AND WHAT A LONG BUSINESS IT’S BEEN. Almost sixty years had passed between that morning in the apartment on Halsted and the night Anton and I pulled up to Sheb’s office under the lighted arch of the Lowry Avenue bridge. Among his many enterprises was a Mississippi River barge and recycling racket, and buried beneath mountains of scrap metal a single-story cinderblock building with two barred windows, lit by a trio of towering lights, served as his headquarters. As Anton parked beside the Suburban and three other cars, my phone rang.
“It’s Ingrid,” I said. “I’ll wait out here. Leave this running?” I patted the dashboard.
He stepped out, and I answered the call as I watched him head toward the door. A motion sensor light flickered as he reached it, and he disappeared into the shop.
“Hello, my love. Are you all right?” Ingrid said.
“I’m just fine.”
“How was dinner with Bett? How was the funeral?”
“Everything’s fine. There were lots of folks at the visitation. Lots of people I haven’t seen in decades. He was well loved. Dinner at Bett’s? What can I say? Anton was there. So was his daughter. She flew in from Chicago. I haven’t seen her in, how many years? She seems like a great kid.”
“Well, you always liked her mother.”
“Better than Anton did, I’m afraid.”
“Are you at his place? That’s where you’ll stay the night?”
“We’re headed there soon. And what about you? How’re things at home?”
“You should see the snow! It’s coming down in curtains.”
“I wish I were there. There’s nothing I like more than a winter’s night with you. Especially a cold and snowy one.”
“We could share a bottle of wine in front of the fireplace.”
“For starters,” I said.
“You flirt,” she said. “Tell me, what are you boys doing tonight? Don’t say you’ll go to that bar he runs. What’s it called?”
“Boff’s. God, I hope not, though I guess he lives in an apartment right next door. I can’t imagine what it’ll be like.”
“Is it good to see him?”
For a long moment, I stared at the squat building in front of me, thinking it looked like a munitions shelter, and that inside my brother was as likely rigging a bomb as disabling one. I had no idea what kind of business he was in with Sheb, and no idea about the sort of person Anton had become.
“It is,” I said. “Truly. I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I forgot how much I love him.”
“Oh, Jon.”
“He seems adrift, though. I’ve only been with him for three hours and he’s already had half a dozen drinks. He gets a text message every fifteen minutes, and talks back at his phone. He got a text from Sheb and we left Bett’s house like it was on fire. You should’ve seen the way he looked at Angel when we left. Christ, you should have seen how she looked at him.”
“I suppose your father’s passing is hard for him.”
“I wonder.”
Until then only one of the two small windows set in the cinderblock had been lit, but there was suddenly a bright light in the other. The silhouette of someone’s head and shoulders passed, filling the small space, then passed by a second time a moment later before that window went dark again.
“You should have seen all the old ski jumpers there tonight. Most everyone I ever knew. My cousins. All the old guys. Noah came down.”
“I can imagine the hum in that funeral parlor, what with all the stories going around.”
“There was lots of lying, that’s for sure. But not from Noah. And not from Anton. He gave a nice eulogy. I wish it hadn’t surprised me.” In the background, I heard the doorbell chime.
“Oh, honey, Clara and her new girlfriend are here.”
“In the middle of a blizzard?”
“They made us a loaf of pumpkin bread and rode their new fat tire bikes over in the snow to drop it off.”
“Tell me again this new friend’s name?”
“It’s Delia. She seems nice. And I don’t mind at all that she’s got Clara bringing treats over. In the middle of a storm or otherwise.”
I heard Clara shout, “Mom, we’re here!” and Ingrid holler back, “Just a minute!” Her voice came back to me. “Now listen, Jon. I hope you and Anton have a nice evening. Don’t worry about us. We’re all safe and sound.”
“Give Clara a hug for me?”
“Of course I will. And call me in the morning? Let me know when you’re on the way home?”
“I’ll talk to you then, love. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
The absence of her voice seemed to intensify the storm outside. I switched off the wipers and turned the radio back on and reclined in the big bucket seat. The snowflakes melted as soon as they hit the windshield, so after only a few seconds the view went bleary. The clock on the dash read 8:59. My bedtime most nights, though surely not this one. I knew Anton would keep me up. He’d keep drinking. We’d talk. I was looking forward to it, actually. With the thought of the long night before me coupled with the brandy and beer, I closed my eyes to the voice on the radio announcing Debussy’s “The Snow Is Dancing” performed by Noriko Ogawa.
When I opened them, it was 9:30 and Anton still hadn’t come out of Sheb’s office. I turned the wipers on and sat for a moment rubbing the sleep from my eyes and then killed the engine, put the keys in my pocket, and stepped out of the truck. The footprints Anton had made were drifted over. Eight or ten inches of snow must have fallen by then, and the wind was funneling up the river. The motion light turned on as I stepped to the door. A series of three deadbolt locks descending from eye level to the knob greeted me. I didn’t knock.
I don’t know what I was expecting to find, but it wasn’t the posh space in front of me. Less an office than well-appointed apartment, there was a pool table and high-tops and chairs on a red rug, a bar along the wall to my left beneath the window that had momentarily flickered on before, and to my right another closed door. I opened it, and walked into what was clearly Sheb’s office. The cigar smoke overwhelmed, and through it I saw him sitting there, still in his suit from the funeral. Anton relaxed on a couch with his feet resting on a glass-topped coffee table. Across from him, on another couch, two young women reclined with their bare legs and short skirts in a tangle. They looked younger even than Clara, who was finishing college that year.
“Goddamn, if it isn’t the prodigal son. In my own office,” Sheb said, blowing another mouthful of smoke across his desk. “Your old lady must’ve had quite an agenda for you, as long as she kept you on the phone. We’ve been in here raising a toast to Pops.”
I saw then a bottle on the coffee table, surrounded by three shot glasses. When I looked back at Sheb, he had another glass raised in his fat hand.
“You should remember him,” I said.
His face lifted in one of his slow, twisted smiles. “Now that we’re alone, the real Johannes shows up. I’m happy to see him.”
