MY BODY FELT LIKE THE SNOW above me looked, as alive to the happiness of my brother’s company as the flakes were to the breeze in the streetlights. I felt like the dust of a shattered star. Fine and faint and aglow and drifting. The flesh on my calf burned the way it did whenever I exert myself. And only three blocks into our ski and despite the bitter cold, I was sweating like I’d just taken a sauna.
Anton’s great idea, at three o’clock in the morning, with Missy and Britt sleeping in his apartment, was to pillage his storage room for cross country skis and boots and poles and then trek across the northside. He wanted to go to Wirth, back to our old stomping grounds, and because I was potted and flying on the coffee I’d drunk—and because after the night we’d had I’d have done anything he asked—we clipped into those bindings and started poling across the Broadway interstate bridge and toward the neighborhood of my childhood. The fast food places and bars and liquor stores and drugstores were deserted but lit up like the Vegas strip. The snow was everywhere blown into gentle waves, some of them four or five feet tall and crashing into bus stop shelters and parked cars. As for cars driving east or west, there were none. We had the city all to ourselves.
We started singing old songs as we pushed through the intersection at Lyndale Avenue, my breath heaving between lyrics. Anton was making a point, one I understood and could even appreciate, and so a block later I made a heroic effort to get a couple ski lengths in front of him and then dropped into a telemark and came to a powdery stop in front of him.
“You win,” I said.
“My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim . . .” he sang, a childlike grin on his face.
“If you push that pace, I won’t make it to Penn, let alone the parkway, never mind the jump.”
“I had to stop for the night!” he finished. “I can’t help it. It’s been this way since I was fucking six years old. Always trying to keep up with you.”
“I don’t have to stop for the night. Just slow down. You passed me a long time ago, brother. A long, long time ago.”
“All right, we’ll slow down. You ready?”
“I’m ready.”
But we went only another block before we stopped again. This time on the corner of Bryant Avenue. My senses were twisting and on those uncanny streets, with unfamiliar buildings and stores all around me, I couldn’t be sure of the source of my uneasiness.
“Your premonition’s right,” Anton said.
I looked at him, confused. “The bingo hall?”
“Used to be right here.”
I skied from the middle of the street over to the sidewalk and stopped under a Burger King sign. I could as much as see Patollo’s ghost rising from the parking lot. The sight of him matched one from a hundred nightmares in the years since I’d killed him. I slid toward him, but he vanished in a whorl of blowing snow.
“Jesus Christ, Jon. There’s no historical marker for your murderous old man here. It’s a goddamn Burger King. That’s all.” His voice carried like static between us.
“Is that really how you’re going to remember him?”
“Well, he killed him.” His voice was sharper, and I could see the exhaustion on his face even from where I stood.
I started to close the ground between us. “His funeral was just tonight, Anton. Our father’s funeral was tonight. You gave him a eulogy. A goddamn lovely one, I might add . . .” My voice trailed on the snow. I as much as watched it blow off into the night. After a minute I said, “I owe you an explanation. The real story doesn’t resemble the one you think you know.”
He knocked his ski poles together. “This thing where you get all philosophical? It’s exhausting. It’s a known fact Pops killed Patollo. That makes him a murderer. It doesn’t have to be dressed up in layers of mystery and make believe.” He shook his head and buried the tips of his poles again. “Just . . . why?”
“It’s not that simple. I promise you.”
“He confessed, Jon. Without so much as a word in his own defense. He let that prosecutor shove a thousand goddamn words down his throat. He could easily have gotten away with a self-defense argument, but he wouldn’t even pursue that. It’s like he wanted to go away.” He was almost shouting and in the wild and otherwise empty night his voice sounded just like it did when he used to have tantrums as a little kid, only four notes deeper.
He knocked his ski poles together again. Harder this time, to emphasize his anger. “You blame Ma for everything, but don’t you see it’s Jake who shit the bed? He’s the one who fucking tossed us all to the wolves.” He closed his eyes and shook his head and looked up into the streetlights and yelled, “Fuck!” Then he pointed a ski pole at me and poked me in the chest with it. “And you, you fucking deserter. You fucking kidnapper.”
I nodded. Go on, I thought. Get it all out.
“You walked out on us and were gone for forty years. For my whole fucking life. Now you think you can come back here and visit your demons? It’s bullshit, Jon. You fucking traded out.”
I collapsed, snow pouring down the back of my pants and up into the cuffs of my coat, one borrowed from Anton. I tried to shake it out, but shifting around only allowed more to go down my pants.
I might have sat there all night if a city bus hadn’t come plowing down Broadway. I hopped up and brushed the snow off and this time did get some of it out of the arms of the coat. The bus drove past, the faces of a pair of third-shifters sitting behind windows running fast with melted snow. It left a huge plume of snow in its wake, and parallel tracks that we’d eventually follow to Golden Valley Road.
But before we resumed our all-night ski, I confessed to my brother what I should have decades earlier. “I’m going to tell you something. You can kill me if you want to.”
“Fuck you and your melodrama.” He turned to start skiing back to his place.
“We’re not going back there. Not until I tell you this. Will you listen?”
He unzipped his coat and pulled out his flask. He unscrewed the cap and took a long, tight-throated drink. He screwed the cap back on without offering me any. “Say it, Jon. Then we can go back to my place and wait for morning. You can get out of here. You can be free again.”
