GLEASON

by LOUISE ERDRICH

Issue of 2006-03-20
Posted 2006-03-13

John Stregg opened his front door wide and there was Gleason, his girlfriend Jade’s little brother. The boy stood, frail and skinny, in the snow with a sad look on his face and a gun in his hand. As the president of the New Otto Bank, of New Otto, North Dakota , Stregg had trained his employees to stay relaxed in situations like this. Small-town banks were vulnerable, and Stregg had actually been held up twice. One of the robbers had even been a methamphetamine addict. He did not flinch now.

“What can I do for you?” he said to Gleason. His voice was loud and calm. His wife, Carmen, was reading in the living room.

“You can come with me, Mr. Stregg,” Gleason said, leading slightly to the left with the barrel of the gun. Behind him, at the curb, a low-slung Oldsmobile idled. Stregg could see no one else in it. Gleason was just nineteen years old, and Stregg now wished that he’d joined the Army as Jade had said he was threatening to do. Except that, if he had, he might be carrying something better than an old, jammed-looking .22-calibre pistol. From the living room Carmen called, “Who is it?,” and Gleason whispered, “Say ‘Kids selling candy.’ ”

“Kids selling candy,” Stregg called back.

“Tell them we don’t want any,” Carmen yelled.

“Say you’re going for a little walk,” Gleason said.

“I’m going for a little walk.”

“In this snow?” his wife cried. “You’re crazy!”

“Put your coat on,” Gleason said. “So she doesn’t see it still hanging on the rack. Then come with me. Shut the door.”

As he headed down the walkway with Gleason behind him, Stregg began to hope that he would find Jade hidden in the car. That this was some odd kind of prank. Some desperate way for her to get to see him. It was evening, and the windows of his house cast a soft, golden light all the way down the landscaped twist of paving stones. There was a band of utter darkness where a stone wall and close-grown arborvitae cast a shadow onto the boulevard. The car sat beyond that, in the wintry shimmer of a street lamp.

“Get in,” Gleason said.

Stregg stumbled a bit in the icy snow, then let himself into the passenger’s side. The back seat was empty, he saw. Gleason held the pistol just inside the sleeve of his large topcoat, and kept it pointed at the windshield as he rounded the front of the car and ducked quickly into the driver’s seat.

“I’m going to ease out of this light,” he said.

Gleason kept his gun out and his mild eyes trained on Stregg as he put the car in drive and rolled forward into the darkness beyond the street lamp’s glow.

“Time to talk.” He put the car in park.

Gleason was a nervous-looking boy with large brown eyes, a thin face, and a mop of toast-brown hair flopping over one eye and bending into his collar. There were little wisps of down on his chin. He was artistic. This sort of behavior, Stregg knew, did not come naturally to Gleason. He’d probably had to get slightly drunk in order to drive to the Stregg residence with a gun and ring the bell. And what would he have done if Carmen had answered? Would he have pretended to be selling candy bars for some high-school trip? Did he have a Plan B? Stregg stared at Gleason’s gaunt little face. The boy didn’t seem likely to put a bullet in him. Plus, his hands looked too weak to pull back the slide. Stregg knew, too, that his presence in Gleason’s car had depended on some implicit collaboration on his own part.

“So,” Stregg repeated, in the patient voice he used with jumpy investors, “what can I do for you?”

“I think a hundred thousand dollars should be just about right,” Gleason said.

“A hundred thousand dollars.”

Gleason was silently expectant. Stregg shivered a little, then he pulled his coat tightly around himself and felt like crying. He had cried a lot with Jade. She had brought all his tears up to the surface. Sometimes they rushed out, and sometimes they trickled in long tracks down his cheeks.

She’d said that there was no shame in it, and she’d cried along with him until their weeping slowed erotically and sent them careening through each other’s body, toward a dark peace. Stregg heard himself make a sound, an Ah of doubt. There was something about the monetary figure that struck him as wretched.

“It’s just not enough,” he said.

Gleason looked perplexed.

“Look, if she keeps the baby—and you know I want her to keep the baby—she’s going to need a house. Maybe in Fargo , you know? A hundred thousand isn’t enough for a decent house. And then there are clothes, and, what, car seats, that sort of thing. I’ve never had a child, but I know they need certain equipment. Also, she needs a good, safe car. A hundred thousand isn’t enough for everything. It’s not a future.”

