Fugitive Son: A Memoir
Autor Aramís Calderónen Limba Engleză Paperback – sep 2024
As Calderón shares, Fugitive Son is not a love letter to his father, whom he sees even after his death as an unethical, toxic, and incredibly complex man. Rather, Calderón’s memoir explores how his father’s undeniable love for his family despite drug addiction, lawlessness, and toxic masculinity informed Aramís’s rebellious decision to join the Marines, and how all this shaped his determination to become the father he wished his own had been.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781640126268
ISBN-10: 1640126260
Pagini: 214
Ilustrații: n-a
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.28 kg
Editura: Potomac Books Inc
Colecția Potomac Books
Locul publicării:United States
ISBN-10: 1640126260
Pagini: 214
Ilustrații: n-a
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.28 kg
Editura: Potomac Books Inc
Colecția Potomac Books
Locul publicării:United States
Notă biografică
Aramís Calderón is a data scientist for a defense contractor and a combat veteran of the Iraq War. He enlisted in the Marines in 2002 and received an honorable discharge after twelve years of service. Calderón earned an MFA in creative writing and has published poetry, short stories, and the novel Dismount.
Extras
1
We spent our summer Sundays visiting my father in prison.
To be closer to him, my mother had moved us from Florida to
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when I was eleven. The long, one-lane
road from our apartment to the prison was flanked by swamp, and
the stink of an unseen petrochemical plant filled the car even when
the windows were rolled up. To pass the time, Mom would crank
up the radio volume and sing along to Whitney Houston and Bryan
Adams songs about love and loneliness. My siblings napped, and I’d
pass the time reading a map we kept stored in the glove box. Our
destination on the map was a town named Carville.
On August 16, 1992, we were running late as usual. Mom parked in
the visitors’ area, a gravel lot with a view of the Mississippi River just
beyond a barbed wire fence. She tried walking quickly through the
parking lot, but her high heels sank into the ground every other step. I
held my little brother’s hand, but Peewee’s little legs struggled to keep
up. My sisters, Memé and Chiní, skipped and laughed, happy to be out
of the car. As soon as Mom’s heels hit the sidewalk, she took off even
faster. I couldn’t understand why. Even the few times we’d been late
for visitation hours, Dad’s anger had dropped after a hug and a kiss.
The federal corrections facility housed minimum-security inmates
with medical conditions. Mom had said they moved Dad here
because of his bad knees. Next door to the prison was a leper colony,
but I never saw any of the residents.
I knew back then my father had committed crimes, but I didn’t
understand what “conspiracy drug trafficking” meant. I knew he
was a drug smuggler, and I knew what the word smuggler meant
because Han Solo in the movie Star Wars was also one. Teachers
had taught me drugs were bad, but I’d learned that lesson long
before the D.A.R.E. program appeared in my school. Still, I didn’t
believe my dad was a bad man.
A garden surrounded the prison. The able-bodied inmates
planted and maintained a riot of manicured bushes punctuated
with bright red and yellow flowers. The guards were polite and
happy, unlike the rough-spoken corrections officers with their
thin-lipped smiles whom I remembered from Dad’s previous
prison stay, at the maximum-security Homestead Correctional
Institution in Florida.
The reception area was in a rectangular white concrete building
that always reminded me of a shoebox. We followed Mom through
the heavy door with its thick glass pane. I was out of breath and felt
the stab of a stitch under my ribcage. Little brother Peewee’s face
was covered with sweat. Mom checked us in with the guard, and he
thanked her and called her “ma’am.” She shooed us over to the waiting
area, and we occupied ourselves among the other kids. Peewee
and I stayed away from the boys and my sisters from the girls.
