Don’s uncle is a government assassin.
We don’t know this for sure, obviously. But wherever he goes, a foreign dignitary gets injured. Or dies. Pope John Paul? This uncle was in Malta. Viktor Yushchenko’s poisoning? This uncle was in Ukraine.
The obvious conclusion is that he is an assassin. Not a good one, apparently, but still. You simply cannot chalk all that up to coincidence.
It’s a theory.
Don and I have others.
Like that Indy is, unbeknownst to any of us, the president of Paraguay.
One day, after spending 28 years as his daughter, Indy told me he owned land in El Paso, Texas. At the time, Don was in the Army, stationed at Fort Bliss. Indy wanted Don’s phone number.
He wanted Don to go check on the land.
I was skeptical. And not just of the idea of my new husband checking on some random land in western Texas that heretofore had been unknown to me. I was skeptical that Indy even owned the land in the first place.
I asked Willie about the El Paso land. I mean, she probably knows as much about Indy as the mailman. But I had to start somewhere.
That was when she told me Indy also owned land in Maryland and Las Vegas. Las Vegas! I knew about Maryland, but Las Vegas? What are we, the Windsors?
Don’t get too jazzed, Willie warned me. The Las Vegas land had been taken by eminent domain. And the annual tax on the El Paso land is $2.60.
I’m not joking and I didn’t misplace the decimal. I wrote the check for that tax while Willie was sick. You have to pay it on time though, or else it goes up to a staggering $2.61 after 6 months of delinquency. That nonsense will break you.
It’s no surprise I didn’t know Indy is a real estate mogul. He shops in thrift stores and he turned his finances over to Willie in 1968. Also, I never asked him if he owned land in El Paso and Las Vegas. I mean, it was on my list. I just hadn’t gotten to it yet. When you have to ask your dad every question in the world to get any details whatsoever on his life, there’s so much to ask and precious little time to do it in. I mean, I have to sleep sometime.
And so, in a hotel room where Uncle Sam had put Don for his stay at Fort Bliss, we developed our theory.
Indy, the president of Paraguay.
I suppose, as newlyweds having just ended a two-month government-forced separation, we should have been trying to break a few of the Army’s laws on carnality. But for reasons we still don’t recall, Indy’s secret life as a land baron took priority. Indy, had he known, would likely have been thrilled to know his baby girl wasn’t defiling a government-funded hotel room, even if it was with a son-in-law he likes.
So we wove a story about Indy, fueled by hops and maybe some tequila. By the time we were done, Indy not only owned the aforementioned United States properties; he had also managed to get elected president of Paraguay. His face is on the Paraguayan currency. It’s the only currency in the world to depict its leader wearing a Phillies cap.
So I asked Indy. Are you, in fact, president of Paraguay? He only laughed. It’s the same response he gave me when I asked if Ben Affleck played him in Argo and if I have any siblings from his Marine Corps stint in Asia. You’re not going to get him to talk unless he’s in the mood, and I have yet to catch him in the mood to discuss his presidency, Ben Affleck, or my older brothers and sisters.
I moved onto Willie. As his wife – and first lady – she might know if he was president of Paraguay. But I got nowhere. “How would I know?” she asked. “He doesn’t tell me anything.”
“But you knew about the land ownership,” I persisted.
“That’s because I got the tax bill the first year we were married,” she told me.
I’m guessing Paraguay’s president has people to pay his Paraguayan bills, and that those people do not include his first lady.
Last week, Don and I watched Skyfall, which is the best of the Daniel Craig Bond movies. As we watched the credits, we were in no way shocked to see that one of the executive producers had the same exact name as Indy.
“Is that you?” I asked Indy.
Indy only laughed.
No one gets answers out of the president of Paraguay.