“O.K.,” Gleason said, after a while. “What do you suggest?”

“Besides,” Stregg went on, thinking out loud, “the thing is, in for a penny in for a pound. A hundred thousand would be missed just as much as a larger amount would be. My wife sees our accounts. It might as well be . . . Let me think. If it’s under half a million, the papers will say nearly half a million anyway. So it might as well be over half a million. But not seven hundred thousand, because they’ll call that three-quarters of a million. So let’s say six hundred thousand.”

Gleason was quiet. “That’s just over half a million,” he said finally.

Stregg nodded. “See? But that’s a doable thing. Only there has to be a reason. A very good reason.”

“Well,” Gleason said, “maybe you were going to start some kind of business?”

Stregg looked at Gleason in surprise. “Well, yes, that’s good, a business. Only then we’d need to actually have the business, keep it going, make a paper trail, and that’d lead to more deception, and the taxes . . . It’d all lead back to me. It’s too complicated. We need one catastrophic reason.”

“A tornado,” Gleason said. “I mean, in winter, maybe not. A blizzard.”

“And where does the money come in?”

“The money gets lost in the blizzard?”

Stregg looked disappointed, and Gleason shrugged weakly.

They both cast about for a time, mulling this over. Then Gleason said, “Question.”

“Yes?”

“How come you don’t just get divorced from your wife and marry Jade? The way you’re talking, it sounds to me like you love her. So maybe I didn’t have to come here and threaten you with this.” He wagged the gun. “But I’m not getting why you don’t just leave your wife and run off with Jade, or something, if you love her.”

“I do love her.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Look at me, Gleason.” Stregg put his hands out. “Do you think she’d stay with me just for me? Now, be honest. Without the money. Without the job. Just me.”

Gleason shrugged again. “You’re not so bad, man.”

“Yes, I am,” Stregg said. “I’m sixteen years older than Jade and I’m half bald. If I had my hair, then maybe, or if I was good-looking or athletic. But I’m a realist. I see what I am. The money helps. I’m not saying that that’s the only reason Jade cares for me, not at all—Jade is a pure soul—but the money helps. If I divorced Carmen now, I wouldn’t have a job. I took the bank over from her father, who is, yes, in his nineties and in a nursing home, but perfectly lucid. Carmen is a fifty-one-per-cent shareholder. Besides, here’s the thing. Carmen has done nothing wrong. She has never, to my knowledge, betrayed me with another man, nor has she neglected me, within her own powers. Until I met Jade last year, you understand, I was reasonably happy. Carmen and I had sex for twenty minutes once a week and went to Florida in the winter; we gave dinner parties and stayed at the lake for two weeks every summer. In the summer, we had sex twice a week and I cooked all our meals.”

Gleason looked uncomfortable.

“The thing is, we’re the last small, independent bank in this part of the state and pretty soon we’ll get bought out, swallowed up. That will change my situation. I’d like to be with Jade. I plan to be with Jade. When I can. If she’ll have me.”

Now Stregg leaned searchingly toward Gleason. “What does your presence here mean, exactly? Did she send you?”

“No.”

“What happened? She won’t talk to me right now, you know.”

“Well, she told me about her being pregnant. She was kind of upset, and I thought you were ditching her. That’s what I thought. You know, it’s always been just the two of us. She raised me after our mother O.D.’d. I was only eleven when it happened, and she was twenty-one. I’d die for her.”

“Of course,” Stregg said. “Of course you would. Let that be our bond, Gleason. Both of us would die for her. But here’s the thing. Only one of us—right now, anyway—only one of us can provide for her.”

“So what should we do?”

“Something has come to me,” Stregg said. “Now, I’m going to propose something that may surprise you. It may seem bizarre, but give it a chance, hear me out, Gleason, because I think it will work. Are you ready?”

Gleason nodded.

“Say you kidnap my wife.”

Gleason gave a strangled yelp.

“No, just listen. Tomorrow night you do the very same thing as tonight. You come to the door. Carmen answers. You show her the gun and you come into the house. You have some strapping tape. A pair of scissors. At gunpoint, you order me to tie Carmen up. Once she’s taken care of, you tie me up and say to me, in her hearing, that if I don’t deliver six hundred thousand dollars in cash to you by the next day you’ll kill her. You have to say that, I’m afraid. Then you bring her out to the car—not this car, a rental. Don’t let her see the license plates.”