I thought of all the ways I could deny wanting to be free of him. Freedom had never been my reason for running away, after all. It was true then as it is now that I loved my brother fiercely, and everything I did for us I did in the name of that love. But he didn’t want to hear about all that any more than he wanted to sober up, so I forged ahead on another course instead. On the one that mattered. In a voice as flat as the drone of the now disappearing bus I said, “Pops didn’t kill Andrus Patollo.”
“Fuck you,” he said. “I suppose you think Sheb did.”
“Sheb didn’t do it.” I kept my eyes steady on him.
He finally looked across the sidewalk, knowledge of what I was saying creeping up on him. “No,” he said. “I don’t believe it.”
“There was nothing else to do. Patollo had a gun drawn on them. He was furious. He was going to shoot someone.”
Anton only stood there shaking his head.
“Sheb was taunting him. Boasting about having more money and more class. And there was Pops, with all the history between them. Patollo felt like he owed him a lesson, I guess. He was pointing the gun at Pops.”
Now Anton wasn’t even shaking his head, only staring at the falling snow as if its persistence might yield still other unspoken truths.
“I’m telling you, if I hadn’t clubbed him, he would’ve killed Pops.”
I knew I was pleading. To Anton. To the past and the fates and to Pops, who I suddenly imagined was with us in the bright blowing snow. But what else could I do? How could I convince my brother that it wasn’t Pops’s fault that we all ended up where we did? How could I convince him to forgive our father? How could I ask for forgiveness myself, after so many years of lies? This last question spurred me on to the rest of our confession.
“That’s not everything,” I said.
He mumbled, and when I asked him what he said he looked up and spoke clearly. “Next you’ll tell me you poisoned Ma.”
It wasn’t a question. More an accusation—which, in its way, wasn’t altogether untrue. If that bowling pin to the back of Patollo’s skull was the first blow in a chain reaction, Bett’s swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills was about the third or fourth echo of Patollo’s fat head piking that piece of sharp chrome. With this logic, he was right. I had poisoned her. Or at least set into motion the reason she would eventually do so herself.
He finally looked at me. “Well? What else did you fuck up?”
I thought of Helene, our half-sister, sitting there at the head of the bowling lane, as perplexed and terrified, no doubt, as I was myself. I thought of how much she looked like me, and how, in the half-hour we had to ourselves, she revealed herself to sound like me and even smile like me. And though it wasn’t my fault that Pops had fathered this other child—it wasn’t even his fault, for all he knew about it—I should have told Anton of our sister a long time ago.
I grimaced as I told him on that snowy street.
“A sister? You’re full of shit.”
“It’s why Patollo was here. He was getting rid of her, after Lena Lyng died. She killed herself, too. Or at least that’s what Patollo said.”
I waited for Anton to say something, but he didn’t. I heard a plow clearing Lyndale and looked back in time to see the red and blue safety lights flashing like a cop car. I don’t remember how long we stood there in silence, but Anton broke it.
“What was her name?” he asked.
“Helene.”
“Helene,” he repeated. “How old was she? Or is she? Are you still in touch with her?”
“I’m not. I never heard from her again. But I bet Sheb has.”
“You’re probably right. Fucking Sheb.” Now he looked at me kindly. “Tell me about her? You didn’t say how old she was.”
“She was twenty back then. Five years older than I was.”
“What did you say her name was? Helen?”
“Helene.” Then I said, “She looked just like me. Like the female version. Right down to the same button nose. And her voice . . .” I got lost for a moment on the trail back to hearing her speak for the first time. “She talked just like Bett.”
“What do you mean she talked like Bett?”
“Just the sound of her voice. And the way she drew her vowels out. It was like they’d grown up in the same house or something.”
“And you never saw her again? Why not?”
“I mean, before the cops showed up here”—I pointed at the ground, at the Burger King parking lot—“she and I were left alone while Pops and Sheb came up with a plan. I remember they made us sit with our backs to Patollo, who was just pinned there.” I closed my eyes to bring it all back. “That’s when we talked, she and I. When she asked me about Pops and you and Bett. When she told me about her mom—about Lena—and when she said she was scared. She didn’t know what she was going to do now that Patollo was, well, now that Patollo was gone. She said she just wanted to go back to Chicago. That she hated it here.”
“What’d you say?”
“I had no idea what to say.”
Anton had a look I’d seen before. Like on the night we left Minneapolis for Duluth and the Torrs’ lake place. Or like the night I walked out of Vescio’s. Or when he left the hospital room in Vermont with Pops. Something like panic was on his face. Something like misery. Like the entire world was on the verge of swallowing him whole, and maybe I could give him a hand. But then he remembered the countless times I’d failed him, and he steadied his gaze on the snow.
“So she went back to Chicago? Sheb set her up?”
“That’d be my guess.”
“Did Ma know about her?”
“She did. But until that day in the basement of the bingo hall, Pops didn’t. At least that’s what he said.”
“And here I thought Pops was always the truth teller.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he never lied. That was his thing, right? And yet, all these years and he never told me about this half-sister, this other child of his.”
“In fairness, neither did Bett.”
“I mean, we fucking ate dinner together every Sunday night. Like, for forty years.”
“Seems like it might’ve slipped, I agree.”
He moved closer to me and spoke beneath the wind. “And you killed him? Holy shit.”
“I’m sorry I never told you. You could’ve forgiven Pops a long time ago.”
“How did you live with it?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “We all had to find ways to carry on. With our secrets and our lies and all the shit we never told each other.”
“I guess you felt like you owed me a shock? After I told you about Ma earlier?”
