“Not today, big man,” Steve said. Jeremy’d been “big man” ever since the day he’d helped his father change a tire when he was eight years old. “It’s going to snow all night. If it warms up after noon this thing’ll fall right off.”
The gutter wasn’t going to fall right off if they waited until daylight to fix it: Steve knew it, Jeremy knew it. But they also both knew to keep busy in winter if they could. Mom had gone off new Highway 30 into a telephone pole in the snow six years ago, in 1994. Jeremy’d been sixteen.
He put his gloves back on and held the ladder while his dad drove in the nails. There wasn’t much wind but a little breeze, maybe; it moved the snow around at his feet. “Get home late today?” he said.
“No,” said Steve. “Just didn’t think of it until after dark. Saw the forecast.” Then there wasn’t much else to say, and the hammer pounding dully became the only sound you could hear in the neighborhood besides the occasional creak of a branch.
*
Later on they watched Reindeer Games: Jeremy brought home new releases when they were something his dad might like. Spy stuff. Cop movies, sometimes. They got a late start because of the rain gutter; the movie wasn’t over until nearly midnight.
They both found Reindeer Games confusing, and their attention wandered as it ran. They talked through the slow parts. Afterwards they tried to answer each other’s questions about it, but they couldn’t get it straight. Then Dad started in about the job.
“There’s soil labs, water labs right here in town,” he said.
“Dad,” said Jeremy. “I have a job.”
“Sure. Not a whole lot in it, though, you know.”
“I know.” He picked up the remote and hit REWIND. “You’re right. I don’t know.”
“Well, I saw some postings, anyway.”
“I was thinking about starting DMACC next semester.”
“Well, you said that last year, though.”
The VCR auto-ejected and Jeremy put the tape back into its case. “I know,” he said. “You’re right.”
In some versions of this story, there’s an argument here, because Jeremy feels like his father is being nosy, and because he feels ashamed of being twenty-two years old and not having made anything of himself yet; he’s resentful when something reminds him about it. In these variations Jeremy tells his father to give him a little breathing room, and Steve Heldt, who is a good father and who shares, with his son, an incapacitating loss, thinks to himself: Stay out of your son’s way; he’ll find his way if you let him. In some other versions Jeremy stays awake for a couple of hours, maybe watching another movie he brought home but unable to focus on it, and in the morning he tells his father to write down some of those job listings, and he ends up getting a position at a soil testing lab in Newton, eventually transferring to a bigger lab back home in Nevada.
In this version he keeps his job at the Video Hut, and then something else happens.
2
Story County was prairie until the mid-1800s. In school they taught a little about the Iowa tribes, but it was hard to get a clear picture of who exactly’d been in Story County when the settlers got there. There had to have been somebody, though. That word Iowa, that was a native word, and lots of places throughout the state were named after tribes: Sioux City. Tama. Black Hawk. Plus it was a known thing that tribes had been removed from their land all over the state at some point during the westward expansion. But they didn’t really dwell on this too much in high school, so all Jeremy really had was a rough outline. Few details, or none.