THE MINNEAPOLIS SKI CLUB used to run a bingo hall up on Broadway between Bryant and Colfax Avenues North. A bunch of folding tables and chairs lined the creaky floor and surrounded a raised platform where the caller sat behind the brass hopper on game nights. Above the stage an electronic board kept the game’s tally. On all the surrounding walls, photographs of the great club jumpers of the past lined the hall like a gallery of presidents. Pops was up there, his mouth pressed into a howling O, his skis so close together they might have been confused as a single board were it not for the pair of tips that came up to his left shoulder. He wore the number 16 in that photograph, and I never once saw him glance at it.
I looked forward to the monthly club meetings with unbridled excitement, even into my teenaged years. It was an extra opportunity for the club jumpers to get together and talk shop and revel in our shared exuberance. And revel we did. Whatever else was on the agenda, we took advantage of those nights to anticipate and replay the season as it came or went.
It was also true that after the junior jumpers had covered our agenda items, the men of the club set us loose in the basement while they tended to more legitimate topics, foremost among them fundraising and budgets.
The basement. It had once been a bowling alley but like the rest of the building had fallen into ill repair, and for us it was mainly a place to store skis, which lined the entire length of the lane farthest from the door. There was also a sort of makeshift office down there. Like any good racketeer Sheb kept a bevy of hideouts, and since he had helped set up the bingo hall for the ski club—obtaining the gaming license through a connection at city hall—his reward was yet another place to conduct his sordid business. But already I’m ahead of myself.
When it was time for the club leadership to discuss their monthly accountings of bingo hall proceeds, we boys were sent downstairs to goof around. Not only were the dark recesses of that basement excellent grounds for scaring the hell out of each other, they were also ideal spots for secreting away to ogle the dirty magazines Sheb kept in his desk. We’d pilfer them one at a time and squirrel away with flashlights in corners and closets and behind the old service counter. A couple of the guys would sneak packs of cigarettes, too, and we’d light them up and pretend to be our dads.
And because Pops was the club president during most of my childhood, and because when we weren’t down there at club meetings we were down there meeting Sheb for one reason or another, I considered the subterranean corridors of that hall to be like my own backyard. Anton and I had even fashioned our own fort in the aisle behind the pinsetters. From there, we could spy on whatever business Sheb and Pops were engaged in at the desk on the other end of the lanes. And there was no shortage of business down there. We saw lots of handshake deals between Sheb and men in suits and ties. There were plenty of young men, too, guys I recognize now must have been apprentice or aspiring drug dealers. Sometimes Sheb was just having a drink and a laugh with a friend. It was not uncommon for uniformed police officers to walk down those stairs and sit with Sheb for an hour over cigars and bottles of beer. What all those meetings had in common is that the tone of them, regardless of who sat across the desk from Sheb, always seemed affable, no matter what angle we snooped from. He was a well-spoken and serious negotiator, and if he couldn’t find agreement with a would-be colleague, he’d laugh it off and move on to the next meeting. No harm, no foul. I often heard him announce that the secret to success was not to keep your enemies at bay, but to not have any in the first place, a lesson he must have learned from Andrus Patollo. Not that he ever would’ve given him credit.
Unless the meeting had to do with ski club business (and Sheb helped manipulate the park board and city council members, usually with simple arm-twisting but sometimes with bribes or more), Pops was not a party to these meetings. We understood Sheb was family, and I admit that back then I often thought fondly of him and even relished his visits to the house and marveled at his easy way with people from every walk of life. He showed up at Christmas, and our birthdays, and for summer barbecues at the pit in our backyard. But we also understood that his business dealings were profane and illegal and we weren’t even allowed to talk about them in private.
All of this made that day in 1975 so much more beguiling. It was mid-March. A string of warm days and rain had brought the ski jumping season to an end, and Pops offered to help Selmer move all the skis from the clubhouse at Wirth Park to the bingo hall basement. He of course brought me along to assist. Anton would have come, too, but he had an ear infection and was laid up in bed.
