Burn Down the Ground Read online

  “The Millers are hurtin’ enough as it is. They don’t need to come home and see that filth,” Mr. B. assured the mock jury. He promised to deal with Curt and Junior separately, once they returned to Boars Head.

  “You’re lucky,” Dad signed. He was still angry, but he was now able to look me in the face. “You could have gone to jail for that. You’d better clean it like new.” His signs were exaggerated and emphatic, relaying his wrath.

  Sarah drove Maria and me to the Millers’ in their truck full of cleaning agents and painting materials. I averted my eyes from the walls and went straight to the bathroom. I spent the afternoon sweating and scrubbing over my shame before giving the room a fresh new coat of paint.

  Satisfied, Maria exclaimed, “It looks better than before!”

  “No kidding!” her mother agreed. “I shoulda had y’all come mess up our house.”

  The crime scene was returned to its pre-vandalism state, and I escaped the worst judgment of all, the shame of a confrontation with the Millers. Haley’s family moved to Massachusetts before I ever saw them again. If they were aware of what had happened, I never knew. When memories of my repulsive behavior that day crept into my mind, I quickly pushed them away with reminders of good things I had done on their behalf, like sticking up for Haley’s little brother when Chris King picked on him.

  Frankly, I was disgusted with myself.

  Real classy, Kambri.

  My life had turned upside down and I didn’t like who I was becoming. I was humiliated, but it was just as devastating to see that I had disgraced Mom and Dad. They may have given me too much freedom but had raised me better than this. Being called to the sheriff’s station for prank calling had done little to straighten me out, but shaming my parents and me in front of our neighbors was horrific. I resolved to stay clear of Maria and start the ninth grade as a new and improved Kambri Crews. Other than her full refrigerator and air-conditioning, I couldn’t think of a good reason to stay friends with her.

  My ninth grade of school had barely begun when Mom delivered more bad news. “We need to sell Charlie Brown. He costs too much money, Kambri.”

  I hadn’t been riding him much since Maria and I had stopped being friends. When I did, he was back to his unruly self, hating the saddle and not wanting to walk without another horse and rider to keep us company. We would barely leave our driveway when he would start bucking or walk under a low-lying branch in an attempt to scrape me off his back. If he succeeded in getting rid of me, he’d run back to the shed, leaving me to walk back on my own.

  He carried expenses with oats, alfalfa, and vet bills. Selling him and his tack would help lower our debt. We were living in a shed. Charlie Brown had to go.

  We sold my saddles and tack at the next auction. Carrie, a girl on our bus, convinced her father to buy Charlie Brown for a hundred dollars. He was a good horse and worth more than that, but we were not in a position to turn down an offer. Carrie’s family had a lot of farm animals and they were familiar with Charlie Brown. I had taken him on overnight trail rides with Carrie and her family, so they had seen how he broke into full gallop on the corner of Boars Head, knowing he was almost home. He turned into our driveway so tightly I could reach down and touch the dirt if it weren’t for the death grip I was giving the saddle horn. Impressed by his ability to turn a corner so fast, they planned to retrain him and enter him in barrel races at the local rodeos.

  My heart was broken when I said goodbye to Charlie Brown, but I knew he would be better off in Carrie’s care.

  Soon every trace of Charlie Brown was gone except for the iron longhorn bell we had used to summon him. “I kept it so you’ll always have something to remember him by,” Mom said with a consoling smile. Dad hung the bell in the kitchen by the door to the shed. Every now and then one of us would clang it. The piercing caterwaul inside the metal shack made my ears ring, but I didn’t care. I liked remembering Charlie Brown.

  Today, the bell sits on a shelf against a brick wall in the living room of my Queens apartment with layers of chipped paint where Dad tried covering up rusty spots. The chain is corroded but still attached. Every now and then I get the urge to take it out on my fire escape and give it a good clanging just to hear it ring.

