to wave at the figure standing in a Columbia sweat suit and a trench coat with a knapsack and a bat bag slung from his shoulders and a brown lab following along beside him. He had been amazed to find such a large settlement so different from New York, where city life surrounded you like a cold, steady rain—here it rose up like something hopeful out of the brown landscape, silver buildings in the far distance and getting smaller as they’d continued on foot, hours walking south along city streets that slowly gave way to suburbs and then very rapidly to corn fields, empty intersections with stop signs and dusty roads leading off in straight lines toward a perfectly perpendicular infinity. He’d worn out his shoes, had left them alongside the road, developed calluses on his feet as the sun lowered against the horizon. It had been no problem to locate the horse ranch, armed as he was with the items he’d discovered in the knapsack, barely decipherable letters on yellowed paper creased with folds and a large roadmap of the city and the lands south of it. There was a star in black marker at the bottom border of the map where a road labeled Billionaire Drive ran off the page, an arrow pointing south that the Snake had followed, two more miles in his bare feet as evening arrived and the world grew cool and vaporous and the Snake knew he’d reached his destination, knew it immediately upon seeing the words engraved across the granite archway over the entrance.