Byron's Lane

by Wallace Rogers

  “We’ll moor the boat in a trendy marina, live on it, and use it to attract rich, recently divorced women at least ten years younger than us,” Adams decided. “After a year in Florida interviewing prospects, we’ll pick two out to marry—one for you, one for me. We’ll use our money to buy a racehorse and a minor league baseball team and live happily ever after.”

  My hands reached for the sides of my seat as Adams approached a bend in the road; he was halfway committed to passing a cement truck in front of us. Part of me was listening to what he was saying. Most of me was trying to determine if he was really intending to pass the truck on a fast-approaching blind curve.

  “I’ve thought a lot lately about getting back in the horse business,” Adams said, downshifting, pulling his car closer to the back of the truck. “I’ve actually been thinking about that more than I’ve thought about getting married again. I’ve had better luck with horses.”

  He laughed. I gripped the sides of my seat tighter.

  A few years before Adams was first elected to the legislature, the state government passed laws that allowed pari-mutuel betting. A robust thoroughbred horse-racing business briefly flourished in Minnesota. A racetrack was built near where he lived. Some of his neighbors originally moved to the area intending to breed, board, and raise thoroughbred horses for a living. Adams formed a partnership with two of his friends and they bought a gelded yearling, the last son of the famous racehorse Alydar. The father of Adams’s horse was a notorious underachiever who made a career of finishing second to Affirmed, a racehorse of lesser stature by every measure, who somehow managed to win the Triple Crown in 1978. The only place Alydar ever beat Affirmed was on the stud farm.

  Adams’s horse was an accident. His unremarkable mother was in a fenced field she wasn’t supposed to be in when Alydar showed up in a frisky mood, despite his old age.

  Belying his checkered beginning, for two miraculous years Adams’s horse performed like his father was expected to. The horse developed a fierce following in the Upper Midwest and made his owners a fair amount of money. Their wild ride ended when their prized possession broke his right front leg during a workout, the day before the biggest race of his life at Arlington Park in Chicago.

  Big-time horse racing died in Minnesota about the same time Adams and his partners retired their young thoroughbred to pasture. Native American Indian tribes were building gambling casinos. A large one sprouted up on reservation land three miles from the track. Slot machines and blackjack were easier ways to gamble than betting on horses. They provided instant outcomes and immediate gratification. Gamblers no longer had to study the Daily Racing Form, stand in line to place a bet, and wait for twenty minutes to watch a two-minute horse race. Adams bought his first Porsche with part of his share of his horse’s winnings. He invested most of the rest of it in the stock market. He eventually drained his investment account to make a huge down payment on his oversized house.

  Adams’s second Porsche jumped out into the southbound lane, accelerated with a deep-throated groan and a burst of power, and scooted back to our side of the road—five car-lengths in front of the cement truck and comfortably ahead of an oncoming bus. I relaxed my grip on my seat. As utility poles alongside the road passed by my periphery with the frequency of fence posts, we honed our Florida plans.

  “Living with characters like us will provide our new wives with excitement like they’ll have never known in their previous marriages. By the time we’re broke and they’re on to us, they’ll be too old to make lifestyle adjustments and dump us,” Adams said. We both laughed and continued on down the road.

  Adams knew exactly where we were going. He had been there before. It was a favorite destination for Democrats seeking a place to do what they used to do in smoke-filled big-city hotel rooms. This was the great outdoors, a green, environmentally-friendly setting. In the north woods, plotting and deal making seemed wholesome. The place we were headed was a hiding spot known to Democrats in Washington as well as Saint Paul; black-and-white and color photographs of three generations of prominent politicians displayed on a wall at the lodge gave them all away.