“You ready to go?” I asked Anton.
“When Anton told me you were coming to grace us with your presence, I thought about how I might welcome you home,” Sheb said. “Let me introduce you to Chloe.” He stood, and lumbered to a cabinet in the shadows behind his desk. When he reemerged, he held another glass. He came around to the coffee table, and filled the glasses all around. “Chloe,” he said, “this is Anton’s big brother. He’s a famous guy, though you’d not know it to look at his shirt.” He offered me a glass. “You couldn’t bother to get dressed for your father’s funeral?”
Chloe leaned forward and shot her drink. “What kind of famous are you, baby?”
“I’m not famous,” I said. “Not by any stretch of the imagination.”
“He’s a famous author,” Anton said.
“I’m not famous,” I said again. “And no thanks,” I added to Sheb, who shrugged and drank from the glass he’d just offered me.
“Your dad was proud of you. Whenever one of your stories came out, he’d bring me a copy. I liked the last one best, about that nance lighthouse keeper and his bitch wife.”
“I didn’t know you could read, Sheb,” I said.
He smiled again, drank another drink. “I can read everything. Books and otherwise.” He went back to his desk and sat heavily. “For example, I can read the look on Chloe’s face. She wants to party with you.”
“Anton,” I said, “let’s go.” To the women I said, “I’m sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about, Jon,” Sheb said. “And don’t be in such a hurry. The night is young.”
“I’m not,” I said. “And my brother and I have some things to talk about in private.”
“You don’t see him much, do you? Why is that?”
“Because I’m an asshole.”
“No argument here,” Anton said.
I looked at him, sitting back on that leather couch in his black leather jacket, his boots up on the table, his hands behind his head. He winked at me, like this was all a game among fraternity brothers.
“Sit down, Jon,” Sheb said. “Please. I want to visit. I haven’t seen you in years.”
“Yeah, stay,” the woman who’d spoken before said. “We do want to party.” She held up a small vial, asking Sheb’s permission. When he nodded, she uncapped it and tapped a small mound of coke onto the tabletop. She divided it into five lines with a credit card and rolled a twenty-dollar bill and snorted one. She handed the twenty to the other woman, who bent and snorted. Anton put his feet on the floor and leaned across the table, his leather jacket creaking. He did a line, and offered me the bill.
I took my phone out of my pocket.
“You calling your wife to see if it’s okay to take a little sleigh ride?” Sheb said.
“I’m getting an Uber.”
“Jesus Christ,” Anton said. “You’re such a buzzkill.” He stood up, wiped his nose. “You don’t need a goddamn Uber.”
Sheb laid his palms flat on the blotter centered on his desk. His fingers spread wide, his thumbs drummed some off-rhythm beat. “I wish I had a brother. Someone to talk to like that. I guess Jake fit that description when we were kids, but even that was different.” He cleared an imaginary layer of dust from the blotter. “Chloe, I don’t think Jon wants a date tonight.” He opened the middle drawer behind his desk, removed and counted out five hundred-dollar bills, and waved them at her. “Why don’t you and Kristi go over to the bar and have a night on me?”
Chloe got up and took the money. She crammed it into her purse and pulled a fur coat over her shoulders. And then she looked at me and said, “I never met anyone famous before. Well, except for pro athletes, but they don’t count.” She took a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and lit one. She handed it to the other woman, and lit a second. To Anton she said, “You guys gonna go to the bar?”
“We’ll stop in,” Anton said.
“Good,” Chloe said before leaning down to kiss Anton on the mouth. When she stood up, she cupped her hand between her legs and pretended to swoon.
Kristi hadn’t said a word since I’d come in, but before they went to the door she turned to me and said, “I read your book. The one called A Lesser Light. I thought it was so strange. Good strange.” She glanced at Sheb, weary, but risked a final thought. “And I didn’t think the wife was a bitch. I thought she was bad ass.” She walked out of the office. Chloe followed.
When the outside door closed behind them, a whoosh of cold air swallowing up their absence, Sheb said, “I never knew a stripper to read a book, but I guess the world is full of surprises.”
“You’re just learning this now?” I said.
“I knew another Bargaard with a smart mouth,” Sheb said. “Rest his soul.”
“We’ll all end up like him some day,” I said.
“Tell me, Johannes, is that some of your hard-learned professorial wisdom?”
I shook my head. “No. It’s the first day of class in every subject, Sheb.”
“No wonder I didn’t know, never having gone to school much.”
“There’s no use starting now. Anton?”
I walked to the door. Anton got up and followed me. “Later, Sheb,” he said.
“Anton?”
My brother turned back. So did I. Sheb was holding a Nike shoebox. Anton went and took it from him and together we walked back out into the snow.
When we got into the truck, he stashed the shoebox under a blanket on the floor of the passenger cab.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Business,” he said, putting the key in the ignition, starting the truck and blowing on his hands.
“Why don’t you hate him?”
“Sheb? I do,” Anton said.
“Then why do you still work for him?”
“Because I don’t have a PhD, dumb ass. No one’s going to hire me to teach English at some tony college. I barely graduated from high school.” He flipped the wipers on, backed out of the parking lot, and drove to Washington Avenue, where the truck spun in a snowdrift for a moment before he turned left. “We gotta stop at my place so I can change.”
“Change? For what?”
“It’s Friday night, man. I’ve got to get the cuts to market.”
“What are you talking about?”
He slowed through an intersection and looked both ways. No cars were coming from either direction. He turned the volume down on the radio and said, “Listen, this is where I live. This is what I do.”
“What do you do?”
He looked at me. “I’m a fucking butcher, okay?” He took a pack of cigarettes from inside his coat and lit one, offered me the pack, and pocketed them again after I declined. He cracked the window and blew a stream of smoke out. “I have some work to do is all. Close your eyes if you want. But don’t hassle me.”
He took another drag from his cigarette and flipped it out the window as we pulled up to the stoplight at Broadway. Boff’s was kitty-corner now, and he didn’t even glance at it.
