Golden Age

2018

AFTERWARD, Richie didn’t know what to think. He hadn’t seen Michael for months, nor did he hear from him, call him, e-mail him, or drive past the Shoebox. If Jessica was aware of that visit in November, she said nothing about it; she was such a sound sleeper that she could easily not have heard a thing. There was a part of him that had forgotten about it, the part of him that reveled in Leo’s Thanksgiving visit with Britt and Jack and their baby, Mona. Jack was ten now, and it looked as though he modeled his every word and gesture on Leo. Even Britt laughed that she could ask Jack if he wanted cereal for breakfast or eggs, and the first thing he did was look at Leo. Leo appeared to feel comfortable with being adored; he was affectionate with Mona, who at nine months was grabbing table edges, pulling herself up, and crowing ecstatically. Jessica would sit on the sofa and set Mona astride her knees, and within moments, they would both be laughing. When Richie described how Leo was as a toddler, everyone laughed at that, too. Maybe all that resistance had been funny, and Richie hadn’t had the sense to see it.

But there was a part of him that didn’t forget Michael, or, at least, that was how he reconstructed it after the fact. He looked up that girl whom they once left floundering in the freezing water down the road from their house in Englewood Cliffs — older than they were, bulky and contemptuous, Donna Fitzgerald then. On Facebook there were four, one of whom had once worked as a steamfitter. No way, with a girl who might have married, to find her and ask what she remembered about that incident. There were fourteen William Westons — which one had supplied the hammer that Richie had slugged Michael with when Michael sneered at his tent-erecting failures? Alicia Tomassi — there were eight of those on Facebook and seven on LinkedIn. None appeared to be an artist, though one looked rather like the old Alicia, who, he remembered, put it about that he and Michael both attacked her. “And lucky for her” was what Michael said. And so, if he could line up the witnesses, how would they testify? Would his congressional colleagues remember Richie’s bike leaning against Michael’s Ferrari? Would Jerry Nadler remember giving him the oh-yeah-I-get-it-now look a week or so after Richie voted for the Iraq Resolution, and Nadler saw them walking side by side out of a restaurant? Nothing had rankled quite so much in that article in the Times as the line about Richie being the younger twin. He had crushed the paper and thrown it against the wall — they called themselves reporters! How often had he thought about these things in the intervening months? How often did he tell himself the past was past and he was over it, and for that year, Michael did take him in hand, did make him get his act together. Did not tease him about how he might sleep with Jessica (his thoughts lingered over this one, and Leo entered the picture, only to be consciously banished). Did these thoughts form a pattern, or just appear to form a pattern in retrospect?

And why was he out after midnight, why did he wake up with a raging headache and lie there beside the person he cared most about, and, after finding no ibuprofen in the bathroom, decide that right now he had to go to Safeway and get some, that his head would burst if he didn’t? He got dressed and went to his car. The evening was warmish and foggy, so that the air was full of light and the streets were shining, and he didn’t have his watch, he’d forgotten it, and he drove rather aimlessly because of the headache — he had to make himself think how to get to Safeway, although the hardest thing in the world was thinking. The streets were empty, so empty, and there was a man in a smooth leather jacket that caught the light, jaywalking, holding up his hand imperiously, looking at him, and he realized that it was Michael, though why he was there at that moment, Richie could not understand. Michael recognized him, grinned, and gave him the finger; and Richie felt himself press down on the accelerator, press down hard, and then Michael grew to enormous size, and there was an impact, and a bump-bump as the car went over the body, and he drove home without looking back and without any headache, and he went to bed and slept like a rock until Jessica came into the room (it was bright daylight) and said, “Honey, someone is here from the police.” She looked upset, and all the cop said was “Congressman, I have some bad news for you. Your brother was the victim of a hit-and-run sometime between three-thirty and four-fifteen this morning, and, I am sorry to tell you, he passed away, and his body is at the morgue.”

