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By Root 6771 0

Gene bought it, had a stove-in septic line and a serious mold problem and was already too close to the shoulder of a highway heavily trafficked by ore trucks and due to be widened soon. Behind it was a ravine full of trash and eager young birch trees, one of them growing up through a mangled grocery cart that would eventually strangle and stunt it. Gene should have known that a more cheerful motel was bound to appear on the local market, if he could only be a little patient. But poor business decisions have their own momentum. To invest wisely, he would have had to be a more ambitious kind of person, and since he wasn’t this other kind of person, he was impatient to get his error over with, to shoot his wad and begin the work of forgetting how much money he’d spent, literally forgetting it, literally remembering a sum more like the one he later told Dorothy that he’d paid. There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it’s the right unhappiness. Gene no longer had to fear a big disappointment in the future, because he’d already accomplished it; he’d cleared that hurdle, he’d permanently made himself a victim of the world. He took out a crushing second mortgage to pay for a new septic system, and every subsequent disaster, large or small—a pine tree falling through the office roof, a cash-paying guest in Room 24 cleaning walleyes on the bedspread, the Vacancy sign’s neon NO burning through most of a July Fourth weekend before Dorothy noticed it and turned it off—served to confirm his understanding of the world and his own shabby place in it.

For the first few summers at the Whispering Pines, Gene’s better-off siblings brought their families in from out of state and stayed for a week or two at special family rates whose negotiation left everyone unhappy. Walter’s cousins appropriated the tannin-stained swimming pool while his uncles helped Gene apply sealant to the parking lot or shore up the property’s eroding back slope with railroad ties. Down in the malarial ravine, near the remains of the collapsed shopping cart, Walter’s sophisticated Chicago cousin Leif told informative and harrowing stories of the big-city suburbs; most memorable and worry-provoking, for Walter, was the one about an Oak Park eighth-grader who’d managed to get naked with a girl and then, unsure about what was supposed to happen next, had peed all over her legs. Because Walter’s city cousins were much more like him than his brothers were, those early summers were the happiest of his childhood. Every day brought new adventures and mishaps: hornet stings, tetanus shots, misfiring bottle rockets, ghastly cases of poison ivy, near-drownings. Late at night, when the traffic abated, the pines near the office did honestly whisper.

Soon enough, though, the other Berglund spouses put their collective foot down, and the visits ended. To Gene, this was just more evidence that his siblings looked down on him, considered themselves too fancy for his motel, and generally belonged to that privileged class of Americans which it was becoming his great pleasure to revile and reject. He singled out Walter for derision simply because Walter liked his city cousins and missed seeing them. In the hope of making Walter less like them, Gene assigned his bookish son the dirtiest and most demeaning maintenance tasks. Walter scraped paint, scrubbed stains of blood and semen out of carpeting, and used coat-hanger wire to fish masses of slime and disintegrating hair from bathtub drains. If a guest had left a toilet especially diarrhea-spattered, and if Dorothy was not around to clean it preemptively, Gene took all three of his boys in to view the mess and then, after egging Walter’s brothers into disgusted hilarity, left Walter alone to clean it. Saying: “It’s good for him.” The brothers echoing: “Yeah, it’s good for him!” And if Dorothy got wind of this and chided him, Gene sat smiling and smoking with special relish, absorbing her anger without returning it—proud, as always, of raising neither voice nor hand against her. “Aaaa, Dorothy, leave it alone,” he said.