JW watched the charcoal leaves where the horses had been, then lifted his eyes to take in Eagle’s house. The music continued from the neighbor’s party. He wondered if Eagle and Jacob were over there, but then the light came on in Eagle’s study. It shot a yellow glow out through the blinds, sending color out into JW’s black-and-white world, and he saw the window crank shut.
He sat at the table and turned on the bug receiver. He plugged the milky-white earbuds into the jack and put them in his ears, then he tuned the knob until he heard Eagle’s voice come in.
“Did you steal it?”
“No! God! Why do you always say that!?”
JW stared at the swirling shadows on the Formica. He imagined Eagle and Jacob standing in the hallway, outside the study door. Eagle had probably intercepted him, maybe had a hand on his arm.
“Then where did you get it?”
“I told you, I found it!”
“Where?”
“At the community center!”
“Where?”
“It was sitting on a bench!”
“Jacob, what are you doing?” Eagle sounded as if he were at the end of his rope. “We come up here and things only get worse. Now you got a switchblade, and you’re arrested with pot—”
“Oh, like you’ve never smoked pot—”
“What is happening to you?” The concern again, and now anger, too.
“I hate it here! Okay? I hate everything.” Jacob’s voice broke with emotion. JW could almost see him turning away, putting a hand up to his nose and eyes in order to hold back tears, or at least to hide them from his father.
“I don’t know what to do,” Jacob said, his voice wet with mucus. “You think being here’s supposed to make everything better, but it’s not.”
“Why?” Eagle asked, softer now.
“I don’t know. Because they call me a fucking apple.” Deep and hoarse.
“They’re just trying to provoke you.”
“I know. I miss Mom. I’m sorry.”
JW heard sniffling. He hunched over the receiver in the moonlight, his fingers pressing the earbuds in. He felt dirty. He was intruding on something personal, but he had also just picked up an important clue. He took out the tiny spiral notepad that he sometimes carried in his pocket. He flipped it open to a blank page and wrote, Smokes pot?
“Hey, hey. I miss her too,” he heard Eagle say in a quiet tone. “But we have to make this work, just you and me. We’re doing this for her, remember?”
“Yeah, right,” Jacob said disdainfully. “The bank’s for her, because of what her boss did. Like she’ll really know or care.”
The comment ran through JW like a spike. He wrote in the moonlight: Bank’s b/c of what her boss did.
“It’s the principle, son.”
“Whatever.”
There was a rustle of clothing and the closing of a door. JW sat, riveted, and kept listening.
***
IN THE HALL, Eagle watched Jacob rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand. Jacob took the knife back from Eagle’s weakened hand, and Eagle let him go. He watched him head down the hall into his room and close the door, and not long after, he heard the muted sounds of Call Of Duty IV: Modern Warfare. His son was losing himself in bullets and fire.
He stood still in the hall’s emptiness, listening to the house, then went into his study and closed the door. He sighed and leaned back against it. Things seemed to be getting worse, but he told himself that he needed to be patient. Yes, Jacob had crummy friends and bad grades, and even trouble with the law. But it was also true that the police were racist. Jacob had a good heart. He attracted troubled boys because he accepted them, and acting out was part of the grieving process.
But he also knew that it didn’t have to be this way. He just couldn’t seem to find a way to change the dynamic. No matter what he tried, it felt as if they were trapped in this place, in the aftermath of Wenonah’s death, pulled farther and farther apart by their diverging galaxies. The apple comment was particularly concerning. Red on the outside, white on the inside. Not Indian enough meant not poor or dysfunctional enough for rez life—a sort of reverse racism. It made Eagle angry. It wasn’t fair to dump five hundred years of history on a boy.
He knew he wasn’t the most involved father. When Jacob was younger he had reached out to Eagle plenty of times—“Hey, Dad, let’s do this”—and Eagle hadn’t made the time. He always had good reasons. There was a meeting at work he had to prepare for, or a tough day he had to recover from. He would have liked to do more, he always intended to the next time Jacob asked, but the job was demanding, especially for an Indian. He was breaking barriers. It took extra energy. And banking was hyper-competitive to begin with. His coworkers didn’t seem to be spending more time with their kids either, and they seemed to be just fine. Wenonah was the one who’d wanted kids anyway—and then the bottom dropped out.
After she died, Eagle realized to his surprise that living in South Minneapolis wasn’t the same for Jacob as it had been when he was growing up. Jacob wasn’t getting fed at friends’ houses, and the friends Jacob made weren’t the articulate kids of academics and professionals that Eagle had hung out with in his youth. There seemed to be more gangs, drugs, and violence. Jacob had two bikes stolen, one of them at gunpoint, and the kids he hung around with looked tougher and tougher.
It all came to a head one day in late September. Eagle had been working at the bank downtown. After a power lunch with a bunch of executives, he had put together a half-billion-dollar corporate financing package for General Mills. He came home around eight to learn that Jacob had been arrested with a friend for stealing tobacco from Lowell’s drugstore.
