Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128)

by Otto, Shawn Lawrence

“That’s fine,” he said. “I need to enter today’s deliveries in the ledger anyway.” He left the guys to continue spreading and parching, and walked with her back up toward the house.

  In the spring, he had finally finished the living room. But he didn’t yet have any furniture for it, except for a large flat-screen TV and a Playstation that he and Jacob used to play games. Two controllers lay on the floor near a pair of beanbag chairs. He washed his hands in the kitchen, filled a glass with water, and headed down the hall to his office, where he counted his remaining cash and put it back in the safe.

  The safe and house had stood open for days in the commotion following the visit by the FBI, and somehow the Chief Onepapa note had disappeared. He took a moment and searched through the safe for the fourth or fifth time, still unable to accept its loss. One of the police officers or perhaps even one of his own employees must have taken it; when he came home from the hospital, the safe was still open and the bill was gone. He had heard that Grossman was suspected of stealing a shotgun from another house on the reservation, but after all the statements and trauma he was too tired and bitter to pursue a complaint that seemed minor in comparison to what had happened.

  He closed the safe door, sat at his desk, and pulled out his ledger book. The wooden blinds cast dark stripes over its wide pages, enriching them in an old-world fashion. He still kept the wild rice books by hand as a symbolic act, recalling the nearly half of Minnesota that his people had sold and never really gotten paid for. He took a notepad and several signed scraps of paper out of his pocket and picked up his special fountain pen, in order to record the weights of raw rice deliveries and the monies paid for them.

  Ed Two Horses had brought in thirty-five pounds and Springer Watson fifteen. As he wrote down the entries, his special pen ran dry. He shook it and tried again, but the ink was gone. He unscrewed the back and pulled out the cartridge, then opened the top desk drawer and began to rummage around inside for a replacement. He couldn’t find one initially, so he slid the chair back and pulled the drawer wide open, reaching all the way to the back, where his hand fumbled over an unfamiliar round object.

  The thought of what it appeared to be seemed absurd and disturbing. He set it on the desktop and continued rummaging around until he found the remaining ink cartridge. He scribbled on the cartridge package until the ink flowed blue, and finished making his entries.

  When he was done, Eagle picked the bug back up. He had bought a kit like that himself once, intending to give it to Jacob back when he was ten or eleven and obsessed with pretending to be a spy. Eagle remembered Jacob poking mirrors taped to sticks around corners, a single eye wavering in them. But then Eagle had gotten busy at work, and somehow time had gotten away from him. He had figured that the kit was tossed when they moved up here from Minneapolis, but maybe it hadn’t been. Maybe Jacob had found it and assembled the bug on his own.

  Eagle sat back, his fingers toying with the plastic device. The thought was ridiculous. Jacob was fifteen. He wasn’t interested in electronics projects or in spying around the house, and he doubted he even had the patience to make one of these things. All he ever wanted to do was to ride horses, to cruise with his friends, or to play World of Warcraft. Then, with a sudden jolt, Eagle’s eyes lifted to the window, and to the abandoned blue trailer in the copse of old oak trees below.

  He went down to the barn and dug around in the toolbox until he found a pry bar. He passed Jacob in the hissing smoke of the rice, his charred canoe paddle floating light in his hands as he turned it in a rolling cascade.

  “What are you doing?” asked Jacob.

  “Just checking on something.”

  Eagle crossed the street, pry bar in hand. He toed the bark and leaves off the wooden stairs in front of the trailer home. A tattered remnant of yellow crime-scene tape flapped from a weathered piece of duct tape near the door. He lifted the pry bar to the door crack in order to pop it open, and was surprised to find that there was already a dent of a similar size. Apparently he wasn’t the first. He inserted the pry bar in the dent and levered the door open with a pneumatic gasp.

  Inside, it was damp and bone-chillingly cold. The windows were covered with a fine patina of dust and ash. The air reeked of dead smoke and chemicals. The plywood sub-floor groaned underfoot against the trailer’s metal frame. The place felt like a mausoleum.

