“Visitor, please stand,” the meeting’s chair was saying to him.
JW looked around. The meeting was in session and people were looking at him. He noticed that an older woman with kind eyes had sat down next to him.
“I’m sorry, I guess I wasn’t paying attention,” he said.
“He asked you to stand,” she said with a warm smile. “Don’t worry.”
The chair was middle-aged, balding, and wore a navy blue plumber’s uniform bearing a patch embroidered with the name “Gary.”
“Thank you,” JW whispered to the woman next to him. He stood and smoothed his suit jacket, realizing as he did so that he had slipped into exactly the position he wanted to avoid: junior to some well-meaning—but less intelligent and less successful—gambling addicts.
“I’m Gary L.,” the man said, “and in keeping with Gamblers Anonymous tradition, we’re going to start by asking you twenty questions. If you answer yes to seven or more I’m going to ask you if you think you’re a compulsive gambler. All right?”
JW glanced around at the faces watching him. The farmer with the long brown face and fingernails. The frizzy-haired waitress with rashy cheeks. The implement salesman with blonde bangs combed long and low across his forehead. The kind-looking woman in mom clothes, who wore a home detention ankle bracelet. They seemed encouraging, but all of it was mildly disgusting. They knew nothing about him—what he did, what he knew, what he had accomplished—or the position he had in the community. Who were they, to judge him?
“I think you can probably skip the questions,” he said, a hand in his pocket in his best business-conference-presenter persona.
“Well, it’s our procedure,” replied the chair.
“That’s fine, but, you know, I was just going to leave,” said JW, pointing in the direction of the door. “I just wanted to get the book and then the door was blocked. I’m sorry to disrupt your meeting—”
“That’s fine,” said Gary, in a tone that struck JW as surprisingly gentle for a plumber. He suddenly felt that it would be rude of him to leave. He lifted an arm.
“You know what? Go ahead,” he said, and smiled around the room. “You all seem like reasonable people.”
“Okay.” Gary read from the Big Book. “Did you ever lose time from work or school due to gambling?”
“No.”
“Has gambling ever made your home life unhappy?”
JW let out an ironic laugh. “I don’t have a home life per se. My wife and I are separated.” He was smiling as if it were funny, he realized, and a wave of regret washed over him. He felt his face flushing. “You know, I’m really not that comfortable sharing personal information like this.” He looked around the room, hoping to find a sympathetic smile. Instead, they all looked sorry for him. JW was deeply unsettled, but he clasped his hands and tried to stand in place politely.
“Did gambling ever affect your reputation?” the chair asked.
JW sighed in renewed irritation—with himself more than anything. “So I’ve been told.” It came out clipped. He felt the blood rising in his temples.
“Have you ever felt remorse after gambling?”
“Gary, just give him a minute,” said the woman beside JW.
JW shrugged. “Hasn’t everyone?” Now his sarcasm was unmistakeable.
“Look,” replied Gary, “you may think this is stupid, but this isn’t banking. Yes, I know who you are. We’re not your loan applicants. We’re gambling addicts, all of us, and wherever we come from, we’re all on the same level in here.”
JW felt a burst of anger. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize we’d been through the twenty questions yet.”
A few of the people laughed, and Gary glanced at them and banged his gavel. “That’s enough,” he said.
JW’s mouth was dry and his feet hurt. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t think I’m ready for this.”
“You’re among friends. You can let it out.”
JW looked from the chair to the others in the room and back again. He let out a small laugh and rubbed his neck.
“No,” he said, “I’m not going to do that.” He realized he was clenching his fists, and willed them to relax. “I’m gonna go,” he said. “Thank you. I’m sorry.” He began moving toward the door.
“You don’t have to,” said Gary.
Too late, JW realized he’d left his Big Book on the chair. He grabbed another one from the table and hurried out.
“Addiction is cunning, baffling, and powerful,” he heard Gary call after him as he headed for the stairs. “It’s other people that keep us sane. You can come back any time!”
He took the stairs two at a time and pushed the door open, stepping out into the fresh air and sunshine. He was angry with himself for becoming combative and sarcastic. It was shameful, really, the way he had conducted himself. Maybe there were things he could have picked up by sitting in the back of a meeting like that.