Richie said, “Oh Jesus, you are kidding me,” and the cop frowned regretfully, and Richie said, “Any clues about the perpetrator?” and one cop said, “Not many, I’m sorry to say. The surveillance cameras in the area seem to have been down for maintenance.”

“Which area?” said Richie.

“Delaware, almost to M Street, sir. Southwest?”

It seemed to Richie that he didn’t even know where that was.

After they called his mom and Janet to give them the news, and Jessica left for work, he went out and looked at his car, a nondescript silver Toyota. No dents, no scrapes, no hairs caught in the grille. At dinner, he said to Jessica, “I have been tired all day. I feel like I was up a lot last night.”

She said, “You know me, I sleep through everything, but I have this vague memory of you going to the bathroom. You groaned.”

He didn’t ask anything further.

Surely, Richie thought, this is all a hallucination, not something he remembered but something he had fantasized about for so long that it had now sprung into his head, a movie he’d finally bought the ticket to. He did not go to the morgue, and when the funeral director suggested a closed coffin, he agreed at once.

Janet called Chance and Loretta; Loretta called Binky and Tia. Claire said that she would come to the funeral, but Jesse and Jen didn’t think they could afford it — they did know about Piddinghoe Investments, because Felicity had told them. Loretta came; she was obese now, looked terrible in an autocratic way. Chance and Emily went to the Hut and got Andy. The obituary included the part about Michael being the victim of a hit-and-run, that the case remained open, but left out Piddinghoe Investments, the offshored millions, everything Richie had never told anyone about Michael’s small cruelties and invisible (to others) sneers. No one invited Lynne, and it turned out that, according to Loretta, she and Michael were not divorced, but Richie wasn’t sure exactly how Loretta meant the word “not.” Claire came — the last original Langdon. She gave Richie a hug and said that she couldn’t imagine what he must be feeling. She was right: she couldn’t. He would not say that he grieved, he would not say that he didn’t grieve. He thought maybe, if you had spent your entire life suffering from serious pains in your leg, and then that limb was amputated, those particular pains were gone, but other pains replaced them — that was the best way to describe how he was feeling. Jessica knew he was freed, but he said nothing to her about the regret, fear, anxiety, the sense of being lopsided and perhaps fatally out of balance. He looked around the service and saw tears — Tia and Binky for sure, Jessica because she was a kind person, but also Janet? Chance maintained his stoicism, Emily stuck close to Chance and squeezed his hand every so often, Leo explained the concept of death to Jack, and Britt walked around the room and out into the corridor hand in hand with Mona, just to keep her quiet. Felicity stayed away, Guthrie had to work, and Perky was in Moscow. After chatting with his mom and giving her a hug, Claire came back and stood next to Richie, put her arm around his waist, and leaned against him just a little bit. She said, “When you get to be my age, the deaths get quicker. It’s making me kind of crazy. Not only Carl and Lois and Henry, and now Michael, but three friends of mine in Chicago.” Richie said, “Felicity would say, Get used to it,” and he spoke in such a cold voice that Claire turned and stared at him. Then she said, “Well, I do know what you mean,” and moved away.

He did not dare spend any time with his mom. He felt like she would know the answer to his conundrum, and she would tell it to him in a single enigmatic phrase. He preferred to wait for the police to come up with something.

Loretta had the body shipped to Savannah, where she interred it in a family plot she had purchased. Richie thought that she had caged Michael at last, and no doubt the tombstone would read, “Loving husband of.”

—

CLAIRE WOULD HAVE put on a better funeral — more to eat, because you had to give the mourners plenty of time to get comfortable with one another. And you had to lay the food out in stages, so that they would eat plenty and feel their endorphins kick in. Strawberries dipped in dark chocolate, baguettes and an array of cheeses, ambrosia — her mother’s old standby (with sliced oranges, coconut, and chunks of banana) — small squares of bacon-Gruyère quiche, champagne. You had to bring it out and offer it around with a sympathetic look on your face, and people would take it and feel better, and then they would start to talk more openly, and stories would come out about the person who had died, and all of those stories would be funny or affectionate, and by the time the food was gone, everyone would have a positive feeling about the corpse. But Richie was in shock, and Jessica, lovely woman that she was, was never offended by reality, and so never thought of changing reality for the better. As they were driving back to the hotel from the funeral, Janet said, “That gave me the creeps.”