“I definitely owed you this, but not like you’re saying. I should’ve told you years ago. Decades.” I paused, and wondered if what I was about to say was honest. I believed it was. “I thought by not telling you, I’d spare you hating me on top of them. I thought by not telling you I had a chance to win you back.”
“Win me back?”
“Your opinion has always mattered to me. I’ve been miserable not knowing you. I regret it so much.”
He looked stunned, and for a moment just stood there. But then he took a chance and said, “What about Mom and Dad?”
“Do I regret not knowing them?”
He nodded.
“I knew Pops.”
“And Ma?”
I looked away and shook my head.
“Jesus, there’s just no end to this thorny shit, is there?” Again, this wasn’t a question to be answered. “I suppose you told him to keep that secret?”
I merely shook my head again.
“Jesus Fuck have I been angry with you.”
“This isn’t news.”
He kicked the snow from the tips of his skis and took a long look into the darkness. He didn’t look at me when he said “I guess this explains why Ma always blamed you.”
It wasn’t a shock to hear it. And after all we’d confessed that night, the truth is I didn’t have the will—then or ever, come to think of it—to muster much more than a shrug. “I didn’t know that.”
He shrugged, too, and looked at his watch and said, “It’s almost four. You want to keep going?”
“I do.”
“Tell me more about our sister?” He knocked his poles together one more time.
“I will if you take it easy on me,” I said, gesturing up Broadway, unrolling before us in one long snow-covered bridge to our past. “And if you’ll indulge me in some memories of jumping at Wirth. We haven’t talked about it in how long?”
“About jumping? Since 1980. That’s thirty-five long years, big brother.”
“That sounds like a long damn time.”
“It’s more than half our life ago.”
“We won’t get it back in one night, but we’ve made a good start,” I said.
He looked at me with that cocksure glimmer back in his eye. “That’s the truth. But before we go down our favorite rabbit hole, tell me more about Helene and that day?”
And so we pushed off again, each of us in a track left by the bus, and I told him more about the half-hour I spent with our onetime sister.
The shock of that dead man hung like a hawser from one of us to the next—me to Pops to Sheb to Helene and back to me again. Blood pooled beneath his head and filled the air with a metallic tang. I started to cry and Helene took a step closer to a man she clearly loathed, even cocked at the waist to inspect his lifeless body.
“Don’t touch him,” Sheb said, his voice calm. Almost sweet. “Don’t go closer.”
“Jon,” Pops said, grabbing my arm, “and you . . . child. Come with me.” Later he admitted that in the shock of the moment he couldn’t remember his own daughter’s name.
She looked up at him and said, “What?” As though that one word could encapsulate the infinite questions needing answers.
“I’m taking you upstairs,” Pops said.
“No,” Sheb said. “Not yet. No sense putting them up where anyone passing by could see them.”
It occurs to me Sheb was made for a moment like that. His whole conniving life, all his misdeeds—they lent him a grotesque confidence.
“Johannes, Helene,” he said, signaling us with a wagging finger. “Come sit.” He pulled two folding chairs into the shadows. “Over here while we figure out what to do.”
He went back to his desk and summoned Pops, whose neck he took in his big hand and whose forehead he rested on his own. I couldn’t hear what they whispered, even as much as I strained to do so. I did see their heads shaking yes and no, I saw their shoulders shrug. I saw Pops nearly eat his own balled fist.
While I watched them—and absorbed the fact that I’d killed a man, a famous family nemesis, no less—Helene watched me. I could feel her eyes on me as surely as I could the weight of my deed. When it became too much, I returned her gaze.
She didn’t look away or even blink. Instead she was like a vain child studying her reflection in a mirror. Eventually she spoke. “Is he a nice man?”
Speaking softened her face, and she seemed suddenly fearful. “Pops?” I said. “Or Sheb?”
“Jakob Bargaard.”
“He’s real nice.”
She looked over her shoulder at him, then back at me. “He seems like it. He’s calm.”
“I don’t think he’s calm now.”
“Well, you just killed Andy, so probably he’s a little worried about that.”
Killed. She might as well have hit me over the head with a bowling pin for the weight of that word on my conscience. I started to cry, burying my face in my hands and picturing the prison I’d soon occupy.
“I’m sure it’s scary,” she said, sweet-voiced and gentle, “but I have a feeling you’ll be all right.”
“All right? I’m gonna go to jail.”
She shook her head and glanced across the bowling lanes. “I’m happy he’s dead. You have no idea how terrible he was.” Now she touched my knee in a motherly way. “You did the world a favor. Or at least you did me one.”
I looked up at her through my wailing eyes.
“He used to beat her, you know? Mom. She had a black eye half her life.”
“Lena?” I said.
She looked at me like I was a child. “Yes, that’s my mom’s name. That was her name.”
“Why’d he beat her?” Of course I knew that some men hit their wives, but I’d never seen it. Pops never even raised his voice at Bett, much less a hand.
“He gets mad about everything. His club is going bankrupt. He owes a lot of people a lot of money. Mom wasn’t drawing them in anymore.”
“She was still singing?”
“What else would she do? He moved her to Wednesday nights. Jazz nights, he called them.”
“She sang jazz?”
“She sang everything.” She clenched her eyes shut. “Everything. Sometimes she still sang me to sleep.” Her eyes fluttered open, almost as if she were just waking.
Bett had never once sang me to sleep. Not that I remembered. “Did she die by accident?”
“I think she probably didn’t. But who knows?”
“Aren’t you sad? About her dying?”
“What a stupid question.”
“I’m sorry.” I felt the shame of my ignorance. But for an instant it spared me the seriousness of the situation.
“It doesn’t matter.”
