The Family Hightower (4 page)

In
1994
, Rufus's idea, like I said, is to drive from Cairo to Casablanca. There's a David Lean movie in his head about it, Peter thinks, one where it's their lone car racing on a highway through the Sahara, because his father still falls for the romanticism, even after he's lived in Africa so long. But the highway itself is dusty and dry; the car's filthy before they leave the city. There's traffic. They almost can't see out the windows. Then there are the long, long delays at the border between Egypt and Libya, Libya and Algeria, while the guards try to square Rufus and Peter's obvious Americanness—maybe you can never lose it, no matter how hard you try—with the fact of their non-U.S. passports. Rufus loves it. He never quite says this to Peter, but he's at his happiest like this, like it was when Peter was a kid. The two of them skating across the surface of the world, houses and trees and people standing with blue plastic buckets by the side of the road just blurs in their eyes. His son is all he needs, all he wants.

They don't know that guerrillas invaded the Atlas Asni hotel in Marrakech and shot two Spanish tourists dead, or that three young French Muslims from the slums of Paris will be charged for the attack. As a huge manhunt continues, the network they're a part of will seem ever bigger, and more than thirty men will see the insides of courtrooms in Morocco and France, be jailed or slated to be executed. But Morocco points its finger at its neighbor, too, right from the start, accuses Algeria of funding the whole thing. Then the border's really shut down, and reader, it will still be closed years later. So Rufus and Peter find the gate between Morocco and Algeria lowered. Two mustachioed border guards lounging outside the customs office, machine guns lying across their laps, looking at the dusty Peugeot as it drives up. They don't even act like they're going to stand up.

“Turn around,” Peter says.

“Why?” Rufus says. “We need to know what's going on.”

“Not from them.”

Rufus nods, puts on the brakes, and backs up. The wide cafés along the road are all empty. Only two are still open, one playing faint raï from a tiny radio, which a man with a broom turns off as soon as he sees them.

“The border is closed,” the man with the broom says to them, in French.

“We don't speak French,” Rufus says in Arabic. Peter doesn't correct him.

“The border is closed,” the man says again, in Arabic.

“Why?”

The man with the broom takes in Rufus's accent, squints at them. It's too much to explain.

“The border is closed,” he says again. “Go back. And get out of this country.” He knows how hostile he sounds, but he's trying to save them.

They stand in the road for a minute, the car idling. Peter leans against the hood, stares at the metal. His father walks in front of the car, looks at the border again, back at the road they came down. Then turns back to his son, smiling.

“Looks like Casablanca's out,” he says. “It's just us again.” And Peter takes a good, long look at his father.
I can't do this anymore,
he thinks to himself.
I just can't.

“No, Dad,” he says. “It's just you.”

Rufus's smile leaves him.

“I'm not going with you this time,” Peter says. “Or any time.”

“Please,” Rufus says. “Just come.”

“Why? For the next scheme that gets us tossed out of somewhere? The next plan that falls through?”

“No,” Rufus says. “Because I'm your dad and you're my boy.”

“Tell me what the hell our lives mean, Dad,” Peter says. “Tell me why we keep running.”

Rufus has been protecting his boy so much, doing everything in his power to make sure that no harm comes to him. And it goes beyond sheltering him from the dark heart of his family, way beyond the bits of instability in his own life that Peter could see. A few times over the years, when Rufus has known that trouble is coming for them—because a deal he's tried to make goes bad, because they just aren't where they're supposed to be—Rufus has put his son to bed, then stayed awake in a darkened alley two blocks away with a gun across his lap, waiting for the intruders to come. A couple times, he's been able to talk it out with the silhouettes who appear around the corner. Most times, though, it has ended with bullets. To their legs, their arms. A couple times, their chests, their heads, when he's known there's no other way out. It's then that he's understood his own father the most, loved him and hated him, almost as much as he hates himself and what he's become. He's promised himself he'll spare Peter all of that, but it's getting harder and harder to do that and still keep him close. He doesn't know how.

“You sound just like your mother,” Rufus says.

“That's just it, Dad,” Peter says. “I wouldn't know.”