The family waiting area was the best I’d ever seen. The moms
here sat a little straighter, and the kids smiled more. Toys for the
visiting kids were clean. The Barbie dolls my sisters played with
had their heads and all their limbs, and the board games were
complete. Here, the guards announced the start of visiting hours
in soft voices, and they didn’t search adults for contraband. Mom
sat in a chair with a clean, cushioned seat and read a beauty magazine
with Julia Roberts on the cover. After seeing the movie Pretty
Woman, my mother had adopted a hairstyle to resemble her. She’d
even dyed her hair red.
The inmate visitation area provided large plastic picnic tables
and clear views into the garden. My father sat alone at one of the
tables. In the other prisons he would pass the time waiting for us
by talking with the other inmates, but here, no one even looked at
him. Dad didn’t seem to care. I assumed the inmates feared him.
When Dad caught sight of us that day, he waved us over. His tan
jumpsuit was a size too large. We hugged him all at the same time,
and he embraced us all within his arms. I saw his prisoner number
stenciled in black block characters on his back: 39941-019.
Dad said, “As- salamu-aliakum.”
We replied in a chorus of broken Arabic, “Wa-aliakum-salam.”
His cheeks turned pink when he smiled at us, his trimmed goatee
framing his lips. “Good. Your pronunciation is getting better.” I
avoided all the eyes on us every time we spoke Arabic to each other.
Dad practiced Islam, that of the Shia sect to be exact. Like most
Argentinians, he had been raised in the Catholic Church. Whenever
I asked him why he’d converted, he’d tell me that Christian doctrines
hadn’t appealed to him, and the sense of guilt and shame in the
Christian creed reeked to his soul of hypocrisy. He’d repeat the
story of how he’d become functionally godless during his teenage
years, until he’d converted to Islam in the 1970s during his first
stint doing hard time in the U.S. federal prison system; there, he
said he’d befriended a good Muslim man, who mentored my father
and protected him. I understood later, through my own wartime
experiences in Iraq, that there were no atheists in foxholes.
Mom repeated the Arabic greeting like a robot. My father had
converted her after they’d met. She, too, was a disillusioned Catholic,
but at best she was an unenthusiastic Muslim woman. I never saw
her wear a hijab, and she only prayed with Dad.
By Islamic laws and my father’s insistence, we kids were all
Muslims. All of us had Islamic middle names, proclaimed we were
Muslim, and even avoided eating pork to make Dad happy.
I sat across from Dad, while Mom and Memé sat beside him.
Chiní and Peewee sat next to me. Dad kissed Mom, tongue and
everything, and my siblings and I made a chorus of disgusted
disapproval.
When they finished, Dad looked each of us in the eyes. “You all
look healthy.” He looked at me a second time. “Are you swimming
or doing exercises, Peté?”
We all had nicknames in my family, and they rarely called
me Aramís. I hadn’t even known my name was Aramís until the
second grade, when I cried because my teacher yelled at me for not
responding to daily attendance. When I was a baby, I had a large
pacifier, and in Spanish it’s called a chupeté, and ever since they’ve
called me Peté.
“Yeah, there’s a pool in the apartment complex.” The week before,
I had walked back home under the summer sun and burned the
bottoms of my feet.
He turned to Mom. “Lele, stop buying that sugary cereal.” Mom
sighed and waved away his critique. “Leave him alone, Evaristo.”
She usually called him Eva and only used his full given name when
something was wrong and she needed his attention.
I didn’t understand what Dad was getting at. The only emotion
my eleven-year-old mind registered was happiness at seeing him.
He shook his head and turned to kiss Memé’s head.
Dad peered under the table and pointed at the knock-off Converse
footwear my grandma had bought me at Payless. “You need to get
boots, Peté. Those sneakers provide no support.” He took the
welfare of my feet seriously and always told me how boots, preferably
combat boots, were better for me and my size.
Mom interrupted Dad before he could remind me how, if I didn’t
take care of my feet, I would be dead in a war. “Evaristo, we need to
talk.” She’d used his full name again. They held each other’s gaze.
