About a year later, Glenn’s oldest boy called him on a Saturday afternoon. That was rare. His boys didn’t talk to him much anymore.
“Mom’s drinking,” the boy said in his small child’s voice. “There are motorcycles in the yard.”
Glenn jumped in his car. When he pulled up at his former house, he saw four motorcycles on the lawn and a few more on the sidewalk. A biker stepped out of the front door and said, “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m her ex-husband,” Glenn said, standing in the middle of the yard.
“Then you better go.”
“I’m just here for my kids.”
A couple more bikers stepped onto the porch. Two of them stepped down to the lawn. “I don’t want any rash judgments,” Glenn said, holding out his empty hands. “There are children in that house, and I just want them safe.”
There was a kid’s baseball bat lying in the grass. Glenn didn’t notice it until one of the bikers picked it up and stepped toward him. When he started to swing, Glenn didn’t run. Instead, he stepped in, ripped the bat from the biker’s hand, and brought it down on the man’s knee. His friends leapt off the porch. If there had been one more of them, or if they’d been sober, Glenn might have been in trouble. But as a bouncer, he knew how to handle drunks. Before he had time to think, a second biker was on the ground with a dislocated elbow, and the other two were kicking their rides into gear. Glenn threw down the baseball bat, walked into his old house, retrieved his children, and drove them back to his apartment.
Three hours later, a policeman knocked on his door. It was an officer Glenn knew from his days in training.
Glenn told him the story. The policeman said, “Well, Glenn, that’s fine, but her parents are there now, and you need to take those kids home, because there’s a kidnapping charge filed against you.”
After that, life in Sioux City became unbearable for Glenn Albertson.
One day, when he was still working for his father-in-law’s insurance business, an older man had stopped Glenn on the street. “Just wanted to tell you, young man,” he said, checking out Glenn’s suit, “that you look pretty sharp. You got a minute?”
“Yes, I do,” Glenn said.
They sat down together. The man was filthy and disheveled, wearing a tattered cream-colored suit. His shoes hadn’t been shined in a long, long time.
“I used to be a banker,” the older man said, handing Glenn a business card. It read VICE PRESIDENT, FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF CHICAGO. “My father was a banker, and his father was a banker before him. Everyone I associated with was a banker. That’s all I knew. But when the Depression hit, my bank went under. I lost my job.” Glenn nodded and waited.
“What do you do, young man?”
“I sell insurance.”
“Well, I’m going to tell you something in case that doesn’t work out for you: Learn as much about as many things as you can, because that way you will never have trouble finding a job.”
Glenn thanked the man for the advice and handed him back his business card, along with some loose change. He never saw him again, and he never knew if the man had really been a banker or was just an old drunk with a business card, but his words stuck with him. Glenn never went to college, but he became a student of life. When his boys were young, he learned to cut hair at barber school. He knew police work and security. He could sell insurance, tend bar, and fix just about any make or model of car. He knew carpentry, plumbing, and just enough electrical to get out of trouble. “Learn to do.” That was his motto. “Learn
and
do” was his creed. But he had been born in a place where it was a short, easy path to the bottom and a long, hard road to the top, and if ever there was a time when he could have taken the lower path, it was after his divorce. He was angry enough, and hurt enough, to throw it away in a bottle of booze. Because it’s easy to learn a new trade, but it’s hard to learn a new way of life. And when the going got hard, the men of Pierce Street hit the bars. Glenn? He may have worked on Lower Fourth, but he spent his nights in a diner near his apartment instead of on a barstool. Three years later, he married a waitress there and moved with her to St. Petersburg, Florida.
“There were too many ghosts,” he said of his decision to leave Sioux City. “Too many people running around thinking they knew something. I just got tired.”
In Florida, Glenn worked construction, until the owner of the gym where he worked out, seeing how popular he was, offered him a job. Within a year, he was managing the place: selling memberships, changing pool filters, repairing the hot tub. He went to classes for six months and became a certified massage therapist. He worked seven days a week, not just for the money but because he was a blue-collar guy from Sioux City, Iowa, and he loved hard work.
