The Art of Making Money

by Jason Kersten

  He rejoined his wife and son after his dishonorable discharge. They moved back to Schaumburg and picked up where they’d left off. Over the next two years, the couple had two more children, Wensdae and Jason, and for a little while it looked like Art senior would reform. Then, in December of ’77, he was arrested for robbing the truck in DuPage County and wound up in Stateville.

  On the day he visited, Art junior was too young to think of his father as a “criminal”—a distinction that comes naturally only to those of us lucky enough never to have had a family member behind bars. In a vague way, little Art knew that his dad was “in a bad place full of bad men, but it was unfathomable that he was one of them.” All he remembers was sitting on his daddy’s lap in the visiting room, being perfectly happy that he indeed had a father, and ecstatically cognizant of the fact that in a few months his “pops” would be leaving Stateville to become, once and for all, a permanent presence in his life.

  THINGS WENT ACCORDING TO PLAN at first. In March of 1978, Senior left Stateville to serve out the remaining six months of his sentence at a halfway house in Bensenville. During the day he worked at a wire-manufacturing plant, a job at which he excelled. Malinda visited him at night and on the weekends with the kids, and his reintegration into both his family and law-abiding society progressed smoothly. By the time he left the halfway house and rejoined his family, Magnum Wire was so impressed with Senior that the company made him a foreman, and he was able to begin anew his life as a father and husband in a three-bedroom home that was as respectable and as congruous as that of any workingman in town.

  Art remembers that taste of normality with the possessiveness and incredulity of an old exile. “You wouldn’t believe it, but there was a time when I was a kid when I had pretty much a normal life,” he says. “I was a suburban kid. We had a nice home. We were a family. We did normal things like go to the movies. I remember my dad taking me to see Superman, you know, with Christopher Reeve, and holding his hand in line and thinking that was just the coolest thing.”

  Despite Senior’s appearance of becoming a family man, what little Art and none of the other Williamses knew was that he had been seeing another woman even before leaving the halfway house. Her name was Anice Eaker and she was a lithe, blonde-haired, blue-eyed divorcée who lived on the other side of Bensenville with two kids from a previous marriage. From the moment she appeared she laid siege to Senior’s affections with pythonic determination.

  Malinda did not give in easily. She learned of the affair and insisted that Senior break it off. He did, but a few days later Anice came by the house looking for him. She even had the temerity to let herself in the back door, but instead of finding Williams she found Malinda, seething and incredulous. Little Art was there, too, and watched wide-eyed as his mother proceeded to administer a beating as brutal as any he’d later see on the streets of Chicago. By the time it was over, she had broken Anice’s nose.

  Anice later called the police, claiming that Malinda had tried to kill her. Confronted by Anice’s thoroughly battered face, they had little choice but to arrest Malinda. Senior bailed his wife out and convinced Anice not to press charges, but Malinda sensed that getting her husband away from the other woman would require more drastic measures. She told Senior that they either had to leave the state and head back to Texas, or she’d leave him.

  Senior consented to the move, and within two weeks the family was packed up and headed south. They made a go of it in Houston at first, where Senior worked odd jobs, and when that failed to pan out they retreated to a mobile-home park in Pleasant Grove, a suburb of Dallas. Like many such marginal communities, it hosted a mix of blue-collar strivers, wanderers, the elderly, and religious zealots. The Williamses’ next door neighbors were an older couple that consisted of a World War II veteran and a Santería priestess from the Philippines. The priestess, whose name was Connie, had long black hair that nearly reached the ground, and a beautiful smile. She baby-sat the kids, sang to them, and spoiled them rotten with cookies and milk. She told Art stories about the moody pantheon of Santería demigods, conversed with invisible entities, and told him that a powerful spirit dwelled inside of him.

  Little Art loved her.

  While Art was learning about the dark arts with his mystical nanny, his dad was spending days on the other side of the park with an evangelical minister. With no work, an unhappy wife, and a guilty conscience, Senior was reaching for Jesus. Things came to head one day when he dropped by his neighbor’s place to pick up Art and found him kneeling in front of a Santería altar with candles ablaze. Harsh words, accusations of devil worship, and hexes ensued. The minister convinced Art senior to move his family to the other side of the park and organized a trailer-park exorcism, during which they held Art down on the floor of their makeshift church and commanded the devil to abandon the boy.

  Needless to say, Art was terrified and hopelessly confused—a state that would only become more enhanced by what followed: Exhausted from all the moving, her husband’s bad decisions, and finally the commotion surrounding Junior, Malinda had a nervous breakdown. It manifested itself as a near-catatonic depression and rages at Senior over the fact that they’d descended from a relatively good life to the status of trailer trash.

  The obvious solution, he told her, was to return to Illinois and quickly reestablish themselves. And so a little more than a year after they left, they moved back to the Land of Lincoln. They stayed with Senior’s half-brother Richard, who lived in Schaumburg—only eight miles from Bensenville and Anice Eaker. Senior’s proximity to his old mistress was probably enough to doom his marriage, but the catalyst for his final break with Malinda proved far more destructive and tragic.