Claire said, “Worst I’ve ever seen. Chicago gangsters are buried with more affection.”

“Michael aroused passion, I suppose, but I doubt if he ever aroused affection, or even wanted to.”

“But,” said Claire, “you are supposed to paper that over at a funeral, or the death forever afterward seems to be roiling in anger and resentment.”

Janet said, “A fitting tribute, then.”

She stopped at a red light, and they exchanged a glance. Claire said, “So why did you cry at the service?”

“He was a cute baby. I was only three, but I remember that. I think I was crying for all the cute babies.”

Claire reached over and squeezed her niece affectionately on the knee. They were practically the same age now, weren’t they? The eleven years that separated them had dwindled to almost nothing.

Claire was dreaming that their hotel was attached to a hospital, and that she had gone into one of the hospital rooms and gotten into bed with a gray cat. She was snuggling up to him and thinking that the hospital bed was much more comfortable than the hotel bed when Janet woke her up, saying, “Do you think that we’ve lived through a golden age?”

Claire’s eyes opened on the clock face, which read “10:34”—she had been asleep for maybe seven minutes. She took a deep breath, then said, “Why would we think that? No one thinks that.” What she really thought was, Why would you think that, with everything that you’ve been through? She turned on her side. Janet’s gray bob was pale in the light from the hotel courtyard. Janet said, “Believe me, I never would have — my conviction that we as a species have fucked every single thing up is the most lasting thing about me. But I was looking at my mom open her handbag for a Kleenex, and that handbag is truly vintage—”

“Green vinyl,” said Claire. “I saw that.”

They both laughed.

“Anyway, I remembered telling her that I wished I had been born in 1787 and died in 1860, because there weren’t any wars then, so I must have been in sixth or seventh grade, because that was when we first studied American history.”

“Nineteen sixty?”

“Sometime around the U-2 incident. Francis Gary Powers shot down spying in the USSR. I wonder what ever happened to him. Jeez. It was like I learned what death was and that it was imminent at the very same moment. But it never happened. We’re still alive.”

“I know what happened to him,” said Claire. “After they traded him back from Russia, he got a job for some TV station, and he was doing fire recon in California when his copter crashed. I don’t think it’s been a golden age.”

“How long have I been convinced this country is doomed? I always thought it would be fossil fuels, corruption, guns, and climate change, Frank Langdon’s legacies. I thought racism was like a giant tapeworm, horrible and disgusting, that we just had to live with.”

“I never heard Frank make a racist comment.”

“After the people were murdered in that church in Charleston, I said to myself, That’s what’s going to destroy us after all.”

“No,” said Claire. “That is what will make it so that no one in the world will care if this country is destroyed.”

“A golden age, though,” said Janet. “In comparison with what’s to come. Golden ages are always in the past.”

Just then, Claire had a small memory, maybe from the nineties? She was sitting in her window seat, waiting for takeoff at O’Hare. They must have been at the edge of the runway, and for some reason, she saw something she had never seen before — planes approaching in the twilight, their headlights on, appearing in the distance, tipping slightly upward, then floating downward. As soon as one landed, another appeared, so silently, so rhythmically, so cooperatively. And then darkness fell, and a few stars glimmered, and a three-quarter moon. She didn’t relate this memory to Janet, but she did think right then that all golden ages were discovered within. No one would ever know that her father, Carl, the endless Iowa horizon, a pan of shortbread emerging from the oven, and her grandchildren laughing in the next room had indeed made her life a golden age. She glanced over at Janet, who gave a little snore. Dreaming, Claire hoped.

