Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128)

by Otto, Shawn Lawrence

  “I think she’d hump a tree if it wasn’t stuck in the ground,” said Hayhoe. He took the two rusty gas cans out of the trunk. They pulled off the cork-gasketed lids and started pumping vaporous green gas into them. “Man, those cans are old school,” noted Cheese Whiz as they watched the vapors pour out of their wide mouths and run down over the concrete.

  “Poboy alert,” said Jeremy. They all turned and watched Grossman’s car fly by on the highway.

  “He can stop us all he wants,” shrugged Hayhoe. “We ain’t got nothing, just gettin’ ready to cut some grass for our grandmothers, be upstanding citizens.”

  “Make your grandmother’s place look citified,” said Cheese Whiz.

  “You boys need to make certain the yards on the reservation look as clean and upstanding as our yards do here in town,” said Jeremy in his best uptight white-alderman voice. They all laughed, and then Hayhoe clicked the pump off.

  Hayhoe ditched the car in a wooded path off a damp gravel road. They took turns carrying the heavy gas cans through the cut wheat field that lay between the woods and the back of the bank. They set them on the lawn between the building and the back drive, stretched their tired arms, and Hayhoe unscrewed the top of the first can.

  “This is for your dad, man,” he said, looking at Jacob. “You’re both part of us now. We stick together, Indi’n to Indi’n.” He hoisted the can and poured the green liquid over the log siding, darkening it in the moonlight. Jacob could smell the thick stench of it. Jeremy and Cheese Whiz took turns pouring from the other can as Hayhoe handed his can to Jacob. “Okay, little bro, your turn. Don’t get it on your shoes or they’ll know who did it.”

  Jacob’s hand closed around the old wooden handle. He lifted it and felt the gas sloshing back and forth inside. He splashed some out onto the log walls just as Cheese Whiz struck a light.

  The flame leaped toward Jacob in a sudden giant woof of yellow heat. “Holy shit!” yelled Jeremy.

  Hayhoe yanked Jacob back by the collar. They stumbled backward and fell to the pavement, the gas can draining on its side beside them.

  “Fuckin’ assholes, you almost burnt us!” said Hayhoe.

  “The gas can!” said Jacob.

  The fire quickly took hold. Hayhoe scrambled for the can and ran it into the field. The boys followed, then turned and looked at the blaze in frightened wonder.

  “Jesus,” said Cheese Whiz.

  “We gotta go!” said Jeremy. He began screwing on a gas cap. Hayhoe found the other cap on the edge of the grass, and they hoisted and lugged the cans back through the field, running and looking behind them as the fire continued to grow.

  “Jesus, it’s going fast, huh?” observed Hayhoe.

  A powerful fear rose in Jacob as he ran through the sharp bristle. He thought of Grossman, who had roughed him up when he had arrested him before, and he thought of how mad his dad would be if he got caught again, especially over the bank. JW’s old bank. “I can’t be caught doing this,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” said Hayhoe as he and Jeremy carried the cans back through the field. “We stick together.”

  Just then, Cheese Whiz yelled, “Cops!”

  They saw a sheriff’s cruiser racing along the highway toward the bank, its blue and red cherries turning. It pounded up over the curb cut and shot into the bank parking lot, its searchlight cutting out the night.

  “Go with him, go!” Hayhoe said to Jacob. “We’ll meet you at the car!” He nodded toward Cheese Whiz and Jacob split off with him, the sharp wheat stubble stabbing at his ankles as they angled away into the night.

  ***

  GROSSMAN MADE OUT the silhouettes of two people running with gas cans as he finished calling in the fire. He blurped his siren and flipped on his PA. “You there!” he yelled into the mike. “Stop. Put your hands up! Now!” But the figures just kept running deeper into the cut wheat, so he floored it and drove the cruiser out after them. It thumped and yawed and fishtailed in the soft earth, and he heard a rooster tail of mud spraying his wheel wells, then a sick wet thump as the car bottomed out and got stuck in a tractor rut. He shifted into reverse, but the cruiser didn’t move.

  “Shit!”

  He aimed the searchlight at the fleeing forms and got out to give chase, unholstering his service pistol. He had called in the fire as soon as he saw it, and by now he could hear the North Lake Fire Department sirens in the distance.

  “You’re not gonna get away,” he yelled at their backs. “You’re only making it worse.”

  Then one of the two figures stopped while the other kept running. Good, he thought. He could get this one to ID the other.

