Daughter Outlaw

Once Daddy's revolver was found in the glove box, it's pretty standard procedure from there. They cuff Daddy, and all us kids begin to cry so loud the group of uniforms outside the car turn in our direction. It's apparent that they can hear us, but none of them even budge. Daddy notices their response and requests that the arresting officer allow him to say his “goodbyes” to his children crying in the backseat. The man grabbed the center links that locked his hands to one another and drug him in an awkward manner towards the back door. Shuffling in sync behind the man with the badge, Daddy appeared smaller than normal. When the gentleman reached for the handle, that is all the permission we required.

Pouring out of the metal entrapment containing every last memory I had of him, we sniffled and sobbed openly and without fear of punishment or judgment. By the look that fell upon the officer, he didn't intend on letting us out or allowing us to hug or touch him when he brought him to us. I guess he imagined four hysterical children were going to sit there on the cold hard leather and watch through the open space between as their hero, father, protector, teacher, and God said a few encouraging words and waved their lives and futures into oblivion and chaos.

Instead of forcing us back into the car, the cop surprisingly released his grip on the restraints which contained what he once believed to be a violent and treacherous crime suspect and threat to the community in which he served. Encouraging the lot of us hooligans to adorn our now, loving father, kneeling before us in tears of humility and grief.

On any other occasion, I would have smiled behind my tear-filled lying eyes, and I would have watched in awe as Daddy pulled off his award winning performance with such finesse, but today was not that “any other occasion."

He had an air of confidence about him, always. He goes ever so peaceful and cooperative, on all of our normal illegal encounters, so to the others, it may seem as if everything is going to be alright. By the way he went along with the situation so comfortably, no one would ever have suspected him of guilt. Mannerisms alone suggested otherwise, regardless of the facts stacked obviously against him. Not a single care in the world or a whisper of anything but silence, decked head to toe with inked memories promoted by his faded out tattoos.

The ranking officer separated himself from the crowd of others, walked up to Daddy, and excused him for the long haul. Crawling back into the heated space inside of our cage, I watched through the back glass window where Max, Uncle George's dog, used to lay before the last event's officers shot him on that Arizona highway for protecting us kids. I wished he was here to help Daddy right now, but facts are, he ain't. Dragging him towards his own, empty police interceptor, Daddy looks back one final time and lifts one hand as far around as he can for us to witness him signing, “I love you” with his index finger, thumb, and pinkie. His tears flowing down his cheeks for all the onlooking pedestrians and this morning's job goers to see.

I'd like to say that's when I realized that it's everything I feared. He's not coming back, not this time. But I knew it was the end the moment he requested to say his farewells. You see, Daddy never had to tell us "bye" because he always knew he was going to be coming home shortly after. For him, it was, “till next time”, always. Well, except now.

By the time the wrecker towed the “suspect's vehicle” away, the officers had already contacted the local “Women and Children's” shelter in that farewell county for available beds. One agreed to escort us over to claim ours in his unmarked car that arrived only moments after they hauled my father out of my life forever.

The shelter provided, what was left of my family, with a single room containing two sets of bunk beds, one on each side of the room. The walls were unadorned, plain, white, and vacant of a sense of home. We all were able to remain in the same room, though, which made it a little less hollow.

Days fade into weeks, and word comes that Daddy is staring down the barrel of a large stent in the penitentiary without mention of just how long that sentence for strong armed robbery would truly end up being. I close my eyes and can still recall the streaks of pain rolling down his face, on all of ours, and I remember the love and pain we shared through all our tragedies and struggles.

These days, I keep to myself, trapped inside my thoughts and hurt. Often times, my last birthday replays in the depths of shadowed memories. Stuck on the reel of brokenness, just pounding out the imprints of the only real thing I have left. My head drops to my hands, where I hold the little black notebook that Daddy kept for me to open when that day came.

Squeezing my eyelids tightly together, the salt of the streams coming down from them, rolls across my lips, and I can taste the fear of the unknown. The memories of greatness blink and flash through the back of them as they continue to leak, and I pull the strap from around the black of the faded leather notebook in my old, weathered hands.

A grown women in my own right today, I believe today will be the day I rally the strength inside to finally turn the cover to the first page. Inside the cover reads my name, "Daughter Outlaw." Below that it is signed "Your Daddy, The Boogeyman," and etched beneath in a single line whispered his words back to me. "I will always go back for you, and I never forget."

