The Gate (17 page)

Al got back in the car business for two reasons. First he was bored, and second he knew Ben was struggling. He and the new owners of Precision didn't get along. The Barton brothers came from a strict family. They were dress right, cover down kind of businessmen who always had an eye on the bottom line, and Ben was more laid back like Al.

Al thought the car business ought to be fun, and he was forever horsing around. When we were partners he watched over the service and parts department and pretty much left the front end to me, but he always liked hanging around with the salesmen. He had an easy way about him, and they all liked and respected him. He expected a lot from people, and when he got it the man was generous to a fault. He loved to reward performance and always had a contest of some sort going on.

One month he'd decide that if parts and service out-grossed sales, the managers would each win a week at his cottage. The next month he'd do the same thing with the mechanics, and he was forever putting little cash spiffs on cars that had been on the lot too long. One night after we'd had a particularly good month, he had four-by-eight sheets of plywood put on top of the hoists, covered them with white tablecloths and candelabras, and treated all fifty-two employees and their families to a steak fry.
Three months later he bought a set of stainless steel cookware for everyone and sent a note home with it thanking the wives for letting their husbands put in a few extra hours. Like I said, he made it fun.

One day Al came in with one of those “take a number” dispensers like in a bakery and mounted it on the wall of the showroom. Then every once in a while he'd walk out of his office in the back, grab a number, and yell, “Number twenty-eight! Does anyone have number twenty-eight?” Customers didn't know how to react to that. Some of them would give him a puzzled look, others tried to ignore him, but some would sheepishly go over and take a number.

Ben loved that sort of thing, but the Bartons were all business, and after a while they started to clash.

For example, Ben sold a green Volvo wagon on European delivery to a family named the Hansons. In those days people could save a couple thousand dollars off the list price if they ordered a car in the States and then flew over and picked it up at the factory in Europe. They could drive around Europe on vacation and then drop it back off at the factory, and they in turn would ship it to the dealer that sold it.

Ben wrote the Hansons up, filled out the order form, the insurance form, and the shipping forms, and they gave him a five hundred dollar deposit. In cash. He finished the deal up after the office was closed, so he wrote them a receipt and pocketed the money, intending to turn it in the next morning.

To celebrate the sale, after work he started buying rounds at O'Brien's, and he used some of the deposit money to cover his tab. Ben and Mary Alice were still married then, and when he got home late smelling like beer, she got after him.

“Where have you been?” she snapped. “And what were you doing? No good, I'm sure of that!”

“Shows you what you know,” he said. “I had a drink with a customer who owed me some money!” And with that he threw
what was left of the deposit money at her. The next day he realized he had to make up the money, so he hit me up for a loan. Said he wanted to buy Mary Alice something for her birthday. If he'd have just told me the truth I'd have covered him, but Mary Alice and I were like oil and water, and I wasn't about to help him do something nice for her.

Ben never did come up with the five hundred dollar deposit, and when the Hansons came in and gave him a check for the balance, he stuck it in his top desk drawer and forgot about it. A couple months later I got a phone call from Lars Linblad at the Volvo Factory in Gothenburg telling me that someone named Hanson was there claiming that he ordered a car from us but they didn't have any record of it. I told him I didn't have any record of it either, but when Lars said that the salesman's name was Ben, I told him I'd call him back. I marched into Ben's office breathing fire, and he admitted what he'd done and gave me the Hansons' check, promising he'd make good on their cash deposit. Feeling like I had a little egg on my face, I called Lars back and said to give them a car. The only problem was, the Hansons had ordered green, and the only wagons they had at the factory with American equipment were turquoise.

“Give 'em a turquoise one,” I said, “and tell them I'll have a green one for them when they get back to the States.” I was sure we were going to have to eat the mileage and the shipping on the turquoise one, but somehow Ben had it sold before it landed on a boat in Baltimore. His commission on the wagon and a Mercedes coupe more than covered the five hundred, and Al told me to lighten up.

