The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [90]
Art was speechless when he saw the house. Although it was unfinished, it was a tavernesque, two-story A-frame, with a driveway that swung around behind and a coach house on one side. Inside were four bedrooms, all done in natural wood, as well as a library and an interior balcony. “I had kinda imagined my dad living in a shack or a cabin, real frontier stuff, but that house was huge and it was comfortable. I knew right away that he had a good life, or at least a good house.”
After showing Art and Natalie the house, Senior led them out back to a trailer set off in the woods. It was small and primitive, with no plumbing, and Senior explained that he and Anice had lived there while he’d built the main house. He told Art and Natalie that they’d have privacy there.
“You can stay here as long as you like,” he added to his son’s amazement. Art was encouraged by the statement, but Natalie was not enthused by the arrangement.
“There was no way I was gonna sleep out in the woods in Alaska,” she says. “I mean, I’m from Texas, but they had grizzly bears and wolves up there, who knows what kind of shit. I’m pregnant, and it just felt like we were being shoved off to the side.” When she politely expressed her concern about the bear situation, Senior trotted off. A few minutes later, he returned with a 120-pound bull mastiff, a four-legged ball of muscle and slobber that was easily the largest canine she had ever seen. The dog hopped into the trailer, swaggered around and greeted everyone, then politely embedded himself on the kitchen floor like a battleship anchor.
“Whatever you’re afraid of, this guy isn’t,” Senior assured her. “I take him with me when I hike and he backs down from nothing.”
Natalie did feel better. She asked Senior what the beast’s name was. Given the dog’s size and breed, she figured it had to be something butch, like “Cannonball” or maybe “Brutus.”
“That’s Sonny,” Senior said.
ONCE NATALIE AND ALEX WERE SETTLED in the trailer, father and son headed over to the coach house, which served as Senior’s office and private getaway. It was all done in pine, with a black leather sofa, a twenty-inch TV, and its own kitchen, bathroom, and telephone. Art got the feeling his dad spent a lot of time there.
They sat down on the sofa. It was time for the Talk and they both knew it. To brace themselves, Senior loaded up a big bowl of Alaskan bud and they smoked it down to dust. Wanting to keep the floodgates to the past under his control, Art took the initiative by asking his father what he had been doing for the last sixteen years. Senior gamely fielded the question. After he had dropped Art off with his mother in Chicago that day long ago, they had headed to Alaska to visit Anice’s brother, who was stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base, near Anchorage. While visiting him, they had fallen in love with the state, and for the first time in his life Senior had decided to put down roots.
“There are places here where you might be the first person to set foot there in hundreds of years,” he told Art, then diverted into a story about how he and Anice’s son, Larry, had once discovered an abandoned Russian settlement deep in the mountains. Buried beneath the collapsed huts they found old coins and small caches of gold nuggets. Senior still had a few of them, and he rose from the sofa, retrieved a wood box, and he showed Art some of the artifacts. Art held an old Masonic coin in his palm, imagining what it would have been like to have been there for the discovery.
Senior explained that within two months of arriving in Alaska for a “visit,” they were all living in Anchorage. But rejecting his foot-loose past, this time Senior was determined to stay. He found piecework painting