Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128) (31 page)

JW laughed painfully and poked at his pancakes with his fork. “Well. I lost my son, my job, my reputation, my house, and all my money. And now I've lost what was left of my family.”

“I heard you had a gambling problem. But you're not gambling. You're lying in bed.”

JW sighed. “I guess I just decided to feel bad, and that's the safest place to do it.”

“Decided to feel bad. Kinda weird.”

“Instead of going and gambling it away, which is what I've been doing. I was sitting there in the casino parking lot, and I thought, ‘I don't want to go back into the avalanche. I can just sit here and feel this shitty feeling,' you know, ‘for one minute. That's doable. Then re-evaluate.' And the minutes have sort of strung together. I'm hoping it'll run out, but I would feel guilty if it did.” He shrugged. It sounded stupid.

“Actually, that's sort of profound,” she said, then nodded as if that confirmed something, and looked out at the trees. “Although judging from the condition I found you in, I don't know if it's the best long-term strategy.”

He snorted and nodded, and they went back to their breakfast.

“I have a question for you,” he said finally, and finished swallowing. “How did Jacob's mom die?”

She looked back down at her food. He sensed a sudden
momentousness, as if she didn't want to get into it. She took up her knife and cut off another piece of pancake.

“She OD'd.” Her mouth drew into a thin line. She crammed the pancake in and began chewing.

JW nodded slowly. “Did she always do drugs?”

“No. That was my problem.” She stared at him defiantly as she stuffed another piece in her mouth. The feathers in her hair hung by her cheek. He could tell that she was ready for a fight, but he had never felt less judgmental. He nodded.

She shook her head and began to pick at her food with the tip of her fork. “She was on the straight and narrow.”

“Why did she start?”

“Look, I don't know what he's told you, but it wasn't my fault, okay?”

“I didn't mean that. I don't know anything about it.” His voice was gentle. He reached for a way to make her understand, some gift of intimacy. “I used to be real close to my son. I mean, we were”—he shook his head and held up two fingers—“like that. But as he got older, he kinda got away from me. I don't know how. I think I was just too busy. And he just fell in with some rough kids. But maybe it wasn't even that, maybe it was just bad luck. He tried to miss a deer on the highway just east of town, and he crashed. Gone, just like that. After the funeral I … I thought I was fine. You know: the strong husband, man of the family, wife and daughter grieving uncontrollably, but I was okay. And then I just started spending more time at the casino. I don't even know how it happened. I guess it was just a little shot of hope. Or sometimes I think maybe I was just trying to fight back against chance, against the fucking bad luck that killed him and ruined my life. And you know what? I have no fucking idea, and it doesn't matter. Things don't always have to make sense.”

She nodded slightly, then looked down at her plate. “Her boss at the bank, he used to run the branch up here. He hired her out of high school to come work in Minneapolis.”

JW thought he vaguely remembered her, but he couldn't be sure.

“He was really nice to her, told her how smart she was. He kept promoting her, and we all thought, ‘God she's really made it.' But then one day she calls me and says she just talked to her boss on her cell. He was back up here, and he called her down in Minneapolis and said that there was a discrepancy in the books, that somebody had reported her. He said he was going to call the FBI. She was totally freaking out. I mean, this girl was valedictorian, okay? Johnny was her dream. Building this bank was her dream. There's no way she would put all that in jeopardy by stealing.”

Mona's righteous anger was rising. JW frowned and shook his head in agreement.

“She drove all the way up here to show him proof, but she was nervous.” Mona swallowed, and looked out at the leaves, her chin on the butt of her hand and her wild eyes shining. “She got careless. Fucking girl just got careless.”

“What do you mean?” JW asked. He felt certain he was on the cusp of something.

She sighed deeply. Rather than look at him, she told the story to the trees. “Her boss was in a room at the casino hotel. He didn't want proof. At first she thought she didn't have any choice. I mean, what woman would put herself in that situation, right? She must have deserved it somehow. But then she told him no. She said ‘No!' And he raped her.”

JW closed his eyes. “I uh, I …” He shook his head, fumbling for a new hold on things. “Why didn't she press charges?”

Mona looked back at him. “JW.” She spoke to him in the tone of a disappointed mother. Even in her anguish, she was obviously disgusted by the question. “Tribes can't prosecute white people. Don't you know that? And state laws don't apply the same way on reservations. And then he had whatever bullshit ‘evidence.' Jorgenson's like you. He works the loopholes.”

He looked at her, instantly ashamed. “Like me?”

Mona continued, disregarding his objection. “She bought a morning-after pill and she came here. She wanted to get high and forget all about it before she went home to her man and her baby, and I was—” she froze and her voice broke “—fucking stupid enough to let her.” She wept at the trees for a moment, then looked directly back at JW. “Johnny's never forgiven me. And I guess I haven't either.”

He sat, frozen, and listened to her quiet sobbing. The sun in the birches' yellow leaves spoke of fall, of vulnerability and decomposition.

30

When the doorbell rang, Jacob was thinking about the fire's aftermath and stabbing his knee with a compass. It was something he had begun doing lately, without knowing why. He sat on the toilet and pushed the sharp end of the compass into the soft skin on the side of his kneecap until it bled. The pain somehow brought focus and some fleeting measure of absolution from his gnawing fear and guilt.

