Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128) Page 3

  For the first part of the drive, JW had listened to an audiobook called The Power of Habit, about whether or not we have free will. It was a question that had come to occupy him recently. He had started listening to science books like this when Julie was eight or nine and he ordinarily loved them, but tonight he kept reaching up to turn the player off. The feral look in Jorgenson’s eyes kept coming back to him. He wondered if he had imagined it, or if he had overlooked something important in their parting exchange about getting a beer. He hoped he hadn’t missed a career opportunity. He and Carol were tight on money, and if a new opportunity to help Jorgenson had been in the offing he should have stayed and gotten the beer. Even though Carol was expecting him, she would have understood.

  Each time he turned the player back on, the worry boiled back up, and he turned it off again to think things through. He finally unrolled the windows to let the grassy air fill the car and buffet his ears with noise. Jorgenson was going to make a play for CEO when the Old Man retired. Maybe this had been a chance for the upper executives to feel JW out, to see if he could fill Frank’s shoes managing the Greater Minnesota branches.

  If that was the case, Carol wouldn’t want to move. She loved North Lake. He wondered if he could somehow manage things from there. After his dad was laid off from Reserve Steel, JW remembered, he had taken a job selling leases for cell phone towers. The job had him on the road a lot, but he had made it work. “How do you know when you’re up North?” his dad used to ask farmers in order to loosen them up. “There’s no sign announcing it, but you know you’re there when the Dairy Queen sells bait.” It always got a laugh.

  On the other hand, maybe Frank had discovered the loan he had made to himself, and wanted to discuss it in private. A spike of anxiety shot through him. That would explain the predatory quality JW thought he had seen in his eyes. As he drove onward, his mind swung from one possibility to the other. He decided to call Jorgenson in the morning to apologize, and to see if the conversation led anywhere.

  The stakes were high. North Lake was a torn-up town after the mines closed, and many of the workers, who lost their jobs and their pensions, still pined for the old days. There still wasn’t as much opportunity as there had been. It was during this aftermath that he and Carol had first fallen in love—a love that was in many ways responsible for his working for Jorgenson now.

  Carol Ingersoll was the daughter of one of the town’s most respected families. With fine blonde hair swept over her low forehead, her round blue-gray eyes and knobby nose, her wide neck and button chin, she wasn’t a classic beauty. But she had an angular jawline and plush lips, so she was thought of as the town beauty nonetheless. She was popular and personable, she was believed to be smart, and she was at the top of the social food chain. JW, on the other hand, was a scrappy seventeen-year-old horse trainer, a loner in school with middling grades, who worked to make extra money to support himself during the long stretches when his dad was away on the road.

  He thought about the moment of their meeting. He was delivering a mare from Fredrickson’s Barn to Olson’s Stables, which was the more upscale horse barn that catered to lake people from the Twin Cities. Everybody was trying to figure out ways to make money off the lake people. The Main Street businesses had even started selling North Woods–themed kitsch and faux antiques to attract vacationers.

  He remembered hauling Fredrickson’s old blue horse trailer into Olson’s gravel lot, the truck’s rusted fenders flapping like an old person’s jowls. He slowed to a stop in a cloud of yellow dust near the mouth of the red-and-white barn, by far the most successful boarding facility in the area. Its main door stood open to the sun, and its broad center aisle shone with the muted wood planking and bright silver bars of horse stalls. Bales of pine shavings were stacked on pallets just inside, and a delivery worker was loading his forklift back onto the end of his truck. JW turned to let the mare out and saw Carol and her friend Mary Beth walking toward the barn.

  “Hey,” she said, with a little wave and a smile. Such personal acknowledgment was unexpected. But in that one wave the notion that he could have this most desirable of girls shot through him. He could immediately imagine her smell, the feeling of her fine arms and hands, her hair on his face. His mind raced. Olson needed a younger trainer like JW, he told the stable owner when he checked in the horse. It would help bring in the girls.

