If we forgive our fathers, what is left?

— Smoke Signals, Sherman Alexie

I got into every college I applied to, all twelve of them, but Columbia was like getting my astronaut application accepted. When the envelope arrived, my sister and I actually clutched each other and hugged, which was about as common as a unicorn sighting around our place. My guidance counselor told me, when I first shoved my list of schools across her desk, picked out of her dusty directory, that I should maybe 'learn to set more realistic goals'— man, fuck that. (She put my face up on the bulletin board outside her office after I showed her the letter, though, so I forgave her.)

It would be the triumphant ending to some corny movie about getting out of the hood, like Stand and Deliver, if it wasn't for Curly— who'd never had the slightest interest in my education before— deciding that he hated the whole idea on principle.

"You're just a kid, you ain't even eighteen until next March," he said, his forehead crinkling up like a washing board as he tripped over the letter, but he'd gotten the gist of it when he put it back down on the coffee table. "This place is in New York? What was wrong with OSU?"

One of the lingering side effects of Curly's half-decade in prison was that parts of him remained cryogenically frozen in time; the last footage he ever saw of New York, circa 1977, was of a Chevy on fire during the city-wide blackout while Abraham Beame bankrupted the place, and that was what stuck with him like gum to the bottom of a desk. "The fact that it's in the state of Oklahoma," I said, with what I thought was phenomenal patience and self-restraint. I needed to play my cards carefully, in this situation, because Curly held all of them. He was right, that I wouldn't be eighteen until March; I'd skipped fourth grade. I still had to wheedle him for a parental signature like I was going on a field trip to the Alamo.

"What's wrong with the state of Oklahoma? Stillwater is nearby, hell, you could even still live at home—"

This was not shaping up to be my proudest moment. It was fixing to become a colossal temper tantrum, actually. I didn't let that realization stop me. "I don't want to go to OSU when I got into Columbia." I searched for a metaphor that might compute better for him. "That's like drivin' a beater truck when you have an Audi in the garage."

"But they said they'd pay for everything, even textbooks, that they'd give you some kind of stipend for attending—"

If I was thinking straight, I would've explained that we were nowhere near the income level where Columbia would expect any kind of financial contribution from us, either, as I added some much-needed diversity to their roster. I wasn't. "You have a GED, Curly," I bit out. "You don't know one college from another."

My mama would've really let me have it, if she'd been home from work and heard me spouting off. Curly was well-aware that I was smarter than him (if not necessarily wiser) and kind of sensitive about it. I figured don't be an ass was about to be the next thing out of his mouth, but then he just laughed. "Lord—" he dragged it out with a drawl into Lawd, like my stepgranddaddy Ed, who'd crawled out from under a rock in the Ozarks— "the boy ain't even left home yet and he's already forgotten where he came from. I'll try not to embarrass you too much when you bring some high-falutin' girl home for Christmas, all right?"

I felt bad, but not bad enough to apologize, which left the guilt to slosh around my stomach like a puddle of nuclear waste from Chernobyl— my disappointment outweighed it, that even a token 'congratulations' was beyond him. I knew that if I asked him upfront, Curly would say that of course he was proud of me, that he always had been and always would be, and that in fact, he'd be just as proud of me if I'd dropped out of high school to drive a garbage truck. Not in the false, overcompensating way some middle-manager dad would try to explain away his son going to junior college to 'find himself' to extended family. He'd mean every word of it.

But I didn't want him to be proud of me no matter what. I wanted him to be proud of me because I got into Columbia, the way Uncle Darry was running around telling everyone who cared and plenty of folks who didn't give two shits that his nephew was about to become an Ivy Leaguer, with nobody buying his way in, either. It was a distinction that made perfect sense to me, and none to him, which was why I was looking forward to Uncle Darry explaining it.

Though Curly's words rang right around my head like he'd slapped me upside it, eavesdroppers never hear nothing they like about themselves, chismoso, so knock it off, I lingered in the doorway anyway. It was a bad habit, but I'd honed my eavesdropping skills through a lifetime of having to overhear unpleasant secrets, and besides, it drove me crazy that people might be talking about something I wasn't privy to— especially if that was about me. Curly and Uncle Darry were drinking whiskey out of a big Tennessee Honey bottle and the nice, crystal-cut glasses, in the living room, the TV turned to a low-volume rerun of Miami Vice neither was paying attention to. I couldn't believe their relationship had managed to improve to this point, though the tension between them was still obvious, if you knew them well. Five years ago, they couldn't be in a room together without things erupting into literal, physical violence. There was a not-so-distant Curtis-Shepard family Thanksgiving where a table got flipped over.

