The Art of Making Money (26 page)

Just before they left, Art placed another call to his dad.

“I’m coming, Pops,” he told Senior. “I’ll be there in three weeks.”

12

SONNY

It is the same for all men. None of us can escape this shadow of the father, even if that shadow fills us with fear, even if it has no name or face. To be worthy of that man, to prove something to that man, to exorcise the memory of that man from every corner of our life—however it affects us, the shadow of that man cannot be denied.

—KENT NERBURN, U.S. THEOLOGIAN AND AUTHOR,
Letters to My Son
, 1994

 

 

 

 

In one of the photographs Natalie saved from the summer of 2001, she, Art, and Alex stand smiling at the railing on the edge of the Grand Canyon—the most universally American and wholesome family photo it’s possible to take. Only when you know that it was taken with a disposable camera bought right there at a Grand Canyon gift shop for a fake hundred-dollar bill does the impression shift. Then the moment and even the wide canyon itself seem stolen and swiped out of time. But no matter how much you remind yourself that the whole experience is predicated and floating on felony, ultimately the family togetherness of the image prevails.

They hit the Southwest hard, slamming malls in Albuquerque, Tucson, and Phoenix. In between cities the theme became “Billy the Kid,” as Art kept an eye out for any diversion where the outlaw had a history. By the time they got to Billy’s grave at Fort Sumner he’d decided that the Kid was a spiritual cousin. “He was a guy from the inner city. His father died when he was eight. His stepfather was no good, dragged him and his mother around the country. He ended up getting swept into crime as a teenager trying to survive.”

That little Alex was being swept along on a crime wave, accompanying his mom and Art into malls, was a thought that nagged at both of them. “I didn’t like that he was there while we were doing this stuff,” says Natalie, “but I believed, or told myself, that this was our last run, and he was having fun, seeing the world.” By now counterfeiting was their way of life, second nature, and they were long past that first step into any life of crime—the denial of the consequences it might have on themselves or others. The conventional definition of crime is an act that violates the laws of a society, but it would not be less accurate to say that it is an outcome of acting almost completely in the present tense.

Art hadn’t even thought about how he’d get to Alaska by the time they reached Seattle. Once he was there, it occurred to him that buying a plane ticket meant presenting his ID, which would then be entered into a database. His name was almost certainly flagged, which meant that the Secret Service would immediately know not only his location, but also where he was headed. He doubted his father would appreciate the extra company of a surveillance crew. For a moment, he thought about backing out.

Drawing on her experience as a ticket agent at DFW, Natalie devised a nifty tactic to avoid Art having to show ID. With Alex at her side, she bought three tickets to Anchorage, explaining that they were for herself and her two kids—one of whom hadn’t yet arrived at the airport. She and Alex then checked in, receiving color-coded stickers on their boarding passes indicating that they’d already shown their IDs. She handed Art one of the checked passes, then checked Alex in again at a separate window with the third ticket. Nine-eleven was still four long months away, and in that wondrous world before, all three strolled through security and onto the plane.

 

 

 

ART WAS A BALL OF nerves on the flight to Anchorage. Even though he’d talked with his father several times over the phone, the prospect of actually seeing him had been abstract—a possible future in a life where most plans had more to do with wishful thinking and telling people what they wanted to hear than actual commitment. By the time they landed, his stomach was churning. It didn’t help that, prior to passing through security, Natalie had duct-taped their remaining fifty thousand dollars in counterfeit across his belly.

Art had been a scrawny twelve-year-old when his father had last seen him; now he was twenty-eight and nearly six feet tall, with broad shoulders and an upper body powerful from working out. “A few minutes before we landed, I realized that my dad probably wouldn’t even recognize me, and I wasn’t even sure I’d recognize him,” says Art. “I didn’t want to walk past him, or even just up to him and see nothing in his eyes. It really hit me that this wasn’t just going to be awkward, but awkward from the very first moment.”