—

GUTHRIE SOMETIMES TALKED to Perky, now known as LTC John Perkins Langdon (he had added the “John” himself because as “Perky” he had been incessantly harassed during training and he didn’t like “Franklin”). LTC John Langdon talked like an army training manual — clipped, ruthless, impatient. As far as Guthrie was concerned, Perky’s way of dealing with his own PTSD was to embrace it. He had seen action not only in Afghanistan, but in Yemen, during the crisis, and in Greece, when the EU called in American forces to put down the uprising. When Perky was in the States, he was stationed at Fort Hood. He complained a lot about the heat and said there were rumors going around that Fort Hood was no longer sustainable — they might reopen Fort Ord, out in California, just for the weather. The way he talked now was always sharp, irritated, military, never “perky.” What John would do when they retired him, Guthrie could not imagine.

One day, at the noodle shop in Iowa City, Guthrie overheard some people talking, talking about Seattle, about Pike Place Market, Bain-bridge Island, and, most important, how far Seattle was from everyplace else in the world—“almost like Perth,” said one of the girls. Of course, this was not true. You could see on any map that Seattle was close to several cities: Portland, the nightmare that was Vancouver. But he got up from his lunch, disposed of his bowl and his utensils, and placed his tray on the stand, and that afternoon he left. He took all of his cash out of the bank ($846), packed a single suitcase, filled his car with gas. He stopped at the mall, gave his letter of immediate resignation to the supervisor of the skating rink, picked up his skates, and bought four new decks of cards, just to pass the time. He headed west on 80, not intending to see the farm, but at 63 he turned north after all. Late in the afternoon, he drove past it, then looped around the section. The big house was still there, but the old Maze, the windbreaks, and the barns were gone. Even the Osage-orange hedge was gone. Equipment was parked beside the hill. The hill still sported a small jungle of weeds, trees, wildflowers. Possibly that had been his dad’s favorite place on the farm, but possibly not. He drove on, through Sioux City up to Sioux Falls, where he stopped and spent the night in his car. It was then that he decided not to head straight to Seattle, but to see a few things. He thought twice about this when he woke up just after dawn and all that was visible was dust (he could taste it, too, even though the windows and the vents in the car were closed). He sat up sweaty from the heat, and looked at his watch. Only 7:00 a.m. He put up his seat back, blew his nose (dust) a few times, and made himself wake up. He could turn around. But he knew perfectly well that Iowa City was death for him. No one saw that but Guthrie. Even so…and, anyway, he had resigned from his job. These days, that was like committing suicide.

He drank some water and pulled out of the parking lot. South Dakota was strangely different from Iowa, even this close to the border. Already in May, the former farm fields were brown, the parking lots had no cars parked in them, and the abandoned buildings they surrounded had lost their names. It was spooky. He pulled onto I-90. By eight, the dust had settled, and he could turn on the AC, which might be, literally, a lifesaver. He remembered from school that the Ogallala Aquifer had never stretched this far north — it was mostly in Kansas and Nebraska. There must have been some aquifer up this way, but he couldn’t remember the name of it. It was gone now. The landscape was moonlike, except for the quality of the road (excellent) and the remnants of former towns that he passed along the way. The Missouri River at Chamberlain was almost dry — the bridge soared above it, and the former bed of the river was a dusty stretch of dirt with a thin, shiny greenish line running through it; there had been so little snow out west that it hadn’t flooded in five years. His dad had always been strangely anxious about floods.