The father is joking. The son isn't. It's just the first of a lot of things Peter says that day that he promised himself never to say. He knows he's breaking that promise even at the time, feels like the thoughts he held in for years have turned into bullets. All through this last visit, all across the highways of North Africa, it's like he's been carrying a loaded gun around, pointed at the back of his father's head, and now he's taking every shot he has. Even if the first shot is fatal, he'll pull the trigger until he's empty. It's rage, rage as he's never felt in his life, and a part of him is shocked that he can be so cruel. But it doesn't stop him from doing it.
I wish you'd left me with her,
he says.
Sometimes I wish I'd never even met you.

And he's on the first plane out. Rufus takes him to the airport. Peter won't let him get out of the car; he jumps out almost before it stops, grabs his bag from the backseat in one quick motion. His father waits by the curb, waves at his boy, but Peter doesn't see it, because he doesn't turn around, doesn't look back. Just keeps walking until he's in the building and sure his father's gone.

It's August
1995
. The street to Peter's apartment in Granada is always dark. There's a lamp mounted to the wall just two buildings down from his, but the bulb went out before Peter moved in and nobody's replaced it. It's quiet around here; the shouts from partyers and car horns feel far away. Peter's less drunk than he was, but still more than he wants to be. He smacks his lips, still feels like he's had a shot of Novocain. He fumbles with his keys for too long, drops them, fumbles again, and is in at last. He climbs the swaying stairs to the second-floor landing, screws with the keys again. In his apartment, the mattress on the floor is unmade but not messy. Neat stacks of papers line the wall. His suitcase is propped open, half out of the closet, the laundry in a canvas bag beside it. He can smell the dishes in the sink, flicks on the shuddering neon light in the kitchen. There are six new messages on his answering machine, piled on top of four old ones. The first three are from his editor. One's from an English student of his. He likes her. She's pretty and has a voice that turns upward in unexpected places, a sly intelligence and dark humor that's so soaked into her Spanish that it seeps into her blocky but effective English. In the past few lessons, she's managed to tell jokes, laugh at some of his. He tells her the old line that you know you're fluent in a language when you can argue with a cabdriver. He would ask her out, except that she's already engaged, to a man she's been dating for almost four years. They met when she was twenty. Peter has never met his student's fiancé, but admires him for knowing, even then, the kind of woman she was and would become; for knowing that he wouldn't do any better. In the last year, Peter has met a few women who have struck him, within minutes, as amazing people.
I'm engaged,
they all say.
Of course you are,
Peter thinks.

The next message has more static than usual. The voice is high and anxious. He doesn't know who it is. “Petey,” it says. “It's me, Curly. I'm in Cleveland. I don't know why you went to Spain, but you shouldn't have used your real name. They know where you are, now, and they're coming after you. You got to call me if you get this, but get out of there first.” The next message: “Petey, you got to call me and let me know you're all right, all right? It's Curly.” The next: “For God's sake, Petey, call.” The next three messages are just the sound of someone hanging up the phone, the final message with a small groan first. Giving up.

All at once, Peter's stone sober. Something rises in him, the kid who knows how to get through shantytowns, from the slums of Mombasa to the
musseques
of Luanda. His father, decades ago, walking out of Cleveland with nothing and vanishing, coming back only to vanish again. His aunt Sylvie, who knows everything. His grandfather, that survivor, that bastard, crawling up his spine. He turns out the lights in the kitchen, looks toward the stairs, wonders if he's remembered to close the outside door. Decides it's too late to check now.

Getting ready to run comes easy to him; he's helped his father do it so many times. He goes into the bathroom and kneels down to reach under the sink. Taped to the underside is an envelope, right where he left it. Inside is twelve thousand nine hundred and twenty-three dollars in a mixture of cash and traveler's checks, the last thing Rufus gave him before Peter left him in Algeria.
The rest of your money,
Rufus said. Peter also has a small blue book with a list of phone numbers in it, his passport, a folding knife with a small wooden handle. He packs three changes of clothes into a backpack. Breaks up the money, hides most of it in the packed clothes, then sticks a thin stack of the large bills in the pocket of his T-shirt, under a light jacket. He looks around the dark apartment, can't see anything well, but in his mind, the kitchen light is on and he's calm, just looking over everything one last time to make sure he's not leaving anything behind he can't live without. He isn't. Then he locks the door, wedges a chair under the doorknob, opens the window, and waits, sitting on the mattress, leaning against the wall. If he smoked, now would be the time for a cigarette.

