Free Under Radar by Michael Tolkin

never reveal his true purpose. The ambassador presents his papers. You’re the assassin who got caught. You’re on trial for the murder of a man you didn’t know.”
    â€œI knew him.”
    â€œThis murder was not your first evil deed. I saw you falling into crime when you were a little boy. It hurt you more not to steal than it hurt the other boys. You wanted to steal money from Mom’s purse, rubbers from Dad’s drawers.”
    â€œHow did you know?”
    â€œMoses killed an Egyptian. It says in the Bible that he saw an Egyptian beating up a Hebrew, and when he looked this way and that and saw no one, then he killed the Egyptian. Sometime later he found two Hebrew slaves fighting, and he told them to stop, and they said, ‘What are you going to do? Are you going to kill us the way you killed the Egyptian?’ You didn’t know I was watching, but I was there. I know you.”
    â€œWill you look after Rosalie and the girls?”
    â€œOf course I will. I love them. I’m going to spend as much time with the girls as I can, and I’m going to do right by this side of the family. I’m going to help Rosalie make a new life, help her find a job, and find a good father for the girls.”
    ...
    During the trial, remanded to the district’s small jail, protected, a little, by his American passport but knowing that prison was certain, Tom looked hopefully, even eagerly, ahead to an ecstatic boredom, a concentration of misery made enlightening as the resolving experience ofhis life. After three months in the Spanish Town Prison, around the bay from Kingston, to his surprise and disappointment, the day of his sentencing was not, he feared, and never would be, the division between before and after. Prison, in the beginning, was just the next place he went to after the place he had been before. Some days were good, some days were bad.
    The Spanish Town Prison was hell, of course, a universe of pain and insult, six thousand men behind stone walls whose foundations were older than Boston. Someone was always screaming somewhere. Gang wars from outside continued inside, and the guards bet among themselves on fights that ended in death. Tom, hating himself, stifled his impulse to indignation, the voice of the American who might say, “I have my rights.” He wanted no rights beyond those he could earn.
    But he did want something, he wanted the approval of the brutal men around him. They ignored him. Scarred, vicious men passed him without notice. He had killed a man to protect his daughter’s honor, everyone understood this. He wasn’t in prison because in a drunken coma he had run his car into three Jamaican children, or been caught transporting drugs. His crime was human.
    As they avoided him, he decided that his intimidating aura of tragedy demanded from others a cautious and distant veneration.
    Or so he thought at first.
    After a time, he saw their opinion of him as nothing more than cold indifference.
    And then he knew that he was wrong, they were offering friendship all the time, in their own way, and that they were all strangers to one another.
    Now he embarrassed himself for wanting validation from such poor men. He knew he was confused, that he had wanted respect, yet he pushed these men away and created their disdain.
    Looking back on his life, Tom saw a pattern, of first imagining that his worst feelings were the general opinion, the worst feelings about himself or others, and then sharing those opinions with people more generous to the world who pushed him away, not wanting to be stained.
    Tom wanted to dig through the junk heap of his life until he found the layer where he had lost attachment to those scraps of his character that could summon worthy regard. He knew that if he could only pull the conflicts together, he would rescue himself from the whole flotilla of misjudgments that ended with a dead fat man at the bottom of a waterfall. He wanted this,