Our first stop was the chalet at Wirth Park. Pops pulled up at the rear entry where in summer the golf course maintenance vehicles and mowers were parked. We went back and forth between the station wagon and the clubhouse locker room with armfuls of the skis that Selmer fitted out to kids who came on Saturdays to try ski jumping. Next were the boxes of boots, several of which had to sit on my lap as we drove. Then we parked on Broadway and shuttled the gear into the basement and lined it all against the bowling lane wall.
I reminisced about the different skis I’d used over the years, some of which still had my name magic-markered on the tips, and I felt the sense of completion at the end of a winter. Pops was jocular and teasing and we went through the highlight reel of the previous few months. We talked about Anton and his strides and it was an afternoon so perfectly father and son that what would happen next seems almost impossible to believe.
He’d bought me a Coke and we were sitting on either side of Sheb’s desk when the phone rang, that loud shrillness suddenly interrupting our gabbing. He looked at me with a goofy expression and said, “Who in the hell’d be calling here? Should I answer it?”
Before I could muster a reply, he took the receiver up and said, “Hulloh?” A second later he covered the mouthpiece with his hand and whispered, “It’s Sheb,” lifting his shoulders in a questioning way.
For the next few minutes he sat back and listened to whatever Sheb said, Pops’s only response an occasional raised eyebrow or “Huh.” And then Sheb said something that altered my father’s expression to one I’d never seen. His face contorted and blanched ghostly white and he didn’t say another word until, a moment later, he said, “Five minutes? Okay.”
When he hung up the phone he stared at the receiver on the desk for some time before he looked up, startled to see me sitting there with him.
I said, “Is everything all right? What did Sheb want?”
He stood, looked around frantically, and finally settled on the end of the bowling lanes. “Why don’t you take that Coke back to your hiding spot?” He gestured into the darkness. “Here.” He went to the wall behind the counter and turned the lights on along the wall opposite the lined-up skis, which was also the aisle back to the fort.
“Why?” I said, taking the bottle as he handed it to me.
He only put a hand on my shoulder to steer me away, walking with me halfway down the aisle before saying, “Just stay back here, okay? Whatever happens, don’t make a sound. Don’t come out.”
How to describe the fear and agitation? My father, who had never once appeared scared, never mind terrified, was suddenly wraithlike and mute and sitting in the chair opposite Sheb’s desk as I so recently had. Worse than his pallor and silence was his sequestering me, back among the cobwebs and old wooden bowling pins. I pressed myself into the darkness awaiting what I couldn’t begin to imagine, but I was terrified, too.
And so it was strange, even almost a relief, when Sheb showed up with two others in tow: a man almost equal his size dressed in a long coat and matching black homburg hat and a woman a hundred times more elegant and dignified than had ever descended those steps before. Pops stood when the three of them reached Sheb’s desk and shook the tall man’s hand. Standing beside him, Pops appeared half the other man’s size and for once was not only diminutive in stature but also plainly daunted.
The woman was introduced next, and when Pops shook her hand he held both it and her gaze for a long time. From where I sat behind the lanes, I couldn’t hear much more than the occasional exclamation, but it was clear from that dark distance this meeting was living up to my father’s sudden dread of it. Even Sheb, who was by then as brash as he’d ever be, seemed diminished in the presence of this other man. Sheb shrank. His gaze turned downward. The assertive way he spoke with his hands vanished after the first sharp word from the man in the hat, and he holstered his hands in his trouser pockets instead.
This man paced from Sheb’s desk to the ball returns, gesticulating calmly, pointing to the woman as though she were the evidence and he the prosecuting attorney. His coolness was as evident in his gait as it was in his dress, and for a moment I was lost in his swagger. He did most of the talking, and as much as Sheb was clearly listening, Pops was not. His attention went entirely to the woman, who stood with one foot firmly planted on the ground and the other raised and resting on her ankle.