He was to the Badlands by lunch; he stopped and had a hot dog and a Coke at a bar in Wall, then drove south into maybe the strangest landscape he had ever seen. His car thermometer said ninety-eight outside, eighty inside. He took off his shirt and shoes, and drove barefoot. The Badlands came upon you gradually, but then there they were: you were driving along the edge of steep cliffs that fell away from the plains, rather than rising above them. The land was so dry that it looked rather like rock. Things got more and more desolate; after a while, he was among the cliffs, and then past them. A house here and there — abandoned ranches, no doubt. The switchbacks meant that he had to drive slowly, so it was dusk when he stopped, parked by the side of the road, and rustled up a box of crackers and another thermos of water. He thought it was perfect, in its way, that he would spend the night here, in the bleakest spot he had ever been in, bleaker than Iraq. Iraq was dry and forbidding, but you knew from ninth-grade history that every square foot of Mesopotamia had been walked over and thought about for thousands of years. Here, that did not seem to be so. Even though Native Americans had lived here, they seemed entirely vanished now, as if, Guthrie thought, the world had ended. But it was cooler than Sioux Falls. He slept fine, and was in a better mood in the morning. He detoured over to Rapid City and ate three fried eggs, an order of bacon, and a slice of cantaloupe. His car was saving him a lot of money. It got fifty miles to the gallon and was comfortable enough to sleep in — that was a hundred dollars a night in hotel costs.

He knew three guys who had disappeared into the North Dakota oil fields — Jake Sharp, in 2012, Randy Case in 2014, and, the most desperate, Lundy Mitchell last year, when he lost his job at the Iowa City Veterans Administration, and left his wife and three kids on South Lucas Street. He sent back most of his paycheck from Williston, where he, too, lived in his car. But the oil business wasn’t what it had been five years ago. According to Tracy Mitchell — who had never wanted Lundy to go, but what else was there to do, especially since their four-year-old was battling liver cancer and needed a transplant — the best fields ran out in about a month.

The weather cooled off a little as he drove north, but as soon as he crossed I-94, he felt the anxiety coming on. Even though he was alert about his triggers, he at first didn’t understand that it was the huge tankers rumbling by, shaking the road and buffeting his old car, that were giving him headaches and making his palms sweat. And the sunlight was blinding — or it seemed blinding to Guthrie — another trigger, because whenever he remembered Iraq he remembered squinting into the desert, barely able to make out where the danger was coming from. Finally, he saw a rest stop and pulled over. It was a nice rest stop, with aspen trees and a bit of a lawn, obviously built in the last few years, but the former oil fields encroached upon it — four dead derricks within a quarter-mile of the lookout, and another one in the distance. There was some sort of old holding pool nearby, and where there might once have been prairie grasses (and even wildflowers, at this time of year), there was now just dusty, gravelly earth. He imagined George Armstrong Custer sitting here on his horse, thinking he had been transported to Mars. On the highway, beyond the little break of trees, brakes squealed and two horns blared, a whining car horn and a deep, aggressive tanker horn. There was no sound of a crash (Guthrie didn’t turn around), but Guthrie’s heart was pounding anyway, as if the gunfire and explosions would commence momentarily. He went into the men’s john — rather luxurious — and sat there in the coolness for a long time, going through his exercises. Maybe, he thought, what worked in peaceful Iowa City would not necessarily work in oil country. He went back to his car, rolled down the windows, and stayed there for a while, practicing his card tricks. By one o’clock, he felt calmer, and also hungry — hunger was always a worthy distraction. He pulled out of the rest stop.

But he couldn’t tolerate the highway. Every driver seemed predatory. So, at the next turnoff, he took a small road into the wildlife refuge, and it was like entering another world. The rough hills were marginally greener than the plains; deer stood by the side of the road as if they enjoyed observing passersby. Most important, the park was quiet and nearly empty: empty hills, empty roads, empty cliffs, empty valleys, empty enormous sky. He took some deep breaths, and found his box of crackers again — almost empty. He did not drive far into the park; it was pretty apparent that the roads were narrow and treacherous, it would be easy to get lost. But he got himself together here, so that when he headed back to the main road, even though it was now dusk and he could see the gas flares on the horizon more clearly, and smell the oily scent that pervaded the countryside as it came through his ventilation system, he was okay with it, more willing to think about his imminent hamburger than his imminent death.