  “Where the girls go, the families go,” JW said. Olson knew it was true. Horses had mostly become a girl thing in recent years, and so Olson took JW up on his offer to work a week for free to see what he could do. By July it had become a full-time summer job. He’d taken the girls off barn nags and put them on two of Olson’s fancy show horses. He promised he wouldn’t let the girls screw them up, and he worked with them in the riding ring out by the road, where two pretty girls bouncing on horseback brought in even more clients for the stable and its talented young trainer.

  By August, when Mary Beth went on a family vacation to the Wisconsin Dells, Carol came for private lessons. He took her on long trail rides through the thick grasses along the riverbed. They talked about life and their classmates as the water flowed by, thick and brown. Most of the time it was Carol doing the talking, and JW thrilled to feel her thigh brushing against him, or to direct her hand placement with his own.

  By the beginning of the school year they had become a couple, throwing the town’s social balance out of order. She told her friends that he was really smart, but despite what he would come to think of as her down-to-earthness, her crowd was one of speedboats, water skis, and downhill skiing trips to Spirit Mountain—or even Aspen—in the winters. Her friends were the children of the top executives from the paper mill and the former mine manager. JW had grown up in a four-room house, and the farthest he’d been was Fargo. Yet somehow—after a few weeks of gossip and consternation—he became cool, a token of their open-mindedness, and the social stratification of early high school began to fall away.

  He and Carol continued riding. He loved her sleek blonde hair, her plush pink lips, and the strange gray-blue pools of her round eyes. At night they had exuberant sex—in the tack room, in an empty stall thick with pine shavings, in the changing rooms of horse trailers. He loved the sound of her gasping, rhythmic sighs.

  In the spring he was invited to the Ingersoll home for dinner. Arguably the nicest house in town, it was a classic brick and clapboard two-story colonial with mini-mansion touches—the small, white-columned front portico, twelve-pane double-hung windows, and white painted shutters. The interior had an enormous wood-paneled family room hung with brass rubbings from England and a high trompe l’oeil ceiling painted like a summer sky. Mrs. Ingersoll kept fresh flowers in vases and plastic on the pale sofas in the living room.

  Carol and her younger brother, Evan, who was twelve, sat opposite JW at the Queen Anne dining table, with Carol’s parents, Bob and Mary, on either end. He remembered the light streaming through the lacy living-room curtains and falling across the ashen blue carpeting. Mary’s knife clicked faintly against her china as she quizzed him, the expanse of the living room opening up behind her. “Have you given much thought to what you’re going to do? For a career.”

  “A little bit,” he replied. “Right now I’m thinking about training horses.”

  “He changes it weekly,” added Carol.

  He felt his face redden at this betrayal.

  Mary smiled and went back to her carrots. “Well, sooner or later you’ll have to pick one and stick with it, I suppose.”

  “I know,” said JW.

  “You could be a horse trainer,” Bob said from the other end of the table. The French doors to the sunroom stood open behind him. “But there isn’t much money in it.”

  “Yeah,” said Evan, “Like loser money.” Carol elbowed him.

  “There’s ten dollars an hour in it,” JW said to the boy, suddenly defensive. He glanced toward Mr. Ingersoll. “Maybe that’s not that much for a grown-up.”

  “Well, that’
s pretty good for a kid, especially these days,” replied Bob, eyeing Evan. “But you can’t do it forever. And you probably want a better lifestyle. Have you thought about that?”

  “Not really.” JW was adopting the aw-shucks air of a hayseed, something he did when he was nervous, but he kicked himself for it and sat higher, adjusting his grip on his silverware.

  “The key to making real money is to do something that helps people control their destiny.” Mr. Ingersoll poked the air with his fork for emphasis, then went in for another bite of chicken.

  “I guess I can see that,” said JW.

  “Take your father,” Mr. Ingersoll went on. “He puts up cell phone towers, right?”

  “Sort of. He drives around and sells the leases.”

  “Even better! He helps people control their destiny by giving them power. He helps famers make money off those leases, and he gives people power to make their lives better by having the convenience and safety of a cell phone. Do you see?”

