by Deni Béchard
His trip to Tijuana was no more than this. He drove there the way others stretch. He was warming up for a change, a new type of crime, but first he needed to taste his freedom, to enjoy the emptiness of the highway sky and see the many shapes the earth could hold.
He pulled a string of robberies along the West Coast and claimed to have robbed at least fifty banks and as many jewelry stores at gunpoint. Wanting to look respectable, he got a nose job to repair the damage of fights and years in prison. He triangulated his life between LA, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City, where his girlfriend thought he was a traveling businessman. All that time, he was contemplating the details of the Hollywood burglary, the big job, the one that would set him free and allow him to go home with pride.
But there was still the recklessness—casinos and resorts and a night when, drunk and standing on the hood of a moving car, he fell off and broke his arm. He robbed a jewelry store with it in a cast, but, back in the car, couldn’t get his gun out of his pocket. He asked his partner’s girlfriend to take it out, and she accidentally pulled the trigger and blew a hole in his pants.
“We were lucky the bullet didn’t hit the gas tank,” he told me, then described another time when his partner forgot his gun in a jewelry store, having put it down to fill his bag. Nobody wanted to go back, but their fingerprints were on it since they’d all used the same guns.
“I was scared that time,” he said, “going into a place I’d just robbed, with a bunch of people who were pretty angry and had one of our guns. I went in with my gun pointed, but they hadn’t even picked up the one we’d left. They all got right back down on the floor.”
He paused, “You know, I understand why you want to write. I get it. I know why you’re doing what you’re doing.”
I just cleared my throat and nodded, stupidly, as if he could see, and he began telling me about the big job again.
“When I pulled it, I thought everything would be easy. I thought it was my way out. I couldn’t know my partner was going to be stupid and set fire to the surveillance apartment. When his girlfriend and I got to the house in Nevada, we drew the blinds and dumped the money on the living room floor. The pile of stacked bills came up past my knees. I thought I’d done something so big, so perfect, I’d never have to worry about anything again. I thought I’d fooled life.”
I was trying to understand what this had to do with writing, but before I could ask, his voice grew faint.
“It wasn’t what I thought. Those big dreams don’t work out. Nothing’s as easy as it looks.” He hesitated and said, “That’s when I finally went home. I knew the police were after me, and I wanted to show my family how rich I was. But I couldn’t stay. I was already on the run. It’s the only thing I regret. What I did to my mother. She didn’t deserve it.”
I’d become used to his contrasts, enthusiasm then regret, the way he spoke like an old man, tired of life, then suddenly shifted to anger, as if facing his choices once more. Then he would sound hopeful, as if again planning the big job: LBJ giving his speech, the truck in the alley, the jackhammer to blast through the vault so he could slide inside. But the grain of the concrete pointed in, hooking on his clothes when he tried to get out, and he had to undress. How did he feel, wriggling naked from the vault, over the jagged edges—a rough birth but one full of promise, not the disillusionment I might have expected?
When his partner didn’t show up, he knew the police would come looking. He bought a Chevy convertible, new silk clothes, and dozens of gifts for his family, then drove to Quebec, crossing the continent and border, passing Montreal, following the rugged coast home, the Saint Lawrence growing wider until he could barely see the other shore. He felt as if he were returning to some wild outer region on the edge of the world, and yet the wildness in him was greater than ever, and he’d been transformed like a man gone off to war.
I don’t think he knew why he was returning, whether to prove something or soothe his guilt, or just to have an audience for his success, to fill that longing all children have to please their parents, to show their strength.
His sisters and brothers ran outside as soon as he parked.
“Maman, Maman!” they were shouting.
His mother kissed his cheeks. There was no recrimination. He’d called over the years and sent letters with lies, but there had been gaps, his time in prison. He realized that the feeling he’d always had, that he’d been her favorite, was right. She would forgive anything.
Bernard was there, in boots and work pants, arms covered in tattoos. His own nose had been flattened, and he teased my father about the new nose and asked if he was a Hollywood star.
My father said no and lied that he had a transportation company in the US.
Bernard snorted, jealousy and uncertainty in his eyes. “Une compagnie de transport?” He wiped his mouth and turned away.
A few days later, my father took his mother to visit her sisters on the north coast. She hadn’t seen them in years. He chartered a small airplane, and in the spring sunlight, she gathered with her family, children milling about as he stood with the men, saying little, just practicing stories about his imaginary company.
When they returned, Bernard teased him about the presents, calling him a good boy, “un bon ’tit garçon.” My father ignored him, and Bernard spoke about the merchant marines, the brawls in port cities. He was glad their father had taught him how to box. He wanted to go drinking, to see my father fight again, but my father was afraid of drawing attention. He said he didn’t fight anymore, and Bernard just nodded, watchful.
My father talked about life in the US, how he’d chosen not to become an American citizen since he didn’t want to be drafted for Vietnam. Bernard asked what he thought of the province now that the priests had lost power and Le Front de libération du Québec was planting bombs in Montreal. But my father just shrugged.