  The resort’s location was betrayed by one small sign, nailed discreetly on top of a mailbox post. An arrow attached to the bottom of the sign pointed down a narrow crushed-gravel road that bisected a dense forest of white pines. At the road’s end was a crystal clear four-hundred-acre lake shaped like the big sectional couch in Adams’s living room. When the tree-lined private drive reached sight of the lake, it widened out into a landscaped parking lot that comfortably bumped up against the front entrance of a massive two-story log cabin lodge. The lodge was flanked on both sides by six cabins. Each of them had frontage on an elbow of what I soon learned was appropriately called Pine Lake. A stable of horses and a well-manicured golf course provided amenities for guests who wanted more than a place to hike, swim, fish, or canoe.

  The small band of Democrats—eleven men and four women, the state party’s leadership structure—had the place to themselves that weekend. There were eight vehicles in the parking lot. The tourist season had ended on Labor Day, three weeks before. No media were apparently present. Adams told me that the Democrats inside were probably in a bad mood, upset that they’d have to tolerate his presence, listen to his arguments, and consider his opinions for the next eighteen hours. “If they knew the media wouldn’t be around, they probably wouldn’t have asked me to come.”

  Adams and I checked into our guest rooms. We changed into the kind of casual clothes that politicians like to be seen wearing but generally don’t wear well. By the time we joined the group they had already convened for their kick-off cocktail hour in the lodge’s Great Room. We were half an hour late. A dozen faces took note when we walked in.

  The large room was windowless. Its lacquered rough wood décor should have made the place heavy, dim, and gloomy, but the birch logs burning in a massive stone fireplace and soft table-lamp lighting gave the place an unexpectedly intimate, cozy feeling.

  Bouncing among small cliques of people scattered around the bar, Adams introduced me to all his comrades—state house and senate legislators and two full-time party officials. They were cordial but seemed a bit edgy having someone from outside their inner circle suddenly thrust in their midst. Whenever the conversation allowed, I assured them that I wasn’t expecting to attend their meetings—that I had come for the cocktail hour, the ride from Minneapolis, and the fresh air. Adams pulled me aside and scolded me for setting their minds at ease so quickly. He had mischievously spread a story around that I was a card-carrying East Coast Republican.

  Like a barn full of cats nervously flicking their tails, the congregation had been whipped into a state of mild agitation before we joined them. Most of Adams’s workmates were naturally vivacious and excitable, but they were unusually animated that late Friday afternoon. Word had leaked about the shooting at Adams’s house. Wild rumors buzzing around the room when we joined the group made it impossible for Adams to avoid talking about what had happened. He had no choice but to assemble everybody in front of the fireplace and tell them about it.

  “On Monday night, somebody took a shot from the field behind my backyard that hit the side of my house. I was standing on my back deck at the time. As you can see, it missed me.” Adams chuckled; nobody in his audience joined him. He recalibrated.

  “It was probably a stray shot from a kid in the field hunting rabbits. I’m not worried about it. It’s nice to see so many of my friends concerned about my well-being.” Adams smiled again. The room was quiet.

  Then the state’s house majority leader spoke: “I heard the FBI is involved in a big way, investigating the shooting. What’s that all about?” He clearly knew the answer. He wanted to measure Adams’s response.

  Adams’s smile disappeared. “Look, Pete, I was a bit critical of radical Islam in a couple of pieces I wrote after I got back from Iraq. The Feds want to be sure there’s no cause-and-effect
here. This wasn’t some radical Muslim’s doing. They’re better shots.” This time quiet laughter rippled through the room.

  As he shared his rabbit hunter theory, the tone of his voice was more hesitant and measured than it had been the afternoon before. The veneer on his bravado was beginning to wear off and reveal streaks of concern. I wasn’t sure why. I made a mental note to ask him about that during the drive back to Minneapolis.

  His audience’s interest was different from mine. I feared harm being done to a dear friend; they felt a direct threat. Had al Qaeda followed Adams to Minnesota? What if al Qaeda tried to stage their next attempt somewhere in the State Capitol? What were the chances of collateral damage—that they’d be the deliberately chosen victims of someone wanting to dramatically, emphatically respond to what Adams had written?

