DURING THE OIL BOOM in the late seventies my father worked offshore on the Halliburton rigs and rig supply boats out of Morgan City, Louisiana. Before that, although I was too young to wonder about it, he didn't work at all, and after he got his hand crushed in a chain boom during the winter of 1980, I don't think he worked at a job again. We were not poor. My mother stayed at home and cooked for us, and we lived in small, decent rental houses, never apartments or trailers, although the houses were very much out of the way, sunk into the swamps north of Grand Isle, or on the far outskirts of Lafayette, or, once, briefly, out in the country way up by Monroe. It was a time when there were a lot of families shifting from place to place in Louisiana and Texas, and nobody paid us much attention. My father always said that we lived out of town so my mother could have a garden, and she always did, but of course that was not the real reason.

When I was almost fourteen my father was arrested for the robbery of a small branch bank in Lake Charles. He was caught at a road block on I-10, along with two partners who had been frequent visitors at whatever place we were living for as long as I could remember. My brother Shawn was arrested a few days later. He was a helicopter pilot, just out of the Army, and back from the invasion of Grenada, and my father and his partners had hired him to fly over an abandoned warehouse and a field of dry broom grass while another of their partners tossed out flaming jugs of gasoline. The fires worked to divert the Sheriff and the Lake Charles city police, but the State Police got everything sealed off much faster than anyone had thought. Shawn had a good lawyer and a lot of luck, and got a suspended sentence. The courts were full of adventurous young dope smugglers just out of the service, and the judge was fed up with sending them to jail. My father got twenty years at Angola....

Ontario Review #50