The gravel was littered with cigarette butts and withered dandelions. There were polished flecks of green glass from an old Mountain Dew bottle mixed in with the rocks near his car. He got in and closed the door. He inhaled the sweltering air. Turned the key and let the air conditioner blast dust at him. Then he pulled back out onto the highway and headed toward town.
Some ten minutes later, JW pulled up and parked in front of his house, still jangled and full of self-recrimination. It was shortly after noon. He wanted to catch Carol, and he knew that she usually tried to eat lunch at home, where she could listen to the midday program on public radio. He got out, walked up to the house, and rang the glowing round doorbell. He waited a moment. Maybe he should have stayed in that meeting. He felt as if he had made a choice between two paths without realizing it, but he also knew that he was being overly dramatic. He could always go back, as Gary had said. Any time. He rang the doorbell again. He heard the sound of a squeaking floorboard just inside, and then the door was unlocked and swung inward.
“John!” Carol smiled nervously at him. Her face was flushed and she seemed pleasantly surprised and a bit out of breath. She stepped out, pulling the door partially shut behind her. Her shoulder-length blonde hair fell in loose shaggy locks around her face. He recognized a cubic zirconium necklace around her neck, just like the one he had seen on the Home Shopping Network. It struck him as odd that she would buy something like that for herself, especially now. Still, seeing her somehow made him feel relieved and normal again.
“Hey,” he said.
“You look awful.” She smiled quizzically and pushed a lock from her face.
“I tried calling, a number of times.”
She frowned and smiled at the same time, a mixed expression that he had always found endearing in its impenetrability. “John, you stood me up. I waited up ’til after eleven.”
“I know, I’m sorry. You got time for lunch?”
“No, I don’t, I have a meeting today.”
“A meeting?”
“Yeah, I told you. Jim Franklin’s taking me to the new agents luncheon.”
He nodded. She had said that. Then he heard the squeaky floorboard inside. A flicker of insecurity darted across Carol’s face, and in that instant the mirage of old times evaporated. She moved partway back through the door. Behind her in the foyer stood Jim Franklin, a blow-dried insurance agent in his early forties, whom JW had always disliked. Carol’s thin brows knit together and she looked down, moving the hair back behind her ear.
“John!” Franklin said in a glad-handing tone as he shrugged into his suitcoat behind her. “How was the conference?”
JW wanted to believe that it was all a big mistake. That Jim Franklin wasn’t really there, in his house, in the middle of the day, with Carol, who had been slow to answer the door. Jim Franklin, who knew about his travel schedule.
“I’m fine, Jim,” he managed to get out. He turned back to Carol. “Is Julie home?”
“You know she’s at school.” But her voice had a little break in it as she realized why
he had asked. The sky seemed to tilt in her eyes.
“It’s not what you think,” she said. “We have to run. We can talk later.” She and Jim stepped outside. She pulled the door shut and locked it as Jim gave JW a little wave and a winking nod and headed toward his sports car, which was partially obscured by the evergreens at the corner of the house.
He nodded to Carol. “Call my cell.”
“Okay.”
He watched her hurry after Jim, and then the car pulled out. They both waved. He waved back. It was a fine day, and anyone watching would have thought the waves festive, the beginning of something fun.
JW walked to his car across the street, the sky beating down on him with the light of a desert. His hands were numb despite the heat, as if his arteries had been cut at the armpits. In the brilliant sunshine he could really see how filthy his car was, and that there was a rust speck forming on the lower portion of his door. He’d have to wash it, but the rust would be harder to fix.
He got in and set out for the Northland Mall. He gripped the wheel tightly. It couldn’t be. It was too fast. They’d only been separated for a few months. And after all, she had said it wasn’t what it looked like. He thought about their daughter Julie. In all this, it was time with her he most looked forward to, but they hadn’t had much of it lately. In some ways Julie had more in common with him than she did with Carol. She was interested in things, in nature, in animals, in science. While Carol was practical and family-oriented and tradition-bound, Julie was an impractical dreamer. He loved that about her, and he had always encouraged it.