  He told me later that he was sure the leaked news had come to his colleagues by way of the office of the state police. He was upset about it. Sensing my rekindled anxiety, he pulled me aside and told me the same thing he’d said at the conclusion of his short talk with the

  Democrats: “I’ll attend to this on Monday. Don’t people have anything better to talk about?”

  Between trips to the hors d’oeuvre table, I stumbled into the middle of small groups of intense people. Except for the shooting at Adams’s house, every conversation was about public opinion polls, fundraising strategies, and techniques to get out the vote. I heard nothing about governing. There was no Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, or Paul Wellstone anywhere in the room, willing or ready to address controversial public policy issues or make hard decisions.

  During the drive up, Adams had shared his opinion that Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party had gradually lost its soul over the last twenty years. The Republicans had lost theirs, too, he added. So the net effect was a wash. Both political parties were addicted to big money contributions and obsessed with not offending anyone. The essential skill that separated leaders from foot soldiers in politics these days, he told me, was the ability to determine which way the wind was blowing and where the masses were moving, and to run out in front and lead.

  He’d laughed and spoke in a deep robotic voice: “‘I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?’ I’ll bet you don’t know who said that.”

  “Benjamin Disraeli,” I’d quickly answered.

  Happy hour was winding down. Adams’s colleagues decided my presence was temporary and non-threatening. Nobody seemed too interested in me, what I did or where I came from, beyond the usual innocuous, gratuitous things strangers ask each other when they’re pushed together at cocktail parties. None of the people I met had a talent for that special kind of inane conversation. No one fooled me into thinking they were really listening to my answers to their perfunctory questions. I found this to be odd among successful politicians. It was a glaring lack of an important skill set. When I eventually made my way back to Adams, I told him so.

  He laughed. Aware of the irony in his response, he assured me that they all acted differently when they were talking to constituents and potential contributors—and that they figured me to be neither.

  After everybody had funneled into an adjacent dining room for a working dinner, I ambled back to my guest room and changed into sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and running shoes. With the assistance of the young man who had checked us in at the front desk, I collected a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a Diet Dr Pepper. He found me a paddle in a closet just inside the lodge’s front door and led me outside to an upturned canoe, which we turned over and moved to the edge of the lake. I thanked him as I put my bag of food on its silver aluminum floor, waved off his offer to help, and pushed the small, short canoe smoothly into the water. I hopped into it just as its trailing half slipped contact with the sandy shoreline. I proceeded to explore Pine Lake, as much as I could of it in the remaining daylight.

  The water was dead calm. Breezes blowing near the lake’s surface made small ripples that sparkled when touched by what was left of the day’s sunlight. The waves showed the ghostly wind’s progress crossing the lake and disappearing in stands of poplar, pine, aspen, and birch trees on the far side of it. Besides whispering velvet gusts of wind, the only noise on the lake came from my paddle gently churning the water, and the sound the canoe made as it slowly, deliberately moved across its blue-green surface. The brown, rust, green, gold, and red shades of the trees that surrounded the lake reflected spectacularly in its water-mirror and grew ever-dimmer as the sun started to fall into clouds forming just above the treetops on the western horizon.

  Cool air moved over water still warm from a summer’s worth of heating. At places on the lake that were already shaded by the trees, small wisps of fog began to assemble. As light faded all around me, the patches of mist combined and formed a tissue-thin gray cloud that attached itself to the water. I paddled the canoe toward the fog bank. As I cut through its wall, I felt the fog’s cool moistness on my face. I was reminded of what Adams had said about the way Christina made him feel.

  I stopped once in the mist and ate my dinner. The damp cloudy cloak around me induced some deep thinking. I missed Maggie. I wished out loud she was there in the canoe with me. I wondered why someone would want to shoot Jonathan Adams.

