House Arrest
Three weeks after I’d returned from the treatment center visit, on his last Saturday there, I talked with my younger brother Brad, picturing him at the pay phone in the narrow gray hall, cigarette in one hand, head nodding to other guys coming and going past him to the bathroom or snack machine. He said he’d be discharged the next day, that Dad would drive down to pick him up and take him back to the farm. “God knows what happens then, but at least now I can think again.”
I called him the evening after he’d gotten settled back at the farmhouse. He was alone there now; his housemate Foley had moved out months before, right after Brad’s night up in Sully County jail. Brad told me that he would see his lawyer the next week, and had been thinking he might now agree to an extent with the lawyer’s advice.
“But that means I should be prepared to be put on house arrest, or get taken into custody,” he said, “once they decide when to have the hearing— or for any reason they want, I guess.”
When I mentioned our cousin Brandon up on the reservation who’d also been arrested, Brad warned that we couldn’t talk much over the phone, implying that it was probably still tapped, likely would be for a while.
“Ok,” I said. “Let me know if you find out about a hearing. And if you need my help before then, I’ll fly out.” I assumed he’d decided to plead guilty to possession of meth, but not to conspiracy or distribution, maybe to repeat the names he knew the Federal prosecutor already knew.
I talked with a criminal lawyer in Charlottesville who told me that even for Federal cases South Dakota was a very different place from Virginia, but that almost every defense lawyer for a drug case anywhere, especially if conspiracy was one of the charges, would advise “First in, first out”: if you want to get the lightest sentence possible, be the first to cooperate. I figured that Brad’s lawyer had already said this to him, but I was desperate, made various lists trying to imagine how to help Brad, and Mom. Worry was weakening her as much as the leukemia; I could hear it in her voice over the phone now. I was pretty sure the idea of turning over new names to the authorities, if he even knew any more than they had, wasn’t something Brad would consider, but I tried to think of ways to convince him without making him feel worse. I felt frantic to keep him from years of confinement.
What could my words do now, though? Why should I be listened to? Growing up, I’d been the older sibling; I was supposed to be good and get high grades, and I did, to stay beyond Dad’s reach, but ultimately less had always been expected of me because I was the girl. And I’d been fine staying under the radar, out of sight, till maybe I could get away and be something different someplace else. Unlike me, Brad was gregarious, charming, and a risk-taker, which made my staying out of sight easy. If I’d wanted to gamble on attention— running with a loose crowd, say— it wouldn’t have been very hard to keep it unknown. I’d understood how to skirt drama, and only conspicuous trouble got noticed in our home. When it did, and involved a costly mistake, or shame on the family, repercussions were fast and harsh. Almost always they were meted out to Brad, and I felt ashamed about escaping them. Only occasionally did I try to intervene and face Dad’s hair-trigger temper myself. I’d always wished there had been a brother older than me, with more power to speak up, to question Dad’s insistence on his own version of reality. I recalled a time when I was in high school and contradicted Dad: he’d blamed Brad for wrecking the clutch on a tractor, but it had been our unreliable Uncle Norm’s doing—Norm had admitted he’d blown the clutch, though not to Dad. Ah, it’ll get fixed, Norm had said to Brad and me, then left the tractor stranded sideways in the farmyard where we stood rolling our eyes at each other. Brad had started looking the clutch over when Dad came along. As our family rode back to town from the farm later, Dad cursing at Brad, I tried to break in and argue for Brad. Dad’s furious face glared at me in the car’s rear-view mirror: “Keep your mouth shut about things you don’t understand!” The rest of the way home we all watched the darkening fields go by.
More and more as we grew older, I could see Brad throwing the dice—drinking, partying, staying out late—anything that might distract from Dad’s rages and switches of mind. Maybe Brad was simply drawn to anything that let him forget where or who he was. Sometimes, as he spent more and more time working on the farm, the prairie itself allowed this: it could seem like everything there was of the world, going on forever, without limit, separate from human concern. Other times it felt like no place at all, cut off, a containment without escape. Now that feeling was about to be literal for Brad if they put him on house arrest.
Within weeks they did, and a court date was scheduled. Dad said he’d pick me up at the airport and take me right out to see Brad, since the hearing would be the next morning. On the flight from Sioux Falls to Pierre, setting back my watch, I thought about Dad trying to handle internal tensions, anger and pride and shame and the defiant wish to defend his son in spite of all of it. Now he was Brad’s driver and grocery deliverer too, since Brad couldn’t go anywhere but out in the fields.
