Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128)
Page 5
4
Carol and JW’s house was on a residential street opposite the city park. When he was a kid the park had been groomed like a golf course, but in the twenty-five years since the mine closed the city had gone longer and longer between mowings. As he pulled over, he saw dandelion heads glimmering like pale mold in the moonlight. It was the house of the fateful dinner, and now it was theirs. When Carol was pregnant with Chris, Bob and Mary announced that Bob had accepted a new job in Atlanta. They had purchased a condo there and were going to keep an apartment here in town. They were giving them the family home so that their grandchildren could grow up like Carol had: playing in the park until the squirrels scampered at dusk, and dreaming of England and being royal.
The house was dark now, except for their second floor bedroom window. The clock glowed dimly on his dash: 11:15. She was likely in bed reading, or watching the late show. Perhaps it wasn’t too late. He stepped out of the car and eased the door shut. He crossed the street. He would apologize. He had been delayed, and he had forgotten to charge his cell phone, he would say. It had run out. How stupid of him. But as he headed up the walk the window darkened. He continued on to the doorstep, where he saw his mail lying in a small bundle. A sticky note flapped in the breeze:
John—
Went to bed.
Carol
He picked it up. He ran his fingers down the grooves of the doorframe’s half-Roman column. Rousing her at this point would not end well. He stood quietly for a moment as his hopeful vision of the evening dissolved, wishing there were some way he could reverse time and power past the gravity of the casino. He turned back to his car. He sat there outside his darkened house, then finally drove off into the night.
Aside from a few bites at the casino, he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He stopped on the way home for gas and some food. He pulled a Chuckwagon sandwich from behind the glass cooler door and stuck it in a microwave on the orange counter by the window. Outside, the local sheriff’s deputy, a big bearish guy named Bob Grossman, had his red and blue lights flashing as he talked to a car full of kids parked in front of the store. He didn’t look happy.
The microwave dinged. JW pushed the greasy button and pulled out the hot plastic pillow, avoiding the steam emanating from the tear he had made in the corner. The police lights shone into the store as he made his way toward the counter, turning the customers faintly red, then blue. A bunch of Native American kids tumbled out of the car. He watched them jostle each other, laughing like they didn’t care, as Grossman yelled at them. He set his sandwich on the counter.
He had seen Grossman do this before. The Lions’ Club had even had him in to talk about what a hazard the reservation kids were, and his strategy of keeping pressure on them. The boys ran wild and drank and caused problems ranging from burglary to traffic accidents. The dysfunction, addiction, and poverty of the reservation was a regular point of contention at Chamber of Commerce events, where the more conservative members groaned about how the Native Americans lived in a welfare culture, while the liberal members said it was because of a cycle of poverty and broken families. Grossman was a member of the Rotary club, the Chamber, and the Lions, and was widely felt to be the best check they had on the problem. Some people were talking about supporting him for sheriff when Big Bill Donovan retired. JW grabbed a few paper napkins from the dispenser next to the register.
“Gas on three,” he said.
The cashier typed in the gas and bleeped through his food with a bored affect as JW studied the rolls of lottery tickets under the scratched plastic fog of the countertop.
“Thirty-one forty-nine. Anything else?”
“Yeah, give me a hundred and fifty in scratch-offs. Loons.”
He felt embarrassed, as if he were asking for a copy of Penthouse. She pulled out a long streamer of shiny-foiled tickets. The loons’ backs glinted in the light.
“Thanks,” he said, folding them accordion-style as he hurried out the door, forgetting his sandwich and drink inside.
He stuffed the remaining bills and coins into his pocket, then headed past the Native American boys, who were clearly drunk. He thought about the wreckage his ancestors had caused by introducing alcohol to the Native Americans, and they by giving tobacco to whites. He scratched his thumbnail across a glistening loon to reveal the number sets—it was a loser—and got into his car, thankful that he didn’t have those kinds of problems.
