DARK MONEY
Of all lies, the worst is The truth will set you free.
I don’t think truth unshackled my father. Truth paid his moving expenses, set him up in his grandmother’s house with his new wife ― his former secretary ― and two children he didn’t know how to talk to. Truth banished him from branch location and operations, from belonging to the fraternity of money, and in his exile, he wandered by motorcycle from flea market to gun show. In twenty-five years since, I don’t think truth has, like a magician, swept doves from under its handkerchiefs, or doubled my father’s joints to free him from the straitjacket and cuffs. He collects badges. Detectives, marshals, the old silver stars. He still believes in law and order, even as the television he keeps muted shows him images of protestors, of the officers who discharged weapons into unarmed teens. Has it brought him any comfort to know where the money came from, whose pockets it now lines? Has it brought him any comfort to speak that truth to regulators? Sometimes in my dreams, I see the Keating Five seated in a circle, cigars and good Scotch, in a dim room. They laugh about dark money, having taken so much out in the open, and John Glenn says, I could still go back into space, and John McCain says, Who knows? Maybe I’ll just run for President, and then they both do, but before ― my father shuffles in, his expression neutral, a white cloth draped over his arm, puts their empties on his tray, and asks if there’s anything else he can do for them. |
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Ross White is the author of two chapbooks, How We Came Upon the Colony and The Polite Society. He serves as the poetry editor of Four Way Review and the director of Bull City Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Best New Poets 2012, Poetry Daily, New England Review, Nimrod, The Southern Review, Tin House, and others. A recipient of scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, he currently teaches poetry writing and grammar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.