The thought crossed my mind “all those registered sex offenders are the stupid ones.” The ones who got caught, who couldn’t hypnotize their co-workers, friends and extended family into seeing what they wanted to see. The bald fat stage master who says when I snap my fingers you’ll wake up and believe I’m the most beautiful woman in the world. My uncle was a smart sex offender. That’s what I was thinking driving my cousin’s jag choking on his ashes.
Uncle Pig raped his grand kids, his own kids and at least one of their friends. My oldest cousin is fifty now. He’s been in prison a lot more than he’s been out of it. The oldest sister lives in luxury, is bilingual and travels the world. I’ve come to the desert to try and save her from the prison in her heart and think “why not me?” There was plenty of opportunity. He was my mother’s favorite brother and my favorite uncle. We visited him often and lived with him on occasion. My mom and he would play cards until all hours of the morning. They would comment on how I was a “classic beauty like Grace Kelly.” I was never afraid of him and his opinion mattered to me.
In the romantic version my family was eccentric and rough around the edges. A dying breed of hard-scrabble pioneers from the west. They lived in the Idaho Mountains killing and growing everything they ate and starving if they failed. They’d always lived on the edge of the law. Poaching meat, running moonshine, and dealing dirty card games around logging and mining camps. There were seven kids and my mom was the youngest. Mom knew as soon as she could talk that you “didn’t tell.”
My cousins and I weren’t real close. No one in my family was. We were all gypsies. Moving when the wind blew east or next month when the wind blew west. But we were bonded by the fact that we lived this life and were the only kids in the family our age. Their dad was fifty plus when they were born and my mom was forty when I was born. All our other cousins were the same age as my mom or older. We were our own generation in our family. Over the years when we would find each other we always talked about “our” child hood. This weekend I broke the news that we didn’t share a childhood. We shared a family. They survived and I thrived. They were abused, used and unwanted while I was protected and loved. And that was the answer to “why not me.”
When I was eleven, Mom and I were in a car or on a plane or otherwise on our way to living with my uncle. She said to me, “if Uncle Pig ever touches you, tell me.” Since finding out he was evil, I’ve replayed that memory a million times. What did I think? How did she explain a statement like that? I don’t remember much more than some vague explanation, which I totally accepted. He was a smart sex offender. My mother was hard; an excellent shot, and had proven her need to protect me would mostly overcome her childhood.
It was one of my Cousin Angel’s boyfriends that got drunk and told me Uncle Pig had “molested” her as a child. He was another in a very long line of boys and men who thought they loved Cousin Angel no matter how much she cheated on them, lied to them, or punched them in the face in restaurants. When the words came out of his mouth he was crying in his beer hurt at being cast aside and excusing all her behaviors. The cousins and I were in our early thirties then. Our children were still little. Although not as little as they were when being forced to give oral sex to uncle pig. He was a smart sex offender. My children escaped. I was in law enforcement at the time. Uncle Pig was still alive.
