“Yes, Nils, it is real,” I said, and I said it softly, because the fireworks were still blooming over the fairgrounds. “Eight point eight million dollars. June. Every rig, every crew, every employee.” On the deck, forty people stood with their wine glasses halfway to their mouths. “The International shotcrete rig behind the garage of your son is unit four. It is on line four of that schedule, and it belongs to the company that bought me out. Henrik is selling it for one hundred eighty nine thousand dollars, along with a mixer and a skid steer. None of them are his.”
Nils said nothing. A high flash from the fairgrounds lit his face, white and then green, and I saw that he was frightened. Henrik, thirty years old and tall as a doorway, stared at the rail. “Uncle Arlo, I was going to explain,” he said. “Pao told me you came on Thursday night with a story about me okaying it,” I said. “You told him I was selling off before the bank got it. There is no bank, Henrik. There was only an uncle who taught you to shoot a perfect pool wall in four hours.” He covered his eyes. “I wanted a company with my name on it,” he said. “I know,” I said. “You could have asked.”
Kristen walked across the deck and stood beside me. She is a tall, composed woman with a voice like a bell, and every head turned. “Nils,” she said, “for thirty two years you have called my husband the pool guy. At every Thanksgiving. At every State Fair. At the wedding of our daughter.” She laid her hand on my shoulder. “His name is Arlo Vang. He came to this state as a boy and pulled himself up out of a rented backhoe. Say it.” Nils set his wine down on the rail. “Arlo Vang,” he said, hoarsely. “I have been small. I am sorry.” The fireworks boomed behind us.
A single sheet of paper laid on a deck rail gave one nephew the weekend to bring his uncle back to the party in Falcon Heights.
I gave Henrik my terms on the deck, under the booming sky. The rig, the mixer and the skid steer would be back at my yard in Roseville by noon on Monday. Lindberg Aquatic Design would be closed, and the black paint scrubbed from the tank. He would tell the lawyers of the buyer the whole truth. If he did all of it, I would not press charges, and I would ask the company to keep him on as a rig operator at the same pay, because he was the finest wall shooter I had ever trained, and a skill like that should not be wasted.
On Monday morning, I waited at the gate in Roseville with a cup of coffee. The mixer arrived first, towed by Henrik himself. The skid steer came on a flatbed. And at nine, the white and blue International crawled through the gate with its tank scrubbed clean and the number four visible once more. Pao, my yard manager, climbed up into the cab and checked the hours on the pump. When he climbed down, he took off his cap in the old Hmong way, as a sign of respect. “Uncle Arlo,” he said, “nothing is missing. Everything is home.” I laid my hand on the wet tank, and I felt the whole thing hum.
That Wednesday, an old woman I had never met rang my doorbell. She was ninety if she was a day, wearing a green coat and carrying a dish wrapped in foil. Her name was Mrs. Lindberg, the mother of Nils and Kristen, and she walked with a cane carved from birch. “Arlo, I am the grandmother in this house,” she said, “and I have been ashamed since June. I raised my son better than that.” She pushed the dish into my hands. It was a rice hotdish, and it was still warm. We sat at the kitchen table and ate it together, and I do not remember when I last ate something that tasted so much like forgiveness.
At the Sunday gathering of my family, the Vang clan filled the whole backyard. Three hundred cousins, aunts and uncles, with pots of sticky rice and platters of egg rolls, under a string of paper lanterns. My older brother Tou, who farmed with our father in the old days, stood up and tapped his glass. “My brother arrived in Minnesota with nothing,” he said. “Today he employs seventy people, and he sold the company so that every one of them would keep a job.” He raised the glass. “To Arlo, the pool man.” The whole yard cheered, and this time the name sounded like a title.
The money consequences were fair. Henrik repaid the buyer for the fuel and hauling, about fourteen thousand dollars, and he agreed to run the rig for a year without overtime. Nils sold his second car and a share in a lake cabin to cover the legal fees of his son. When he tried to hand me a check for the cost of my trouble, I shook my head and pointed at the garage. “Two hundred chairs, Nils,” I said. “Carry them yourself next year.” He laughed, a short startled laugh, and tucked the check back into his coat.
In the name of my mother, Nou Vang, who passed twelve years ago and who never learned to swim because there was no pool in the mountains of Laos, I started the Nou Fund. It pays for swimming lessons, lifejackets and pool passes for children in Ramsey County whose families came from refugee camps and mountain villages. In the first summer, we taught one hundred sixty children to swim. A girl of eight, in a bright red suit, floated on her back in the shallow end of a pool for the first time, laughing at the sky, and her grandmother cried on the bleachers.
The following August, I attended the State Fair party at the Lindberg house on Snelling Avenue, and I walked in through the front door. Nils met me in the driveway, in shirtsleeves, with two hundred chairs stacked beside the garage. “Arlo,” he said, “I carried them all myself this year. Henrik helped.” Henrik, beside him, grinned and waved. I walked up to the deck, where a seat had been saved for me at the front rail. When the first fireworks went up over the fairgrounds, everyone on that deck looked at the sky, and I sat among them, and I let myself watch.