“You should bring him home,” his mother said over the phone. Eagle had banished Jacob to his room after a big fight, and then gone for a walk to cool down. He was sitting on a city bench near the rippling black water of Minnehaha Creek. Brown bats dropped from the eaves of houses, unfolded their wings, and cluttered the air. Frogs pulsed in the long grasses by the riverbank. It was two hours earlier in Los Angeles, where his parents had transferred when Jacob was five. His mom was stuck in traffic on the 405. He could hear the engines.
“At least it’s tobacco,” she said. “The spirits might be trying to guide him.”
He pressed his cell tight to his ear and looked out at the stone and Tudor houses on the other side of the glistening creek. Someone was having a party. He could hear the clink of glasses and laughter, the playing of a piano, and the closing of a car door. He saw a couple in evening dress walking up the sidewalk, arm in arm. He realized that part of him was secretly hoping his mother would tell him to ship the boy off to live with them in Los Angeles.
“What do you mean, bring him home?” he asked.
“To the reservation. That boy needs to get back in touch with the land,” she said, “with his roots in the people, not all this wannabe gangbanger bullshit. That’s a recipe for being downtrodden forever. I see the same thing here in LA. Listen to me, baby. You gotta press reset.”
As a sixties-era Native rights activist and a college professor, his mom believed the land and the elders could heal Jacob, as if by osmosis. Eagle shared his white father’s more skeptical views and thought her idealism naive. To him, the reservation was a place of dysfunction and squalor, not a source of spiritual rebirth. He doubted it would change anything for Jacob. The reality was that her son just wasn’t cut out to be a father. He never had been.
He sat picking at the softening wood slats of the bench as she countered. “That’s bullshit,” she said. “Wenonah was so good at being a mom that you didn’t have to build any skill. But now you have to.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“It’s not! It takes work. But if your father did it in his stiff-assed ‘I’m a scientist, not a dad’ gichi-mookomaan way, you sure as hell can.”
Eagle laughed. “He actually said that?”
“Yeah, he said that. But I think he did an okay job with
you.”
Eagle sighed. He had seen the arc of his life extending forward like a shining arrow. With his gift and his ambition, he would rise to the top. As an Indian? No. As Johnny Eagle. A guy with a funny-sounding last name, who had the goods to get things done. To make progress. That was also how he was going to provide for his family, and for his son. He had a new membership at the Minneapolis Athletic Club, and with it, access to the city’s financial elite. The sky was the limit.
And now he was contemplating giving it all up, just when the brass ring was within reach.
“He’s your child,” she said.
“I know, I know. But you’re talking a career here. And I can’t guarantee him anything if I leave banking.” He knew how hard it would be to get back in, and that if he left, he probably never would.
It was through Wenonah, rather than his mother, that he had come to know the reservation. How ironic it was that he met her in Minneapolis. She took it upon herself to educate him about his land, his people, their history—all the things he had never wanted to hear about from his mother—and through her eyes they had always seemed mysterious and cosmic. But there were plenty of hungry young bankers nipping at his heels. Faltering for even a second was risky, much less walking away for years. He hung his head and rubbed his forehead.
“Four years on the rez. Fourteen to eighteen. Then you can send him away to the former instrument of cultural genocide, and you’ll be off the hook,” she said. It was her term for the University of Minnesota, Morris. “He’ll be surrounded by good kids, and he’ll get past this.” The campus had once been an Indian boarding school where children were sent, often against their parents’ will, to learn white ways and Christian religion, breaking the intergenerational chain of stories and language that had held tribes together. When the repurposed school became part of the university, it was on the condition that any Native kid who qualified could attend tuition-free.
Eagle pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. Four years. If he could get him there. He realized he had made his decision; he was just hoping she would give him a last-minute reprieve.
And now here they were on the rez, and Jacob was having the same problems. Eagle had given it all up, apparently for nothing. In desperation, he’d bought Jacob the horse. He’d even moved next door to Wenonah’s sister, though an argument over her incessant drinking had ended any hopes he had of it being a constructive relationship. What more could he do? At some point Jacob would have to start meeting him halfway. But watching him earlier in the day with the horse, seeing how excited and childlike he was, had moved Eagle almost to tears. Maybe he could steer JW toward helping Jacob more.
***
BACK IN HIS trailer, JW reached up to turn off the receiver. There hadn’t been much sound for a while, but as he extended his hand toward the switch, he heard a strange series of clicks, followed by the squeak of a hinge. Then the crinkling of a plastic bag, and a moment later the flick of a lighter and a soft sizzle, followed by a pause, then a windy exhale. It sounded as if Eagle was smoking a pipe. A pot pipe.
JW listened in the moonlight. The table still swam with the shadows of leaves, and the music still boomed down from the neighbor’s delirious party, but it was all different now. He had a grip on something that could be the answer for him. He went to the kitchen junk drawer and pawed around until he found a small digital recorder. He held an earbud to it and pressed record. There it was again: the faint sizzling inhale, followed by a slight pause and a blowing exhale.
JW turned the receiver off. He thumbed the tiny volume dial to max and pressed rewind and then play to hear it again—sizzling inhale, blowing exhale. He pressed stop. His eyes fell to the small spiral notepad. He underlined Smokes pot? with two sharp strokes. The Treasury department would frown on giving a banking charter to someone who smoked pot. The fiduciary and political liabilities were simply too great. With Jesus and Lady Luck on his side, JW realized, he just may have found a way to stop Eagle and get his job back.
