Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128)

by Otto, Shawn Lawrence

  Jacob was dumbfounded. This was impossible. JW had made him return the cigars. He was his friend. Something was wrong.

  Grossman stumbled to his feet, lost his balance, then stood again. He put his hands on his knees for a moment, and hacked deeply, silver bands of snot and saliva streaming from his nose and mouth. Fladeboe got JW to place his hands on the trailer wall, then holstered his gun and began to frisk him. Barden’s handheld squawked and Grossman’s voice came raspy over the radio.

  “We got it! We got the money!” he gasped.

  A sense of confusion and betrayal rose in Jacob. He had seen JW come out of the trailer with his own eyes. JW had stolen the money.

  “—whole bag of it,” rasped Grossman. “He was burning it on the stove.” He wiped a stream of snot from his face.

  “Ten-four,” said Richardson. He was standing beside Jacob. “Is it still burning?”

  “Just what’s on the stove. I gotta go back in and put it out,” replied Grossman, turning back to the door. But then Fladeboe said something to him and Grossman nodded and went to handcuff JW, while Fladeboe took a deep breath and stepped up into the trailer. Then Jacob heard the hollow metal whoosh of a fire extinguisher and the smoke began to slow.

  “The son of a bitch,” said Eagle, his hands still cuffed behind his back. He looked at Jacob. “I’m sorry I exposed you to him, son. I should have known better.”

  “But he was at the eagle feather ceremony, with Aunt Mona—”

  “They found the money in his trailer, son. This whole thing was his doing.”

  “I guess the FBI had it wrong,” said Deputy Barden. He glanced at Richardson, who nodded in reply.

  Barden stepped up behind Eagle and hiked his arms up. Jacob saw tears come to his father’s eyes, then heard the cuffs fall away with a dull clink. His father brought his hands around in front of himself, rubbing the angry purple rings on his wrists.

  Jacob looked at him with concern. “Are you okay?”

  Eagle nodded.

  ***

  “OKAY, JW.” GROSSMAN was wheezing as they stood by one of the cars, but otherwise seemed to have recovered from the smoke inhalation. “I’m gonna read you your rights. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you—”

  JW looked up at Eagle and Jacob and the agents on the front deck. A flock of mergansers flew overhead, carping and squabbling. The sky was teakettle blue. He could see Eagle’s intense stare and feel his hatred radiating down at him. There was nothing he could say.

  Jacob toed the ground, no doubt feeling betrayed. He saw Fladeboe intercept Mona as she rushed down the road.

  “What’s wrong? Why are you arresting him?”

  JW caught her eye and shook his head, attempting to convey that she should not say a thing. He saw the worry and confusion on her face, her feathers flashing in the morning sun.

  “Just stay back, Mona,” instructed Fladeboe, holding up his hands to bar her way. “She’s the local drunk,” he said to Grossman. She slapped him, prompting Fladeboe to grab her wrists. “Settle down, Mona,” he said, and walked her backward.

  JW breathed heavily through his nose, but he said nothing and looked away.

  ***

  ON THE DECK, Jacob was filled with an undirected rage. His heart told him something was wrong. “Dad, it can’t be—”

  Eagle raised a hand to silence him.

  “You need to listen to me!” Jacob said, trying again. But Eagle was focused on Richardson.

  “It looks like we may have had a bad tip,” said the agent. “I apologize.”

  Eagle nodded curtly, then watched as the agents and Deputy Barden began walking down to the cars.

  “Dad,” Jacob said, but Eagle cut him off again.

  “Not now,” he said. Then he raised his voice, addressing the agents. “If he was your tipster, he was probably going to plant that up here. He was trying to stop us.” Richardson stopped and turned back.

  “That’s interesting,” he said. “Why do you say that?”

  “I’m opening a new tribal bank. You might have heard that it, too, was set on fire, but mine burned down. We were going ahead anyway. You think this is a coincidence? He came out here and got a job working for me. He was trying to destroy us.”

  Jacob was boiling inside. He had had enough. “You’re wrong!” he yelled. He shoved his dad and stepped off the porch.

