The Family Hightower (2 page)

 

 

Part 1

1995

 

 

Chapter 1

Ev
ery
story's a kind of violence perpetrated on the facts. You cut off their arms and legs, stretch them out, break their ribs until they fit where you think they're supposed to. All of it in search of meaning. Some stories, the job is so clean, everything's arranged along an arc so bright that you can't see the carnage that went into making it.

But this story isn't like that. There is blood everywhere, pieces all around us. There are so many people involved: the Hightower family and all the people they touched, all the people they hurt. People and politics and history, of the family and four countries. This means we have to move around a lot. If you're looking for the kind of story where you follow one person from beginning to end, and the clock ticks forward, sentence after sentence—well, it's not going to go like that around here. You won't be confused at the end, you'll know everything then, I promise. But where do we start?

We could go to that strip of land that, in
1995
, three countries claim but nobody's governing, the triangle at the intersection of Ukraine, Romania, and Moldova. We could bend a hundred years of history into a perfect circle and call it whole. Would it satisfy you? Almost without a doubt. But it wouldn't be true. We could start in Cleveland in
1
966
, give you the pinion of the drama. We could start with a single dollar bill, because this is all about money in the end. The things people do when they don't have enough, or think they don't. The impossibility of knowing when we have enough, because not one of us knows ourselves that well, and the man who says he does? Don't trust him. All these things matter, all of them could force the story to mean something, to mean a lot of things. But that's not what we're here to see. We are here, you understand, to see the bodies and the blood. The muscles and the tendons. So maybe we should start with cords: a telephone line running unbroken from Cleveland across the Atlantic to Granada, Spain.

It's August
1995
, and Curly Potapenko, in Cleveland, is doing the calling. He's been trying to reach the younger Peter Henry Hightower—Muriel's boy, whom everyone calls Petey—all day. He's trying to warn him, but nobody'll pick up the phone. Curly Potapenko is scared to death that this is because Petey's dead already. It's not a stupid thing to think: The only reason Curly has a phone number is because he paid a guy off to give it to him—a double cross—because he knows the people he's been working for in Kiev have been tracking Petey down in the hopes of killing him. They have a couple guys out, one heading to the Romanian border, one heading east into Russia. Another one heading west, into the rest of Europe. They're even talking about sending a guy somewhere in Africa. They're following all the leads they have.

Curly doesn't know that nobody's picking up the phone in Spain because the young man who lives in the apartment is out. That's all. The bigger problem, though, is that Curly—and that means the people in Kiev, too—in this case, have the wrong Peter Henry Hightower. They've found Rufus's son, not Muriel's, the one who's on the outs right now with his dad for what he thinks is for good, though it doesn't stop him from feeling bad. Our man Peter, who's about to get involved in a plot he doesn't want any part of.

It's
9
:
06
p.m. in Granada, and Peter is leaving the Art Deco movie theater on the corner of the Plaza de Gracia. He's been to that theater a lot, because he knows almost nobody in this town. He lives by himself in a studio apartment, makes a living from tutoring Spaniards in English: students, businesspeople, a pampered spouse who thinks of language acquisition as a quirky hobby. He sells freelance articles about Granada to magazines, too. The angles come to him without much work, a relic of his days as a more serious journalist: the travel angle, the culinary angle. He's a good investigative reporter, too, when the story grabs him. But often, the story doesn't grab him. These days, no story seems to. Sometimes that Spain feels like a dream to him. For the first five seconds of every day, he has to remember where he is; he keeps expecting to wake up somewhere else. There's the maze of the Moorish quarter. The Generalife, so complicated and peaceful at the same time. And then there's the haze of the place during siesta. He has never adjusted to sleeping during it, or even resting, so he stays in his apartment, sweating in the heat, or goes for long walks. The city's eeriest to him then; it's as though everyone got a piece of news he missed and abandoned the place, and he's the only one left behind. All of Spain seems strange to him that way, and it was like that the day he arrived, by plane into Madrid, and took the train south, riding in the beige smoking car, like living inside a cigarette, staring out at the blank landscape outside the city. It has all been believable as a hallucination.