"Y'all are projectin' your lost hopes and dreams onto my kid—" the only thing Curly read was pop psychology, which he claimed was more essential to running a successful bar than any mixology— "and I'm thinkin' about what's best for him, as usual. I didn't even want him to skip the grade. He's seventeen, he's a baby." He took a long, fortifying draught from the glass. "Hell's he gonna do, runnin' around New York by himself? We don't even know nobody there to keep an eye on him."

I was so incensed by a baby I nearly broke my cover to get in there and protest, my face hotter than the time I had strep throat and a 103 fever. When Curly was seventeen, he was in charge of an entire gang. When he was nineteen, he had me. I knew exactly how he and my uncles saw me, as naive and lacking in street smarts, and I hated it as much as I couldn't figure out how to change that perception. Maybe when your daddy was a former kingpin, though, looking tough in his eyes was a losing game.

"Don't say 'y'all' when I'm startin' to agree with you," Uncle Darry said, and the sting of his betrayal took my breath away like a sucker punch. He could hold his liquor, and he wasn't slurring, but there was a slightly thicker drawl to his words now as he reclined in the beat-up armchair. "I don't want to compare him to Ponyboy, exactly, he ain't quite got that head-in-the-clouds quality to him. But Ponyboy was in the same position, year ahead of his cohort, and look at what happened there." Uncle Ponyboy either failed or dropped out of TU— did the latter, maybe, after the former was a foregone conclusion— joined a hippie commune for a while, then ran off to California to become a professional homosexual, where he'd remained since 1969. "I thought I didn't push him hard enough, but lately I've been wonderin' if the opposite's true. 'S like potty training. He just wasn't ready."

"More and more, he reminds me of Tim, and not in a good way." Curly licked a stray drop that was threatening to crash off the rim. Was I ever going to get to be my own person? "Tim's a genius, y'know, I ain't just gassin' him up because he's my brother. Everyone says so. But I never wanted my kids to get his brains, when it came down to the wire— we went to go clean up his apartment, after he got sent upstate, he had the Lord is my shepherd and yea, though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me written on the walls in his own blood. What kind of fuckin' valley was he walkin' through in there?" He picked up the bottle and topped off his glass, an easy grace in the flick of his wrist. "Should've pushed harder with that goddamned child shrink, maybe. Can't believe that woman had a whole PhD and couldn't manage to make an eleven-year-old kid talk."

So now Curly thought I was a baby and a basketcase. Great. "They still call it manic depression?" Uncle Darry asked, a little too casually.

"Bipolar, now, I think. Like you're goin' between two— Mike, you ain't slick, I can hear you breathin' from a mile away." Curly wasn't drunk yet, but he was a little sloshed, and his voice came out louder than he probably intended. I ended up jumping my way into the doorway. "Git in here."

"I ain't some damn baby, Curly," I muttered, scowling, which was sure proving it to him. "I can take care of myself fine."

Uncle Darry might've gotten on me for the cuss if he were sober, even a mild one, but he didn't say anything. Curly just smirked. "What'd I tell you about eavesdropping, huh?" He gestured me closer with his hand; reluctantly, I stepped forward. I expected a quick one upside the head. If I were only so lucky. "You're always gonna be my fuckin' baby—" I let out an embarrassed squawk that sounded like the garbage disposal getting jammed, as he cupped my chin, tilted my head up to look at him— "and don't you forget that."

He lost ground, though, when Uncle Tim showed up with his two cents a few days later. They held this conversation over a joint, which they probably shouldn't have been smoking inside, because that smell didn't come out of the upholstery in a hurry. (Trust me). "You can't just make up for lost time at Mike's expense, Cacho, and don't give me none of that crap about how he ain't ready to leave the nest yet," Tim said roughly, which was about the only way he knew how to talk to anyone. "It don't work like that. He's grown up now, and you're gonna have to accept that, before he really is sprinting out of the house once he's eighteen."

I expected Curly to argue, but instead he fell silent. "I love my boy," he finally said. "I don't get him none, but I love him."