  “Jacob!” Eagle called out after him, but Jacob was heading down the hill. He needed to explain that JW had been out with them last night. And he needed to know what was really going on.

  He heard Grossman talking to JW as he opened the back door of the cruiser. “You had it all, and you threw it away. And for what? A lousy roll of the dice?”

  JW looked at him, but said nothing.

  “Listen to me!” Jacob said, racing up to the car. “You’re making a mistake! He was with us last night!”

  Grossman pointed at him.

  “Back the fuck off.” He called to Barden on his radio. “Dan, can you get me a fucking perimeter?”

  “Ten-four,” barked the radio, and Barden started walking down to the cars.

  “Stay back or I’m going to fuck you up.” He pointed at Jacob, then turned back to JW and put a hand on his shoulder. “Watch your head,” he said.

  Jacob grabbed his arm. “Just listen to me!”

  The blow came fast as Grossman spun and backhanded him hard. Jacob stumbled backward and fell onto the gravel. His knife flew out of his shirt pocket and sprung open.

  “Weapon!” yelled Grossman.

  Jacob scrambled to his feet, his face burning and his eyes blind with rage. He let out a roar of frustration and rushed Grossman.

  The blow had sound, a blast that hit Jacob in the chest and blew him backward with an otherworldly force. He stumbled, but stayed on his feet. He put a hand to his chest and felt a sticky warmth and an aching. His hands came away greasy red.

  Grossman’s Ruger was smoking and his chest was heaving. The painful ring of the shot filled his ears.

  He heard Eagle screaming, and turned to see him running toward them.

  His Aunt Mona was crying and fighting to get out of Fladeboe’s grasp, but she was making no sound at all.

  “Goddamn you, Bob, he’s just a kid!” he heard JW yelling from somewhere. “Call a fucking ambulance!” It sounded like tinkles.

  There was a rushing and then he was in his dad’s arms on the gravel. His lungs wouldn’t lift. His heart pounded in his chest. He felt the warmth on his back and it was somehow comforting. He let out an involuntary, burbly cough and felt the hot, coppery-tin taste of blood in his mouth. He struggled to wipe his dry lips, and his hand came away with a pink-tinged froth.

  “Jacob!” His dad’s face loomed before him, but the sound of his voice came from a mile away. “Jacob! Can you breathe?”

  His dad pulled his own T-shirt off and pressed it into him. He shook his head. He tried to speak. His breath was weak and came bubbled and dark, and he struggled and grappled with an unspeakable urgency. His dad leaned down and put his ear close. “I’m sorry,” he managed to whisper, and then the darkness rushed over him.

  ***

  JW RODE IN the back of Fladeboe’s car, destined for booking at the Bass County Government Center. A metallic bitter taste filled his mouth, and his clothes and hair reeked of smoke. The blood from the gash over his swollen left eye had coagulated and was sealing his eye shut. He could feel it, dry and scabby, on his cheek. The ambulance rushed and bumped on ahead of them on the dusty reservation road, leaving them in a cloud of dust so thick that Fladeboe had to work his wipers.

  “Can you turn on the emergency radio in case they say anything about him?” asked JW.

  “It is on,” said Fladeboe.

  But there was only a dead silence, cut by periodic snippets of barely intelligible communication from other tow
ns in the far twilight of radio range.

  They pulled out onto the highway, past Eagle’s burned bank. He stared at the tag hanging and spinning from Fladeboe’s rearview mirror: a picture of four Indian chiefs in traditional headdresses. The caption read, Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism Since 1492.

  ***

  THE AMBULANCE DOORS opened outward at North Lake Hospital’s emergency entrance. The EMT with Eagle and Jacob hit a lever as he got out, and the gurney’s legs scissored down onto the asphalt as the driver came around to take the other end. Jacob was unconscious, with an oxygen mask on his face and tubes running into his arms, but they had managed to restore a faint pulse that ran through him like a tiny serpent. Eagle followed as they wheeled the gurney toward the sliding doors, bags of plasma and saline swinging violently from the chrome rack.