“No.” Memé wrapped her chubby arms around Dad. After Dad
gave a halfhearted attempt to break free, he smiled and licked her
forehead. She giggled and let go.
Dad wiped her hair back and pointed with his chin to a door. “Go
play together in the garden. There are butterflies there.” He blew a
kiss at my baby sister. “Do you like butterflies, Chiní?”
Chiní got up and headed toward the door. Dad reached across the
table and squeezed my hand. “Don’t let your five-year-old sister go
out there alone. And take your brother.” He barked the words like
an order given to me by a military superior.
I never enjoyed being commanded by him, but I obeyed with
protest. “How come Memé gets to stay?” Memé and I were only a
year apart and afflicted with severe sibling rivalry.
Dad scoffed, “She’s not.” He kissed her and nudged her with his
shoulder. She rose from his side and hopped to my side. “You take
care of her too.” Again, he commanded. Memé smiled because he’d
raised his voice at me. One more point went to her in our endless
game of who was the favorite.
The temperature outside had risen fast. The month of August in
Baton Rouge was just as muggy and hot as in Miami, but there was no
ocean breeze here. We played outside but again segregated by gender.
Peewee and I played hide-and-seek, but we got bored and eventually I
coaxed him to follow me and throw twigs at our sisters. Memé retaliated
with rocks, but a stern look from a corrections officer ended the game.
We wandered the garden with all the other children of convicts,
but we never spoke to one another. I believed each convict’s kid had
been conditioned by our lives to be suspicious of our own kind. I
know now we were merely ashamed.
A butterfly as big as my face flew near me. I’d never seen one that
big before. I didn’t see the beauty of its wings or the grace of its flight;
instead, I heard the wind whooshing under its wings and the spindly,
predator-like legs. It sent me into a panic. I used every curse word
I’d learned from the school bus and at home. It felt like thousands
of them were crawling all over, trying to enter my ears and into my
brain. I ran back inside to my mother.
My father had his arms around Mom. She wasn’t leaning into
him, and neither was smiling, but I had more pressing concerns.
Behind me Memé was laughing.
I sat down and buried my face into my arms, covering my ears.
Dad tapped the table with his knuckles. “What’s going on, Peté?”
Before I could get my shit together, Memé told him how I’d run
from a pretty butterfly, she said, “like a pussy.”
“What? You ran away and left your little brother and sisters?”
Dad grabbed my wrist, not unkindly but not softly. “Answer me.”
I was more scared of the butterfly than his disappointment at
that moment, and yet if I spoke, I knew my voice would crack. Dad
despised men who cried, so I kept quiet.
“Leave him alone,” Mom said, without sympathy or kindness.
“No.” Dad got up slowly. “We’re going to conquer this right now.
Let’s go, soldier.” He staggered the first few steps and then found
a more dignified stride the closer he got to the garden door. Both
his knees had been broken when the cocaine-loaded plane he was
flying crashed into the Caribbean Sea. His right leg was shorter than
the other, and the skin around his knees was covered in scar tissue.
I followed him out the door back to the garden, my siblings and
mother behind me. Memé ran forward and grabbed Dad’s hand and
led him to the monster butterfly.
It didn’t seem as frightening to me at a distance, but I still stayed as
far away as I could. Dad reached out to the butterfly, and it crawled
up his hand. “This is beautiful. Al-humdu Allah, truly a marvel of
His creation. Come see, Peté.”
I didn’t step up. My siblings got close to it, Memé and Chiní
touching its wings with their fi ngertips and Peewee laughing as it
slowly crawled around Dad’s hand. My father stepped closer to me,
and Mom stood behind me to keep me from running.
It was beautiful and terrifying.
“This is a harmless creature.” Dad extended his hand to me.
I leaned as far from it as I could. “How do you know?”
The butterfly’s wings rose and fell slowly. “Peté, the only thing
you fear is fear itself.” He gestured for me to give him my hand.
