Ben Blum - Ranger Games - A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime

My cousins weren’t all like my uncles. Alex’s older brother, Max, was shaping up to be an intellectual loner with a sarcastic sense of humor, and Sam and Carly, their younger brother and sister, followed at Alex’s heels like shy puppies, heads bent close together, talking in hushed and dreamy tones. But Alex himself was a Blum straight from his father’s mold: cheerful, confident, alarmingly muscular for a preteen, already fluent in that jocular male banter I had always felt so alienated by, quick to snag a disk out of the air and flip it back with a grin on his way inside to watch TV.

When Norm and I first met to talk about the robbery, I had already been interviewing Alex about his story for six months. I was twenty-eight years old and inching toward a new direction in life, teaching writing workshops at an elementary school in New York City as part of a fellowship at an MFA program and feeling more and more like a grown-up journalist, but being taken out to lunch by my uncle was an exercise in instant regression.

“Hey, handsome!” he said, rubbing his fist into my hair and corralling me toward his black Saab. I was in Denver for two weeks, staying with my mother. Climbing into the passenger seat felt like boarding a roller coaster. Norm accelerated with a smooth, important hum up the on-ramp to Interstate 25, a stretch of highway as ubiquitous in trips through Denver as paintings of stallions rearing up against the sunset are in the steakhouses, stadiums, and sports bars where you inevitably end up. After learning that I had been commuting from Brooklyn to Manhattan on a bike, he grilled me about my helmet usage, then segued into a long, funny tale of sweating each morning through his only two suits, heavy wool Salvation Army castoffs from my dad, while biking to his own first job in Denver in the ’70s. Both of us seemed relieved at having found this common ground.

“These things,” Norm said, chuckling, “were like horse blankets.”

He brought the car and the anecdote to perfect simultaneous conclusions in a restaurant parking lot, ushered me through the front door with a cheerful wave at the hostess, and obliged our teenaged waitress to laugh three times with embarrassed pleasure at all his hammy compliments to her fine memory and good taste as she told us about the specials. It occurred to me that Norm was just the way Alex would be if you added thirty years and removed the distorting influences of a bank robbery and a prison term: relentlessly fun, impenetrably cheerful, quick to dispatch all troubling ambiguities with chummy cliché. He ordered the Cobb salad. I went with the spinach calzone. We watched the waitress walk away in silence. Norm’s aura of energetic fun collapsed with startling suddenness.

“Okay,” he said. “This gets very complex with the dynamics of the family.”

By then the differences I saw between my uncles were no longer just geometric. Stories had accumulated on those bald domes, constellations among the pockmarks and divots. Norm, I knew now, had been the chubby, guileless runt of the family, an unplanned addition born two years after their only sister, Judy. Around the house they had called him “Stump.” His older brothers once managed to convince him that ears could be trained to wiggle if you practiced enough. Norm worked for years on his jaw pops and clenched eyebrows before shifting his energies to hundreds of sit-ups, push-ups, wind sprints, and squats every morning before the school bus came, striving his whole childhood to match Dad’s accomplishments as a high school football star and eventually exceeding them in both hockey and baseball long after anyone was paying attention. By the time Norm was checking wingmen against the boards for the State University of New York, his brothers were hitchhiking west to the dirtbag mountain towns of Colorado for a lost decade of carpentering, ski bumming, low-level pot smoking, and high-level beardedness. When Norm finally graduated, in 1979, and biked two thousand miles in three weeks to join them, they had already descended en masse to Denver, shaved, gotten into real estate, and surprised themselves by making more money than they knew what to do with. Dad picked up his littlest brother outside town in the yellow Toyota that he and Mom called the “rust bucket” and threw his bike into the backseat. He had a room waiting to rent to Norm in a drafty house he’d just bought on Gilpin Street, some friendly local millionaires to introduce him to, and one of those Salvation Army suits for him to wear to an interview at Coldwell Banker, the firm where he himself had gotten started before striking out on his own.

Norm worked there for eighteen years, through a leveraged buyout and two name changes. Dad never quite let go of his rebellious mountain hippie streak, wearing bright orange skater shoes to business meetings and referring in private to the imaginationless investors of his daily working life as “glompers,” but Norm went full native, surrounding his sunny grin with slacks, oxford shirts, and tasseled loafers as naturally as with a hockey jersey. The deep, unsatisfiable yearnings that trouble his brothers have never afflicted Norm. The world as he finds it has always been enough. Those Fourth of July barbecues I remember so well were rare spiritual oases for them all, returns to a boyhood order that was possible only with Stump in the middle.

“Alex was a lot like I was when I was a kid,” Norm began as we waited for our food. “He was a straight arrow. Sort of a protector. He was a class clown, just like me. Very into routine. Very particular about the location of his toothbrush and towel. Just like how pathetic I am—routine keeps me sane. Sports were his guiding light.”

Norm’s first son, Max, was born five years after Norm’s arrival in Denver, when he and Laura still lived in a small house in Aurora that faced an unfinished commercial park and Buckley Air Force Base’s looming polyhedral radomes, known around Denver as the “golf balls.” When Laura became pregnant again in 1986, Norm knew they needed something bigger and better, with a broad, flat yard out back where his boys could learn half of what they needed to know about life and a nearby ice rink where they could learn the rest. Though he had just undergone knee surgery to repair a torn ACL from hockey, Norm brokered the biggest deal of his life to scrape together the down payment for the ranch-style fixer-upper that would one day unsettle me with its perfection and began hobbling over every weekend to paint, plaster, and shingle. A month before the deal closed, Laura went into labor with their second son.

Alex was born on April 11, 1987. By the time he was four years old, Norm had strapped skates to his feet and swung him out over the ice at the South Suburban Family Sports Ice Arena, a mile from their new house. By the time he was seven, he was charging around under his own power with a stick jammed in his gloves and a helmet the size of his torso for the Littleton Hockey Association’s youngest competitive team, the under-eight “Mites,” coached by Norm and a family friend named Murray Platt. He loved skating, loved scoring, loved bonking into teammates so both flopped to the ice, though he was smaller than most since his birthday was right after the cutoff.

Norm and his siblings were the product of an unlikely pairing. Al Senior, their father, was the son of Jewish glove makers in New York. Beverly Beck, their mother, was a glamorous Texan belle who met Al on a fashion-buying trip. Norm’s best memories of his own childhood were from the Beck family ranch an hour south of San Angelo, where Beverly’s brother Bernie raised cantankerous emus and skittish African deer. Starting when Alex was in kindergarten, Norm arranged to take his own boys there each summer to dodge scorpions and cottonmouth snakes and shoot crickets with a BB gun for use as bait to catch bass in the Concho River.