His apartment building was just half a block farther up Sixth, behind the Food ’n’ Fuel. It was on a narrow strip of land between Sixth and the highway, just beyond Sabo’s Guns. The building was long and short, clad in rough plywood siding wavy from rain. Thin layers of it sloughed off like dead skin in the summer. The building had a crabgrass lawn and a gravel parking lot. A billboard loomed overhead, advertising Dr. Reed Orput, who could renew your confidence with a mouthful of dental implants. Remake your life, it said, with Dr. Reed and the Smile Factory. Orput’s porcelain grin had become a navigation point for JW, indicating where to turn.
A much smaller sign at the parking lot entrance said Whispering Pines Apartment’s, Your new home! Every time JW pulled past it he was irritated by the misplaced apostrophe, but he hadn’t gotten around to scratching it out. There were no pine trees on the property, but someone had once planted juniper bushes amid wood chips that were crumbling to soil next to the building’s foundation.
He approached the entrance carrying his briefcase, his bindered stack of mail, his keys, and his ribbon of spent lottery tickets. A large Walmart semi barreled past on the highway, buffeting him in its hot backwash. He twisted his key in the lock, pulled the glass open, and went inside.
His apartment was on the second floor, six steps up from the street. Second-floor units cost ten dollars a month more than first-floor apartments. JW stuck a small key in his dented brass mailbox, but there was nothing inside. He headed up the stairs, his shoes sticking to the yellowing plastic runner. The hall smelled of borscht. His door was halfway down the hall on the right, the highway side. A bright orange piece of paper was stuck to it:
EVICTION NOTICE.
You are hereby ordered to
VACATE YOUR PREMISES IMMEDIATELY
due to NON-PAYMENT OF RENT.
Move now! Save court costs!
—Whispering Pines Management
An artery pulsed hot in his neck as he peeled the notice off. He heard clattering dishes from somewhere, a TV, late-night laughter with some woman. He wondered how many of the tenants had seen it, and wished management had simply called him.
He went inside and tossed everything on the coffee table. The apartment was cheap anyway. That had been its advantage, and it came furnished, so when JW moved out of the house he didn’t have to buy all-new furniture for a temporary separation while he and Carol worked on their marriage. Of course, tonight he may have blown that too, he thought.
He turned on the TV and headed into the kitchen, a small galley that sloped sharply downhill toward the highway. The announcer’s voice boomed in the other room as he opened the fridge. “Baxter Pawn Baxter Pawn Baxter Pawn! Just three hours from almost anywhere and the largest selection in the upper Midwest!”
He stared into the fridge’s yellow interior and shook his head to regain his focus. Pig’s Eye pilsner, Red Owl milk, Swanson TV dinners. Some bologna gone green. He took out a beer and closed the door. He wasn’t a slob, JW thought, but he should be cooking. The fridge should have real food. Perhaps that was part of the problem. Not enough self-care. He had been spending too much time at the casino. He was a well-respected banker with a beautiful family. And yet here he was, with no real sense of what he should do next.
He turned and walked back across the slanted floor. Road construction on the highway had caused the building’s foundation to bow inward. He had examined it one day while doing laundry on the first floor. It explained why the windows along the highway side would not open and why the floor ran at a funhouse slant.
This flaw presented
the need for special adjustments. The legs of his bed were propped up on the road side with chunks of two-by-fours. In the kitchen the fridge and the range both trudged uphill. The countertop tilted downhill. On his first day in the apartment JW had come home to find his brand-new Walmart toaster oven in pieces on the floor.
He returned to the living room. The pale-green brocaded sofa emitted a sharp, dusty odor when he sat down. He grabbed the remote and changed channels to the Home Shopping Network. He ran through his ribbon of scratched-off loon tickets until he found the two winners. He tore them at the perforations and tossed them on the coffee table. Six dollars each.
“Isn’t it gorgeous?” the blonde saleswoman asked viewers as she modeled a cubic zirconium necklace. “What woman wouldn’t fall in love with the man who gave her this?”
