A lot of the girls who had been coming in for riding lessons on evenings and weekends instead began making small deposits and withdrawals during his shifts at the bank. Frank Jorgenson, who at thirty-three had recently been promoted to president, noticed the influx of femininity and took a liking to JW. He’d come over and goof around with him when the girls were in. JW soon realized this was a performance of sorts, but he enjoyed it too, and Frank was funny in a pudgy, self-deprecating sort of way. One day he even asked one of the girls out on a date. When her parents came into the bank to talk to him about it, he told them he had been joking. They couldn’t be serious—“I mean, look at me”—and soon he had them laughing about the whole misunderstanding while their daughter sat red-faced in the reception area. Other times he would run for a six-pack of Grain Belt—JW was still seventeen—and they would sit in Frank’s office after hours and drink while Frank lectured to him about banking and how the world was changing.
“There are too many people. There are going to be fights over resources,” Frank said. He pointed his beer bottle at JW, his eyes glistening. “We bankers are in a position to control that, and it’s going to make us immensely rich.”
JW kicked himself again for not staying for a beer with Jorgenson. The road dipped into another low vale that blocked the sun. The air flowed down cool and moist with a gathering fog, smelling richly of fresh-cut alfalfa. On the left the land rose to a hayfield that still looked dry and warm in the long sun. A farmer drove a red tractor over the short-cropped stems, pulling a dusty green hay baler and a fully stacked wagon. Two boys sat high atop the bales, pitching and rolling. He felt the congestion of the city falling away. He tuned the radio to the Power Loon, and soon he was singing along to an oldie about satisfaction, a hey hey hey.
Ten minutes later, he pulled into a Cenex station and got out under the yellow-white canopy. The red band on the pumps glowed in the beautifying light of what his high school photography teacher—a peripatetic man named Rolf Van Hoevel who wore a walrus mustache and clogs—had called the magic hour. He passed the pumps and went inside. It had become somewhat of a tradition, buying artificial flowers at this Cenex. They sold bouquets of them in a plastic bucket near the register, pale blues and reds and yellows and whites, all mixed together in a pop-music arrangement of pastel fireworks.
He set the bundle on the seat of his car and pulled back out into the sunset. Driving home reminded him of happier times, when he had driven the same road with Julie. On her birthdays he would take her out of school, and they went on elaborate field trips, to the Science Museum in Saint Paul, or the aquarium in Duluth, or the Cirrus Aircraft plant. These were natural interests of hers that her mother didn’t respond to, but he believed you took a kid’s natural interests and built the kid up into the world from there. The interest was the foundation. So he gave her options, and they would go on the field trip she was most excited about. They called these trips their dates, and they would talk about nature and science and biology. JW even made a point of studying up on these subjects so he could answer her questions. He bought her books. He started a subscription to Scientific American.
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.
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.