“Don't be so hard on the kid,” he said. “No harm no foul, these things happen.” They happened a lot to Ben, but he had a way of squirting out of trouble.

A few years later when Al remarried, he asked Ben to be his best man at the wedding, and that's when our friendship tailed off a bit. In Al's mind I'd dropped a peg or two; Ben had taken my place, and Al welcomed him home like the prodigal son.

Marriage agreed with Al. It took the edge off him. His wife, Kristen, was a good woman, and I think loving her mellowed him a bit.

Years later, when Al learned he was dying of cancer, we got together and wrestled with the whys of life. Kristen called me when Al was close to death, and I was holding his hand when he breathed his last breath. At his funeral I said that according to the Bible, “God doesn't judge by outward appearances but by the condition of our hearts” (see 1 Sam. 16:7). And that's how I knew Al was in heaven, because I knew his heart.

———

“Bet you're surprised to see me here,” Al said.

“No,” I replied, “not in the least. You were always more religious than you let on, soft and tenderhearted, like your mother.”

“She said to say hi,” he said, getting a little emotional. “And you could say that she's the reason I'm here. Now come on,” Al insisted. “Let's take a ride. I think better when I'm driving.” The tires spit gravel and dust as we exploded out of the driveway. It had been a while since I'd ridden in a car that's sole function was to go fast. We talked about the car, the old days, Ben, and the people we used to know for about a half hour, and then Al shifted the conversation away from small talk.

“Look,” he said, “you and I were always pretty straight with each other, so I'm going to come right out with it. I always felt a little awkward talking about religion with you. It's not that I didn't believe in God, because I did. I just didn't like him very well, or to be more exact, I didn't like his brand of justice. You see, when I was eight years old, my dad died, and I prayed that God would do something. I believed in miracles, and each night I prayed for one, but God never delivered. One day after church I asked the preacher why, and he said, ‘God has his reasons. He's always fair, and you must never question him. Besides,' the preacher said, ‘he's not a pull toy on a string. He doesn't follow you, you must follow him.'

“I took that to mean that my father's death was somebody's fault, a payment of some kind, retribution for my sins, or my brother's sins, or God only knows what. The scales of God's justice had been balanced by my father's death. That may not have been what the preacher meant, but that's how I interpreted his words. After that, I never had much use for organized religion.”

Al continued. “Evidently, it was also God's will for us to sell off most of the family farm and live hand-to-mouth. My mother worked her fingers to the bone, but each Sunday when they'd take a collection for the poor, she'd put a few pennies in the plate. The problem was, we were as poor as anybody I knew, but we never saw a dime of that collection money. So growing up, I learned two things: you can't trust preachers, and you can't trust God to do what you think is right.

“After that, I decided I'd better look out for myself. I spent my whole life trying to make enough money so that when we got older, Jane and I could enjoy life. But when I finally had the money, the one person I wanted to enjoy it with was gone.

God doesn't always answer our prayers as fast as we'd like.

“For a few years there, I was so angry about it that I'd go over to that mausoleum, sit in the chair by the little brass plate that bore her name, and question God's fairness. ‘Why Jane?' I'd ask. ‘And why now, when we had so much to live for?' Why would a loving God take a mother from her children when they needed her most? Why would he take her from me when I needed her most? Was this my fault? Was God balancing his scales again?

“He didn't answer my prayers as fast as I wanted, so I answered them myself,” Al said. “I came to the same conclusions I'd come to as a boy in Indiana: either God's not really there, or he doesn't care, or he and I had a very different understanding of what's fair.

“So now imagine how I felt when one day, out of the blue, you
announce that you're going to pull a rich young ruler on me and sell everything you had to go and follow Jesus. Can you imagine how that made me feel? The God I was mad at was the same God you were going to give your life to. To be honest, I felt a little betrayed.”

When Satan is raising havoc in our lives, we sometimes blame God.

