Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128) (16 page)

“Good,” he said. “Now scratch his cheek. Go on.”

Jacob reached up to Pride's cheek. The horse shied and threw his head up, but then brought it back down, and when Jacob scratched him he wound up leaning into it.

“See, he likes that. Okay, now drop your hand.”

Jacob did. The horse stood still, in a mild state of attention.

“Now take one step forward.”

Jacob took a big step forward, pulling Pride along.

“Don't pull on the rope. We don't want him learning to pull all the time. He's got to decide to follow you. Right? So keep it slack.”

Jacob let the rope hang and Pride stayed standing a step behind him.

“Okay,” JW continued. “Now we wait. Don't look at him. Don't pull, and don't move.”

Jacob stood there, fidgeting nervously, facing forward. The horse snorted and stamped once with his left foot. He nodded his head, but didn't move.

Jacob let out a frustrated pssht. “Pretty stupid training method if—”

“Watch it!” Eagle said sharply.

“All in little steps, son,” JW said quietly, “all in little steps. Gotta get him to toddle before you can get him to run.”

The horse bobbed his nose down and up, then finally gave in and stepped forward. Jacob let out an awkward laugh, truly surprised. “Oh my gosh! I can't believe it!”

“You see? Okay, pet his cheek so he knows he's done good. Nice! Okay, drop your hand and step again.”

This time the horse followed much more quickly.

“Holy shit,” said Jacob. “It's like he knows what he's supposed to do.”

“He does.”

“Bullshit.” Jacob grinned and took another step. Pride followed. Eagle laughed and shook his head, frowning at the boy's profanity. JW grinned at him as the boy and the horse took another step, then another.

“One step at a time,” said JW. He brushed his hands on his jeans and ducked back through the rough-hewn rails. He put his arm on the top rail and watched Jacob walking slowly around the ring with Pride on a loose rope.

“Kid's got an aptitude,” he said. “He just doesn't know it.”

“I'll be damned,” said Eagle under his breath, as much to himself as to JW.

13

JW brushed his teeth over the tiny porcelain sink and banged out the brush. He could hear loud music somewhere outside. He swirled out the sink and turned off the light. The windows were open to the night and he could hear the faint sound of glass breaking, and a brilliant rise of laughter. He passed through the kitchen toward the moonlit table, curious about where the sounds were coming from. The gold-flecked Formica glowed like a pool of milk, the gray shadows of leaves rushing and dallying over its surface like fish.

The mysterious neighbor's place up on the hill was lit up like a roadhouse, its windows cranked open. The faint sound of laughter and the clink of drinking reached him over the music. Several cars were parked in the street and the driveway. He noticed a shadow moving nearby in the trees, and then a silver horse emerged and began to cross the road. It was one of the wild ones he had seen in the scrub pasture. One by one, the others followed, appearing silently and moving like spirits. Their backs shone and faded in the moonlight, their varied colors washed to shades of gray. They crossed onto Eagle's grass as if in a silent movie and walked up to the edge of the paddock, where Pride had been left to roam. JW watched him look up at the wild horses. He took another mouthful of hay, then slowly began to mosey over, his head down and trailing hay strands. When he reached the rail, he lifted his nose to sniff the intruders. Their muted
muzzles rubbed and bumped in the moonlight. There was a sudden sharp whinny and Pride lifted his head over one of them. Then, pecking order established, they fell quiet and sniffed each other again. Pride turned and walked back to his hay, and the wild horses walked toward the woods beyond the pole barn and evaporated into the trees.

JW watched the charcoal leaves where the horses had been, then lifted his eyes to take in Eagle's house. The music continued from the neighbor's party. He wondered if Eagle and Jacob were over there, but then the light came on in Eagle's study. It shot a yellow glow out through the blinds, sending color out into JW's black-and-white world, and he saw the window crank shut.

He sat at the table and turned on the bug receiver. He plugged the milky-white earbuds into the jack and put them in his ears, then he tuned the knob until he heard Eagle's voice come in.

“Did you steal it?”

“No! God! Why do you always say that!?”

JW stared at the swirling shadows on the Formica. He imagined Eagle and Jacob standing in the hallway, outside the study door. Eagle had probably intercepted him, maybe had a hand on his arm.

“Then where did you get it?”

“I told you, I found it!”

“Where?”

“At the community center!”

“Where?”

“It was sitting on a bench!”

“Jacob, what are you doing?” Eagle sounded as if he were at the end of his rope. “We come up here and things only get worse. Now you got a switchblade, and you're arrested with pot—”

“Oh, like you've never smoked pot—”

“What is happening to you?” The concern again, and now anger, too.

“I hate it here! Okay? I hate everything.” Jacob's voice broke with emotion. JW could almost see him turning away, putting a hand up to his nose and eyes in order to hold back tears, or at least to hide them from his father.

“I don't know what to do,” Jacob said, his voice wet with mucus. “You think being here's supposed to make everything better, but it's not.”

“Why?” Eagle asked, softer now.

“I don't know. Because they call me a fucking apple.” Deep and hoarse.

“They're just trying to provoke you.”

“I know. I miss Mom. I'm sorry.”

JW heard sniffling. He hunched over the receiver in the moonlight, his fingers pressing the earbuds in. He felt dirty. He was intruding on something personal, but he had also just picked up an important clue. He took out the tiny spiral notepad that he sometimes carried in his pocket. He flipped it open to a blank page and wrote,
Smokes pot
?

“Hey, hey. I miss her too,” he heard Eagle say in a quiet tone. “But we have to make this work, just you and me. We're doing this for her, remember?”

“Yeah, right,” Jacob said disdainfully. “The bank's for her, because of what her boss did. Like she'll really know or care.”

The comment ran through JW like a spike. He wrote in the moonlight:
Bank's b/c of what her boss did
.