I wish I could say that I was free of judgment, that I knew my brother’s life was his to live as he wished. But as we sat in the silence of the snow-shrouded streets, I felt only what I perceived to be the unhappiness of his existence, and I took some responsibility for it. Like I might have done more to protect him. Like I should’ve somehow stopped the decades from passing us by. I felt all this even as I knew I was wrong. I was certain, as he fishtailed through the intersection and we drove by Boff’s, that if he could read my thoughts he’d tell me to go fuck myself. And so I said, “How much does a rig like this cost?”
“It’s a company car, man.”
He turned left on Eighteenth, then took another left into an alleyway and parked beside a twelve-foot cinderblock wall. “Home again, home again.” He shifted the truck into park and turned it off. From behind the center console he grabbed the shoebox and got out. He opened the back hatch of the topper and lowered the rear gate and set the shoebox atop another box, this one the size of a treasure chest, and lifted them both out. I closed the truck’s gate and the topper hatch. We climbed three flights of stairs and I waited while he set the boxes down and unlocked the door. Below us, and across another alleyway, the neon sign for Boff’s throbbed in the blizzard. I scanned the parking lot. Thirty or forty cars covered with snow. It was Friday night, after all.
I wouldn’t have been more surprised if the inside of his place was a cathedral nave. It must have been a couple thousand square feet, almost all of them open. Floor-to-ceiling windows of the faux industrial kind were equal size to the brick walls between them. The ceilings were twenty feet high, the floor concrete. In the center of the apartment was a sleek kitchen, all stainless steel and black granite, with four posts towering from the corners of the massive counters, half of which sat above a bank of leather barstools. All of it glowed from the street and interstate lights that filtered through the snow and those many-paned windows.
“Nice place,” I said.
“I built it out myself,” he said, carrying the boxes to the kitchen and setting them on the counter. He hit a light switch on the wall and a row of recessed lights blinked on one after another. “Have a look around. Want a beer?”
“I’m good.” I wandered to what might have passed for the living room in the corner of the apartment overlooking downtown. Where the skyline should have been only a quaver of amber light pulsed, like the beating heart of the blizzard. An L-shaped couch and a table cluttered with car magazines and video game controllers sat on a huge rug. There was a television in the corner. The bedroom and bathroom were the only walled-off rooms of the apartment, and a movie screen hung from a mount in the ceiling above the bedroom wall. Sitting on a table ten paces from the screen was an old reel-to-reel movie projector.
“What’s this?” I called across to him.
Anton was unpacking the larger of the boxes into a refrigerator under the counter. “You’re going to love that. Give me a second.”
I poked my head into the bedroom, which was disheveled, then walked around the kitchen to the other side of the apartment. The windows on this side were covered with vertical blinds, and next to the windows was a dining table that would have accommodated a dozen guests on the benches along either side of it. Between two of the shuttered windows were three five-by-five-foot framed posters of my brother ski jumping (the first in his inrun position, the second in midflight, and the final in a deep telemark landing) and, lined up like a bar chart, his collection of jumping skis were also mounted on the wall. Ten or twelve pairs of them, as close to anything the timeline of his younger life.
“Cool as shit, right?” He was standing on the other side of the dining table, the light above now casting a spotlight on his skis.
“How did you manage to keep them all?”
“I didn’t. Pops did. There’s a stash of yours over at Mom’s. I’m sure she’d be happy if you got them out of the garage rafters.”
I went over to the shortest pair. Splitkeins without bindings. Maybe 200 centimeters long. There were Sokols and Kongsbergs and Fischers. But the last six pairs were all Elans, the Bargaard brand of choice. I walked along the wall, my fingertips grazing the skis. When I got to the end, I turned to him. “This is amazing.”
He nodded.
I pointed at the posters.
“Harrachov,” he said.
“1983?”
He nodded again.
“Which skis?” I asked.
He pointed at the pair of blue Elans.
“Fucksakes, that’s more than thirty years ago.”
“Believe me, I’ve done the math many times. The answer never gets better.”
I took another survey of the apartment and pointed around him at the box on the counter. “Tell me what’s in them?” I said.
“Honest to God, it’s pork chops and steaks.”
“Why do you need fifty pounds of meat?”
“Sustenance.” He opened a different fridge and pulled out a can of beer. “You sure you don’t want one?”
“I’m sure.”
He switched off the dining table light, and the kitchen light, so that only a floor lamp next to the couch shone. “Come here,” he said, closing the blinds on the windows overlooking the skyline and the interstate. “Sit down.” He bent to the projector, turned a lever, and it wheeled to motion. “I’m gonna change. Watch this.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw him step back to the kitchen counter and lift the shoebox. He walked to his bedroom door and paused. “That’s Pops. 1954. I’ve watched it a hundred times. The projector belonged to the ski club. I found it over in the basement of the bingo hall before it was torn down.”
Then I was alone in Anton’s living room, with only the whir of the antique movie projector and the film leader counting down from eight. The voice of Jack Brickhouse, the famous Chicago sportscaster, joined me.
“Welcome to Soldier Field, sports fans. What stands before me is one hundred and fifty feet of towering thrills. It’s been seventeen years since the city has seen something like this: more than one hundred daredevil ski jumpers from all over the world competing in an out-of-season competition in front of thousands of spectators. Fifteen thousand dollars of crushed ice, and a cool Lake Michigan breeze to keep it fresh, means it’ll be just like the middle of winter.”
The footage panned the crowd, thousands and thousands of people in the stands. Men in fedoras and trench coats, the women in dresses and matching hats and scarves. The jump was towering indeed, rising from the colonnades like a ramp to heaven. The camera zoomed to the top of it, where four American flags whipped in the wind.
“Will it be world champion Erling Erlandsson, here from Sweden, who takes home the victory?” The camera cut away to a fresh-faced kid, signing autographs on the field. “Or the Olympic champion, Norwegian Arnfinn Bergmann?” Again, the camera cut away to Bergmann, mugging for a throng of adoring young women. “Or will it be America’s hope, Chicago’s own Jakob Bargaard, who sets the standard?”