  The stove top, the counter, and the floor were littered with tiny bits of charred money and the dried white powder from the fire extinguisher. The cabinets and walls were charred black around the stove, and soot clung to the cabinet doors and ceiling. Old dishes moldered in the sink, the food long dried to them.

  Eagle was surprised to see all the tiny flecks of cash. He had a vision of meticulous FBI scientists tweezing evidence into sterile bags, but maybe they didn’t need to. After all, JW had confessed. Seeing his clothes and possessions still lying about collapsed time. Suddenly it was a year ago, and Eagle’s feelings of outrage and betrayal rushed back with a surprising force.

  He opened the kitchen drawers, looking for the bug receiver. There had been no testimony about a bug in the confession or at the sentencing hearing, but it made sense that JW would use such a device if he had been planning to frame him. He dislodged books, plastic dishware, and old groceries. Not finding anything in the main section of the trailer, he went on to the bedroom. He looked in the bedside table and through the banker’s boxes in the closet, but there was nothing.

  Eagle sat on the flaccid mattress, thinking. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe his anger over JW’s betrayal had blinded him to other possibilities. The eavesdropper could be one of the guys in the shop, or possibly even Mona. Or perhaps it was whoever had taken his Chief Onepapa bill in the days when the house and the safe had stood open.

  He saw JW’s dirty laundry in the clothes hamper outside the closet. He pulled it over. A spicy mildewy smell mingled with the smoky dampness as he dumped out the year-old unwashed clothes. And there, in the pile, he saw an electric cord.

  He pulled at it and found a rectangular plastic box and some attached dangling earbuds. He fished them out from the shirts and pushed the pile of clothes away with his foot. He plugged the cord into the outlet by the nightstand and held one of the buds up to his ear and said, “Testing.”

  It came through loud and clear.

  He turned the box off and unplugged it. He sat in the cold and looked out the bedroom door at the still trailer stretching out before him. He finally had evidence that JW had been spying on him. But what did it matter?

  He tried to see the world through JW’s eyes. He had been working for Jorgenson, trying to undermine the creation of Nature’s Bank. That much was clear. He had bugged Eagle to get information. That was why he had rented Mona’s old trailer in the first place. Eagle glanced out the window and noted the view it afforded of his own home. He felt like a fool for having offered JW a job, and for letting him work with Jacob and the horse. He had believed that it could be different, that times had changed, and that the past didn’t need to determine the present.

  But why, then, did JW start burning the money at the worst possible minute? If the plan was to frame him and it had gone wrong, why draw attention to himself? The panic scenario had always bothered him. JW wasn’t the kind of guy to panic, and if he had been working with Jorgenson, the cops wouldn’t have been looking for him. There was also the question of how a bundle of cash wound up in the road. His first theory was that Grossman had planted it. He was friends with JW and Jorgenson, and he hated Indians. But after JW was arrested these questions had nagged at Eagle, until he eventually moved on.

  He stared at the charred flecks of burnt money on the floor in front of the stove. A new theory began to emerge in his mind. What if he and Mona were both right? What if JW had been spying, but hadn’t planted the money? Could it have been Jorgenson? Was it possible that JW and Jorgenson had some falling out, and then that JW got up early and took the money out of his house? Or could that have been his plan all along? He r
emembered how he had been drawn from sleep that morning with a sense of urgency, and thought he had heard the sliding door opening.

  He sat up with a bolt of insight. There was a way to test this theory. He fell to his hands and knees and crawled into the kitchen, scanning the scattered bits of money, fleck by fleck, moving methodically across the floor as if he were a chopper pilot on some mountain search and rescue. And then he found it, as different from the rest as one snowflake from another. The tone of the ink, the particular curvature of the engraved filigree, the quality of the paper—he had memorized these details over many years. It was the last remnant of his 1899 Chief Onepapa Silver Certificate.

  There was only one possible explanation. JW had somehow been in his safe. Mona had always said that when she woke at dawn, he was gone. He must have broken into the safe, removed the cash, and taken it to his trailer, mixing the eight hundred and the silver certificate in with all the rest. But why?

