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.

Hanscom groped blindly on the bar, found another slice of lemon, and squeezed the juice into his other nostril.

“You’re gonna fucking kill yourself,” Ricky Lee whispered.

Hanscom tossed both of the wrung-out lemon wedges onto the bar. His eyes were fiery red and he was breathing in hitching, wincing gasps. Clear lemon-juice dripped from both of his nostrils and trickled down to the corners of his mouth. He groped for the stein, raised it, and drank a third of it. Frozen, Ricky Lee watched his adam’s apple go up and down.

Hanscom set the stein aside, shuddered twice, then nodded. He looked at Ricky Lee and smiled a little. His eyes were no longer red.

“Works about like they said it did. You are so fucking concerned about your nose that you never feel what’s going down your throat at all.”

“You’re crazy, Mr Hanscom,” Ricky Lee said.

“You bet your fur,” Mr Hanscom said. “You remember that one, Ricky Lee? We used to say that when we were kids “You bet your fur.” Did I ever tell you I used to be fat?”

“No sir, you never did,” Ricky Lee whispered. He was now convinced that Mr Hanscom had received some intelligence so dreadful that the man really had gone crazy… or at least taken temporary leave of his senses.

“I was a regular butterball. Never played baseball or basketball, always got caught first when we played tag, couldn’t keep out of my own way. I was fat, all right. And there were these fellows in my home town who used to take after me pretty regularly. There was a fellow named Reginald Huggins, only everyone called him Belch. A kid named Victor Criss. A few other guys. But the real brains of the combination was a fellow named Henry Bowers. If there has ever been a genuinely evil kid strutting across the skin of the world, Ricky Lee, Henry Bowers was that kid. I wasn’t the only kid he used to take after; my problem was, I couldn’t run as fast as some of the others.”

Hanscom unbuttoned his shirt and opened it. Leaning forward, Ricky Lee saw a funny, twisted scar on Mr Hanscom’s stomach, just above his navel. Puckered, white, and old. It was a letter, he saw. Someone had carved the letter “H” into the man’s stomach, probably long before Mr Hanscom had been a man.

“Henry Bowers did that to me. About a thousand years ago. I’m lucky I’m not wearing his whole damned name down there.”

“Mr Hanscom-”

Hanscom took the other two lemon-slices, one in each hand, tilted his head back, and took them like nose-drops. He shuddered wrackingly, put them aside, and took two big swallows from the stein. He shuddered again, took another gulp, and then groped for the padded edge of the bar with his eyes closed. For a moment he held on like a man on a sailboat clinging to the rail for support in a heavy sea. Then he opened his eyes again and smiled at Ricky Lee.

“I could ride this bull all night,” he said.

“Mr Hanscom, I wish you wouldn’t do that anymore,” Ricky Lee said nervously.

Annie came over to the waitresses” stand with her tray and called for a couple of Millers. Ricky Lee drew them and took them down to her. His legs felt rubbery.

“Is Mr Hanscom all right, Ricky Lee?” Annie asked. She was looking past Ricky Lee and he turned to follow her gaze. Mr Hanscom was leaning over the bar, carefully picking lemon-slices out of the caddy where Ricky Lee kept the drink garnishes.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

“Well get your thumb out of your ass and do something about it.” Annie was, like most other women, partial to Ben Hanscom.

“I dunno. My daddy always said that if a man’s in his right mind-”

“Your daddy didn’t have the brains God gave a gopher,” Annie said. “Never mind your daddy. You got to put a stop to that, Ricky Lee. He’s going to kill himself.”

Thus given his marching orders, Ricky Lee went back down to where Ben Hanscom sat. “Mr Hanscom, I really think you’ve had en-”

Hanscom tilted his head back. Squeezed. Actually sniffed the lemon-juice back this time, as if it were cocaine. He gulped whiskey as if it were water. He looked at Ricky Lee solemnly. “Bing-bang, I saw the whole gang, dancing on my living-room rug,” he said, and then laughed. There was maybe two inches of whiskey left in the stem.

“That is enough,” Ricky Lee said, and reached for the stein.

Hanscom moved it gently out of his reach. “damage has been done, Ricky Lee,” he said. “The damage has been done, boy.”

“Mr Hanscom, please-”

“I’ve got something for your kids, Ricky Lee. Damn if I didn’t almost forget!”

