are domestically dependent sovereign nations. They own reservation land collectively, not as individuals, and as bankers it’s neither your fault that it is this way nor your responsibility to fix it. You can’t change the legal system or the very unfortunate history of the United States when it comes to the treatment of Native Americans. You are required to work within it, and you have a legitimate business need to protect your customers’ assets to the best of your ability. Now, I’ll look for an answer from a brave soul.” JW faced the audience, his hands in his pockets.
“Is this redlining? Is it a crime?”
His shirt was a brilliant white, his tie a lavender slash. He was almost done, and on time. Just a few minutes left for them to understand, his lessons slipping into their thinking, their mental scales tilting. Finally the balding banker replied in a voice that was barely audible.
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
His look admitted the truth of this, but nevertheless he seemed defeated by it. JW saw Jorgenson make a note in his cell phone as he watched the man’s reticence. Jorgenson viewed anyone who wasn’t adamantly in support as a bitter enemy, and someone to purge. It was his one major weakness.
JW gave a slow, gentle nod.
“No. The gentleman is right. He is absolutely correct. This is not redlining. This is business. You have left the choice up to the customer. Remember, this is the free market. You are using an inherent conflict in federal law to protect your assets, which you are obligated to do as a fiduciary. And, incidentally, any choice the customer makes, you win. You can protect your bank, which is your depositors’ funds, your community’s funds, and you can make money. You have reduced your exposure to risk, and hung onto your casino deposits.”
The room was silent. A tone sounded and a female announcer’s voice came on over the room’s speakers.
“This concludes our afternoon breakout sessions,” she said. “Please join us for a wine and cheese reception in the Pocahontas Room.”
For a moment, the bankers remained in their chairs, mulling ethics, profits, and legality. It was, as JW had said, a new era. The buzzword at the conference was aggregation, which meant cobbling many small victories together into larger portfolio gains. It’s what the big boys were doing, and it required intelligence and agility at the margins—the very qualities JW was talking about. The law was no longer a simple set of boundaries to the playing field; it was sports equipment to be used in the game. Community bankers needed to get more aggressive or they were going to get eaten for lunch. They had to remember their role. They weren’t legislators or social workers. They weren’t there to right the greater wrongs of society. They were bankers. And as the plenary speaker had said in the morning keynote, “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”
Jorgenson shifted off the wall. He drew his hands from his pockets and started to clap. The bankers glanced over at him and then joined in. He walked down the steps along the wall as the applause continued. The bankers gathered up their briefcases and swag bags and began to mill out.
“John White,” he said, stepping up to the table, “you are a strategic genius.”
JW smiled wryly and coiled his power cord. “I guess that’s why you made me branch president.”
Jorgenson laughed. “Guilty as charged. You got time for a Grain Belt?”
JW looked at the clock and winced. “I told Carol I’d be home for dinner. It’s a four-hour drive. Can I take a rain check?”
He saw a cloud pass briefly across Jorgenson’s face, then it was gone. Jorgenson smiled and nodded. “Yeah, sure. How is that beauty queen?”
“Oh, you know Carol. Always into something.”
The two of them walked out onto the mezzanine, where conference-goers were congregating in small groups or speaking with industry reps at display tables along the walls. Like royals, they strolled toward the glass balcony and rode the escalator to the vast atrium below.
They shook hands at the bottom, and then JW pushed his way out into the afternoon sun. It was bright and hot, and as he turned he could still see Jorgenson, a ghost beyond the glare of the plate glass, standing there watching, with a hand in his pocket. For an instant, his expression seemed almost malevolent, but then the glare shifted and Jorgenson smiled and waved. JW waved back and stepped across Nicollet Mall, heading toward his parking ramp.
Jorgenson’s expression stayed with JW as his dirty white Caprice made its way north and west into a purple-orange sunset. He had left the interstate just before Duluth and taken a four-lane, divided artery that angled off into the north country. After an hour it lost its median and came together, squeezing its way into a small town and finally ending at a flashing red light. JW turned onto a narrow, two-lane capillary that shot out past a Cenex station and a Dairy Queen (three people in line at the small yellow window—a handful of kids romping on a red picnic table—a girl crying over a dropped cone on the sidewalk, long light in her blonde curls) and then he was out into the rolling farm fields and sudden bluffs of Minnesota’s Iron Range.
The region’s iron and taconite mines had sprouted dozens of little towns full of Finns, Croats, Cornish, and Italians—all of them stout, resilient people who could cheerfully survive decades stooped in tunnels moiling with pickaxes, so long as they had beers and pasties and the love of friends and good women. An hour ahead, in one of those range towns with its little Victorian houses covered in asbestos shakes, his wife Carol and their thirteen-year-old daughter Julie were waiting for him.
The road plunged into an area of glacial moraines. The sun lit the tops of the domes and angled long brown fingers into the valleys. Columns of shadowed geese piled down onto shimmering lakes, forming dark squabbling islands. Wetlands grow damp beards of fog.
For the first part of the drive, JW had listened to an audiobook called The Power of Habit, about whether or not we have free will. It was a question that had come to occupy him recently. He had started listening to science books like this when Julie was eight or nine and he ordinarily loved them, but tonight he kept reaching up to turn the player off. The feral look in Jorgenson’s eyes kept coming back to him. He wondered if he had imagined it, or if he had overlooked something important in their parting exchange about getting a beer. He hoped he hadn’t missed a career opportunity. He and Carol were tight on money, and if a new opportunity to help Jorgenson had been in the offing he should have stayed and gotten the beer. Even though Carol was expecting him, she would have understood.
Each time he turned the player back on, the worry boiled back up, and he turned it off again to think things through. He finally unrolled the windows to let the grassy air fill the car and buffet his ears with noise. Jorgenson was going to make a play for CEO when the Old Man retired. Maybe this had been a chance for the upper executives to feel JW out, to see if he could fill Frank’s shoes managing the Greater Minnesota branches.
If that was the case, Carol wouldn’t want to move. She loved North Lake. He wondered if he could somehow manage things from there. After his dad was laid off from Reserve Steel, JW remembered, he had taken a job selling leases for cell phone towers. The job had him on the road a lot, but he had made it work. “How do you know when you’re up North?” his dad used to ask farmers in order to loosen them up. “There’s no sign announcing it, but you know you’re there when the Dairy Queen sells bait.” It always got a laugh.
On the other hand, maybe Frank had discovered the loan he had made to himself, and wanted to discuss it in private. A spike of anxiety shot through him. That would explain the predatory quality JW thought he had seen in his eyes. As he drove onward, his mind swung from one possibility to the other. He decided to call Jorgenson in the morning to apologize, and to see if the conversation led anywhere.
The stakes were high. North Lake was a torn-up town after the mines closed, and many of the workers, who lost their jobs and their pensions, still pined for the old days. There still wasn’t as much opportunity as there had been. It was