He half hoped to run into Lundy Mitchell — he didn’t — but he did run into, of all people, Scott Crandall, who had been in his unit in Iraq, and whom he hadn’t thought of once in the interim. He was sitting at a bar in Williston, and when he heard Guthrie order his burger and onion rings, he turned around and said, “Shit!”

He looked so belligerent that Guthrie prepared himself right then to be cold-cocked, but the guy smiled (not many teeth), flexed his enormous biceps (years in oil country, setting rigs), and said, “Langdon, shit, man, what the fuck!” and threw his arms around Guthrie and squeezed. Guthrie was six feet tall, 190, but Scott — or, as he was now known, “Croc”—was two inches taller and forty pounds heavier, all muscle. Even his enormous belly was as hard as a rock. He was bald, had a tatt on his cheek and another on his forehead, and took Guthrie back to his man-camp room for the night. Which would have been fine, considering they both got pretty drunk, but Croc wanted to talk and talk and talk. He hadn’t been away from Williston in ten years; he’d once made plenty of dough, but he played a lot of poker, too; and he wanted Guthrie to know every detail of how his best friend in Williston had been crushed to death when a tanker rolled backward into a drilling rig — the screaming lasted ten full minutes, and they couldn’t do a thing about it. If Langdon thought Iraq was bad, he should stick around in Williston for a week. Anyway, that scam set up by the big oil companies and the Arabs, the one where they dropped the price of oil to fifty dollars a barrel and kept it there for a year, had worked — put most of the drillers on the Bakken out of business. Croc finally passed out (twelve Coronas and a bottle of vodka; Guthrie remembered him getting so drunk in Iraq that he set his duffel bag on end and shot it full of holes, laughing the entire time). Guthrie was out of the man camp and to Billings, Montana, by noon.

He had $346, and wasn’t halfway yet. He was getting fifty miles to the gallon; he had eight hundred or so miles to go; so at $8.90 a gallon (the price of gas was back up now), it would cost him $150 just in gas. There was a part of him that wanted to arrive in Seattle with a dollar in his pocket and a new name — let’s say “Sage” (maybe, with effort, he could live up to that) — but it was a stupid part of him. There was no speed limit in Montana, so he could get pretty far in twenty-four hours. That was what he was thinking. It would also be smart to plug in his phone, now dead, but he realized that he had left the car charger somewhere — it wasn’t under the seat.

He filled up in Coeur d’Alene, happy to have gotten that far. He was a man of the plains, so the switchbacks over the mountains in the dark, the way the guardrail loomed into the light, spooked him and made him jerk the wheel. He did think many times about how one of the effects of PTSD was not that you were suicidal, exactly, but that death was such a familiar concept that it seemed like a reasonable alternative to, not fear, but shock, suddenness, the unexpected. Eventually, a person got very tired of those shots of adrenaline that didn’t stop firing. Your body itself became the enemy that could never be placated. At a place called Moses Lake, he turned off into Potholes State Park (how could he resist?), and pulled into a shady spot. The weather wasn’t terrible here — he only had to crack his windows a little. He was hungry, though. That was his last thought before he fell asleep.

The blow against the window that woke him up was followed by the blow that cracked the window. The third one shattered it, and the glass poured into his lap. A face was right in his, the face of a teen-ager. The face was snarling, and behind it were more faces, three or more. Everyone was screaming. Guthrie jerked back, and the kid leaned in, saying, “How much money you got, fuckhead?”

Guthrie had no idea, but he said, “Hundred bucks, maybe.” The kid said, “Hand it over. Hand me your wallet.”

Guthrie hesitated, not out of fear — that hadn’t kicked in yet — but just out of surprise, slowness. The kid lifted his gun. Guthrie recognized it; it was an old Ruger. It came through the broken window, and Guthrie felt the muzzle touch his cheek. Instinctively, he turned his head.