“You don’t really have a transportation company, do you?” Bernard said.
“Of course I do,” my father told him and walked away.
Expo 67 had begun in Montreal, and my father planned to take his two youngest brothers. The day before he went, he invited his father for a ride in his convertible. They argued. He didn’t say why, only that he’d never liked his father. Even when I asked, again frustrated with him for all that he hid, he refused to give a precise answer.
“We never got along or had much to say to each other,” he told me, then pressed on with his story. In Montreal, he walked past a police station to look at the wanted photos. His was there. He knew he shouldn’t stay any longer, and yet he couldn’t help but stare and feel the weight of his errors. He hadn’t stripped away anything, become light or free. There was no frontier left that he could cross to start again. His crimes had followed him through so many fake names and temporary addresses, making their way home.
During a heavy snowfall, I called him from home and asked if he remembered the card he’d received at the post office when I was a boy. He’d stood in the sunlight, staring at the flowery card. I asked what it was, and my mother joked that it was from his other family.
He didn’t remember the card, but his response was surprising. “Maybe it was from the girlfriend in Salt Lake City. She had a son.”
“A son?”
“She was pregnant when I went to prison, but she never visited me. She sent photos. The boy looked a lot like you used to. But then she married another guy, and they had a kid. I saw a picture of both kids. The other one was really ugly. Anyway, I stayed in touch for a while after I was deported. But I realized there was no point in it. The kid had never known me. He had another father, so I let him live his life. Maybe she sent the card. I don’t know.”
“You never wanted to meet him?” I asked, trying to accept this, that I had another brother. I closed my eyes against my anger.
“No, he was named after the fake name I used back then,” he said, as if with that name he hadn’t been the same person, and so this wasn’t his son. “But that woman was pretty angry.
When I was in prison, she found out that she hadn’t known my real name, and she changed the kid’s name to her new husband’s. Is there really such a thing as a fake name? I mean, we make them all up. One’s as good as another, right?”
He was silent, as if recalling what he’d felt then. I gazed out the window, the snowstorm ending now. Clouds thinned, the white forest lit by the moon.
“You know, I was reading about angels the other day,” he went on, his voice growing soft. He described an article about a Florida couple who met a beggar in front of their house. The beggar asked for food or money, and they gave him a sandwich and twenty dollars. A month later, a black man with blue eyes came to their door and gave them a winning lottery ticket. He said they’d lost it. They never bought lottery tickets and told him so, but he showed it had their names on it.
I was having a hard time listening, still thinking about the brother, but there was nothing to feel about it, no space even for regret, and so I tried to hear his story about angels, and when he’d finished, I said it sounded a little sketchy.
“It was in the newspaper,” he told me. “They don’t put bullshit in the newspaper. This is all true stuff.”
He talked about miracles, ghosts—the time when he was a boy and saw his grandfather. Years later, after my mother had taken us to the US, he’d seen his own father standing at the foot of his bed one morning, hair and skin so dark he seemed a figment of the dawn. Light was just coming through the windows. It was his father as a young man.
“I’d hated him,” he said, “but I felt at peace then. I blinked and he was gone.”
Though I tried to listen, I was thinking of something else.
“Is André your real name?”
He was silent, then cleared his throat and said yes.
Later, after we hung up, I just sat, tension in my throat and chest. I could get used to anything, I realized, the silence of my rooms, the pain of what I was trying to accept. My head was becoming cluttered, and it might feel good to talk to someone else. I’d been studying too much and had little contact with other students. My mother and I didn’t speak often, and I’d been distant from my brother and sister for years.
I put on my hiking boots and a few long-sleeve shirts, then went out and jogged a forest path that was no more than a white trace through the trees.
Cold air stung my lungs, and I gained speed, enjoying the slip and plunge of my feet as they sought purchase on the hidden earth. The moon shone over the evergreens, the white shelves of their branches, the naked maples limned with snow.
I found a rhythm, and as I moved, I saw dozens of characters, stern or hopeful faces. Who were they—the men who’d taught him crime, or his partners, his girlfriend, the inmates he’d fought, his family, Bernard and the others whose names I didn’t know? I was furious with my father for all that he’d kept from me, and for all that I couldn’t bring myself to say. I wanted to ask him more about these fleeting faces, to find the words to put them on paper, to reveal his past and make him human, infuse him with a breadth of fallibility and simple need.
After his arrest in Miami, he had one opportunity to escape. He’d refused the plane in hopes of this, preferring the trip cross-country in the police car, the two cops taking turns behind the wheel looking more miserable than the convicts in the back. There was my father and occasionally one or two others along for a leg of the ride, shuttled between jails just as my father was being returned to California so he could stand trial. They ate at diners, used public bathrooms, all the while handcuffed and guarded. After lunch one day, my father took a paper clip off the counter from next to the cash register while one of the cops paid.
