Burn Down the Ground

by Kambri Crews

  I picked up a screen and my father dumped a pile of dirt and ashes on it. I wiggled it and dirt fell through as Dad spread the pile around in a thinner layer.

  “Neat-o, mosquito,” I mouthed, since my hands were busy shaking the screen.

  We canvassed the entire front yard without finding the necklace. After several hours, our backs and knees hurt.

  “I give up,” Mom sighed, arching her spine to stretch out the kinks.

  For years whenever someone complimented her beautiful earrings, my mother regretfully commented on how there used to be a matching necklace.

  I hadn’t known about the explosive confrontation between my parents after the Halloween party that night. In a drunken, stoned rage my father had ripped the chain from my mother’s neck and had thrown it in the yard, but I had slept through the entire fight.

  My parents’ relationship seemed to suffer a cold spell after the necklace incident, just like the weather. One February morning, the ground coated with a layer of frost, I was on the back porch tending to our mutt Taffy and two of her offspring. Unlike Pamie, they weren’t allowed in the trailer. They were so badly infested with fleas and ticks that if you parted their fur you couldn’t see their skin. I hated seeing them so neglected and spent hours with them huddled around the dryer vent. I used my red and blue sleeping bag to keep them warm and scraped off as many of the insects as I could with a lice comb. I heard my parents coming back from a trip to Webb’s with the Sunday paper.

  I noticed my mother’s puffy, bruised cheek the minute she stepped out of the Chevy. Her right eye was so swollen that she could barely open it. Jumping to my feet, I cried out, “Mama, what happened to your eye?”

  My father was at her side. He was watching, anticipating my reaction to her answer. She gave it without using ASL. “I slipped and fell on the ice,” she replied.

  “Ice? What ice?” I asked, and then looked to Dad. The frost on the ground wasn’t enough to hold a footprint. It had only snowed once that I could remember, a phenomenon so rare that we raced to take photos and scraped together a wad of snow the size of a tangerine that we kept in the freezer to preserve for eternity.

  With my obsession with Dorothy Hamill, I would have been the first one to try skating on it if there had been ice near our trailer.

  My father remained expressionless. So I looked back to Mom and asked again, “What ice?” At that moment our eyes locked and I knew that she wasn’t telling the whole truth, nor did she intend to talk about it any further. My father took her by the elbow and led her through the back door, and I knew not to ask any more questions.

  My parents had never argued in front of me. Their room was on the opposite side of the trailer from mine. Since they didn’t bicker and yell like hearing couples do, I wouldn’t have had any way of knowing what was happening behind their bedroom door. When they had a disagreement in my presence, I knew because their signing became more animated and sharp slapping sounds accompanied their ASL. Once I was in my bedroom, I wouldn’t have heard the angry smacks of their hands.

  Dad may have made a shrill sound or grunt but, even if he had, I might not have paid attention. As a child of deaf parents, I was used to tuning out the clamor and commotion around me. My mother used to take out her hearing aids when she got home from work, and neither she nor Dad was aware of how much noise they made as they banged around the trailer cleaning house, inadvertently slamming doors and clanging dishes.

  Mom’s shiner lasted for weeks and she seemed withdrawn and depressed. We stopped singing and dancing around the trailer while we did the housework; she wasn’t reading books and had no interest in playing cards with me. Instead she took long naps behind her locked bedroom door, disappeared for solitary drives, or, worse, just sat in silence on the swing. I wanted to ask her about it but for more than twenty years, I never did.

  SHOWCASE SHOWDOWN

  My mother was now the lead person at HeliFlight Systems in Cut and Shoot. Dad was still in construction in downtown Houston. Like Mom, he left home every day before daybreak and got home well after sunset. Our parents logged so many hours working and traveling to and from their jobs that most times my brother and I were left at home in the woods without any adult supervision. Life on Boars Head developed into a southern-fried Lord of the Flies.