She wore a knee-length dress—the front half was white, the back half black—and black shoes not right for the slurry of melting snow and rain outside. Between the buckles on those shoes and the hem of her dress, black stockings shone even in that dim light and from as far away as I hid. A fur stole slung across her shoulders blended up into hair so blonde it appeared almost as white as the front of her dress. She could have been my age, or she could have been thirty, but in any case her prettiness was as profound as the tension in that group.
Twice Pops took his eyes from her, both times peering across the bowling lanes and into the darkness he must have imagined I occupied. But in neither instance did his expression betray his feelings. Nor did they offer much in the way of suggestion, those looks. So I just sat there, frozen, scared, and intrigued by what possible alignment of fates led my unsuspecting father to this meeting of wolves. He looked, I realize now, like the raven who alights beside the pack.
Having been relinquished to that dark nook, I worked as fast imagining the purpose of that assembly as I did taking inventory of the players. And for all the powers of my young imagination, I could not fathom either. Not properly.
Not then, and not ever.
My confusion increased along with my fear. The man in the hat seemed to be getting more agitated with each passing word, most of which came violently from his own shouting mouth as that behemoth moved among the three of them, scolding and unrelenting. He paid special attention to Pops. Or anyway he seemed to, brandishing a special blend of mockery and abhorrence, describing him, finally, as someone who deserved a bullet to the back of the head.
What boy who ever loved his father so much could sit in that dark spot, alone, hoping the storm of that gigantic man would not land on his Pops? What boy wouldn’t have scooted out from behind the lanes and slithered up the aisle under the half-wall parallel to the lanes? What boy wouldn’t have found himself close enough to that unwilling party to see the scintillating mother-of-pearl handle of the pistol in the man with the hat’s holster? What boy wouldn’t have gasped, and shuddered, when that same man in the hat told his Pops to shut the hell up and take his goddamn medicine?
Pops pulled an old metal desk chair from the shadows and sat as though the man in the hat had whipped him in the gut with the butt of that pistol. Pops put his elbows on his knees and studied the floor as though the answer to all this strangeness might be written in the dust and debris.
At some point, I’d set down the Coke and picked up two bowling pins instead. I can remember discovering they were in my hands and being both surprised and emboldened. I knew from our hiding out down there that even where I stood—not twenty feet from them now—I was invisible behind the half-wall. I set the pins down as quietly as I could and raised myself up so only the top of my head and my eyes peeked above the concrete.
I could see the woman looking back in the direction of my shadow. As though she’d sensed a ghost. No sooner did I notice the cigarette in her hand—and the way she held it loosely beside her painted lips, and the way she tipped the ash with metronomic flicks of her thumb—than the man in the hat said to my father: “She’s your daughter, you moron.”
His daughter. Pops’s daughter? My sister?
For a brief moment, I expected Pops to rise and tell the ox that was impossible. That he must surely have been mistaken. But as soon as I thought it, she looked at me again, and all I saw was myself looking back.
“Helene?” my father said, softly, but loud enough for me to hear.
“I already told you her goddamned name. I told you three times.”
Pops watched her for a moment, and if she couldn’t look back, who could blame her. What must she have known about meeting her father for the first time, at her age, which I could see was closer to mine than I had originally thought.
Pops spoke now to the young woman named Helene. “What happened to your mother? What happened to Lena?”
The man in the hat let this question stand. In fact, he seemed to relish how uncomfortable it made her. When she didn’t answer after a moment, he said, “Well, girl? Tell him.”
Her voice sounded just like Bett’s when she spoke. “There was an accident on the L.”
“An accident!” the man in the hat exclaimed.
“It was an accident, Andy,” she said.
She might as well have summoned the devil, uttering that name. It was Andrus Patollo. Of course. It had to be.
As if to prove me right, he removed his hat and set it on the edge of Sheb’s desk, then ran his enormous hands over his perfectly bald head. He turned to Pops and said, “She jumped in front of a goddamn train.”
“When did this happen?” Pops put that question between the two of them.
Patollo answered. “Last Saturday.”
“I’m sorry,” he said to Helene. “I’m so sorry. And I’m sorry this is how you’re meeting me. I never knew. I promise that’s true.”