We looked at Pops and Sheb, still forehead to forehead. I can imagine now how their conversation might have gone, but on that day I was stupefied, and I asked Helene what she thought.
“Probably they’re deciding if they should call the police or not.”
“Should they? Maybe they shouldn’t.”
She shrugged. “Andy wouldn’t. He’d have some creeps come and take the dead guy away. Who knows where he’d end up.”
The thought that maybe we’d all just walk out of the bingo hall filled me with a sudden, galloping hope. I’d even get a sister out of it. One who seemed worldly wise and interesting. It was a hope short in lasting. My next thought was about how Pops always demanded responsibility, how he viewed it as essential for dignity. For the same reason he never missed a day of work, he wouldn’t let Sheb bury Patollo without alerting the authorities. Which meant, I thought, my fate was sealed.
I started to cry again.
“Why do you keep crying?”
“Because I’m going to jail.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen,” I said, feeling every bit a child younger than that.
“They don’t send kids to jail.”
“What do you mean? How do you know that?”
Now she seemed exhausted. Very much like a frustrated big sister. “I bet you go to church, don’t you? Every Sunday. Put on a button-up shirt, say your prayers, praise God, the whole racket.”
“No.”
“No what, you don’t wear a button-up shirt?” She smiled and shrugged and looked again at the men. “Do you have a cigarette?”
“No,” I said again. Was she turning on me? What had I done? Why did I wish to impress her? How was I thinking about anything but the dead body impaled on the bowling ball return?
“I bet you do,” she said in such a way that I understood that part of the conversation was over. “Andy had to sell his house. I think he came to try to get money from that ugly man.” She flicked her head at Sheb, who was now leaning against the edge of his desk. He was indeed ugly. Uglier than ever.
“Sheb wouldn’t have given him anything. He keeps it all for himself.”
“I respect that,” she said. “God, I wish I had another cigarette. It stinks down here. What is this place, even?”
“It’s the bingo hall,” I answered quickly, hoping to gain back her confidence.
“It’s disgusting.”
I turned away but kept my eyes on her, trying to make it seem I could be as aloof. We sat there while Pops and Sheb hammered out their ruse. I retied my sneakers and glanced at her boots. I knew I’d regret not being able to devise then the questions I’d surely have later, so I let the first thought I had simply blurt out. “Why did he bring you here? What do you want?”
She studied me for a moment, even leaned forward and tilted her head like she was searching for a new angle from which to observe me. “You look different than I thought you would. So does he.” She lifted her head toward Pops. “Mom always said I looked like him, but I don’t. But you do, and I look like you. It’s weird.”
“You knew about us?”
“Of course I did. And I knew you didn’t know about me. Your mom is strange. Is she crazy?”
I wasn’t offended, as I probably should have been. But instead I understood her observation about Bett to be the simple articulation of a feeling I’d always had myself. As it settled on me that Bett knew about Helene but we didn’t know about her, the depth of her deception revealed itself. To this day I can’t fathom its machinations. I’ve rarely even tried. And on that day in the bingo hall basement, I gave up after the mere realization it was true, and I said what any awestruck little brother might say to his beautiful sister: “You think I look like you?”
“Duh,” she said. Then a thought clearly flashed in her mind. “Wait, are you like your mom? Kind of, you know, lamebrained?”
“She’s not lamebrained.”
She studied my face again. “I think you are. I see it.” She flipped her finger at my noggin, as though its contents spoke for themselves.
“How did you know about us? What did Lena say about me?”
“God you’re spooky. Maybe you’re like an idiot savant or something?” She looked at me again, her eyes as inquisitive as the policemen’s surely would be soon. “Or maybe you’re just freaked out right now. That makes sense, too.” Then she looked away, satisfied, before leaning down and picking one of the bowling pins from the rubbish. She gripped it like a cudgel. “I have to say, you clobbered him.” She set it down. “Does your mom sing a lot?”
“No. Do you?”
“Never.”
“Why not?” I wanted to know her, that much was clear to me even then.
“Because songs are just pretty lies. I hate lies.”
“But songs aren’t singing, right? You must be a good singer?”
“I’ll never know,” she said without an ounce of flair. Like she’d made a choice and would abide it forever.
They were the last words she’d say to me. They might as well have been tattooed on my consciousness for the impression they made. I was spellbound by her singular conviction. By her ambivalence. By her own sense of herself. I possessed none of those things. Not then, and probably not ever.
When Pops called to us, he did so by name. “Helene,” he said, his voice catching, “Jon, come over here you two.”
She popped right up, crossed that dimly lit distance as if it were a walk she’d taken a thousand times before. I was slower to follow, believing, as I did, I was walking the plank to my own imminent fall.
When we stood opposite them, Pops looked at me with unvarnished conviction. “Listen to me, Jon. I’m going to say this quickly. It’s not an invitation to a discussion. This is how it’s going to happen. Plain and simple. We’re going to call the police. We’re going to tell them I clubbed Andy. He took his gun out and was threatening Sheb and I clubbed him in self-defense. You and Helene weren’t even down here. You were upstairs getting a Coke from the vending machine. You have no idea what happened. Neither of you do—”
“No,” I interrupted.
I don’t know why I protested, but it didn’t deter him in any way. He turned to Helene and paused, his attention fully on this new daughter. For a long moment they stared at each other before Pops reached out and took her hand. “Sweetheart,” he said, his voice gentle in a way it had often been with me. “Listen, we have so much to catch up on. So much to learn about each other. And we will. You can stay here as long as you like. We’ll make room for you. Of course we will. But first I need some assurance that you’ll do what I say.” Then he addressed both of us. “The police will be here very soon”—Sheb was on the phone as Pops spoke—“and when they arrive, all you need to tell them is that you were upstairs getting Cokes. Everything else, tell the truth. But neither of you saw this, and Jon certainly didn’t do it.”