  A month after the new school year began, Mom left for Fort Worth. She had gotten a job at HeliDyne assembling wiring panels for helicopters and had been staying with friends while looking for a place for us to live. She’d been away for weeks, and I had barely laid eyes on my father. He still technically lived with us, but he was rarely home. I had no idea where he was but I no longer paced the driveway worrying about him. I had grown accustomed to his long absences the same way Mom had and, besides, I was off on my own adventures with David.

  David was a junior and I was a freshman at Montgomery High School and we were now inseparable. He was going steady with my new best friend, a girl in my grade named Amber, who had recently moved to Montgomery to live with her father and stepmother in a three-bedroom A-frame home nestled in the woods. A curvy, green-eyed blonde with alabaster skin and a splash of freckles on the bridge of her nose, Amber was as talkative and adventurous as I was. We met in drama class, where we had an instant connection over our love of poetry, theater, and hard rock music. The three of us had lunch every day with Amber’s stepsister Gina, who had lived in Montgomery for several years. Gina had dark brown hair and a slight frame with delicate features; she was much more reserved than Amber and I, who cracked jokes and prattled on so much that Gina could rarely interject a comment.

  Moving into your barn because your trailer had been repossessed is what some might consider a low point. For me, it was a fresh start. When school began, I forsook team sports. My smoking habit and transportation difficulties were the same issues from the year before. Instead I joined the debate team, won the election for the position of class secretary, and made the honor roll with straight A’s. That was about as opposite from Maria as I could get given the circumstances.

  Dad gave my brother an old lemon-yellow Datsun to use. He drove Amber, Gina, and me everywhere and we called ourselves the Four Musketeers. Just like all of our previous cars, there was no radio in the Datsun, so David and I sang songs we used to sing with Mom on our way to the movie theater in Conroe plus new favorites like ZZ Top’s “Cheap Sunglasses” and anything by AC/DC. Amber always took lead. She sang more beautifully than anyone we had ever heard.

  With Mom in Fort Worth and my father missing in action, there was no food in the refrigerator and no air-conditioning in the shed. David crashed on couches at friends’ homes or stayed at the shed while I spent most school nights sleeping over at Amber and Gina’s house. If I needed anything from home, I used the school bus to get me there. I slept alone in the shed, and then rode the bus back to school the next morning with my duffel bag packed with necessities.

  Sometimes David and I would hang out in the shed together. When I saw that David’s friend Allen had a new ear piercing, I decided I wanted one, too.

  We implemented the “do-it-yourself” technique, by pressing an ice cube to my earlobe for about a minute while David ran a carpet nail through the open flame of his Bic lighter to sterilize it.

  David squeezed my lobe. “Can you feel that?”

  I thought I could, but David was convinced it was numb enough. Allen stood on his tiptoes and craned his neck to get a better look.

  “Hold this behind your ear,” David instructed as he handed over a bar of Dad’s Lava soap. He wiped the black soot off the nail with his shirt and lined it up just to the left of where my other earring hole was. I squirmed nervously watching him prepare his tools.

  “Dammit, you gotta be still, Kambri. Okay, you ready?” David asked.

  I took a deep breath and held it as David reared back with the hammer. I squeezed my eyes shut. I felt a sharp stabbing pain as David grabbed hold of the soap and wiggled the nail out.

  “Gimme the earring.”

  Allen handed over a bowl that contained my st
ud floating in rubbing alcohol. David fiddled with it until he managed to secure it in the hole. He gave me a handheld mirror for me to admire his handiwork. My lobe was swollen and tomato red, but beautifully adorned with a shiny new gold ball earring.

  I was impressed by how quickly the operation went and how little blood was shed. “The ice hurt the worst.”

  “I told ya,” David said. “If you don’t like it, just take out the earring and let it grow over.”

  A few days later, David and I found out AC/DC would be in Texas for their Fly on the Wall tour. We had to go. There was no need to ask permission, and in fact, there was no one to ask permission from. We pooled our money together and David drove us to AstroWorld, an amusement park with an amphitheater in Houston. We wasted time before the concert by riding roller coasters and getting high in the Sky Tram.