The camera caught Pops in silhouette, his skis on his shoulder, a cigarette pinched between his lips, his V-neck sweater across his slight shoulders. He glanced at the camera, winked, and disappeared into the parade of jumpers. The film spliced, and when it came back on it was to a stage at the end of the hay-strewn Soldier Field turf, which served as the outrun. It spliced again and picked up in the middle of Lena Lyng’s rendition of the national anthem. Her voice cut in and out, but her lips kept singing, her hand stayed on her heart, and, for all I tried to blink him away, the man standing at the bottom of the staircase remained a young Magnus Skjebne. He wore a long leather duster, was damn near the size of the car parked beside him. Still again the film cut out, and for a while only single images would flit across the screen. A shot of the crowd. The announcer on the stage. A ski jumper crashing through the hay bales on the field turf. Occasionally a jumper in midflight, or landing, or standing at the top of the scaffold ready to kick himself onto the inrun. It was like listening to someone talk and only hearing every tenth word.
But then, for twenty or thirty seconds, the film and the announcer’s voice would steady and come out together. A sequence of four jumpers in a row, with exclamations of their daring and courage. “Here’s the Finnish jumper, Matti Rantannen, ready to make his first leap. Can he best the 112-footer of the last flyer? He’s in the air—” Brickhouse’s voice gave way to the clicking of the film, but the image of the Finnish ski jumper flying down the scaffolded landing hill did not. He was the picture of elegance, his feet locked together, his skis like a single plank, his body purposeful, following his outthrust chin, his hands locked and leading the way. Even through the choppy footage he appeared to not even twitch. Not even blink. And when he landed, his skis still ramrod straight and locked together, his arms thrown wide now, fingertips up, he had about him a stoic and emotionless perfection. “110 feet for the flying Finn,” Brickhouse’s voice singsonged as Matti Rantannen slid into the hay bales on the outrun. He popped up and dusted the chaff from his sweater and raised a hand to the cheering crowd.
Another half-dozen jumpers came and went without commentary. Two of them crashing, one quite spectacularly. When Brickhouse’s voice reemerged, he said, “And now we’re down to the final three jumpers in our competition. First up, wearing number 101, a fellow who could have taken the L to the stadium today, the local favorite Jakob ‘The Bird’ Bargaard.” Only the roar of the crowd accompanied Pops as he kicked out of the start. He threw his hands in front of him and crouched impossibly low. So low his ass seemed almost to rest on the tails of his skis.
Did the film go to slow motion? Did the absence of Brickhouse’s voice intone admiration and hopefulness and respect? Could I actually recognize, in the grainy image of Pops’s face, the aspect of a man I knew to be utterly and unfailingly determined on this, his favorite subject, in this, his most important moment? Did the concentration that attended that look give way to bliss, plain and simple, as he sprang from the take off, as he settled his hands not out beyond his face like nearly all the jumpers who had come before him, but at his sides? Did he pause, there at the top of his flight, and ride on the exhalations of thirty thousand Chicagoans? Did a thought of Lena Lyng cross his mind? Did the sound of her voice, singing “Blow me a kiss, from across the room” lift his hopes? Or was it the hand of his redeemer, lifting him by the back of his sweater? Surely there was something more than the zephyr off Lake Michigan, because where all the other hundred jumpers had reached their zenith somewhere over the makeshift knoll, Pops kept rising. It looked like he would never land. It looked—and I recall now that this is what he always said about that jump—that he wouldn’t land until he was in Minneapolis with Lena and her sister, his wife, my mother, Bett. Had he seen himself up there? In the Soldier Field troposphere? Is that how he knew what he looked like?
Though of course he did land. At 133 feet. In an immaculate telemark and with a look of ecstasy on his face. 133 feet was altogether too far, nearly on the playing field itself. It was as much a surprise that he didn’t fall as that he went so far in the first place. The camera followed him to the hay bales where he came to a sliding stop. He did not wave at the raucous crowd. Did not raise his arms in triumph. Did not wink or grandstand or gloat. He merely removed his skis and stepped out of the hay and waited for the world and Olympic champions to take their turns.
Arnfinn Bergmann went first and, though his jump was stylish, he landed at 118 feet. The world champion Swede went 109 feet, and dragged his hands on landing, skidding into the hay. The last frames of the movie show another hulking man in a fur coat, his hat raised in one hand and a cigar in the other, standing in front of the same microphone that Lena Lyng had used to sing the national anthem. She was still there beside him, in a fur stole, looking like a Hollywood starlet. The woman who might have been my mother. The man who would later die at my feet.
The receiving wheel on the projector sped up, sending the loose end of film flapping. When I looked back into the kitchen, there was my brother standing over the counter, talking to another man I’d not even notice come in. Anton had changed into jeans and a black Adidas track jacket. The man standing next to him was half his size, a wizened seventy-year-old whose shirt collar was four sizes too big. Still, he wore a tie and jacket and a herringbone flat cap. His gold-rimmed glasses covered half his face.
“You don’t recognize me, do you, Jon?”
His voice sounded familiar, like something I’d known my life long but couldn’t quite place. “You were at Pops’s funeral tonight?”
“Sure I was.”
We walked toward each other. “I’m Phil Johnson. Tom Johnson’s old man.”
“Of course,” I said. Tom learned to jump with me at Wirth Park under the watchful eye of Selmer Dahlson. “How are you?”
“I’m sorry about your father. He was a friend of mine. A damn good one.”
I nodded, and then looked at Anton, who was watching us, one hand on the box on the counter. “Phil helps on Friday nights,” he said, divining my question even before I knew what it was.
Phil shrugged his shoulders and arched his eyebrows. “What can I say, my public works pension ain’t what it needs to be.”
It was my turn to shrug.
“Got a bag each of steaks and chops, Phil.” Anton held up two canvas grocery bags. “You got the produce?”
“In my car.”
“There’s a full house next door.”
