He put the car in gear and went, feeling again how easy it had been to slip through an unsuspected fissure in what he had considered a solid life-how easy it was to get over onto the dark side, to sail out of the blue and into the black.
Out of the blue and into the black, yes, that was it. Where anything might be waiting.
3
BEN HANSCOM TAKES A DRINK
If, on that night of May 28th, 1985, you had wanted to find the man Time magazine had called “perhaps the most promising young architect in America” (’Urban Energy Conservation and the Young Turks,” Time, October 15,1984), you would have had to drive west out of Omaha on Interstate 80 to do it. You’d have taken the Swedholm exit and then Highway 81 to downtown Swedholm (of which there isn’t much). There you’d turn off on Highway 92 at Bucky’s Hi-Hat Eat-Em-Up (’Chicken Fried Steak Our Specialty’) and once out in the country again you’d hang a right on Highway 63, which runs straight as a string through the deserted little town of Gatlin and finally into Hemingford Home. Downtown Hemingford Home made downtown Swedholm look like New York City; the business district consisted of eight buildings, five on one side and three on the other. There was the Kleen Kut barber shop (propped in the window a yellowing hand-lettered sign fully fifteen years old read IF YOUR A “HIPPY” GET YOUR HAIR CUT SOMEWHERE ELSE), the second-run movie house, the five-and-dime. There was a branch of the Nebraska Homeowners” Bank, a 76 gas station, a Rexall Drug, and the National Farmstead amp; Hardware Supply-which was the only business in town which looked halfway prosperous.
And, near the end of the main drag, set off a little way from the other buildings like a pariah and resting on the edge of the big empty, you had your basic roadhouse-the Red Wheel. If you had gotten that far, you would have seen in the potholed dirt parking lot an aging 1968 Cadillac convertible with double CB antennas on the back. The vanity plate on the front read simply: BEN’S CADDY. And inside, walking toward the bar, you would have found your man-lanky, sunburned, dressed in a chambray shirt, faded jeans, and a pair of scuffed engineer boots. There were faint squint-lines around the corners of his eyes, but nowhere else. He looked perhaps ten years younger than his actual age, which was thirty-eight.
“Hello, Mr Hanscom,” Ricky Lee said, putting a paper napkin on the bar as Ben sat down. Ricky Lee sounded a trifle surprised, and he was. He had never seen Hanscom in the Wheel on a week- night before. He came in regularly every Friday night for two beers, and every Saturday night for four or five: he always asked after Ricky Lee’s three boys; he always left the same five-dollar tip under his beer stein when he took off. In terms of both professional conversation and personal regard, he was far and away Ricky Lee’s favorite customer. The ten dollars a week (and the fifty left under the stem at each Christmas-time over the last five years) was fine enough, but the man’s company was worth far more. Worthwhile company was always a rarity, but in a honkytonk like this, where talk always came cheap, it was scarcer than hen’s teeth.
Although Hanscom’s roots were in New England and he had gone to college in California, there was more than a touch of the extravagant Texan about him. Ricky Lee counted on Ben Hanscom’s Friday-Saturday-night stops, because he had learned over the years that he could count on them. Mr Hanscom might be building a skyscraper in New York (where he already had three of the most talked-about buildings in the city), a new art gallery in Redondo Beach, or a business building in Salt Lake City, but come Friday night the door leading to the parking lot would open sometime between eight o’clock and nine-thirty and in he would stroll, as if he lived no farther than the other side of town and had decided to drop in because there was nothing good on TV. He had his own Learjet and a private landing strip on his farm in Junkins.