  As they rushed down the wide hallway, Eagle became aware of a woman in hospital blues at his side, saying something about insurance. Two RNs ran up to join the gurney, and the EMTs filled them in as they hurried forward. Jacob was pale and pasty as lard.

  “Sir?”

  The woman’s hand was on his arm. Eagle reached into his back pocket.

  “Here’s my wallet,” he said, hurrying after the gurney. “It’s all in there.”

  “Thank you, but I need you to come with me. You can’t be with him in surgery anyway. Please, sir.”

  One of the RNs looked up at him and nodded, and in that moment he felt Jacob’s soul slipping away from him. The force of his will could not keep Jacob alive. He was in the hands of others, who neither knew nor cared for him. As he stopped his forward rush, Eagle felt he was somehow finally giving up, and a sickening knot swelled in his heart as he watched the EMTs and the RNs wheel his son away around a corner.

  “Sir?”

  He turned to the woman and nodded, and she led him into a maze of glass-walled offices.

  “You may want to wash up a bit,” she said as they stepped into her office. He suddenly realized that he was shirtless and streaked with his son’s blood. She pushed a folded hospital gown at him and nodded toward a back corridor. “Men’s room is the second door on the left.”

  Eagle elbowed the door open and turned on the faucet, leaving sticky smudges on the handles. There was only one sink and toilet, and the door locked from the inside. He flipped the lock with his elbow, then went back to the sink and began washing the blood from his hands. Red rivers swirled around the white porcelain and ran down the drain. He pulled his hands out of the water and stared at the mirror.

  “My God,” he said, “what have I done?”

  V

  THE PAYOUT

  35

  In describing prison to Julie, JW observed that to Midwest Lutherans and hardened criminals alike, beauty has a palliative effect. In fact, he continued, beauty is as essential to the soul as air is to the body. The state prison in Stillwater was a post-Victorian example of this principle, and he described it in letters the way he once told her of the organelles of cells and the gill pouches of pharyngulas embryos from whence fish and people both spring.

  Built in 1914 on the upper bluffs of the Saint Croix River, which separates Minnesota from Wisconsin, the prison’s tall brick façades had enormous windows and decorative flourishes that would be deemed impractical and unnecessary today. Its population of murderers, thieves, and drug dealers spent their lives in a twenty-acre square that was surrounded by guard towers and a high brick wall erected by the inmates themselves. There were buildings for the administration along the river side of the square, a hospital, a counseling center, special disciplinary housing (otherwise known as solitary), three industrial manufacturing buildings, and three very large cell houses.

  The interior walls were finished with light blonde bricks, and the bars, gates, and railings were of blue-gray painted steel, a contrast that gave the building a light, airy feeling. The floors were made of a faintly pinkish stone that was polished to a reflective shine, and the corridor floors had a slight dip, worn thinner in the center by the daily traffic of a hundred years.

  There were two main cell houses, each containing a detached, completely enclosed cell block—four tiers of blue-gray painted steel bars, cells, and catwalks—that sailed like a battleship inside in its own private, bounded ocean, never touching the outside walls. The other house, D block, had five tiers.

  But what really characterized the prison was its enormous windows, which let in a wash of high milky light of the kind that would suitable for a painter’s studio. This was especially true in the cell houses, whose exterior walls were three-quarters glass. In fair weather, these steel-framed window walls could be operated with levers to completely open the cell blocks to the breeze. The effect was of soaring freedom, which was sometimes a torture, but more often a balm.

  The catwalks of JW’s cell block had a catwalk that led along the cells like the gunwales of a battleship. During open hours, prisoners who were not at work stood on the walkways and leaned over the jointed pipe railings, talking or staring out the windows at the world beyond the walls. Otherwise they congregated by the telephones and exercise equipment that stood under the vast window walls in the wide stone aisle of the first floor.