“I don’t think so,” Gleason said. “I think you’re describing a federal crime.”

“Well, yes,” Stregg said. “But is it really a crime if nothing happens? I mean, you’ll be really, really nice to Carmen. That’s a given. You’ll take her to a secure out-of-town location, like your house. Keep her blindfolded. Put her in the back bedroom where you keep the freezer. Lay down a mattress so she’s comfortable. It’ll just be for a day. I’ll drop off the money. Then you’ll let her out somewhere on the other side of town. She may have a long walk—be sure she brings shoes and a coat. I don’t think we should tell Jade.”

“Jade’s gone, anyway.”

Stregg’s heart lurched. He’d somehow known it. “Where?” he managed to ask.

“Her friend Bonnie took her to Bismarck , just to clear her head. They’ll be back on Friday.”

“Oh, then this is perfect,” Stregg said.

Gleason looked at him with great, silent eyes. His and Jade’s eyes were very similar, Stregg thought, and he suddenly felt extremely sorry for Gleason. He was so wimpy, so young, and what would he do with Carmen? She worked out on a stationary bicycle and lifted free weights. Gleason kept shifting the gun from hand to hand, probably because his wrist was getting tired.

“By the way, where did that gun come from?” Stregg asked.

“It used to belong to my mother’s boyfriend.”

“Is it loaded?”

“Of course it is.”

“You don’t have ammunition for it, do you?” Stregg said. “But that’s good. We don’t want any accidents.”

When Gleason knocked on the door the following evening, John Stregg pretended to have fallen asleep. His heart beat wildly as the quiet transaction occurred in the entryway. Then Carmen walked into the room with her arms out in front of her and her square honest face blanched in shock. She made a gesture to her husband, asking for help, but Stregg was looking at Gleason and trying not to give everything away by laughing. Gleason wore a cinnamon-brown knitted ski mask with white piping around the mouth, nose, and eyes. His coat and his pants were a baked-looking brown. He looked like a scrawny gingerbread boy, except that he was wearing surgical gloves.

“I’m going to throw up,” Carmen moaned when Gleason ordered Stregg to tie her up.

“No, you’ll be O.K.,” Stregg said. “You’ll be O.K.” Tears dripped down his face and onto her hands as he tried firmly but gently to do his job. His wife’s hands were so beautifully cared for, the nails lacquered with soft peach. Let nothing go wrong, he prayed.

“Look, he’s crying,” Carmen said accusingly to Gleason, before her husband tied a scarf between her teeth, knotting it tightly behind her head. “Nnnnnn!”

“I’m sorry,” Stregg said.

“Now it’s your turn,” Gleason said.

The two of them suddenly realized that Gleason would have to put down the gun and somehow subdue Stregg, and their eyes got very wide. They stared at each other.

“Sit down in that chair,” Gleason said at last. “Take the tape and loop it around your legs.” He proceeded to instruct Stregg in how to do most of the work himself. He even had him cut strips to the appropriate length, all of which Stregg thought was quite ingenious of Gleason.

Once Stregg had secured himself to the chair and Gleason had gagged him, Gleason told Carmen to get on her feet. But she refused. Even as anxiety coursed through him, Stregg felt obscurely proud of his wife. She rolled around on the floor, kicking like a dolphin, until Gleason finally pounced on her and pressed the barrel of the gun to her temple. Straddling her, he untied the gag in her mouth and rummaged in his pocket. He drew out a couple of pills.

“You leave me no choice,” he said. “I’m going to have to ask you to dry-swallow these.”

“What are they?” Carmen asked.

“Just sedatives,” Gleason said. Then he spoke to Stregg. “Leave six hundred thousand dollars in a garbage bag next to the ‘Adopted by the Flickertail Club’ highway sign. No marked bills. No police. Or I’ll kill your wife. You’re being watched.”