I looked away. The corrections offi cers and families glanced in
our direction but ignored us when they saw who was talking. There
was nothing to see here but a hardened criminal teaching his son
to not be afraid of butterflies.
He lowered his voice. “Look at it.”
I shook my head. Before Dad could try again with platitudes, the
butterfly grew bored of my cowardice and flew off.
Dad’s sigh rumbled like the gravel rocks Mom struggled to walk
over every time we visited him. “Peté.” He gripped my shoulder.
“Son, that was a chance right there to confront and overcome your
fears. You can’t run away from your fears, or they will own you.”
I remained silent. He would ignore my rationalizations about
poisonous varieties and how vulnerable the inner ear was. I knew my
words were mere excuses coming to him from his disappointment
of a son anyway. His first arrest was at twelve years old. By sixteen
he was a father and a cocaine cowboy by eighteen; no satisfactory
explanation of my fears existed. He shook his head and turned away.
We walked back together to the table indoors. My sisters spent the
rest of the visit telling Dad about their new schools, while Peewee
sat on his lap and leaned against his shoulder.
Mom looked bored and chewed her nails. Whatever she and Dad
had been talking about before wasn’t so important anymore.
Dad didn’t speak to me for the rest of the visit until he said in
parting, “As-salamu-aliakum.”
We spent our summer Sundays visiting my father in prison.
To be closer to him, my mother had moved us from Florida to
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when I was eleven. The long, one-lane
road from our apartment to the prison was flanked by swamp, and
the stink of an unseen petrochemical plant filled the car even when
the windows were rolled up. To pass the time, Mom would crank
up the radio volume and sing along to Whitney Houston and Bryan
Adams songs about love and loneliness. My siblings napped, and I’d
pass the time reading a map we kept stored in the glove box. Our
destination on the map was a town named Carville.
On August 16, 1992, we were running late as usual. Mom parked in
the visitors’ area, a gravel lot with a view of the Mississippi River just
beyond a barbed wire fence. She tried walking quickly through the
parking lot, but her high heels sank into the ground every other step. I
held my little brother’s hand, but Peewee’s little legs struggled to keep
up. My sisters, Memé and Chiní, skipped and laughed, happy to be out
of the car. As soon as Mom’s heels hit the sidewalk, she took off even
faster. I couldn’t understand why. Even the few times we’d been late
for visitation hours, Dad’s anger had dropped after a hug and a kiss.
The federal corrections facility housed minimum-security inmates
with medical conditions. Mom had said they moved Dad here
because of his bad knees. Next door to the prison was a leper colony,
but I never saw any of the residents.
I knew back then my father had committed crimes, but I didn’t
understand what “conspiracy drug trafficking” meant. I knew he
was a drug smuggler, and I knew what the word smuggler meant
because Han Solo in the movie Star Wars was also one. Teachers
had taught me drugs were bad, but I’d learned that lesson long
before the D.A.R.E. program appeared in my school. Still, I didn’t
believe my dad was a bad man.
A garden surrounded the prison. The able-bodied inmates
planted and maintained a riot of manicured bushes punctuated
with bright red and yellow flowers. The guards were polite and
happy, unlike the rough-spoken corrections officers with their
thin-lipped smiles whom I remembered from Dad’s previous
prison stay, at the maximum-security Homestead Correctional
Institution in Florida.
The reception area was in a rectangular white concrete building
that always reminded me of a shoebox. We followed Mom through
the heavy door with its thick glass pane. I was out of breath and felt
the stab of a stitch under my ribcage. Little brother Peewee’s face
was covered with sweat. Mom checked us in with the guard, and he
thanked her and called her “ma’am.” She shooed us over to the waiting
area, and we occupied ourselves among the other kids. Peewee
and I stayed away from the boys and my sisters from the girls.
