The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [7]
Everything began as it was supposed to. The kids waited at Aunt Donna’s, then Senior showed up and took them out to lunch. They joked and teased each other over burgers, delighted to be spending two full days with Dad. After lunch, he told them that he had a surprise planned for them, and they piled back into the car with glee.
Art watched his father closely as he steered onto the highway, trying to divine where they were headed. All he knew was that they were not headed into the city. After an hour of watching off-ramps whiz past, shiftings of doubt moved through his stomach. His mom had never mentioned anything about a long trip.
After three hours, he began repeatedly asking his father where they were going. He wanted to go home.
Senior refused to tell him, and became short with him. He told him that they were taking a vacation, and that he shouldn’t complain. Art junior started to cry, but it didn’t do any good.
They drove 2,200 miles, all the way to Lobster Valley, Oregon. By the time they finally broke away from the highway two days later, Art junior and Wensdae knew that they were not going home. They were now farther away from it than they’d ever been, in a fascinat ingly alien landscape of pine trees, mountains, dirt roads, and ranches. Senior drove deep into the countryside, winding the car through hairpin turns until they finally crackled up a gravel drive to an A-frame house somewhere in the middle of a forest. As Senior killed the engine, from the front door of the house emerged the first familiar thing Art had seen in two days.
As always, Anice was smiling and expectant.
MALINDA CALLED THE POLICE, but they couldn’t help her much. Kidnapping aside, Senior would not have been using his real name. Later on she’d come to believe that the entire time she’d been sequestering the kids from him, he’d been setting up camp with Anice in Oregon, waiting for the opportune moment to take them back.
By now Art junior had moved so many times that he was developing a feel for impending relocation, along with a sense of absolute powerlessness. Other than food and entertainment, his desires—to stay in one place, to be with his mother, simple regularity—were irrelevant. He controlled the only thing he could, his imagination, and latched himself to books and studies as a way of riding out the parental storms. No matter where he was, school was a sanctuary, and he consistently placed in the top of his class. “He was a little geek,” remembers Wensdae. “He had these big glasses and he was always reading, usually stuff way beyond whatever grade he was in, almost like he was trying to stay ahead.”
Art’s childhood dream was to be a lawyer; he’d read that it had been the formative occupation of the founding fathers and it had the ring of accomplishment. On another level, it embodied the guiding structure that he was missing at home. Fair play, a governing set of rules and principles—the way things should be. Deep inside, he knew that he was at a disadvantage compared with the kids he’d meet in other towns whose fathers were not convicts, whose mothers were stable. He wanted to cross over into that realm, and his desire had not yet turned to anger.
THEY STAYED IN LOBSTER VALLEY for a few months, then it was on to Lebanon, Oregon, and later Mount Shasta, California. In each town, Williams, now aided by Anice, would hang paper just before departing. Art junior was learning to read the signs. The grown-ups would start speaking in hushed voices and appear preoccupied. The house would suddenly fill up with new goods that never emerged from their boxes—televisions, stereos, expensive suits. There’d be a celebratory night—a nice dinner out, a trip to the movies, or a few gifts for the kids—followed by a predawn exit.