He wants to be wrong about all of this. He wants no one to be coming for him. He wants to laugh about it in the morning.
God, could I have been any more paranoid?
But at almost one in the morning, he hears someone jangling with the lock at the bottom of the stairs who doesn't have a key for it.
So I remembered to close the door after all,
he thinks. He rises, goes to the open window while he hears footsteps coming up the stairs. He's perched on the sill by the time the intruder reaches the landing. Peter gives the situation one last chance to make him feel like an asshole. The lock rattles, rattles. Something snaps off in the keyhole and there's what sounds like a low, short curse, though Peter doesn't understand the language. Then there's a loud crack—whoever's on the other side of the door has put his foot to it—but Peter doesn't wait to see if it opens. The alley outside his window is a skinny thing, just wide enough for two bicycles. The roof of the next building is just a floor below him. He's never made the jump, but he knows he can do it. He lands hard and rolls, then has the good sense to hide on the roof, behind a chimney, instead of trying to run. He could never clear the roof without being seen, but if he hides, it'll be as if he did. He crouches again, shifts his legs to get comfortable. Figures he can wait all the next day.

It's a clean getaway, in other words, clean enough that the man looking for him, who's met Peter's cousin Petey and has a photograph just to make sure, never sees he has the wrong Peter Henry Hightower. Peter makes only one mistake—a mistake his cousin would also have made—in not erasing his messages while he had the chance. Which is how Curly
Potapenko is dead within forty-eight hours, and how the body of this story is split open to spill way, way out. It's just like I said: This is about way more than Peter, Rufus's son; way more than Petey, Muriel's boy. This story is about everyone, and dear reader: There is blood everywhere.

 

 

 

Chapter 2

Th
e
southern highway out of Kiev shoots across open fields, vast expanses of land, but Petey can't see any of it. All he sees is what's in the headlights—blurry pavement, white dashes blinking past like a strobe light. He's in the backseat of a car that isn't his. The car's driver is nervous. He thought he was just picking up a tourist, but Petey's been getting twitchier and twitcher, and now the driver's going faster and faster to end this trip as soon as he can. The taillights of cars and trucks flutter by as they pass. The driver must be doing a hundred. The car's engine is screaming; it wasn't built to go this fast, and it's not going to last much longer if he keeps it up.

Petey keeps turning around, looking out the back windshield. Then faces forward again and points at a truck in front of them.

“Pass him,” he says.

“He's going faster than we are,” the driver says.

“I don't care. Pass him,” Petey says. His Ukrainian is getting shaky. “You can't let anyone catch us.”

The car roars, and the driver prays a little, out loud. He's doing a Hail Mary, but Peter doesn't understand enough of the language to know that. A wave of adrenaline and fear sweeps him up, and his thoughts get irrational. The headlights make him feel like the target, like the people chasing him can see him, and he wonders if he can get the driver to turn them off. If he won't, maybe he'll climb out onto the hood of the car and smash them with his shoe. He looks ahead at the red lights in front of him and thinks of an accident he heard about that everyone knows was an assassination, a head-on collision, on a road just like this, that no one walked away from. He's sure he can see those oncoming lights in the distance, also going a hundred miles. That approaching car'll swerve through all the vehicles in front of them and collide grille to grille, a dead hit. He wonders what two hundred miles per hour's worth of velocity feels like, just how much of each car will be destroyed, or how much will be left of anyone that's identifiable.
I'm so fucked,
Petey thinks.
I've fucked up everything.
It's the most self-aware thought he's had in a long time. And then:
I never should have come here. Never should have brought Curly here, or met Madalina. Never should have left Cleveland.

Maybe you're laughing that Petey thinks that. We haven't talked about this yet, but we should: Cleveland doesn't deserve its reputation. The endless jokes. The Mistake on the Lake.
What's the difference between Cleveland and the
Titanic
? Cleveland has a better orchestra.
And everyone seems to know about the Cuyahoga River. It's true, the river's been on fire, more than once, the last time in
19
69
. You can find the pictures if you want. And yes, it's true that the mayor's own hair catches on fire in
1972
; it's for a ribbon-cutting ceremony, except that, because it's for the Materials Engineering Congress, the ribbon is a strip of metal and the scissors are an acetylene torch. Sparks happen.