  Senior and Anice’s new plan was to enroll in bartending school, taking turns watching the kids while the other attended classes. One evening while Senior was watching the kids, Wensdae woke up and wandered into the kitchen, where she found her father at practice mixing drinks while the other kids slept. She was only five, but her memory of what happened next would stay with her like an immutable pathogen.

  “What are you doing?” she asked her father.

  “I’ll show you,” he said. He quickly left the house, returning minutes later with a bottle of red wine. He poured her a glass, encouraged her to drink it, and when she was happily dizzy, he led her into the back bedroom.

  Malinda came home from class minutes later. She opened the bedroom door to find her husband lying naked on the bed with their daughter.

  The fighting lasted most of the night. Senior tried to convince his wife that nothing had happened, but Malinda had seen. Her rage re-erupted the next morning even stronger. As they screamed and yelled at each other, Senior rounded up all three children and put them in the car. Malinda followed him to the driveway, demanding that he leave the children with her. When he refused and prepared to get in the driver’s seat, she tried to wrestle the keys away from him. He shoved her hard to the ground, then jumped into the car. As he drove off, Malinda was still on her back in the driveway, kicking and screaming for him to return the kids.

  Days later, the police would pick her up from wandering the streets and take her to Elgin Mental Health Center, where she would be diagnosed with severe depression and spend the next month undergoing treatment.

  Art never knew what caused the fight. Because of their individual shames, no one ever told him the truth about what his father had done. In Art’s childhood mind, everything congealed around the bizarre incident with Connie, and for years he’d harbor a vague shame that it had all been his fault—the work of the vengeful spirit inside him.

  SENIOR DROVE STRAIGHT TO ANICE’S house in Schaumburg. She had a room prepared for Art junior and his siblings, and welcomed them in as if she’d been expecting their arrival for weeks. Senior told his children flatly, “This is your new mother, we’ll be living with her from now on.”

  Art’s first instinct was to not trust her; the last time he’d seen Anice, after all, his mother was pounding o
n her face. But he quickly grew to like her. Anice employed all the dialogical tricks that suggest coziness, calling Art and Wensdae “kiddo” and “honey” and even referring to Jason as “my baby.” She was particularly affectionate when Art senior was present. Over the next several months she cooked for them, played games with them, and seemed remarkably unperturbed by the fact that she had gone from two kids to five overnight.

  Anice’s own children, Larry and Chrissy, were older than Art junior—Larry by four years and Chrissy by two. Larry, a budding jock who had always wanted a younger brother, duly drafted Art junior as his number one sports buddy, a role Art junior happily embraced. They’d play basketball at the courts at a nearby school on an almost daily basis, and Little Art beamed when the older boy began calling him “bro.” Chrissy, a gabby little blonde, was less enthused by the three new “brats” who had taken over the house, but she eventually came to love them. Neither of Anice’s kids had any relationship with their own father, and Art junior noticed that early on Anice encouraged them to call Art senior “Dad.” Art junior called Anice by her name.

  The kids were just adapting to the new arrangement when Malinda was released from the hospital. She quickly got an apartment in Arlington Heights and a job cleaning houses, then demanded that Art senior give her custody of the kids under threat of bringing in the law. Even though her mental stability was questionable, he made no attempt to resist.

  ART JUNIOR AND HIS SIBLINGS didn’t see their father for several months after rejoining Malinda. Senior called the house numerous times and spoke to the kids, but Malinda, horrified by what she had seen at Uncle Rich’s, refused to allow him to visit. He swore to her that nothing had happened—he had experienced a moment of weakness, but her entrance into the room had prevented it from going further. He loved his daughter and would never let that happen again. Malinda experienced a moment of weakness too. She finally gave in and consented to let him have the kids for a weekend, stipulating that she did not wish to see his face. She would drop the kids off at her sister Donna’s house on Saturday morning, where he’d pick them up and return them Sunday evening. She made sure that her eldest child knew the plan.

  Everything began as it was supposed to. The kids waited at Aunt Donna’s, then Senior showed up and took them out to lunch. They joked and teased each other over burgers, delighted to be spending two full days with Dad. After lunch, he told them that he had a surprise planned for them, and they piled back into the car with glee.

  Art watched his father closely as he steered onto the highway, trying to divine where they were headed. All he knew was that they were not headed into the city. After an hour of watching off-ramps whiz past, shiftings of doubt moved through his stomach. His mom had never mentioned anything about a long trip.

  After three hours, he began repeatedly asking his father where they were going. He wanted to go home.

  Senior refused to tell him, and became short with him. He told him that they were taking a vacation, and that he shouldn’t complain. Art junior started to cry, but it didn’t do any good.

  They drove 2,200 miles, all the way to Lobster Valley, Oregon. By the time they finally broke away from the highway two days later, Art junior and Wensdae knew that they were not going home. They were now farther away from it than they’d ever been, in a fascinat ingly alien landscape of pine trees, mountains, dirt roads, and ranches. Senior drove deep into the countryside, winding the car through hairpin turns until they finally crackled up a gravel drive to an A-frame house somewhere in the middle of a forest. As Senior killed the engine, from the front door of the house emerged the first familiar thing Art had seen in two days.