  If the getting-fired-for-gambling story was real, it would have been to double-cross Jorgenson. To get a new start somewhere with the money, or maybe even to go gambling again, either of which seemed true to his low character. But he had made a mistake. He had dropped a bundle in the road.

  But then why had he started burning the rest, when everything else he had done was thought through so carefully? Why bring such terrible consequences down on himself, when the FBI would have arrested Eagle for the theft? Why would he have thrown it all away? And gone to prison, no less?

  He stared at the remnant, turning the question over and over. None of it made any sense. He sighed and looked up through the dusty window. He saw Jacob turning the rice in the smoke, and in that moment, Eagle understood.

  38

  The three-story metal shop had very few workers, and JW was able to spend most of his time there with a sense of freedom that was not available elsewhere in the prison. Metal carts and racks of steel sheets and tubing were stored in the broad open expanses of the first floor, between the concrete columns. The exterior walls were of white painted bricks, the top edges of which were covered with the dust of decades, and banks of enormous old frosted-glass windows shot the space through with angles of white light. The broad open expanses were filled with the scraping sparks of grinders, the high whines of drills, the screeching zuzzing of diamond saws, the clanging of metal tubes, and the crackling flashes of arc welders.

  JW enjoyed the creation process, absorbing himself so deeply that he could forget about the intricate bars of the inner prison he had fashioned for himself. He was paid seventy-five cents an hour, a premium over the fifty-cent starting wage. The Department of Corrections took half of this to offset part of the cost of his incarceration, and he put the rest in a college fund for Julie. As he worked, he often found himself thinking of Jacob and Pride, of ricing with Eagle, and of the night with Mona, when he felt he was being reborn. His body warmed and loosened as he imagined her smoky peach hair and her feathers, but he now felt sure he would never see her again.

  His mentor was a master welder named Jimmy Johnson, a weary black man in his early forties who had long ago been caught selling an ounce of marijuana to an undercover cop. Johnson would soon be leaving and JW hoped to take his place. And so today he was being tested.

  His task was to weld together a series of cut square tubes, making base frames for snowplow brackets. The parts broke frequently from the force of plowing snow, and the Minnesota Department of Transportation relied on MINNCOR, the prison’s business enterprise, to make new ones. He stood in a twenty-by-twenty-foot work area that was cordoned off by thick sheets of translucent red plastic strung between the columns. The purpose of the sheets was to protect workers outside from the blinding light of the welders, but they created a defined space that he thought of as his own. A large steel table sat in the center of his work area. A grounding clamp was clipped to one corner of the table; its thick black cable ran to a red arc welder that emitted a hollow humming sound where it sat by a heavy outlet. There were a couple of metal scrap barrels beside it, and a set of acetylene tanks.

  Johnson watched as he arranged the tube pieces, squaring them like building blocks, then clamping them. He lowered his mask and touched them with the welding stick. He removed the clamps and started laying in a reasonably smooth bead along the first joint.

  As he worked, a guard ducked in through a flap in the plastic, holding a clipboard up to shield his eyes. He spoke to Johnson as JW completed another spray of blue sizzling sparks and the smell of ozone filled the air.

  “White!” Johnson yelled over the noise.

  JW lifted his face shield and the guard became visible, waving.

  “Looks like you’re gonna get an ass-whooping,” yelled Johnson. “But nice job on the weld.”

  JW took off his gloves and headed over to the guard.

  “I guess they’ve been paging you,” said the guard over the screeching of a diamond saw next door.

  He nodded toward the flap in the red plastic. JW ducked through it and stepped out into the main corridor, removing his earplugs and tucking them into a pocket in his coveralls. He walked ahead of the guard, past men grinding steel and cutting parts, shooting out long pheasant tails of yellow sparks.

