Prologue
‘Don’t write anything about your father, for God’s sake!’ Cy was saying. ‘You can’t do that, can you?’
Cy was a friend in Mexico. He had spent most of his life on the other side of the law, smuggling drugs and running planes. He was in the country to escape the police. He lived on the coast somewhere, far enough not to be found, to feel safe for another day on the run.
I sometimes stayed in a house nearby. At night, I sat around with Cy and listened to his stories about his past lives. There was one in particular that stands out for me now, several years later.
One day, a long time before we met, one of his long-lost daughters had managed to track him down. She just walked up the driveway and into Cy’s house, wanting to talk. He invited her up to the living room and sat her down on the couch. ‘You’ve got 15 minutes,’ he told her. ‘Fifteen minutes and you can ask me anything you want, and I swear to God I won’t lie to you.’
Cy’s daughter had asked him why he left her and her mother so many years before. He swayed in the memory of it as he talked, as if the recollection was as difficult as the decision itself. His eyes glassed over, and a sad smile swept across his face.
I wondered what I would have asked my father if I’d had only 15 minutes. Have you ever killed anyone? What’s the saddest thing that’s ever happened to you? Do you know that I love you?
‘He doesn’t have to tell me anything, does he?’ I said to Cy one night, as he rolled a joint. He dropped his hands into his lap, not letting go of the joint, and stared at me with a look of surprise for asking. His mouth formed a small ‘o’. A rill of sea-coloured light shone off the lenses of his reading glasses. He shook his head. ‘Hell, no! He doesn’t.’ He almost shouted it, irritated at my impertinence. ‘It’s his own goddamn business.’
Everyone who came around to Cy’s house knew that my father had worked for the CIA. I had told him once, and word must have spread. Many of them had been involved in something illegal over the years. Most of them accepted my father’s job as a matter of course, part of the natural order of the universe. It was an entirely non-judgmental position. They joked about it with me, and Cy encouraged them. ‘I swear the other day he introduced himself with a fake name,’ he said to his rag-tag crew once. ‘He introduced himself as Scott Jorgenson.’
The men would wink at me when I came in. ‘What are you writing over there?’ they would ask. ‘What’s your last name, anyway?’
I would smile. To this group of outlaws, my writing inspired more suspicion than anything about my dad’s job. It was as if the recording of events, the endless re-working and re-wiring and self-prognostications, were the source of the real problem. They, like him, preferred the darker corners.
‘Where you going next, anyway?’ one would usually ask, and I would say one place or another. If it was a war, which it usually was in those years, they would all nod. ‘And what are you gonna do over there, huh?’ another would ask, and they’d laugh.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Cy. ‘I won’t tell your old man.’
Just a bunch of harmless old criminals sitting around in Mexico, getting stoned and joking about the journalist-spy who lived next door. If anyone understood my father, they did. They were living just outside the law, on the sidelines — in a parallel universe of secrecy, of codes and conduct in which deceit and betrayal were sources of consistency and of fear.
‘They’re not all bad, you know,’ Cy mused, referring to the lawmen he had clashed with for many years. ‘I’ve spent my whole life in criminal enterprise, but people are just people, any way you cut it. I swear to God, that’s the truth.’ It was the voice of moder-ation and restraint from the other side of the law, from the dark recesses of a man who had done bad things, pleading for the understanding and forgiveness of those who didn’t sympathise.
I gave him a curious look.
‘I’m lying; I’m dyin’,’ he said insistently, and took a shot of the back-alley tequila he had gotten from a friend. The crow’s lines at his eyes were deep and weary, worn from use; the creases tanned into life, the humility scratched as if into bone.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Have another shot of this. Best damn tequila you ever had. I swear to God, it’ll make you cry.’