  In our first few years on Boars Head, David had flunked sixth grade, survived a bite from a copperhead, and beat an eight-foot rattlesnake to death with a metal pole. After skinning and mounting the hide of the slain reptile, he carried around the snake’s severed rattler like a trophy, recounting to everyone how he saved my life. I backed up his tale (I didn’t get bitten, so he had saved my life, sort of), thus earning him the alpha-male title on Boars Head. He was David, Lord of Montgomery, fearless and feared. His notoriety suited him and he strutted around shirtless with his best friend, Allen, a short, stocky boy with a bushy head of dirty blond hair and a fuzzy new mustache. Allen lived in a mobile home located just over a mile down the road from ours. His dented trailer was propped up on concrete blocks and streaked with red stains from years of rain rusting the nails. The yard was overgrown with brush and littered with old car parts, paint buckets, and tattered clothing. Some windows were cracked; others were patched up with cardboard and duct tape. Like many trailers around ours, it looked abandoned, but Allen lived there with his father and older brother.

  In the past, I was always invited to join David in catching turtles and frogs, playing on the tire swing, or participating in a game of tackle football with the other boys that lived on Boars Head. Some days he’d stay inside with me to work on jigsaw puzzles and play rounds of Monopoly or Skip-Bo. But things seemed to be changing and we hadn’t played together in weeks. His invitations stopped and I was left at home alone while he and Allen were off to God knows where. I presumed they were up to no good, especially after they were caught sniffing fumes from cans of spray paint in the King family’s barn.

  Most of my days in the woods were filled with soul-crushing monotony and isolation. I spent countless hours kicking the dirt.

  Three summers on Boars Head and I was bored.

  “Go outside,” Mom would say without lifting her eyes from the latest Stephen King novel.

  To do what?

  I pouted on our wooden swing and kept vigil for our mailman. When I saw his ratty Buick stop at the mailbox, I would race to the end of our driveway, hold my breath, and pray there would be something for me. On the best days, my Book-of-the-Month Club package would arrive.

  My mother was such an avid reader with so many books that Dad had built her a floor-to-ceiling bookcase spanning the width of our trailer. She passed down her passion to me and signed me up for a monthly book club membership. I cherished each new book as if it were part of Shakespeare’s First Folio. Deciding that jettisoning my books to gather dust after a few readings was wasteful, I devised a plan: I would transform my bedroom into a public library and share my collection with the world, starting with everyone on Boars Head.

  After taking a detailed inventory of titles, genres, and the retail value of each book, I asked my father to build me a custom case like the one he did for Mom. Using skills I learned at school serving as the librarian’s assistant, I explained how I wanted it divided into Nonfiction, Fiction, Periodical, and Reference sections. He took careful notes and measurements and made each shelf a different size and shape, painted it glossy black, and mounted it to my bedroom wall.

  I was a budding entrepreneur, and my library was just one of several ventures under the umbrella company of Kambri Crews Products. Others included an internal post office, a papier-mâché puppet theater, and a personalized stationery store. The common denominator was their heavy reliance on our teletypewriter, or TTY.

  Before email, text messaging, and videoconferencing rendered it virtually obsolete, the TTY (also known as a telecommunications device for the Deaf, or TDD) was a deaf person’s lifeline of communication to the outside world. Our machine was a recycled army-green Department
of Defense castoff that stood a full four feet high and weighed almost two hundred pounds. When turned on, it sent out a surge of power that made the entire trailer vibrate as if it were a rocket ship preparing for liftoff.

  To call deaf family or friends, we dialed the number on a regular telephone, then placed the receiver into a modem device with two rubber suction cups. We typed in a message and the TTY converted the keystrokes into a series of piercing tones transmitted to the TTY on the other end of the line. Basically it was instant messaging, only instead of a digital screen it had a massive spool of computer paper that documented every word of dialogue.

  Only one person could key at a time and typing conversations was time consuming. The telephone company charged by the minute for long-distance calls, so universal shorthand evolved. TTYs used only capital letters. So “GA” signaled to the person on the other end of the line that he should now “go ahead” and begin typing. “SK,” short for “Stop Keying,” meant you were ready to end the call.