Already, in an instant, I had started to wonder whether I had done it. Clubbed Patollo, that is. Or if I’d only wanted to. Only imagined it. I might have convinced myself if I’d had more time, but Pops was ushering us upstairs and hurrying quarters out of his pocket for the vending machine.
“Over here,” he said. “You both sit here. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t move.”
And so we were left alone again, while he waited at the entrance, like a big city hotel doorman, for the police to arrive. Helene cracked open her bottle of Coke and sat back and crossed her legs. Five minutes later she removed a bottle of fingernail polish from her purse and commenced painting her nails. A red as bright as Patollo’s blood.
“Are you sure she wasn’t just fucking with you?” This was Anton, as we skied by a fried chicken place and veered left onto Golden Valley Road.
“I mean, she was definitely fucking with me.”
“Do you really think she knew about us? About Pops?”
“Why not?”
“It sounds like she wasn’t curious at all. About him or us or anything. Was she really so disinterested?”
“She thought I was a simpleton. She was curious, but she also knew she wasn’t going to have anything to do with us. Pops, maybe. But not us.”
“Why did she even come here?”
“Patollo made her. He wanted to wash his hands of her. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Why would he care?”
“I gather he and Lena were a thing. Which meant Helene was a thing. One he didn’t want to deal with anymore.”
Anton nodded like this made all the sense in the world. “Then the police showed up?” he asked. Since we’d turned off Broadway and on Golden Valley Road, where no traffic had passed in what must have been hours, our skiing slowed. Snow came up to our shins, and we were as much as snowshoeing, shoulder to shoulder.
“About ten of them. A whole squadron.”
“And you just sat there with Helene, having a Coke?”
“Yep. Until they came to question us.”
To his great credit, Anton looked back cautiously. He didn’t press or judge me. Or suggest I’d somehow fucked up. What I’d told him in the previous twenty minutes broadened his life in ways it would take years to traverse. I had my own discoveries to make. But in that moment, and the next couple hours, I was intent to be happy with my brother. And I think he felt the same way.
“You must’ve been scared.”
“Never been more so.”
“And Pops just stepped in front of that bus.”
“He felt responsible. I mean, who knows men like Andrus Patollo?”
“I’m surrounded by them,” he said, obviously too tired to revisit this particular patch of shitty ground.
“I’m a dumb ass.”
“I know what you mean. I made choices a long time ago. Bad ones. Here I am.”
The resignation in his voice stopped me cold. Anton stopped, too.
We both looked up at the dark, free of snow for the first time all night. The sky was as black as his eyes, which I met when I looked down.
“If you knew back then what I told you just now, would things be different?”
He shrugged. He knocked his ski poles together. “You didn’t ruin my life, Jon. My life is all right. I’ve got Angel. I drink too much. I should quit snorting coke. I should’ve taken better care of Esme. But I’m happy. I work hard. My daughter’s brilliant and beautiful and already ten times the person I ever was. That’s something. I’ll figure out the rest of it. I always have.”
I started to speak, but he knocked one of his ski poles against one of mine and shook his head and smiled and he spoke instead. “Look at us. Look at all this.” He lifted his arms as though to summon more snow. Or the King of Kings. “The night’s almost over, brother, and we’ve got a couple miles to go. Let’s beat the sun?”
I smiled back at him. “You think the sun’s coming out of those clouds?”
“I’d bet a hundred dollars.”
“You still owe me a hundred from our bet in Lake Placid.”
“What bet?”
“That you wouldn’t finish in the top twenty,” I reminded him.
Anton scrolled his memory, smiling when he found it. “Double or nothing, then?”
“All right.”
He stretched his arms and pretended to check the time and said, “This has turned into more of a footslog than a ski, but we’re up for it.”
“We are.”
“I know what’ll fuel us on.”
“Tell me,” I said. “More songs?”
“I’ve heard about enough of your caterwauling.”
“You’re on a word-roll, Bargaard.”
“Working to impress the judges.”
“I give you a nineteen-point-five.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” he said. “It’s gonna take us a good half-hour to get there. That’s plenty of time for each of us to go top five. You start?” He kicked right up next to me.
“Lake Placid, 1980, ninety-meter, first comp ride.”
“You’ve been rehearsing this.”
“Since you left me in that hospital room in Vermont thirty-five years ago, brother.”
As the night grew its darkness like a blooming flower, we skied across the rest of that north Minneapolis road, past North Commons Park where we played Little League, past the YMCA where we took swimming lessons, past the houses of boyhood friends. We skied into the darkness of the residential stretch of that road, where not a single light shone from any window and the corner streetlights wavered as though at the mercy of the wind, which came up with the snow’s passing.
This game, like the places we’d just passed, was another holdover from our childhood. Who could say which of us dreamed it up first, but we could pass hours—in cars, when we should have been sleeping, out in the summer garden picking raspberries—chronicling our five favorite or best things. Songs or pretty girls or things Pops cooked on the grill or movies or television shows. Of course, the best rounds of this game always had to do with ski jumping. But those games before 1980, the last year we played it, had been with the child Anton. And though I could have continued in our serious vein of conversation for another week, he was right that what the rest of that night called for, after all the revelations and recriminations, was a trip down happier memory lanes.
