The Memory Closet

by Ninie Hammon

  I look down at the dirt as I circle the car splashing gasoline on it. Resolutely down. I refuse to allow myself even one little glance in a window. The impact of the crash may have moved the body; maybe Windy fell into the back seat. But I don’t look, won’t let myself look. I make two trips around the car before the gasoline’s all gone.

  “It’s empty,” I shout to Jericho.

  “Bring the can back up.”

  I reach for the rag to put it back into the spout.

  “No, don’t bring that. Leave the rag down there.”

  Even empty, the can is heavy and it’s hard for me to haul it up the dirt slope. I slip and slide backwards in the soft earth, and Jericho keeps looking over his shoulder, searching the empty highway in both directions.

  “Hurry up! Somebody’s bound to come along pretty soon.”

  I finally get the can to the top of the hill and Jericho tells me to hide it in the brush around the trees up the road. When I rejoin him at the edge of the gulley, I glance down at the car. From this angle, it’s impossible not to look into the back window; it’s facing uphill. There’s no white-shrouded body in sight.

  Jericho leans his weight on his crutches and takes my shoulders in his hands.

  “Look at me!”

  I raise my dead eyes to his.

  “Now listen. Here’s what I want you to do, and you have to do it exactly the way I tell you to. Will you do that?”

  I forget and merely nod, and he shakes me hard. “Talk to me!”

  “I’ll do what you tell me.” I sputter.

  “I want you to take this butane lighter,” he hands me a yellow plastic cylinder shaped like a Pez dispenser, “and go back down the hill. Pick up that rag with gasoline on it and light it. Be careful; it’ll catch quick. When it does, you throw it onto the car where you splashed gasoline and you high tail it back up here to me. You run as fast as you can, do you understand?”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  I make my way back down the slope to the bottom and pick up the rag I left there. I glance into the car then for the first time. I can’t help it. I don’t see Windy. I am suddenly seized with an almost irresistible urge to go to the window and look in. To see her one last time and say goodbye. I actually take a step forward to do that when Jericho yells at me.

  “Burn it! Go on. Do it, Annie. Set it on fire.”

  I lift the soaked rag up in front of me.

  “Light it, quick! I think I see somebody coming.”

  I flick the lighter, put the flame to the cloth and it catches so fast I fling it onto the car to keep from burning my hand. I hear the “whump” sound as the gasoline catches. Then I turn and run back up the slope as fast as I can.

  When I get to the top of the hill, Jericho’s on his hands and knees in the dirt, rubbing it into his clothing. He answers my unasked question: “So it’ll look like I crawled up the hill.” Then he wordlessly takes the lighter out of my hand and shoves it down into his pocket.

  There is, indeed, somebody coming, but they are a long way off. Jericho looks anxiously at the car below us in the gulley. Fire has encircled it, black smoke has begun to rise into the air, but the car isn’t yet burning.

  “Now, we tell people …” He sees I’m staring at the car. “Annie, look at me.” I turn to face him; on his knees we’re almost at eye level. “We say that I was afraid the car was going to explode, so I got you out of it and back up here to safety.”

  For the first time, he notices my face.

  “Where’d you get that black eye?”

  Mama slapped me, said she’d whip me with a belt.

  He doesn’t wait for an answer. “That’s good, the black eye and the bruise on your cheek—that’s good. That happened in the wreck. Ok? That’s what you say, that it happened in the wreck.”

  Over his shoulder I see the truck, you can tell it’s a pickup truck. It’s still the only vehicle on the road. Surely, the driver has seen the smoke by now.

  “And we say that I started back down for Windy, but the car exploded and it was too late to help—”

  “Help! Annie, help me!”

  The voice is faint, calling from a long way off. It is as pure as tiny bells.

  Jericho and I turn in unison toward the gulley. Windy is in the back of the car, banging her hands on the window, wailing, “Help! Annie, get me out!”

  “Windy!” I scream her name in a faint whisper and leap to my feet.

  Jericho reaches for me, catches my braid instead of my arm and yanks me backward with such force I land flat on my back in the dirt in front of him.

  “You stay right here!” he growls in a voice I’ve never heard before.

  “You set her on fire, now you can watch her burn.”

  “Nooo!” I shriek, instantly hysterical. I writhe on the ground, kicking, squirming and screaming. I manage to get up on my knees, then yank my head brutally from side to side to wrench my braid out of his hand. “Windy’s alive! I have to help her! She’s ali—”

  Suddenly, there is a loud whump; all the gasoline has caught and the car is instantly engulfed in flames. Windy is pressed against the back glass, her eyes full of terror, her face contorted in a scream. Her hair catches on fire and—

  Kaboom!