Beyond their birthday excursions and camping trips with the Brownies, Julie and JW talked about science and the universe on trips to the grocery store, or to the Northland Mall. On one of their trips together, driving to visit his father as he was dying of cirrhosis in the hospital in Fargo, Julie read a book on evolution—which JW had bought her secretly, since Carol didn’t want her reading books that openly defied the pastor’s sermons. He watched the light reflect in her glasses as she read to him about the geological clock. “One hour equals about four hundred million years,” she told him with awe. He watched her face fill with excitement as she pondered that sense of scale, and how so much that we think of as ancient is crowded in at the end of the eleventh hour.
“Amazing,” he acknowledged, shaking his head in wonder.
She read on: “The earliest human ancestors we’ve discovered are about four million years old, and that’s at 11:59:24. And the start of human civilization—everything we know, everything we have done since the beginning of history, all the roads and towns and cities we’ve built—all that has happened in the last one third of the last second, the time it takes to snap your fingers.”
She looked out the car window and shook her head. “It’s like an explosion.”
He missed Julie with an almost palpable longing. Part of the distance that had emerged between them was her age, he knew, and the social demands of junior high. He remembered seventh grade, how brutal it was. Gone were the glasses—it was contacts and eyeliner now—and gone was the innocence. But a big part of it, most of it, he felt certain, was everything that had happened in the year since Chris died. He missed their dates, and their car conversations, and her unguarded exuberance, in a way that made his heart ache.
Northland Mall lay on the outskirts of Virginia, a town that seemed to him like a miniature version of Duluth, some forty-five minutes down the highway from North Lake. Filled with the post-Victorian homes of mining executives and the scattered saltboxes of their minions, the city clawed its way up a giant hillside. Despite an early, five-story brick attempt at a skyscraper downtown, the tallest building to date was the water tower. Up the hill, to the north and west, the vast mall occupied as much square footage as most of the downtown. When it was built, JW had been asked to be part of a consortium of banks that provided financing, together with the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board, a government agency that was supposed to take the taconite production tax and reinvest it to stimulate the local economy. He had passed on the deal. It was too big for the area, his numbers said.
After some modest initial success, the mall had fallen on hard times during the Great Recession, making his decision look prescient. Avoiding that loss was one of the reasons North Lake Bank had become a regional leader.
He found a spot near the northeast entrance and walked across the potholed drive. Inside he could hear the sound of a distant fountain in the main concourse. He headed past the Army-Navy recruiting center, a temp agency, a sleepy Chinese restaurant, and a Goodwill, then stepped into the RadioShack. He was after something he’d seen in the store several years ago, when he was looking for an electronics project as a Christmas gift for Chris. He made his way to the back. There it was, on a bottom shelf near the door to the back room, by the old Heathkits. Dusty and forgotten, the eavesdropping hobby kit’s packaging showed a twelve-year-old boy listening on headphones to his mom and dad, who were in the other room. A bug hidden behind a chair emitted lines representing radio waves. The description said it had a range of a hundred yards. JW stood, blew the dust off, and picked up some rosin-core solder and a soldering iron from the opposite shelf.
The clerk was a gregarious older man in a red RadioShack golf shirt, with silver hair in a bowl cut. More hair ran thick down his neck and arms, and poked out in a tuft from his open collar.
“You got a boy for that project?” he said jovially as he stuffed the merchandise into a small plastic shopping bag.
“No,” said JW. His tone stopped the man short, but then he regretted his abruptness. “A daughter,” he added. The clerk brightened immediately.
“Well, she’s like my granddaughter, then! When she’s old enough, she says she’s going to go down the hall here and join the army and be a technoqueen. That’s what I call her.”
JW smiled and nodded as the man printed his receipt.
“You take care!” He handed the bag over with a big smile.
JW nodded again as he took it and left.
8
The sharp smell of hot solder filled JW’s nostrils as he bent over the speckled kitchen table. It was a warm afternoon, and beyond the window screens a breeze roiled the oaks in a constant sibilance, the leaves casting pale gray shadows that moved across the table like a flock of birds.