Peter's thinking of that now, at
11
:
27
, after a slow meal of North African tapas at a bar two blocks to the north of the theater, because, as the clock moves from noon to midnight, the Plaza de Gracia travels back in time. The tiny, buzzing cars, delivery trucks, and scooters of the afternoon give way to bicycles. The modern buildings near the theater, the bright magazine kiosk, get pale in the light of the lamps in the square. The cobblestones, the palm trees, the old buildings of wood and white plaster, come to life. Two Romanis play a tarnished violin and an accordion missing four keys. Their cases are out and already lined with pesetas. Beyond them, an acting troupe has set up a small stage, two floodlights, five rows of ten chairs each, which are one-third occupied. Three actors onstage, two women and a man, in peasant costumes, all scream at each other in Spanish, too fast and slangy for Peter to understand, though it's holding the small audience. They gasp when one of the men attacks the woman, breathe hard when the second man stabs the first and red silk pours from the first man's embroidered shirt. They're quiet for the last minutes, then stand up, clapping, shouting bravos. Whether they're just family and friends is irrelevant to the actors when they're onstage, or maybe all the more meaningful. A man with a black jacket and white hair approaches the stage and waves down the victim of the murder, who's up and bowing. They hug like an uncle and a nephew do, the older man patting the younger one on the back.

A heavy realization—
I've had way too much to drink
—settles into Peter's head. All of a sudden, he can't remember his bed ever feeling so far away. He puts his hands in his pockets to steady himself, keeps his head down. Passes back through the Plaza de Gracia, weaves through the alleyways around the Cathedral, where three Romani women are laughing in a corner, all red scarves, flowing skirts, dangling bangles. He can almost hear it, the past roaring up around him, and he's ashamed, ashamed and sorry for himself at the same time, as only drunk people can be.

It's a year ago, in
1994
. Peter is in Cairo with Rufus, his father. His dad, as usual, has moved there for what he says is work, though also as usual, Peter can't figure out what he does. He leaves the house at odd times, makes calls from Egypt's industrial-strength pay phones. Comes home sometimes not with money, but things: a long piece of meat and a basket of vegetables, three pairs of new shoes, a bicycle. It seems good enough. But Peter can see in his father's walk that he's getting bored, nervous.
We could go back to Nairobi,
he keeps saying; he hasn't been there since
1983
, and even Peter knows—with all that Rufus has tried to protect him from—even Peter knows how unhappy he was there by the time he left. But he's still talking like that:
We could go to Bissau.
At last, Peter comes home to find the bags packed in the hallway, his father spinning a key ring on his finger that Peter doesn't recognize.

“What are those for?”

“A car. A Peugeot
405
, to be exact. Egyptian model. They're making them here now, you know.”

“You bought a car?”

“What do you think, I stole it? Don't answer that.”

“Where are we going?” Peter says.

“Casablanca.”

Peter just looks at him.

“I know what you're thinking, Peter,” Rufus says.

“You always say that, Dad, and you never do,” Peter says. “You never know what I'm thinking.”

“All right. What are you thinking?”

“That you're in trouble again. That your latest scheme, whatever it is, has fallen through, and now we have to skip town.”

“That's not true.”

“Then why are we leaving?”

“Okay, okay. Part of what you say is true. Or what you're saying is part of the truth.”

“Dad, are you high?”

“No. No. I'm saying you don't know the whole story.”

“Then tell me. Tell me already.”

Rufus opens his arms. “Look at me. I'm most of the way to sixty. I don't want to live like this anymore. I can't afford Europe, but I can't stay here, either.”

“What do you mean by
this,
Dad? How is it we've been living?”

“Please, Peter. This is the last trip. I promise you, when we get to Casablanca, I'll stay there for good. You'll have to go there to bury me.”

They've been through this before, five times in the past nine years. The first time—in
1986
—Peter's only seventeen, but knows he could pass for what white people understand as twenty-two, maybe twenty-five. He's already tall, with cold eyes; the circumstances of his life, the things he's seen, make him carry himself like few kids in rich countries do. They're living in Cape Town then, after having moved from Harare, from Lagos. He only sees his father leave the house, come back, always at different hours, wearing different clothes, holding bundles of cash. Their apartments, though, are almost always the same. Plaster walls, a cracked tile floor. The sun driving through thin windows. Never any curtains. Bare furnishings: A table, two chairs, a hot plate, sometimes a gas stove lying on a counter, the line coiling to a propane tank on the floor. By
1986
, Peter's been to thirteen schools, managed to learn to read, write, do math. He's learned how to fit in, how to move around; he can do it with an ease that almost compensates for having no sense of who he is, or where he's from. But one day in May, with the summer turning to fall, he decides he's tired of it. At the time, he doesn't quite understand what he wants—a home—so he just waits for his father to come back, and then tells him he wants to see his aunts and uncles, his cousins. It's night. His father glances out the dark window and squints.

