The Son of Every Man

Chapter 1.3

What does your daddy do for work? In those days, it was a question children were used to hearing. He was asked many times—all of us were. But of course for Gabe, answering truthfully wasn't an option, so he was taught to lie.

"Tell them I'm a trapeze artist," his father instructed him when he was in the first grade. "You know what that is?"

Gabe nodded, his eyes big, brown and wondering.

"Tell them I can't talk to your class right now because I'm traveling with the circus, in Europe. You know where that is?"

Gabe shook his head.

"But you can tell them, right?"

"Yes, but what is your real job?"

"I just told you," he said, a strange grin spreading across his face. "I am a trapeze artist."

Gabe delivered the lie whenever he was prompted by teachers, doctors, other children—anyone who wanted to know. He lied without drama, and without fail. Naturally, his childhood peers took great interest in this revelation and pressed him for details. He had little trouble shrugging them off. Adults, upon hearing his answer, tended to leave him alone.

Even when he was very young, he knew his father went to the desert to work. As he got older, he came to understand a little about what Marco did there, managing people and bookkeeping and making deliveries. But there was so much his parents didn't say, wouldn't say, and with no siblings to confer with, he was left to wonder on his own. Gabe couldn't remember when exactly it happened, but the truth came flooding into his psyche during his early teens: The fact that he couldn't know, that his parents wished for him not to ask, was totally abnormal, incredibly bizarre. He knew then that this thing his father did to house them in a decent building (indeed, to place grilled beef atop rice noodles in the fancy variant of ceramic bowls that didn't chip) was surely illegal.

Privately, he fought to overcome the pain and shock this brought to his life. He would later recall the ensuing years as dark and quiet ones. There was nothing truly clean in his world, nothing untouched by the hands of evil, so his eyes instead fell to a more palatable realm: a hundred thousand pages of books and magazines and occasionally literary journals—whatever he could get his hands on. Meanwhile, his grades flatlined, an issue over which his parents showed little concern.

And then, one day when he was almost seventeen, he joined his father for a walk along the beach. They went very early in the day, beating the rush of tourists, stepping out onto a long and narrow pier. Uniform purple and red flags ran its length, flanking them on both sides, flapping urgently in the breeze. When they reached the end, his father folded his arms on the rail and stared out at the open water. Gabe studied him for a second before doing the same.

His father's fist thudded repeatedly against the rail before he spoke. "You read many, many books, my son. Never stop that habit. It will give you tools others do not have. I recognize some of the titles. I know the stories contained within them. Surely by now they have taught you things about the way the world really works."

"Yes."

"Surely you know that the vocations of many in this great city roam outside the bounds of the law."

"I know that."

"Gabriel, my son, I need you to tell me now. Do you know where the money in this family comes from?"

Gabe's suspicion over the nature of his father's work had crystalized over course of his sixteenth year. It took on a recognizable form now, one that he could reach out and (nearly) grab onto at will. He turned to his father with a confidence that had mysteriously mounted inside him as he approached his late-teens and said, "I don't want you to make me say it. I'd rather you were the one to say it."