I said, “Listen. There’s only one way I’m leaving San Jose today, and that’s with a large sum of money in my pocket. So either you tell me where you keep your bank book or deposit box key, or I’ll start looking for them myself. It can’t be too hard to find something in this cracker box. But you won’t like it if I have to go looking. Because once I find it, I just might be inclined to leave you tied up here on your own without anyone to help you. Think about it. Strapped to a bed, rotting away from the inside. Imagine that and then tell me it wouldn’t be preferable to pay a ransom instead.”
As he listened, Dad stretched his neck out so that the point of his head was nearly brushing the headboard. He hocked a wad of phlegm into his mouth and spat at me with so little forward momentum that the loogie arced almost instantly and landed on his own sick-covered chest. It was a bit of petty vindictiveness on my part, I know, but I reached down and took his pillow away. His head fell flat against the exposed mattress, and as I began tearing the room apart from corner to corner and top to bottom, I thought I heard him whimpering softly.
“You know Kylee told me all about the bridges you burned down in Porterville. Turning a knife on a sixteen-year-old girl fresh off the bus. Makes me wonder if there’s any evil you wouldn’t sink to given enough time.” He had stopped fighting against his constraints; he had stopped rustling altogether, in fact. Crouching above the dresser drawers, I glanced up briefly to see that he was still breathing. There was nothing I could have done, of course, if his breath had given out, but the longer he remained confined, the more gratifying it became to feel myself in control of such matters. “In case you were wondering, I told Kylee all about my plan before coming up here. She wished me good luck; compared to what you deserve, she said, being drugged and robbed is getting off easy. That’s the sort of close friend I have in her. Been a better source of support to me than you ever have.”
Though I was looking everywhere around the room except back at Dad, I listened closely for sounds of distress from where he lay. The thought of him feeling acute shame and rage as well as pain was blissful to me at that moment; otherwise, I never would have gone so far as to label Kylee a “source of support.”
I said, “I wonder if you would be so obvious as to keep your important documents hidden in the closet.”
The groan he let out just then told me my intuition was exactly right. I threw open the door of the small closet and proceeded to dump plastic and nylon-wrapped suits onto the floor three, four, and five at a time. I had never seen so many clothes crammed into such a tight space. Over the years he must have spent a small fortune on his wardrobe, and now he was so fat he probably couldn’t have fit into any of his old suits without spending a second fortune to have them let out. Suddenly I noticed a shelf up top with a plastic container that appeared to be precisely what I was looking for. I tore off the lid and right away discovered a plain white envelope resting on a stack of folded papers. I counted the money inside; a few hundred dollars, and nothing more.
“Where’s the rest of it? There has to be more than this.” I dumped the papers out over the pile of suits. One of the first things that caught my eye was an old American Social Security card, a badly creased and faded artifact the likes of which I had only seen on historical websites. “Who’s Elias Francis Rabedeaux? Is that your real name? Is that the name of our family?”
No response from the old fraud, nothing but the ongoing sounds of sickness. Faced with one illuminating piece of evidence, I decided to go through the rest of the papers one by one and see what other information revealed itself in the process. While his identification cards were almost all pre-Republic and in generally poor condition, the more recent documents (financial and property records from at least four different counties) were all but pristine. And the story they told was deafening. Endeavor by endeavor, failure by failure, they illustrated the chronological landscape over which, in the course of twenty years, Dad had waged his losing war against the forces of poverty and mediocrity; an online travel agency out of Santa Clara, a winery that never made it past the investment stage, a seafood import business with operatives on both sides of the Pacific. All these ideas and more he had tried to turn into successful businesses, and without exception they had imploded on him, fallen into the red, failed to get off the ground, or otherwise disintegrated from sheer incompetence. I held the papers, the proof of his life’s failure, out in front of me. I held the papers in my hands as a stinging pain grew behind my eyes. Then I tossed them all into the air and watched them float and fall over the bed and his massive body like so many birds falling dead upon the sea.
I said, “Is this where it all went? Is this what you sunk all your money into, you fat, pathetic hypocrite?”
The great entrepreneur had no words by which to vent his outrage, the first time I could recall such a thing ever happening. All that remained of the contents of the storage box was a roll of rather official-looking documents that differed from the others in that they were scanned copies instead of originals. I unfolded one of them and immediately noticed the name “Dawn Temple” typed in block letters across the page. I was going to ask him if this was some aunt he had never told me about, but then I realized the page I was reading was actually a marriage certificate, and that attached to it by a staple in the upper left corner was the lease agreement to an agricultural parcel way out in central San Joaquin.
“Why didn’t you tell me that you got remarried? Unless she was very ugly, I would think you’d want to parade your new wife in front of me. Isn’t that the type of man you are?”
His breathing had changed since I started going through his personal files. His whole manner, in fact, seemed oddly subdued, as if he had put the pain out of mind for the time being, replacing it with something more pertinent or troubling.
I looked at the rest of the pages. At first I thought they were all photocopies of the same two documents, the marriage license and the lease, until I looked closer and saw that each of the certificates had been issued by a different county, and that they each had a different date and wife listed beneath his signature. Five certificates, five wives in total, each with a different parcel of land on which to lay the foundation of the marriage. It was almost funny to me at first, the thought that he had failed at six marriages and five government farms on top of all his business failures, but from the start I could tell that something wasn’t quite right. It didn’t feel like a discrepancy exactly, but more like an absence or omission of something critical. And then it hit me: there were no divorce certificates, no evidence that the leases had ever been cancelled. He hadn’t been failing at marriage; he had been capitalizing on it. These documents weren’t proof of his failures; they were the deeds to his fiefdom. Once again I felt my hands go numb as electric needles danced across my spine. My tongue itself seemed paralyzed inside my mouth, but somehow I managed to make words.
I said, “Five wives. You have five wives. That’s where your money went, isn’t it? That’s what you’ve been doing all this time. Buying land for your broodmares to graze on.”
He puffed air onto his soiled mattress. He would not look at me. “Let me ask you one more thing. How many children do you have? In total. How many sons and daughters do you have besides me?” I jammed two fingers into his side, where I thought the appendix was, and waited calmly for his screaming to dissipate. “How many children do you have? How many of us have you brought into this mess?”