He opened his first letter, a bill from Connexus, the local rural electric cooperative.
DISCONNECTION NOTICE: Your electricity will be DISCONNECTED for non-payment. You must call immediately.
He set the mail down and rubbed his temples.
5
The following morning was fine and dry, and it felt warm as JW left the building. He pulled out onto Sixth, heading for the highway. The city of North Lake had a scenic rusticity that owed much to its proximity to the west end of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a vast roadless expanse of hundreds of lakes along the border with Canada. Native lake names like Kekekabic, Ogishkemuncie, and Gabimichigami, fell easily from the tongues of Iron Rangers when they talked fishing, and the region attracted outdoor enthusiasts from around the world who wanted to experience an authentic American wilderness. North Woods décor, log buildings with dark green roofs, colorful chalk sandwich boards changed daily by dreadlocked hipsters, Will Steger mukluks, and tree stumps sculpted by chain saws into bears and eagles all helped to attract eco-vacationers who injected cash into the local economy.
North Lake Bank operated from a log building out on the main highway. It hadn’t been built to appeal to the granola crowd. That was a happy accident. During the housing crisis, one of JW’s best customers, a log home builder, was suddenly left with several unsellable vacation homes he had built on spec. They were pitched up like derelicts along the vast shores of North Lake. When he fell behind on his payments, rather than liquidate his business at a certain loss, JW suggested he use his unsold inventory to construct a new building for the bank, thereby saving an important customer’s business and solving the bank’s space problem at a bargain-basement price. The picturesque result had earned JW a feature article in Banking magazine and a Community Banker of the Year nomination. Since then, business was up sharply.
He pulled in, bumping up over the curb cut. A large carport supported by thick log posts and iron stanchions sheltered the drive-through lanes. The grounds were well landscaped, with a chain-saw sculpture of a leaping trout on the front strip of grass. He angled into a space marked by a small brass lawn sign that read President.
The morning’s rising heat hit him hard as he stepped out. The lawn sprinkler heads hissed, wetting the sidewalk. Schmeaker’s black Charger with its red NRA bumper sticker was already parked in his spot, which was marked by a similar sign that read Vice President.
With morning had come clarity. He was still the president of North Lake Bank. He could get a short-term loan to consolidate his debts. He would call Carol to apologize. It was all manageable. He pulled open the front doors, fully reinhabiting the persona of the competent and successful bank president, the man invited to speak about his successes around the Midwest. He was, truly, among the very best at what he did, and that counted for something.
Sandy smiled up at him.
“Sandy.”
“Good Morning, Mr. White. Mr. Jorgenson’s here to see you.”
“Jorgenson?”
That was a strange bit of news. JW walked back to his office to deposit his things on his desk. He wondered what could have caused Jorgenson to make the four-hour drive and arrive by nine in the morning, when he had just seen him yesterday afternoon.
JW snugged his tie and headed for the conference room, a wood-paneled space centered by a long table. Its red surface was rich with morning light slanting in through wooden blinds. Jorgenson sat at the far end, poring over some papers.
“Frank! Is something wrong?”
Jorgenson looked up from the paperwork. His face was inscrutable.
“Close the door, John.”
JW corrected course, surprised at Jorgenson’s tone.
“Sure.”
He closed the door and touched the button to turn the blinds down slightly, as a courtesy more than anything, and began walking between the wall of windows and the long table.
“Everything all right?”
“No, John, I’m afraid it’s not.” Jorgenson set the papers down and sat back as he neared. “I didn’t sleep last night. I got up at four in the morning just to come and see you, so I could find out what’s going on up here.”
JW’s heart sped up. Had he discovered the loan? “I don’t understand.”
Jorgenson picked up his smartphone and thrust it toward JW. The screen glowed with colors.
“Take a look at that.”