  AC/DC played to a packed audience at AstroWorld’s Southern Star Amphitheater. They were pure electricity. In awe, I stayed glued to my patch of grass, not missing a moment of their theatrics, from the gristly voice of Brian Johnson to the over-the-top stomping and guitar riffing of Angus Young. A giant replica of the Liberty Bell was lowered from the rafters during “Hells Bells.” The bell was smashed with great fanfare while a deep dong sound seemed to vibrate forever. They even had real cannons that fired blanks during the finale, “For Those About to Rock.”

  I bought a Fly on the Wall concert T-shirt and changed into it in the bathroom. On the ride home our ears were ringing, so we shouted to hear each other speak.

  We were having the time of our lives.

  Soon Mom called from Fort Worth with news. She had saved up enough money for us to relocate.

  “What about school?” I asked.

  “My friends gave me the names of a couple of schools around here. Your daddy is gonna drive you up here so we can check ’em out.”

  David and I were closer than ever. He and my best friend, Amber, were in love. I was doing well in school both academically and socially and was living with little parental supervision. Even though I was having fun, the prospect of getting out of the shed and attending a city school with better opportunities was invigorating. I didn’t know it then, but wanderlust is a trait that I share with Dad. This was my second drastic move, the first being my move to Boars Head. The thrill of exploring a new town, meeting different people, and beginning fresh adventures had me itching to leave Montgomery behind.

  I returned to the shed after school and found my father at home waiting for me. He had already closed and padlocked the “windows” and door of the shed, turned off the breakers, and cleaned out what little was in the refrigerator.

  I climbed into the Toyota next to Dad and we set off north to Fort Worth to meet my mother. The next day was spent touring schools. During the admissions interviews, Mom spoke as though I was a commodity greater than gold. “She makes straight A’s, she’s in all the honors classes, and has never been written up or had any disciplinary issues at school.” She wasn’t lying; she was omitting. My troubles with Maria and the law were secrets left on Boars Head. “She’s really interested in drama,” Mom continued, as though we were theatergoers. Never mind I’d only seen a production of The Nutcracker during a field trip in elementary school. “Do y’all have a drama program?”

  The guidance counselors seemed impressed with Mom’s sales pitch and promoted their own curriculum. “Oh, yes, we have a very large fine arts program and a few shows are produced each year. And we have one thousand some–odd students in our sophomore class.”

  One thousand students? In a single grade? That was almost three times the entire population of Montgomery.

  We selected a school and Dad and I drove back to Boars Head. I hadn’t seen our dogs for what seemed like weeks. “Duke! Duchess! Cookie!” I called a few times each day but they never came running.

  Was anybody feeding them now that Mom was gone?

  “Have you seen the dogs?” I asked David when he stopped by one afternoon.

  “Nuh uh.”

  “Where could they be?” They had never stayed gone this long.

  The next time I saw Dad I asked the same question, “Where’re the dogs?”

  Dad shrugged and signed, “I don’t know.”

  Something wasn’t right. I recalled my mother’s words from years before after our old dog, Taffy, had been abandoned when her owners had moved to the city and we adopted her. I asked how a family could just desert a pet. “She’s a country dog, Kambri,” Mom had said. “She can’t go live in the city with them.”

  More than once, Mom had taken a litter of puppies produced by Taffy or Duchess to the pound. I panicked that they’d be euthanized if they weren’t adopted. Dad told me they were the lucky ones. When he was a kid, he tied up litters of kittens in a potato sack and tossed them into a pond to drown. I knew Dad had tried killing Duke before. The red boxer pup was a financial drain. Duke was accident-prone with his snakebites, broken legs, and a collection of other wounds and had cost us hundreds of dollars in vet bills. Dad wanted to eliminate him.

  “I took Duke out into the woods and shot at him, but the gun jammed,” my father said matter-of-factly. “Duke heard the click on the gun. His ears perked up, his brow furrowed, and he cocked his head from side to side. He was just too cute for me to shoot.”

  That was then.

  Now I pressed Dad for an answer about the animals. “When’s the last time you saw them?” I signed.