There was still no knowing what kind of sentence Brad would receive, or even whether the gun charges would be removed. The range seemed to be from five to twenty years. Dad had attested that he himself was the only hunter, the only one who’d used any of the guns on the farm in ages, unless a coyote needed killing, but his words had had no effect.
At the farmhouse door I hugged my brother, and asked him to sit down on the steps with me while Dad went to check on something in the workshop. I told Brad about my meeting with the lawyer in Charlottesville who had said the same thing his lawyer had. “Maybe you can still make a deal before the hearing tomorrow.”
He patted my knee, closed his eyes. “No.”
Dad and I were ready early the next day; I stayed with Mom while Dad went out to get Brad, then they returned to pick me up. Mom wasn’t going to the hearing; the doctors had said that the cancer treatments had made her too susceptible to infection at this point to be in places where there would be a lot of people. Mom was also on house arrest.
At the courthouse, Brad was called into a conference room to meet with his lawyer. A short while later, Dad and I saw him coming back down the dingy hall, shaking his head. The Federal Prosecutor had decided just that morning to postpone the hearing, giving no explanation for the delay, no idea when they’d reschedule.
Back at the house in town, Mom threw her arms around Brad the second he opened the door. As he explained what had happened, relief that he hadn’t been taken into custody overwhelmed her worry about the uncertainty. “Maybe it’s a good sign?” she asked tentatively.
“I don’t think so, Mom,” Brad said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Dad drove Brad out to the farm then, saying he’d be back, and planned to go out again later to talk with one of the farm neighbors about fencing—I could come along then if I wanted to. I did, and he dropped me at the farmhouse with the pan of apple crisp that Mom had insisted on making for Brad that morning, praying he’d still be around to eat it at the end of the day. I saw Brad sprawled below the sink in the kitchen as I walked in.
“Hey—I’m glad you’re here,” he called over when I closed the back door. “I’m almost done tightening this pipe—be with you in a second.”
The Twins game was on in the farmhouse living room, the drapes closed—dark, heavy green fabric, dusty along the outer folds, as if they hadn’t been moved in years, permanently pulled against daylight. I walked over to the south window and lifted the edge of one curtain to look down the draw, past the cattle-dam and lower bluffs, across the wide river with its shifting sand bars, and beyond, to the western bluffs facing ours.
“You mind if I open these?” I asked as he came in behind me, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Beautiful out there—might lift your spirits....”
“Oh, sure. I forget about it. Go out to work it, but I don’t always think about the view from in here.” So often he couldn’t sleep at night, and would lie out here with the TV, he said, leaving the drapes that way in case he finally drowsed off. “Dad loves finding me on the couch when he walks in in the mornings,” he said, beaming at me, raising his eyebrows. Then he leaned over, pulled the cord to open both curtains, stepped back and put his muscular arm around my shoulder. He reached in his pocket for his cigarette pack with the other hand.
“Guess I’ve got used to not wanting to be seen from out there too, not knowing who could come up the road, or might be training their long-range antenna this direction from the next bluff over.”
I nodded.
We watched down the ravine, the long grass shimmering in a breeze. A pigeon murmured outside the window.
“You know, they even got you identified on some phone records, Sis—one of the few details that makes any sense in those Discovery notebooks that Dennis passed on from the prosecutor.” Most of it was about people he didn’t know, had never even heard of, he said. “When I do find my name, half the time they seem to think I’m talking some kind of code with Brandon.”
We both laughed at the idea of him and our cousin Brandon talking in code.
“Can ya bring that old horse trailer up next time you come? Pretty suspicious-sounding.” Brad shook his head.
I said I’d help talk it over, if he wanted to. He’d been told he wasn’t supposed to discuss the Discovery materials except with his lawyer or wife, but Margie wasn’t there anymore, and Dennis, the lawyer, was back in Rapid City, nearly two hundred miles west.
“If you need a listener for thinking things through, I’m here, ok?” I said. “Especially now, while I’m actually around, and we don’t have to use the phone.” We knew it might still be tapped. As he nodded, I looked out the window again, quiet for a while. “Some spot the Nystroms happened on to here.”
We stood for a time, just looking out over the Missouri. He twirled the cigarette through his fingers, like a tiny baton.
“Fancy,” I said, looking down at his hand.