In the backseat of the cruiser, he sat in the middle, the convicts on either side holding the edge of a newspaper so they could all read. Using it as a shield, he began picking his cuffs. The convicts looked concerned, but with the radio on and the windows cracked, my father was able to whisper that if they ratted him out he’d kill them in their sleep. Both on his side of the law and not uncurious about what kind of show he might put on, they didn’t.
He got his cuffs picked, and as they were slowing through a Southern city with high wooden sidewalks and packed dirt roads, he hopped over the convict at his side and threw open the door. He sprinted and jumped onto the sidewalk and raced along its boards. The car skidded to a stop, and then the cops were out, too, running behind, pointing their guns but unable to shoot because my father ran as close to pedestrians as he could.
He was nearing a corner when a man tripped him and he fell from the raised boards, the wind so badly knocked out of him that he could only stare at the sky.
“That man,” he said, “he stuck out his foot like he was some kind of hero.”
The anger in his voice was fresh, and he no longer sounded far away, or old. He didn’t describe what the cops did. He always skipped getting caught. An old lady spat at his feet as he was led away. “May the Lord have mercy on you,” she said. That much he did tell me.
He was eventually sentenced to seven years and sent to a prison in Tacoma. On his first day there he went to the warden and requested his own cell. He was told that only murderers got their own cells.
“Do you want me to kill someone?” my father asked.
Later, he was taken to a single on the top floor.
In the pen, he perfected his English and learned some Spanish. He strengthened his resolve with fantasies of what he would do when he got out. He’d train dogs. He’d raise a family and teach his sons to fish. But on the days when visitors were allowed, his girlfriend never came. To pass the time, he got a diploma, and when the teacher explained the expression tabula rasa and asked for an example, he answered, “Like my criminal record each time I change my name.”
There were many stories cast in the thin gray penitentiary light. One inmate stabbed him suddenly in the shoulder and he managed to snap the man’s arm before his own went numb. And the story of the fight in which he shattered the man’s leg he told again, as if trying to make sense of that strange amalgam of strength and powerlessness, how one captive could destroy another. The man had been bragging that he could beat my father up, so after lunch my father followed him into his cell and slammed the door, the lock falling into place. The damp knuckles, the kicks, the bruised and broken ribs and split lips were so common there, and in the end, the man was down, clutching his side, his eyelid and cheek clouding his face. He tried to crawl under the bed to stop the beating. My father stooped and took his leg as if to move a log. He folded it against the metal bedpost and kicked. Then he sat on the toilet as the man screamed and wept beneath the bed. He listened to the running footsteps of the guards, unable to open the door himself.
His telling of this story was almost gentle, as if he couldn’t understand how a man could be made to suffer such pain and humiliation.
His punishment was two weeks in solitary confinement, in the Hole, a cramped space where he could barely stretch out. His clothes were taken away, and he was given loose overalls. There was no cot, only a large Bible with a disintegrated spine, and to sleep, he spread its pages on the damp concrete. A slit in the door allowed guards to peer in, and a larger one near the floor was for bread and water.
He exercised, doing sit-ups and push-ups, and became obsessed with perfecting his kicks, trying to hit the ceiling. He was given one full meal a week, on Sunday, and when a guard opened the door and another carried the tray in, my father was ready. He unleashed his perfect kick, catching the tray on the bottom and sending the food into the guard’s face. The man fell backward and scrambled out, and the other guard slammed the door.
Moments later, the warden called through the slot, “Two more weeks!”
Living on bread and water, my father kept practicing kicks, angry with hunger as he stretched or exercised, his muscles taut. He hammered his body with his fists, then leaned back and struck the cement ceiling with the ball of his foot.
“I didn’t want to be pathetic,” he told me. “I didn�
�t want to be grateful and stuff all that food in my mouth. It looked like a good meal, and after I kicked the tray, the cell smelled like good food. It drove me crazy. But I didn’t want those fuckers to think I’d thank them for feeding me like that. So I enjoyed myself. I made it a game. I did nothing but push-ups and sit-ups and stretches. My body had never been that hard.”
I knew the wild light in his eyes, the joyful madness that had driven him into so many reckless situations just to test himself, to know that he could win. He didn’t want to fall asleep. He would keep his fire. It was better to stay hungry.
The next Sunday, when the guard opened the door, he kicked the tray again, faster, with more strength. Though the guard was ready, the food still splattered. The warden stormed back into the basement.
“Another two weeks, you son of a bitch,” he shouted through the thin rectangle that several times a day framed a bored, indifferent eye rimmed with red.
But a few days later my father was released back to his cell because higher powers had interpreted his actions as a hunger strike, and no one wanted to risk that he might die.
Several months passed, and he learned that he was to be deported to a prison in British Columbia, where Canadian taxpayers could feed their own criminal. He was waiting for the transfer papers to arrive, but shortly after he told the other inmates, one of them spread the word that he was planning to kill my father. It was the first death threat my father received in prison. Though the man might have been bluffing, trying to sound tough because my father was leaving, my father had no choice. He told me the rule: if a man says he’s going to kill you, believe him and kill him first. He sat up all night in his cell, readying himself.