Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128)

by Otto, Shawn Lawrence

  He was talking about JW’s mother. One day during the first summer his dad was mostly away on the road, JW’s mother was at the kitchen counter, bending over some pasties on the dough board, singing her special version of an old Finnish song:

  Then the aged Väinämöinen

  Spoke aloud his songs of magic,

  And a flower-crowned birch grew upward,

  Crowned with flowers, and leaves all golden,

  And its summit reached to heaven,

  To the very clouds uprising.

  You, my son, my Kalevala, my story of the north—

  And then, mid-verse, she stopped. She had always been a little artsy, and JW loved painting the lower cupboards with her, or making chalk masterpieces on the garage floor. But he sensed that this was different. She began seeing visions, and speaking to invisible gods.

  She never sang a word again, but she whispered day and night. JW thought she had gone crazy right then and there, and in a way she had. At the time there was no way to know that a small frog was growing inside her brain, extending its little webbed feet. Or that the tumor would eventually kill her when he was thirteen.

  JW was charged with taking care of her when his father was on the road and she was sick with the migraines, but she just lay there whispering verses, so he spent most of his time outdoors. In truth, she frightened him. It was as if some ghost spirit from the Finnish North had taken her, and when JW was around it made her upset, so he avoided her as much as he could.

  During the early stages of his mother’s illness, JW whiled away most of the time with his friends, Craig and the twins, Keith and Kevin. They were outside from dawn until dusk, with only a few short breaks for meals or snacks at each other’s houses. They spent part of one summer exploring the dump, climbing into rusting cars, turning their steering wheels, the spice of dust, mold, and old tobacco smoke lifting from the seat stuffing. And they loved to play in the trees, climbing from one to another to avoid the sharks and lava below. But JW’s favorite game had always been cowboys and Indians.

  Craig’s mother said the game was crude, and she was surprised that Keith and Kevin, who were half Ojibwe, went along with it. But the game’s historical connotations never seemed to matter to the twins. In fact, JW usually played the Indian, while Keith and Kevin and Craig all pretended to be cowboys. They would share a root beer, pretend to get drunk, and then ride in a posse to hunt JW down.

  JW had always admired the Indian braves in TV shows, how they hopped on horses and rode bareback while shooting arrows at their enemies at a full gallop. Some days he even put on war paint and a headdress, and bet them each fifty cents they couldn’t find him before he could shoot them. They’d count to a hundred while he ran into the woods by the wetlands, where the cottonwoods and the buckthorn gave way to a green algae pond. He’d hide up in the trees and wait patiently, planning what he would do with the money.

  JW woke thick-headed and woozy in the wash light of mid-afternoon. It took him a moment to remember where he was, but the musty smell of the trailer brought him back. He heard the sound of a car door slamming, and then the sound of an engine turning over. He looked out and saw Johnny Eagle backing his Bronco out of the driveway. It headed slowly around the bend, toward the reservation road. He checked his watch. It was a little after two. The boy wouldn’t be home from school for another hour and ten minutes, if the pattern of the past few days held. He stood, took the little round bug from the table, and stepped out through the flimsy aluminum door.

  The wooden steps were catching a spot of sunlight. He could feel the warmth through his jeans as he stepped down onto the grassy gravel. He pushed the door shut behind him and looked around. There was no sign of life at Eagle’s house, or at the white brick house farther up the hill. He looked back up the lane toward the trailer park, but no one appeared to be up that way either. It was now or never. His heart picked up speed as he stepped onto the dirt road. His fingers felt tight. He stretched them and crossed toward the riding ring and then onto Eagle’s lawn. The horse stood in a makeshift stall of two-by-sixes, inside a metal lean-to. It snorted at him with an air of concern.

  He crossed uphill toward the house, which had even taller trees behind it. He strolled up the white concrete walk toward the front door, trying to appear relaxed in case someone happened to be watching. Ranks of orange and green lilies stood at attention. He looked into the dark pool of a window. Everything still. He stepped onto the low front porch. His heart was pounding. A bristly brown mat in front of the door bore the word Bendigen. He didn’t belong here. This wasn’t the sort of thing he did. He pulled open the wooden screen door, knocked on the carved main door. His fingers were numb.

  There was no sound. He glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone was watching. His chest felt tight. He noticed the doorbell. A glowing yellow rectangle. He pressed it and an old bell echoed inside, but there was no reaction. He looked behind him again, and up the trailer park lane across the street. From here he could see the tops of a few trailers poking over the hill.

  His hand closed around the knob, feeling cold and weak. It turned. He paused, then pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  “Hello? Anybody home? Mr. Eagle? Hello!”

  The interior was themed in rustic wood and Native-style decor. To his right stood an unfinished room of studs and insulation. Ahead, the foyer opened into a large eating area, with a broad library table covered with piles of papers and books. The floor was wide-plank wood, marred and finished with a dull wax. To the right of the eating area was the kitchen. Despite the fact that it was only partially finished, it had massive granite countertops, a breakfast bar, a deep sink, and stainless steel appliances. To his immediate left was a corridor leading to the bedrooms.