I went first because my career, such as it was, paled beside his. I took my last jump in Lake Placid at the age of nineteen. He took his in Harrachov, Czechoslovakia, at eighteen. I could curate my list from twenty or so jumps, almost all of them in Minnesota or Wisconsin or Michigan. Anton must have been off a hundred jumps in ten different countries.
The truth is, I felt giddy at the prospect of knowing this about him. Which is why I rifled through my list. I described the jump in Lake Placid, one in Iron Mountain, on the big hill at Pine Mountain. I picked a ride at Chester Bowl, in Duluth, when I beat my pal Noah Torr to win the junior class competition earlier in the year Pops went away to jail. I remembered the first jump I took off the hill we called Big Bush, the other Minneapolis Ski Club hill out in Bloomington, which even when I was jumping it in the late seventies was rickety and frankly hazardous to stand on, never mind ski down. But, oh, how I loved it. Icy and fast and with nasty headwinds. It was a jump to make us tough. The sort of hill Pops said put hair on your chest. One cold Tuesday night I went what Pops guessed was sixty-two or sixty-three meters, which would have been a hill record if it had been in competition, but since only he and I and a few other Minneapolis jumpers were there, the only record book it ever appeared in was the one I kept in my mind, for a night just like this. I could remember now as clearly as the moment after it happened the feel of lift, the pause as I went over the knoll. The certainty I would go too far. The thrill of that.
Last I described not a single jump but that season the two of us shared at the Torrs’ place on Lake Forsone. And though I couldn’t say this for violating the rules of the game, what I meant was that my pleasure came in watching my brother. It’s just true. But I described the jumps we took as though I’d landed his. Maybe he could tell, but he only smiled and huffed as we skied on, our eyes acclimating to the dark as though we were owls winging through the drifts.
“That’s already six,” he said when I finished. But then he added, “I know there’s still one more. Save it? We’ll do number ones together?”
“Yeah,” I said.
And we pushed on, past Thomas Avenue, further into the night of our lives. Further back.
Anton started as though his answer had been given a hundred times before. The easiness in his voice? I’d not heard it all night. I’d not heard it since he was ten years old.
“I had good jumps at Pine Mountain and Chester Bowl, too,” he began. “And at Bush, of course. But I’m gonna go back to Lake Placid with you for number five. Not to the long jumps on the big hill, but to the jump that would have cost you your Bronco if the guys doing the marking down there had had the sense to judge right.”
I affected the voice of a television sportscaster. “Coming in just shy of eighty meters, from the Minneapolis Ski Club, the youngest competitor here this week, Anton Bargaard.” I put the tip of my ski pole up toward his mouth, as though it were a microphone. “Tell me, young man, what’s it like to miss the mark by eighteen inches?”
I could see his smile in the dark. He stopped skiing, took hold of my ski tip and brought it closer to his mouth. “I’m glad you mentioned being from Minneapolis, Howard Cosell, because anyone could see that jump went flying by the eighty-meter mark. I was short-sticked, plain and simple. And I think I know why. See, I’ve got a brother out here this week, and he’s quaking in his high-backed boots about the shavetail coming up behind him. He paid off the distance markers. There’ll be a full investigation, you can rest assured of that.”
He dropped my ski pole and planted his own and off we went again. I believe it’s true there was an energy in his stride, a second wind come up on the heels of his memory. I skied into his draft.
“Next,” he said, over his shoulder and above the lifting breeze, “I’d have to go to my first competition abroad.”
“Sapporo, Japan,” I offered.
“That’s creepy,” he said, again over his shoulder. Even with all his banter he was putting a small distance between us, a ski’s length already. “You’re what, like my fan club?”
“I paid attention!”
He skied harder, somehow gliding in the powder. “Okurayama, Sapporo,” he said. “That jump was so beautiful. You can’t believe it. And huge. Practically a ski flying hill. I was seventeen. There with all the A-team guys. First jump training, I went 125 meters. It was just a perfect jump.”
“Easy when you weigh a hundred pounds.”
“Double that now,” he said. “But I can still get around.” He dropped one knee and threw his poles out wide in a powdery telemark. “I landed like that.”
I believed he did. Having come from the Selmer Dahlson school at Wirth Park, Anton’s landings were legend from the time he was a little boy. His skis practically one, his down-knee only an inch above the right ski, his arms ramrod straight, like he was pushing the world wider.
“Those couple of years I more or less spent living in foreign countries were a fucking blast, I’ll tell you that. So many parties, so many women, so much fine foreign grass, and so little school. No wonder I fucked it all up.”
I pushed hard, to catch up with him on Golden Valley Road. I wanted to spend the rest of the night happy. My whole adult life with Anton, from that day in the bingo hall, had been an exercise in regret and sadness and measured responses, and for once I wanted the old sauce again. Skiing beside him, I said, “Come on now, we’re talking top five. No regrets. None of that sad sack shit.”
He bit. His face relaxed and he leveled his poling and shortened his cross country stride and we went on side by side.
To put a finer point on my admiration of his success, I said, “The only reason I kept going as a writer is because I quit as a ski jumper. You inspired me that way.”
He glanced at me. “You quit ski jumping because you had only one leg, right? I mean, half the time—even when you had two—you jumped like you were a wing short, but that’s another story.”
“Let me ask you something, smart guy: did you ever once beat me? Mano a mano?”
“I was five years younger than you!” He feigned outrage, then, as a faux consolation for me, added, “I still am.”
