OLIVER.
12. Whispered the story.
My daughter was lost to me. I remember. As I tumbled through life, I knew she was a daughter, yet I had no recollection of making her. So then: she was lost to me.
I found her in a Santa Fe trailer park, abandoned to a swing set. The mother in with bad people. I left my truck running. Men came out of trailers.
I could carry this body then.
When I took her out of New Mexico, we changed her name to Therese.
Stephen Witten. Captain Witten. He found her for me. Remembered her. Made me remember.
Where I was then in the north was a long trip to New Mexico. Hours alone, days of south, west, south then west, planning to punish this woman who took my girl from me. I couldn't remember their faces.
I took the girl off the swing, closed my arms around her, and the men came. I took the one step back just as the first one hit me in the neck with a rock. I was so tall he fell. The next two tried to tackle me, but my stride was strong, and I dragged them, four, five feet, before they regrouped.
I made it to the road before one smartened up with a knife.
He stuck me in the back, his force cramped punching through my leather jacket, (an up north jacket worn down south), and the knife only got in me an inch. I just kept walking. The girl hugged against me, and when I got to putting her in the truck she let go. She didn't make a sound.
I locked her in the truck. Went back with free hands.
These were peoples if documented at all in the state of New Mexico it would have been by the judiciary. No authorities would be called.
Three of them died. They had knives, Maggie.
I LOST HER AGAIN at nineteen. A boy in Worcester. Welding in a machine shop, but wanted to be a musician. She left with him. Came here with him, not so far from where we are sitting. She was in this phase of remembering. Everything was remembering. She remembered a lot that never happened. Remembering places she'd never been. This kid gets a hold on her, and tells her everything is true, and writes songs about kidnapping and all this happy horseshit. Writers are perverts.
So I lose her this time. I know it's going to be awhile before I see her again. I know I'll have to live with the worry. I'll suffer it. I can pray for her.
With praying I used to think some people, good people, do get answered; one who's done what I've done, there's no answer for me. But then I think: Why not? Why not answer me? I signed off to do hasty things in life, and will pay for them, but these things were done by Your consent. Some men have the ingenuity to bend with and against the word of Him, and come out accredited, to bypass sin and be saved; then there's the hard men like me: I'm under the jurisdiction of a different angel, but he is in the organization. Read the Bible, God's ordered wetwork before. I did my bit for him; he owes me. Protect her, I prayed to him. Protect her, and don't get cute with putting her with what I've done.
WHEN I KNEW for sure she didn't die here with this rocker who took her here on the Bad Day, that was God answering me. It was ten years to find her again, but these were peaceful lonely years. She lived. Good enough. The rocker died here. That's why I looked for her here. A day comes when I'm looking down here for her, and then I look up, and she's there, forty feet high, inside a photograph. And inside that forty feet she's on a beach with her these gypsies around her, and she's done up as some Aryan princess, swarthy jippos bowing and kneeling. Strange. I have some responsibility for what Henny had made of her: Those north bones she got from me.
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