“Just, now just, wait,” he said, his voice shaking. “Okay? I’ve made you a lot of money. I’ve turned this into the most profitable branch in your territory.”
“That’s why I was offering you a deal,” said Jorgenson.
“Well, let me—” JW stared at him, but words eluded him.
“What, do you think I’m fucking around?”
JW swallowed and forced himself to focus. “No. It’s just, sudden. You want me to investigate him.”
“Without alerting him, yes.” Jorgenson seemed to calm. “You figure out what it is and if it’s a real threat.” He leaned back again. “We’ll tell people you’re taking a leave to deal with your gambling problem. You get yourself one of those twelve-step books and you carry it around with you. Might even do you some good.”
JW turned away and looked through the blinds, out at the fields behind the bank, breathing deeply in a conscious effort to get hold of himself. He looked down. Sunlight cast dark stripes across his new suit and his hands. He felt his jaw muscles bulging, and he willed them to relax.
“Okay,” he said, barely audible.
“What was that? I didn’t hear you.”
“Okay!” JW had a sudden impulse to strangle him.
“Wise man,” said Jorgenson. “Whispering Pines manages some trailer homes out on the reservation, near where this Johnny Eagle lives,” he said. “Go take one. I’ll cover your rent.”
JW stood motionless, staring out the window. “And if it is a bank?” He turned back and presented a composed face to Jorgenson, who rose from his chair and walked toward him. He stopped and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Then I want you to stop him.”
II
THE HAND
6
The sides of JW’s white Caprice became caked with ocher dust as he drove. The reservation road cut through a vast landscape that alternated between trees and meadows. Stands of birch, maple, and aspen ran along high hills on the left, surrounded by sweeping tracts of Norway pine. Meadows of fall wildflowers and scrub pastures ran on the right. Scattered groupings of jack pine towered over everything, their thin trunks shooting high into the air before branching out into heads of shaggy greenery. Barbed wire sagged between ancient wooden posts pitched cockeyed in the soil. A barn collapsed into itself, its gray wood tinged with faint remnants of red paint, its blue-shingled roof folding in at crazy angles and frilled with green moss and lichens. A Model-A Ford sank into a wetland on the left.
The day was warm, but he kept his windows closed and the air conditioner on to keep his belongings from getting covered with dust. Still, the air coming in through the vents smelled like chalk, and the dashboard became coated with a fine powder. His clothes bulged in gleaming black lawn-and-leaf bags, which filled the back seat. He had once heard such bags called Indian suitcases, and now here he was, his car packed full of them, heading into Indian country. His business suits hung pressed against the doors. The front passenger seat and footwell were piled high with stuffed banker’s boxes, while his briefcase rode tucked under his knees. He turned on the radio and sang along with Boz Scaggs.
The wilderness eventually crumbled into a collection of scattered prefab houses whose windows were draped with sheets and blankets. Derelict cars rusted into the yards. A trailer home stood on cinderblocks between the road and a rocky lake. Its siding was mostly stripped from its ribs, exposing a gaping hole clear through its middle. In the opening he could see the lake beyond, and inside the trailer four green-webbed lawn chairs standing in a circle around a grill with sawed-off legs. A ways farther on, a woman in office clothes pushed a sputtering lawn mower with a spindly chrome handle, its small engine spewing clouds of blue smoke. She looked at him, but didn’t wave back at his gesture.
Then woods sprang up again on either side, and the houses were gone. The elevation began to climb and after a mile or so the road turned north and the forest fell away into a high oak savanna. Then it narrowed before plunging into a woodier area. He traveled through more oak interspersed with buckthorn and birch, then a wetland full of bright yellow tamarack trees standing like fire on the water. He came around a bend and slowed as he emerged into a small settlement cut into the woods.
On the right was a home with a mostly finished addition and a brown metal pole barn. On the left he found the lane the Whispering Pines rental agent had described to him over the phone. It climbed and then disappeared over a small hill. Her white Toyota pickup was parked in the tall grass beside the lane. He pulled off and parked next to it. Jorgenson had described this place as a trailer park, but when JW got out he only saw one trailer. It was a dilapidated blue one from the 1960s, and it sat under a stand of craggy burr oaks near the road.