“Yeah, see how long I can keep it out of my mouth.” He gazed out the window again. “Hey—about my trouble—let’s be careful, in case, you know—" He gestured with an open palm at the wide landscape outside.
“Ok, yeah,” I said.
“Goddamn Kadlecek, my new neighbor to the east,” he whispered from the side of his mouth, “he’s the one’s been at it, I’m pretty sure.”
I asked if he really thought an agent lived that close by.
“Federal job in town was what he told me when he moved in down at the old Erikson house. Hunted pheasant in our corn that first fall he was here; borrowed my county atlas and never returned it.”
He said he’d seen Kadlecek out on the rise north of the house beyond the windbreak once, “Just sitting in his car with the big antenna.” He lit the cigarette, inhaled, then slowly released smoke. “I was on foot—he didn’t even notice me come up. Expert detective. Just watching the sunset, was what he said. About as bright as Uncle Norm,” Brad half-chuckled.
Everyone had always thought of Brad as the sunnier kid between us— easy-going, quick-witted, a people-person, face always open. Fair, with a reddish tinge in his brown hair and blue eyes with light in them, he looked like Mom’s twin brother Bud the minute he arrived, grew up good-natured and joking like Bud, drawing people to him. I inherited more of Dad’s darker features and temperament—hated hearing that from relatives when I was young. I wondered now if Brad’s open face and charm had become for him a kind of disappearing. I had escaped by managing to follow rules, or appear to, to seem to be good, unassailable, and finally get away. He was expected to carry on the farm; he’d had to check out by different means. The night before, when I’d asked him about meth, as we walked outside— what it felt like— he’d begun by talking about starting to drink around age fourteen as a way to be gone.
“Then remember that first time I signed myself in for treatment, senior year, and how furious Dad was, then more furious when Mom started going to Al-Anon meetings?”
Al-Anon had been nearly the only source of psychological help around Pierre then. Dad was sure that people would think the alcoholic in the family was him.
“Didn’t occur to him that his Tuesday and Friday poker nights with the AA guys might’ve given that impression for years,” Brad had laughed.
About meth, addiction end-game, he’d said that at first the high, the pure pleasure, was unbelievable, but that after a while it didn’t take you away anymore; it just turned you into a body without pain for a bit, doing things you never thought you’d do.
“Your soul’s what’s gone, somewhere distant,” he’d said, “someplace you’ve lost track of.”
We were walking in the dark, along the farm’s gravel driveway, his little dog Remy trotting beside us. The sky was clear, full of stars.
“Then sometimes, between, it feels like you got no skin. You wonder if you’re alive, or human.” He went quiet again for a while. “Then detox—that’s a whole other kind of brutal.”
Now, standing at the window, looking out to the river, I wanted to believe his ready smile, believe that things would be all right, he was ok, he was clear of the meth. It had been court-ordered treatment this last time, though, with a much more severe court decision to come, the timing apparently up to the whims of the prosecutor, who was delaying. We both knew safety was a long way away. Brad cursed again about Kadlecek spying on him.
That was when he said, “Come here,” and turned to walk ahead of me down the hall to his office. Opening the door, he held a finger to his lips, then stepped over and pulled two fat blue binders off the shelf below his rows of CDs and model tractors. Rubber-banded to the top binder was a small box marked, as the binders were, “US Atty., District of SD/ Criminal Div.,” followed by Brad’s name and “Discovery Materials produced.” He unfastened the box and handed it to me. I opened it; it was full of photographs.
He told me in a low voice that he didn’t recognize any of it. “I definitely let myself wind up in a lot of wrong places, but not—" he hesitated, frowning and shaking his head—“Not those.”
We heard the kitchen door slam, then Dad yelling in to ask if anybody was there.
“Look a while—those too,” Brad said, pointing to the binders. “I’ll talk to him—maybe you’re on the phone to Virginia in here.” He stepped out, closing the door, leaving me at the desk alone.
The pictures were shots of chaos. Shadowy and inscrutable. Coolers and scattered trash outside a trailer whose door hung open above chipped cinderblock steps. Flashes of dim rooms inside—or maybe in another trailer or shed or house or basement—buckets and bottles and canisters and rubber hosing going every which way, rusty grime-encrusted sink, pulled-open drawers, rug ripped and burned away, a mirror’s spattered doubling of the scene.