He was wearing a faded denim vest, and now he reached something out of one of its pockets. Ricky Lee heard a muted clink.

“My dad died when I was four,” Hanscom said. There was no slur at all in his voice. “Left us a bunch of debts and these. I want your kiddos to have them, Ricky Lee.” He put three cartwheel silver dollars on the bar, where they gleamed under the soft lights. Ricky Lee caught his breath.

“Mr Hanscom, that’s very kind, but I couldn’t-”

“There used to be four, but I gave one of them to Stuttering Bill and the others. Bill Denbrough, that was his real name. Stuttering Bill’s just what we used to call him… just a thing we used to say, like “You bet your fur.” He was one of the best friends I ever had-I did have a few, you know, even a fat kid like me had a few. Stuttering Bill’s a writer now.”

Ricky Lee barely heard him. He was looking at the cartwheels, fascinated. 1921, 1923, and 1924. God knew what they were worth now, just in terms of the pure silver they contained.

“I couldn’t,” he said again.

“But I insist.” Mr Hanscom took hold of the stein and drained it. He should have been flat on his keister, but his eyes never left Ricky Lee’s. Those eyes were watery, and very bloodshot, but Ricky Lee would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that they were also the eyes of a sober man.

“You’re scaring me a little, Mr Hanscom,” Ricky Lee said. Two years ago Gresham Arnold, a rumdum of some local repute, had come into the Red Wheel with a roll of quarters in his hand and a twenty dollar bill stuck into the band of his hat. He handed the roll to Annie with instructions to feed the quarters into the juke-box by fours. He put the twenty on the bar and instructed Ricky Lee to set up drinks for the house. This rumdum, this Gresham Arnold, had long ago been a star basketball player for the Hemingford Rams, leading them to their first (and most likely last) high-school team championship. In 1961 that had been. An almost unlimited future seemed to lie ahead of the young man. But he had flunked out of LSU his first semester, a victim of drink, drugs, and all-night parties. He came home, cracked up the yellow convertible his folks had given him as a graduation present, and got a job as head salesman in his daddy’s John Deere dealership. Five years passed. His father could not bear to fire him, and so he finally sold the dealership and retired to Arizona, a man haunted and made old before his tune by the inexplicable and apparently irreversible degeneration of his son. While the dealership still belonged to his daddy and he was at least pretending to work, Arnold had made some effort to keep the booze at arm’s length; afterward, it got him completely. He could get mean, but he had been just as sweet as horehound candy the night he brought in the quarters and set up drinks for the house, and everyone had thanked him kindly, and Annie kept playing Moe Bandy songs because Gresham Arnold liked ole Moe Bandy. He sat there at the bar-on the very stool where Mr Hanscom was sitting now, Ricky Lee realized with steadily deepening unease-and drank three or four bourbon-and-bitters, and sang along with the juke, and caused no trouble, and went home when Ricky Lee closed the Wheel up, and hanged himself with his belt in an upstairs closet. Gresham Arnold’s eyes that night had looked a little bit like Ben Hanscom’s eyes looked right now.

“Scaring you a bit, am I?” Hanscom asked, his eyes never leaving Ricky Lee’s. He pushed the stein away and then folded his hands neatly in front of those three silver cartwheels. “I probably am. But you’re not as scared as I am, Ricky Lee. Pray to Jesus you never are.”

“Well, what’s the matter?” Ricky Lee asked. “Maybe-” He wet his lips. “Maybe I can give you a help.”

“The matter?” Ben Hanscom laughed. “Why, not too much. I had a call from an old friend tonight. Guy named Mike Hanlon. I’d forgotten all about him, Ricky Lee, but that didn’t scare me much. After all, I was just a kid when I knew him, and kids forget things, don’t they? Sure they do. You bet your fur. What scared me was getting about halfway over here and realizing that it wasn’t just Mike I’d forgotten about-I’d forgotten everything about being a kid.”

Ricky Lee only looked at him. He had no idea what Mr Hanscom was talking about-but the man was scared, all right. No question about that. It sat funny on Ben Hanscom, but it was real.

“I mean I’d forgotten all about it,” he said, and rapped his knuckles lightly on the bar for emphasis. “did you ever hear, Ricky Lee, of having an amnesia so complete you didn’t even know you had amnesia?”

Ricky Lee shook his head.