He was at loose ends, his mind shuffling and disjointed. He and Cheese Whiz had split from Hayhoe and Jeremy at the bank and run in a different direction. They heard the gunshot and kept running, afraid that one of the other two had been shot by Grossman. They hid in the trees, afraid to move or make a sound. When the fire was put out, they circled back, only to find that the car was gone. They waited for half an hour, wondering if Hayhoe or Jeremy would come back for them, and then they decided to walk onto the reservation, so no one would know they had been in town. They stayed in the ditches along the highway and cut through the fields to the reservation road, and then Cheese Whiz called his uncle Smokestack, who picked them up from the old sweat-lodge site, where they had been drinking beer earlier in the day. Eagle was angry when he learned that Jacob had left in spite of the fact that he was grounded, but then Jacob told him how they had been at Jeremy's grandmother's,
eating fry bread and listening to her stories, and then how Cheese Whiz had shown him how to do a sweat, how they build the lodge out of birch branches and deer hides, but how his uncle Smokestack just uses tarps, why worry about deer hides, but the fire tender would still use a deer antler to carry the hot grandfathers one by one from the fire into the lodge, and then how they would throw sweet grass and water on the hot stones, swatting themselves with fresh branches as they asked the spirits in, Jacob saw his father's face soften. He rushed through the story, making the account so detailed and enthusiastic that his dad finally raised a hand to cut him off. Instead of punishing Jacob, he just sent him to his room with a warning not to do it again.

It wasn't until the next morning that Cheese Whiz called to tell Jacob that it was Grossman who had been shot. Hayhoe and Jeremy had gone to visit relatives in Montana. They agreed to say that Cheese Whiz had spent the evening teaching Jacob about sweats as a way to welcome him into the band.

In the days since, Jacob had lived in terror of someone discovering his role in the bank episode. In hindsight, he realized that he had put everything—their lives here, his father's mission, their relationship—at risk in one stupid moment, and now he was trapped in its looming shadow.

When the doorbell rang, his heart leaped. His dad wasn't home, and the police had been everywhere asking questions. He wiped the blood from his knee with a wad of toilet paper, then tiptoed silently to the front door and peeked through the peephole. It was JW. Jacob stood deliberating for a long moment, then pulled the door open, relieved and angry at the same time.

“Jacob,” said JW. His eyes were rimmed with red, as if he
had been crying. “I just learned what happened to your mom. I don't know what to say.”

Jacob felt an impulse to slam the door in his face, but another part of him wanted him to apologize. “Where have you even been?” he said.

JW sensed his anger. “I just took a few days off,” he said. “I'm sorry. I'm back now.”

“And I'm supposed to be happy.”

“I thought maybe we could work on the horse.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” How could he tell JW that everything had changed? That he had tried to burn the town bank down? That he was living in terror? That he hated JW for abandoning him? He looked away, at the unfinished living room.

“Okay,” replied JW.

“Wait.” Jacob didn't know what to say. “Fuck you.”

JW nodded and turned away. Panic reared up in Jacob. “Wait.”

JW paused. “I'm sorry,” Jacob said, floundering in confusion.

“Hey,” said JW. “It all just fucking sucks,” and Jacob knew he understood.

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J
ACOB RODE
P
RIDE
bareback. He was still angry, but it felt good to be focused on something outside of himself. Maybe he could just forget about what had happened. Red boy, blue boy, meld with the horse.

He felt in charge around JW, as if he could see things that he forgot about otherwise. Who he was. How he was. What mattered. The feeling slowly started to counter crazy
out-of-control fear and guilt he'd been swimming in since the shooting. He knew Ernie would tell his dad that he was working with JW again, and he knew his dad would be angry, but he didn't care. He needed this like water. This was the one thing he was doing that wasn't wrecking things, and his dad would just have to deal with it. He walked the horse around JW, who stood in the center of the paddock. “Okay,” said JW, his hands in his jean pockets, “let's bring him up to a trot. What you got?”

Jacob shifted his balance forward and gave a slight squeeze with his knees, prompting Pride to step up into a trot.

“Good job! Nice transition!” JW called after him. “Keep him in the same circle now, don't let him wind out.”

Jacob smiled in spite of himself. JW knew what he had just accomplished, even if it was lost on everyone else: the intricate details, the subtle communication, the shifts of balance that took hours of practice and concentration and only made things look invisible and natural to everyone else. He went around again for another dose of praise, focused intently on the circle—the perfect circle, at a fast trot, with loose reins. He shifted his weight to face slightly into the circle he wanted Pride to create, their minds becoming one.

“That's right!” cheered JW.

Jacob kept Pride turning at a steady trot, raising dust that lifted into a yellow cloud. Around and around and around.

“Good!” JW bellowed at him through the dust. “Bareback is all about balance and connection. As your discipline improves, so does his!”

The rhythmic motion and the fur and the sweat and the reins in his hands, the thumping hoofbeats and JW's shouted
encouragement, all grounded Jacob and brought him back from the cloud of anxiety he'd been caught up in. He vowed he would never go back to his bad ways. He felt Pride's spine becoming one with his tailbone, the two of them fusing into one animal, one nervous system, one brain, one ocean of emotions.

“This happens because he tests you, and again and again he finds he can trust you,” JW bellowed through the dust. “Discipline, consistency, trust.”
Red boy. Blue boy. Red boy. Blue boy.
It went through his mind like a drumbeat.
One animal. One animal. One animal. One.

“With these three things, your horse becomes more than just an animal. He moves beyond just doing the job in spite of his emotions. He learns to discipline the emotions themselves.”

Jacob's thighs were wet with Pride's sweat. He leaned forward imperceptibly, and Pride stepped into a perfect rolling canter.

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T
HE TRIBAL COUNCIL
met informally in the chair's second-floor office in the new community center. The three men and two women who could make it sat around a large oak table, surrounded by a four-foot-high wainscoting of quarter-sawn oak. The tribal chair's imposing carved-oak desk sat diagonally in a far corner, flanked by the flags of the United States, the State of Minnesota, the POW-MIA, and the Many Lakes Band of Ojibwe.