A bird flitted past Brad’s office window, then there were just the jagged spruce-branches of windbreak shuddering in the breeze. I looked down at the pile of pictures again: another room, a naked mattress, the sheet pulled loose and stained red, surrounded by a confusion of big soda bottles and tubes. Hardees bags. Antifreeze jugs. Matted Teddy bear half-covered by plastic sheeting duct-taped but fallen down from a window. I couldn’t look at all of these, not now. I turned them over, dropped them back into the box, and felt a sensation of dropping myself into some darkness, recalling the murky, junky dirt cellar below Grandma and Grandad and Uncle Norman’s house, the house that this house I was sitting in had replaced. The tiny old house had been jacked up years ago and moved back to the edge of the windbreak where it was now slowly going to pieces. The crumbling earth walls that had been underneath it were widened and sealed off by what was now this house’s concrete basement. But I felt the clammy shadows of that old dirt cellar that had terrified me, that had made me think the creaky house above it might fall in, nights I was left to stay out here, nights I was awakened to go to the cellar, nights before Brad came along, or just after, when I didn’t know why Mom would’ve left me. Now I saw again flashes of dusty beet jars lined up on shelves along the dank walls, twisted garlic-vines hanging over baskets of potatoes and piled-up tires and hoses coiled in the corners, musty clutter of tipped-over file-boxes, dingy mud-smell dark of a grave, rustlings of mice my uncle had said would crawl up inside my nightgown, a rough finger skittering along my thigh. My hands on Brad’s desk were shaking, as if the chair under me was suspended over the silty, smelly hole that was no longer there. I thought of those people who’ve come back after being pronounced dead, having looked down from above on the terrible accident, or on their own resuscitation, as if the frantic people they’d seen below had been working on someone else’s body. Almost as terrifying as the sudden rush of memory was the fact that, except for a vague uneasiness about Norm and the farm, I’d blocked it all out for decades, and that most details were still missing. I was terrified to think what those details might be. It was as if a door in my mind, slammed shut for much of my life, had been suddenly cracked open just a bit by these pictures that had nothing to do with me.
I needed to focus on the present, think of Brad, stop trembling. I closed my eyes, took a long breath, opened them again. In the binders, his lawyer had highlighted the places Brad’s name appeared— flipping through, it looked like maybe ten, twelve paragraphs in hundreds of pages. The first three were the transcripts of Brad’s old school-friend Jim McCann coming over to the farmhouse on three different nights, just as Brad had told me he had, to ask Brad if he had any crank he could spare. Each time Brad had said no, he was sorry, then finally the third time McCann said Come on, I’m beggin’ man—and Brad asked, Jim, what makes you think I’ve got what you need? Then, Sit down, for god’s sake, wait here a minute. And he came back with a little for McCann, who tried to pay him, but Brad wouldn’t take the money, pushed it away. You do the same for me sometime, friend. But listen—I’m trying to get off this stuff—it’s eating me up—and something John said a while back made me start getting nervous that Johanssen might be talking to the cops, or somebody might be talking. I have no idea, but that really freaked me out—but hey—the transcript showed a pause— you didn’t hear it from me.
What Brad didn’t know in that moment: even giving away meth was distribution, and McCann had been wearing a wire each time he’d knocked, trying to save himself from prison.
The Feds’ various informants noted in the transcripts so many different names in different locations, some like “Chuckle” and “Whispering Jack,” as if they’d scripted a bad TV drama, but it was nevertheless terrifying. Fuzzy Rafferty, our cousin Brandon’s neighbor up on the reservation, was threatened by some boss with getting drowned face-down in a toilet if he told anyone where two bodies were buried in Montana. On another page, in a different setting, to different characters, Rafferty bragged about knowing. There was no telling which words on these pages were true and which weren’t. I closed my eyes, thinking I’d have to make an excuse to come back later or the next day, alone, with Mom’s car; reading through the transcripts would take hours, and I needed to do it in a different room, with Brad there—not alone. With Brad, who of course had had to look at all of it alone. Now Dad had been out in the living room talking to Brad for some time, no doubt wanting to know what I was doing, why I was taking so long.
“Where you been?” Dad asked as I walked back to the living room, his eyes glancing over from the baseball game as it flickered to a commercial. “All right,” he said to Brad. “I’ll catch the rest of this in town; don’t let the Yankees get another run on the Twins. You need any groceries tomorrow?”
“I’m fine,” Brad said. “Mom keeps sending out food—tell her to go easy, all right?” He looked at me and asked, “You ok?”