The rental agent hopped down from the pickup. Young and blonde, she held a zippered key rack in one hand and a small tube of mace in the other. JW pretended he didn’t see it.
“As I said on the phone,” she said, shifting the mace to shake hands, “these are super-affordable. The nice ones are up in back, over the hill.”
“Oh, so there are more of them,” he said.
“Oh, yeah! The view is gorgeous! People just have a hard time finding them because this lane looks like a private driveway or something.”
“I see.” JW smiled.
She began to lead him up the hill into the sun, but he stopped and looked at the houses across the street, a little worried about his belongings.
“Is it okay to leave my car here?” he asked.
“Yeah, it should be fine.”
“Maybe I’ll just lock it to be safe. It’s all my stuff.”
She nodded, her expression clouding. “Okay,” she said, and tucked a fine wave of her sunny blonde hair back behind an ear.
As JW returned to lock the car, he was shocked to recognize Johnny Eagle in the yard across the road. He stepped behind his car, suddenly embarrassed to be there. Jorgenson had certainly done his research, and it made JW wonder what else he had planned. Eagle was walking with a boy, and they were arguing. He put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and the boy whirled away and yelled something inaudible at him. It suddenly occurred to JW that the boy resembled one of the Native kids he had seen Grossman roughing up at the convenience store. But he couldn’t be sure.
The boy stormed away up to the house and Eagle sighed and followed.
“Mr. White?”
JW turned to see the rental agent waiting, a quizzical expression on her face. He glanced back at the dilapidated baby-blue trailer down near the road. There was a sun-faded, red and white For Rent sign behind one of the windows.
“Let’s see this one,” he said, and started toward it.
“Okay…” said the agent. Her tone implied that she thought he was a little crazy, but she walked back down the hill toward him, and the two of them headed up a short path that led to the trailer’s grassy gravel parking spot.
“I don’t even know if I have keys for this one,” she said, opening her black zippered key rack. “Oh wait, I think I found one!”
She climbed up the two broad wooden steps—made out of some old two-by-twelves—and took out a dull pewter key shaped like a cloverleaf. She jiggled it into the stubborn lock and got it to turn, then stepped back and pulled the flimsy aluminum door open.
The interior was straight out of the 1960s. It was clean, but set up more like a camper than a house. He stepped inside and looked around. It wasn’t much wider than eight feet, and maybe thirty feet long. To the right of the door was a gold-speckled, chrome-trimmed kitchen table with woven blue bench cushions on either side. A band of windows ran along the front end of the trailer, beyond the table and above the bench on the door side. The opposite wall had a small bookshelf behind the bench, and next to it, across from the door, sat a brown faux-leather sofa. To the left of the door was a galley kitchen with more gold-speckled countertop and white-enameled cabinets, and an old O’Keefe & Merritt gas stove, chrome and white porcelain. Opposite the narrow kitchenette was a small ut
ility closet, a built-in furnace and water heater, and a tiny blue bathroom with a pull-chain light hanging over a medicine cabinet and a small porcelain sink.
He pulled the mirrored door on the medicine cabinet open. There were two rippled glass shelves and a rusty slot opening into the wall. The words Used Razor Disposal were embossed in the metal just below the slot. It reminded JW of a similar one in his childhood home, which he had always imagined as some kind of strange portal into another dimension. He swung the door shut.
Behind him was a small frosted glass window over a mismatched blue toilet and a narrow shower stall with enameled pressboard walls that were painted to look like tiles. He stepped out of the bathroom and continued on.
To his right, the kitchen aisle ended at a door to the bedroom, which was at the opposite end of the trailer from the dining table. It smelled musty and was filled by a double bed with a thin blue-striped mattress. A high bank of windows ran around the bedroom, affording some privacy, he imagined, when lying down, but letting in a porch-like light. The narrow floor space before the bed contained a dark wooden nightstand in the medieval revival style of the early 1970s, and a narrow bedroom closet with a thin bifold door on the same side of the trailer as the bathroom. He measured the wall’s thinness at the edge of the doorframe. It fit easily between his thumb and fingers.
