Don’t Look Behind You

eighteenth birthdays from their mother’s estate had disappeared. They had both accepted that long ago.
    “He really had no one else to leave his assets to,” Ty says. “He had planned to leave them to Marv Milosevich, but he got mad at Marv over something.”
    At last, at eighty-three, Bob Hansen had begun to ponder his own mortality. He had a few of the ailments that came with old age—various aches and pains—but he was basically healthy and still quite strong, strong enough to walk along the Green River for miles every day, picking up trash. He had, however, stopped hunting and fishing.
    He had no one to go with him to pursue the blood sports he had enjoyed for much of his life.
    “When I get old,” he once told Marv Milosevich, “I’m not gonna go to one of them rest homes. You sit in a chair, and they don’t take care of you. I’m gonna go my own way—kill myself.”
    “That’d be hard to do, Bob,” Marv said cautiously.
    “I can manage it—I’ve made up my mind.”
    Since the midnineties, Bob had begun to doubt his own mind. He was forgetting things. To cover up for that, he kept a kind of journal, most pages riddled with misspellings, which Kathleen Huget found. There were also the yellow notes on the walls of his house. He jotted down miscellaneous bits of information—things he’d heard on
60 Minutes
or Fox News.
    “Gold—Highest in 62 years”
    “Ford Will Give Buyout to 75,000 employees—from $40,000 to $140,000”
    “Venezuela’s President called Bush a ‘Diablo’—Devel”
    “FEEMA is paying eleven million dollars per night for hotel rooms in Louisiana for flood victims”
    “CATHOLIP BISHOP: No stem cell research, no abortions, no condoms or birth control devices”
    There were scores of notations that seemed to have no pattern, although Hansen focused on countries that controlled oil, elderly celebrities who had died, war, disaster—and occasionally, sex transgender operations. He was either trying to keep his mind alert and current or he was writing down items because he had no one to talk to.
    When Flory was still with him, he listed resorts and trip destinations, along with the names of high-priced hotels and motels.
    He studied his notes constantly, trying to build muscles in his memory.
    Hansen also wrote precise lists of things he had to accomplish, particularly when he was preparing for a visit to Costa Rica. One list had thirty-eight reminders for everything from “Put money in checking account to cover expenses while I’m gone,” to “Unplug refrigerator and freezer—Put rocks in door.”
    What purpose rocks in the refrigerator doors served is obscure.
    Bob Hansen was an intelligent man but a lousy speller. Some of his notes are laughable because of that. He wrote “VIAGRA—Pills for sex—Impudence [
sic
] Drug.”
    When he commented on President Bill Clinton’s disastrous affair, he wrote “Monica Luinsky or Levinsky, Clinton’s Lover.”
    Hansen also kept track in his journals of how many fish Marv Milosevich had caught. He did not list his own tally of fish.
    From the time he was a young man, he’d kept precise listings of every penny he had spent on the women in his life. Bob Hansen had always considered that they “owed him” for the food they ate and the secondhand clothes he bought them.
    The year 2008 was coming to an end. Marv and LaVonne Milosevich talked about asking Bob to come for Christmas dinner, but knowing that he would put a pall over the festivities, they kept putting the decision on that aside. Finally, they decided not to.
    Bob Hansen had finally run out of friends—except for Lily and Herb Stuart in Costa Rica. His estate, estimated to be worth $5 million, would reward
them
for standing by him. Hansen’s will specifically said that his wife, Joann Cooper Morrison Hansen, had left him, and it was worded in such a way that even if she should ever resurface, he wanted her to have
nothing.
His children were also disinherited in the will.
    Later, Marv felt guilt about that last Christmas, but he had also become tremendously disappointed in his one-time mentor, the man he had tried valiantly to remain friends with. The meanness in Bob Hansen had only intensifiedas he had grown older, and there were few comfortable moments to be spent with him.
    Bob was a racist, a miser, a misanthrope, the living image of Ebenezer Scrooge, a white supremacist, and a latter-day Nazi. He continued to blame everyone but himself for his misery.