My eyes went round and exposed the whites around my hazel iris's. "No. He couldn't have," I murmured. I couldn't bring myself to open it any further. Bringing it to my chest and pressing it firmly to my heart, the tears come harder. My mind takes me back to the day of my sixth birthday.

It began at a rest stop, in which state, I can no longer recall. There was, what appeared to be an elderly man, to the rest of the common world, tucked comfortably in the rest of a dark, brown folding chair made of cold steel and placed perfectly beside a portable card table stacked high with a display of over-sized, but beautifully illustrated hardback books. The gentleman sat toothless while he gummed his bag of onion flavored chips, named to rhyme it's flavor.

Curious as I was, I approached him, without fear of consequence from Daddy, to figure out this man's business. I find out that my sixth year birthday was the day he turned one whole century old. Back then, that didn't seem as old as the one hundred years he informed me it equaled. When I learned the definition of "century", I knew right away why the man was there.

Some time long before that day, when I was still too young to speak, Daddy said that I used to have night terrors. As I grew, they worsened. The older I became, the more intense they did as well. On occasion, bringing the terrors right out of my dreams and into the day with me. I did my best to explain to Daddy the things that I saw. That was, until I noticed that he didn't believe me. I could read it all over his expressions. So Instead of embarrassing him or anyone else, mainly myself, I just kept that world a secret. There after, barely speaking an unnecessary word until about two months before my sixth birthday.

That's when the man who rules the unseen realm, told me that there was a time coming where a "hundred year old angel" would pass me the gift of grace to alter the tragic future of the Outlaw I was being groomed to become.

You see, we have been living "on the run" for the entirety of my memories. Daddy was a "real life armed robber" and my stepmother was referred to as a "street walker." I was even given an Outlaw name to ensure my destiny. I knew Daddy wouldn't understand, and I did what I could to seek the angel quietly. I would recognize him by the "smoke in his hair and the white of his wings", but they all looked like that to me. Which is why an angel at the rest stop is what I saw, when everyone else witnessed a man, and why he didn't appear special to me. This angel, though, was a "century old", so I smiled at him. Then I said, "Your master shared a secret with me. He said that you were the one to bring me a present. Is that true?"

His dark, charcoal blue eyes began to water. Reaching backwards into his tanned leather satchel, he pulled an object out of it shaped like a rectangle and wrapped in old sackcloth. The same object that I held in my own hands that very day, just forty years into the future.

I didn't get the chance to open it then. I knew that I had to keep it from Daddy because he'd never believe a real angel had given me the grace of his master to change the devastation of my future. That and because when Daddy noticed I was talking to the elderly man, he came over and scooped me up, snatching the gift out of my hand and forcing it back into the hands of the giver. The angel tried to explain, that it was mine, not his, and Daddy had nothing but horrible words for the man in return.

I cried to no end that day, even though, the event later, at the toy store, had softened Daddy's heart enough to make me impossible promises that he would go hunt down the man and find that very object to undo the breaking of my heart. I went to sleep that night with tears still in my eyes and told him that, "it was alright because I knew he would never find him, and soon forget." He whispered into my ear as he kissed me goodnight, "I will always go back for you, and I never forget."

The day Daddy had been taken by the laws, he whispered to me to look underneath the seat in the back of the car. When I found the sackcloth wrapped rectangle, I could not bare to open it unless I knew for sure he was coming back. Even after they sentenced him to fifteen years, I sat, and I waited my whole life as an Outlaw for his return.

That memory of the rest stop hurt on that day because all I wanted that grace to be was what kept me with Daddy. All I could think was, "If it wasn't my destiny to be an Outlaw, then why had I become one anyway?"

Clutching the book by it's first page, I attempted to open my oldest secret so I could revel in it's pages, but it seemed as if they were glued together. I pulled and it creaked quietly to a hidden box filled with a stack of one hundred and forty year old one hundred dollar bills equaling to twenty thousand dollars of real American money.

I finally understood. My entire life was intended to change when Daddy was taken, but I had refused to let go of the past. In turn, I had ruined my future anyway. I didn't have to lead that Outlaw life. In fact, taking Daddy from me was the change that had to happen before I could have the "grace", or having all the money wouldn't have done any good.

Heart breaking into a thousand more pieces, I look in the mirror and recognize that it was all my fault. I drop to my knees and apologize for the bitterness and blame that I have used as an excuse to be the disaster that I had become.