He turned and walked back into the kitchen aisle.
“I haven’t been in this one,” the rental agent said from the door. Her tone was apologetic. “The ones up over the hill are way nicer—”
JW looked out the kitchen sink window, and saw it afforded a convenient view of Eagle’s house and yard. He gave her a friendly smile. “This’ll be fine.”
She frowned and shrugged. “Why not?” She laughed and threw up her hands. “I’ll go get the lease!”
Alone, he ran his hands over the cabinets, taking in the aura of cheap nostalgia. Although everything in the trailer was decades old, on closer inspection it seemed surprisingly well-cared for, with little bits of epoxy patch here and a few replaced and glued handles there, as if it had been repeatedly fixed and maintained in crafty ways.
He sat at the small table with the rental agent and completed the paperwork. Then he walked her to her truck, and she departed. She seemed in disbelief at her good fortune to have rented one of the places out here, let alone the one JW had chosen. He turned back and took a deep breath as he surveyed his new home. It was a mission, like being in the army, he told himself. This was his barracks, and all that mattered was its utility. He opened his car, grabbed two of the lawn-and-leaf bags, and carried them toward the trailer. When he went back to get his suits, he saw the boy again, leading a big chestnut horse toward a railed-in riding paddock in Eagle’s side yard. The horse was planting its feet almost every step of the way. The boy, he realized, had little idea what he was doing.
He hung his suits in the tiny bedroom closet and sat on the flaccid mattress, testing it. It had a large tan water stain at the foot of the bed. Someone must have left the windows open in a driving rain. He looked out the windows to his right, over the lamp on the bedside table, and watched the horse running loose in the paddock. He watched as the boy approached and it galloped away.
JW snorted. Horses were a constant challenge, he reflected, a mirror of one’s own weaknesses. If you didn’t know how to work them, they worked you. He unpacked a family photo from a banker’s box and set it on the nightstand, followed by an old clock radio, which he plugged into a brown outlet protruding from the wall. Then he stood and went back into the main room to find the lawn bag that contained his bedding.
7
That night JW dreamed of his father for the first time in years. The dream had the quality of memory, for in it a flock of blue jays was attacking a cardinal in the grass. This had really happened. But in the dream his father stomped on the birds as if putting out a fire, and they flew squawking into a nearby tree. But one was left on the ground, fluttering around with a broken wing, near the dead cardinal. His father stomped on it, crushing it, and turned to JW with rabid glee.
He woke with a buck of panic, his father’s baleful expression stuck in his mind. He lay in the dark, hot and sweaty, and listened to the trailer’s murmurs and creaks. His heart was thumping, and a terrible lucidity came over him as he cooled and the dream faded.
He got up, his limbs stiff and dull as wood, and stumbled in to the tiny kitchen. He made a cup of chamomile tea to settle his stomach. The pot whistled as he tried to shake off the spell. As feeling returned, he sat at the tiny table and sipped in the dark. The speckled Formica glowed in the moonlight. He needed help, he realized. He had been utterly competent most of his life, but now he was in over his head—with his gambling, with Jorgenson, with his failing relationships and his enormous debts. He was coming apart on the inside. But there was no one to help him, no one who could understand, or offer aid and counsel.
He began to make a list. He would find the local Gamblers Anonymous group and he would get a Big Book. He doubted it would do any good—after all, gambling was not an addiction like alcohol—but he wrote it down. He would go to Carol and fix things with her. He would take Julie camping or shopping—whatever she wanted to do—in order to rekindle their relationship. Make more of an effort. Get over himself. He could feel a sense of normalcy and resolve returning as the list grew.