  Yet despite the beauty of the windows, and of the pipe-jointed railings and the pink floors, the cells themselves were instruments of torture. Numbered with black stencils, each was a mere six feet wide by nine deep, its front wall of bars the perfect receptacle for the guards’ night sticks. The cell offered neither space nor privacy, nor room to think too far beyond the mundane and the daily, and JW hadn’t anticipated this closing of his mental world. Each cell held a single metal bunk rack hung from the wall with two solid steel brackets, a tiny sink, an attached metal desk with a built-in stainless stool, a bookcase, and a stainless toilet without seat or lid, which sat in full view of inmates and guards, and of escorted visitors and administrators of both genders. All showers were on the first floor, at the far ends of each cell house, and afforded a similar lack of privacy.

  At some point, in light of these conditions, modesty inevitably gave way to a sense of indifference, as if the men there were little more than cattle. Over time, JW had come to share this immodest apathy, with one notable exception—he still closely guarded one last important secret: that he was, in fact, innocent, at least of the crime he had confessed to. He couldn’t stop wondering if the space he bought Johnny Eagle had even been capitalized on in the wake of the events on the reservation.

  It was a warm September day again, a little over a year after his arrest, and the windows in his cell block stood open to let in the breeze. Moving air lifted things and blew away the smells of defeat that sometimes seemed to emanate from the steel itself. He lay on the bunk in his first-tier cell, reading a copy of The Economist from the library and listening to the radio on low. Radios and TVs were supplied for good behavior, and came in clear plastic housings so inmates couldn’t hide contraband in them. Cell phones, tablets, and computers were forbidden, and all communication with “the streets,” as the guards called the world outside the prison wall, went through monitored channels.

  JW had tried several times to find news of Jacob and Johnny Eagle since his arrest, but he hadn’t turned up anything reliable. Carol and Julie had visited shortly after he was incarcerated, and JW asked them what they knew. Sitting opposite him in the visiting room, separated by a five-foot sea of blue carpet, Carol looked disconcerted. “Honey,” she said, “I guess I just don’t understand any of this.”

  “I don’t expect you to,” he said. Then he asked if they knew whether Jacob had survived the shooting. They said they thought he had, but that they’d heard he was in a long-term care facility. When his subsequent questions went unanswered, he eventually stopped asking.

  Then he heard of a new Ojibwe inmate from northern Minnesota, and he hunted the man down in woodshop. The inmate told him he’d heard about the shooting, and that the boy had died. JW was not permitted to make unsolicited telephone calls, so he s
ent letters to Eagle and to Mona, apologizing and begging for forgiveness. These, too, went unanswered.

  Over the following months, his world had slowly contracted to what could be found within the prison walls. No one came to visit him. No one wrote or called. And as a result, JW turned increasingly inward. He became wiry and jaded and focused on the job at hand. But in idle moments he would think back to the events leading up to his arrest, shifting and re-shifting them until patterns of meaning that had seemed entirely clear grew murky and confused. His greatest source of comfort was a clear sense that he had behaved honorably, even if no one outside knew it. And yet—

  Jacob.

  He spent days mulling over minute details of the entire last year of his free life, building vast gossamer webs of cause and effect, and then tearing them to shreds, forcing himself to stick only to the known facts, and to abandon any thoughts of happy endings, of karma and people getting what they deserved. That way lead to the unending dry road of depression and loneliness. He was beyond that now.

  In the end, he told himself, life was not joy but catastrophe. There was no way around it, and so he needn’t feel so bad. We all lose everything in the end. For him it was just a little sooner, and he had at least done it for a cause.

  And yet there was the boy.

  It burned at him, even though he couldn’t imagine having done anything differently. His mistake was that he had acted too late, resisted Jorgenson too late, and been too slow on the uptake. In short, his were defects of speed and intelligence, perhaps, but not of character.

  And yet.

  He probably never should have gotten involved with Jacob. Had he not made him care, then at least the shooting wouldn’t have happened. But then he doubled back yet again. Given the circumstances, the racism, the shackling arms of the past reaching forward, guiding everybody into ignorance of the past—could it have gone any other way? Given Grossman, could it have gone any other way? Was it even responsible to contemplate? Had he acted with the necessary kid gloves? Was it not his duty to first do no harm? Had he always been a prisoner of circumstance? Was he a killer, just the same?