Karma
A work of fiction by Aaron Backes
Prologue
“Man, how bittersweet is Karma!”
- “Karma” by Sevendust from the album Cold Day Memory
January 10, 2012
The bitter winds of another harsh Minnesota winter blew across the frozen Lake Krendle, a mid-sized lake that was just one of the state’s 10,000. Today’s projected high temperature was supposed to be a balmy negative fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, according to the ditzy blond weather lady, Maci Hughes, the early morning “Minnesota Metro News” meteorologist on the Twin Cities CBS Channel 8. Coupled with the bitter wind chill, it felt like fucking forty degrees below zero. Thankfully, it wasn’t snowing yet, although a couple of inches of fresh powder were in the forecast for tomorrow. It was too damn cold to snow much more than that, I guess.
A cold sun shone across the frozen lake, a light which I could see scant glimpses of through the small smudged window of the fish house I was currently sharing with my two good buddies Eric and Ron. We were fishing for panfish like we usually do once or twice a week during the winter. The fish haven’t been biting too well today, but we didn’t seem to mind. Besides, with all we’ve been through lately, it just felt good to get away for a while, drink a few beers, shoot the shit and take our minds off of the outside world, at least for a few hours anyway.
“Man, that wind is a motherfucking bitch,” Ron exclaimed while shivering nervously. His shoulder length grey hair swayed slightly as he shivered. A California native, Ron had only been living in Minnesota for five years, moving himself, his wife and their identical twin daughters from sunny La Jolla, CA to the sometimes aptly-named town of Autumn, MN when our now former employers relocated his position. He told me once he’d never even seen snow in person, except for a few ski weekends in the mountains of northern California, until he moved to Minnesota. “Why the hell are we still here? Winter in Minnesota sucks ass!”
“Yeah, no shit,” said Eric as he half-heartedly fidgeted with his fishing pole and nursed his beer. “We should’ve taken off for somewhere warm, like Florida or Mexico or something,” he said, taking another swig from his can of Dark Harvest beer and inching closer to the space heater that kept us from freezing our extremities off in the fish house. “I know I’d sure like to be laying on a warm beach somewhere right now!”
“That would be nice,” I replied as I fished around in the cooler for another cold one. Ideally at that time, we should have been taking a mid-winter’s vacation someplace nice and tropical, although we all knew we couldn’t leave the state. At least, not until the murder investigation was over, anyway.
Part 1
Chapter 1
How did it all begin, you ask? Well, it’s a long, complicated story. I can’t believe half the shit that happened. If I hadn’t lived through it, I’d have thought it was all a dream, or maybe some Stephen King story, the kind that keeps you up all night reading the entire thing from cover to cover, because the story just draws you in, so much that you feel like you’re a part of it. Might as well start from the beginning, I suppose. That’s how most storytellers do, anyway. Be pretty silly of me to start at the end, now wouldn’t it?
The ball started rolling almost three years ago at ITU, our former employers. ITU stood for International Technologies Unlimited, although there are now a few other choice words we’ve come up with now to creatively spell out that abbreviation. You can make up your own if you’d like, of course.
ITU began out of a rented warehouse in Yonkers, NY in the mid 1970’s as a small commodities trader. When I started there, they were known as an international insurance and securities broker, offering commodities in offices from Wyoming to Sweden, and almost everywhere in between. They had offices in thirty-two states and the one I worked at was the only branch in Minnesota. Besides their main lines of financial and insurance services, they also offered product warranties, computer software, and multiple other miscellaneous products and services.
When friends and family have asked me what I did at ITU, it was kind of hard to explain. Sometimes I said I was a jack of all trades, master of none. Other times, I said that I wore many hats. A few coworkers called me “Mr. Nice Guy.” To Angela Engelbretsen, the “grandmother I never had” (even though she was barely old enough to be an older sister to me) in Accounting, I was a veritable saint, especially considering all the crap I’d put up with in the long run. She always quick with compliments!
As far as what my actual job was, I was the chief administrative clerk for the Insurance and Financial Services – Upper Midwest Division. I basically did all of the office work, the “behind the scenes” details for the six sales reps (one each for Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota and Michigan), the local level marketing consultant, and our regional sales manager. The Minnesota office was the only one in the Upper Midwest (except for a small billing and accounting office in Wausau, Wisconsin), so it made sense to base the reps for all of those states in one central location.
My main task every day was to log the sales data from each rep into the company’s database. Sometimes that involved deciphering some interesting chicken scratch scribbled by certain sales reps whose penmanship skills left a lot to be desired. After logging all of that information, I still had to (according to company policy) file the physical contracts in our file cabinets. I also had to scan and print each contract and save them in the respective file cabinets. I didn’t mind the tedious aspect of the job, although it made me think that for a company who emphasized the option of paperless billing to its customers, they sure killed a lot of trees!
About twenty years ago, the building was a warehouse and manufacturing facility for various automobile, truck, motorcycle and RV parts and accessories. It even had a small three-stall garage for repairs and maintenance for fleet vehicles, and had a two-stall car wash, before that part of the building was later torn down. It was part of a small national chain that went belly-up around the time of the dot-com bubble’s burst about ten years ago. When that business went under, ITU bought the building a few years later. I haven’t found anything remaining from that old parts franchise, but a few coworkers swore that the building was haunted by a couple of workers from that business. If you ever visit that building now, you may still find a stray desk or filing cabinet, although I imagine most of the building’s been vandalized or occupied by a stray homeless person or now since then. It’s been vacant for quite a while now. The last time I drove by there, it almost looked like a bomb had hit it, which in a way, I guess it kind of did!