When the investors pulled out, and the health club shut down, Glenn moved his family to Texas, where a friend had a contract to repaint the Dallas city schools. He was thirty-five years old, and he didn’t have a single key on his key ring. No house. No apartment. No bank account. He didn’t even own a car. But he had the important things: a wife, a new baby son, and a family dog. It was never about the job for Glenn Anderson. He could be happy doing just about anything. It was about having a family. They were all Glenn needed to feel at home.
But Texas wasn’t home. Florida had never been home either. Not really. Home was Sioux City, Iowa, where his parents had eventually purchased a small white house on a busy corner, and his kids from his first marriage were growing up in his old four-bedroom split-level ranch without him. After a few years, when the painting contract expired, Glenn and his new family moved back to northwest Iowa: back to the cold winters, the hard granite, and the questions from old friends. He went back to his old line of work, repairing cars. His wife drove regularly to visit her parents in Michigan, always taking their son along. The trips were a financial hardship, and he missed his boy terribly, but Glenn didn’t mind since it kept his wife happy. He was a year away, he figured, from the white picket fence, the big backyard, and the family home.
Her cousin was the one who spilled the beans. “She’s seeing her old high school boyfriend, you know,” the cousin told him. “She never got over him.”
Glenn didn’t know. Despite the collapse of his first marriage, Glenn Albertson was still too honest and trusting to consider the possibility that his second wife was cheating on him, too.
At least this time, he was warned. When his wife told him she was moving to Michigan and taking their child, Glenn didn’t ask why. He didn’t fight for his boy because he knew from experience that was a battle he couldn’t win. They just split the sheets and moved on.
He tried one more time. This time he married a friend, a woman he had known for more than ten years. He might have loved her, and she said she loved him, so marrying her seemed like a good thing to do. They weren’t young, so they started trying to have a child right away. After a few years of heartache and stress, she got pregnant. Then she lost the baby. For a month, they held each other and cried. Then the doctor told them she wouldn’t get another chance; they would never have a child of their own. It was devastating news.
They took in foster children, infants and young kids but also older kids who had been shuffled through the system and were desperate to form attachments to someone. Foster parenting was rewarding, but it was also hard. Glenn would dedicate himself to a child, work to create safety and security and a feeling of family, become strongly bonded and invested in his or her life, and then watch the child ushered away, often for reasons he couldn’t comprehend. They fostered eleven children. Eleven stints of joy; eleven heartbreaks. The twelfth, they decided to adopt. She was a full-blood Sioux, born to a young mother unable to care for her, and Glenn was at the hospital the day she entered the world. As soon as he saw her, he knew she was the one. His heart just opened and gobbled her up. His wife knew it, too. This is what she had been waiting for: a daughter of her own. They named her Jenny, and when they held her, it was like the world closed around them and was complete.
Or so Glenn thought. He didn’t understand the real state of his marriage until he came home early one day and overheard his wife talking to her mother in the kitchen.
“I don’t need him now,” he heard his wife say.
“Then get rid of him,” her mother replied. “You have your daughter, and you can get his money. What more do you want?”
“Nothing.”
With that one word, another door slammed shut on Glenn Albertson, in his life and in his heart. He was fifty years old, he had been married to three women for a total of twenty-four years, and what did he have to show for it? All his life, he had wanted nothing more than love, nothing more than a family.
I’m not going to do it anymore
, he told himself. He was done.
There are a million ways for a man to get knocked down. Not down for the count, but knocked down hard enough that when he gets back up, he isn’t the man he was before. Maybe he’s better. Maybe he’s worse. Maybe he’s worse for a while, then he gets better, and he ends up better than he ever would have been. Or maybe he gets up staggering, wounded beyond repair. After all, if there are a million ways to get knocked down, there are at least a thousand ways to get back up.
You think about things like that in northwest Iowa, a region that’s been knocked down more than a few times over the years. In my lifetime, the biggest blow was to the family farm. My father was a proud descendant of a line of farmers, but in the 1950s the advent of enormous threshers and reapers changed both the nature and finances of farming. Unable to afford the big machines, our production held steady against falling prices, undercutting our family’s foundation. Eventually, my father was forced to sell out to a neighbor, who cut down our trees, knocked down our house, and plowed under our land.
