Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128) (17 page)

“Four years on the rez. Fourteen to eighteen. Then you can send him away to the former instrument of cultural genocide, and you'll be off the hook,” she said. It was her term for the University of Minnesota, Morris. “He'll be surrounded by good kids, and he'll get past this.” The campus had once been an Indian boarding school where children were sent, often against their parents' will, to learn white ways and Christian
religion, breaking the intergenerational chain of stories and language that had held tribes together. When the repurposed school became part of the university, it was on the condition that any Native kid who qualified could attend tuition-free.

Eagle pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. Four years. If he could get him there. He realized he had made his decision; he was just hoping she would give him a last-minute reprieve.

And now here they were on the rez, and Jacob was having the same problems. Eagle had given it all up, apparently for nothing. In desperation, he'd bought Jacob the horse. He'd even moved next door to Wenonah's sister, though an argument over her incessant drinking had ended any hopes he had of it being a constructive relationship. What more could he do? At some point Jacob would have to start meeting him halfway. But watching him earlier in the day with the horse, seeing how excited and childlike he was, had moved Eagle almost to tears. Maybe he could steer JW toward helping Jacob more.

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B
ACK IN HIS
trailer, JW reached up to turn off the receiver. There hadn't been much sound for a while, but as he extended his hand toward the switch, he heard a strange series of clicks, followed by the squeak of a hinge. Then the crinkling of a plastic bag, and a moment later the flick of a lighter and a soft sizzle, followed by a pause, then a windy exhale. It sounded as if Eagle was smoking a pipe. A pot pipe.

JW listened in the moonlight. The table still swam with the shadows of leaves, and the music still boomed down from the neighbor's delirious party, but it was all different now. He had a grip on something that could be the answer for him.
He went to the kitchen junk drawer and pawed around until he found a small digital recorder. He held an earbud to it and pressed record. There it was again: the faint sizzling inhale, followed by a slight pause and a blowing exhale.

JW turned the receiver off. He thumbed the tiny volume dial to max and pressed rewind and then play to hear it again—sizzling inhale, blowing exhale. He pressed stop. His eyes fell to the small spiral notepad. He underlined
Smokes pot
? with two sharp strokes. The Treasury department would frown on giving a banking charter to someone who smoked pot. The fiduciary and political liabilities were simply too great. With Jesus and Lady Luck on his side, JW realized, he just may have found a way to stop Eagle and get his job back.

III

T
HE
W
AGERS

14

JW tried calling Carol on the greasy antique pay phone outside Big Al's garage. “You've reached the White house, leave a message!” He hung up, frustrated.

Inside, they hadn't even looked at his car.

“I figured you weren't coming back for her,” Big Al said. This from a man, JW thought, who was always late on his loan payments.

“Why would you think that?” he asked.

Big Al shrugged. JW stood in the garage's storefront, dressed in his finest gray suit and a crisp white shirt. Cream-colored metal shelves smudged with swipes of black grease held Interstate car batteries, and stacks of Michelin tires covered the bare concrete floor, topped with cardboard cutouts of a tire man. A foggy-globed gumball machine stood by the door, full of faintly visible colored orbs. A smudged, olive-green cash register sat on the glass counter, and the air was pregnant with the smells of body odor and motor oil.

“What you drivin', anyway?” asked Big Al, peering out the window at the truck Eagle had lent him. It was hand-painted with a round Native-looking logo and lettering along the bed that read Native Organic Wild Rice.

“It belongs to a friend,” JW began, then raised a hand to revise his answer. “An acquaintance. I rented it.”

Big Al raised an eyebrow. He turned away to grab a shop towel for his greasy hands. “Let's take a look up under her skirt.”

He walked around the counter and shoved the glass door open. A string of brass bells smashed and swayed against it as he passed. Outside, he led JW through a gate in a chain-link fence that ran around a weedy gravel yard east of the shop. It was filled with old junkers that Big Al used for spare parts.

The Caprice sat amid some weeds near the street. Big Al walked up to it, spread a dirty hand on the hood, and lowered his bulk to the ground.

“They ever catch the drunk Indian that run you down?”

“They were just kids.”

Big Al grunted and stuck his head under the car.

“Well, those drunk Indian kids cost you about twelve, fifteen hundred. Hub's shot, axle's bent, maybe I can straighten it but it's probably not worth it. Steering, tie rod maybe. Boots. Who's your insurance?”

JW had dropped his collision and comprehensive coverage a few months back, when he was in the thick of the cloud. He hadn't had an accident in fifteen years, and at the time he thought he could leverage the savings into winnings that would pay the premiums for a whole year. He would double that, then repurchase them and add the rest to his nut. Looking back now, it seemed crazy. Big Al poked his head out from beneath the car to see if JW had heard him.

“I only have liability,” he said.

The mechanic got to his feet, brushing his hands off on his soiled blue coveralls.

“Seriously? You got no insurance. The guy that makes me carry it on every goddamn thing just to keep my loan.” He laughed bitterly, then led JW back toward the shop.

The door chimes banged around JW's head as they crossed back inside. A fat kid in a blue jumpsuit was rotating
tires with an impact wrench, filling the building with harsh metallic chatter.

“Well, JW, what you gonna do?” Big Al yelled over the noise. “I said fifteen hundred to be good to you since we go back to high school. But when I get into it, it could be more. And that doesn't include the airbag. You want that done, that's another grand.”

“It is what it is,” JW said. “Go ahead. Except the airbag.”

Big Al nodded tentatively. “Okay,” he said. “I'll need cash up front.”

JW looked at him. He realized he was clenching his jaw, and let it loosen before speaking. “I pushed through the loan so you could buy this place,” he said just loud enough to be heard over the noise. “You didn't have the credit.”