  Dusk’s light had faded away by the time I paddled back to my starting point. I pulled the canoe out of the water, onto a patch of grass. I dropped my empty aluminum can and wadded-up paper bag into a trash can and found an Adirondack chair near the shoreline and curled up in it. Serenaded by loons late to leave the lake, I quickly fell asleep.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Two hours later, Adams was standing over me. He had a blanket draped over one arm and was shaking me awake with the other. It was dark all around us. Before I could apologize for missing our appointment for drinks at the bar, he pointed up to the heavens.

  I had never seen a night sky so brightly lit with stars.

  With excitement in his voice, he announced the evening’s plans he’d made for us: “Let’s do something we haven’t done in forty years,” he said as I stiffly rose from the chair. Adams turned on a flashlight tucked beneath the folded blanket. He led us along the shoreline and out onto a pier that extended beyond the reach of the lodge’s floodlights. A small red light pulsed at the end of it. The dock widened at that point. Twenty seconds later I was standing there, looking out at the blackness. Adams was spreading his blanket out over the dock’s wooden planks, damp with evening dew. I felt the moisture the blanket had absorbed as we sat down, but it felt comfortable and familiar.

  “I’ll bet I’m the first guy you ever brought out here,” I joked. I detected elements of his famous grin in the dim light of the flashlight, laid flat on the dock. A minute later we were lying on our backs, our faces firmly focused on the Milky Way and scores of constellations that held up a clear, moonless sky.

  Like each of the stars above us, Adams was in a reflective mood. Like theirs, his light that night was generated years before—in a faraway galaxy named Maplewood. In a hundred different ways, we were a long way from Byron’s Lane. Yet the moment firmly cast us back there in mind and spirit.

  “The world was a very different place when we did this last, wasn’t it, Tom? It was easier. Nobody knew then as much as we do now about how things are supposed to work. We felt our way through life back then. A lot of what we bumped up against was new, unpredictable.

  Nobody assumed they knew what was waiting around the corner.”

  I looked for the Big Dipper and pondered what he’d said. His stream of thought carried us backwards.

  “Just like this magnificent night sky, our whole lives were spread out before us the last time we did this. How far do you think we’ve come since then? Or maybe I should pose a more interesting question: How close are we to where we were?”

  Adams and I had spent at least one night a week during our fourth-grade through sixth-grade summers in our sleeping bags under the stars that hung over my
Ohio backyard—the very same stars that peppered the sky over Pine Lake, Minnesota, that Friday night. The familiar setting caused an avalanche of memories.

  Girls we barely acknowledged when we saw them in the hallways or in class when we were ten years old became hours-long topics of conversation those summer nights, as we transitioned from grade school to junior high. We improved our fluency in sports talk. We pointed to satellites and high-flying airplanes that we spied moving silently across the sky. We speculated in whispers whether what we had seen might be flying saucers. We listened to WHK on my transistor radio all night for news bulletins of UFO sightings. Between news updates, we listened to Johnny Holliday play the latest hit songs by the Temptations, Roy Orbison, the Four Seasons, and the Beach Boys. We scanned the night sky for shooting stars. When we saw them we reacted like people do when they watch fireworks on the Fourth of July.

  After all the lights had gone out inside my house, Adams and I would climb out of our sleeping bags and stealthily meander along the dry drainage ditch that separated the backyards of houses on my side of Byron’s Lane from the backyards of houses on the east side of Scott Drive. Near the north end of the block was Julie Cook’s house. Mike Bachman swore to us that he had twice watched Julie’s mother slip out of shorts and a tank top and into a nightgown. Mrs. Cook was our consensus pick for best-looking mother in the neighborhood. She was divorced. It added to her allure. But we always seemed to arrive after the bedroom lights were out or the curtains had been drawn. Always disappointed, but always undaunted, we’d eventually slink home to my backyard, crawl back into our sleeping bags, and speculate about what Bachman swore he had twice seen.