Chapter 2
I started working at ITU about two and a half years ago. I’d just moved to Central Minnesota from Duluth after a nasty divorce. I still love my ex-wife Candace and will have some feelings for her, but she fell out of love with me while we were still married. Shit happens, I guess. She later married my old grade school buddy Greg Hansen. He has a good construction and remodeling business going in both Duluth and Two Harbors, so Candi can continue being a part-time substitute teacher and spend more time with our two boys Will and Austin.
When Candi first told me she had feelings for Greg, I blew up. We were at one of our favorite restaurants downtown, celebrating a rare night out without the kids when she dropped the bomb on me right after we’d finished the main course, and man did it hit me hard. I felt like I’d been kicked in the nuts with a sledgehammer! We’d been together for almost fifteen years and been married for ten, so of course I took the news pretty hard. I almost caused a scene at the restaurant, and narrowly avoided getting us kicked out. The manager of the restaurant was a friend of a coworker of mine at the time, so of course word got around town, and I had to lay low at work for about a week! My office door at the car lot remained closed most of the time I was at work, because it was the only way I could get any work done without some snarky comment by my less than sensitive coworkers.
The next weekend, I ran into Greg at a McDonald’s in Duluth, where I was taking the kids to lunch after treating them to an animated Disney matinee in town. He was there on a lunch break from one of his remodeling jobs with a couple of guys in his work crew. He made an effort to say hi and make some small talk, but because I had the boys with me, I couldn’t tell him what was really on my mind. I mentally pictured cursing him out, and then picking him up by his coveralls and tossing him head-first out of Mickey D’s. Thankfully I didn’t carry out that idea, or else I probably would’ve been arrested. Gee, that wouldn’t be traumatic for the kids now, would it?
Greg later sent me a couple of emails and a few odd texts, tiptoeing around the fact that he and Candi were an item, offering a few half-hearted apologies. He even offered to buy me a beer at one of the local bars we used to hang out at to make it up to me, but to me the damage was already done. I should have known something was up weeks earlier when he “unfriended” me on Facebook, but social media’s something I have a hard time getting into – my kids are better at that kind of stuff than I am, anyway, although I knew they were far too young to be monkeying with that stuff.
A few weeks later, I came home from a rather disappointing day at work to find Candi still in bed, nursing a hangover from a “girl’s night out” with her girlfriends the night before. While I was sitting on my side of the bed (the kids were still in school for a couple more hours), my foot landed on a piece of clothing under the bed. I kneeled down, and found a pair of boxers that weren’t my brand. Furious, I coerced Candi into revealing that Greg had slept with her a couple of days before when I was at work. Turns out, this wasn’t the first time either.
A couple of months before, when I took the kids to visit my folks in Lakeland, Florida during their school’s spring break, Candi stayed behind. She told me that she had some student evaluations to work on, and that she was going to spend some time organizing the spare room of our house that she’d been using as a home office. At the time, I didn’t think much of it, but lying there in bed nursing a hangover, Candi confessed that Greg had slept over all week that week until the kids and I returned. At that moment, I realized my marriage was over.
Things unraveled from there rather quickly – my marriage fell apart, not to mention my friendship with Greg. (His marriage ended soon after too, although he and his wife Sherri had been living apart for two years. They were in the same house, but slept in separate bedrooms. They had no kids, and his wife was as shocked as I was, so I guess I can’t feel too badly for him.) After I signed the divorce papers (we worked out an arrangement with our respective lawyers to share custody of the kids – they’d still live and go to school in Duluth and I could spend time with them on weekends), I decided that I had to get the hell out of town, not knowing when or if I’d ever return. I quit my job selling new and used cars at the Duluth Automart too. At that point in my life, I just wanted a new start.
After packing what was left of my life’s possessions after the divorce into a U-Haul truck, I decided to head to Autumn, MN because my old college roommate Ramon lived there. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, but he was the kind of good, reliable friend who understood exactly what I’d been going through, because he went through a bitter divorce himself a few years ago. He told me I could crash on his couch for a few days. He also told me about a job at UTI that he’d recommend me for. Candi used to give me grief constantly because I never finished college (I went to two semesters of general education classes at UMD but dropped out to spend time with my mom after she had a stroke), but I’ve been working at a lot of different jobs, ever since my dad had me start mowing my Grandma Hazel’s lawn during the summer I turned thirteen. Hence, the “jack of all trades, master of none” moniker.
At the time, I was also offered a job with another firm in town selling life and health insurance for Seventh National Trust. I’d just been selling insurance for MNWI Co. in Duluth for five years before I got into the auto industry, and I really had no interest in selling insurance again. It was easy money for me. I had a natural ability to sell, and I had built a good client base, but I really got bored with it. After all the turmoil in my life, I just wanted a fresh start. Looking back on how things all unfolded now, however, I kinda think that I made the wrong choice.
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