Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128) (5 page)

It was different with his son Chris. First it had been stamp collecting—the two of them had spent hours bent over the yellow kitchen table with duck-billed tweezers, surrounded by wax paper and fat, staticky books reeking of mastic, stamps flapping like gossamer insect wings as they turned the heavy pages. But the stamps' filigree soon faded into the hormone bath of early adolescence, and then it was all power and gas. Minibikes and small engines led to the homemade go-cart with the old Kohler he had salvaged from a broken wood splitter. Then it was on to hunting and gun safety classes—an interest that was abandoned, in turn, after Chris squatted next to the doe he shot at thirteen, looking into its dark eye, petting its fur as its organs steamed in an iridescent pile among the leaves and forest detritus. After that it was back to engines: first tuning the riding mower to achieve peak performance, and eventually the Mustang they bought for just seven hundred dollars. They spent long nights bent over it in the garage while JW's car sat outside in the weather, their hands coated with a gritty molasses of black oil and road dust, their knuckles skinned red in the engine's dark cubbies. What he wouldn't give to have just one of those long, sore nights back.

The air grew dusty and dry now despite the cooling. The purple-orange sky had faded to sapphire, and billboard lights flickered on. He was nearing the big prairie, where the rolling hills and dales of the glacial moraine began to flatten and stretch their legs westward for their run through the Dakotas. Here the billboards were smaller, made by locals from plywood
on six-by-six posts. They hunkered close to the road, lit from below by fluorescent tubes that attracted fleets of dive-bombing insects. Spiders cast their nets into the night seas and sailed out on bands of silk. He passed a sign for the Many Lakes Casino:

WORK HARD.

PLAY HARD.

WIN BIG.

He was nearing home.

As JW drove, he watched closely for the roadside spot where it had happened; it was easy to miss, in spite of the fact that it held such life-changing prominence. Sometimes he had to turn around and go hunting for it, peering across the pavement as he drove, searching for the small white cross. But this time he saw it early, backlit by the low-angled sun, and he pulled over and got out. He walked around the car, took the bouquet out of the passenger door, and carried it over to the marker, which bore a single word: Chris. An older bundle of flowers was faded by the sun and covered with a patina of dust kicked up by a month of car traffic. He squatted and untwisted the wire that he used to hold them in place, then fastened the new bouquet and arranged it as fully and attractively as possible, fluffing the individual petals to broaden the flower heads.

“Goodnight, son,” he said. He stood and carried the old bouquet to the car, throwing it into the passenger footwell, where it couldn't sully the upholstery.

The dusky rolling hills ran out behind him under darkening skies and the wind filled his ears as he drove on. Ahead the road climbed back out of the valley, and the dark planes of a building materialized from the shadows on the right. The fading light conjured parts of cars, and then fourteen massive
searchlights shot up into the sky, their beams crossing to form a giant teepee of white light. Banks of neon splashed out, the colors bouncing over the roofs and glass parts of the cars like thrown watercolors.
Many Lakes Casino
, the roadside monument said,
Win Big!

He passed the turnoff, the neon glow lighting his windshield and turning the backs of his hands red on the wheel. He thought of Chris's accident and the sudden shock of it—a ripping away when he hadn't been looking. The red fell from his hands like fading fingers as he climbed the hill, a new vista opening, and his thoughts returned to the dinner Carol had waiting, where he hoped to save his marriage and his relationship with Julie, his remaining child. Chris's death had sent him into a tailspin, futility crashing over him in swamping waves, spinning him in the undertow. Problems had cropped up in their marriage, cracks and fissures that grew into crevasses and canyons, over money, over his gambling. Carol always seemed angry, and Julie had stopped talking to him. But Carol had agreed to see him, and his heart sped a little now that the moment was imminent.

He adjusted his visor against the low blast of sun. He was going to find a way, starting tonight, to turn things around. A way to come together and move forward again—not as if nothing had happened, but acknowledging that it had, and then finding the forgiveness and the strength and the love to heal together. He didn't really know what he was going to say, but he was determined to make it happen.