  “Smart move,” he yelled, and then there was the flash and bark of a gunshot.

  He wasn’t knocked out, but it felt as if he had been, even though he was fully aware of the passage of time—every split second of it. Lying on his back in the wheat stubble, Grossman focused on the burning pain in his shoulder. He reached up to touch it, and his world went white with fear when his hand came away hot and sticky with blood. He rolled over in the stubble.

  “Oh my god, oh my god,” he muttered, and then he threw up into the moist black dirt.

  For a few minutes that felt like a lifetime, Grossman lay there on his back, his shoulder throbbing. He imagined other shots whizzing overhead, between him and the flickering sky. There were northern lights. He could hear nothing, but he was certain that if he lifted his head it would be shot off. His heart pounding, he gingerly felt the shoulder with his right hand. The bullet had cut the skin and muscle above his left collar bone, but it was just a flesh wound. He could hear the fire engine arriving, the voices of the firefighters as they hooked up and began battling the fire. And then he heard Dan Barden’s voice, calling out to him from near his car. He wanted to answer, but his voice was lost in his chest. Finally, after some effort, he rolled onto his knees, got slowly to his feet, and tottered back over the rutted field.

  “My god, Bob, you’re hit!” said Barden when he saw him approaching. Beyond him a fire engine stood in the lot. The firefighters trained a hose on the blaze, sending out a cloud of steam that rose white and billowy through the truck’s lights and into the night.

  “I’m not feeling so well,” Grossman replied, and lay back on the hood of his cruiser.

  The fire was doused quickly. The damage to the thick logs was minimal, Grossman heard the captain say, as a paramedic daubed his wound with white gauze. “Thanks to your quick action, Bob,” he added with a respectful nod.

  Against Grossman’s better judgment, he let Barden drive him to the North Lake hospital, where he spent three hours getting stitches and a bandage, and then down to County, where he filed a report and called his boss, Big Bill Donovan, at home.

  His wife Margie came to pick him up, her face white with fear. She drove him home while Barden went up with a tow truck to retrieve his cruiser.

  The days that followed held small rooms and coffee. County deputies and agents from the FBI and the BIA questioned him ad nauseam. Officers canvassed the reservation, the school, the gas stations, and the trading post. They hung out at the Pit Stop, at the Tamarack Restaurant and the Many Lakes Casino, asking questions about who had started the fire, and who had shot Deputy Grossman. It was a full-court press, but the Native Americans weren’t talking. Nobody knew anything. Or at least they said they didn’t. But Grossman knew they hung together.

  Despite searching extensively, the police didn’t find the bullet that had hit him. Big Bill actually asked Dan Barden to check Grossman’s service pistol to make certain he hadn’t inflicted the wound himself, a line of inquiry Grossman found both insulting and laughable.

  Big Bill offered him paid leave per union rules, but Grossman insisted on going back on duty the next day, as if nothing had happened. “You fall off a horse, you get back on,” he said. It was important to make a statement to the Native kids that they couldn’t intimidate him, and it was good PR for his image with the public. Still, for safety’s sa
ke, Big Bill reassigned him to the south territory until the investigation was finished.

  As he drove up and down the highways around Virginia and Hibbing, Grossman couldn’t stop thinking about the shooting. He began to wonder if the bullet hadn’t borne some kind of old evil Indian magic curse, infecting him in a spiritual sense. It was irrational, he knew, but over the coming days this conviction took hold.

  29

  It was on the morning of the third day that JW finally swam back from the darkness. A metallic smashing and scraping slowly clarified, eventually taking shape as the clattering and sizzling of a pan on the stove. He smelled bacon and heard an egg crack. He turned over, his head dry and thick, and saw a woman in his galley kitchen.

  “Carol?”

  “You had no bacon, no eggs, what the hell do you eat around here?” It was Mona. She had a cigarette going, and blew smoke into his bedroom.

  He turned back to the wall, feeling exhausted in spite of the fact that he had been in bed for days.

  “I like what you’ve done to the place, though. This one used to be mine, before we started getting the casino payments.”

  “Please go away,” he said to the wall.

  “Go away? I just got here. I tried calling you out with beer last night, but you wouldn’t answer. I figured you were dead or something, figured I better get down here with some food so we could all celebrate. There goes another ugly white man.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because you got a boy out there who needs you. Not that you noticed. Not that his dad noticed either, he’s so damn fired up about getting that damn bank going. Why don’t you get cleaned up, you look like shit.”