  “I guess.” JW had never really thought about his dad like that before, and he didn’t think many other people did either. His dad was a traveling salesman who drank too much.

  “You see?”

  “You give people choices,” offered JW agreeably. He felt like a rube being polished up for the fair.

  “Exactly! Choice is freedom. You work in a business that expands their ability to better their own lives. Horses used to do that. Then it was cars. Now it’s cell phones.”

  JW nodded and smiled “That’s an interesting observation,” he said. Carol crossed her eyes at him from behind her drumstick, as if to communicate that she’d heard these sorts of lectures many times. He was starting to forgive her.

  “Maybe you should consider taking a job at the bank this coming summer,” offered Mary. “That helps people control their lives. Bob could introduce you to the president.” She glanced at Bob, who shrugged and nodded.

  It wasn’t like they had told him to do anything, JW thought as he drove home from Minneapolis. Yet in many ways the strange keitos of chance and emotion running through that dinner had laid the foundation for where he was now. The Ingersolls had set an expectation for the boy who was by chance dating their daughter, a certain standard he had to maintain. And so he took a summer job as a teller at the bank, letting his former life fall away like an old skin, with hardly a look back.

  A lot of the girls who had been coming in for riding lessons on evenings and weekends instead began making small deposits and withdrawals during his shifts at the bank. Frank Jorgenson, who at thirty-three had recently been promoted to president, noticed the influx of femininity and took a liking to JW. He’d come over and goof around with him when the girls were in. JW soon realized this was a performance of sorts, but he enjoyed it too, and Frank was funny in a pudgy, self-deprecating sort of way. One day he even asked one of the girls out on a date. When her parents came into the bank to talk to him about it, he told them he had been joking. They couldn’t be serious—“I mean, look at me”—and soon he had them laughing about the whole misunderstanding while their daughter sat red-faced in the reception area. Other times he would run for a six-pack of Grain Belt—JW was still seventeen—and they would sit in Frank’s office after hours and drink while Frank lectured to him about banking and how the world was changing.

  “There are too many people. There are going to be fights over resources,” Frank said. He pointed his beer bottle at JW, his eyes glistening. “We bankers are in a position to control that, and it’s going to make us immensely rich.”

  JW kicked himself again for not staying for a beer with Jorgenson. The road dipped into another low vale that blocked the sun. The air flowed down cool and moist with a gathering fog, smelling richly of fresh-cut alfalfa. On the left the land rose to a hayfield that still looked dry and warm in the long sun. A farmer drove a red tractor over the short-cropped stems, pulling a dusty green hay baler and a fully stacked wagon. Two boys sat high atop the bales, pitching and rolling. He felt the congestion of the city falling away. He tuned the radio to the Power Loon, and soon he was singing along to an oldie about satisfaction, a hey hey hey.

  Ten minutes later, he pulled into a Cenex station and got out under the yellow-white canopy. The red band on the pumps glowed in the beautifying light of what his high school photography teacher—a peripatetic man named Rolf Van Hoevel who wore a walrus mustache and clogs—had called the magic hour. He passed the pumps and went inside. It had become somewhat of a tradition, buying artificial flowers at this Cenex. They sold bouquets of them in a plastic bucket near the register, pale blues and reds and yellows and whites, all mixed together in a pop-music arrangement of pastel fireworks.

  He set the bundle on the seat of his car and pulled back out into the sunset. Driving home reminded him of happier times, when he had driven the same road with Julie. On her birthdays he would take her out of school, and they went on elaborate field trips, to the Science Museum in Saint Paul, or the aquarium in Duluth, or the Cirrus Aircraft plant. These were natural interests of hers that her mother didn’t respond to, but he believed you took a kid’s natural interests and built the kid up into the world from there. The interest was the foundation. So he gave her options, and they would go on the field trip she was most excited about. They called these trips their dates, and they would talk about nature and science and biology. JW even made a point of studying up on these subjects so he could answer her questions. He bought her books. He started a subscription to Scientific American.

