Byron's Lane (12 page)

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.

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.

When I reminded Adams of our backyard adventures he was quick to fill in some of the details I’d forgotten. Loons on the lake occasionally interrupted us with calls to each other. The loud, distinctive sounds they made demanded that attention be paid to them. They were pleasant distractions to an enjoyable discussion.

It was too dark on the dock to clearly see my friend, in spite of being within three feet of each other. We lay on our backs, two sets of eyes firmly focused in the vicinity of Sagittarius and Orion. The blackness all around us had reduced us to familiar voices. I’ve been told that to meaningfully converse with someone you must look him in his eyes, but I’ve always found conversations in the dark to be the most powerful. Perhaps it was because of whom I had shared them with up until then: Maggie and Adams.

“Tom, I’ve been thinking about the things we talked about last night. Maplewood’s been on my mind today. Did you ever read
The Prince of Tides
?”

“Yes,” I answered. I reminded Adams that Pat Conroy was my favorite writer, that I had lent him my copy of the book fifteen years ago and suggested he might like it.

“God, I guess you’re right.” He probably shook his head and made a face. Adams continued: “Anyway, he starts the book by writing, ‘My wound is geography. It’s also my anchorage, my port of call.’ That impressed me when I read it. In some ways Maplewood was a great place to grow up. But the place gave us too much time to think. And we always seemed to have alternatives when we were challenged. We solved too many of life’s wonderful mysteries because we had time and space to anticipate them, to plan and prepare. The more I learn, the more I read, the more I see and hear, the more doubt I have about heaven and hell—that anything can accurately be described in terms of black or white, right or wrong, good or evil.”

Silence intruded on Adams’s thoughts. He took a deep breath. “It’s in my best interest to get this Doubting Thomas thing straightened out sooner than later. I don’t know how much time I’ve got left.”

He laughed quietly, then slightly changed the subject. “I’m a little bit confused by how so much misery can be perpetrated by people who call themselves true believers. A lot of hateful things seem to be done in God’s name lately. I’m sure God isn’t too happy being constantly thrust into the middle of our power grabs and the messes we make.”

Adams’s remarks reminded me of a Lincoln biography I had just finished reading. I told him so.

“Abraham Lincoln was confused and bothered about this same thing during the Civil War. Each side claimed to be acting with God’s blessing and according to God’s will. But surely God can’t be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the end, Lincoln figured that whatever was God’s purpose was probably something different than his purpose and Jefferson Davis’s purpose.”

“Maybe Lincoln’s opinion is worth consideration. His opinions usually are,” Adams responded. We both laughed. “I wonder what Old Abe would have thought if the Confederates were God-fearing Muslims.”

A long pause followed. I ended it with a sermon based on theology I borrowed from American Indian culture: “There’s evidence all around us tonight that God’s here. He’s everywhere, if you want to take the time to look. God’s the Creator; he’s not the Enforcer. And we’re supposed to be the Maintainers. Someone in your class this morning mentioned the concept of historical symmetry, remember? I think that’s how God tries to teach us lessons about how to get along. He keeps throwing the same stuff at us over and over again until we finally figure out how to handle it. That’s the extent of God’s role in the affairs of men. It’s not about God taking sides.”

Adams laughed. “You know, Walker, you’re smarter than you look.”

He changed his position on the blanket. He was lying on his side, facing me. I saw his outline in the starlight.

“I’m impressed,” he continued. “You apparently know a little about historical symmetry. Not much. Just enough to toss it like a hand grenade into a conversation.”

We both laughed at Adams’s attempt to release air from a topic that was ballooning into something larger than we were capable of keeping under control. Half a long, silent minute later, Adams was sitting with his legs crossed, pointing the beam of his flashlight toward Mars, high above the tree line on the opposite shore.

“How do we deal with guilt? How are we supposed to handle people we’ve wronged? How about forgiveness? Is it important?”

I lost myself in the stars, looking for inspiration. I finally formed a response.

“Forgiveness is important to two people—you and the person who was hurt by what you did, or who hurt you. Forgiveness trumps guilt. If you forgive or you’re forgiven, guilt goes away. Why should it be more complicated than that? Except in a situation that has legal implications, why should anybody else be involved in absolution? Whose business is it, anyway?”