  He shrugged again and signed, “No idea.”

  I glared at him but he took no notice.

  “Duke! Duchess! Cookie!” I called again and again, but they never came home.

  I stayed with Amber and Gina’s family while I finished the first semester of ninth grade. After my last day of school before Christmas break, I rode Bus #9 home to the shed for the final time. My father was almost done packing the Toyota with the last of our belongings. We were limited in what we could take with us. Cartons of childhood mementos and furniture were stacked atop an old green crushed-velvet couch we kept in the barn for destruction by fire. With a quick flick of a match, Dad set the pile ablaze. The fire swelled, consuming our discarded possessions. A cardboard box wrinkling in the flames spilled smoldering books from my now-defunct library. Dad raked my tattered, burning Judy Blume paperbacks and collector’s edition copy of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea back into the flames, then tossed a heap of old clothes on the pile.

  The black and white fake fur coat I received for my tenth Christmas rested on top. I thought about how I had worn that coat the first and only time it ever snowed on Boars Head. Mom woke us up early so we could play in it before it melted. It was a thin dusting of dry, light flurries that barely covered the dirt but still delighted my brother and me. That was when we scraped together miniature snowballs and set aside a few to keep in the freezer. Those were gone, too, when the electricity was shut off and the fridge defrosted.

  When Dad burned our belongings, I twirled myself on the tire swing to tighten up the rope.

  This is the very last time I will ever swing on this swing.

  I wanted to feel sadder at leaving behind Boars Head and all our memories there, but I couldn’t muster a tear. Fort Worth held promise. There I would be a stranger. I could truly reinvent myself. I was banking on this move to give us a clean slate. Each twist of the tire swing gave me a 360-degree view of the home we were fleeing. The shed’s windows were boarded up and the front door was shackled with a heavy padlock and chain. A warning sign that hung on the outside read, KEEP OUT VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. Our vegetable garden, tilled by Dad and planted and tended by Mom and me, was shriveled and brown. The VW Bug was rusting by the spot where the old outhouse had collapsed. Weeds sprouted on the rectangular patch of land where the trailer once stood before the bank took it.

  We had had our chance, but nature was reclaiming what was rightfully hers.

  “Kipree!” Dad shouted from the barn, snapping me out of my reminiscence. I lifted my feet and the tire unwound, sending
me into a wild spin. I looked over my shoulder and Dad signed. “Come. Let’s go.”

  As we drove away, the ashes of our burned belongings still smoldered.

  GROVE STREET

  1986–1987

  THE MIRACLE WORKER

  Mom rented a small house in North Richland Hills, a suburb northeast of Fort Worth in the school district we had chosen. Our three-bedroom ranch sat at the corner of Grove Street and Bedford Euless Road on a block of identical houses, all with simple but well-maintained landscaping. The majority of our neighbors were retirees who had owned their homes for decades, but a few were renters like us. Within walking distance from our house were chain restaurants, bars, motor inns, and a teenager’s paradise: the North East Mall.

  What I liked about our new digs was that it blended in with the others on the block. It wasn’t an eyesore and, for once, I didn’t feel ashamed of it. Mom had rented a three-bedroom because David was still in high school, and he would be living with us. But he was finishing his junior year in Montgomery, so for the first time I was given the bigger bedroom, which had a cool double door and a window that looked out onto the busy roadway.

  On one of my first afternoons in North Richland Hills, I was peeking out through the living room curtains. I noticed a girl who looked to be about my age. I raced to the front door and said, “Hi!”

  “Hi back atcha,” she said.

  I stepped barefoot onto the hot blacktop and howled.

  “Put some shoes on, girl!”

  I had spent my life barefoot on Boars Head. Even after Maria nearly stepped on a rattlesnake, I wasn’t convinced of the practicality of shoes. My feet were so tough that after stepping on a nail playing hide-and-seek with the King boys, I just yanked it out and kept on running. I didn’t even bleed. Here in Fort Worth, however, all the streets were paved. After baking in the Texas sun, the asphalt was scorching hot.