“In and out, then,” Phil Johnson said. “Gimme a hand with this down to the car?” He turned to me. “I’ll say hi to Tom for you.”
“Please do. Good to see you, Mr. Johnson.”
He turned to Anton. “Mr. Johnson, you hear that? Maybe you should take a page from your brother’s playbook. Show a little respect now and again.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Johnson,” Anton said, grabbing the two shopping bags from the counter.
When they were both out the door, I went to the refrigerator and lifted the lid and opened the box sitting inside. There were dozens of cuts of meat and a stack of pre-cut butcher paper and nothing else. I closed the lid on the box, then the refrigerator, and went back to the projector.
I lifted the receiving reel, fed the film back through the front reel, and switched the knob to rewind. The movie wheeled from back to front, and before Anton returned from helping Phil Johnson I was threading the film back through the projector.
The door opened. Anton stomped the snow from his boots. “It’s still dumping,” he said.
I stood upright. “Phil Johnson?”
He walked into the kitchen and grabbed another bar stool and brought it over to where I was standing by the projector. “I didn’t hire him.” He finished the job of threading the projector.
“How does it even work? The meat?”
“I wrap it in butcher paper. Phil brings it next door and sells meat from one hand and eight balls from the other. People think he’s fundraising for the Boys and Girls Club. Who’d ever suspect an old fucker like him of dealing?”
“Who buys it?”
“Everyone.”
“How much does Phil Johnson get paid?”
“I have no idea.”
“This is how Sheb makes his money?”
He smirked. “With me and Phil? Fuck no.” When the film was ready to roll again, Anton looked up and said, “Want to watch it again?”
“How then?”
He sat heavily on the barstool. “He runs that shit all up and down the Mississippi. Winona to La Crosse to Davenport and Dubuque. All the fucking way down to St. Louis and Memphis and the Gulf of Mexico. A dozen other stops along the way. Hundreds of pounds at a time.”
“Hence the barge office.”
“Hence the barge office.”
“And you, you’re just the Minneapolis guy?”
“I run Boff’s, man. I run Boff’s and I package the meat and I deliver it to the eastside of the northside. When Sheb dies, I get the bar. When I get the bar, I quit packing the meat. I sell the bar. I open a ski shop in Edina or Wayzata.”
“That’s your retirement plan?”
“Fuck it. I don’t know. That old bastard’s never gonna die anyway.”
“Don’t you worry about getting caught? What would happen?”
“Of course I worry. But what else am I gonna do?”
I didn’t know the answer to that.
“We’ll go next door for a drink later. After Phil’s done.”
“Okay,” I said.
“And now we’ll watch Pops one more time, yeah?”
“Hey,” I said, and he swiveled to look at me. “Is all that Sheb business why Esme left?”
“Esme left because I don’t know how to make omelets.”
He turned the projector on, and the film clipped through again.
Most of Pops’s stories changed over the years. A perfect jump first described on Big Nansen out in New Hampshire might eventually have taken place in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, instead. Tournaments narrowly won or lost were lost or won. The hairiest winds at Pine Mountain would become gales in Ishpeming. Even if he wasn’t keeping track of these discrepancies, I was. His stories went into a diary I kept, and on nights when I had trouble falling asleep or mornings when I woke up before dawn, I lived my boyhood through the lens of his old yarns as told through my own pen, learning those stories over and over the way other kids learned Bible verses or American history or baseball box scores from the morning paper. His inconsistencies I understood to be part of a larger truth the whole sum of which was the story of his life. And, so, my own life, too.
Two things, though, were never confused or conflated: his abiding friendships and rivalries, and what he called “The Great Chicago Heist,” the story that began in the private dining room at The Valhalla nightclub and ended with an eight-hour drive in a Chevy delivery truck with the words PATOLLO VENTURES painted on the side panels. I suppose in most ways it’s a story that’s not over. I suppose it’s a story that never will be.
But for Pops’s purposes, or rather for Anton’s and mine, the story of the Great Chicago Heist had always unfurled as the old newsreel told it. Lena Lyng singing the national anthem. The throngs of spectators. The towering scaffold. The procession of jumpers. The strong wind off Lake Michigan and the hay bales and the Swedes and Norwegians and Finns. We already knew about the venal Patollo and the shattering glass and the specter of a man named Vaclav Hruby. We knew about the surprise of Bett. And of course we knew about Pops’s perfect jump, not only the most perfect jump of his life but the most perfect jump ever. He claimed he had proof.
Oh, we were spellbound. At five and ten years old, we gulped his stories as fast as the chocolate milk he mixed for us. “What proof, Pops?” we asked.
He’d raise his hands, spread them like a priest calling down the Holy Spirit. “It’s all around us, boys. Just look!”
He was a master of the dramatic pause, and at a moment like this he’d take a sip of his coffee and brandy and study us over the rim of his cup. It occurs to me now to wonder whether those caesuras were part of some calculation, one meant to arouse us, or if his thoughts were only then arising in him. Whatever the case, he’d loll with them, watching us. Smiling. Remembering. Weighing what to say next.
“You boys must remember that the only two jumpers behind me were a couple of crackerjacks?”
“But you beat them, Pops! You beat the best. Is that the proof?”
Another, more devilish grin turned up his lips. “You know what it’s like, Johannes. To kick your boots into your bindings, pull those cables up over the heels, push the front throws down. You stand up and slide your skis front and back a few times. You double check your bindings, and while you’re looking at the cables on your heels, you glance at the guy behind you. He’s supposed to be better than you. That’s why he’s behind you. The best for last, right?”
Anton kept a list of the jumpers who were better than I was, and he’d trot them out one at a time, taunting me. But then he’d sober up, recognizing that his own teasing logic meant that the two men who jumped behind Pops were meant to best him. At this he’d grow lachrymose.
“I always liked having those guys behind me. I especially liked it when I knew they were better than me. And let me tell you, boyos, Arnfinn and Erling were a hundred times the jumpers I was. The difference was, they were there for fun. For a free trip to Chicago. I was there to get out of that stinking city. In other words, they were goofing off. I wasn’t. I was ready to assassinate them.”
