Byron's Lane (11 page)

Adams was right: the drive from the University of Minnesota’s campus north to the Mille Lacs Lake area was exceptional. The sun, its path across the sky sinking lower with every day that moved Minnesota closer to winter, cast long shadows through the thinning trees and over the road. Intermittent wind gusts caused by cars and trucks moving fast along the two-lane highway made fallen leaves scatter, reassemble, and scatter again across the black asphalt. The landscape all around us was beginning to erupt into a riot of color. The maples were turning red and dark pink; the aspens, gold; the oaks, a dozen shades of amber.

The Porsche clung tight and low to the winding road. Adams drove at his usual pace. We would get to where we were going twenty minutes sooner than we should. We were headed for an upscale backwoods resort, where a political strategy meeting for next year’s state legislative campaign would take place.

“You know, I wouldn’t have been invited to this meeting if word hadn’t leaked to the press last week. I’m the party’s trophy wife,” Adams said with a smile.

“Is that right?” I answered. “I figured this was an audition for the party’s endorsement to be its candidate for governor. But I wasn’t going to bring up the subject until we ran out of things to talk about.” Adams responded with a laugh.

Jonathan Adams was acknowledged by most people interested in state politics as the conscience of Minnesota’s Democratic Party. He enjoyed the moniker, wore it proudly, and seemed to do whatever he could to prove it true. He was often on the short side of lopsided votes in the state senate. He sponsored gun control legislation, controversial tax reform measures, and changes that made the senate more transparent and accessible—televised legislative sessions, liberal referenda laws, tighter registration requirements for lobbyists. He was a frequent guest on local talk shows that covered Minnesota state politics. Any party-sponsored event that would likely be covered by the press had to include him. His attendance gave the events legitimacy and profundity.

Apart from these occasions, Adams and the state government’s leading Democrats had little use for each other. Their marriage was one of convenience. They never embraced his
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
style; he never endorsed the way they did business. But Adams and his party’s leaders knew that the public liked to see them dance together. So they danced—and they danced well, especially when microphones sprouted in front of them and the lights on TV cameras were turned on.

“You know, Tom, in some ways, it’s easy to be the kind of politician I’ve always been. I’m like a Republican congressman in the early 1960s. I’ve never really been in charge of or legally responsible for anything. I stand back, I watch, I compliment and criticize. My proposals have merit and might even fix things, but my priorities and what I think is important are so politically toxic and opposed by armies of lobbyists, the majority of elected Democrats will never touch it.”

After ten miles of silence, Adams talked more about politics, and how its hardening edge and increasing dependence on campaign contributions were sapping the fun out of it for him.

“The state party expects me to make at least fifty calls a week to solicit money from donors. I hate the duty. I don’t need the money. I haven’t had a credible opponent in any of my reelection campaigns. The money I raise pays for somebody else’s attempt to get elected. I have no desire to run for reelection next year, just to face four more years of all this.”

His announcement, I thought, was caused by his malaise. If he could shed even a little bit of it, he would change his mind. Maybe he’d run for governor. Politics motivated and defined who he was. Women gave quality to Adams’s life; politics gave it purpose.

Still, Adams was torn. He didn’t know what he could substitute for politics to fill time and keep him sharp. He needed to be in the game. But he was fast approaching a point where he had done just about everything he had ever really wanted on a professional level. He had done well, and mostly on his terms. He was fluttering too close to having to ask himself: Is that all there is? It was a question a baby boomer idealist should never have to ask; we were utterly unprepared to deal with the consequences if the answer was yes.

My life was traveling on a parallel track. My trip west this time was partly business. Minneapolis was on the way to Los Angeles, and I’d be leaving Sunday for what looked to be a week’s worth of meetings in California to finish negotiating the sale of Maggie’s family’s publishing house to a subsidiary of the Disney Corporation. What’s Next questions were on my horizon, too. As we passed along the west shore of Mille Lacs Lake we were tantalizingly close to agreement that sometime within the next two years we’d buy a medium-size yacht and sail it down the Mississippi River, across the Gulf of Mexico, to the Florida Keys.