Stregg was surprised that Carmen took the pills, but then for some reason she’d always been that way about taking pills—a willing patient. Now she turned out to be a willing hostage, and Gleason had no more trouble with her. He cut the tape on her legs and put a hobble on her ankles. She walked out dreamily, her coat draped over her shoulders, and Stregg was left alone. It took him about half an hour of patient wiggling to release himself from the tape, which he left looped around the chair. Now what? He wanted desperately to call Jade, to talk to her, to hear the slow music of her voice. But for some hours he sat on the couch with his head in his hands, replaying the whole scenario. Then he started thinking ahead. Tomorrow he would go in early. He would transfer money from their retirement account into the bank’s general account. Then he would go into the safe and take out the cash and get into the car. He would drive out to the highway sign and make the drop. It would all be done before 9 A.M., then Gleason would free Carmen west of town, where she could walk home or find a ride. There would be police. An investigation. Newspapers. But no insurance was involved.

The amount wasn’t excessive. It would use up most of their retirement account, but Carmen still had the bank. It would all blow over.

A blizzard came up and Carmen got lost and might have frozen to death had a farmer not pulled her from a ditch. Luckily, Gleason had scooped up her snow boots as they left, and her coat was one of those long down coats, quilted past her knees. She suffered no frostbite, and though she ran a fever for six days, she did not develop pneumonia. Stregg nursed her with care, waited on her hand and foot, took a leave from the bank. He was shocked by how the kidnapping had affected her. Over the next weeks, she lost a great deal of weight and spoke irrationally. To the police she described her abductor as quite large, muscular, with firm hands, a big nose, and a deep voice. Her kidnapper was stunningly handsome, she said, a god! It was all so strange that Stregg almost felt like correcting her. Though he was delighted, on the one hand, that she had the description so wrong, her embroidery disturbed him. And when he brought her home from the hospital she was so restless. In the evenings, she wanted to talk instead of watching television or reading the many magazines that she subscribed to. She had questions.

“Do you love me?”

“Of course I love you.”

“Do you really, really love me? I mean, would you have died for me if the kidnapper had made you make a choice? ‘It’s her or you’—say he’d said that. Would you have stepped forward?”

“I was tied to the chair,” Stregg said.

“Metaphorically.”

“Of course, metaphorically. I would have.”

“I wonder.”

She began to look at him skeptically, measuring him. At night, now, she wanted lots of reassurance. She seduced him and scared him, saying things like “Make me helpless.”

“He made me helpless,” she said one morning. “But he was kind, very kind to me.”

Stregg took her to the doctor, who said that it was post-traumatic stress and prescribed antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications, which didn’t help much.

“Hold me tighter—squeeze the breath out of me.”

“Look at me. Don’t close your eyes.”

“Don’t say something meaningless. I want the truth.”

It was terrifying, how she’d opened up. What had Gleason done?

Nothing, Gleason insisted on the phone. Stregg was ashamed to feel repelled by his wife’s awkward need—it was no different from his own need. If she’d been this way before, he recognized, he might have responded. He might not have turned to Jade. He might have been amazed, grateful. But when Carmen threw herself onto him at night he felt only despair, and she could sense his distance. She grew bony and let her hair go gray, long, unruly, beautiful. She was strange. She was sinking. She looked at him with the eyes of a drowning person.

Stregg went to visit his father-in-law at the nursing home. The place did not depress him, though he could see how it might depress others. His father-in-law was resting on his single bed, on top of a flowered polyester coverlet. He’d pulled an afghan over himself, one that Carmen had knitted, in intricate stripes of green and blue. He was listening to the radio.

“It’s me. It’s John.”

“Ah.”

Stregg took his father-in-law’s hand in his. The old man’s skin was dry and very soft, nearly translucent. His face was thin, pale, almost saintly, though he’d been ruthless when he was younger, a cutthroat banker, a survivor.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Stregg’s father-in-law said. “How’s my little girl?”

“She’s just fine.” No one had told Carmen’s father what had happened. “She has a cold,” Stregg lied. “She’s staying in bed today. She’s probably curled up around her hot-water bottle, sleeping.”

“The poor kid.”

Stregg resisted telling Carmen’s father, as he always used to, “I’ll take good care of her.” How wrong, and how ironic, would that be? The old man’s hand relaxed, and Stregg realized that he had fallen asleep. Still, he continued to sit beside the bed holding his father-in-law’s slender and quite elegant hand. It gave him time to consider some things. The baby would be born in four months, and Gleason and Jade were now living in a sturdy ranch-style house not far from Trollwood Park , up in Fargo . Gleason was just about to start college. The last time Stregg visited, Gleason had shaken his hand but said nothing.