The family waiting area was the best I’d ever seen. The moms
here sat a little straighter, and the kids smiled more. Toys for the
visiting kids were clean. The Barbie dolls my sisters played with
had their heads and all their limbs, and the board games were
complete. Here, the guards announced the start of visiting hours
in soft voices, and they didn’t search adults for contraband. Mom
sat in a chair with a clean, cushioned seat and read a beauty magazine
with Julia Roberts on the cover. After seeing the movie Pretty
Woman, my mother had adopted a hairstyle to resemble her. She’d
even dyed her hair red.
The inmate visitation area provided large plastic picnic tables
and clear views into the garden. My father sat alone at one of the
tables. In the other prisons he would pass the time waiting for us
by talking with the other inmates, but here, no one even looked at
him. Dad didn’t seem to care. I assumed the inmates feared him.
When Dad caught sight of us that day, he waved us over. His tan
jumpsuit was a size too large. We hugged him all at the same time,
and he embraced us all within his arms. I saw his prisoner number
stenciled in black block characters on his back: 39941-019.
Dad said, “As- salamu-aliakum.”
We replied in a chorus of broken Arabic, “Wa-aliakum-salam.”
His cheeks turned pink when he smiled at us, his trimmed goatee
framing his lips. “Good. Your pronunciation is getting better.” I
avoided all the eyes on us every time we spoke Arabic to each other.
Dad practiced Islam, that of the Shia sect to be exact. Like most
Argentinians, he had been raised in the Catholic Church. Whenever
I asked him why he’d converted, he’d tell me that Christian doctrines
hadn’t appealed to him, and the sense of guilt and shame in the
Christian creed reeked to his soul of hypocrisy. He’d repeat the
story of how he’d become functionally godless during his teenage
years, until he’d converted to Islam in the 1970s during his first
stint doing hard time in the U.S. federal prison system; there, he
said he’d befriended a good Muslim man, who mentored my father
and protected him. I understood later, through my own wartime
experiences in Iraq, that there were no atheists in foxholes.
Mom repeated the Arabic greeting like a robot. My father had
converted her after they’d met. She, too, was a disillusioned Catholic,
but at best she was an unenthusiastic Muslim woman. I never saw
her wear a hijab, and she only prayed with Dad.
By Islamic laws and my father’s insistence, we kids were all
Muslims. All of us had Islamic middle names, proclaimed we were
Muslim, and even avoided eating pork to make Dad happy.
I sat across from Dad, while Mom and Memé sat beside him.
Chiní and Peewee sat next to me. Dad kissed Mom, tongue and
everything, and my siblings and I made a chorus of disgusted
disapproval.
When they finished, Dad looked each of us in the eyes. “You all
look healthy.” He looked at me a second time. “Are you swimming
or doing exercises, Peté?”
We all had nicknames in my family, and they rarely called
me Aramís. I hadn’t even known my name was Aramís until the
second grade, when I cried because my teacher yelled at me for not
responding to daily attendance. When I was a baby, I had a large
pacifier, and in Spanish it’s called a chupeté, and ever since they’ve
called me Peté.
“Yeah, there’s a pool in the apartment complex.” The week before,
I had walked back home under the summer sun and burned the
bottoms of my feet.
He turned to Mom. “Lele, stop buying that sugary cereal.” Mom
sighed and waved away his critique. “Leave him alone, Evaristo.”
She usually called him Eva and only used his full given name when
something was wrong and she needed his attention.
I didn’t understand what Dad was getting at. The only emotion
my eleven-year-old mind registered was happiness at seeing him.
He shook his head and turned to kiss Memé’s head.
Dad peered under the table and pointed at the knock-off Converse
footwear my grandma had bought me at Payless. “You need to get
boots, Peté. Those sneakers provide no support.” He took the
welfare of my feet seriously and always told me how boots, preferably
combat boots, were better for me and my size.
Mom interrupted Dad before he could remind me how, if I didn’t
take care of my feet, I would be dead in a war. “Evaristo, we need to
talk.” She’d used his full name again. They held each other’s gaze.