“Youth is wasted on the young, I guess.” We took a few more strides. “I’m serious,” I continued. “I mean it. You were so goddamned good. If I hadn’t quit ski jumping and watched you kick ass, I never would’ve stuck with trying to write books. The rejection was unrelenting. Any normal person would have walked away. But I thought about how you soldiered on and how I didn’t. And so I kept writing.”
I could tell he was embarrassed. Rather than give one of his snarky replies, he only looked dead ahead into the darkness.
“Five: Placid. Four: Sapporo. Three?” I pushed.
“The Holmenkollen, same year. I sucked, but it was a holy experience.”
“I visited the Holmenkollen a few years ago. Ingrid and I did, when we traveled to Norway. It’s different now—looks like a spaceship—but I can picture the old Holmenkollen. The one with the troll’s hut on top?”
“That’s the one. The knoll was actually a building. Like the big hill in Lake Placid. There were a hundred-something jumpers. The first fifty of them Norwegians—every one kicked my rube ass.”
“You know, Pops would mail newspaper articles to me up in Duluth. Things he’d clip out of the sports section. He was so proud.”
“And every time I was home, we’d grab a bottle of beer and sit at the kitchen table after Ma went to bed, and he’d tell me all about you and college. Like you were some kind of Rhodes Scholar. The Dean’s lists and the academic awards. Grad school, later on.”
“I barely finished grad school,” I said.
“Well, I barely finished high school, so I guess we have that in common.”
“We’ve got plenty in common,” I said. “Harrachov must be on your list?”
“Number two,” he said.
“That’s one Pops sent the clipping for.”
“I kept it myself. I don’t have much of that stuff. Wish I had more.”
“You’ve got the big posters.”
“Is that sad?” he asked. “Leaving those things up there.” He was talking about the pictures in his dining room, the triptych of images.
“Here’s the thing: I think I have about five pictures of me ski jumping. The only good shot is from Lake Placid, but it’s all blurry. And despite that, and despite the fact it’s been more than thirty-five years since I crashed and burned, I still think about it almost every day. I’ve made a huge liar out of myself, remembering how good I thought I was. A picture like the ones you’ve got hanging would be a nice reminder. And a check, right? That was as good as you got, and there’s proof.”
“Why do you do that? Act like you were some sad sack of shit? If you hadn’t crashed, you’d have gone to the Olympics. Straight up. Every time I ever strapped them on, I aspired to be as good as you. That was true in Sapporo, Oslo, Harrachov, you fucking name it. Don’t act like you were a scrub.”
I was taken aback. Though it’s true I always added a few meters to my longest jumps in my memory, I also knew that some of them were damned good. My jumps. And what he said about the Olympics was a fact: I would have made it. For an American jumper, that’s the pinnacle. Or it always has been. That’s as good as we get. But it’s also true that I would have been the last man on a team, and what Anton said about the fifty Norwegians beating him in Oslo could have been said of jumpers from Finland and Austria and Germany and Poland and Japan. They were all so much better than we were as nations of jumpers.
And yet, Anton had competed with them. As a gangly, knuckleheaded teenager, he competed with them. He took eighth place at the Junior World Championships as a sixteen-year-old. He may have stunk at the Holmenkollen, but at a tournament in Trondheim, Norway, he took twelfth place. Again, as a teenager. He competed with the very best the world had to offer. In Harrachov, as the youngest competitor in a field of sixty jumpers, he took eighteenth place. If he’d been able to keep his life on track—if he hadn’t robbed the liquor store in Czechoslovakia and been kicked off the team—he not only would have made the Olympic team in 1984 but might have done something once he got there. He was that kind of talented.
“Remember Pine Mountain?” he said.
“High flying Pine Mountain,” I said. “I loved that jump.”
“I did, too. Remember the feeling you had the first time you went off it? How it seemed like you’d never come down?”
“Exactly,” I said. I even lifted one of the cross country ski tips and jutted my chin out like I was midflight. It’s still something I think about, the height over the knoll on that jump in Michigan. It was legend.
“Well,” Anton said, “double that, and you’re in the neighborhood of Harrachov. Thirty-five or forty feet up. Going 120 kilometers an hour. The mountain wind just howling crosswise. And me, like you said, damn near a hundred pounds. A flea. Half the guys bailed on their first jump because it was just too goddamn frightening. They just wanted down. But I recall the first jump on that hill and the conscious thought, while I was up there, that I never wanted to come down. It felt like an option.”
I looked over at him, skiing beside me, and admired him in a way I never had before. And not because of his prowess on one of the biggest ski jumps on the planet, or because of his accomplishments the world over, but because he’d somehow managed to live his entire life with an attitude similar to the one he described in that moment. Unabashed. All himself. I knew that first jump was the longest of his life. 160 meters. 500-some feet. I knew that his ski flying results that weekend constituted his best international finish. I knew that for one round in that competition he beat Matti Nykänen, widely regarded the best ski jumper in history. And I knew that he looked back on it all with something like disgust. The notion that he was so close to the summit and that he fell so spectacularly from it, well, it haunted him. Of course it did.
But I also couldn’t help thinking that the memory and feel of that flight was something he got to walk around with every day. I was envious of that. I didn’t have anything that compared.
“There were, like, a hundred thousand people there. Literally. And it was raining. And half the crowd had umbrellas open. And even now, when I feel myself in that flight, like, paused, I remember the umbrellas. I thought I might land on them, for fucksakes. And I remember how when I finally did land, that insane feeling of being back in the world, back on the world, coupled with the tremendous roar of that crowd, it left me feeling like a goddamned king.”