As for Jade, she spent a lot of time alone. Stregg couldn’t get away much because of Carmen. Jade understood. She was radiant. Her hair was long, a lustrous brown. They went into her bedroom in the middle of the day and made love in the stark light. It was very solemn. He went dizzy with the depth of it. When he lay against her, his perceptions shifted and he saw the secret souls of the objects and plants in the room. Everything had consciousness and meaning. Jade was measureless, but she was ordinary, too. Afterward, Stregg drove back down to New Otto and arrived just in time for dinner.

When he left the old man, Stregg usually patted his arm or made some other vague gesture of apology. This time, still thinking of his visit with Jade, he bent dreamily over Carmen’s father. He kissed the dry forehead, stroked back the old man’s hair, and thoughtlessly smiled. The old man jerked away suddenly and eyed Stregg like a mad hawk.

“You bastard!” he cried.

One day, Carmen was sitting in her bathrobe at lunch, tapping a knife against the side of a soft-boiled egg. Suddenly she said, “I know who he was. I saw him in a high-school play right here in New Otto.”

Stregg’s guts turned to ice and he phoned Gleason as soon as he could. Sure enough, Gleason had been in every single drama production in high school. Stregg put the phone down and stared at it. Carmen was at the town library at that very moment, looking through old high-school yearbooks.

This was how it happened that instead of starting college Gleason bolted and joined the Army. Jade was heartbroken and cried day and night after he was shipped off for basic training. She said that she couldn’t feel anything anymore, and she turned away from Stregg when he visited and wouldn’t let him touch her. After six weeks, Gleason sent a photograph of himself in military gear. He didn’t appear to have bulked up much. His helmet seemed to balance on his thin head, shadowing those wide, soft brown eyes. He looked about twelve years old.

Stregg drove home after visiting Jade one afternoon, and put his car keys on the coffee table. “I’m leaving now,” he said. “You keep everything. I have clothes. I have shoes. I’ll make myself a sandwich and be going now.” Jade’s cold sorrow had finally driven him to this. Stregg was sure that he would lose her if he didn’t take action.

He walked into the kitchen and made the sandwich and put it into a plastic bag. He walked out into the living room and stood in the center of the carpet. Carmen just looked at him. Then she raised her hand, swept it to the side, and let it fall. The gesture seemed to hang in the air, as if her arm had left a trail. Stregg turned and walked out the door and across town, and headed back to Fargo along the highway. There was only a slight wind, and the temperature was about forty-five degrees. The fields were full of standing water and ducks and geese swam in the ditches. He didn’t take a ride until the sky darkened.

Shortly after John Stregg moved into the house in Fargo , his baby boy was born. In those dazzling moments after the birth, Stregg had a vision. The baby resembled Gleason, brave young Gleason, with his big feet and no ass to speak of, who looked as if he could hardly lift a water canteen. Gleason’s heart was a pale and valiant little fish. Was there anyone more magnificent than Gleason? Stregg saw that Gleason was a kind of Christ figure, a martyr like those in the New Testament. Only he had been thrown to the lions in the name of his sister’s happiness. It had occurred to Stregg that, in his new life, Gleason might grow in strength and valor and become exactly the person Carmen believed had abducted her. Now he saw that Gleason already was that person, and that Carmen had recognized it all along. He also saw that Gleason had told his sister about the kidnapping.

All of this was clear in the face of the tiny new baby. Stregg looked closer, and tried to see whether Gleason would live or die. But, just then, the baby opened his mouth and bawled. As Jade put the baby to her breast, Stregg sank back into the hospital chair, dizzy with spent adrenaline. For a long time, he just watched mother and son from across the room.

Only twice did Stregg visit New Otto. The first time, he brought a U-Haul and loaded into it all that Carmen had not disposed of—she’d thrown a lot of things away. But physical objects had ceased to matter to Stregg. Jade argued with him every day, threatening to go to the police, to turn him in for the kidnapping.

“You’ll lose everything.” Stregg waved his arm. “This house. And Gleason will go to jail. Would you like that? You’ll be out on the street. And what about little Gleason?”

