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Whenever I asked her questions—about war or why it was wrong—she answered carefully, explaining with so many details—Vietnam, corrupt government, the loss of individual freedom—that I didn’t understand much. She talked to me as if I weren’t a child but rather a very old and serious man.
Unlike her, my father barely answered whenever I asked about his family. “Why don’t you like to speak French?” or “What did your parents do?” earned me few words: “There’s no point,” or “He fished. She took care of the kids.” Then he told me about his travels or fights, like the time he hitchhiked cross-country to Calgary and went to a party and got in a terrible fight over a beautiful woman.
“This bruiser,” he said, “was two or three times as big as me. We were throwing each other across the room. We broke the table and chairs and knocked all the pictures off the walls. There wasn’t anything we didn’t break. That guy was tough, but I didn’t let myself get worried. You get worried in a fight, and you’ve had it. So I kept hitting him, and pretty soon everyone at the party started cheering me. They were originally his friends, but he was arrogant, and I was the better fighter. They could see that, so I guess they wanted to be on my side. Each time I got him down, I’d say, ‘Stay down,’ and everyone else would shout, ‘Stay down!’ but he’d get up, and then I’d hit him five or six times, and he’d fall on his ass again, and everyone would yell, ‘Stay down!’ I tried to be nice, but that guy was big, and he kept shaking his head and trying to get back up and then I’d have to hit him again. It wasn’t easy, but I finally made him understand.”
If I asked him whether he’d had worse fights, he told one story after another. His confrontations with bruisers, this being one of his favorite words, often had strange endings.
“The bruiser was so strong I had to bite his nose to win. We were on the docks, by the fishing boats, and I got him down and bit his nose and just hung on until he started crying. Sometimes you have to do things like that to win a fight.”
He told me about journeys, from Calgary to Tijuana in a truck without brakes, or driving an old Model T along Alaskan railways to get to towns not connected by roads. Whenever a train came, he swerved off the tracks, and afterward he and his friends hefted the Model T back on.
My favorite was the time he and a friend were driving through Nevada and picked up a Mormon. He drove so fast that the Mormon prayed in the backseat and wept to the Lord until my father, racing at over a hundred miles an hour, slammed the brakes. The Mormon flew onto the dash, his back against the windshield so that the car was briefly dark and all my father saw was the screaming face of the religious man. The friend kicked open the door and they chucked the Mormon out. He grabbed at the earth, kissing it—“Like the goddamn pope,” my father said.
I didn’t know what a Mormon was, but I’d seen the pope on TV, descending from an airplane and kissing the ground.
“I bet dogs pissed all over that ground,” my father had told me and changed the channel.
✴
THE PROOF THAT his stories were true was his madness. He raced through traffic or hit large puddles with such speed that his truck had wings of muddy water and sputtered until its engine dried. Watching TV, he contemplated Evel Knievel’s attempt to jump a motorcycle over buses, or how Houdini had escaped handcuffs, live burial, and torture cells.
Yet many of his exploits involved not escaping torture but subjecting us to it. In the mall, when I was four, he hid, standing with mannequins in a window, arms lifted and motionless, head cocked at an angle as he stared into space. He blended in perfectly, his posture so convincing that my brother and I walked past him repeatedly, crying as we called out his name. Only when a woman stopped to help us did we see the mannequin leave the display and hurry toward us, laughing.
Or once he took my brother and me to an empty store that he intended to rent. Along with running Christmas tree lots each winter, he’d established three seafood shops in the city and wanted to open more. But while my brother and I explored the musty backroom with its peeling linoleum or old cardboard boxes, he locked us in and hid outside. We raced to the storefront window, calling out, and my brother pounded on it until, suddenly, it cracked.
My father loomed in the broken glass. His key ring jangled against the door and he threw it open. He spanked us for acting like babies, but as he struck me, I struggled and shouted, “I wasn’t crying!” Even afterward, following him to the truck, I yelled, “I wasn’t crying!” I stopped only when he turned and glared.
✴
USUALLY WHEN I woke up, my father had already gone to his stores, and he returned after I was in bed. But some mornings before school, if his truck was in the driveway, I stood at the window and searched the misted rows of pines. His figure passed between them, followed by the swift movement of his German shepherds.
The November of my fourth grade, while he worked his tree lots, I worried that the salmon runs would end and checked spawning dates in the books I’d hoarded from the school library. He and I used to fish often, in the streams between the fields or in the reservoir outside the valley, but he had less and less time and often wasn’t even around, so I couldn’t ask. I lay in bed, looking at pictures of fish—the toothy great barracuda or the gaping goosefish with its antennae. Their mystery riveted me, the way they appeared from deep, shadowy water and vanished again.
I woke up later that night with my cheek glued to the page I’d been reading. I carefully peeled it off and sat up. He was shouting somewhere downstairs.
I got out of bed and opened my door. No one was in the kitchen, and I crept downstairs, gently setting my foot on each step so that it wouldn’t creak.
I went to their door and listened. My mother was crying.
“It’s all bullshit,” he said.
“I saw it. It was as real as you standing here. I was lying there dead, and my body rolled over, and half of my face was rotted. It was me from a past life.”
I held the doorframe, my cheek to its cold, painted wood.
“Stop going to those things. What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m not stopping. I want to know who I used to be.”
Her description was like a mystery in a novel. But maybe he was protecting her. That happened in stories too. I’d thought she was angry at him, not the other way around. I was so confused that I stomped back to my room.
The next day he was gone, and she made us sit with her on the living room carpet. She wanted to teach us something special she’d learned. We sat cross-legged and closed our eyes, and she told us to calm our minds until we saw a white light. The white light was our soul. This, she said, was called meditation.
I rolled my eyes in the dark and then opened them. My brother and sister sat, my mother, too, their eyelids settled. The sun descended against the mountains, the fields in shadow. The last flare of daylight dimmed in the dirty glass.
I closed my eyes again, and there it was—a pale thumbprint in the inky substance of my mind.
That night, when she came to say good night, I told her.
“I