“If it is,” Patollo boomed, “then your shrew wife is not only the craziest thing I’ve ever met, but also the best con.”
“Hey,” Pops said, sitting up in his chair.
“That’s right,” Patollo said. “She’s known. Bett was down to visit a long time ago.” Now he picked up his hat and leaned against the desk.
To Helene Pops said, “Is it true you met your aunt?”
She nodded.
“She never told me about you,” Pops said.
Again, Helene nodded, with perhaps even less conviction or understanding than she had a moment before. I realized she was as frightened as I was.
“She never told you because she’s a scheming bitch. Just like her sister. And you”—he pointed at Helene—“are every bit as bad as either of them.” His expression was not one of annoyance or anger even, but of something almost like pleasure. He looked at them in turn, like a scolding parent to his three knuckleheaded children, landing finally on Sheb. “Which is why I’m handing her back to you all, who should’ve been responsible from the start.”
Pops, ignoring Patollo’s bluster, spoke again to Helene. “You’re what, twenty years old now?”
Helene started to answer, but Patollo’s voice boomed over hers. “I don’t care if she’s ten or twenty or thirty years old, she’s a leech, just like her mother and aunt, and I’ll not be responsible for her.”
I could see Pops’s anger rising, and could also sense that Patollo would not abide much pushback. He seemed like Sheb in this way, but Sheb, for all his normal bluster and posturing, was strangely neutered in Patollo’s company.
“Why don’t you give me a chance to talk to Helene,” Pops said. His voice was level. Eerily so, given the tension in the room. He stood, and took the girl’s arm and brought her to the chair he’d just occupied and helped her to sit as though she were feeble. “Everything’ll be all right, okay?” he said. “Give me just a second here.” Now he turned to Patollo. “Let me talk to her without all your ranting.”
He glanced over his shoulder and down the lane, as though to remind himself of me. I can still see the sideways tilt of his head, like he could tell I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. But that can’t have been true. Maybe it was merely a shrug of apology. Or of confusion. Or a message that he hadn’t forgotten about me since his daughter suddenly walked into his life.
In any case, I wasn’t down there to receive his questioning look. And for all my own confusion, I was now intrigued as well as befuddled. What would he say to that scared young woman? How would he handle that belligerent oaf? How was my life going to be different from this day on? How would his?
He went and knelt by her side. He put a hand on the arm of the chair and screwed up the courage to look at her, to lift her chin to look back at him. “I’m sorry about your mom. It’s a goddamn terrible thing. Whatever happened.”
She slid herself free, and looked in my direction.
“What do you do down there in Chicago? You go to college?”
“Of course she doesn’t go to college,” Patollo grumbled. “She’s dumb as a goddamn potato.”
“Just shut the hell up,” Pops said.
“There’s the vinegar I remember!” Patollo boomed, assuming a position like a prize fighter and punching the air left–right–left.
“Sheb, tell him to give me a fucking break, would you?”
Sheb didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look up from his hands, which met at the fingertips as though sewn together. Patollo’s reaction to this was to stand taller, to reach into the pocket of his jacket a hair’s breadth from the pistol, and take out a cigar. He made a great show of clipping it and lighting it and puffing on it. I remember the smoke filled the room in no time at all.
Oblivious to all of this, Pops kept his attention on Helene, who now seemed almost trembling with fear and humiliation. “What do you do in Chicago?”
She mumbled her response.
“With your mother?” Pops said.
She shook her head.
“Well you won’t miss that, will you?”
A look of unabashed relief washed over her face, and I knew it was not so much the words he’d spoken as the way he’d said them. His voice, when he wanted it to be, was unmistakably soothing, and I could well imagine how she felt receiving those words.
He leaned in closer to her, so close he nearly blocked her from my view. She nodded and shook her head and sighed, but with each minute that passed he was winning her trust, and when he finally stood and dusted his hands, he turned to Patollo and said, “What is it with you, treating women like auction items?”