“And I appreciate that. But now I gotta pay on that loan, so I gotta have cash. I'm sure you understand.” He nodded as he spoke, but his gaze was firm.

JW nodded, visibly angry. “It'll be a couple days then. Payment schedules,” he said over the noise.

Big Al nodded in return. “I understand. I'll leave her sittin' there for another week or so.”

“A week?”

“Two. Whatever. But I can't have it here forever. You know that.”

JW nodded, then walked out without saying a word. The sun was hot. He got into the pickup and slammed the door, rattling the change that had reappeared in the handle. As he turned the ignition he became acutely aware of the feathers, the beads, and the dream catcher hanging from the rearview mirror. There was a cassette tape of Eric Clapton's
Unplugged
stuck in the player, and it played over and over. He punched it off. As he backed out, he saw Big Al take in the truck's tribal
license plate, then shake his head as he turned back to the car bays.

He thought about Big Al's expression as he drove back to the rez. The entire exchange had left him feeling as if he had somehow slipped into an alternate reality, in which people like Al Bakken felt entitled to judge him—not because of his troubles, but because he was living on the reservation. He had somehow become one of Them, and there was now more to prove, more doubts to overcome. He thought he had sensed the same sort of attitude from others that morning. At the gas station, and waiting at a stoplight. No one was any less polite, but there was a coolness. Or was it all in his mind?

He turned onto the lane that ran through the trees, and then onto the barn drive that led up to Eagle's rice operation, more determined than ever to find the evidence he needed to stop him and his bank. Then he'd see about Big Al and his late loan payments.

As he pulled in by the pole barn, Eagle walked out of the big door and pulled it closed. “Where the hell've you been?” he said. “I've been waiting for you. Get in the Bronco.”

*
 
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W
ATERFOWL
L
AKE WAS
perhaps the most aptly named lake in Minnesota. As Eagle pulled into the long grass under some trees near the shore, JW could see thousands of birds—landing and taking off, calling and arguing and eating. The lake covered some hundred and fifty acres, and the entire surface was green and tan with the wheat-like stalks of wild rice.

JW stepped out of the Bronco and looked around, dumbfounded. “More than a million waterfowl come through this lake during the fall migration,” Eagle told him. The birds
funneled down from vast stretches of Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, even the Northwest Territories. The air was thick with black ducks, wood ducks, gadwalls, pintails, scaups, ringnecks, canvasbacks, redheads, mallards, mergansers, and ruddies, as well as the massive honking traffic jams of incoming Canada geese and their great white brethren, trumpeter swans. All colors and varieties of waterfowl floated and squabbled amid the rice, quacking and carping and splashing.

Groups of band members stood on the shore near canoes beached in the long grass. A group was gathered around Hal Charm, a blonde man of about forty-five who wore a floppy cloth cowboy hat and a green-netted vest.

“Hal's our biologist,” Eagle told JW as they approached the group. “He's managed to double the rice harvest in the last three years.”

As they neared the group, JW saw one of the Indians glance over at them in a way that was not welcoming. “Apple's got a white boy with him,” he heard. “Hal, how's it looking?” Eagle asked as they entered the group.

“Well, as I was telling Black Bear here, conditions look good to me, and you can tell they look good to the ducks, too. The rice committee approved the opener for today, but we're still waiting for final word from the elders on whether it's really ready to harvest.”

Just then, an elder stood up in a canoe out amid the rice stalks. He raised his two rice-knocking sticks high in the air to signal the rice opener.

“And that's it,” added Hal.

The gathered groups of men, women, and children whooped with excitement. They broke up quickly and headed happily for their canoes. Eagle led JW back to the Bronco
and popped the ratchet straps holding the Kevlar canoe—a Wenonah—to the racks on top.

“Come on, let's go!”

Eagle hoisted the canoe onto his shoulders, where it easily balanced, propped up by two blue foam blocks attached to an ash yoke spanning its middle.

“Grab the knockers and the life jackets,” he said. He pulled a long wooden pole off the car rack and headed for the lake. JW looked around the back of the vehicle and found the vests and two three-foot-long, drumstick-like pieces of wood. They were surprisingly light. He grabbed them and followed Eagle, who already had the canoe in the water and was standing ankle-deep.

“Okay, get in.”

JW walked to the stern end and began to step in.

“Hey, hold it!”

He stopped and looked back at Eagle.

“I'm not gonna let you bridge my boat! Just walk out next to it and climb in. Drain your shoes over the edge before you put your feet in.”

JW looked at him.

“I'm serious! They'll dry. What, you never been canoeing?”

“Fine.” JW waded out over the sandy bottom in his shoes and pants and climbed in, doing his best not to drag too much water in with him. As soon as he was settled, Eagle pushed off with the pole and they glided out into the long grasses.

“What do I do?” asked JW.

“What they're doing!”

JW took the knockers from his lap and looked around. The Indians were expertly guiding their canoes through the rice plants, each one poled by a man standing in the stern. Those in the bows used one knocker to gently bend the rice
stalks over the other and then brushed or shook the rice kernels off into the canoe. Several of them were making fast work of it, seemingly racing.

Rice stalks glided past on either side of the translucent yellow bow. They looked like long stalks of wheat that stood about three feet above the surface of the water. JW tried bending a few with the sticks, but at first he pushed too hard and creased the stems. The heavy stalks folded over, became waterlogged, and started to sink to the bottom. The Indians he saw around them were incredibly fast, but they were bending the stalks more gently over the canoe with one knocker and rubbing the other knocker over the top of them, or lightly beating the grass.