“You really want to see them?” Rufus says.

“Yeah, I do.”

They don't have anything you want,
Rufus almost says, but stops himself. Realizes it'll only make him seem small-minded, uncharitable, things he tries hard not to be, even though he wonders if it isn't better sometimes, or at least useful, to be petty. His devotion to his son only makes it worse. Rufus wants to teach his son to open himself up to the world, to do what he can't do himself, and he doesn't know how to reconcile that with his conviction that he would destroy entire villages to protect his boy. He doesn't say anything. He goes to the foot of his bed, bends down, and pulls out a metal box with a padlock on it. He unlocks it, pulls out a wrinkled brown folder, and hands it to Peter. Inside, there's a spiral-bound stenographer's notebook filled with addresses and phone numbers, and an envelope with several thousand U.S. dollars in it.

“This is for you. You should start with my brother Henry.” He searches for the words. “He'll understand you the best, I think.”

Peter's counting the money, his mouth open a little. It occurs to Rufus that his son has never seen that much cash in one place before. That's one thing he's kept him from.

“This . . . this is a lot.” Peter says.

“Not as much as you might think,” Rufus says.

“If you had all this money, why have we been living like this?”

“It's not my money, Peter. It's yours.”

Peter doesn't know what to say, and Rufus feels bad for him, wonders in that second if it was a mistake to raise him like he did. But it's too late now.

“Do you want to go or not?” Rufus says.

Peter spends the summer of
19
86
in shock.
His uncle Henry's place in New Canaan, Connecticut, is smaller than the palaces around it, more secluded, but finer, carrying the whiff of overdesign and expensive detail. The house of a man who's had money for long enough that he knows what to do with it. But the man is almost never there, except on weekends. He gives Peter a set of clothes, a haircut, says he would give him a car, but Peter doesn't have a license. During the week he drives north into Massachusetts with his cousin Alex; she's a rising junior at Amherst, majoring in political science. They take the curves slow along Route
2
, in the tall pines at the north end of the Pioneer Valley.
I wanna be your sledgehammer,
the radio says. It seems to be on every station; they can't escape it. They're there to visit four friends of Alex's who are holed up in a house in Colrain for the summer; their plan is to smoke a lot of pot and play as much music as they can. Everyone's up until five in the morning; the friends have a guitar, a mandolin, and a banjo, and they stumble and laugh their way through a pile of folk-rock songs. They talk about how they want to live like that, out of a car, moving all the time. They don't have any idea what they're wishing for.
Alex, you played violin when you were a kid, right?
they say. They can't get any of the words out unless there are hard consonants in them.
Play the fiddle with us.
But Alex isn't interested in her friends, wants to know all about Africa from Peter. She hangs on every detail. Peter tells her about Rufus and him trying to stave off dehydration once when their car breaks down in Chad. They were stranded for four days with a man and two women in the shade of a crumbling building that might have been a military checkpoint, or a tiny field office for a foreign oil company. He and his father had no language in common with the other three, but they shared what little water they had, until a gas truck rattled by and they all jumped up, got in the truck, waving their arms and yelling. Even at the time, Peter didn't know how they all fit in the cab. He tells Alex about the market in Onitsha, Nigeria, too, the maze of stalls of cloth and clothes, raw and dried meat, chicken, engine parts. A market as big as the world. Before the civil war, Peter tells her—and Alex nods, though she didn't know until then that Nigeria had a civil war—the market even had publishers. They put out pulp fiction, tracts on morality. He shows Alex one of them when they get back to New Canaan:
Learn to Speak
360
Interesting Proverbs and Know Your True Brother
, by C. N. Eze.
A brittle orange cover with a Xeroxed photograph of three upper-middle-class white people on it being friendly to each other. A white guy in a shirt, tie, and sweater vest smiling on the back cover.
I enjoy myself with proverbs,
the caption reads. Alex is fascinated.