Senior had told Art he’d be waiting for him just past the security checkpoint at the main terminal, that universal nexus where everybody except your own people are vaguely disappointed to see you. Determined not to be a lost pup, Art concentrated on the older males as they entered the crescent of expectant faces. After a few anxious seconds he locked on to a man who looked like he was in his early fifties. The square jaw, the narrow cheeks—he was suddenly certain that he was looking at his father.

“Pops,” he said.

“Arty!”

The Hollywood rule of estranged-father-and-son reunions is that the son must keep his dad at arm’s length, while the father tries to win his kid back over with a combination of repentance and love, but Art hugged his father right there. Like it had been on the phone, it was easiest to go through the motions of normality. Anice was there, too, and Art embraced her as well. She seemed to have aged far faster than his father. Her face, Natalie would note, “looked like it had been wadded up at the bottom of a laundry basket,” and her stringy hair, dyed orange, fell down to her chest in an attempt at youth. She was bony and frail, a weathered ghost of the woman Art remembered from childhood. Crowning her overall decline was the fact that she was in a wheelchair; a few weeks earlier she and Senior had fallen into an argument, apparently over a woman he had been seeing on the sly. They had been driving when the fight erupted, and in her anger Anice had jumped from the moving vehicle, breaking her right leg in several places.

After Art introduced Natalie and Alex, the party piled into Senior’s truck, a big red dually, and drove to a diner for dinner. As the initial shock of the reunion wore off, both men began to relax. They ordered food, then Art said he was stepping outside for a cigarette.

“I’ll come with,” Senior said, and the two went back to the truck. Sitting in the front seat together, they small-talked a bit, then paused and looked at each other.

“I can’t believe it.”

“I know.”

Junior started to relax. The one thing he had heard about Alaska, other than that it was extraordinarily beautiful and overflowing with dark and light, was that it was legal to grow pot there for personal use. He asked his father if this was true.

“It is,” Senior said.

“I guess you don’t know this about me, but I wouldn’t mind trying some Alaskan bud, just for the hell of it,” Junior ventured.

His father laughed and popped open the glove compartment. He withdrew a Ziploc bag filled with the greenest, thickest marijuana buds Art had ever seen, followed by a pipe.

 

 

 

THE DRIVE FROM ANCHORAGE to Senior’s house near Chickaloon was about two hours, most of it along one of Alaska’s most scenic routes—the Glenn Highway. They’d arrived during the short night so there wasn’t much of a view, but outside the truck’s windows was a landscape that would later take Art’s breath away. A few miles north of Anchorage, forests gave way to lush green flatlands framed by the Chugach Mountains. As they headed north along the Cook Inlet, crossing it near the town of Palmer, the mountains narrowed in from both sides and they wound into the Matanuska Valley, carved by a glacier and silvered by the wide Matanuska River. They hugged the river for twenty miles, until finally Senior took a left off the highway and climbed toward the Talkeetna Mountains along a dirt road. There was nothing at the end of it but his house and two hundred acres of forest that were his.

Art was speechless when he saw the house. Although it was unfinished, it was a tavernesque, two-story A-frame, with a driveway that swung around behind and a coach house on one side. Inside were four bedrooms, all done in natural wood, as well as a library and an interior balcony. “I had kinda imagined my dad living in a shack or a cabin, real frontier stuff, but that house was huge and it was comfortable. I knew right away that he had a good life, or at least a good house.”

After showing Art and Natalie the house, Senior led them out back to a trailer set off in the woods. It was small and primitive, with no plumbing, and Senior explained that he and Anice had lived there while he’d built the main house. He told Art and Natalie that they’d have privacy there.

“You can stay here as long as you like,” he added to his son’s amazement. Art was encouraged by the statement, but Natalie was not enthused by the arrangement.

“There was no way I was gonna sleep out in the woods in Alaska,” she says. “I mean, I’m from Texas, but they had grizzly bears and wolves up there, who knows what kind of shit. I’m pregnant, and it just felt like we were being shoved off to the side.” When she politely expressed her concern about the bear situation, Senior trotted off. A few minutes later, he returned with a 120-pound bull mastiff, a four-legged ball of muscle and slobber that was easily the largest canine she had ever seen. The dog hopped into the trailer, swaggered around and greeted everyone, then politely embedded himself on the kitchen floor like a battleship anchor.

