THE MOTHER MARY RANCH
A one-lane driveway had led in from the road, the surrounding fence converging from both sides on the gate. He had stood in bare feet with the sun almost gone behind him and throwing immense shadows across the world, whispering the name he’d been whispering his entire life, the shape of the letters striking him with a new familiarity, making him linger on the word, holding it in his mouth like a stone. In anxious twilight he’d snuck through the unlocked gate and stepped around the turn where the trees ended, leaned against the stone pillars looking across the fields at the darkening mansion, crickets singing, the world otherwise silent. In the shed obscured by trees while the whimpering dog lay down and slept he had set out the bat bag on the dusty sawhorse, removed the rifle and inspected it, opened the bolt and laid three cartridges across the magazine, snapped it shut and sighted along the barrel.
He did not know why he was here exactly, but he knew it had something to do with the house. The grass was wet and cold against his bare feet as he stepped out across the fields. Then he ducked quickly to the ground. Two of the windows high up on the side of the mansion were suddenly illuminated, and the Snake watched as a figure opened one of the windows and looked out across the field toward something in the far-off darkness. The Snake lay flat on the ground in the damp grass and brought the weapon to a ready position, but the man was gone. He had vanished back into the room, but the light was still on.
It had begun gradually. Instances in which his eyes seemed to be seeing two things at once, one reality layered over another and separating, a sensation that brought a feeling not quite like pain behind his eyes, an agony not completely physical in nature. He’d spent his early days in New York wandering up and down Broadway, looking for hustles like he’d pulled off in Fairbanks, but this was a different universe. He had arrived here largely by accident. At the recruiting offices in Anchorage they’d told him his eyesight was too poor, and so he’d gone and gotten arrested instead. Got drunk and got arrested. When they let him out, he caught the ferry to Seattle. Still had all that money from the fake IDs burning a hole in his pocket. Someone in Seattle had told him that New York City was the place to be. “If I were seventeen years old and without a tie to anybody in the world”—this dusty, bearded man had said to him in the caboose of a railroad car—“that’s where I’d go. I’d catch a cross-country train to the Big Apple.” So that’s what he’d done. And when he’d gotten there … what? It simply wasn’t what he’d expected. No one to talk to. You’d think in a city of however many millions there’d be plenty of people to talk to. But it seemed the bigger the city, the less willingness to communicate. And this city was big. Big enough to make him realize how small he was.
He had not thought he would miss them, but he did. He missed the twins, and he missed GB. In a way he even missed those nights in the backyard with his father, arguing over the pipeline. But these were just emblems for the true nature of his missing. He’d see her sometimes, would notice her on the opposite side of the street, her face looking across the traffic and the sea of pedestrians to gaze directly into his eyes. He’d turn and follow her, would think he saw her disappearing around a corner, but when he got there it was just an empty alley. He would remember the way she’d once run her hands through his hair. The sensations in his head grew stronger, more frequent. Sometimes, he would close his eyes and try to calm them, like walking through a giant house closing all the doors that seemed to have blown open in a raging wind and were now swinging back and forth on their hinges. If he was able to concentrate and slowly shut each of the doors, he could settle down for a moment in the resulting calmness. But then another would open, far off on the other side of this strange house with its endless corridors, and he would set out in search of it. People began to say odd things to him, people passing him in the street and looking him in the eyes and saying the most unusual things. That they knew what he was up to. That they had their eyes on him. He would find places to crash wherever he could, with people he met at bars. He had worked at a restaurant for a very short period of time, but then one of the waitresses started spreading rumors about him, and they had fired him. He had followed her home and she had called the cops.
It became harder to meet people. They all seemed to know things about him, though he didn’t know them. One night he thought he saw her and had chased her into the park, asking her why she was running from him, but a jogger tackled him and someone called the cops. He’d begun waking up in police stations, in hospitals. No recollection of how he’d gotten there and no answers to the questions they were asking him. The holding cells with the noisy belligerent cops and frightening fellow inmates were bad. But the hospitals were worse. The pills had no taste until after he’d taken them, when a bitter dryness would crawl slowly up his throat and spread, would make his mouth feel like chalk and then spread across his sinuses and then to his eyes, clouding his vision with a veil of dry fog. His arms would begin to spasm and then they would itch. He would itch all over. Then came the rashes. But worst of all was what the medicine did to the house, went around closing all the doors and then sealing them up as if they’d never been there to begin with, the walls pulsing and becoming featureless and then closing in until his mind was not a house at all but just a room. A room with no windows and no exit, no floor and no ceiling and no walls either, just him. Just his body imprisoned in a world so constricted he couldn’t move. He couldn’t even think.