  It was sunny outside, but cool and autumnal. The guard followed him through the pitted asphalt yard, toward a fifteen-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire. There was a gate at the open door of a small control house. He entered the house and walked along a narrow corridor, between barred windows on the left and a long counter on the right, then stepped through the metal detector. He stopped with his feet on the red marks and extended his arms while a guard patted him down, searching for shop-made shivs, tools, and contraband. He signed out on the clipboard, then exited on the other side of the tall fence, followed by the guard.

  They headed across more worn asphalt, with pavers showing here and there beneath. The yard door of the main housing complex was a little ways northeast of the fence. He climbed the four stone steps worn into a progression of spoons and waited. The guard reached past him to press the intercom button and the door buzzed. He pulled it open and stepped inside.

  The corridor was wide—twenty feet across—and on the far side stood a guard desk. To his left the cafeteria rotunda rose high behind gray-blue bars, slanted with misty shafts of light. To his right the corridor ran several hundred yards past the cell houses to the administration building and the only gate in or out of the prison.

  “Hey, Chaz,” he said to the desk guard.

  “Hey, JW. Got any new bank deals hopping?”

  JW smiled as he signed back in. “No, but I heard about one on the radio. Nature’s Bank. You should check it out. Best rates around. You can set up an account online.”

  “You’re not fixin’ to rob it, are you?”

  JW handed the clipboard back.

  “I didn’t steal anything the first time.”

  The guard laughed. “Yeah, you and all the other guys in here.”

  He headed down the pink stone floor, toward the administration building and the visitors’ center at the far end. The walls here were sandstone-colored tile, the windows huge contraptions of metal and frosted glass, and the gray-blue bars segregated everything into discrete sections. The gates were all open.

  “It’s not an ‘ass-whooping,’ by the way,” the guard said as he ambled along beside JW. “You got a couple visitors. Totally unscheduled. They got the Warden to let ’em in. Couldn’t fucking believe it.”

  They walked past the door to D-block on the right. The entrance to the visiting room was ahead, just before the corridor ended at the main entrance. Most inmates initially expected to get a lot of visitors, but only a few had any at all. Carol and Julie had visited twice, but Carol knew you couldn’t just show up unannounced and expect to get a visit, unless something urgent dictated it. He hoped nothing serious had happened.

  The last time he had seen them was in the early summer. What he remembered most was sitting across from
them, five feet away, and wishing he could hold Julie. He looked forward to seeing her again.

  He waited in front of the steel door that led to the visiting room. It buzzed and opened and he headed through another metal detector, then stood for another pat-down. He turned left down a smaller corridor and was buzzed through another locked door and into the visiting room.

  Johnny and Jacob Eagle were waiting for him. His heart was suddenly racing. Jacob shot up a hand in a sort of wave. JW glanced at the guard, who motioned him in. He felt his knees and hands shaking as he sat down opposite them. He cupped his hands together and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He didn’t know where to begin, what to say. He breathed and smiled and rocked up and down on his toes.

  “I didn’t expect it to be you two,” he finally got out. He laughed and wiped his eyes on a sleeve.

  Eagle shook his head, frowning and smiling at the same time. Jacob showed his teeth as if the whole scene were funny, but then JW realized that his eyes were watering.

  “How are you?” he asked Jacob.

  Jacob ducked his head to wipe his eyes. He nodded. “Fine.”

  JW nodded back. He felt powerfully moved but also awkward, intimate and yet a distant stranger. Time had passed and things had changed, and there was more flowing between them than could be put into words.

  “I’m so sorry,” JW said, and a wave of grief washed up in him.

  Eagle leaned in. “We want to go back to the FBI.”

  “Don’t,” barked JW, before he could even think out his reply. Guards shifted off the wall and began to watch him. The Native inmate next to him glanced over, then at Eagle.

  JW softened his tone. “It won’t turn out well.” He met Eagle’s gaze. “They’ll assume you were in it with me, and they’ll come after you as an accessory, or as an accessory after the fact. Frank’s got a lot of friends. That’s the last thing you need right now.”

  “But we know you didn’t do it,” said Jacob.