Patollo flicked an ash from the arm of his jacket and took another puff of his stinking cigar. “Have I not raised your daughter? Have I not provided for her in every way? Did I not let you walk away not only with your life, twenty years ago, but with my truck? Do you think it would’ve been any trouble at all for me to have had someone come and retrieve it? And you?”
“We’re not talking about back then. And if you didn’t send someone after me, that’s a choice you made yourself. I don’t give a damn about it. As for raising my daughter, well, I suspect you and I have different ideas about how that goes. But still and all, I’m happy you brought her to me. Grateful, even.”
“Then you should say thank you,” Patollo said.
For the first time since they had arrived, Sheb spoke. “He doesn’t need to say shit to you, you dried-up old sod.” He planted his palms on his desk and pushed himself up as Patollo stuffed the cigar in his mouth and rolled his shoulders back and put his thumbs in the belt loops on his pants.
“Look at this,” Patollo said, pausing dramatically between each word. “Finally decided not to let the runt over here do all the talking?”
“He’ll talk for himself.” Sheb came out from around the desk so the two giants were standing square. “I’m just good and tired of you thinking you have some jurisdiction here. We’re not in your den of thieves—”
“We’re certainly not!” Patollo nearly exploded. “This rat-infested crypt is more like the bottom of the sewer pipes in my mansion.” He puffed three times on his cigar. “You’ve amounted to exactly what I thought you would, Magnus.”
Sheb collected himself. He found yet more resolve, and kept going. “You’ve always mistaken your name in the paper for meaning something, you know that? You’ve kept that fat head shaved bald so the light shines there. All you understand is the grand gesture. It would be sad if it weren’t so pathetic.” Now he took a step away from Patollo and wandered the stage they inhabited like a thespian. “Me? I’m diversified, Andy. You may see a shit hole, but it’s only a part of a larger enterprise.”
“Larger enterprise my ass. We stopped at that dump just down the street. I thought I’d show Helene some of her future. It even made me sad.”
“Why? Because there’s no fountain? Because real people work and go there? And this girl,” he looked at Helene, who still sat mortified at Pops’s side, “if she did work there, she would do so of her own free will. And she’d be treated with respect and dignity.”
“By the Saturday morning drunks swilling down there? I doubt it.”
“The guys belly-up now, most of them, they work the third shift in the train yards or recycling plant. They’re good family guys. Union guys. Boff’s is where they go to warm up. It’s their happy hour. And it’s called service.” He walked back to the chair behind his desk and sat heavily. I could feel the floor shudder. “And do you know what they’ve made me, Andrus Fucking Patollo?”
Patollo only glowered at him.
“I’ll give you a hint: it’s something you’re not.”
Patollo appeared puzzled, and his bluster paused while he contemplated Sheb’s riddling. It was plain to me that this was an unfamiliar position, his being on the end of something that might be described as a lesson.
When, after a few seconds, Patollo hadn’t responded, Sheb said, “They’ve made me a millionaire, Andy. For all your conniving, you never got there, did you? I know you’re not there now. You’re as bankrupt in accounts as you are in spirit.” He wrapped his hands behind his head and sat back, flung his feet up on the desk. “You’ve brought Helene here because you can’t afford to take care of her anymore. And ain’t that something.”
Patollo finally removed the cigar from his lips and held it in his left hand. His expression was unreadable, but he looked from Helene back to Sheb, and I could as much as hear the machinations in his mind. When he spoke, it was with half his previous conviction. “You’ve heard the story about the father and the son, Magnus?”
“Yeah, yeah. And the holy ghost and fuck you.”
“The father raises the son. He teaches him to be fierce and wise. How to work hard and take pleasure in life. How to provide. And the son, the thankless nit, he comes of age. He grows big and strong. Bigger and stronger even than the father. He develops a sense of himself that’s all out of proportion. He thinks he’s a man and in the eyes of many he’d be mistaken for one. Except when he’s with the father. The father, despite his growing older and losing strength, still eclipses the son. And the son, thinking this truth must be corrected, confronts the father, tells him that he’ll be in charge now, that he’ll duel the father if he must. And the father, because he loves his son, and because he raised him to be fierce and wise, advises him to withdraw his challenge. He tells him, because he loves him, that he does not want to duel, that it would be an unfair fight.” He paused in his ridiculous speech and stared again at Sheb, some of his confidence restored by all the gabbing. “Do you understand, Magnus? That the father is protecting the son? That the son can never best the father because he is the son?”
