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 all of it.”
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’d 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. But he was still thinking about the check, and he told me that he’d gotten the better deal. He cursed the Catholics and the backwardness of Quebec.
✴
AFTER MONTANA, HE crossed the border and changed his name again. He tried to be calm, businesslike in his crime, but his rage 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. Maybe 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 car rolled, and when it stopped, he was underneath, his 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, and 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