And yes, there's a lot about the city that's tragic. It's all there in print, in newspapers and history books, photographs that don't hide the way the place has looked sometimes. All that industry and all the ruins it leaves behind, all the burn marks from the riots in the sixties. It's all true, but it can't tear down what it is to visit the place, to see it for yourself. Stand on the sharp edge of the river valley overlooking the Cuyahoga, somewhere near where Lorain Avenue leaps across the river valley over the Hope Memorial Bridge. Look at the statues on it, the guardians of traffic, they say they're called. Then see how bridge after bridge jumps the same wide space over the river, highways, local roads, train tracks. Look at the streets twisting beneath the gargantuan pylons, the tiny brick buildings beneath them. Look at the river twisting, contorting, doubling back, all the way to the pale lake, a swarm of seagulls over the green water. And then take a look at the center of the city on the opposite shore, the huge stone wings of Tower City, the sleek glass office buildings beyond it, the curving federal courthouse. It's a giant monument to commerce, all of it, because Cleveland's a city built to make money and a city that money built, built and took apart, again and again. It's America unvarnished, America without reserve. When the country rose, Cleveland flew. When it declined, Cleveland crashed. And it's so easy to write it off now, to keep the jokes about the burning river coming, but somewhere in the years the city is staggering toward are the pieces of our future, too, whether we know it yet or not.

Do you see what I'm saying? Capitalism's an animal, and it eats places like Cleveland, or maybe you could say it tries to eat Cleveland, but then Cleveland kicks at the animal's teeth until it gets spat out. The people who live there are meat, and they know it. And in
1989
, they can almost smell it, the blood in the air that signals a change, though into what, they've stopped trying to guess.
25
th
Street, in the neighborhood of Ohio City, is rough then, even for the people in the neighborhood. They don't go over there for anything after dark unless it's trouble. And that's just what Petey's there for when he runs into Curly Potapenko for the first time on the corner of Bridge Avenue and West
28
th Street. There they are, two white kids looking for drugs.

Petey and Curly eye each other with suspicion; they're not there to be friendly, and they can see the differences between them right from the start. Curly's an Ohio City kid. He remembers watching the Muhammad Ali-Chuck Wepner fight in
1975
on TV, and afterward his cousins Big Joe and Mark pinning him to the floor and shaving his head, though not before Curly knees Big Joe in the balls. Big Joe writhes and screams, and Mark stands up, nodding, a look of approval on his face.
Nice shot.
He remembers watching Wepner take hit after hit, a guy from Bayonne, New Jersey, versus the heavyweight champion of the world. Wepner never stands a chance, but there he is, under the lights, and he lasts so long.
That's us,
Curly thinks, even then.
He's one of us.
He hears his parents talk about how Ohio City's slipped, how it's like living somewhere after a war, or an epidemic, where people abandon their houses or torch them for the insurance money, and then looters come to salvage the copper. But he doesn't see any of that. To him, Ohio City—the neighborhood all around them, from the edge of the Cuyahoga past the West Side Market and down Lorain Avenue to the highway exit, its low clapboard houses and its tight alleyways—are his world. It's where he's from, and he's proud of it, though not of what he's done. Petey, from Edgewater Avenue near the bluffs overlooking Lake Erie, doesn't know a damn thing about Ohio City. But each of them recognizes something of himself in the other, the same toughness and vulnerability. The marks of a strong, volatile family, of not quite finishing high school. The same sense of shame, that their parents raised them better than this, that their grandparents would be so disappointed; the same anger that they should be forced to rise to their families' expectations. The unsettling feeling hasn't kicked in yet that they're still showing themselves to be more like their own people than they know. Curly is there to buy crack, gets a shake of the head from Petey.
Come here.
Petey's buying cocaine.

By then, Petey's already what you'd call a small-time crook. That beautiful boy in the crisp suit at Sylvie's wedding is gone, or hiding. Even now, Muriel's not sure just when it happens. He's so sweet for the first few years of his life that it takes her years to realize that what she thought was just a streak of mischief in him is a lot more than that. He gets suspended from school twice by the time he's twelve, both times for stealing other kids' stuff. Then he takes his social studies teacher's wallet, spends all the money in it in an afternoon. The school calls a meeting. Muriel repays the teacher on the spot, tries to apologize. The teacher takes the money, isn't interested in the apology.
Don't you know what your son is really like?
she says.
Don't you see the things he does?
Muriel doesn't say anything, and when the teacher realizes Muriel has no idea what she's talking about—always trying to see the good in everyone has made her maybe a little too blind to the bad—a look comes over her face, a mix of pity and scorn, that almost makes Muriel cry. The principal sees that and takes a more diplomatic angle. It's the same message, just trying to avoid tears.
Look, I'm not telling you what to do with your son,
he says.
But I'm not sure this school is the best place for him. I'm not sure we can give him what he needs.