“No.” Memé wrapped her chubby arms around Dad. After Dad
gave a halfhearted attempt to break free, he smiled and licked her
forehead. She giggled and let go.
Dad wiped her hair back and pointed with his chin to a door. “Go
play together in the garden. There are butterflies there.” He blew a
kiss at my baby sister. “Do you like butterflies, Chiní?”
Chiní got up and headed toward the door. Dad reached across the
table and squeezed my hand. “Don’t let your five-year-old sister go
out there alone. And take your brother.” He barked the words like
an order given to me by a military superior.
I never enjoyed being commanded by him, but I obeyed with
protest. “How come Memé gets to stay?” Memé and I were only a
year apart and afflicted with severe sibling rivalry.
Dad scoffed, “She’s not.” He kissed her and nudged her with his
shoulder. She rose from his side and hopped to my side. “You take
care of her too.” Again, he commanded. Memé smiled because he’d
raised his voice at me. One more point went to her in our endless
game of who was the favorite.
The temperature outside had risen fast. The month of August in
Baton Rouge was just as muggy and hot as in Miami, but there was no
ocean breeze here. We played outside but again segregated by gender.
Peewee and I played hide-and-seek, but we got bored and eventually I
coaxed him to follow me and throw twigs at our sisters. Memé retaliated
with rocks, but a stern look from a corrections officer ended the game.
We wandered the garden with all the other children of convicts,
but we never spoke to one another. I believed each convict’s kid had
been conditioned by our lives to be suspicious of our own kind. I
know now we were merely ashamed.
A butterfly as big as my face flew near me. I’d never seen one that
big before. I didn’t see the beauty of its wings or the grace of its flight;
instead, I heard the wind whooshing under its wings and the spindly,
predator-like legs. It sent me into a panic. I used every curse word
I’d learned from the school bus and at home. It felt like thousands
of them were crawling all over, trying to enter my ears and into my
brain. I ran back inside to my mother.
My father had his arms around Mom. She wasn’t leaning into
him, and neither was smiling, but I had more pressing concerns.
Behind me Memé was laughing.
I sat down and buried my face into my arms, covering my ears.
Dad tapped the table with his knuckles. “What’s going on, Peté?”
Before I could get my shit together, Memé told him how I’d run
from a pretty butterfly, she said, “like a pussy.”
“What? You ran away and left your little brother and sisters?”
Dad grabbed my wrist, not unkindly but not softly. “Answer me.”
I was more scared of the butterfly than his disappointment at
that moment, and yet if I spoke, I knew my voice would crack. Dad
despised men who cried, so I kept quiet.
“Leave him alone,” Mom said, without sympathy or kindness.
“No.” Dad got up slowly. “We’re going to conquer this right now.
Let’s go, soldier.” He staggered the first few steps and then found
a more dignified stride the closer he got to the garden door. Both
his knees had been broken when the cocaine-loaded plane he was
flying crashed into the Caribbean Sea. His right leg was shorter than
the other, and the skin around his knees was covered in scar tissue.
I followed him out the door back to the garden, my siblings and
mother behind me. Memé ran forward and grabbed Dad’s hand and
led him to the monster butterfly.
It didn’t seem as frightening to me at a distance, but I still stayed as
far away as I could. Dad reached out to the butterfly, and it crawled
up his hand. “This is beautiful. Al-humdu Allah, truly a marvel of
His creation. Come see, Peté.”
I didn’t step up. My siblings got close to it, Memé and Chiní
touching its wings with their fi ngertips and Peewee laughing as it
slowly crawled around Dad’s hand. My father stepped closer to me,
and Mom stood behind me to keep me from running.
It was beautiful and terrifying.
“This is a harmless creature.” Dad extended his hand to me.
I leaned as far from it as I could. “How do you know?”