It was the missions that gave his life a sense of purpose. It was his secret that no else knew. The people who watched him walking along the streets and pointed and laughed could point and laugh all they wanted, because they did not know what he was really up to. They did not know that he was a soldier. They did not know that he had given his life over to the service of the United States government, that he was doing all of this to protect them. Those moments when he’d discover the discarded duffel on the marble wall behind the Maine Monument at Merchant’s Gate, when he would descend to the pizza shop on 46th and Ninth for his slice of sausage, when he’d step along the puddled paths of the Dene with his contact in the suit coat, these were the moments that offered him a remedy to what he recognized, even when he was in the grip of it, as a sort of loneliness of the soul.
That was what this past week had been for the Snake. From the moment he’d seen the light in his window on the fifth floor, had climbed the steps and seen the man who looked like his brother and may well have been, had been whisked from the city and heard the tremendous sound and turned to see the tallest towers in flames, had been driven on roads crowded with vehicles in a postapocalyptic crawl across a landscape that moved from concrete and glass to swampland and suburb to mountain and pasture, had been sat down in the living room of a woman who looked like someone he remembered but spoke only with silence and handed him a phone on the other end of which was a boy whispering to him what he had to do and why … well, all of this had been leading somewhere, hadn’t it? It had been leading here, to this moment. The moment the Snake had been waiting for all of his life.
The lights still pulsed high up on the side of the mansion. But now a dark shape moved across one of the windows. The figure was looking out again, dressed all in black, and for a moment the Snake’s face calmed with the memory of her. For a moment, he could remember her coming to him in that cold room in the bunker beneath the heart of the country, could see her rappelling across the rooftops of a dacha in Russia. But this was not her. This was not the woman he’d hoped this mission would lead him to. This was not his mother at all. This was not what he’d been running toward; it was what he’d been running from. The Snake stood in the wet grass and raised the rifle. He sighted along the barrel and pulled the trigger.
GB HILL FELT LIKE A ghost.
He was lying on his back in the damp field, looking up at the slowly arriving stars, when he heard the rifle blast echo across the ranch.
He had barely been able to see the Buick parked along the side of the road in the shadow of the
stable, but he had known it had to be them. The plates were Nevada; the car was a piece of shit. Not the sort of thing he could see his father driving. He had thought at first it was empty, but then as he’d pulled around to the right side of the car he had seen the door open and the woman get out, her face illuminated in the glow of the headlights that he had left on, the car still running. Where’s Max, he had said to her. I’m here to stop this. And her answer had been so matter-of-fact (“He’s in the house. With his bomb.”) that it had taken a moment for GB to register the words. A bomb. There had never been any mention of a bomb. There had been endless dissections of anger, onslaughts of condemnation and fault-finding, lengthy commiserations and spewing of blame and fury. And yes, GB had gone along with it. He was as grief-stricken as Max was furious, or at least he’d thought he was. He blamed his father for all of his shortcomings and failures just like Max did, and he had known that there were perhaps violent intentions behind this. And yes, perhaps he had encouraged them. Perhaps he had even said he was willing to take part in them. But a bomb? And so although he had set off at a run across the fields and toward the house when the woman he would never have recognized told him what was happening, he had within moments slowed to a jog, and within moments of that was walking, and within moments of that he had paused in the middle of the field, looking up toward the mansion and knowing that somewhere in there was his half brother, that this man who had existed for him these past months merely as a voice in his head, as an endless barrage of words scrawled on a page, was now armed with a shoebox that was the unconscionable conclusion to this thing they’d created and pursued, this plan that GB knew he was partly to blame for, perhaps entirely to blame for, though he could not believe that he had played a role in it, could not believe now what his grief had led him to do. He had leaned forward with his hands on his knees, whispering, “I’m sorry … I’m so sorry …” Because he knew that he should step across that field and do what he’d intended to do ever since he’d felt his complicity pouring over him in the bar of the night before. But he knew also that he couldn’t. He was too afraid.
When he’d seen the headlights, he had thought at first it might be the police. When he’d turned to see Maddie rushing out into the road next to stable, had seen the BMW slowing to a stop, the driver’s door opening up, he had stepped forward and waited—had waited to witness his father emerging from the vehicle. But it was not his father. It was a young woman. He could see this in the splay of light that reflected off the back of the blue Buick. And then climbing out of the backseat was a boy no older than four or five, holding something in his hands and wearing a striped T-shirt. He did not know these people, and their presence here had sent him stumbling backwards, had made him fall over into the high grass looking straight up at the sky, and it was at that moment that he’d heard it: the sound he at first mistook for the shoebox, only to realize a moment later—after he had crawled to his feet, after he had scanned the field in the darkness that was like fine charcoal dust—that it was something even worse.
