"Prison Letters"
by Patricia Engel

Uncle Victor was in the slammer for helping uncle Chano arrange the execution of his former wife, Ximena. Victor was one of my favorite t’os, always ready with a toy for me when he came over, an endless supply of Cabbage Patch Dolls when they first got big and parents were killing each other in the stores for them. My mom always got uneasy because she knew the dolls came off some truck, just like that time Victor showed up with eighty pairs of designer shoes for her. Victor had a big heart but no boundaries. My dad said Victor was so generous he'd steal the shirt off someone else's back and give it to you. Even the times when he was broke from gambling and bad deals and had no presents for us, I adored Victor for the way he pulled me close to him at family parties and said I was a gem, an angel, that my heart was so big and shiny he could see it jiggle when I laughed.

He didn't look like my dad or any other of his brothers. They were all tall, lean, carrying Abuelo's Austrian roots in their sharp features and gigantic gypsy eyes. Uncle Victor was short and stubby, with a rubbery thick nose and tiny eyes that disappeared when he smiled. His teeth were low-quality fakes from a childhood of Medell’n street fights. I heard that before I was born he did a lot of cocaine, but that was the '70s before people called it a problem. Victor would go on benders, disappear for days, but always turned up on Sunday mornings and went to mass with my mom even when he was still with his first wife, a Jewish girl named Rebecca who died before I had a chance to meet her. They were on the rocks and she was pregnant. She went to see her parents after a big fight with Victor and an eighteen-wheeler smashed into her Datson on the Long Island Expressway. Victor blamed himself and jumped off the roof of his house but didn't get so much as a scratch. And a couple of years later, he married this nutty Peruvian lady and had two boys, but they got divorced too.

My mom and Victor were especially close. She treated him like he was a kid and he just loved her—probably because she was the only one who didn't treat Victor like a big nobody. She said with so many siblings, it's no wonder he got lost in the shuffle and Victor just needed someone to believe in him. Victor brought her cakes, flowers, weird things for the house like a cookie jar in the shape of a giant mouse and forty cases of fake logs for the fireplace. My dad would come home and ask where all that junk came from and she'd say, "Your brother Victor.Ó And one day she finally convinced Papi to give Victor a job in his factory minding the truck drivers, which in the end was a bad idea because after he strangled his wife, Chano asked Victor to hire one of those truck guys to drive Ximena's body down to North Carolina, set her on fire, and dump her in a swamp.

Victor said he wanted to prove that he could handle something big like that for his older brother, that he was a businessman just like Chano and could carry out a plan as good anybody else. But the police found the body, identified Ximena by her teeth, and they all went down like dominos.

I was the one who wrote the first letter to Victor. I saw he'd sent my mom a card, got the prison address and his inmate number off the envelope. I was fifteen and he'd been on the inside for a year already and I wanted to make sure he knew he wasn't forgotten. The first letter I wrote was about how my grandfather fell in the family factory and busted his leg wide open—a death sentence for a diabetic. Abuelo lived on the verge of a heart attack. You had to feel bad for the guy. When his dad and brothers died in a concentration camp he probably figured the worst was behind him. And then he had to watch two sons go to jail for murder. I left that part out of the letter though. I didn't want Victor to feel extra guilty. It was bad enough that he got Life and had to let his kids be adopted by their stepfather.