  Since letters were typed on paper in real time, there was no backspacing to correct a typo. Instead mistakes were indicated with XX and then correctly typed. I spent hours memorizing the placement of keys and pecking with my index fingers, so I would never have to use XX. When the phone rang, I raced to answer it. If my greeting was met with screeching computer sounds, it meant someone deaf was on the other end, usually Mom’s mother or sister Carly calling from Oklahoma. I placed our receiver on the coupler and typed like a pro, “HELLO THIS IS KAMBRI GA.”

  Although our TTY served an important purpose for the family, without a phone attached to its modem, it became an oversized, clunky typewriter and the heart of Kambri Crews Products. I typed leaflets notifying everyone I knew about the library’s grand opening. David and the kids on Bus #9 became card-carrying members.

  While such a nerdy endeavor might elicit taunts from kids in other neighborhoods, the children on Boars Head greeted my enterprise like I was the ice cream man. They were equally bored and isolated, after all. This was no child’s play; even my parents were frequent patrons. I kept a detailed log tracking who checked out which books and if they warranted late fees. Dad was a big fan of science and technology and my library records showed he checked out every issue of 3-2-1 Contact. Unlike Mom, he always returned his selections on time. My mother preferred books like A Separate Peace, although she owed dearly when she gave it back eighteen days late!

  The summer I turned eleven started out the same as the previous three. Like most brothers and sisters, David and I bickered over the basics. Protective over our things, we labeled them with warnings of “DO NOT TOUCH!!!” If Dad brought home a rare treat like Ding Dongs, we divided them evenly. After counting them out, I unwrapped and licked every square inch of cake as a safeguard, then rewrapped them and carved my name in the tin foil.

  But somewhere along the way, David seemed to despise the very sight of me. I had no idea of what had changed between us. I was his enemy and I couldn’t figure out why. The easiest explanation was that he was nearly four years older and was outgrowing me. He had woods to explore, animals to slay, girls to conquer. I had always been excited whenever my brother stayed home to keep me company but now dread replaced enthusiasm when he started bullying and knocking me around.

  The scene always played out the same way. David woke up in relative peace, the grogginess of sleep coating his fury like frost on a windshield. He’d fix himself a bowl of Lucky Charms, onto which he scooped heaping helpings of sugar from a canister. He’d sit in the living room hunched over his cereal, crunching and slurping away, and we’d watch The Price Is Right, shouting out our bids to the host, Bob Barker, and the contestants vying for the prize, a shiny new kitchen appliance, a bedroom set complete with wall-to-wall carpeting, or a brand-new car. “Higher! Higher! Higher! Lower! Lower! Higher! Higher! Idiot! I said higher!”

  By the time the closing credits rolled, David’s rage would begin to emerge. Just as Mr. Barker was reminding us to spay and neuter our pets, my brother bared his tiny teeth like fangs and said, “You’d better run for your life.”

  I’d leap off the couch and run in a different direction each time in a weak attempt to outsmart him. If I made it to Mom and Dad’s room, I had more time because they had installed a heavy-duty metal doorknob that used a real key. A spare was hidden in the living room, in an antique metal pitcher on the top shelf of the bookcase. While David was fishing for it, I could barricade myself in their bathroom, where I would stare at the door waiting for its inevitable betrayal.

  David’s voice got closer. “I’m comin’ to get you, Kambri.”

  My heart pounded and my ears throbbed. The bathroom door handle was a cheap plastic knob that pushed in to activate the lock. Any slim device, like a bobby pin, could be used to pick it. Though I tried pressing against it with both hands, David always prevailed.

  “You think you can outsmart me?” Spit foamed in the corners of his mouth and sprayed as he hissed.

  He danced on his tiptoes like Sugar Ray Leonard, and jabbed me with slaps and punches. My arms flailed about in a pathetic attempt to fight him off. The more upset I became, the harder he laughed.

  “Leave me alone,” I whined.

  “You should see your face! ‘Leave me alone,’ ” he mocked, imitating my pained expression. “You’re so ugly.”