Two years ago he had been in London, first designing and then overseeing the construction of the new BBC communications center-a building that was still hotly debated pro and con in the British press (the Guardian: “Perhaps the most beautiful building to be constructed in London over the last twenty years’; the Mirror: “Other than the face of my mother-in-law after a pub-crawl, the ugliest thing I have ever seen’). When Mr Hanscom took that job, Ricky Lee had thought, Well, I’ll see him again sometime. Or maybe he’ll just forget all about us. And indeed, the Friday night after Ben Hanscom left for England had come and gone with no sign of him, although Ricky Lee found himself looking up quickly every tune the door opened between eight and nine-thirty. Well, I’ll see him again sometime. Maybe. Sometime turned out to be the next night. The door had opened at quarter past nine and in he had ambled, wearing jeans and a GO “BAMA tee-shirt and his old engineer boots, looking like he’d come from no farther away than cross-town. And when Ricky Lee cried almost joyfully “Hey, Mr Hanscom! Christ! What are you doin here?,” Mr Hanscom had looked mildly surprised, as if there was nothing in the least unusual about his being here. Nor had that been a one-shot; he had showed up every Saturday during the two-year course of his active involvement in the BBC job. He left London each Saturday morning at 11:00 A.M. on the Concorde, he told a fascinated Ricky Lee, and arrived at Kennedy in New York at 10:15 A.M.-forty-five minutes before he left London, at least by the clock (’God, it’s like time travel, ain’t it?” an impressed Ricky Lee had said). A limousine was standing by to take him over to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, a trip which usually took no more than an hour on Saturday morning. He could be in the cockpit of his Lear before noon with no trouble at all, and touching down in Junkins by two-thirty. If you head west fast enough, he told Ricky, the day just seems to go on forever. He would take a two-hour nap, spend an hour with his foreman and half an hour with his secretary. He would eat supper and then come on over to the Red Wheel for an hour and a half or so. He always came in alone, he always sat at the bar, and he always left the way he had come in, although God knew there were plenty of women in this part of Nebraska who would have been happy to screw the socks off him. Back at the farm he would catch six hours of sleep and then the whole process would reverse itself. Ricky had never had a customer who failed to be impressed with this story. Maybe he’s gay, a woman had told him once. Ricky Lee glanced at her briefly, taking in the carefully styled hair, the carefully tailored clothes which undoubtedly had designer labels, the diamond chips at her ears, the look in her eyes, and knew she was from somewhere back east, probably New York, out here on a brief duty visit to a relative or maybe an old school chum, and couldn’t wait to get out again. No, he had replied. Mr Hanscom ain’t no sissy. She had taken a pack of Doral cigarettes from her purse and held one between her red, glistening lips until he lit it for her. How do you know? she had asked, smiling a little. I just do, he said. And he did. He thought of saying to her: I think he’s the most God-awful lonely man I ever met in my life. But he wasn’t going to say any such thing to this New York woman who was looking at him like he was some new and amusing type of life.
Tonight Mr Hanscom looked a little pale, a little distracted.
“Hello, Ricky Lee,” he said, sitting down, and then fell to studying his hands.
Ricky Lee knew he was slated to spend the next six or eight months in Colorado Springs, overseeing the start of the Mountain States Cultural Center, a sprawling six-building complex which would be cut into the side of a mountain. When it’s done people are going to say it looks like a giant-kid left his toy blocks all over a flight of stairs, Ben had told Ricky Lee. Some will, anyway, and they’ll be at least half-right. But I think it’s going to work. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever tried and putting it up is going to be scary as hell, but I think it’s going to work.
Ricky Lee supposed it was possible that Mr Hanscom had a little touch of stage fright. Nothing surprising about that, and nothing wrong about it, either. When you got big enough to be noticed, you got big enough to come gunning for. Or maybe he just had a touch of the bug. There was a hell of a lively one going around.
Ricky Lee got a beer stein from the backbar and reached for the Olympia tap.
“Don’t do that, Ricky Lee.”
Ricky Lee turned back, surprised-and when Ben Hanscom looked up from his hands, he was suddenly frightened. Because Mr Hanscom didn’t look like he had stage fright, or the virus that was going around, or anything like that. He looked like he had just taken a terrible blow and was still trying to understand whatever it was that had hit him.
Someone died. He ain’t married but every man’s got a fambly, and someone in his just bit the dust. That’s what happened, just as sure as shit rolls downhill front a privy.
Someone dropped a quarter into the juke-box, and Barbara Mandrell started to sing about a drunk man and a lonely woman.
“You okay, Mr Hanscom?”
