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. The fall from the raised boards knocked the wind out of him so badly 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, but 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 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 my father managed to snap his arm before his own went numb. And the fight in which he shattered the man’s leg against the bedframe he told again, as if trying to make sense of that strange amalgam of strength and powerlessness, how one captive could destroy another. This telling was almost gentle. As the man screamed in pain, my father sat on the toilet, waiting for the guards, unable to open the cell door himself. He spoke as if he couldn’t understand how men 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 and 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 light in his eyes, the joyful madness that had driven him into so many reckless situations just to test himself. 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, my father 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.
“I didn’t want to have to do it,” he said. “I got lucky. My transfer papers came through the