“Yeah, fine.” I smiled, and said I hoped he could sleep. “You sure you’re all right out here?” I asked, as if there were an alternative.
“Oh yeah, never better. I’ll just close the drapes again.” He tilted his head and winked.
Walking with Dad to the truck, I tried to think of an excuse to borrow Mom’s car the next day and drive out separately from him, so he wouldn’t know that Brad had wanted me to look at the Discovery materials. I wasn’t even sure Dad knew about them. I needed some time with Brad when Dad wouldn’t walk in on us going over the notebooks and photos and insist on seeing them too.
We rode down the gravel drive and out of the windbreak, toward the broad field planted with winter wheat now. That field across from the house had always seemed to stretch beyond the farmyard as far east as the sky, just the two towering old oaks right next to each other out in the middle of it at a low spot the tractors maneuvered around, where enough moisture sometimes stood after rain, sinking in to let the two trees keep surviving. Dad turned, headed down the long hill from the farm to the river, then turned right again onto the highway and began to pick up speed as clouds raced over the bluffs above. I listened to our tires humming on the blacktop, the air coming in Dad’s cracked-open window, and watched, on our left, just beyond the railroad running along the highway, the big river making its way on down the continent from up in the Bitterroot. I said I thought Brad was holding up on the surface, but wondered how he was really doing.
“Hard to know,” Dad said. “He’s got a tough row to hoe now,” as though this was a final word on the subject.
The sky dimmed, and farmyard lights twinkled here and there along the road; no other cars coming or going. Dad looked far ahead through the darkening windshield, as if he might see his way to Honolulu. His cheekbones were still prominent, his firm jaw set as usual, something locked there a long time ago.
The following morning I spent alone with Mom while Dad went out to check on the fields and Brad’s work. Mom was nervous about Brad, saying she was glad I was going to see him by myself, and she suggested questions I might ask him, but at times while we talked she leaned her head back on the couch and closed her eyes, and my mind wandered to my having been left out at the old farmhouse at night, when I was so young. Each time she opened her eyes again I told her Brad would be ok, but we both knew there was no knowing.
She had managed to convince Dad to steer clear of the farmhouse when I went out there, that it would be good for Brad and me to have some time alone. Brad sat in the living room beside me while I paged through the blue binders more carefully and made notes, and a list of questions for him, and he made notes in response to my notes. I looked again at the wretched, deranged photographs, then forced them all to a small corner of my mind.
For hours we wrote notes back and forth, as if the whole house required silence, as my uncle in the old vanished cellar once had. Late in the afternoon, I drove Brad to the north boundary of the farm, beyond which he was not allowed to go, and we sat in Mom’s car beside the old north cattle dam whose surface rippled in wind in the near-dark. Even there he was reluctant to talk much, partly for my sake, he said. I had a pen and my notepad, and we wrote notes back and forth again in the front seat there, but now many of his responses were simply “I don’t know,” or just a shaking of his head.
Finally I whispered, “You know, your counselor at the treatment center suggested to me that the Feds might be figuring you—the one guy not from the rez in this so-called conspiracy— as some kind of big operator.”
He laughed. “What kind of operator fries his brain the way I was doing?”
“That’s exactly what the counselor said.”
I didn’t want him in that frightening farmhouse anymore, much less anyplace worse. Canada’s only four hours away I wrote down. I could rent a car and drive you.
“No,” he whispered harshly. “Lawyer says just talking with you—or anybody—about something like that would make you a co-conspirator, if they’re still out here listening for me on their receiver.” He shook his head once again and looked outside his window, then turned back to me, whispering again. “Five more years for me, and five for you too, you dumb shit. I love you Sis, but leave the foolishness to me. You got no experience with it.” He pulled from his pocket the pack of smokes with his bic tucked into the cellophane and laughed. “Maybe prison’ll cure me of these too,” he said, tapping a cigarette on his knee. “The treatment center was right about these: the hardest drug to beat.”
I took his other hand, and he leaned over to hug me. I started the engine to distract us both from my tears and drove south toward the farmhouse again. He lit the cigarette, rolled down his window and took a few drags, then just before I turned into his driveway he flicked it out, sparks disappearing along the gravel.
Debra Nystrom is the author of four collections of poetry, and her nonfiction, fiction and poetry have been published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Slate, The Kenyon Review, Narrative, Georgia Review, Yale Review, Agni, Harvard Review and numerous other journals and anthologies. She has taught for many years in the University of Virginia’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. She is working on a memoir.