Ben Hanscom looked at Ricky Lee out of eyes that suddenly looked ten-no, twenty-years older than the rest of his face, arid Ricky Lee was astonished to observe that Mr Hanscom’s hair was graying. He had never noticed any gray in his hair before.
Hanscom smiled. The smile was ghastly, horrible. It was like watching a corpse smile.
“I don’t think I am, Ricky Lee. No sir. Not tonight. Not at all.”
Ricky Lee set the stein down and walked back over to where Hanscom sat. The bar was as empty as a Monday-night bar far outside of football season can get. There were fewer than twenty paying customers in the place. Annie was sitting by the door into the kitchen, playing cribbage with the short-order cook.
“Bad news, Mr Hanscom?”
“Bad news, that’s right. Bad news from home. ” He looked at Ricky Lee. He looked through Ricky Lee.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr Hanscom.”
“Thank you, Ricky Lee.”
He fell silent and Ricky Lee was about to ask him if there was anything he could do when Hanscom said:
“What’s your bar whiskey, Ricky Lee?”
“For everyone else in this dump it’s Four Roses,” Ricky Lee said. “But for you I think it’s Wild Turkey.”
Hanscom smiled a little at that. “That’s good of you, Ricky Lee. I think you better grab that stein after all. What you do is fill it up with Wild Turkey.”
“Fill it?” Ricky Lee asked, frankly astonished. “Christ, I’ll have to roll you out of here!” Or call an ambulance, he thought.
“Not tonight,” Hanscom said. “I don’t think so.”
Ricky Lee looked carefully into Mr Hanscom’s eyes to see if he could possibly be joking, and it took less than a second to see that he wasn’t. So he got the stein from the backbar and the bottle of Wild Turkey from one of the shelves below. The neck of the bottle chattered against the rim of the stein as he began to pour. He watched the whiskey gurgle out, fascinated in spite of himself. Ricky Lee decided it was more than just a touch of the Texan that Mr Hanscom had in him: this had to be the biggest goddamned shot of whiskey he ever had poured or ever would pour in his life.
Call an ambulance, my ass. He drinks this baby and I’ll be calling Parker and Waters in Swedholm for their funeral hack.
Nevertheless he brought it back and set it down in front of Hanscom; Ricky Lee’s father had once told him that if a man was in his right mind, you brought him what he paid for, be it piss or poison. Ricky Lee didn’t know if that was good advice or bad, but he knew that if you tended bar for a living, it went a fair piece toward saving you from being chomped into gator-bait by your own conscience.
Hanscom looked at the monster drink thoughtfully for a moment and then asked, “What do I owe you for a shot like that, Ricky Lee?”
Ricky Lee shook his head slowly, eyes still on the steinful of whiskey, not wanting to look up and meet those socketed, staring eyes. “No,” he said. “This one is on the house.”
Hanscom smiled again, this time more naturally. “Why, I thank you, Ricky Lee. Now I am going to show you something I learned about in Peru, in 1978. I was working with a guy named Frank Billings-understudying with him, I guess you’d say. Frank Billings was the best damned architect in the world, I think. He caught a fever and the doctors injected about a billion different antibiotics into him and not a single one of them touched it. He burned for two weeks and then he died. What I’m going to show you I learned from the Indians who worked on the project. The local popskull is pretty potent. You take a slug and you think it’s going down pretty mellow, no problem, and then all at once it’s like someone lit a blowtorch in your mouth and aimed it down your throat. But the Indians drink it like Coca-Cola, and I rarely saw one drunk, and I never saw one with a hangover. Never had the sack to try it their way myself. But I think I’ll give it a go tonight. Bring me some of those lemon wedges there.”
Ricky Lee brought him four and laid them out neatly on a fresh napkin next to the stein of whiskey. Hanscom picked one of them up, tilted his head back like a man about to administer eyedrops to himself, and then began to squeeze raw lemon-juice into his right nostril.
“Holy Jesus!” Ricky Lee cried, horrified.
Hanscom’s throat worked. His face flushed… and then Ricky Lee saw tears running down the flat planes of his face toward his ears. Now the Spinners were on the juke, singing about the rubberband-man. “Oh Lord, I just don’t know how much of this I can stand,” the Spinners sang.