“Me either. But there I was, tooling along in the Caddy tonight, and all of a sudden it hit me. I remembered Mike Hanlon, but only because he called me on the phone. I remembered Derry, but only because that was where he was calling from.”

“Derry?”

“But that was all. It hit me that I hadn’t even thought about being a kid since… since I don’t even know when. And then, just like that, it all started to flood back in. Like what we did with the fourth silver dollar.”

“What did you do with it, Mr Hanscom?”

Hanscom looked at his watch, and suddenly slipped down from his stool. He staggered a bit-the slightest bit. That was all. “Can’t let the time get away from me,” he said. “I’m flying tonight.”

Ricky Lee looked instantly alarmed, and Hanscom laughed.

“Flying but not driving the plane. Not this time. United Airlines, Ricky Lee.”

“Oh.” He supposed his relief showed on his face, but he didn’t care. “Where are you going?”

Hanscom’s shirt was still open. He looked thoughtfully down at the puckered white lines of the old scar on his belly and then began to button the shirt over it.

“Thought I told you that, Ricky Lee. Home. I’m going home. Give those cartwheels to your kids.” He started toward the door, and something about the way he walked, even the way he hitched at the sides of his pants, terrified Ricky Lee. The resemblance to the late and mostly unlamented Gresham Arnold was suddenly so acute it was nearly like seeing a ghost.

“Mr Hanscom!” he cried in alarm.

Hanscom turned back, and Ricky Lee stepped quickly backward. His ass hit the backbar and glassware gossiped briefly as the bottles knocked together. He stepped back because he was suddenly convinced that Ben Hanscom was dead. Yes, Ben Hanscom was lying dead someplace, in a ditch or an attic or possibly in a closet with a belt noosed around his neck and the toes of his four-hundred-dollar cowboy boots dangling an inch or two above the floor, and this thing standing near the juke and staring back at him was a ghost. For a moment-just a moment, but it was plenty long enough to cover his working heart with a rime of ice-he was convinced he could see tables and chairs right through the man.

“What is it, Ricky Lee?”

“Nuh-n-nuh. Nothin.”

Ben Hanscom looked out at Ricky Lee from eyes which had dark-purple crescents beneath them. His cheeks burned with liquor; his nose looked red and sore.

“Nothin,” Ricky Lee whispered again, but he couldn’t take his eyes from that face, the face of a man who has died deep in sin and now stands hard by hell’s smoking side door.

“I was fat and we were poor,” Ben Hanscom said. “I remember that now. And I remember that either a girl named Beverly or Stuttering Bill saved my life with a silver dollar. I’m scared almost insane by whatever else I may remember before tonight’s over, but how scared I am doesn’t matter, because it’s going to come anyway. It’s all there, like a great big bubble that’s growing in my mind. But I’m going, because all I’ve ever gotten and all I have now is somehow due to what we did then, and you pay for what you get in this world. Maybe that’s why God made us kids first and built us close to the ground, because He knows you got to fall down a lot and bleed a lot before you learn that one simple lesson. You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for… and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you.”

“You gonna be back this weekend, though, ain’t you?” Ricky Lee asked through numbed lips. In his increasing distress this was all he could find to hold on to. “You gonna be back this weekend just like always, ain’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Mr Hanscom said, and smiled a terrible smile. “I’m going a lot farther than London this time, Ricky Lee.”

“Mr Hanscom-!”

“You give those cartwheels to your kids,” he repeated, and slipped out into the night.

“What the blue hell? Annie asked, but Ricky Lee ignored her. He flipped up the bar’s partition and ran over to one of the windows which looked out on the parking lot. He saw the headlights of Mr Hanscom’s Caddy come on, heard the engine rev. It pulled out of the dirt lot, kicking up a rooster-tail of dust behind it. The taillights dwindled away to red points down Highway 63, and the Nebraska nightwind began to pull the hanging dust apart.

“He took on a boxcar full of booze and you let him get in that big car of his and drive away,” Annie said. “Way to go, Ricky Lee.”

“Never mind.”

“He’s going to kill himself.”

And although this had been Ricky Lee’s own thought less than five minutes ago, he turned to her when the taillights winked out of sight and shook his head.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Although the way he looked tonight, it might be better for him if he did.”

“What did he say to you?”

He shook his head. It was all confused in his mind, and the sum total of it seemed to mean nothing. “It doesn’t matter. But I don’t think we’re ever going to see that old boy again.”

 

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