  JW stared at the wall and listened to her jabbing the bacon around. “I’m serious! Get your ass out of bed!”

  He sighed and turned over. After a moment he swung his dead legs slowly down to the floor. He sat still for a moment—a wave of dizziness—then got up and stumbled into the bathroom, clearing his dry throat.

  “Don’t just take a pee and brush your teeth,” he heard her say outside the cardboard-thin door. “I expect a man to be showered and shaved and nicely dressed when I cook him breakfast.”

  JW flushed the toilet and made it so.

  When he stepped back into the kitchen he saw she had found a tablecloth that he didn’t even know he had, a bright yellow tourist map of Minnesota, with lumberjacks in the northeast, the Mississippi headwaters in the northwest, and a jumping trout in the center near Brainerd. Laid out on it were plates of purple-brown mazaan pancakes, bacon, eggs over easy, coffee, Many Lakes Ojibwe maple syrup, and orange juice. A plastic trash can by the door served as a basket for the unused foodstuffs and cooking utensils she had brought. She seemed happy.

  “Move! Sit!”

  He slipped onto the bench by the door. The morning was warmer than the last few had been, which he took as a good omen. There were deep half-moons under his eyes that the shower hadn’t cured, and his hands were shaky from low blood sugar. A fecund, cool breeze wafted in through the windows and over the tablecloth, smelling of earth, oak bark and leaves.

  Mona’s shaggy hair hung around her face in the cool morning light. He watched the shifting seas of her eyes as she chewed her bacon, holding a half piece between her fingers. Indians could have light eyes and even blonde hair, he knew, but her eyes were striking. They had fine dark rims around the irises that gave her a slightly wild quality. JW set down his fork and swallowed.

  “Thank you.”

  “Mmm Hmm. So what are you so depressed about?” She picked up her mug of coffee and held it between her hands, warming them the same way Carol did.

  JW laughed painfully and poked at his pancakes with his fork. “Well. I lost my son, my job, my reputation, my house, and all my money. And now I’ve lost what was left of my family.”

  “I heard you had a gambling problem. But you’re not gambling. You’re lying in bed.”

  JW sighed. “I guess I just decided to feel bad, and that’s the safest place to do it.”

  “Decided to feel bad. Kinda weird.”

  “Instead of going and gambling it away, which is what I’ve been doing. I was sitting there in the casino parking lot, and I thought, ‘I don’t want to go back into the avalanche. I can just sit here and feel this shitty feeling,’ you know, ‘for one minute. That’s doable. Then re-evaluate.’ And the minutes have sort of strung together. I’m hoping it’ll run out, but I would feel guilty if it did.” He shrugged. It sounded stupid.

  “Actually, that’s sort of profound,” she said, then nodded as if that confirmed something, and looked out at the trees. “Although judging from the condition I found you in, I don’t know if it’s the best long-term strategy.”

  He snorted and nodded, and they went back to their breakfast.

  “I have a question for you,” he said finally, and finished swallowing. “How did Jacob’s mom die?”

  She looked back down at her food. He sensed a sudden momentousness, as if she didn’t want to get into it. She took up her knife and cut off another piece of pancake.

  “She OD’d.” Her mouth drew into a thin line. She crammed the pancake in and began chewing.

  JW nodded slowly. “Did she always do drugs?”

  “No. That was my problem.” She stared at him defiantly as she stuffed another piece in her mouth. The feathers in her hair hung by her cheek. He could tell that she was ready for a fight, but he had never felt less judgmental. He nodded.

  She shook her head and began to pick at her food with the tip of her fork. “She was on the straight and narrow.”

  “Why did she start?”

  “Look, I don’t know what he’s told you, but it wasn’t my fault, okay?”

  “I didn’t mean that. I don’t know anything about it.” His voice was gentle. He reached for a way to make her understand, some gift of intimacy. “I used to be real close to my son. I mean, we were”—he shook his head and held up two fingers—“like that. But as he got older, he kinda got away from me. I don’t know how. I think I was just too busy. And he just fell in with some rough kids. But maybe it wasn’t even that, maybe it was just bad luck. He tried to miss a deer on the highway just east of town, and he crashed. Gone, just like that. After the funeral I … I thought I was fine. You know: the strong husband, man of the family, wife and daughter grieving uncontrollably, but I was okay. And then I just started spending more time at the casino. I don’t even know how it happened. I guess it was just a little shot of hope. Or sometimes I think maybe I was just trying to fight back against chance, against the fucking bad luck that killed him and ruined my life. And you know what? I have no fucking idea, and it doesn’t matter. Things don’t always have to make sense.”