Patollo removed his jacket and laid it over the ball return so that he was looking straight at the place I crouched. I was huddled beneath the half-wall, afraid to glance back, and only when he spoke again, his voice carrying away from me and toward Pops and Sheb and Helene, did I dare risk another peek.
His hands had transformed into two post mauls swinging at his side. His shoulders twitched. His suspenders and the leather strap of the holster crisscrossing his back made him even more imposing in his shirt sleeves than he’d been in his hat and coat, and his obvious ease in this stance—now with his knuckles planted on the desk, not far from Sheb’s black boots—made me fear for the man we called uncle.
But if Sheb were scared, he didn’t show it. He didn’t so much as flinch. Instead, with his hands still behind his head, he said, “The main problem with your story is that you’re not my father, and I’m damn sure not your son.”
Sheb lowered his legs. He stood up. And he mocked Patollo with an insincere smile.
All this time, neither Pops nor Helene had said a word. I’d almost forgotten they were there, given all the pontificating going on between the two thugs. They must have forgotten, too, because when Pops’s voice came tinkling through the air—“Why don’t you just go ahead and leave”—Patollo took a boxer’s step back, and, in the same motion, withdrew his pistol and pointed it at Pops.
How many moments of tragic significance were borne into the rest of my life with those next few minutes? How much of my future was damned by that old man’s impotent rage? By his clinging to his younger self, the one who built an empire on toughness and cunning and no small amount of legerdemain, if Pops and Sheb had been accurate in the stories they’d long told about him. In those stories, Patollo always ended up the butt of their joke. A cranky cur bested by a couple of first-time dealmakers and swindlers.
It was almost as if he’d felt their mockery and scorn, and come to settle accounts. I couldn’t move, much less protest the gun still pointed at my father. None of us moved. None of us spoke. Not for a moment or two. Not until Helene’s voice filled the bowling alley in what I might best describe as a howl.
“Don’t you dare hurt him, Andy,” she said, pleading for a father she’d known all of ten minutes, rejecting at the same time the man who had stood in as that figurehead all her life. “Just do like he said and go away.”
Her voice stirred in Patollo more rage. “For fucksakes, shut up! Both of you!” He waved the pistol back and forth between Pops and Helene, his face contorted in confusion and wrath and I was certain he was going to kill my father.
Summoning some depth of courage I’d never even suspected before, I slid back down the half-wall, silently picked one of the bowling pins off the floor, and duck-walked the remaining length of the lane. Now instead of rising to glance above the wall, I peered around the end of it, my eyes at knee-height. Patollo stood only ten or fifteen paces from me.
No one had moved or spoken in the few seconds I spent moving, and yet it was somehow obvious tempers had worsened.
The next voice I heard was Sheb’s. “Your argument’s with me, Andy. All Jake over there did was win a bet, one he shouldn’t’ve had to make in the first place. Don’t make this more than it has to be.”
Now Patollo swung the gun in Sheb’s direction. “You’d stand there in your Sears and Roebuck suit and tell me how to do my business?”
“What I’m saying is, none of this is reason to wave a gun around.”
Pops spoke next, after he stood and slowly faced Patollo. “Almost twenty years has passed since the last time we stood next to each other. I was nobody then, I’m nobody now. You’ve done for me something so kind I can’t quite muster up thanks, but I want you to know how much I appreciate your bringing Helene home. I sincerely do. This angel has landed, that’s all I care about. Anything else, well, I apologize for the way we left town a couple decades ago. Whatever that truck cost, we’ll make right for you. But please calm down. This is my child here.”
When he gestured at Helene, the most profound jealousy I’d ever experienced welled up in me. It’s a jealousy that’s not been matched since, and I can’t help but think it jolted me into a kind of subconscious rage that allowed for what happened next.