In Sioux City, the same forces—the consolidation and industrialization of farming and ranching—caused changes almost as drastic. When the Missouri River was the primary artery of the Upper Midwest, the town was a major transportation hub, a rough-and-tumble crossroads where cowboys and boat captains met whiskey and women. The stockyards were some of the busiest in the world, and even in a town of 120,000 people, the cows often outnumbered the citizens ten to one. The slaughter-boss mansions on Rose Hill were built of solid granite, but so were the churches. Even Central High School, built of Sioux Falls granite in 1893, was a castle, complete with towers and turrets.
But after World War II, the Missouri River began to lose its pull. Highways replaced railroads and steamboats, decentralizing agricultural production and driving ranchers and farmers closer to their home fields. The town flooded repeatedly, until a major project was finally undertaken to change the flow of the tributaries meeting the Missouri. The slaughter business declined, along with the factories that supported it and, eventually, the population. Sioux City shrank from 120,000 people to 100,000, then down to 90,000. The airport closed a gate, dropping to a few flights a day. In time, the downtown would be revitalized and Lower Fourth Street turned into a high-end shopping and entertainment district, with even the former El Forastero motorcycle clubhouse converted to pricey condominiums. But outside downtown, the ice still cracked the steep roads, no matter how often they were repaved, and the Arctic wind tore through the storefronts on Pierce Street. Most of the Rose Hill mansions were cut up into apartments. Sioux Tools closed down. The bakery on the corner across from Glenn’s parents’ house became a late-night convenience store, its lights blaring out over the shoddy gas pumps until 3:00 A.M. Glenn’s father, a hard-drinking, hard-laughing, hardworking man of old Sioux City, developed an inoperable tumor on his liver.
Years earlier, before Glenn had his own family, his father had moved out. Glenn never knew why; he assumed it had something to do with alcohol. For a while, he thought he’d never see his father again. But when Glenn Albertson, Sr., came back three years later, he was a new man. Still a drinker and a worker, but kinder and more understanding. More appreciative of what he had at home. He romanced his wife into falling in love with him again, remarried her, and they were happy for the rest of his life. He won over his son again—Glenn had always loved his father, no matter what—and now cherished their relationship. Even when he was away in Florida and Texas, Glenn called his father every week. After his third divorce, they started a painting business together, often sharing hotel rooms for weeks at a time. They painted McGuire Air Force Base in Trenton, New Jersey. They painted the high school in Madison, Nebraska, including Glenn’s beautiful freehand mural of a dragon, the school’s mascot. When he saw Donnelly Marketing in South Sioux City, Glenn thought they’d never finish. The building was a block square and three stories high, without windows. Working side by side, just the two of them, they finished the job in only three months, complete with hand-lettering.
But the most important job Glenn ever worked was painting his father’s beloved 1984 Buick LeSabre after a hailstorm. For a week, Glenn banged out every dent while his father leaned against the wall and watched. He painted the car burgundy, slowly and exactly, even removing the gold pinstripe his father hated and replacing it with a metallic maroon. When Glenn was done, his father took the car out and showed it to all his friends. He was so amazed at what his son had done—so proud—that he wanted everyone to see it. Glenn had fought for approval all his life, and he’d finally won it at forty. A few years later, Glenn Albertson, Sr., died.
Shortly thereafter, Glenn moved in with his mother. They were both in transition: Christel Albertson from life as a wife, Glenn from decades of trying to be a husband and father. Glenn ran errands for his mother, made repairs around the house, and occasionally cooked a meal, even though his mother was by far the best cook in the neighborhood. His room was a monk’s cell, as he called it: a bed, a dresser, no radio or television, nothing on the walls. At night, he played guitar, fingering the frets for a few minutes while he developed those old calluses, the ones that help you bend the chords. During the day, he worked on New Car Row, the three blocks of Sixth Street between the railroad tracks where all the car dealerships had their showrooms. As the years passed, he worked at almost every dealership on the strip, taking comfort in the routine of inspecting, diagnosing, taking apart, and putting together. And if a Porsche had to be driven fast every now and then, just to test it for a client, well then, Glenn never complained.