JW took it and examined the image. Two men pored over a roll of blueprints spread over the hood of a truck. Behind them rose the pale ribs of a new building. He was surprised to recognize one of the men.
“That’s Johnny Eagle.”
“The one from your talk yesterday. And he’s at the building site that Sam Schmeaker’s been e-mailing me about, the one that’s going up on the edge of town. Just took that this morning.”
JW looked up at him. Jorgenson was clearly irritated. “What else do you know about him?” he asked.
JW put the phone down. He didn’t, really. Not much more than the story in his presentation. “Moved back to the reservation after his wife died, little over a year ago.”
He pulled his right cuff farther down his wrist. His white shirt and collar felt constricting under his jacket, as if they had become twisted somehow.
“Have you been keeping track of this building project?” said Jorgenson.
“There’ve been some grumblings about it at the Sunrise Rotary, but—” He hadn’t paid any particular attention. They had just started putting it up ten days ago or so. “It’s on the edge of the reservation. They haven’t announced what it is yet,” he said.
“Last year when he was in here, was it a tribal loan he was after?”
JW shook his head. “No, I would have approved that. It was for his house. An addition, remodel or something, and some kind of small business.”
Jorgenson nodded, thinking about it. “You know he used to be a vice president at one of our competitors in Minneapolis,” he said. “A real climber. They called him the Indian Obama.”
JW saw the implication. He picked the phone back up and thumbed through some of the other images. “You think it’s a bank.”
Jorgenson looked both worried and aggressive, like a bear about to strike. “You tell me.”
JW finished thumbing through the images. The structure did seem to have preparations for a drive-through canopy. “We’d lose the tribal deposits,” he said, setting the phone back on the table.
Jorgenson nodded. “Yeah, and that would probably put this branch out of business. I bet that’s his intent. Do you know how much Capitol Bank Holdings paid for this branch?”
“No.” He wanted to sit, but Jorgenson hadn’t asked him to, and he sensed that it would anger him.
“Eight million dollars. And you built it higher since.”
JW suddenly realized how damaging such a development would be to Jorgenson’s CEO campaign. If a tribal bank put Jorgenson’s flagship branch out of business, they would lose millions of dollars and his entire strategy for growth near casinos would be called into question. JW and everyone who worked here would be out of a job, and permanently blemished by the failure. It would be a blow to the entire community.
“Not many. They’d need a state or federal charter to do it.”
Jorgenson looked at him for a moment as if contemplating something, then nodded faintly.
“If you took a leave, do you think you could get your arms around this thing for us?”
“A leave?” JW was shocked. “Frank, I’ve got my hands full as branch president—”
“Well, actually—”
Jorgenson slid a piece of paper out from beneath the stack of financial reports he had been reviewing and pushed it across the table to JW.
“I’ve been looking into some of your loans. One in particular.”
JW picked it up, noticing how the embossed recorder’s seal caught the light. He saw his signature along with the forgeries of Sam’s and Sandy’s as the notary public. It was the second mortgage on his home. The $100,000 figure suddenly looked staggering. He felt a wave of nausea.
“What’s the problem? It’s my second mortgage. That’s what banks do, they improve people’s lives.”
“John, come on, okay? You’ve been waiving your payments for almost a year.”
JW laughed. “You know Carol. Her redecorating—”
“Bullshit! Okay? Bullshit.” Jorgenson slapped the table. “Everybody knows you’ve got a gambling problem, and that you and Carol are separated over it. Christ, I used to run this branch! You think I don’t still have connections? I also know you’re being evicted from your apartment. So let’s cut the shit, and you give me some honest answers.”
“Frank, it’s just a little gaming.”
“This is embezzling,” Jorgenson said, stabbing the papers with his fingers. “Put your keys on the table. I’m going to call the FBI.”
JW hesitated.
“Now!”
JW felt sick and paralyzed. The enormity of what was happening was surreal. He started to reach for his keys, but somehow he found the presence of mind to push back.