The butterfly’s wings rose and fell slowly. “Peté, the only thing
you fear is fear itself.” He gestured for me to give him my hand.
I looked away. The corrections offi cers and families glanced in
our direction but ignored us when they saw who was talking. There
was nothing to see here but a hardened criminal teaching his son
to not be afraid of butterflies.
He lowered his voice. “Look at it.”
I shook my head. Before Dad could try again with platitudes, the
butterfly grew bored of my cowardice and flew off.
Dad’s sigh rumbled like the gravel rocks Mom struggled to walk
over every time we visited him. “Peté.” He gripped my shoulder.
“Son, that was a chance right there to confront and overcome your
fears. You can’t run away from your fears, or they will own you.”
I remained silent. He would ignore my rationalizations about
poisonous varieties and how vulnerable the inner ear was. I knew my
words were mere excuses coming to him from his disappointment
of a son anyway. His first arrest was at twelve years old. By sixteen
he was a father and a cocaine cowboy by eighteen; no satisfactory
explanation of my fears existed. He shook his head and turned away.
We walked back together to the table indoors. My sisters spent the
rest of the visit telling Dad about their new schools, while Peewee
sat on his lap and leaned against his shoulder.
Mom looked bored and chewed her nails. Whatever she and Dad
had been talking about before wasn’t so important anymore.
Dad didn’t speak to me for the rest of the visit until he said in
parting, “As-salamu-aliakum.”
Cuprins
Acknowledgments
A Note on Translation
1. Chapter One
2. Chapter Two
3. Chapter Three
4. Chapter Four
5. Chapter Five
6. Chapter Six
7. Chapter Seven
8. Chapter Eight
9. Chapter Nine
10. Chapter Ten
11. Chapter Eleven
12. Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
A Note on Translation
1. Chapter One
2. Chapter Two
3. Chapter Three
4. Chapter Four
5. Chapter Five
6. Chapter Six
7. Chapter Seven
8. Chapter Eight
9. Chapter Nine
10. Chapter Ten
11. Chapter Eleven
12. Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
Recenzii
“Savage and tender. In Fugitive Son Aramís Calderón gives a searing portrait of his drug-dealing, prison-escapee father who evades authorities for a year with his wife and four children in tow. Calderón’s unsentimental memoir pulses with horror and love as his eleven-year-old self wrestles with his father’s Islamic faith and his own uncertain journey toward manhood. Calderón’s prose is spare and unyielding.”—Liam Corley, author of Unwound: Poems from Enduring Wars and Changelings: Insurgence
“Intensely personal and extremely well told, Fugitive Son delivers a most unusual and compelling coming-of-age true story that doesn’t pull punches. Fraught with suspense and a brand of strict lawlessness never seen before, the father and son here are like no others. Among the struggles and heartbreak, there is hope, and ultimately a new flavor of redemption. Poignant is an understatement. This book is intriguing, entertaining, and severely moving.”—Jeffery Hess, author of No Salvation, the Beachhead trilogy, and Pascagoula Run
“A heartbreaking and eye-opening book. Bold, plainspoken, and cosmopolitan, Fugitive Son tells the story of a boy who wants to know the truth about his mysterious Argentinian father who just happens to be Muslim. Aramís Calderón has crafted a fascinating memoir about family, politics, and religion. I couldn’t put it down.”—M. C. Armstrong, author of The Mysteries of Haditha and American Delphi
“A gritty, brutally honest, unflinchingly authentic, finely nuanced, richly detailed, fast-paced, and ultimately deeply moving personal record of hard-won strength and innermost resilience. Fugitive Son is a remarkably talented new writer’s effort to raise a bulwark against despair.”—Mikhail Iossel, author of Love like Water, Love like Fire
Descriere
In this compelling memoir Aramís Calderón tells a fascinating story of what it’s like to be a fugitive’s son, what drives a young man into the military, and how his time in combat brings back childhood memories he’d hoped to forget.