“We’ll moor the boat in a trendy marina, live on it, and use it to attract rich, recently divorced women at least ten years younger than us,” Adams decided. “After a year in Florida interviewing prospects, we’ll pick two out to marry—one for you, one for me. We’ll use our money to buy a racehorse and a minor league baseball team and live happily ever after.”

My hands reached for the sides of my seat as Adams approached a bend in the road; he was halfway committed to passing a cement truck in front of us. Part of me was listening to what he was saying. Most of me was trying to determine if he was really intending to pass the truck on a fast-approaching blind curve.

“I’ve thought a lot lately about getting back in the horse business,” Adams said, downshifting, pulling his car closer to the back of the truck. “I’ve actually been thinking about that more than I’ve thought about getting married again. I’ve had better luck with horses.”

He laughed. I gripped the sides of my seat tighter.

A few years before Adams was first elected to the legislature, the state government passed laws that allowed pari-mutuel betting. A robust thoroughbred horse-racing business briefly flourished in Minnesota. A racetrack was built near where he lived. Some of his neighbors originally moved to the area intending to breed, board, and raise thoroughbred horses for a living. Adams formed a partnership with two of his friends and they bought a gelded yearling, the last son of the famous racehorse Alydar. The father of Adams’s horse was a notorious underachiever who made a career of finishing second to Affirmed, a racehorse of lesser stature by every measure, who somehow managed to win the Triple Crown in 1978. The only place Alydar ever beat Affirmed was on the stud farm.

Adams’s horse was an accident. His unremarkable mother was in a fenced field she wasn’t supposed to be in when Alydar showed up in a frisky mood, despite his old age.

Belying his checkered beginning, for two miraculous years Adams’s horse performed like his father was expected to. The horse developed a fierce following in the Upper Midwest and made his owners a fair amount of money. Their wild ride ended when their prized possession broke his right front leg during a workout, the day before the biggest race of his life at Arlington Park in Chicago.

Big-time horse racing died in Minnesota about the same time Adams and his partners retired their young thoroughbred to pasture. Native American Indian tribes were building gambling casinos. A large one sprouted up on reservation land three miles from the track. Slot machines and blackjack were easier ways to gamble than betting on horses. They provided instant outcomes and immediate gratification. Gamblers no longer had to study the
Daily Racing Form
, stand in line to place a bet, and wait for twenty minutes to watch a two-minute horse race. Adams bought his first Porsche with part of his share of his horse’s winnings. He invested most of the rest of it in the stock market. He eventually drained his investment account to make a huge down payment on his oversized house.

Adams’s second Porsche jumped out into the southbound lane, accelerated with a deep-throated groan and a burst of power, and scooted back to our side of the road—five car-lengths in front of the cement truck and comfortably ahead of an oncoming bus. I relaxed my grip on my seat. As utility poles alongside the road passed by my periphery with the frequency of fence posts, we honed our Florida plans.

“Living with characters like us will provide our new wives with excitement like they’ll have never known in their previous marriages. By the time we’re broke and they’re on to us, they’ll be too old to make lifestyle adjustments and dump us,” Adams said. We both laughed and continued on down the road.

Adams knew exactly where we were going. He had been there before. It was a favorite destination for Democrats seeking a place to do what they used to do in smoke-filled big-city hotel rooms. This was the great outdoors, a green, environmentally-friendly setting. In the north woods, plotting and deal making seemed wholesome. The place we were headed was a hiding spot known to Democrats in Washington as well as Saint Paul; black-and-white and color photographs of three generations of prominent politicians displayed on a wall at the lodge gave them all away.