Jade had named the baby after her brother. There was no getting away from Gleason; he would always control the situation, no matter where he was. Gleason, with his bristle-headed cut, with his combat boots and rifle. In the months after his son’s birth, Stregg had come to understand that he would never be forgiven for engineering the kidnapping scheme that had sent Gleason off to the Army. He had lost Jade’s love. She kicked him out to sleep in the garage, where he curled up beside his car, in a sleeping bag spread out on a little camp cot. Jade spent all day by herself, caring for the baby and cleaning the house. Every so often, she would thrust a shopping list at Stregg, or make him help with heavy lifting. Beyond that, she didn’t want him to get close to her or the baby. He moved around the small house like a ghost, never knowing where to settle.

He’d found a job at the insurance agency he’d always used, a low-level position assisting others in processing claims. One day, a homeowner’s claim from his old address landed on his desk. Carmen had filed a claim on everything that he had taken from the house—his own things, which she had agreed and even pressured him to come and clear out. There were power tools, each with a serial number and an identification code, and some stereo and other electronic equipment, even a small computer. Looking at the list, Stregg felt a glimmer of heat rise in his throat. He took his jacket from the office door, went back to the house that his and Carmen’s retirement money had bought, and packed up everything he kept in the garage. He drove to New Otto with a full car, and parked in the driveway of his former home.

After a while, Carmen came to the window. She looked at him as he got out of the car, and he looked at her, through the window, which was like the glass of a dim aquarium. When she vanished, he was not sure whether she would come to the door or be absorbed into the gloom. But she did open the door at last, and beckoned him inside. They stood in the entry, quite close. Her hair had gone from gray to silver-white. A pulse beat in her slender throat. Her arms were stick thin, but she seemed to generate an unusual light. Stregg could feel it, this odd radiance. It seemed to emanate from her translucent skin. It occurred to him that he should sink down at the feet of this beautiful, wronged woman and kiss the hem of the pearl velour jogging suit she was wearing.

“You filed a claim on all my stuff. I’m bringing it back,” he said.

“No. I want the money. I need the money,” she told him.

“Why?”

“We’re sunk. They’re not going to buy the bank out. They’re opening a new one next to it.”

“What about your father’s accounts?”

“He’ll live to be a hundred,” Carmen said. “John, he told me that you were seeing another woman all along.”

“I don’t know where he got that idea,” Stregg said.

Carmen waited.

“All right. Yes.”

Her eyes filled with terrible tears and she began to shake. Before Stregg knew it, he was holding her. He shut the door. They made love in the entryway, on the carpet where so many people paused, and then on the bench where visitors sat to remove their boots. His remorse, and his shame, compelled him. And her need for him was so powerful it seemed as if they were going over a rushing waterfall together, falling in a barrel, and at the bottom Stregg cracked open and told her everything.

He had to, because of Gleason. Stregg clung to Carmen with blackness washing over him, and talked and talked.

“I know he violated you,” Stregg said, after he’d spilled everything else. “I understand now.”

“Who? That boy? He was just a twerp,” Carmen said. “He never touched me. I said all that stuff out of desperation, to try to make you jealous. Why, I do not know.”

She sat up and eyed him with calm assessment. “Possibly, I thought you still loved me, way deep down. I think I believed there was something in you.”

“There is, there is,” Stregg said, strangling on a surge of hope, touching her ankles as she got to her feet.

“When the snow was covering me, out in the ditch, I saw your face. Real as real. You bent over me and pulled me out. It wasn’t the farmer, it was you.”

“It was me,” Stregg said, lifting his arms. “I must have always loved you.”

She looked down at him for a long time, contemplating this amazing fact. Then she went upstairs and called the police.

In the years afterward, Stregg was sometimes asked by the friends he made behind bars what had caused him to confess what he’d done, and then take all the blame. Sometimes he couldn’t think of a good reason. Other times, he said he had guessed that it would never end; he’d seen that he’d be kicked from one woman to the other until the end of time. But, after he gave his answer, he always came back to that moment when he’d first opened the door to Gleason, and thought of how, when he saw the boy standing in the glowing porch light, in the snow, with that dull gun and that sad face, he hadn’t flinched.