  As always, Anice was smiling and expectant.

  MALINDA CALLED THE POLICE, but they couldn’t help her much. Kidnapping aside, Senior would not have been using his real name. Later on she’d come to believe that the entire time she’d been sequestering the kids from him, he’d been setting up camp with Anice in Oregon, waiting for the opportune moment to take them back.

  By now Art junior had moved so many times that he was developing a feel for impending relocation, along with a sense of absolute powerlessness. Other than food and entertainment, his desires—to stay in one place, to be with his mother, simple regularity—were irrelevant. He controlled the only thing he could, his imagination, and latched himself to books and studies as a way of riding out the parental storms. No matter where he was, school was a sanctuary, and he consistently placed in the top of his class. “He was a little geek,” remembers Wensdae. “He had these big glasses and he was always reading, usually stuff way beyond whatever grade he was in, almost like he was trying to stay ahead.”

  Art’s childhood dream was to be a lawyer; he’d read that it had been the formative occupation of the founding fathers and it had the ring of accomplishment. On another level, it embodied the guiding structure that he was missing at home. Fair play, a governing set of rules and principles—the way things should be. Deep inside, he knew that he was at a disadvantage compared with the kids he’d meet in other towns whose fathers were not convicts, whose mothers were stable. He wanted to cross over into that realm, and his desire had not yet turned to anger.

  THEY STAYED IN LOBSTER VALLEY for a few months, then it was on to Lebanon, Oregon, and later Mount Shasta, California. In each town, Williams, now aided by Anice, would hang paper just before departing. Art junior was learning to read the signs. The grown-ups would start speaking in hushed voices and appear preoccupied. The house would suddenly fill up with new goods that never emerged from their boxes—televisions, stereos, expensive suits. There’d be a celebratory night—a nice dinner out, a trip to the movies, or a few gifts for the kids—followed by a predawn exit. When they left Lebanon, Art actually saw the cash—a few thousand dollars on the kitchen table. He was excited until he realized that he wasn’t getting any of it.

  As the towns and months went by, the separation from Malinda and the itinerant lifestyle wore on Art and Wensdae, who increasingly complained to their father that they wanted to see their mother; but the more they bugged him about it, the meaner he became. Wensdae had it the hardest. Senior had of course lied to Malinda about nothing happening that day at Uncle Rich’s—he had raped his own daughter. According to Wensdae, that was the only time he ever sexually abused her, but her psychic wound would only grow with her body. Shortly after Senior kidnapped the children, she started wetting the bed, and on her sixth birthday Art rewarded her with a large present, beautifully wrapped. She eagerly opened it to find that it was a box of diapers. She ran off crying. Art junior ran after her and tried to console her, but he was so miserable himself and shocked by his father’s cruelty that he just ended up crying with her over the fact that they wanted to go back to Mom.

  Anice’s colors darkened too. Once it was clear that Senior had no intention of returning to Malinda, both Art junior and Wensdae got the feeling that they had become unwanted baggage. “She was completely fake,” says Wensdae. “She’d ignore us when my dad wasn’t around; then if he was she’d suddenly try to act like a mom.”

  The one place Art junior began to feel at home was Mount Shasta, a town of about three thousand tucked away among the mountains and redwoods near California’s border with Oregon. Surrounded by national parks and graced with stunning views of an eponymous fourteen-thousand-foot dormant volcano, the town had the magical aura of a wonderland. He made fast friends with a local girl who lived up the road. Her name was Lisa Arbacheske, and during the summer of ’82 he spent nearly every day with her.

  “Her life seemed so perfect,” he remembers. “She had a house down by the river, a big, beautiful log cabin. They had horses. She was the most beautiful little girl, with long, brown, curly hair. My first kiss was with her, on a log near her house. It was the happiest I’d been in a long time. She made me feel loved.”

  Art wanted to stay in Mount Shasta, but by then Wensdae’s psychological rebellion had intensified beyond Senior’s control. In addition to the bed
wetting, she developed a habit of muddying her clothes after her father dropped her off at school, and sometimes removing them altogether. When school authorities complained, Senior and Anice panicked that he’d be discovered and arrested.

  Toward summer’s end Senior left town, taking Wensdae and Jason with him. He came back two weeks later driving a brand-new Ford Bronco, but the kids weren’t with him. He told Art that he had dropped them off in Chicago with their mother, and to pack his bags because he would be joining them in a week.

  “I didn’t believe him,” says Art. “I thought he had done something with them, and I freaked out. I remember fighting with him, and that was the first time he ever hit me, really hard in the face.”

  A few days later, Art said a tearful good-bye to Lisa, then climbed into the back of the Bronco, which was crammed with the family’s belongings. He still didn’t believe that his dad was taking him back to Illinois, and spent much of the next three days sobbing in the back while the rest of the family repeatedly told him to shut up. But he wasn’t the only miserable child on the trip. “On the way back my parents ran out of money,” remembers Chrissy. “So we stopped in these little towns, and my parents made us get out of the car and knock on people’s doors to beg for money. I hated it; we all hated it. That’s how we got gas money.”