Cures for Hunger (39 page)

One January afternoon, as he walked in circles in the yard, smoking diligently, he heard the tremulous voice of an old man announce, “I own the world. I tell you, I own it all.”

My father turned to the man who stood in the cold with his arms spread. He shook his head. “No, you don' own world. Everyt'ing excep' Quebec.”

According to my father—who told this proudly, as if he'd met a celebrity—the man was one of the last living members of the Karpis-Barker gang. He had worked for Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis, though now, when asked about their exploits, he talked about his childhood. “Oh, those days fishing brown trout in the spring, the warm spring!” He lifted rickety hands to show the size of the big one his dad caught. He had a tremendous nose and hit it each time he slipped on the ice, so it was frequently bandaged. Guards and bruisers alike loved him, and even the meanest inmate, Joe Yates, who'd knifed his obese cell mate with the sharpened rusty shankpiece of a boot, would take the old man's elbow to walk him over patches of ice. The guards had contrived to have a fake checkbook printed up for him, and he was forever buying things.

“How much is Quebec? I'll buy it off you.”

“One hundred million dollar.”

The old man pursed his lips. “How many zeroes?”

“Eight.”

He wrote out the check clumsily and tore it off and handed it to my father.

Hearing this, I laughed, and in that moment, I felt there was hope, that I could ask about his family again, about going back. But he was still thinking about the check, and he told me that he'd gotten the better deal. He cursed the Catholics, the backwardness of Quebec, and finally, that night, when he stopped speaking, I no longer had the courage to ask.

 

 

After Montana, he crossed the border and changed his name again. He tried to be calm, businesslike in his crime, but the wildness still took hold. He pulled a few jobs in Edmonton, but worried that the police were onto him. Then his partner ran with the money.

“That time,” my father told me, “I almost got it for good. It's crazy how things work out—the chances I took. It's like I was charmed. The cash was from a small job, but you let a guy fuck with you and everyone will take you for a sucker. So I went to his girlfriend's house and asked if she wanted to get something to eat. It was winter, and there'd been more snow than usual. Snowbanks practically blocked out the sky. As soon as she was in the car, I started driving at least a hundred miles an hour. She was begging me to stop, and I said I would if she told me where her boyfriend was. She claimed she didn't know. She swore she'd tell me if she did. She said she hated the guy, and she said some bad things about him—that he had a little dick. Stuff like that. I was going to stop. At that point I believed her. Just then we came over a bit of a rise. I barely had time to see the car accident on the road. It was almost funny. One of those funeral cars—a hearse—had hit a milk truck. All I could do was put my car into the snowbank. We went right into it, right into a field. The snow was so high we couldn't open the doors. The engine was still running, and the heat was on. The antenna had broken off so the radio didn't work. It took the police three hours to get us out of there. She and I made up during that time. We got along pretty well. Then we had to go to the station to file a report. There were always lots of wanted photos on the wall, and there was an old one of me, but nobody seemed to notice.”

I could picture the fear on their faces, the car slamming into jewel
blue dark and sudden calm. The headlights still shone, a faintly luminous core before them, like a diamond somewhere out there, buried in the snow. He turned up the heater and adjusted the vents. The engine chugged, the sound seeming to come from deep below them.

I love this image, two people captured in ice, held within stillness and cold light, like characters caught, set together in a flash of the imagination. Memory holds us until we are ready to see. Speaking, he knew his words had the charm of impossible odds, the close call, the signature of magic that reminded him that his life was truly his own.

 

 

He returned to Calgary and pulled a job with two men he'd met in prison. But he'd seen his own wildness in them and should've known. Escaping, they hit a patch of black ice and went over an embankment, the police a mile back.

The car rolled, and when it stopped, he was underneath, arms and legs broken and gasoline soaking his chest. Vehicles pulled off the road, and their drivers stood, talking and smoking, though my father tried to draw air into his lungs to tell them not to. One of his partners had struck his head on the dashboard with such force that he'd been scalped, his bloody skull exposed, his hair hanging from the back of his head. For the first time, my father was relieved to see the police arrive. The judge gave him a lighter sentence because God's hand had been swifter than earthly justice.

The day he got out of prison, the paddy wagon dropped him off in an alley, and the officer gave him five dollars. Then my father went to a dive hotel. He'd stashed money in the ceiling vent of the room where he'd been staying when he was arrested, and that afternoon he bought a battered truck without brakes from a farmer.

He was ready to cross the border for good. When he'd been in the prison hospital, he'd known it was time to change. This wasn't the life he'd been after—a tiny cell or, when he was out, a seedy hotel room or a rundown house in the suburbs, enough cash from robberies to get by. Lying in bed, he'd thought of America, so close, like the beating of a woman's heart.

Each failure promised a new beginning, proof that his will was strong
and nothing could extinguish his fire. Was he driven by the desire to risk everything, to lose everything, to be stripped—of language and culture, of name and family—to his essence, as if there might be a self as absolute and free as the soul? Only then, when all else had fallen away, could he sense the transformation that he craved, the possibility of stepping into another life.

He drove his brakeless truck to Tijuana. I knew his need for exuberance, for release, the impulse to freedom the same as that to fiction, the liberty to remember his life as he chose. He sometimes offered descriptions with an impetuous edge to his voice, as if seeing what he could get away with, still testing the limits of the possible.

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.”