The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [94]
They took it for spin along the Matanuska. As Art blasted off to a hundred miles an hour, Senior became a nervous, hectoring old man who begged him to slow down and chastised him for being unsafe. Art couldn’t decide if the car would ever be worth more than that moment. Things were going so well with his dad, in fact, that he knew something wasn’t right.
He discovered what it was three weeks after he arrived, when one morning Senior told Art he needed some help running an errand. They jumped in the truck and headed down the highway to Palmer. Their destination was the local feed store, where Art watched his dad throw down four hundred-dollar bills for eight hundred pounds of dry dog food. He and his dad loaded sixteen fifty-pound bags of food into the truck. It was a trip Senior made once a week.
Halfway back to the house, Art remembered the parking meters.
“How can you do this?” he asked his father.
“Huh?”
“You sit here and spend money on these fucking dogs, and we’ve had to fight to eat at times.”
“What?”
“Pull over.”
“What?”
“Pull over, and step out of the car for a minute,” he yelled.
Senior did as he was told, and the moment they were free of the vehicle Art grabbed his father by the throat. He pinned him against the truck and asked him why he shouldn’t beat the shit out of him when he had spent twenty years feeding dogs while his children went hungry. “How could you do this?” he screamed, over and over.
Senior was terrified. He begged his son to let him go so he could talk. Art eased up, but his fists remained clenched.
“I looked for you,” Senior reiterated. “I should have looked harder.” He told his son that he knew he was a failure, that nothing could excuse the abandonment. Art had every right in the world to be angry, and if whaling on him would make him feel better, then he was willing to take it. That calmed Art down a little bit. But he told his dad that the story about looking for his children was pure bullshit; if he had really looked he would have found them. His father had no idea what all of his children had endured. They had gone hungry, and his hundred dogs had not. He asked his dad over and over again if he had any concept of what it’s like for a child to not know if he’s going to eat. He told him he had no idea why he was there in Alaska; his dad was clearly a piece of shit. Why was he even bothering to try to have a relationship with him? If he hadn’t tracked Senior down, his dad would have continued with his life, perfectly happy to never see his son again. In fact, he was going to leave as soon as they got back to the house.
“I’m a shitty father myself,” Art said, “but I could never do to my kids what you did to us.”
“I’m glad,” Senior said. He was also glad that Art was there. “I want you to stay here, to live with me. We can build you a house on a corner of the property. We don’t ever have to be apart again.”
Art’s anger shifted to wonder.
“Are you serious?”
“Absolutely.”
It was the one thing his father could have said to make him stay.
IT WAS ONLY A FEW DAYS LATER that the pair took another ride, this time to Anchorage. Senior wanted Art to meet one of his friends. Other than a few townies in Wasilla, Art hadn’t met anyone his father socialized with, and he was pleased that his dad was now bragging to his pals about his boy being in town. They pulled up to a large A-frame on the edge of the city. Parked out front were several Harleys.
“Bikers, huh?” Art commented. He tried to hide his disappointment. He loved motorcycles, but the memory of his aunt Donna riding off on the back of a Harley after putting his mom into a coma gave him an inherent distrust of anyone who embraced the lifestyle.
“Hell’s Angels,” his father said. “They’re good guys, you’ll like them.”
And they were nice enough guys. The friend Senior had come to meet, Terry Cartwall, was a blond, pony-tailed Angel who reminded Art of a Viking. He was a fisherman who road-tripped between seasons. It was his house, and three other Angels from