  The force of the explosion lifts the car into the air and sends fire and smoke like a flame thrower up over the edge of the gulley. Jericho ducks and releases my braid. I remain perfectly still, watch the car dance in slow motion as pieces of it fly off in all directions. Then it settles back to the earth with a sickening crunch and burns like the gates of hell had opened up a crack in the earth right there in the bottom of the gulley.

  Windy’s burning. Burning! I lean over and dig my hands into the dirt. Someone’s screaming.

  The memory stopped there.

  I felt a heartbeat-pulse thud like a jackhammer in the wound on the top of my head and the whirling world settled, stopped spinning. I lay quiet, my eyes closed enough that Jericho couldn’t tell I was watching him. He was searching the kitchen, grabbing drawers and flinging them open. In the third drawer down in the cabinet by the refrigerator, he found what he’d been looking for. Dish towels. He wrapped one tenderly around his injured thumb and grunted from the pain. Then he picked up a long, thin towel and began to wind it around the other to hold the first one in place.

  That was my chance.

  I leapt to my feet and sprinted past him toward the back door. I had a full two steps on him and I was a runner. The second I felt the cool night air hit my face, I started to scream, to shriek at the top of my lungs. Maybe the neighbors couldn’t hear Mama and Jericho fighting in the big old house, but surely they could hear me wailing in the back yard.

  I thought I’d actually escaped when I hit the second step of the porch. Then my head suddenly snapped backward, searing a lightning bolt of pain down my neck. He’d grabbed a handful of my hair and yanked hard, in a downward motion like he was popping a whip, and I crashed to the floor of the porch on my back.

  I tried to keep screaming, but all the wind had been knocked out of my lungs. Jericho had pulled out a huge hunk of my hair, but he immediately grabbed another handful and used it to drag me backward into the house. This time, he turned and pushed the back door shut in front of the screen with his injured right hand, while his left hand remained so tangled in my hair I was powerless to wriggle away.

  I kicked and squirmed to get free, grunting from the effort, but I wasn’t strong enough to pull my hair out of his grasp, or to pull free and leave him holding roughly a third of my hair in his hand. He quickly put an end to my struggles altogether by crashing down on top of me. He straddled my chest and pinned my arms to my sides with his knees. I was totally immobilized.

  “Thought you got away from me, didn’t you, Little Princess?” He was panting right in my face and I gagged at the stink of his breath—old beer and decayed teeth. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying right here.”

  He yanked his hand free from my hair, pul
ling out several more hunks in the process. But with my arms pinned to my sides, I could do nothing more than kick ineffectively and flap my head from side to side.

  Slap!

  The blow knocked my head sideways and bloodied my nose, but it wasn’t meant to knock me out. If he’d wanted me unconscious, he’d have used his fist. He could do nothing with his injured hand except hold it to his chest, but he only needed one hand to subdue a woman 150 pounds lighter than he was.

  “I had the time, I’d hurt you a whole lot worse than that, smash that pretty face of yours, make you pay for this thumb.” He encircled my throat with his good hand and clamped it to the floor. Then he leaned over and began to apply pressure.

  “But you done woke the world up.” As he talked, he applied more and more pressure to my neck. I could do nothing but wrench my head back and forth and kick my feet.

  I couldn’t have screamed, even if there’d been anybody to hear. I had no air. My face felt so flushed it must surely burst. The light in the world grew dimmer and dimmer.

  Noooo! I raged in my head as the pressure on my neck tightened. I was furious, not scared. I understood that I was about to die and I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was that this poisonous spider of a man was going to live, that he was going to get away with what he’d done.

  From a long way off I heard his voice. “This is what you get for poking around in the past.” I didn’t wiggle anymore. I no longer thrashed my head back and forth. The world was dark. “Say hello to Windy for me.” And he laughed.

  A whiff of something familiar.

  Then black gobbled me up.

  There was no time where I went. No seconds or minutes. Just dark and quiet. Profoundly black; absolutely silent. Not even a ringing in my ears.

  Then I began to float slowly upward out of the darkness, like a single tiny bubble patiently making its way to the surface from the deepest black fissure in the bottom of the sea.

  I hurt somewhere; I hurt everywhere.

  A heartbeat wom-wom-wom reverberated inside my head.