He had never before done anything like what Jorgenson was asking of him, but he tried to make a list for that, too. He would try to become Eagle’s friend, he thought, and then he would search his house. The thought seemed ludicrous, like something out of a movie. He imagined breaking in, only to learn that it was all a big mistake. Eagle was probably planning to open a fast food restaurant, or something equally innocuous. He would tell Jorgenson that he had it all wrong. Jorgenson would be relieved, and he would give JW another chance. JW would put his nose to the grindstone and stay away from the casino, he would make his payments, he would be home every night for dinner, at church every Sunday; he would slowly work himself out of debt and earn back Carol’s trust. Slow and steady is what he needed, just like everyone else. Conservative, clean, no more crazy risks. And no more gambling, ever again.
As JW imagined this new reality, his earlier sense of dread and anxiety began to dissipate. He had a plan in his notepad. Life was not out of control. He carried it back into the bedroom and set it on the nightstand. He lay back down, and slipped into a turgid, tentative sleep.
He woke in the late light of mid-morning, and after showering he dressed in a crisp white shirt and a nice fall suit. The ominous, unsettled feeling still lingered from the night before, but he had a plan. He stepped out of the trailer and locked the flimsy aluminum door behind him. During the ride back to town he reviewed his list, and with the mental activity the feeling began to subside.
He drove first to the county library, where he used the Internet to find the local Gamblers Anonymous chapters. One of them was meeting just before lunch in the basement of Christ Lutheran Church, an old white clapboard structure north of town. He hated the idea of joining a group like this, especially considering his stature. The whole thing seemed stupid to him, the kind of thing that he imagined urban liberals did to get in touch with their feelings. It demanded a willingness to sit among people who were not functioning at his level of accomplishment, and it would also be damaging to his reputation. He would have to find a way to redefine his identity in a way that didn’t seem so broken, that allowed him to maintain more self-respect—and more importantly, the respect of others—and allowed him room for professional redemption. But first he needed the damn book. He had agreed to get one and “carry it around” with him, as Jorgenson had put it. He would have to suck it up and go to the meeting.
The church sat a few miles out of North Lake, on a two-lane ribbon of eroded blacktop that mostly served as a field-access road for local sugar-beet farmers. It was surrounded by a stand of oaks and a small cyclone-fenced cemetery with tilted headstones. JW parked behind a
large four-by-four pickup—knobby tires and mud flaps the size of his car doors, bearing silver naked ladies—where his Caprice would not be seen from the road. He got out and waited for a car to pass, then followed another man into a side door and down a set of concrete steps.
In the basement a sign directed him through a service area and into a meeting room with a gray painted cement floor and walls, and joists painted white above. There was an old inlaid-wood card table bearing a stack of Big Books near the door. A hand-lettered sign on the table read, “If you need one, take one.” JW took one and turned to leave, but more people were coming in behind him, so he took a seat on a metal folding chair in the back row. The room smelled of rosewater, which was probably the only dignified thing about it in his mind. A pale yellow plywood sign was mounted on the wall nearby, bearing the hand-painted words Character Assets in shiny red letters with blue painted shadows. A long list followed in blue letters with red bullets:
self forgiveness • humility • self-valuation • promptness • straightforwardness • trust • forgiveness • simplicity • love • honesty • patience • activity • modesty • positive thinking • generosity • look for the good!
This last phrase was in a rollicking red script that dipped up and down as if it were written on the peaks and valleys of a carnival ride. JW was growing anxious to leave, but two men stood conversing in the doorway, so he remained in his chair with his legs and hands crossed, the Big Book on his lap.
Below the wooden sign was a paper one made from several pages of computer printout. There’s Nothing So Bad That Gambling Won’t Make It Worse, it said, followed by four exclamation points. In the lower left corner, it bore a small image of a royal flush with a circle and a line through it.
The basement’s white concrete walls had high dusty windows. A cobweb glinted in the sunlight. Hosta leaves grew thick on the other side of the glass. JW thought about the royal flush on the computer printout, imagined getting the deal in some casino poker game, and fantasized about how much he would win. (“A hundred thousand dollars!”)
Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128) Page 6