"Nobody's denyin' that," Uncle Tim said, "but between you and me," he added with a short snort, "I think y'all could use some time apart. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and all that bullshit. Or maybe I'm just sick of playin' UN peacekeeper."

It wasn't the most sentimental ending of a story in the world, but Curly and I didn't settle into a comfortable symbiosis after we had a real touching heart-to-heart about our differences— more like, we defrosted our previously cold war and came back in hot. When I was around sixteen, there was nothing too dumb for us to get into a screaming match over, even an empty cereal box left in the pantry, and Curly wasn't even prone to those before I drove him to it— I quickly perfected the art of slamming my bedroom door and flinging myself face first into my pillows, then cranking up my most obnoxious music, just to drown him out and piss him off. As it was pointed out to us none-too-gently in family therapy (my mama's idea— her other one was burying us both under the garden shed and raising Dani as a single mother), after so many years of icy, carefully-maintained emotional distance, it was about the only way we could figure out how to bond. If we were at home, hollering our heads off at each other, at least we were together and doing it as a family, goddammit. We had each other's undivided attention.

This wasn't some dumb showdown over my Alien Sex Fiend records, though (Curly heard from Father Murphy that they might have Satanic messages if you played them backwards, and promptly deposited them in the garbage can). It was my entire future— and Mom wanted me to go, the way she never got the chance herself, when my long-dead grandparents and even Uncle Darry never encouraged her much in that department. One lingering effect of screwing around on your wife and having her take you back was that you lost every argument for the rest of your life. Once she got involved, Curly caved to her like a house of cards she'd pulled the bottom out of.

I was getting out of Tulsa like a bat out of hell, and not a moment too soon.

I snuck out of the graduation party my parents lovingly threw for me to get loaded in the basement with my cousins— it was embarrassing, but I kind of needed a break from being man of the hour, and also to loosen my tie. By 'cousins', I meant my cousin Elena and my godbrother Neto, who I wasn't that hot about. First of all, I was real good at holding a grudge, and I still vividly recalled the time Curly made me take him to an AC/DC concert in OKC and I had to haul him out by the armpits after he snorted a line there. Second of all, even setting that whole incident aside, he was an asshole. But Elena was dating him, and he was Curly's godson, so I had to put up with him.

"Quit gropin' my cousin in front of me, Guzmán," I said as I flicked my roach at him, one that sent a stray spark leaping onto the sleeve of his t-shirt; he yelped and flipped me off, but it got his hand out from the inside of her blouse, which accomplished my goal. I almost said sister and had to check myself; I had to do that a lot. "Uncle Tim's gonna kill you if she comes home with another hickey." Aunt Gabi kept threatening to make her spend senior year with the nuns at Immaculate Heart.

Neto gave me a sheepish half-smile, like a kid caught rooting around in the cookie jar, but he didn't look that sorry. Elena just rolled her eyes at me. She was Uncle Tim's only daughter, only child, and epileptic on top of all that— if he could've locked her up in the house on a permanent basis, he would've, with Neto left out to dry on the porch. "This song's awful," she said, as she tried to separate her lashes with a safety pin with one hand and comb her bangs up with the other, in front of the mirror above the washing machine. We were going to another party later on tonight; the stereo was blaring Walk Like An Egyptian, which followed you around like the moldy smell from that washer on every radio station that summer, as the top song of 1987. "Put on that new Prince one, okay, babe?"

Neto obliged her and replaced the record— 'that new Prince one' was actually from last year, Kiss, but anything was better than the Bangles, Jesus Christ. I wasn't allowed anywhere near the stereo on principle, because I listened to stuff like Joy Division, which made people want to kill themselves and was impossible to dance to, apparently. "You already got your bags packed, bigshot?" he asked me, as he was rifling through our box of them, next to the Christmas ornaments. I'd taken my suitcase out of the attic in April, back when the letter first came. "Man, surprised your head's even been fitting through the metal detector lately." His smile shapeshifted into something a little nastier. "Though I guess losin' valedictorian to a girl might've popped your bubble some."

"Don't make fun of him!" Elena swatted his bicep. "And what exactly's wrong with losin' to a girl?"

I stifled a groan in another sip from my beer can, already half-empty. I was salutatorian; Noemí Delgado was valedictorian, and I'd been taking shit over it for weeks now. Gun to my head, sure, it bothered me, but not because Noemí was a girl everyone called a 'ballbuster' for raising her hand in class too much— hell, she earned it fair enough. It was because I knew plenty of them thought it was funny that I'd come in second-best, that I'd been made to lose at something for once, and wanted to see how I'd take it. "At least I didn't have to prepare a real long speech about the meaning of life," I said with a shrug, like I didn't care at all.