  It was different with his son Chris. First it had been stamp collecting—the two of them had spent hours bent over the yellow kitchen table with duck-billed tweezers, surrounded by wax paper and fat, staticky books reeking of mastic, stamps flapping like gossamer insect wings as they turned the heavy pages. But the stamps’ filigree soon faded into the hormone bath of early adolescence, and then it was all power and gas. Minibikes and small engines led to the homemade go-cart with the old Kohler he had salvaged from a broken wood splitter. Then it was on to hunting and gun safety classes—an interest that was abandoned, in turn, after Chris squatted next to the doe he shot at thirteen, looking into its dark eye, petting its fur as its organs steamed in an iridescent pile among the leaves and forest detritus. After that it was back to engines: first tuning the riding mower to achieve peak performance, and eventually the Mustang they bought for just seven hundred dollars. They spent long nights bent over it in the garage while JW’s car sat outside in the weather, their hands coated with a gritty molasses of black oil and road dust, their knuckles skinned red in the engine’s dark cubbies. What he wouldn’t give to have just one of those long, sore nights back.

  The air grew dusty and dry now despite the cooling. The purple-orange sky had faded to sapphire, and billboard lights flickered on. He was nearing the big prairie, where the rolling hills and dales of the glacial moraine began to flatten and stretch their legs westward for their run through the Dakotas. Here the billboards were smaller, made by locals from plywood on six-by-six posts. They hunkered close to the road, lit from below by fluorescent tubes that attracted fleets of dive-bombing insects. Spiders cast their nets into the night seas and sailed out on bands of silk. He passed a sign for the Many Lakes Casino:

  WORK HARD.

  PLAY HARD.

  WIN BIG.

  He was nearing home.

  As JW drove, he watched closely for the roadside spot where it had happened; it was easy to miss, in spite of the fact that it held such life-changing prominence. Sometimes he had to turn around and go hunting for it, peering across the pavement as he drove, searching for the small white cross. But this time he saw it early, backlit by the low-angled sun, and he pulled over and got out. He walked around the car, took the bouquet out of the passenger door, and carried it over to the marker, which bore a single word: Chris. An older bundle of flowers was faded by the sun and covered with a patina of dust kicked up by a month of car traffic. He squatted and untwisted the wire that he used to hold them in
place, then fastened the new bouquet and arranged it as fully and attractively as possible, fluffing the individual petals to broaden the flower heads.

  “Goodnight, son,” he said. He stood and carried the old bouquet to the car, throwing it into the passenger footwell, where it couldn’t sully the upholstery.

  The dusky rolling hills ran out behind him under darkening skies and the wind filled his ears as he drove on. Ahead the road climbed back out of the valley, and the dark planes of a building materialized from the shadows on the right. The fading light conjured parts of cars, and then fourteen massive searchlights shot up into the sky, their beams crossing to form a giant teepee of white light. Banks of neon splashed out, the colors bouncing over the roofs and glass parts of the cars like thrown watercolors. Many Lakes Casino, the roadside monument said, Win Big!

  He passed the turnoff, the neon glow lighting his windshield and turning the backs of his hands red on the wheel. He thought of Chris’s accident and the sudden shock of it—a ripping away when he hadn’t been looking. The red fell from his hands like fading fingers as he climbed the hill, a new vista opening, and his thoughts returned to the dinner Carol had waiting, where he hoped to save his marriage and his relationship with Julie, his remaining child. Chris’s death had sent him into a tailspin, futility crashing over him in swamping waves, spinning him in the undertow. Problems had cropped up in their marriage, cracks and fissures that grew into crevasses and canyons, over money, over his gambling. Carol always seemed angry, and Julie had stopped talking to him. But Carol had agreed to see him, and his heart sped a little now that the moment was imminent.

  He adjusted his visor against the low blast of sun. He was going to find a way, starting tonight, to turn things around. A way to come together and move forward again—not as if nothing had happened, but acknowledging that it had, and then finding the forgiveness and the strength and the love to heal together. He didn’t really know what he was going to say, but he was determined to make it happen.