The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [83]
He stopped venturing outside, turned down the shades, and spent what was left of March beached on the sofa reading and watching TV. His plan was to bore the Service into moving on, but he became caught in his own trap. With too much time to think, he lapsed into a severe depression. “I didn’t know what I was going to do,” he says. “I figured that was it, game over. We lost the house in Marshall, and it was only a matter of time before the Service caught me for something else. I thought about the past, all the shittiness, my dad leaving, my mom going crazy, my fucking sister almost dying.”
One day he found himself engrossed in a TV showing of Over the Top, a Stallone film from 1987 about an estranged father and son traveling across the county in a semi truck. Stallone’s character, Lincoln Hawk, is an arm-wrestling trucker who hasn’t seen his ten-year-old kid since he was a baby. His son resents him for leaving at first, but the pair gradually bond on the road. True to its title, Over the Top is one of the most shamelessly sentimental, manipulative, and ridiculously optimistic father-and-son movies ever made. By the end of the movie, Art was bawling.
Natalie found him breaking down on the front porch, trying to hide his tears. “I hadn’t seen my dad in so many years. I didn’t even know what happened to him, why he left. Then that fucking movie came on and got me thinking about everything. And I said to myself, ‘Screw it. I’m gonna find him.’ ”
Natalie went back into the house, got on the computer, and enrolled in an Internet people-finder service for twenty dollars. Fifteen minutes later, she rejoined Art on the front porch.
“Your dad’s living in Alaska,” she told him. “I have his address.”
ART HAD SPENT ENTIRE DAYS on the Internet researching paper companies and bill components; using it to answer his oldest question had never occurred to him. He had to run to the computer to see the address for himself to believe it.
Williams, Arthur J.
P.O. Box 1258
Chickaloon, AK 99674-1258
Art felt certain it was his father because, in a margin, the site listed the subject’s age as fifty-two, precisely the age his dad should be. They entered the city into a map site. There it was, Chickaloon, a mote in the wilderness about sixty miles northeast of Anchorage. Art stared at the map point, transfixed. Farther away than he had ever imagined, but not so far that he couldn’t picture it. His dad was right there, right now, probably holed up by the fire as the dark days ruled over the biggest, wildest state. No phone number was given with the address, but they called information just to be sure. The number was unlisted. Art decided that was better anyway; a phone call out of the blue after all these years would be too sudden.
That same night, Art sat down and wrote a letter. He wanted to pen an account of everything that had happened since his father had left, along with the only question that really mattered: Why? Realizing such an epistle would take a butt roll of paper and probably freak his father out, he kept it simple. He told his dad that he was living in Texas and doing well. He was married and had a kid, with another on the way. He wanted them to know their grandfather, and he had never stopped thinking about him. He understood if his dad was hesitant after so many years, but he still loved him. He left the phone number for Sharon’s office line, telling his dad to leave his own number with her if he was interested in catching up. Art would call him back.
The next morning, Sharon took the letter to her office and deposited it in the outgoing mail.
ART KEPT A TIGHT REIGN on his hope that his father would respond, but the very act of reaching out made him feel like the future was opening up. Three weeks had gone by since he’d left Chicago, and sure enough, the Secret Service tails soon thinned out.