The Margin Between Me and Murder.
When I was 16, my father and I walked out to check the sprouts on a fresh maize crop. Our home place was a half-section — a rectangle 1/2-mile x 1-mile long — so a walk to the middle could be accomplished inside the space of a conversation. On our way back to the house, my father spotted a rusty glint of metal recently turned by the plow.
“Look at that,” he said with amazement as he retrieved it from the earth.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a switchblade. I smuggled it from Mexico when I was 16.”
He knocked the dirt from it and turned it in the sun. The wooden handle had mostly rotted. The blade bore the pocks of oxidation. “Me and Jeff hid this knife in the air filter of our truck. The border guards checked everything, even our Skoal cans, but they didn’t check the air filter.”
It dawned on me that I, too, was 16, and that had I been my father, I would be traveling to old Mexico (an 18-hour drive) with a buddy. “Your mom and dad let you drive to Mexico when you were 16?” I asked.
“Things were different then.”
He sparsely filled me in on a few of their adventures. They’d gone through Galveston on the same trip. Jeff was driving, ogling girls in bikinis on the beach. A boy ran out in front of them. Jeff didn’t see the child, and he flopped up on the hood. It had been 20 years, so Dad didn’t remember all that happened. The boy went to the hospital. Jeff got a ticket (which has gone unpaid these 40 years). And that was the end of it. They went on to Mexico.
Jeff and Dad had been very close. Dad even served as best man in Jeff’s wedding. I was born about the same time as Jeff’s oldest son, and have a single memory of playing with him in a sandbox. Jeff became a firefighter, and my father stayed on the farm, and as the obligations of adulthood grew, then Dad and Jeff grew apart.
When I was in college, both of Jeff’s sons got involved with some meth dealers. A few things went bad, and both of the boys were involved in a murder. They dismembered the body and buried it beneath six-feet of concrete in an abandoned grain silo. The son who is my age will never get out of prison. The younger got a lighter sentence as an accessory to kidnapping.
I feel like my life has been an narrow escape of that fate. I wonder if my father feels the same way.
