Free And Sometimes I Wonder About You by Walter Mosley Page A

marked him as Twill’s grandfather if I didn’t know for a fact that Twill was the son of an African man that Katrina had a dalliance with.
    “How are you, Trot?” the man calling himself my father asked after his second sip of brandy.
    “I can only tell it’s you by lookin’ at this picture,” I said.
    “Memory is more like art than fact,” he said.
    “Are you Tolstoy McGill or William Williams?” I asked.
    The question seemed to hurt him. He put down the glass and looked at his upturned hands. They were very large hands; the kind of paws you would expect on a man who was a sharecropper in his youth. The muscle had softened but it was still there.
    “Tell me what happened,” I said. The hands had convinced me. This was my father. With this certainty returned all the antipathy I felt.
    “When?” he asked.
    “When you left me and Nicky to fend for ourselves and our mother to die.”
    “I thought that maybe you could tell me a little about yourself first,” he said softly. “That other stuff is so painful.”
    “That’s all I’m interested in, man. I watched my mother die praying for you.”
    The sadness in his face almost dissuaded me. Almost.
    When he realized that I would not back down he said, “I was wrong, Trot. Wrong about everything I thought to be true. I believed in the Revolution but I didn’t know then that it was just a means to an end for people who couldn’t even imagine the great socialist state. I was wrong about your mother being the good party member’s wife who could survive the pain of loss and raise his children to be soldiers. Everything and everyone I believed in either betrayed me or was destroyed.”
    “If you knew all that, then why didn’t you come back?”
    “I fought for three years throughout Central and South America,” he said, his eyes pointed up toward the ceiling. “I was wounded in Chile. Then I was captured and imprisoned for eight years; sometimes by dictators and then by the U.S. government men. I was under a death sentence most’a that time. Then finally one day me and some other prisoners were bein’ moved in a caravan and there was a mortar attack. I was wounded but got away. Your mother had already been dead for years, and you and Nikita was grown men.
    “A man named Cavalas found me and hid me in a cave in Uruguay. When I was better I moved back to Chile. I spoke the language and pretended that I came from Cuba by boat. I was a wanted man, a terrorist. At night I read and reread Marx and Lenin and Mao. And one day it hit me—the perfection imagined by socialist theory was impossible for human beings to attain. The philosophy was right but we were poor vessels for it.”
    “My mother is dead and you’re blaming the misinterpretation of philosophy?”
    “I was wrong.”
    “You’re a motherfuckin’ bastard.”
    “I’m still your father,” he said with an inkling of the old rebel.
    “Not since the day you left Mom to die and me and Nikita to make our way in the streets. Now I’m trying to make up for all the hurt I’ve caused bein’ mad at you, and Nicky is in prison.”
    I was ashamed of my self-pity. Here I was holding my father responsible for his crimes and mine, too.
    “Nikita’s not in prison.”
    “I talked to him there last year,” I said.
    “A lot can happen in a year.”
    For some reason I didn’t want to hear any more about my brother right then. I had reached my limit since coming back on the train from Philly. Between Marella, Twill, Mardi, Aura, and now my father, I didn’t want to take in another thing.
    And so, of course, the phones rang; the house number and my cell phone, too. This wasn’t a regular ring, the kind with another person on the other end of the line. This bell, from both devices, was a fast triple-ring; a mechanical call set off by a specific set of circumstances.
    I picked up the receiver of the house phone and a prerecorded pastiche of voices said, “Mr. Leonid McGill…the security system in your