“It's the principle, son.”

“Whatever.”

There was a rustle of clothing and the closing of a door. JW sat, riveted, and kept listening.

*
 
*
 
*

I
N THE HALL,
Eagle watched Jacob rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand. Jacob took the knife back from Eagle's weakened hand, and Eagle let him go. He watched him head down the hall into his room and close the door, and not long after, he heard the muted sounds of
Call Of Duty IV: Modern Warfare
. His son was losing himself in bullets and fire.

He stood still in the hall's emptiness, listening to the house, then went into his study and closed the door. He sighed and leaned back against it. Things seemed to be getting worse, but he told himself that he needed to be patient. Yes, Jacob had crummy friends and bad grades, and even trouble with the law. But it was also true that the police were racist. Jacob had a good heart. He attracted troubled boys because he accepted them, and acting out was part of the grieving process.

But he also knew that it didn't have to be this way. He just couldn't seem to find a way to change the dynamic. No matter what he tried, it felt as if they were trapped in this place, in the aftermath of Wenonah's death, pulled farther and farther apart by their diverging galaxies. The apple comment was particularly concerning. Red on the outside, white on the inside. Not Indian enough meant not poor or dysfunctional enough for rez life—a sort of reverse racism. It made Eagle angry. It wasn't fair to dump five hundred years of history on a boy.

He knew he wasn't the most involved father. When Jacob was younger he had reached out to Eagle plenty of times—“Hey, Dad, let's do this”—and Eagle hadn't made the time. He always had good reasons. There was a meeting at work he had to prepare for, or a tough day he had to recover from. He would have liked to do more, he always intended to the next
time Jacob asked, but the job was demanding, especially for an Indian. He was breaking barriers. It took extra energy. And banking was hyper-competitive to begin with. His coworkers didn't seem to be spending more time with their kids either, and they seemed to be just fine. Wenonah was the one who'd wanted kids anyway—and then the bottom dropped out.

After she died, Eagle realized to his surprise that living in South Minneapolis wasn't the same for Jacob as it had been when he was growing up. Jacob wasn't getting fed at friends' houses, and the friends Jacob made weren't the articulate kids of academics and professionals that Eagle had hung out with in his youth. There seemed to be more gangs, drugs, and violence. Jacob had two bikes stolen, one of them at gunpoint, and the kids he hung around with looked tougher and tougher.

It all came to a head one day in late September. Eagle had been working at the bank downtown. After a power lunch with a bunch of executives, he had put together a half-billion-dollar corporate financing package for General Mills. He came home around eight to learn that Jacob had been arrested with a friend for stealing tobacco from Lowell's drugstore.

“You should bring him home,” his mother said over the phone. Eagle had banished Jacob to his room after a big fight, and then gone for a walk to cool down. He was sitting on a city bench near the rippling black water of Minnehaha Creek. Brown bats dropped from the eaves of houses, unfolded their wings, and cluttered the air. Frogs pulsed in the long grasses by the riverbank. It was two hours earlier in Los Angeles, where his parents had transferred when Jacob was five. His mom was stuck in traffic on the 405. He could hear the engines.

“At least it's tobacco,” she said. “The spirits might be trying to guide him.”

He pressed his cell tight to his ear and looked out at the
stone and Tudor houses on the other side of the glistening creek. Someone was having a party. He could hear the clink of glasses and laughter, the playing of a piano, and the closing of a car door. He saw a couple in evening dress walking up the sidewalk, arm in arm. He realized that part of him was secretly hoping his mother would tell him to ship the boy off to live with them in Los Angeles.

“What do you mean, bring him home?” he asked.

“To the reservation. That boy needs to get back in touch with the land,” she said, “with his roots in the people, not all this wannabe gangbanger bullshit. That's a recipe for being downtrodden forever. I see the same thing here in LA. Listen to me, baby. You gotta press reset.”

As a sixties-era Native rights activist and a college professor, his mom believed the land and the elders could heal Jacob, as if by osmosis. Eagle shared his white father's more skeptical views and thought her idealism naive. To him, the reservation was a place of dysfunction and squalor, not a source of spiritual rebirth. He doubted it would change anything for Jacob. The reality was that her son just wasn't cut out to be a father. He never had been.

He sat picking at the softening wood slats of the bench as she countered. “That's bullshit,” she said. “Wenonah was so good at being a mom that you didn't have to build any skill. But now you have to.”

“You make it sound so simple.”

“It's not! It takes work. But if your father did it in his stiff-assed ‘I'm a scientist, not a dad'
gichi-mookomaan
way, you sure as hell can.”

Eagle laughed. “He actually said that?”

“Yeah, he said that. But I think he did an okay job with you.”

Eagle sighed. He had seen the arc of his life extending forward like a shining arrow. With his gift and his ambition, he would rise to the top. As an Indian? No. As Johnny Eagle. A guy with a funny-sounding last name, who had the goods to get things done. To make progress. That was also how he was going to provide for his family, and for his son. He had a new membership at the Minneapolis Athletic Club, and with it, access to the city's financial elite. The sky was the limit.

And now he was contemplating giving it all up, just when the brass ring was within reach.

“He's your child,” she said.

“I know, I know. But you're talking a career here. And I can't guarantee him anything if I leave banking.” He knew how hard it would be to get back in, and that if he left, he probably never would.

It was through Wenonah, rather than his mother, that he had come to know the reservation. How ironic it was that he met her in Minneapolis. She took it upon herself to educate him about his land, his people, their history—all the things he had never wanted to hear about from his mother—and through her eyes they had always seemed mysterious and cosmic. But there were plenty of hungry young bankers nipping at his heels. Faltering for even a second was risky, much less walking away for years. He hung his head and rubbed his forehead.