As soon as these words were out of my mouth, I wanted them back—not the opinion I expressed, but how I’d said it. I sounded like I was reading a contract.

Adams picked up on it. “Well, that’s definitive,” he answered. “If I disagree with you slightly, or want to know if what I’m thinking about has legal implications, I guess the only place we can address this subject further is appellate court.” We both laughed. “But, seriously, I think you’ve made a good point.” Adams shifted his position on the dock again.

“Tom, I gave Pamela Drake way too much credit for being a major influence on my life. I want to replace her with something else.”

“You’re allowed,” I graciously offered.

“You know what was really memorable? Jim Breech’s visit yesterday reminded me of it. I’ve thought about it a few times since he left.” Adams’s voice became serious. “It was being part of that basketball team our senior year in high school. I hardly played that season, except those two weeks when the Asian flu benched Breech and three other starters.”

Adams scored the only points he made all season during that glorious fortnight of his varsity basketball career when a flu epidemic swept through Maplewood and somehow spared him. He reminded me that Maplewood won three of its four games those two weeks.

“We put the town on the map that winter. It was our fifteen minutes of fame. Free haircuts at the barbershop and free chocolate milkshakes anytime we wanted at the Dairy Queen. Our team picture hung in all the store windows. The farther we went in the state tournament, the more the town, the more the region, the more the state of Ohio embraced us. That was my first taste of the benefits of being a winner and being part of something successful that’s bigger than me. It taught me that success shared is sweeter than success individually earned.”

Adams paused. “I’m sitting here tonight trying to think of a situation I’ve experienced since that was similar to being a part of a team of ten boys from a little high school in northeastern Ohio who somehow made it all the way to the big-school finals of the state high school basketball tournament. There are precious few circumstances today that can produce that kind of feeling, Tom. But it’s different today. Individual achievements are more celebrated these days. Watch ESPN tonight. I rest my case.”

Adams didn’t stop; he pushed his point harder. “That’s too bad. It’s hardly comparable, but that basketball team was the closest I’ll ever get to knowing what my father must have felt like being part of an army that won a world war and saved civilization; what my grandfather must have felt after he pushed and pulled and prodded my mother’s family safely, intact, through twelve years of the Great Depression. We’ve not been challenged as a generation until now. We’re in the middle of a mess that’s going to require a whole lot of shared sacrifice to clean up. It’s our generation’s moment—it’s our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to define ourselves. And we’re squandering it by wallowing in arguments about self-protection, distribution of wealth, and what it means to be truly American—instead of manning up and accepting our social responsibilities and sharing our blessings.”

My friend was animated; he was rediscovering himself.

While he turned a few more thoughts over in his head, I picked up his last one and carried it forward a bit. “You’re right. Think about the history we lived through. How’d it impact us? Take away the civil rights movement. It didn’t involve many white boys like us growing up in the suburbs. What’s left for milestones and turning points before the economic collapse in 2007-2008?” I answered my question: “John Kennedy’s assassination, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and 9/11.”

“They’re all catastrophes,” Adams noted. “We argue about nuances affecting each of them: what happened, why it happened, who’s responsible; we draw no real lessons from any of them—even 9/11.”

“I agree,” I said. “Our finest hours were the Cuban missile crisis and the moon landing. They’re thousand-dollar questions on
Jeopardy
because nobody remembers the details.”

Adams was slipping into his professorial mode, seasoned by a political perspective that sometimes salted too much of what was in his head and came out of his mouth. “Those big headline events made us lose confidence in the political institutions we were taught to respect in civics class back in the ninth grade. ‘Ask not what your country can do for you. Rather, ask what you can do for your country.’ That doesn’t resonate much in conversations with my students and my colleagues in the state legislature. We’ve been celebrating unbridled capitalism and individual accomplishment since Reagan was president. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that it comes at the expense of our collective conscience. Nobody wants to talk about social responsibility.”

The lake’s quiet swept over us as we tried to absorb what both of us had said. Adams continued, in a softer, fatigued voice: “It’s so damn hard to get people to think beyond what’s in it for them. It’s almost always the case that more of something for some of us means less of it for everybody else. Resources are finite, even in flourishing democracies.”