“That’s just—”
“The thing is, I remember just as well when the crowd quieted down. It was over. The jump was over. Their excitement was over. You were gone. Ma was a goddamned ghost. Pops, well, who knows. But it was all just so . . .”
I waited, absorbing the sadness of his words, suspecting the word he wanted was something like fleeting or ephemeral or hollow. I knew the sensation myself. But for Anton, whatever the realization he had at that moment in Harrachov followed him doggedly all the rest of his life. He never got past it. He was never able to accept it as merely part of the experience of life. It became, I think, the backdrop for everything. No doubt it’s the reason he spent that night swilling Czech beer and then busting into the liquor store for more after everyone else went back to the mountainside hotel.
We were coming up on the parkway. Just another half block, which we skied in silence while he considered his thoughts. I imagine that’s what he was doing, anyway. I was still up in the air with him in Harrachov.
“Happy,” he finally said. “Plain and simple.”
I’d almost forgotten he’d yet to finish. “Happy?” I said.
“Fuck yes. Glorious. Ecstatic. Perfect,” he added. “Like this,” he opened his arms wide to the night. “Which brings us to number one. You’ll think I’m full of shit.”
I suspected then we had the same answer, and that we were skiing to it even as we spoke in that bottomless night, even as we called up better, farther jumps.
“I know you’re not full of shit, because it’s the same for me.”
“I can still see us all. Holy man, I can see it all so perfectly.”
“Me too,” I said, glad for the darkness.
“Pops there on the knoll.”
“Acting nonchalant. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.”
“He even told me it was as easy as putting my pants on.”
“He said the same thing to me.”
“The top of the jump was so deep.”
“You had to just edge out over and hope your skis fell in the tracks.”
“And of course it was icy as shit.”
“Because it always was.”
“And you were there watching.”
Of course I was. We were always there together back then. And you boosted me up. Well, we boosted each other up. That’s for damn sure. I can still see the treetops. And the judges’ tower. And the lights barely making a dent in the darkness. The trees, they held their leaves way into winter. Were they oaks? What do I look like, a fucking arborist? I don’t know what kind of trees they were. But they made a noise. Like a shushing sound. It made it all easier, somehow.
We were on Theodore Wirth Parkway now. A plow had come through, so the snow was mostly cleared, but enough of it remained that we could ski freely down the hill and over the train tracks. Anton took telemark turns in his cross country skis. I caught up to him and we skate skied across the long flat between downhills.
It’s the place I go back to most, in my memory. You need better memories. Impossible! All I cared about was that you saw. That you watched. I raised my hand to ask was it clear. Yes you did. And I slid out over the edge of the start and I was in the inrun. Don’t let that quick transition set you on your ass! No, sir. And then . . . we’re in the air. For the first time, really in the air. Really up there. And on our way. That’s the thing. It was just one jump. One little jump at that. But it’s what launched us. And we were all there together. You remember the look on Pops’s face when you got back up the landing hill to take another? Hell yes, I do. Never prouder. Definitely not. And never happier. Him or us. Him or us, yep.
He had about him, even those many years later, something like an essence. Like he was made to be on skis. Like, if he could have conducted his entire life on them, he’d have ended up the mayor of Minneapolis, or a nuclear physicist, or a movie star. Everything about him was right, just then.
He came to a sliding stop before the last downhill to the creek and the clubhouse. “I’m wrong. I thought this was a great idea, but it’s a terrible idea. I’m wrong.”
“What do you mean,” I said. “I haven’t had this much fun in a long time.”
He looked off into the woods, which were buried in snow. Like we were in a tunnel. The streetlights were still on, but there was, between the snow and the sky, a lightening. We’d beat the sunrise after all. As sure as it would rise before the clouds.
“I mean I brought you here to make a point. To give you one more dose of shit before you hit the road again.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I’m just wrong, that’s all.”
Now I looked in the direction he was staring. I saw only the snowy trees and cloudless sky, the first skein of light over the distant city. So I looked back at Anton. His face clearer now. He was crying.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“I was being cruel. I wanted to hurt you.”
“Whatever, Anton. Don’t sweat it.”
Now I pushed off first. I skated for ten strides until I had some speed up and then got into something like an inrun position, the long ski poles sticking straight up behind me. The downhill road sweeps gently to the right, and I steered myself into the center of it without breaking my position. My legs burned pleasantly, folded in half and with the rest of my body atop them. I strained my neck forward, intent to reach the bottom of the hill before my brother, which I did.
As I approached the little stone bridge over Bassett Creek, I rose in slow motion. Something like how I’d move on the take off of a ski jump all those years ago. When I was upright, I pushed my chest and chin out and pretended flight. I pretended I was in Harrachov, above a hundred thousand people. I pretended I was as good as my brother. And then I landed in a telemark, and turned to look across the fairway, into the waning darkness of our night of nights.
His shoulders were slumped and his head quietly shaking as he skied up beside me.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he said as plainly as those words could be uttered.
I looked into the first hint of light and then back at him three or four times before I pushed onto the sidewalk and then over the hummock that bordered the fairway. I was halfway across it before I understood it wasn’t a trick of the dawn. The jump was gone.
Last, I turned back to my brother. My eyes must have asked the question my mouth couldn’t form. He said, “It was torn down more than twenty years ago. Condemned and then gone. A few of us tried to save it, but there was nothing to save it for. The whole program is moved out to Bush now. Has been for a long time.”
I didn’t respond. I couldn’t. Instead I just stared up at the vacancy I imagined in the dark.