Prudence Couldn't Swim Read Online Free Page A

charges, leave them to bake inside a trailer for fifteen hours. The worst I did was squeeze some four-year-olds in the trunk of a car in the middle of a desert. That wasn’t really my fault. These people knew better than to bring little kids. Kids could make noise at the wrong time. Get you into all kinds of unnecessary trouble with the INS.
    I was actually lucky when I got caught in 1989. I had less than half a gram of coke on me and my house was clean. The federal prosecutors in Frisco promised to let me go if I just told them where I got the dope. I was buying from some big boys. I took the two years—did a few college courses in the joint, read a lot of books, played a little handball. I stayed out of the prison politics. Then I got out and started living the square life, sort of. Back in those days the Feds didn’t search high and low for your ill-gotten gains like they do now. In various accounts from Idaho to Virginia I’d stashed more than half a million. I’d used at least half a dozen aliases, all the names of former Raider players: James Otto, David Casper, even the black stars like Clifford Branch and Eugene Upshaw. With my nest egg I bought a four-bedroom house in Carltonville, a drab suburb in the Oakland hills. I was “out of the mix,” ready to live the quiet life like my doctor and accountant neighbors.
    As it turned out, I couldn’t quite keep my hand out of the action. I still trafficked in women. I hooked up desperate blondes, brunettes,and redheads of all ethnicities with the paper they needed to stay in the United States. Through one of Red Eye’s amigos, I provided social security cards for Belarusians, drivers’ licenses for Filipinas, passports for Guatemalans. With modern computers and color printers, a skilled artist could forge anything. When I felt ambitious I hooked these women up with husbands. That’s how I stumbled onto Prudence.
    Before she arrived, the cream of my customer crop received more personal service, often passing through my home for several days to celebrate their newly established legal status in this country with an extended session in my bed. Fringe benefits, I called it.
    Prudence followed a different path. Before we’d even consummated the marriage, she’d moved into my second bedroom. I bought her a queen-sized Sealy Posturepedic. She said she had “woman problems” and didn’t want to give me any diseases. I bought it or maybe I just hoped as we got to know each other things would change.
    To compensate for the lack of sexual action, she cooked curries and baked those biscuits the Brits call “scones.” I loved having her around. She sunbathed topless and let me take pictures, not that she really needed a tan. She joked, flirted, and drank up my whiskey. When she changed the lock on the bedroom door, I didn’t complain. I don’t know how but all this seemed totally normal to me. She ruled the roost. After a while she started disappearing for days at a time and I accepted that I had no right to ask where she’d gone. She always came back with that bubbly smile.
    On that rare occasion when she agreed to pretend to the world she was my wife, I waltzed like a king. Men don’t age that gracefully. As a five-foot-four harelip, I was no Stacy Keach. Nothing restores masculine self-esteem like the jealous glances of other men lusting after your paramour. I lived for those moments.
    The highlight of our public life was Dr. Robson’s fiftieth birthday party. Robson lived three doors down and wore his half century well. He was a gym regular and had forsaken the evils of fast food, alcohol, and caffeine. On a typical Saturday morning, I’d see him standing on his front lawn after his run pouring water out of a plastic bottle over his sweat-soaked, graying hair.
    The good doctor invited the whole neighborhood to his affair,including the reclusive Calvin Winter and “guest.” This was to