His Caprice shot on into the sunset, becoming small and bright as a satellite. But even then he could feel gravity taking hold. The waves of the casino accreted weight and moment. The car reached a sort of apogee, and then he pulled over and turned around.

3

The Many Lakes Casino lot was awash in color and buzzing with sound. A charter bus disgorged senior citizens under the massive front portico, their silver hair running from green to red to blue in the shifting lights. One of them trailed an oxygen tank with aluminum wheels.

JW turned off his car. A breeze lifted in through the window. The dark leaves of sugar beet greens clattered on the edge of the lot. Several pairs of men and women were walking toward the casino, hand in hand.

Julie had given JW a plastic Jesus on the cross when she was nine or ten, and it dangled from his rearview mirror, swaying in the breeze, its clear plastic beads refracting the colored lights. He reached up and steadied it. He needed to get home, but the day had unsettled him.

“Okay,” he said, closing his eyes, “if I open my eyes and see a man and a woman holding hands, I'll go in. Just for five minutes. Just send me a sign.” Carol would have dinner in the oven by now. It would be out in half an hour. He needed to patch things up with her and Julie, to heal the rifts that had formed since the accident. He hadn't handled it well; he knew that.

She had been even more distant lately, not returning his calls, and the red heat of anger that had been in her voice this last year was fading into a cool reserve. It was fine. He could do what he wanted. Whatever he thought
was best. All phrases to let him know that life, and Carol, were moving on, that they had become unhitched. If she would only wait, if he could just get through this, come out the other end with the big win, it would get better. Because with money came hope, and freedom. He could tell Carol about Frank wanting to have a beer. How it made him late and he'd been driving fast to make up the time. Just a half hour inside the casino. Just a short bump. It would give him time to bolster himself.

He opened his eyes, but no one was holding hands. He craned his neck to peer around the rear window stanchion. Not a single couple. He laughed and shook his head.

“All right, all right, I hear you,” he said. He reached for his dangling keys, but then he saw two women join hands.

Close enough. He got out and locked the car. Just in and out. Five minutes, ten tops. A quick bang. It always improved his mood, energized him, made things somehow more manageable. He shot his cuffs and headed for the grand portico.

Most people would be crazy to go gambling like he did, he knew, but as a finance professional he had an advantage, and he used it. He understood margins and risk in a way casual gamblers did not. The senior citizens were clogging the entry foyer. They chattered and lurched about, trying to buy chips. He maneuvered his way through the irritable throng. A voice that sounded like Willie Nelson wafted out of the theater, singing
You are my sunshine.
He had sung that to Julie as a baby. He stepped into the enswathing maternal smell of stale cigarette smoke.

He spent three hundred dollars on chips and headed into a sonic cloud of silvery coin chinking. No wonder old people like casinos, he thought. He didn't care for the slots himself because there was no skill involved. He sometimes played
poker, but most nights his game was blackjack. And tonight, something was going to happen, he could feel it. He was a dog on the hunt, yelping and straining at the leash, shedding his stiff banking persona and thrilled to be giving himself up to chance.

He passed Charlie and Maynard, two Native guards.

“Mr. White,” Maynard nodded.

“Maynard. Charlie,” he replied. A Native waitress named Stormy carried a tray of drinks. Wide high cheeks, a flat nose, small eyes with a laugh in them, big hoop earrings. They said she was Dakota, but she'd been living outside North Lake and working at the casino for years. She always seemed to find him. “Good evening, Mr. White,” she said.

“Stormy, it is a great evening. You time me! I'll be in and out in five minutes, boom! A thousand dollars! Or ten!”

She laughed as he lifted a drink from her tray, feeling spry. She shook her head and walked on.