Patollo lowered the pistol, just enough that if he’d pulled the trigger it would have shot out Sheb’s knee. He’d been listening to Pops attentively, and I’m convinced even to this day that if Sheb had left well enough alone things would have ended right then and there. But he didn’t—of course he didn’t.
“I just figured it out: this is the last desperate act of a washed-up goon,” he said, as if he was thinking out loud. To Pops he said, “Don’t grovel at this has-been. We ought to be kicking his ass six different ways.” Now his voice grew into a tumult. “What son-of-a-bitch thinks he can raise another man’s daughter? Or thinks he should be thanked for bringing her home? Just get the hell out of here.”
“All around me, fucking children.” Patollo anointed Sheb then Pops then Helene with a tip of the pistol barrel.
“Please—” Pops began.
That final plea must have been one too many, because as soon as Pops spoke that word, Patollo bayed, and he raised the gun again, pointed it at Pops, and started to walk slowly toward him, moaning as he did so that I thought the ceiling might collapse on us.
I moved with every bit of quickness and instinct I possessed, closing the distance that separated Patollo’s massive back and shoulders with catlike steps, the last of which was more a leap, with the bowling pin cocked like a baseball bat. At first I doubted I’d even be able to reach the top of him, but I jumped, and I swung the pin with all my momentum behind me and clubbed him over the left ear. His keening stopped as soon as I hit him, and I heard the rattle of the pistol across the wooden floor before I did the thump of Patollo’s head landing on a piece of sharp and boomerang-shaped chrome trim peeling from one of the broken-down ball returns, which pierced his head behind his right ear.
I don’t know which was most abysmal—the silence that echoed from my throbbing head into the hollow of that bingo hall basement, or the slow spilling of words from my father’s mouth saying, “Oh my God, Jon, what have you done?”
What had I done? The blood pooling around Andrus Patollo’s skewered head, the spasming of his hulking, lumpish body suspended between the ball return and the dirty floor, the cry coming from my new half-sister, Sheb’s bated breath, all of it told me what was already unmistakable: I had killed a man.
I had killed a man because I feared for my own father’s life.
And now my father feared for mine.
“Son,” he said, the tone of his utterance enough to bowl me over with dread and terror. He stepped right around the splash of Patollo’s blood, and swept me back a few paces before he took me in his arms like I was a toddler again. “What have I done?” he whispered over and over again. “What have I done?”
When I turn to face Ingrid, all I can see is the reflection of my bottomless shame drowning in the tears in her eyes. For a long time she only sits here sobbing, and I start to wonder if I’d told some fictional version of my dreaded story. Maybe one that absolves me. Or maybe I haven’t even spoken at all. But finally she takes a shuddering breath and wipes her eyes on the sleeves of her coat and says, “How can this have happened?”
It’s still two hours before sunset, but already the woods are gathering darkness. How long have we sat parked here in the middle of Noah’s woods? How long before my wife tells me I’m forgiven?
“Who else knows about this, Jon?” she says after another long pause.
“Knows that I killed Patollo?”
She winces when I say it, appears shocked. But then nods.
“Only Noah,” I say. “I’m sorry he knew and not you. I thought—I always thought—if I could somehow silence the fact of it into oblivion, I’d be all right. The opposite has proven true, though. And now . . .” All I can do is stir the space between us with my hands, acknowledging the mess I’ve made.
She grabs my hands, settles them, holds them. “You understand that this all happened forty-five years ago? A whole lifetime has passed since then. Pops and Sheb, they’re not even alive anymore.”
It’s startling to hear, and if ever time felt dubious, it’s now.
“You don’t have to look back there ever again,” she continues. “And all this talk about being faithless and keeping secrets? Well, weren’t you only afraid?”
As simply as that I feel absolved. I have been afraid. For a single moment, I revel in my unburdening, but the way she holds my hand reminds me of the new fears unleashed only yesterday, in Doctor Zheng’s office.
There will never be a way to confess those into forgiveness. Not for me, and not for Ingrid.