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.
Watching cousin angel flit around her house unable to stop moving, unable to sleep at night, unable to work; my heart hurts. Sadly she is still beautiful. Some cruel part of the universe decided all of Uncle Pig’s kids were going to be ethereal looking. I used to be so jealous of them for that. Angel is almost fifty she is beautiful and she is ill. Years ago, before I knew the truth, when I thought Uncle Pig was just a crummy parent. A man whose children never went to school, a man who allowed kids to smoke pot in his house and bought them paint for stolen motorcycles, back when I believed that, Cousin Angel asked me, “Why didn’t anyone in the family do anything?” This weekend her sister and I are watching her and hope to do something.
The cousins for the most part have no education they didn’t give themselves. They went to school on rare occasion and by fifth grade mostly just quit going. Cousin Angel conned her way into a chance at an amazing career and then performed her way to the top of one of the most performance based competitive industries in the country. Cousin Love worked hard in a field you didn’t need an education for and also performed her way to the top. Cousin Hostage, who was the oldest and probably the smartest lost his brains to alcohol and his life to Uncle Pig first then prison second. His story is one of never being let go. He was Pig’s main target and grew up to be thought of as his partner. Cousin youngest became a high paying blue collar guy who is sometimes yellow from alcohol related jaundice. They are prolific readers and witty conversationalists.
Cousin Angel is on her fourth rocky marriage and Cousin Love has been with the same man for twenty years. Cousins Hostage and Youngest are married to alcohol. They never talk among each other about the sex abuse. Cousin Love doesn’t think Cousin Youngest knows and believes there is no reason he should know. Cousin Angel thought she was the only one until Love’s children disclosed their abuse. Cousin Hostage wrote his dad a beautiful letter on his death bed and made him a box for his ashes. I lost patience with Angel for a moment when she was crying. I told her that Pig “doesn’t deserve to be mourned” and she said “I don’t mourn him I mourn for us”. But she still wouldn’t let me put his ashes in the sewer. He was such a smart sex offender. He died at eighty nine years old, with all but one of his children by his side. He wasn’t ever registered because he wasn’t ever caught.
Cousin Love tells me the story this weekend of how she found out her dad “came for” her children. Those were her words. Cousin Love is so loving and so unloving that when she talked about her dad moving onto her five acre property and said to me “he came for my kids” there was immense pain and no pain at the same time. She talked about how her teenage daughter came home drunk one night and started writhing around on the floor pulling her own hair and screaming at her mother “you don’t know me!” When she’s telling me I’m wishing that Pig were not dead so that I could kill him. Then I think he isn’t dead. He lives in my Cousin Angel who can’t sleep and my Cousin Hostage who’s in prison and my Cousin Love who can’t feel any empathy for her kids and in my Cousin Youngest’s yellow skin and dying liver. We have to kill him.
Cousin Angel can’t live with knowing we dumped Pig’s ashes down the sewage drain. Cousin Love doesn’t care what we do with them. She just wants her sister to move on and be well. We talk about walking them up behind Angel’s house into the desert but she has to live here and is tired of living with his ghost and his ashes. I come up with the idea of driving into the desert and dumping them out the back of the convertible onto the road. The road is our family heritage. At least that’s what I tell Angel. Really I just want them gone and want her to feel good about it.
It’s a windy day in the desert and Love asks “shouldn’t we figure out which way the wind is blowing?” Not being spatial or mechanical or any of those types of things I tell her not to worry about it. I’m going to drive a hundred miles an hour and the ashes should just blow the opposite direction of the car. They don’t. I’m driving a hundred while us and the car get covered in pig’s ashes. But we’re screaming and laughing at the top of our lungs and for some reason it looks like Angel gets lighter every second. When it’s over and the car is covered and we’re hot and sitting on chunks of bone. Angel writes in the ash on the trunk “dead dad on car” and we laugh some more and she looks even lighter.
Angel went to sleep that night around eight. Love kissed me good night and I flew home in the morning. When I landed I had a text from Angel that simply read “dead dad off car ha ha.” He was a smart sex offender—my Uncle Pig. May he rest in hell.