  She nodded slightly, then looked down at her plate. “Her boss at the bank, he used to run the branch up here. He hired her out of high school to come work in Minneapolis.”

  JW thought he vaguely remembered her, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “He was really nice to her, told her how smart she was. He kept promoting her, and we all thought, ‘God she’s really made it.’ But then one day she calls me and says she just talked to her boss on her cell. He was back up here, and he called her down in Minneapolis and said that there was a discrepancy in the books, that somebody had reported her. He said he was going to call the FBI. She was totally freaking out. I mean, this girl was valedictorian, okay? Johnny was her dream. Building this bank was her dream. There’s no way she would put all that in jeopardy by stealing.”

  Mona’s righteous anger was rising. JW frowned and shook his head in agreement.

  “She drove all the way up here to show him proof, but she was nervous.” Mona swallowed, and looked out at the leaves, her chin on the butt of her hand and her wild eyes shining. “She got careless. Fucking girl just got careless.”

  “What do you mean?” JW asked. He felt certain he was on the cusp of something.

  She sighed deeply. Rather than look at him, she told
the story to the trees. “Her boss was in a room at the casino hotel. He didn’t want proof. At first she thought she didn’t have any choice. I mean, what woman would put herself in that situation, right? She must have deserved it somehow. But then she told him no. She said ‘No!’ And he raped her.”

  JW closed his eyes. “I uh, I …” He shook his head, fumbling for a new hold on things. “Why didn’t she press charges?”

  Mona looked back at him. “JW.” She spoke to him in the tone of a disappointed mother. Even in her anguish, she was obviously disgusted by the question. “Tribes can’t prosecute white people. Don’t you know that? And state laws don’t apply the same way on reservations. And then he had whatever bullshit ‘evidence.’ Jorgenson’s like you. He works the loopholes.”

  He looked at her, instantly ashamed. “Like me?”

  Mona continued, disregarding his objection. “She bought a morning-after pill and she came here. She wanted to get high and forget all about it before she went home to her man and her baby, and I was—” she froze and her voice broke “—fucking stupid enough to let her.” She wept at the trees for a moment, then looked directly back at JW. “Johnny’s never forgiven me. And I guess I haven’t either.”

  He sat, frozen, and listened to her quiet sobbing. The sun in the birches’ yellow leaves spoke of fall, of vulnerability and decomposition.

  30

  When the doorbell rang, Jacob was thinking about the fire’s aftermath and stabbing his knee with a compass. It was something he had begun doing lately, without knowing why. He sat on the toilet and pushed the sharp end of the compass into the soft skin on the side of his kneecap until it bled. The pain somehow brought focus and some fleeting measure of absolution from his gnawing fear and guilt.

  He was at loose ends, his mind shuffling and disjointed. He and Cheese Whiz had split from Hayhoe and Jeremy at the bank and run in a different direction. They heard the gunshot and kept running, afraid that one of the other two had been shot by Grossman. They hid in the trees, afraid to move or make a sound. When the fire was put out, they circled back, only to find that the car was gone. They waited for half an hour, wondering if Hayhoe or Jeremy would come back for them, and then they decided to walk onto the reservation, so no one would know they had been in town. They stayed in the ditches along the highway and cut through the fields to the reservation road, and then Cheese Whiz called his uncle Smokestack, who picked them up from the old sweat-lodge site, where they had been drinking beer earlier in the day. Eagle was angry when he learned that Jacob had left in spite of the fact that he was grounded, but then Jacob told him how they had been at Jeremy’s grandmother’s, eating fry bread and listening to her stories, and then how Cheese Whiz had shown him how to do a sweat, how they build the lodge out of birch branches and deer hides, but how his uncle Smokestack just uses tarps, why worry about deer hides, but the fire tender would still use a deer antler to carry the hot grandfathers one by one from the fire into the lodge, and then how they would throw sweet grass and water on the hot stones, swatting themselves with fresh branches as they asked the spirits in, Jacob saw his father’s face soften. He rushed through the story, making the account so detailed and enthusiastic that his dad finally raised a hand to cut him off. Instead of punishing Jacob, he just sent him to his room with a warning not to do it again.