The resort’s location was betrayed by one small sign, nailed discreetly on top of a mailbox post. An arrow attached to the bottom of the sign pointed down a narrow crushed-gravel road that bisected a dense forest of white pines. At the road’s end was a crystal clear four-hundred-acre lake shaped like the big sectional couch in Adams’s living room. When the tree-lined private drive reached sight of the lake, it widened out into a landscaped parking lot that comfortably bumped up against the front entrance of a massive two-story log cabin lodge. The lodge was flanked on both sides by six cabins. Each of them had frontage on an elbow of what I soon learned was appropriately called Pine Lake. A stable of horses and a well-manicured golf course provided amenities for guests who wanted more than a place to hike, swim, fish, or canoe.

The small band of Democrats—eleven men and four women, the state party’s leadership structure—had the place to themselves that weekend. There were eight vehicles in the parking lot. The tourist season had ended on Labor Day, three weeks before. No media were apparently present. Adams told me that the Democrats inside were probably in a bad mood, upset that they’d have to tolerate his presence, listen to his arguments, and consider his opinions for the next eighteen hours. “If they knew the media wouldn’t be around, they probably wouldn’t have asked me to come.”

Adams and I checked into our guest rooms. We changed into the kind of casual clothes that politicians like to be seen wearing but generally don’t wear well. By the time we joined the group they had already convened for their kick-off cocktail hour in the lodge’s Great Room. We were half an hour late. A dozen faces took note when we walked in.

The large room was windowless. Its lacquered rough wood décor should have made the place heavy, dim, and gloomy, but the birch logs burning in a massive stone fireplace and soft table-lamp lighting gave the place an unexpectedly intimate, cozy feeling.

Bouncing among small cliques of people scattered around the bar, Adams introduced me to all his comrades—state house and senate legislators and two full-time party officials. They were cordial but seemed a bit edgy having someone from outside their inner circle suddenly thrust in their midst. Whenever the conversation allowed, I assured them that I wasn’t expecting to attend their meetings—that I had come for the cocktail hour, the ride from Minneapolis, and the fresh air. Adams pulled me aside and scolded me for setting their minds at ease so quickly. He had mischievously spread a story around that I was a card-carrying East Coast Republican.

Like a barn full of cats nervously flicking their tails, the congregation had been whipped into a state of mild agitation before we joined them. Most of Adams’s workmates were naturally vivacious and excitable, but they were unusually animated that late Friday afternoon. Word had leaked about the shooting at Adams’s house. Wild rumors buzzing around the room when we joined the group made it impossible for Adams to avoid talking about what had happened. He had no choice but to assemble everybody in front of the fireplace and tell them about it.

“On Monday night, somebody took a shot from the field behind my backyard that hit the side of my house. I was standing on my back deck at the time. As you can see, it missed me.” Adams chuckled; nobody in his audience joined him. He recalibrated.

“It was probably a stray shot from a kid in the field hunting rabbits. I’m not worried about it. It’s nice to see so many of my friends concerned about my well-being.” Adams smiled again. The room was quiet.

Then the state’s house majority leader spoke: “I heard the FBI is involved in a big way, investigating the shooting. What’s that all about?” He clearly knew the answer. He wanted to measure Adams’s response.

Adams’s smile disappeared. “Look, Pete, I was a bit critical of radical Islam in a couple of pieces I wrote after I got back from Iraq. The Feds want to be sure there’s no cause-and-effect here. This wasn’t some radical Muslim’s doing. They’re better shots.” This time quiet laughter rippled through the room.

As he shared his rabbit hunter theory, the tone of his voice was more hesitant and measured than it had been the afternoon before. The veneer on his bravado was beginning to wear off and reveal streaks of concern. I wasn’t sure why. I made a mental note to ask him about that during the drive back to Minneapolis.

His audience’s interest was different from mine. I feared harm being done to a dear friend; they felt a direct threat. Had al Qaeda followed Adams to Minnesota? What if al Qaeda tried to stage their next attempt somewhere in the State Capitol? What were the chances of collateral damage—that they’d be the deliberately chosen victims of someone wanting to dramatically, emphatically respond to what Adams had written?

He told me later that he was sure the leaked news had come to his colleagues by way of the office of the state police. He was upset about it. Sensing my rekindled anxiety, he pulled me aside and told me the same thing he’d said at the conclusion of his short talk with the