The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [8]
As the towns and months went by, the separation from Malinda and the itinerant lifestyle wore on Art and Wensdae, who increasingly complained to their father that they wanted to see their mother; but the more they bugged him about it, the meaner he became. Wensdae had it the hardest. Senior had of course lied to Malinda about nothing happening that day at Uncle Rich’s—he had raped his own daughter. According to Wensdae, that was the only time he ever sexually abused her, but her psychic wound would only grow with her body. Shortly after Senior kidnapped the children, she started wetting the bed, and on her sixth birthday Art rewarded her with a large present, beautifully wrapped. She eagerly opened it to find that it was a box of diapers. She ran off crying. Art junior ran after her and tried to console her, but he was so miserable himself and shocked by his father’s cruelty that he just ended up crying with her over the fact that they wanted to go back to Mom.
Anice’s colors darkened too. Once it was clear that Senior had no intention of returning to Malinda, both Art junior and Wensdae got the feeling that they had become unwanted baggage. “She was completely fake,” says Wensdae. “She’d ignore us when my dad wasn’t around; then if he was she’d suddenly try to act like a mom.”
The one place Art junior began to feel at home was Mount Shasta, a town of about three thousand tucked away among the mountains and redwoods near California’s border with Oregon. Surrounded by national parks and graced with stunning views of an eponymous fourteen-thousand-foot dormant volcano, the town had the magical aura of a wonderland. He made fast friends with a local girl who lived up the road. Her name was Lisa Arbacheske, and during the summer of ’82 he spent nearly every day with her.
“Her life seemed so perfect,” he remembers. “She had a house down by the river, a big, beautiful log cabin. They had horses. She was the most beautiful little girl, with long, brown, curly hair. My first kiss was with her, on a log near her house. It was the happiest I’d been in a long time. She made me feel loved.”
Art wanted to stay in Mount Shasta, but by then Wensdae’s psychological rebellion had intensified beyond Senior’s control. In addition to the bedwetting, she developed a habit of muddying her clothes after her father dropped her off at school, and sometimes removing them altogether. When school authorities complained, Senior and Anice panicked that he’d be discovered and arrested.
Toward summer’s end Senior left town, taking Wensdae and Jason with him. He came back two weeks later driving a brand-new Ford Bronco, but the kids weren’t with him. He told Art that he had dropped them off in Chicago with their mother, and to pack his bags because he would be joining them in a week.
“I didn’t believe him,” says Art. “I thought he had done something with them, and I freaked out. I remember fighting with him, and that was the first time he ever hit me, really hard in the face.”
A few days later, Art said a tearful good-bye to Lisa, then climbed into the back of the Bronco, which was crammed with the family’s belongings. He still didn’t believe that his dad was taking him back to Illinois, and spent much of the next three days sobbing in the back while the rest of the family repeatedly told him to shut up. But he wasn’t the only miserable child on the trip. “On the way back my parents ran out of money,” remembers Chrissy. “So we stopped in these little towns, and my parents made us get out of the car and knock on people’s doors to beg for money. I hated it; we all hated it. That’s how we got gas money.”
It was only once they crossed into Illinois that Art junior began to think his father might be telling the truth; when the Chicago skyline came into view, he was convinced. Senior drove all the way downtown, where he parked in front of a shelter for women and children on Sheridan Road. He