And what is it that you think he needs?
Muriel says. That's in
1980
.

In
1983
, Petey's fifteen and away at a boarding school outside of Cleveland that says it's all about discipline. That's where he teaches himself how to forge driver's licenses in the school's printmaking studio, first for his friends, just to see if they work, then for himself, when he knows better what not to do. He learns fast that, as far as his circle of friends is concerned, because they're all underage, it's still the Prohibition era, and they're willing to pay—a lot—for alcohol, and not very good alcohol. The difference between alcohol and small amounts of mild drugs, then harder drugs, isn't important to him. He's getting more self-aware, understands that he has a knack that goes beyond teenage bravado in cutting deals with drug traffickers: his willingness to meet them, in cars parked in empty parking lots, in the back rooms of clubs nobody goes in. He can talk straight about the big game he's chasing, meaning the kind of customer he wants. He wants to hook some future bankers and insurance executives on some pretty expensive stuff, and he wants to be the guy they keep coming back to, because they trust him not to sell them out, turn them in just because the police want to know. He argues straight for a better cut of the deal when the plan starts to work. By the fall of
1985
, he's about seventeen and cocky, making a pretty nice chunk of change and still able to convince himself that he isn't doing anyone any real harm. He's using a bit himself, doesn't see the damage, just the blurry memories of nights in Cleveland with pounding music and sweaty limbs in the clubs in the old warehouses, nights ending in spins and shouts on the cobbled streets. He thinks that by selling just to his friends—well, friends and friends of friends, and maybe a few people he doesn't know at all—he's insulating himself from the things he sees on the news. Then two of those friends flip their car going around Dead Man's Curve right at the shore of the lake, the sharp bend in the interstate Clevelanders are supposed to know cold, cold enough to tell any out-of-towners they know who drive through the place on their way from Boston to Chicago to watch out. The friends are both good and high when they crash; for a few hours, neither of them knows how he ended up in the hospital, until they come down. Then they tell the doctors everything. The police, too. They point their broken fingers right at Petey Hightower, whom the police have had their eye on anyway. They're not stupid, after all. They know his pedigree. They've got a hunch about the things his grandfather did. They've been watching the rest of the family, too, because something is just not adding up about them. And Petey's not as smart as he thinks he is. Though some of the authorities are annoyed; they've been learning about Petey for a while because he seems like the kind of kid who might lead them into something bigger, something that a tenacious detective can build into a case that makes a career and puts a bunch of guys away in prison for a long time. But the accident and the outcry around it, because these are rich kids involved, you understand, forces the authorities' hand. They don't have enough to threaten Petey with to get information out of him. And they have to go to court with what they've got instead of what they think they could get if they just had the time to let it play out.

At Petey's trial, for possession of cocaine with intent to sell, the state's lawyer lays out the best evidence he can, argues for the biggest sentence he can. He doesn't say it but he means it:
We put away black kids for this all the time, and it ruins their lives. Why should the rich white kids get off for doing the same thing?
But the defense's job is easier. Petey's been careful about one thing—hiding his money—so the police don't have serious evidence beyond circumstantial testimony that he deals. The defense doesn't mind indulging in a little low-grade character assassination to undermine what Petey's friends say about him, digging up people who say they saw the two kids in the crash buying cocaine from someone in the bathroom of a nightclub who wasn't Petey, crack from someone in Tremont. The argument even taps into some high school gossip, suggesting that the kids in the crash were angry at Petey for stealing their girlfriends and wanted to get him out of the way. Why not frame him for some drug offenses? That part of the story doesn't stick; it's pretty implausible, isn't it, reader? The judge isn't impressed and tells the defense to calm down. Tells him that this is a courtroom, not a cafeteria. But the prosecution's lack of hard evidence isn't good enough for a big conviction. It's also Petey's first offense, and he's a kid, not even eighteen. The judge reminds Petey of this and takes him down a peg—it's clear he doesn't like Petey very much—and sentences Petey to nine months of rehabilitation. The state's lawyer gives the judge an accusatory look.
You let him off easy.
The judge pleads his case.
I'm on your side. But this case isn't the one we wanted in the first place.