III
THE WAGERS
14
JW tried calling Carol on the greasy antique pay phone outside Big Al’s garage. “You’ve reached the White house, leave a message!” He hung up, frustrated.
Inside, they hadn’t even looked at his car.
“I figured you weren’t coming back for her,” Big Al said. This from a man, JW thought, who was always late on his loan payments.
“Why would you think that?” he asked.
Big Al shrugged. JW stood in the garage’s storefront, dressed in his finest gray suit and a crisp white shirt. Cream-colored metal shelves smudged with swipes of black grease held Interstate car batteries, and stacks of Michelin tires covered the bare concrete floor, topped with cardboard cutouts of a tire man. A foggy-globed gumball machine stood by the door, full of faintly visible colored orbs. A smudged, olive-green cash register sat on the glass counter, and the air was pregnant with the smells of body odor and motor oil.
“What you drivin’, anyway?” asked Big Al, peering out the window at the truck Eagle had lent him. It was hand-painted with a round Native-looking logo and lettering along the bed that read Native Organic Wild Rice.
“It belongs to a friend,” JW began, then raised a hand to revise his answer. “An acquaintance. I rented it.”
Big Al raised an eyebrow. He turned away to grab a shop towel for his greasy hands. “Let’s take a look up under her skirt.”
He walked around the counter and shoved the glass door open. A string of brass bells smashed and swayed against it as he passed. Outside, he led JW through a gate in a chain-link fence that ran around a weedy gravel yard east of the shop. It was filled with old junkers that Big Al used for spare parts.
The Caprice sat amid some weeds near the street. Big Al walked up to it, spread a dirty hand on the hood, and lowered his bulk to the ground.
“They ever catch the drunk Indian that run you down?”
“They were just kids.”
Big Al grunted and stuck his head under the car.
“Well, those drunk Indian kids cost you about twelve, fifteen hundred. Hub’s shot, axle’s bent, maybe I can straighten it but it’s probably not worth it. Steering, tie rod maybe. Boots. Who’s your insurance?”
JW had dropped his collision and comprehensive coverage a few months back, when he was in the thick of the cloud. He hadn’t had an accident in fifteen years, and at the time he thought he could leverage the savings into winnings that would pay the premiums for a whole year. He would double that, then repurchase them and add the rest to his nut. Looking back now, it seemed crazy. Big Al poked his head out from beneath the car to see if JW had heard him.
“I only have liability,” he said.
The mechanic got to his feet, brushing his hands off on his soiled blue coveralls.
“Seriously? You got no insurance. The guy that makes me carry it on every goddamn thing just to keep my loan.” He laughed bitterly, then led JW back toward the shop.
The door chimes banged around JW’s head as they crossed back inside. A fat kid in a blue jumpsuit was rotating tires with an impact wrench, filling the building with harsh metallic chatter.
“Well, JW, what you gonna do?” Big Al yelled over the noise. “I said fifteen hundred to be good to you since we go back to high school. But when I get into it, it could be more. And that doesn’t include the airbag. You want that done, that’s another grand.”
“It is what it is,” JW said. “Go ahead. Except the airbag.”
Big Al nodded tentatively. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll need cash up front.”
JW looked at him. He realized he was clenching his jaw, and let it loosen before speaking. “I pushed through the loan so you could buy this place,” he said just loud enough to be heard over the noise. “You didn’t have the credit.”
“And I appreciate that. But now I gotta pay on that loan, so I gotta have cash. I’m sure you understand.” He nodded as he spoke, but his gaze was firm.
JW nodd
ed, visibly angry. “It’ll be a couple days then. Payment schedules,” he said over the noise.
Big Al nodded in return. “I understand. I’ll leave her sittin’ there for another week or so.”
“A week?”
“Two. Whatever. But I can’t have it here forever. You know that.”
JW nodded, then walked out without saying a word. The sun was hot. He got into the pickup and slammed the door, rattling the change that had reappeared in the handle. As he turned the ignition he became acutely aware of the feathers, the beads, and the dream catcher hanging from the rearview mirror. There was a cassette tape of Eric Clapton’s Unplugged stuck in the player, and it played over and over. He punched it off. As he backed out, he saw Big Al take in the truck’s tribal license plate, then shake his head as he turned back to the car bays.
He thought about Big Al’s expression as he drove back to the rez. The entire exchange had left him feeling as if he had somehow slipped into an alternate reality, in which people like Al Bakken felt entitled to judge him—not because of his troubles, but because he was living on the reservation. He had somehow become one of Them, and there was now more to prove, more doubts to overcome. He thought he had sensed the same sort of attitude from others that morning. At the gas station, and waiting at a stoplight. No one was any less polite, but there was a coolness. Or was it all in his mind?
He turned onto the lane that ran through the trees, and then onto the barn drive that led up to Eagle’s rice operation, more determined than ever to find the evidence he needed to stop him and his bank. Then he’d see about Big Al and his late loan payments.
Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128) Page 12