His brother was little more than a shadow, a tiny form he could have covered with one hand, a small figure seeming to tremble in the echo of the gunshot, looking down then at the weapon, which slipped from his grasp and disappeared into the shadows, and GB felt a great comprehending terror rising up inside him, knew even before his brother began to move what was going to happen next.
“Jamie?”
His brother turned, stood frozen for a moment, a hundred yards away and searching the darkness. Then he was gone, racing across the fields toward the mansion.
“Jamie!”
GB felt his baseball spikes dig into the grass, felt them propelling him across the uneven field in a diagonal path. He knew already there was no way he could catch his brother, even though he ran with a staggering gait, stumbling and hopping and off balance. When GB arrived at the door of the mansion it was wide open, flung aside by Jamie as he’d entered and raced along the polished corridors with wall-hung portraits, past the French doors looking in on period-decorated lounges, the hallway whose pine boards were illuminated by the vacant glow of the moon. GB’s shouts echoed up the grand sweeping staircase that embraced the far end of the entrance hall in a sweeping half circle, his spikes chipping into the wood and making him stumble, crying out his brother’s name as he raced along the upstairs hallway in search of the window he’d seen lit up on the side of building, its glass shattered by the bullet that had blown through it.
GB knew now that he really was a ghost. That something truly had been dead inside him all along. Not literally—he was still flesh and bone and could sense and hurt and cry. He could feel the ache in his limbs and the catch in his heart and the gasp of his breath. He could taste the phlegm that had risen in his throat from the running and could smell the perspiration on his body. Being a ghost was not about being of or not of this world. Not really. It was simply about being too scared to move on to whatever was next. It meant focusing too hard on the wrong thing. It meant haunting the rooms and realms to which you’d become devoted merely because to move beyond them took an act of courage, an act of faith.
He knew now that he’d been wrong when he’d stood that Sunday morning one week ago in front of the FOR SALE sign on the front lawn of his and Tammy’s dream home thinking that these fragments of his life were all he had left. They were not all he had left. He should have known and understood this countless times during the week that had passed: should have understood it when he slammed shut the trunk on that forgotten shelf of land above the Hudson River and climbed back up into the city; should have understood it when he heard his brother’s approach in the room on the fifth floor of the halfway house in Hell’s Kitchen and had turned to see him there; should have understood it in the hotel room in Pennsylvania, or when he’d rushed out of the restaurant in Ohio, thinking he’d lost Jamie once and for all, only to find him sitting in the passenger seat with his daughter’s dog, ready to go wherever GB led him. He should have understood it at any one of these moments. A part of him had understood it. But in each of these instants of possibility he had seen also something that terrified him, the acceptance of a new life with new priorities and obligations that meant leaving others behind, the closing of a door when it was so much easier to linger there on the threshold, watching the sunlight play across the floor of any empty room, looking in at the replayed imaginings of something that was already gone.
That night at Yankee Stadium, when he’d seen his brother climbing up on the roof of the dugout, hopping down on to the warning track, and running across the infield, he had not been surprised. He had not been angry either. Not at first. The anger had come later, but what he had felt in that moment, initially, was a painful sadness. Not for him or his baseball career, but for Jamie and what the world had done to him. And now, as he turned the final corner in the chaos of his father’s majestic, doomed mansion, as he saw his brother up ahead, standing at the open door looking in at the room with the light slanting to fall across his face, and as he ran those final twenty feet that separated them, he wished he could be back in that moment. He wished that he was back on that emerald field beneath floodlights in his one moment of triumph, his one moment of achievement, watching his brother run toward him. He wished that he could open his arms and let his brother run into them so that he could tell him it was fine. That everything would be fine.
When he arrived at the door, they stood there together for an instant, comprehending what they were facing, the thing that lay sprawled across the ornate rug in a crimson circle of blood spreading outward, the room strewn with broken glass and the debris from the ceiling where the bullet had lodged itself, the immense mahogany desk and, atop it, a shoebox. A duct-taped shoebox.
GB turned to Jamie, who looked back at him with confusion, something like fear flashing in his eyes behind the thick lenses of his glasses. For a moment, GB felt the thing he’d meant to do escaping, the way it always escaped. But there was no more time for misunderstandings. So h
e wrapped his arms as tightly as he could around his little brother.
4
Dust
RECENTLY, WE GATHERED: A SINGLE mother, a retired showgirl, a housewife, and her adult daughter. We sat on the raised back deck of a bungalow-style home on a dead-end street in a college town with autumn falling all around. Just the four of us now, and a five-year-old boy diving among leaf piles in the yard. And Dat and David, home for the weekend, inside watching football. And a thirteen-year-old chocolate lab.
The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill Page 31