“I'm sorry, Al,” I replied. “I never meant to hurt you.”

“I know that. And there's no reason to be sorry. I was wrestling with some pretty dark stuff back then, and I'm the one who chose not to talk about it. When Satan is raising havoc in your life, you sometimes blame God. But now I have to talk about it, because I'm not the only one who's had those kinds of thoughts about God. Besides, in your line of work, you need to know what people are thinking.”

We had pulled off the road into a pay-to-park lot somewhere in a big city. “I understand that I'm supposed to get you dinner,” Al said. “I never was much of a cook, so I thought we'd get a pie.”

I hadn't noticed until then, but as I looked around, it looked to me like we were in Chicago, a few blocks off Michigan Avenue, maybe on Rush Street.

Wherever we were, the streets were busy. People were moving along the sidewalk in swarms. Buses, bicycles, big cars and small ones wound their way through the city as taxi drivers honked their horns. Little boutique shops lined the streets, and a multitude of languages and music poured out into the street as we passed by. It was an eclectic symphony of sights and sounds.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Jerusalem. The new one.”

People were smiling at each other, laughter filled the air, and in the distance you could hear a street musician's jazz trumpet play “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

“We're here,” said Al, ducking in a doorway. The neon sign in
the window said “Momma Lacarri's Pizza.” Inside, the waiter in a crisp, white shirt and black bow tie showed us to a table.

Al ordered. “We'll have a deep dish with sausage, pepperoni, red peppers, and mushrooms. And bring us a couple of Cokes, please.”

“How do you know what I want?” I asked.

“Trust me,” he said, “you'll like it.” And he was right. We talked about the old Chicago and the new Jerusalem and the excitement of the city, and during our conversation, Al ordered two slices of cheesecake for our dessert.

“I don't think I can eat another bite,” I said.

“There's always room for cheesecake,” Al replied. And somehow we managed to eat most of it.

We walked around the city for an hour or so, window-shopping, taking in the street entertainment, and buying a bag of caramel corn for the ride home.

As we started to drive out of the city, the sun was setting behind us, and the conversation turned again to the fairness of God.

There's evil in the world, but without it there'd be no possibility of us choosing good.

“Listen,” said Al. “What I didn't understand, and what you need to understand, is that the preacher was right, but it's a lot more complicated than that. Good and evil are sprinkled on every life like salt and pepper. We can't avoid it, and God doesn't always cause it. Sometimes it just is. Sometimes it's our fault—we bring things on ourselves. I don't like it, you don't like it, but it's a fact. There's evil in the world, but without the possibility of it, there'd be no possibility of you and me choosing good. The one comes with the other. Each of us is born with the potential for good and evil.”

“I get that,” I said. When I was working at the state prison in Easton, I saw more evil than I ever wanted to, but even the worst offenders had a spark of good. You'd see it when they
talked about their mothers or their girlfriends or even God, but the good was always overshadowed by evil. And the thing I wanted to know was this: Was that always their fate, was it the hand they were dealt at birth, were they simply born bad, or did they have a choice?

Reading the Bible doesn't make you immune to temptation.

Al went on. “Imagine for a moment that there are two dogs standing beside you, a white one on your right and a black one on your left. Each dog has an insatiable appetite. Each and every one of us is born with both of them. As pups, they played with us in our cribs, and as we grew, they grew. Never once, not even for a moment, have they ever left our side. They are fiercely loyal, and outside of heaven's gate, they'll be our faithful companions till death. But don't reach out to pet them, and don't expect them to fetch your slippers, because these dogs will never be domesticated.

“Their names are Good and Evil, and sometimes it feels like we're a rubber chew toy and they're playing tug-of-war with us in their teeth. Each of us has felt their push and pull at some time in our lives, and most of us constantly drift back and forth between the two. Even Saint Paul struggled with it. ‘The good I would I do not,' he said in Romans, ‘but the evil that I would not, that is what I do.'