He held the soldering iron to a sprig of copper wire bent through a hole in the silver end of an electronic component and touched it with solder. The wire shifted and he moved the iron’s beveled tip to better support it, then replaced the end of the solder against the wire. After a moment it emitted a soft puff of smoke and melted into a silver ball that crawled up the copper and down onto the tab. It jiggled again as he removed the soldering iron, then skinned over. A second later it had flashed into a duller gray, the tiny crystals in the metal locking into a new formation. He looked back at the pictogram in the instruction booklet, then slipped a thin green wire into the next tab.
When it was done, JW put the final screws into the receiver—a brown plug-in box with two knobs and a pair of earbuds. A small round bug sat on the table as well, together with the solder, the iron, the Gamblers Anonymous Big Book, and a large framed photo of his family in happier days.
He plugged in the receiver’s cord, put the earbuds in, turned it on, and spoke into the bug like a microphone.
“Testing.” It was the first thing he had said all day. He could hear it loud and clear over the receiver.
He looked out the window at Eagle’s black Bronco in the drive. The sky bloomed above the trees like a Scandinavian flower. He picked up his cell phone, scrolled to Home, and pressed Call. After a moment he heard Carol’s voice. “You’ve reached the White house, leave a message!” It was an old joke from a happier time.
“Carol, it’s John. Just calling you back. Hope your lunch went well. Anyway, I’m not at the apartment anymore, I just—Call me. Please. Love you.”
He hung up and stared out at the trees. The thought
of Carol driving off in Jim’s sports car made his chest tighten all over again, and now she wasn’t calling him back. A noise drew his attention to the pole barn—the stolpe låven, he remembered his father calling theirs in Norwegian. They had a small one in the backyard, where they stored the lawn mower and other items—ATVs he wasn’t allowed to drive or speak of, chainsaws, bicycles, once even a shiny Harley Davidson motorcycle—that would mysteriously appear and then disappear into the van of a man with long hair and a beard, after his father was laid off from the mine. “I’m selling them for a friend, but he’s very embarrassed,” his father explained. “Don’t tell anyone.” One day, the police stopped by, asking about a stolen pair of snowmobiles. But by then his father was on the road selling cell tower leases, his mother was whispering in tongues, and the stolpe låven had been empty for some time.
The large sliding doors of Eagle’s pole barn opened to a cavern of shadow. Johnny Eagle and an older, stockier Indian man with a gray ponytail disappeared into the grainy murkiness, then reappeared a moment later. They each took a lawn-and-leaf bag from the bed of an old pickup truck and went back into the barn again. JW watched, wondering what they were up to. When they reemerged, the stocky man was carrying some white plastic bags. He threw them into the back of the pickup truck while Eagle pulled the big barn doors shut, and then they exchanged some money and the man with the ponytail got into the truck and rumbled off. Eagle walked back up toward the house.
JW organized the items on the table and sat back, waiting for Eagle to leave. He looked out the window again. The sun was high and the trailer was quiet. A slight breeze blew in through the screens. The lace-edged curtain turned over lazily. The buzzing of insects and the warm air soon sent him into a dozing memory. The smell of the solder and the old Formica tabletop conjured up dreaming memories of childhood times spent with similar kits, which his dad got from a RadioShack on special trips down to Duluth. You could build crystal radios, oscilloscopes, FM radios, alarm systems, a TV, or even a computer. JW looked forward to his father’s homecomings partly because of these presents. His father spent most weeks and sometimes months on the road, but when he was home with a new kit JW would pester him until he came down to the basement workshop. He would carry down a six-pack in a cooler and a couple of Dorothy’s root beers for JW. The two of them would work until the early hours of the morning, his dad sipping beer after beer and telling stories of his time on the road selling leases for cell phone towers, or of how the damn Indians were organizing with the crazy enviros to block them. He’d sometimes take his Motorola cell phone out and show him. “See this?” he’d say, waving the briefcase-sized device. “This is freedom. Those idiots don’t know what’s good for them.” Later, when the beers had set in, he would hunch over the workbench. “So,” he’d say, “is she driving you crazy yet? You think you can handle this?”
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