  He’d grab the back of my neck or a fistful of my long blond hair and drag me to the floor. The carpet burned my elbows and tailbone as I writhed around and kicked David’s back with the heels of my feet. He pinned my arms down with his knees and snorted and hocked snot until he amassed enough to dangle a long, gooey string. He let it slowly drip down till it nearly touched my face, then slurped it back up.

  Not wanting his mucus to land in my mouth, I screamed through closed lips. Unsatisfied with my reaction, he began tapping his index and middle fingers on my forehead. Exhausted, I pinched my eyes closed and tried turning the torture into the beat of a song.

  Thump, thump, thump, thump …

  Without warning I lunged to bite his finger. He yanked his hand back in the nick of time as I bit so hard my teeth cracked against each other. A close call, David began striking my sternum instead. Harder and harder he pounded.

  After his arm grew tired or he became bored, he jumped off me with one final slap to the face. “You’re such a whiner. Are you gonna run and tell your mommy?”

  He knew I wouldn’t. David was a master manipulator. He could convince me to partake in activities that he then lorded over me as blackmail.

  “I’ll tell Mom how you skipped school,” he threatened. “You don’t want Mom to find out you beat up Chris King, do you?”

  There was an unspoken rule on Bus #9, that in exchange for David’s protection, I had to obey him. Beating up Chris for committing any infraction my brother deemed unacceptable during the bus ride to and from school was a frequent command. Chris’s offenses could be as flagrant as stealing money from Haley’s five-year-old brother or as insignificant as looking over his shoulder at the other kids.

  “Get him, Kambri!” David shouted as soon as the bus disappeared around the corner.

  Besides the threat of a thumping from David, I also wanted to please him and be part of his growing group of friends. My brother insisted he’d do the job himself if I hesitated.

  “You’ll be next!” he warned, shoving me toward Chris, who was being held down by another of David’s minions.

  I pounced on Chris, who twisted up into a ball as I pounded away at his back.

  Chris cried and howled until his mother appeared on their front porch, sending us scattering as she yelled, “Christopher King, don’t let that girl beat up on you! Kick her ass!”

  Sometimes Chris deserved it, but I still felt bad for hurting him. He was my friend. I would pretend to hit him with my full force to convince my brother that I was doing as he commanded.

  I knew Mom would never tolerate me being a bully. She always fiercely defended the underdog, perhaps because s
he was sensitive to any discrimination against the Deaf. But David’s tormenting had become so unbearable that I began calling my mother at her job begging for help. At home, our phones had amplifiers so she was able to hear when the volume was cranked up and her hearing aids were turned to ten. Because her work phones didn’t have loudspeakers, I had to scream louder than usual.

  “David is beating me up,” I panted into the receiver.

  “Kambri, don’t be a tattletale.”

  “But he’s hitting me!”

  “Remember the boy who cried wolf?”

  Although I didn’t want to be a snitch, I wasn’t lying.

  “Kambri, you can’t keep calling me. I have work to do. You don’t want me to lose my job, do you?”

  Mom was careful to budget her and Dad’s paychecks, but it was always a struggle to make ends meet. If my bugging her at work got her fired, the consequences would have devastated us. I couldn’t bear that burden, so I hung up and promised not to call again.

  My mother chalked up our continued fighting to sibling rivalry, but my instincts—and bruises—told me otherwise. When I pointed out an injury to my mother as proof that I wasn’t a liar, my brother was able to convince her that I was exaggerating.

  My brother loved the wilderness and was always off on treks through the woods, armed with his hatchet, knives, and a canteen. When he was feeling particularly charitable, I would be invited to join him and his neighborhood friends, Allen and the King brothers.

  We’d throw on our rattiest T-shirts, cutoff jeans, and spare tennis shoes and head through the woods for the creek, where we dove into the rushing water and swam alongside turtles and water moccasins, trying not to get too close to the snakes. We’d tie a rope to a tree branch and take turns swinging off the edge of the cliff, doing our best Tarzan yells. We had to swim with our shoes on or else the mussels on the creek bed would slice our feet. On those days, David was the best brother a girl could have. I loved and worshipped him almost as much as I did Dad.