“No one ever does. It just kind of sneaks up on you.”
“Everything went from bad to worse so quickly. First, the mines closed—I suppose we all saw that coming, but we were still unprepared for the consequences. Babbitt, the City of Babbitt, was hit hard. It has a high school built for two thousand students and an enrollment of a hundred and sixty. Last time I looked, a four-bedroom house was selling for forty thousand dollars and no takers. A couple of months ago the city’s only grocery and drug stores burned down—maybe they’ll be rebuilt, I don’t know. In the meantime, people have to drive twenty miles to Krueger or Ely just to get a gallon of milk.
“Then the paper mill in Krueger closed, and no one saw that coming. Two hundred and forty employees out of work, and that’s not counting the loggers and truckers and all the others that depended on it. The mill was profitable, too; it was making money producing cardboard boxes for Kellogg, Budweiser, FedEx. Its parent company filed for bankruptcy for reasons that had nothing to do with us, though, and they just boarded it up. We were all hoping the company would sell the mill; we were told that was the plan. Learned that was a lie when the company decided to turn off the heat last January to save a few dollars—turn off the heat in the dead of a Minnesota winter. No matter how hard they tried to drain and winterize, there were so many feet of piping and odd angles—water pipes burst, equipment was destroyed, infrastructure damaged. The mill was built thirty years ago. Today, the place looks like ancient ruins. No one is going to buy it now—reopen it.
“All this on top of the housing crisis. Unemployment in Krueger is over twenty percent. It’s about sixteen percent across the Range. One in six people is living below the poverty level. The government says it’s a recession. Sure looks like a depression to me. My business—did David tell you I was a real estate agent, that I specialized in selling lake homes? My business went away, too.
“We’re all supposed to keep a positive attitude, though. We’re all supposed to carry on. That’s what they tell us. Carry on. How? With what? There aren’t any jobs, Dyson, minimum wage or otherwise, and there aren’t going to be any. That’s why the Range is losing population and the Cities are growing at double digits, because that’s where all the jobs are. You either leave the only home you’ve ever known, where your parents lived and your grandparents and great-grandparents lived, or…”
“Or you steal,” I said. “You don’t need to justify yourself to me, Josie.”
“Is that what I’m doing?”
“My experience, the reason most people are honest, seem to be honest, is because they’ve never had a reason—or at least the opportunity—to be anything else.”
“You’re saying we’re all thieves at heart?”
“Not at all. Some people are painfully honest. That lovely little girl asleep in there—I bet she’s been against what you’re doing from the very start.”
“Jillian doesn’t understand the real world.”
“From the bruise on her chin I’d say she’s learning fast.”
“Roy. I suppose it’s been tougher on him than the rest of us.”
“Oh yeah?”
“He was in the army.”
“I gathered that.”
“You did?”
“He’s always standing at parade rest.”
“You don’t miss much, do you, Dyson? After he retired from the army, they gave him a management position at the paper mill. They hired him to systematically lay off the workforce so they wouldn’t get their hands dirty. He hated doing it, just hated it, but he was used to following orders. He became terribly depressed. It didn’t help that since he was the man handing out the pink slips, people held him personally responsible for what was happening. He was the face of the company; people didn’t know whom else to blame. When he finished the job, the company fired him, too—fired him in an e-mail. This is a man who’s known structure his entire life. Now he’s adrift.”
“Isn’t that just too damn bad for Roy?”
“You’re not a particularly compassionate character, are you, Dyson?”
“Compassion has its downside. For example, it makes you perfectly willing to forgive Roy for abusing his wife.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. I meant—it’s hard sometimes knowing what to do.”
“Think so? If Jill were my cousin, I’d know what to do. I’d beat the sonuvabitch to death for hitting her, and I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass what drove him to it. But as you suggest, I’m not particularly virtuous.”