“That means kill them,” I told Anton, at which he sprang from his chair, spraying the room with a hellstorm of machine gun sounds.
“And you did,” I said. “You killed ’em!”
Pops put his finger up to his lips. Shhh, he meant to say. He meant to say he killed them with beauty and perfection. He meant to say that he was getting to it, that he needed to tell us again. So he did.
He heard Brickhouse call him “The Bird,” a nickname never before ascribed to him but one that made him smile. After checking his bindings a third time, he stood and flattened the front of his keilhosen, straightened his necktie and sweater, and closed his eyes for five seconds. All of this, he told us, was ritual. What he did before every jump. The only thing different? When he opened his eyes and saw the upturned faces of thirty thousand witnesses, he smiled at them (though surely they could not see his face so far above) and whispered they should keep watching.
He told us how Arnfinn Bergmann, standing beside him, ready to go next, nodded, and said, “Have one, eh?” and how he nodded back and said, “You, too, champ” before he pulled out into the track. He didn’t care about the grandstands or the television cameras. He didn’t care about the crushed ice under foot and ski, didn’t care about the swirling winds. His only concern was his intended happiness, in the next few seconds and the next fifty years. For him, they were the same thing.
He’d close his eyes here, Pops would. His expression readying for the memory of it. It would have taken him three or four seconds to cover the distance of the inrun, but those seconds were always recalled in slow motion. I swear I could see him conjuring the feeling: his coiled body, his furious energy, waiting and waiting and waiting for the end of the inrun, which was really the beginning. His eyes would pop open and he’d look at us in turn.
“Do you know why I jumped so hard?” he asked every time.
We waited. We never answered.
“Because I knew I had to get all the way to Minneapolis. Do you know how far it is from Chicago to Minneapolis?”
We were mystified, or I was. Probably Anton, even at five or six years old, understood perfectly.
“It would take you seven or eight hours to drive there right now. We could hop in the Ford and be there by sunrise. But,” and again he’d drink from his coffee cup, “it’s only 133 feet. 133 perfect feet. And I’ll tell you what, boyos.” He’d get up and go to the fridge and get the carton of milk and the chocolate syrup and bring them over to mix us another cup. He’d serve us another ladle of his cream of cod soup. Sitting back down, he’d say, “It only felt like eight hours up there.”
“You said there was proof, Pops,” Anton would cry. Even at that young age he wanted no ambiguity, while I devoured it.
But Pops wasn’t done. He rarely was. In answer to Anton’s call for proof, he’d lean across the table. Down on his elbows. He’d say, “Look in my eyes. Real close. Real hard.” And then he’d alternate his gentle gaze from Anton to me and back again. “What do you see?”
“We see your eyes, Pops.”
“And your bushy eyebrows.”
“And whiskers!”
“Well,” he’d say, sitting back, picking up his cup. “I see you, too. But I also see the reflection of myself in your eyes. I see my bushy eyebrows and whiskers. That jump got me you”—he tousled my hair—“and you”—he cupped Anton’s little cheeks—“and you knuckleheads are the proof that that was the most perfect jump ever taken. You are proof positive.”
How could we not believe? Our father loved us so much that he bested world and Olympic champions to get us. Never mind that the logic of his thinking was corrupted by the five years between that leap in Chicago and my own from Bett’s womb. Never mind that the wager made in the secret dining room of The Valhalla nightclub was a vile affront to Lena Lyng and that the depravity of the bet must surely have been the root of our perdition.
Yes, we believed. Because we thought our father was a saint, we did. Because he looked us in the eye and we saw each other’s reflection, we did. But mostly we believed because his love was totally uncorrupted. That part proved, over the years, to be true and unmistakable.
After he was handed the trophy and a bouquet of flowers (which he gave immediately to Lena), after he shook hands with Patollo and the runners up, after he shouldered his skis and finally saluted the crowd, before the fireworks, after Andrus Patollo secretly gave Lena the five hundred dollar prize (“To get back home,” Pops believed he had whispered in her ear), after he shouldered his skis and brought them to the delivery truck that held the rest of their meager belongings, after he changed into his dungarees and a clean shirt and packed his keilhosen, after he smoked a cigarette on the bumper of the truck, and after Sheb and Lena and Bett came out to meet him, the four of them got in the truck and started driving.
They drove through the night under the Wisconsin sky, crossing the St. Croix River as the sun came up in the rearview. Bett and Lena slept in the back. Sheb and Pops sat up front, each of them conjuring their own plans. Sheb’s dreams of that night came true. But did Pops’s? He got some of what he wished for. Anton and me, I mean. But after that? To hear Pops speak of his life, which he often did, from the end of a telephone line a hundred fifty miles away, he at least didn’t have regrets. And I think that was enough for him. He made his own way, he liked to say.
That night at Anton’s apartment, after the second viewing, when he got up and opened the blinds to the still raging snow, and checked his phone, I asked him the only question I could think of. “What do you know about Patollo and Sheb and Pops and all that?” It was a risky question, and from here I can see why I asked it. But that night, I knew I was as much as opening a trap door.
Luckily, he only shook his head sympathetically. “I thought your job was to make shit up.” But he looked at me then, seemed to follow the trail of his words across the space between us. I might have interpreted it as a challenge. Or might only have been paranoid. In either case, I felt something open wide in me, and I knew our night would be long and prosperous.
“Did you and Pops ever talk about it?” I pressed.
“Hell no.”
“What about Bett?”
He walked to the window and looked down at Washington Avenue in the snow. “What about her?”
“Does she ever talk about it?”
He turned back to me. “You know damn well she ain’t much for talking.”
I sat there, waiting to see if he’d say more.
His stare was meaningful and measured, and he trained it on me for an interminable length of time. Long enough for me to realize that maybe the biggest difference between us wasn’t where our parental allegiance lay, but how we thought of the world. I saw it then, and still do, as something to be reshaped; he saw it as something to be kept secret.