The chrome-and-green-glass escalator gleamed with the satisfying quality of 1950s science fiction, smooth as ice to the touch. It had seemed such a ridiculous thing the first time he saw it, going up a single floor, short in stature and full of grandeur, like the prized possession of a pygmy chieftain. But it had grown on him, his stairway to heaven. He stepped off and rounded the corner by the Moose Café Bar, heading for the blackjack section, where the smiling dealers waited behind their Kool-Aid-blue half-moon tables, always welcoming, always encouraging, but somewhat otherworldly.

“Welcome back, Mr. White!” They greeted him like a head of state. “Welcome back!”

The tables seemed somehow alive, their felt almost like a skin, warm and cool at once, and printed with zones to show where the cards went. The edges were padded for
comfort, and each table had four inviting chairs. The dealers stood inside the moons' curves, ready to play. JW picked his luckiest table and sat down.

Gambling, like banking, was all about managing risk. JW kept a tattered book on blackjack in the car. He had read it cover to cover many times, seeking clues to bend the arc of fate his way. The biggest thing to overcome was the house advantage, which came from being able to play more than one player at a time, tilting the odds slightly in the dealer's favor. Teams of players secretly working together could overcome this by playing at different tables, but the casinos banned anyone caught doing it. An individual could overcome it by counting cards: mentally adding one every time a small card was played, and subtracting one every time an ace or ten-card came up. When the count got high it meant the deck was loaded with tens and you went in big. But there were cameras over every table, trained on the players to watch for this sort of too-convenient timing, so JW was cautious about using this method. Still, there was something about trolling the stormy ocean of chance, and pulling a big win back out of it, that drew his obsessions to the surface.

Tonight, as it turned out, he didn't need to count. The cards were all going his way naturally. The payout in blackjack is three to two, and on splits and double-downs a player can double that. The goal is to hit twenty-one without going over. The dealer stays on seventeen or above. JW's luck held, and over the course of an hour he kept getting the cards, one after another. His three hundred dollars multiplied until he had twenty-seven thousand in stacks of multi-colored chips. A crowd gathered—young, vibrant, alive in the moment, enjoying his spectacular winning streak. The table felt glowed electric blue and the cards had a satisfying slippery thwack.

He knew people tended to make mistakes under such pressure. The best thing you could do was to follow a system and forget about the money and the audience. Some players pulled ten, twenty, or even fifty percent back out of each hand as a policy decision, but in his mind this was foolish because over time the house had a slight statistical advantage. By holding back, he would not be fully putting his money to work against that advantage. Mathematically, it was better to have all his chips in play, and to play it up as fast as he could, then get out.

That's what he was about to do after another hand. It was time, he could feel it, but he was within spitting distance of paying off the second mortgage on his house. He felt in total control, reacting instantly. He saw the move, he felt it, he knew it was right, and he played it, over and over. Bam, bam, bam: Thor at the hammer, directing each slam of lightning—there, there, there. But that was a false sense. He knew it. He reminded himself to stay calm. He didn't have to hit twenty-one. He didn't even have to beat the other players. An old man in a rumpled suit—his ashen face was caving in on itself—presented no competition; neither did a younger one with earrings and a goatee and the cocky, puppy-dog air of some sort of media artist. He slouched in his paisley shirt and flung his dark greasy forelock aside, then let it fall again before flinging it back as if it had only just fallen for the first time. JW only had to beat the dealer. Bam! Another win! Yes! The old man pushed back from the table with a wave and a grim expression. JW watched him hobble off through the surrounding crowd. He took a sip from his drink and cautioned himself to use math, not to get sucked in by his emotions as the stakes rose. If he could stay technical, he could maximize his chances of finding a streak that would
beat the house advantage in an even bigger way. He refocused on the game as the dealer began another round.

He had cleared nearly every ace in the shoe. He'd counted seven of them. Aces give players a lot of protection because they can be played as a one or as an eleven, so if you bust past twenty-one playing the ace high, you can fall back and use it as a one. Now that there was only one other player at the table, the odds were actually starting to tilt further in his favor.