“Whatever you’re afraid of, this guy isn’t,” Senior assured her. “I take him with me when I hike and he backs down from nothing.”

Natalie did feel better. She asked Senior what the beast’s name was. Given the dog’s size and breed, she figured it had to be something butch, like “Cannonball” or maybe “Brutus.”

“That’s Sonny,” Senior said.

 

 

 

ONCE NATALIE AND ALEX WERE SETTLED in the trailer, father and son headed over to the coach house, which served as Senior’s office and private getaway. It was all done in pine, with a black leather sofa, a twenty-inch TV, and its own kitchen, bathroom, and telephone. Art got the feeling his dad spent a lot of time there.

They sat down on the sofa. It was time for the Talk and they both knew it. To brace themselves, Senior loaded up a big bowl of Alaskan bud and they smoked it down to dust. Wanting to keep the floodgates to the past under his control, Art took the initiative by asking his father what he had been doing for the last sixteen years. Senior gamely fielded the question. After he had dropped Art off with his mother in Chicago that day long ago, they had headed to Alaska to visit Anice’s brother, who was stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base, near Anchorage. While visiting him, they had fallen in love with the state, and for the first time in his life Senior had decided to put down roots.

“There are places here where you might be the first person to set foot there in hundreds of years,” he told Art, then diverted into a story about how he and Anice’s son, Larry, had once discovered an abandoned Russian settlement deep in the mountains. Buried beneath the collapsed huts they found old coins and small caches of gold nuggets. Senior still had a few of them, and he rose from the sofa, retrieved a wood box, and he showed Art some of the artifacts. Art held an old Masonic coin in his palm, imagining what it would have been like to have been there for the discovery.

Senior explained that within two months of arriving in Alaska for a “visit,” they were all living in Anchorage. But rejecting his foot-loose past, this time Senior was determined to stay. He found piecework painting houses and fixing engines for fishing boats, and eventually saved up enough to outfit his own mobile auto-repair shop. For a decade he and Larry had built up the business, trucking hundreds of miles into the interior to assist isolated motorists. Only a year earlier, he’d sold the business and retired. Senior was now devoted to his two favorite hobbies: exploring the bush and raising dogs. Out past the trailer, he had kennels containing more than a hundred dogs, mostly large breeds or sled dogs, including a pale-eyed, hundred-percent timber wolf named King. In 1995, Larry had even taken some of Senior’s dogs and run them in the Iditarod. In a race where simply completing the course is a victory, Larry had finished forty-eighth.

Art was quietly astounded as the stories flew from his father’s lips. “My dad had gone completely Alaskan,” he says. “The dogs, the fishing boats, even the goddamn bud. It was like he’d been born there. And he was still excited by the place. He told me there were a lot of places he wanted to show me.”

And Art had missed all of it. Listening to the stories, he saw no reason why he and Wensdae and Jason couldn’t have been there, at least for some of it. Part of him wanted to feel rage and strangle his father, but he was too fascinated. “He’d talk and tell stories and I’d just be amazed at what an interesting person he was. I realized that my father was cool, he was fun to hang out with. What was weird was that, at the same time, he was a fucking asshole who left us to rot in the projects.”

Even when it was Art’s turn to catch his father up on
his
life, he did not show him an angry face. He made sure Senior knew that while he had been frolicking in the wilds of Alaska, he and his siblings had been living in one of America’s most dangerous neighborhoods, going hungry, and struggling with a clinically insane mother, but he did not assign blame. He told him about Jason being more or less permanently incarcerated, about getting shot, and about how they’d all been wards of the state after Aunt Donna nearly killed their mother, but there was never a suggestion that Senior’s presence, or even financial help, might have mitigated some of it. He stopped short of telling his dad about his crimes, or of Wensdae’s accident. Art wasn’t yet sure how to break it to Wensdae that he had found their father, or how either of them would react.