Elena jabbed me between the ribs with her mascara tube, fucking hard, the way she did when we were kids. Uncle Tim always took her side whenever we fought, too, because she was the girl and I was the boy. "Is Jennifer comin' by, later tonight?" she asked, to change the subject.

Jennifer Harjo was my girlfriend— sort of— past tense. We'd gone to prom together, but she was still a junior and I was a senior and we'd come to a mutual agreement that we wouldn't drag it out when I went to college, when one or the other of us would have to cave by Columbus Day and admit that we'd met someone else. It didn't even really have to be said. We were a couple because I was the captain of the basketball team and she was a flyer on the cheerleading squad, and we'd both been on homecoming court, and then we were swapping spit in Brad Foster's hot tub when his parents were out of town. She was real pretty, and I liked her okay, but I'd never talked to her about anything serious, or assumed she'd be interested if I tried.

What I said out loud: "I think we broke up."

Elena: "You think you broke up? Either you did or you didn't, it's not a Schrödinger's cat type of situation. God, guys just make no sense sometimes."

Neto: "He's leavin' himself open to score with all the co-eds, ain't he? Makes plenty of sense."

Columbia only started admitting chicks in 1983— this was going to be the first year with a co-ed graduating class, period. I was pretty sure I might still have to head over to Barnard for that. "I'm not goin' there just to chase skirts," I said as I sat down on the top of the couch. "Jesus."

"Right, you're goin' there to change the world, sorry I forgot," he said. "You must've had one hell of an essay. My interest in becoming a public defender started at a very young age, as I watched my daddy wait for a judge to sentence his ass for about the millionth time—"

I threw my now-empty can at him; it bounced off his shoulder and clattered onto the concrete floor with a tinny sound. Neto was just razzing me, his own daddy had spent plenty of time in the big house, but I didn't write about Curly in my essay and this was hitting a little close to home. I wrote about the lessons being captain of the basketball team had taught me, about the value of good sportsmanship and hard work. I didn't figure my childhood sob story would give me any bonus points for overcoming adversity— I was afraid they'd think I wasn't from a respectable enough family background to go to any college, much less Columbia. Though it was a pretty irrational fear, I'd spent a couple of nights, lashed to my bed by cold sweat, worrying someone from the admissions committee might have gone digging through the archives of the World and figured out I was related to that Curly Shepard— the same one responsible for the biggest cocaine bust, and the subsequent arrest of half of Tulsa PD and the burgeoning DEA when he sold them up the river, in Oklahoma state history— and then it'd be all over for me.

Fortunately, it was a pretty common surname.

"Y'all hidin' in here?" Uncle Darry called as he came down; we lunged to hide the evidence of the underage drinking, but while we managed to get the cans under the couch before he pulled on the bare lightbulb at the foot of the stairs, we couldn't wipe the guilty expressions off our faces quite as easily. "Mike, sorry, bub, but your mama wants to take pictures again."

That was when Neto managed to kick one of the cans out with a mistimed swing of his foot. I braced myself for him to start hollering, or at least a lecture, but he just smirked and went over to the mini fridge to crack a cold one open himself. "This next set's for Auntie Angela and Uncle Cristián, you better straighten that tie."

Curly losing the war might've been a foregone conclusion, but that didn't mean he was going to forfeit every battle in the process. Every other word out of his mouth that summer, before I left for my job as a lifeguard and as he was coming home from his as a bartender, was some piece of sage wisdom. "You never try to reason with a crackhead," he let me know as I was shoveling Lucky Charms, still half-asleep at the ass crack of dawn, into my open maw— some of the pastel-colored milk dribbled down my chin as he leaned closer to me, dead serious. "They ain't got no sense left, and they won't feel no pain until they're sober, neither. They want money, your whole wallet, you just hand it over, you understand? It ain't worth your life."

