The cruise ship Sunshine came into the port of Galveston at seven in the morning on the twenty fifth of October, a long white wall against a gray sky. I stood on the dock in my work boots and the old jacket of my father, with Detective Ruiz on my left and a Galveston police captain on my right, and thirty feet behind us a team of six federal agents in dark windbreakers. Passengers began streaming down the gangway with their suitcases and their sunburned noses and their paper bags of souvenirs. I watched every face. My heart was a fist in my chest.
She was almost the last one off. My sister Deb walked down the gangway in a flowered sundress and a straw hat, tanned and smiling, pulling a pink roller bag. A heavy bald man in sunglasses walked a step behind her with a duffel on his shoulder. On his neck, above his open collar, a snake coiled up to his ear. Deb saw me at the bottom of the ramp and her smile disappeared. For a moment her feet seemed to stop. “Gary,” she said, in a voice that was almost a laugh. “What are you doing in Texas?”
I said, “Deb, where is Daddy?” She looked at me. Then at the detective. Then at the agents spreading out on either side of the dock. Her face went through the colors of a bruise. “Gary, I can explain,” she said. “He wandered off. He has been confused. I have been looking for him for weeks.” Beside her, Ricky Dale Prather slowly lowered the duffel to the ground. Detective Ruiz stepped forward and said, in her tired steady voice, “Deborah Whitmire, Richard Prather, you are under arrest.”
The father who never asked anyone for anything was found in the end by a son who would not stop asking.
Ricky ran. He bolted left, toward the cargo gate, shoving a tourist out of his way, and I started after him before I thought. He was heavier than me, but I walk steel for a living. I caught him at the corner of a container stack, put my shoulder into his back, and brought him down on the concrete. He hit with a grunt. An agent knelt on his arm. Ricky turned his face sideways on the pavement and looked at me with his small eyes. He said, “Old man should have stayed on the side of the road.” I said, “He is not going to.”
Deb did not run. She stood in the middle of the dock in her flowered dress with her hands up, trembling, and when Detective Ruiz put the handcuffs on her, she began to cry. “Gary, it was Ricky,” she said. “He made me do it. He said Daddy would never know. He said it was just until we got the money. I did not think he would leave him there. I thought he would take him to a hospital.” I looked at my sister, the little girl I had once pulled out of a creek. I said, “Deb. You drove him there.”
Daddy was released from the hospital in Carthage on the fourth of November, three weeks after I found him. He sat in a wheelchair in the sunny lobby in his good flannel shirt, which I had washed and ironed myself, and the nurses lined up to say goodbye. A young one, a girl named Kayla, who had cared for him for eighteen days without knowing his name, kissed him on the cheek. He laughed with half his mouth. His speech was coming back, one word at a time. At the door, he turned to her and said clearly: “Earl.”
The trial lasted ten days. Ricky Dale Prather was convicted of kidnapping, robbery, and aggravated elder abuse in Missouri, and then extradited to Oklahoma to face charges in the death of the old man at Muskogee, whose family, a daughter and two grandsons, sat in the front row in black. Prather was sentenced to life without parole. Deb pleaded guilty and testified against him, and the judge sentenced her to twelve years. At the sentencing she asked to speak. She said, “Daddy, I am sorry.” My father looked at her for a long time, and then he turned his face away.
He has not forgiven her. I will not pretend that he has. But on a Sunday in March, when the wind had gone soft and the redbuds had begun to bloom along the Spring River, he asked me to drive him to the prison for women in Chillicothe. We sat on opposite sides of a long table. Deb was thin, in a gray uniform, her hair gone straight. My father looked at her. He said, with great effort, “I taught you to fish.” She said, “I remember.” He said, “You are still my girl.” And that was all they said.
I took a leave from the iron crew and moved into the house in Carthage to take care of him. He learned to walk with a cane. He learned to say my name again, and then the names of all his old friends from the VFW, and at the end of March Bud and Harold came by with a cooler and a stringer of crappie and took him out on the water. I stood at the dock with my coffee and watched the three of them in the little aluminum boat, three old men in caps, their lines in the water, their laughter carrying across the lake like geese.
In April I was back on the steel in Kansas City, three hundred feet up on a beam in the wind, and I took out my phone at lunch, and there was a picture from Dad. He had finally learned how to send one. It was a photograph of the lake at dawn, with the mist on the water and a single rod propped against the rail. Under it, a message, typed with one finger, with every letter in the wrong place and perfect anyway. GARY. GOT ONE. BIG ONE. COME HOME FOR SUPPER. And I sat on the beam, with my boots swinging over the city, and I cried, and I wrote back, I am coming.