  The central air conditioning kicked on with a cool whir. JW headed down the corridor, in search of an office. His heart was pounding. On the wall was a family photo of the boy—much younger, perhaps ten—with Eagle and a woman, presumably his mother. After pausing at it briefly, JW continued, past a bathroom, to a door that stood open to a masculine, Native-themed room with a queen-sized bed. Opposite he could see into the messy cave of a teenage boy. Clothing piled in mounds. Soda bottles, chips, textbooks, and notebooks on the bed. An older laptop computer and some comic books piled atop an empty terrarium. The smell of dirty laundry and Doritos.

  JW returned to the door opposite the bathroom. It was closed, but not latched. There could be someone inside, he worried, an aging grandparent or someone sleeping. He took a soft step closer, but a floorboard creaked under the carpeting, giving him away. He froze.

  He had never done anything like this, and he had no idea what to expect or how to react if there was someone inside the room. He waited a moment, still, but there was no answer. He pushed the door open slowly with his shirt cuff, and saw that there was no one. He stepped into a home office. More Native décor, and the faint smell of cigar smoke. Wooden louver blinds like those at the bank hung over the windows. There was a large wooden desk, antique, 1940s design, and a black Herman Miller Aeron chair. The wall to the right was covered with a modular birch bookcase, Scandinavian style, that was divided into boxes of different sizes, with books in some places and knickknacks in others.

  JW crossed to the desk. He pressed his fingertips to the paperwork on top. A pale blue report card. Jacob Eagle. Migizi-doodem. Cs and Ds. B+ in math. Teacher comments to the right of each grade: able but distracted; not engaged; disruptive in class.

  The bookcase was filled with books about Native Americans, as well as DVDs of Avatar, Dances with Wolves, Smoke Signals, Babel, Crash, and The Visitor, a small stack of CDs—Jim Boyd, Bob Marley, Jana—and videos of powwows. There was also a brass eagle in flight, which JW took to be an eponymous testament to the man’s inflated self-image.

  He opened the center drawer. Pens and pencils, ink cartridges, a calculator. A self-help book, Fearless Living: Live without Excuses and Love without Regret, suggested a kind of touchy-feely vulnerability
that both moved and repelled JW.

  He took the bug from his pocket, wiped it clean, and placed it in the back of the drawer. He shut the drawer and glanced out the window. The coast was still clear. Down the hill he could see his own trailer, a dirty blue robin’s egg in the fine wavy grass under the oak trees.

  He pulled open the desk’s file drawer, again using his shirt cuff to avoid leaving any fingerprints. Neatly ordered files. He squatted and rifled through the brown tabs. They emitted a rich aroma of cigar smoke. One of the folders said Nature’s Bank. He opened it and examined the contents. Motes of dust lifted off the papers like tiny hot-air balloons, sparkling in the sun.

  He glanced out the window. The longer he stayed, the greater his chances of being caught. But this might be the mother lode. He scanned a page with numbers: Start-Up Capitalization. . . $3.5 Million. He closed the folder and slipped it back into the file drawer. He’d had enough. It was obviously a bank, and he was increasingly nervous. Someone could come home at any time—Eagle, the boy, or someone else. He pushed the drawer shut and glanced out the window again. He crossed to the door. But something caught his eye and he stopped. He went to the closet’s bifold door and pulled it open. Inside was a safe.

  He crouched and tried the handle, but it was locked. The dial had numbers every ten marks to one hundred. He tried turning it to see if it was just slightly off, but it didn’t open. He stood. Glanced at the closet shelves. Office supplies. Paper. A yellow box of trash-can liners. He closed the closet door and returned to the hallway, using his shirt cuff to pull the door shut like it had been. He tiptoed quickly back down the hall and crossed to the door. He opened it a crack and looked out. The coast seemed clear. He exited into the open air of the shaded porch and eased the door shut, then gently let the screen door close. The fresh air hit him like a gasp of relief.

  He stepped off the front deck and glanced at the white brick house up the road, and as he turned he saw a curtain falling back into place in a high corner window. His heart leaped in his chest. Surely whoever lived in the house knew Eagle, and would relay the story of how the white guy in the trailer had broken into his house while he was away. He had to do something. Pretending it hadn’t happened was not an option. Perhaps he could still avert a catastrophe by going up and talking to whomever had been behind that curtain.

  He looked both ways and then walked out into Eagle’s yard, consciously adopting an aw-shucks kind of amble in his gait. He began formulating a plan: He was out looking to borrow some sugar. He wanted directions to the trading post. A dozen clichés came to mind, none of them compelling. He crossed the driveway in front of the brick house’s tuck-under garage and mounted the concrete steps leading up to the front door.

  It was somehow even hotter up there in the sun. The white blazed everywhere, making him feel as if he were in a solar cooker. He glanced at the tall casement windows. They all had white curtains and he couldn’t see beyond them. He would improvise. Eagle’s front door was set in a few feet, and he saw that it was out of view. He was just standing on the porch, he would say, making a phone call. He had wanted to greet his neighbors, what could be wrong with that? He stepped up onto the front porch.