I sure as shit wasn't about to let some hypothetical crackhead run off with my hard-earned cash, but I just nodded along so he'd cut me loose, the same way I did when he and Mr. Guzmán were lamenting how there was just no code or sense of honor with gangbangers these days. When he knocked on my door the night before I was set to leave, I expected more in this vein. "I know," I said exasperatedly, tossing another handful of boxer shorts into my suitcase, "no selling, snorting, or manufacturing cocaine when I'm in New York, or you're gonna come track me down and throw me under the L train." I weighed my Einstürzende Neubauten poster in one hand, that Uncle Pony got for me at a flea market in Berkeley, and my FREE MANDELA banner in the other, and decided I was bringing them both. If he didn't give it a rest already, I'd be too psyched out to get on the Greyhound, which might've been his intention to begin with.

"You got what you wanted, and you're still bein' a brat," and that cut me down pretty quick. He had something in his hand, hidden behind his back like the time he gave me firecrackers for Christmas and told me not to tell my mama. "Listen, I got you a goin'-away present," he said, pulling it into my line of vision; it was a black-handled switchblade, of all things. "Don't let nobody find it— and be careful with it— but just in case."

I could handle myself all right in a fight, but I wasn't exactly holding court on the East side, either, like some people expected me to; the time Brian Reynolds & co. stomped my ass and got me arrested was more than enough to put me off trying to become the lightweight champion of Tulsa. Will Rogers was kind of a rough school, but I didn't have the first clue how to use one of these, I wasn't one of the JD kids. Weren't they illegal to own?

"Thanks," I still said. It was the thought that counted, and I knew what kind of thought Curly had put into this.

He pulled me close to his chest once I put it down, and my resentment dissolved like sugar in iced tea. I didn't want to leave for months on a bad note. Most dads started to loosen up when you became an adult— Uncle Darry and Uncle Tim had definitely unclenched over the years, trust me— but Curly acted a lot more like my father now that he was coming on forty, than my delinquent brother who kept getting shipped off to military school when I was a kid. It was embarrassing, but I'd kind of started to let myself trust him to take care of me, believe that he was planning on sticking around for good and wasn't going to ditch this whole family thing for a new criminal enterprise. He'd signed my last birthday present Love, Dad, even, which was a weird enough shift in our relationship I didn't want to think about it too hard. I called him that sometimes— more often than I used to— but it wasn't the sort of thing we'd put in writing before. Did he want to hear it?

Was I leaving him behind the same way he'd left me?

"Listen," he said into the crown of my head, the words muffled by my hair, "I know you're ashamed of me."

"I ain't—"

"Don't bullshit me," he said simply, and once again, I fell quiet. "You're ashamed of me, what I've done, and you feel like you gotta do somethin' big with yourself to make up for it." Curly could always cut right to the heart of me. "It can't have been easy, always bein' defined by me. I get that."

There were a lot of things I didn't like about living in Oklahoma. The constant loop of Ted Nugent, Emmylou Harris, and Lee Greenwood playing every time I walked into a bar, restaurant, or movie theater. The fact that I'd gotten on a horse once, eaten dust, and never gotten back on, putting me off the rodeo circuit for good. Hell, even all the cowboy hats got on my nerves sometimes. But near the top of that list was that everyone in Tulsa, whether they couldn't believe I'd come out of him or were making me sit at the front of the class to keep an eye on me, knew me as one thing— 'Curly's boy'. It was a city of 360,000 people, and still not anywhere near big enough for me to get out of his shadow.

"But you don't have to," he continued. "You ain't carryin' around none of the sins of the father, okay? That's my job." He held me away from him at arms' length and looked me dead in the eye. "And you can always come home. I promise."

I jerked my head up and down, trying to mask the dread I felt at that last line, though I knew he meant it to be reassuring. He drew me in close again, pressed his lips to my temple for a second. "I love you, yeah?"

He asked it like a question, like he wanted my confirmation. I squirmed with embarrassment like I'd been hit with a taser, put on the spot— I knew I should say it back, but it was something I'd struggled to say out loud my whole life, not even just with him. And I knew that once I left, I wasn't planning on coming back, either.

I feel like I dropped a lot of references here, so to clear stuff up— Curly's acting like New York is an apocalyptic wasteland because it was in pretty dire straits, economically and crime-wise, throughout the seventies, and he's trying to sanitize Mike's music collection because he's fallen hook, line, and sinker for Satanic panic. Einstürzende Neubauten was an experimental band with a penchant for using scrap metal and building tools as instruments (Mike blasts them to get on Curly's nerves, and it works); the movement to free Nelson Mandela was going on throughout the eighties, but he won't be released until 1990.