“Come on, man. Let’s go raise that glass to Pops.” He went over to the door and slipped his feet into a pair of black boots.
I got up and put my shoes on, too. He opened and held the door and we walked out onto the deck. The snow blew horizontal in the parking lot lights next door. Anton zipped up his track jacket and locked the door behind him and we took the stairs down. Along the wall separating the two parking lots, snow had drifted a couple feet deep, and Anton kicked a bunch clear in order to swing open a gate I hadn’t noticed. We crossed Boff’s parking lot and he put a key in another door and pulled it open. Inside was a concrete vestibule, barely big enough for the two of us to stand in together, and another door that he unlocked. This one let into a small room with an old metal desk and boxes of booze stacked floor to ceiling against one wall, a battered couch against the other. Through still another door I could hear the thumping music. Anton sat behind the desk, lit a cigarette, and opened the center drawer.
“Sit down,” he said. “Give me one second.”
He took from the drawer a ledger, glanced at a couple pages, and put it back in.
“How’s business?” I said.
“Looks like we can keep the lights on for another month.”
I crossed his office and stood before a poster of a naked woman with her legs wrapped around a bottle of rum.
“Did you think you were going to find a poster of Tolstoy on the wall?” He took his phone from his pocket and sent a text. His phone pinged back immediately, and he sent another text and then put it back in his pocket and just stared at me for a long minute.
“I’ve read War and Peace, for the record,” he said. “Boring ass book.”
“I’ve never read it myself,” I said.
He gave me a big smile, shook his head, then planted his hands on the desktop in much the same way Sheb had only an hour before. He kept shaking his head, and looking at me, and I knew what would happen next. I could as much see the words taking shape in his mind. I could see the deliberation. And the hesitation. But the urge to win—the desire to outjump me—overtook him, and he said what I’m sure was more than he intended. “You know, when Pops went away, and we had to go to Sheb’s school?”
“Sheb’s school, right.”
“Shut up for a minute.” He shook his head yes and then no and then yes again. “When Ma went to the hospital—”
“When she ran away on us, you mean?”
“You want to hear this or not, dumbass?”
“What?”
“Sheb brought her to the hospital. And after they pumped her stomach and kept her on a respirator for four days, he brought her to the other hospital, too.”
“Pumped her stomach?”
“She ate a whole fucking jar of sleeping pills. While you were up in Duluth, fucking ski jumping with your buddies. The only reason she wasn’t dead that night’s because I had to pee in the middle of the night. I called Sheb and he came over and took her to the hospital.”
“Fuck you.”
He nodded again.
“Where the hell else was he supposed to put me but the School for Boys? For that matter, what else was he supposed to do with Ma?”
“When did you learn this?”
“I’ve known it my whole life.”
“And you never told me?”
He arched his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders. “I guess everyone thought you’d rather not know.”
“Rather not know?”
He only looked at me. In the silence of that moment, the music from inside the bar was louder even than before. I couldn’t believe my naïveté. My ignorance.
“Well, shit,” I said.
“Listen, she’s no saint. Pops wasn’t either. And Sheb, well, he’s a grade-A son-of-a-bitch. But, Jon, the story you’ve been telling yourself since you were fifteen? Since I was fucking ten? That story’s as much a figment of your imagination as the books you write. The sooner you learn that, the sooner we can be friends again.”
I sat on the couch, hung my head. I wish I could say that I suffered my shame in that moment, that learning that my lifelong vitriol for Bett was misdirected roused in me some empathy. But I didn’t, it didn’t. The truth is that though I knew he was right, and I wanted more than anything to be friends with my brother, the thoughts racing through my mind were not about how wrong I’d been about him, or Bett, or how indecently I’d treated them all, but how he’d just told me the next story I’d write.
“I’ll give you a minute. Come out and have one with me when you’re ready. Drinks are on Sheb.”
When I heard the door close behind him, I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my trusty notebook and wrote what I thought would be the first words of this book: Every old ski jumper’s a liar, and my father was one of the best, liar and ski jumper both.
He was a liar. Same with Bett. And Sheb, of course. Liars and hoarders of secrets, all. But they weren’t the only ones. It would be unfair to paint them in a certain light and leave myself in a brighter one. I’m a liar and keeper of secrets, too. And if I’d gone through the years thinking my transgressions were somehow less grievous than theirs, Anton’s announcement in the office of that seedy north Minneapolis bar disabused me of that. Or anyway the years since have.
They seem, at once, both incredibly long and like they’ve passed in less time than the rest of that fateful night did. Ingrid would say that’s a consequence of reliving the same regrets without actually confronting them, and I suppose she’d be right. But it’s also true that my brother’s unvarnished honesty opened portals in my thinking that had—that still have—nothing to do with my mother and father and brother and our long-ago life, and everything to do with my wife and children and the truce I’ve made with my own perfidy. Even if I haven’t yet made that same truce with Ingrid.
I suppose this is another reason The Ski Jumpers is destined for the redrope and the back of my file cabinet. What wife would want her husband’s sorrows and sins and sicknesses brought to bear, even disguised in a novel? Not mine.
And yet, my compulsion to tell her everything that happened those days and nights? It’s crushing, especially with the onset of what I can think of only as my eternal dusk.
Ingrid’s home now, holding two cups of Starbucks in my office doorway. I didn’t hear her come in. Didn’t see the headlights sweep back into the garage.
“Look at you,” she says. “Showered and shaved and dressed to the nines.” She crosses the room and hands me a cup. “What’s this?” She picks up my childhood journal from the desk, glances at it and smiles.
I look down at myself, enfolded in my desk chair, but dressed indeed. I touch my face. It’s freshly shaven. I take the lid off the coffee—a cappuccino—and have a sip. “You,” I say. “Bringing me a treat so early in the day.”
“I saw the bowl in the sink, too,” she says.
“In what sink?”
“The kitchen sink. Your oatmeal.”