  The windows in the front of the house were all closed, but they felt watchful. He looked around in vain for a doorbell. He tried the white metal storm door, but it was locked tight. A Baltimore oriole swooped in and fluttered near a hanging feeder heaped with grape jelly, but seeing him, thought better of it and flitted away. He heard something crash deep inside the house. He knocked, but there was no response.

  “Hello?” he called.

  Still nothing. Now what? He stood in the blazing sun, contemplating his options. A trickle of sweat ran down between his shoulder blades. Whoever was in there had probably seen him. Perhaps they were calling the police. Or going for a shotgun. JW decided to head back to his trailer. That way at least he would have some deniability if the police did come. He could argue that the other person was crazy or just making things up, and that they were probably overly suspicious just because he was white.

  He stepped off the stoop and walked back down the steps, glancing back at the home’s mute windows. He thought he saw a shadow move behind a curtain. He stopped, but nothing more happened. He wondered if this was all just his imagination. He felt sullied by what he had just done, but a job was a job. He headed out the driveway and across the street, glancing back to see if he could catch anyone watching, but there was no sign of life. It suddenly occurred to him that he was a criminal now. Not technically, he reassured himself. He hadn’t stolen anything. You leave your door open and sometimes neighbors wander in, that’s what happens out in the country. He turned toward his trailer home, sure that he could sense someone watching him.

  9

  The sun had moved to the northwest and the trees no longer shaded the front half of the trailer. The metal handle was hot in his hand as he pulled the flimsy aluminum door open. It had expanded in the heat and the bottom stuck in the frame, then sprang outward with a rattling shudder.

  He stepped inside. The air was spicy hot and still. He closed the door and listened to the fine ticks of the trailer’s metal exterior shifting in the heat. There was no air conditioner, so he went around opening all the windows. This must be why the screens were so well maintained, he realized.

  He finished with the roof vent over the galley kitchen, and then the windows in the front end around the table. A cross breeze lifted up, and he sat down on the bench, where he had a view of the white brick house through a gap in the trees. He focused a pair of binoculars on the curtained windows. They gleamed back at him in mute judgment.

  JW lowered the binoculars and began formulating plausible excuses. He hadn’t actually gone into Eagle’s house. He had stood for some time at the door, out of view of the white house, waiting for his neighbor to return, hoping to introduce himself. You need to know your neighbors, after all. Since no one was home, he decided to say hello to his other neighbor. No answer there either, so he walked back home. Anything else was simply the result of an overly suspicious imagination, a misunderstanding.

  A deep rolling build of thunder signaled a storm brewing off to the west. Here on the edge of the prairie, large anvil clouds often billowed up on hot afternoons. One could stand in the blazing sun and watch them, ten or fifteen miles distant: blue-gray rain angling down, stabs of lightning flashing inside. But this one was still a ways off, and there was no coolness or wind yet. The trees buzzed with a cacophony of insects. There was nothing to do but wait.

  As the minutes ticked by and nothing happened, the warmth of the trailer grew more stifling. He put his face up to a window for some fresh air. The police still hadn’t come. JW’s shirt stuck to his skin, and a trickle of sweat ran down the edge of his neck. Maybe it would be all right. There’d been no phone calls, no neighbor coming out, no Eagle, no police. Maybe the neighbor wouldn’t even say anything. Or maybe he had imagined the whole thing. Then again, something had crashed inside, so it was likely a person. And if the neighbor did say something, he would have to deal with Eagle directly. JW imagined him coming over with a baseball bat, or possibly even a gun. He wondered how the laws differed on a reservation, and that thought suddenly seemed to ground his thinking. He was a bank president. What he had done was crazy. He had risked everything.

  His eyes fell to the Big Book. He pulled it over across the table and started leafing through it. Maybe there was something to it. A sickness was clouding his judgment, and Jorgenson had used it to make him into a tool. And yet he couldn’t see a way out of the trap, and it was hard to imagine finding one in the book.

  It was approaching five o’clock, and nothing had happened. The road had been unusually quiet. A single small blue Toyota with a red front fender had puttered by, slowly climbing up the lane to the trailers over the hill. Even the boy hadn’t come home at his usual time.

  JW was getting hungry. He headed over to the stove. He rummaged through the cabinet above and too
k down a battered aluminum pot and a box of mac and cheese. He ran the tap and filled the pot halfway up, then struck a farmer’s match and lit the stove. He set the pot over the flame, and when crystal bubbles began to rise from its bottom, he poured in the pale tubes of dried pasta.

  He looked out the window over the kitchen sink. Still nothing up at the neighbor’s house, but to his right he suddenly noticed a police car creeping up the road. It slowed almost to a stop, and then, as if to surprise him, it turned sharply in and parked directly in front of his trailer. JW ducked back away from the window, his heart suddenly racing. He wondered if he, too, could pretend he wasn’t at home. The car’s door slammed and he peeked out to see a tribal policeman walking around the hood.

  He heard the creak of the wooden steps, and then a hard knock on his flimsy door. He leaned on the counter, thinking over his options. How stupid he’d been. What was he thinking? Was this it? Would he be arrested? The knock came again. He realized that the bug receiver was still on the table.