“That was my school,” he told me.
✴
BEHIND HIS VOICE, there was the sound of pouring rain, its steady beating on his roof. Outside my window, in the moonlight, the first snow flurries lazed in the wind.
“Did you see your family again after that?” I asked.
“One more time,” he said. “One time after that. But I wasn’t the same. I realized that I couldn’t stay. Too much had changed.”
He was quiet a moment, his breathing barely audible against the rushing rain.
“I used to dream of going back rich. I realized how easy it would be. I learned everything in prison. I made a plan to go straight to the top. I would do the big job and take the money and go home. I never thought about what I’d do after that.”
“Why not?”
“I guess I knew I wouldn’t go back. I knew I’d never be satisfied there.”
“Would you go back now?”
“No. Too long has passed.”
“What if we went back together?”
“That might be okay. The two of us. That could be all right.”
“Where do they live?” I tried to sound patient, to mask my anger and resentment that came more and more frequently.
He was silent. I wanted to repeat my question, to insist, to tell him that it was my past too, but from his pause, from the way he cleared his throat, I knew he would again ask me to come back and work with him. I would say no, so I didn’t ask.
CURES FOR HUNGER
My father’s birthday was the day before mine. I would turn twenty and he fifty-six. I decided to call after midnight so it would be both of our birthdays. He liked finding similarities in us and, during a previous conversation, he’d told me that every eleven years our ages were inverted: fifteen and fifty-one, twenty-six and sixty-two, thirty-seven and seventy-three.
Leaves had fallen, winter had come early, and the radio called for a light snow. I pushed through the campus-center door and dialed from the pay phone, but there was no answer.
I wasn’t sure that I believed he would kill himself, but I couldn’t imagine leaving college. The continent protected me from his life, though I hated myself for thinking this.
“Sometimes I don’t know what it was all for,” he’d told me a few nights before. “I was trying to get away, but I never really knew what I wanted to get to. I was too busy just trying to get away.”
Other times he laughed, and I sensed in his words the drive to do something dramatic—to take action and say, “This is mine. I did this.” The impulse seemed true to me, to leave a mark on the world before you could think about whether that mark was worth making.
An hour later, I called again, wanting to fall into that momentary grace, our shared attraction to a life that denied nothing, that made holy the imperatives we struggled to understand.
I called over and over from the pay phone and gave up only after 3:00 a.m., when that brief, diminishing time, which I’d wanted to gift to him, had passed.
✴
TWO YEARS IN prison. He felt like a gambler who’d lost half the money in his pocket and was desperate to win back what he imagined was his. The lost years meant that his return home had to be dramatic. He couldn’t go with nothing to show. He hadn’t called them and didn’t want to see them until he was rich. Only money could justify his absence.
Prison taught him the nature of the self, the way it can be shaped and hardened. He learned to thrive on the thrill of a fight and craved the world—all that he’d take for himself when he was free. Longing carved an empty space within him. He felt gutted and learned to like this too.
After prison, as he headed west and left Quebec behind, the plans he’d made began to come apart. Rage and a nameless desperation rushed him forward. Someone only had to bump into him in a bar and he’d fight. He pulled armed robberies, but the cash was never enough. With the intention of going straight, he took a few jobs—mining and construction, in the Yukon and Alaska—but they only confirmed his belief that without crime he’d never escape the life he’d been born into. It was his wildness that repeatedly put him back in jail, for fights or reckless driving.
After his release, he got a new social insurance card and a license with the name Gaston Tremblay, and then crossed to Montana. He’d made friends in bars and prison, and they robbed a few banks. Drunk, they went into country tourist shops, guns ostentatiously tucked into their belts. They put on clothes and hats, filled their pockets with candy bars and beef jerky in front of the clerk, and walked out, waving good-bye. They ate dinners and then tore hair from their heads and threw it on the plates and said, “I’m not paying. There’s hair in my food!” They once fought an entire kitchen staff and finally ran out when the chef began swinging a cleaver.
Eventually they were arrested for robbery, and he did a year and a half in a prison where local teenagers took their mufflers off and drag raced outside the walls at night to wake the inmates. He’d lain in bed hating these kids, that they saw him as nothing more than a criminal who deserved punishment, that they didn’t know what had brought him here, what he’d been running from. And yet, in their place, he’d have done the same and laughed over it. His stupidity and that of all people sickened him, and each morning he woke, a child once again, in his