Of course. It’s morning. Only shortly after seven. I had oatmeal. I left the dishes in the sink. We’re going up to Gunflint today, to see our daughter and her wife. To spend some happy time together. Annika, our other daughter, will join us tomorrow. Ingrid will make scones tomorrow morning. We’ll have breakfast overlooking the distant lake, and I’ll tell my daughters about my mind.
But right now? I look down at the cup of coffee and the papers and that old notebook with all the stories. Ingrid was at the grocery store. I was only thinking about my brother and father and Bett. Remembering us.
“Sure, I had some breakfast,” I say. I straighten the papers and notebook and put them back in one of the redropes I use to keep projects organized.
“Here,” she says, taking from her sweater pocket a single clementine. “They’re perfectly ripe.” She sits down on the chair opposite my desk and sips her coffee.
I hold the clementine between my thumb and finger and study it as though it were a rare gem. “Thank you.”
“I don’t think it has mystical powers,” she says, teasing.
“Bett used to treat us with these. She’d buy a bag and let me and Anton take them into the backyard. We’d eat them like candy, one after the next.”
She regards me from across the desk. “You’ve got Bett on your mind?”
“I don’t know,” I say, and it’s the truth. I’ve been somewhere with them. With Bett and Pops and Anton and Sheb. But as ever, the recall feels less like a memory than it does the shaking of a strange dream, one I’m forgetting as quick as I wake. One I’m not sure I’d want to hold even if I could.
“You look troubled, Jon.” She leans forward in the chair, sets her coffee on the edge of my desk. “You’re all right?”
“I am. All right, not troubled.” I dig my thumbnail into the clementine, begin peeling.
“Did you call Noah?”
The rind is off the fruit, all one strip. “I haven’t. It’s still so early.”
“You think he’s not awake?”
As though she’s asked an altogether different question, I say, “I owe him and his family so much.”
Ingrid nods. She of course knows this story, too. I can see her connecting the dots of my thinking. It’s such a comfort to have her here with me. She who’d do anything for me. She who always has.
“I’ll call him after I finish my coffee. Why don’t you get ready?” I say.
She stands, folds her arms, looks around the office like she’s seeing it for the first time. “I always love to see you sitting here. It’s where you’re happiest.”
“I’ve been happy everywhere.”
“You know what I mean.”
She’s so beautiful, here in the soft winter light, her kindness and patience seem almost to emanate. She’s loved me so well and let me love her back. She’s made everything simple, without ambiguity, and for this I’ll never have enough gratitude. And for the same reason, I hate the trespasses I’ve committed against her. The big and small ones alike.
“I want to tell you some things today,” I say.
“Tell me some things?”
“In the car.”
“What sort of things?”
“Confessions.”
She says, “That’s exciting.” By which she means to allay the seriousness of my guilt, which she can’t believe is real.
“I mean it.”
She stops in the doorway. “You think you have secrets, Jon?”
Are these secrets I harbor, or something else? I fumble the last sections of the clementine, wondering. “I think so, yes.”
“I wonder if you’re confusing our marriage for one you’ve made up.” She points at the work on my desk. She smiles again. “I’ll be surprised if secrets are what you have.”
I’m suddenly doubtful, and as she leaves I take the file on my lap and untie it and thumb through the pages I put back only a minute ago. They’re redolent of futility, and I think for the thousandth time I’d have been wise to have listened to myself five years ago, as that night of reconciliation with Anton ended, when, in the blank spaces of that blizzard, I already knew enough to leave the past alone. I was certain six hours after conception that I had an abortion on my hands.
But the past is hard to annul. Some people keep photo albums, others gather each year for reunions, still others sit on porches—or at kitchen tables—with their kin, with their mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers, and keep the present and past in communion. I fall into a different category of person, one with incomplete photo albums and absent of family reunions or a porch—or kitchen table—to sit by with a mother or father or brother to keep time moving in the right direction. Which I suppose helps explains why I’ve spent the past five years trying to write The Ski Jumpers, and why, finally and resolutely, I’m abandoning it.
I tie the redrope closed, and there’s a sensation not unlike lift. I can see, suddenly and in a manner of total incorruptibility, the three of us—Pops and Anton and me—on the jump at Theodore Wirth Park. Anton is eight or nine years old and already transcendent on the hill. Pops, for all the pleasure in his expression, all the pride in his bearing, held all his desires in his mittened hand. He was what I have never been: the picture of serenity and contentment and fellowship, his family all around him on the side of a ski jump.
Those mornings, a half-decade of them, I was just a kid. A ski jumper. A boy in his cracked leather boots and wool sweater making leaps of a hundred feet and more. Those rides embodied my childhood. Speed and flight and focus, the sensation of coming back to earth, the elegance of a good landing, the adoring looks of my father and brother afterward. I was in thrall of it all. And I was innocent. Innocent and uncomplicated and simply happy.
But those days ended. Dramatically and finally, to be sure. And though I can still look back and conjure that quintet of years even now, what I see in the years that followed, in the years before I met Ingrid, is vacancy. And hurt and sorrow and shame, and it seems there are better uses for my remaining cogent thoughts than trying to reassemble the mess of all that happened after. It seems, too, that the bounty of peace and love I’ve experienced ought to get a share of my recollections. And this, I guess, is why I want to come clean with Ingrid. So that I can put the last regrets to bed and get on with what pleasures and happiness remain for us. Will it be the same for her? Or will my admissions leave her as I felt for so long myself: like those who I loved and loved me back best had finally only betrayed me?
I set the redrope back in the drawer and slide it shut. I keep a collection of the editions of my books on the top shelf of the bookcase across the room. The hardcovers and paperbacks, the translations, the galleys. Not from vanity but because they inspire me to keep working. To do better. I pause my gaze on the spine of each hardcover, one at a time, and think—not for the first time—that those stories compelled me to live better, different lives, even if only for a few years at a time. The Ski Jumpers will never sit there with the others. I’ll have to live better in my own, real life.
I stand up. I scoop the rind from the clementine into my hand and switch off the lamp on my desk. Ingrid and I will take a drive now. Or will soon. We’ll head north to see our daughters. I’ve so much to tell them all.