  Heavy. On my chest, heavy. I could barely breathe for the weight of it. I could barely breathe at all, dragged each breath in through an opening too small in my throat.

  I opened my eyes. Darkness. I blinked. Flickering light. Mentholatum. A voice. Deep and scratchy. Good.

  “Oh, sweet Annie, I been tryin’ to get him off’n you, but I just can’t.”

  Rhymes with paint.

  “I ain’t strong enough.”

  The weight on me, I tried to shove it, to roll over. Bobo’s shoe was beside my face.

  “Let me help, Sugar.”

  I tried to roll again, struggled with all my strength which was no strength at all, but this time the weight shifted and suddenly I was free. Nothing crushing me. I drew in a deep, ragged breath and let it out painfully.

  When I moved my head, a glass shard of pain spiked down my neck in breath-taking agony. But I had moved enough to see. The weight was lying beside me now. A body. Jericho. He wasn’t moving. And I could see why not. Bobo’s precious it’ll-cut-your-thumb-off butcher knife was buried up to the hilt like a giant exclamation point in his back.

  Bobo’s face swam in front of mine.

  “He’s dead.” The fury and loathing in her voice grated like gravel in a blender. “If ever a man needed killing, Jericho Johnson was that man. I’m just proud it was me got to do it!”

  A siren wailed in the distance. Then a pale shadow of gloom settled over my eyes and I floated gently back down into the dark.

  Chapter 26

  I used to watch a television show in England, an American cop show in re-runs on the BBC. It featured the requisite way-too-pretty-to-be-a-police-officer heroine, her chiseled-good-looks partner and their gritty-no-nonsense boss solving old murder cases. Ten, 20, 30 years old.

  Of course, they always got the “perp” to confess within the 42 minutes of playing time, not counting commercials, and the show always ended the same way. One of the cops catches sight of the image—transparent, ghostly—of the victim the way they looked before they died, just standing there, sometimes smiling, mostly just giving a little nod as if to say they can rest in peace now. Their murderer has been brought to justice and they can rest in peace.

  That hasn’t happened to me. In the weeks since Bobo stuck a butcher knife in Jericho’s back, I’ve looked, half expecting to see her out of the corner of my eye, standing in the doorway or playing with Superstar Barbie or in the back yard with the chickens. So far, she hasn’t shown up. I don’t imagine she ever will.

  But Windy exists now in a way she hasn’t in a quarter of a century. She exists in my memory. I don’t see her ghostly, transparent image in the shadows but I remember her. I remember the day we spent a rainy afternoon in the playroom, painting, Windy very serious, her paper on the floor in front of her, bending over with her little brush getting some detail right.

  The painting probably screamed at the world that Windy lived in a nightmare, that she was just a little girl and she couldn’t do anything about all the real, live Boogie Men who stalked her every waking hour, a painting that cried out in anguish, “Help me, somebody help me!”

  But nobody saw, nobody listened and nobody helped. Not even her big sister. The one person in her small world she could count on let her down. The little girl with the blonde braids named Annie Mitchell killed her. I killed her. I didn’t mean to. I would have jumped into that fire to save her if I could have. But I flicked the knob on that butane lighter, I set that piece of fuel-soaked rag aflame, I tossed it on the car drenched in gasoline.

  I watched Windy burn to death.

  I will have to live with that image for the rest of my life.

  Dr. Kendrick is helping, though. Grace is the shrink in Amarillo Dusty found for me who happens to be a wonderful woman, a great friend and a truly discerning and gifted counselor. I liked her office as soon as I saw it. A big overstuffed couch with fluffy pillows you could hug to your chest when you rocked back and forth sobbing, and cuddly stuffed animals to cling to.

  The first time I sat down in her office, Grace told me I didn’t have to be Ok with her. In that office, I could fall completely apart. I could holler, cuss, cry, curl up in a fetal position or all of the above whenever I felt like it. And I’ve done some or all of those things every time I’ve walked through her door. I suspect I’ll spend a lot more time doing them before it’s all over. It’s one thing to grab the Boogie Man by the throat and drag him out of the closet into the light so he’ll go poof and vanish. It’s quiet another thing altogether to clean up the mess he has left behind in the closet, a quarter of a century of filth, of foul, rotted debris. But Grace has helped me understand that until that closet’s not just empty but clean, the floor swept, the windows open and a spring breeze blowing through it, I will never be free.

  Free to be me—whoever that is! Right now, I couldn’t begin to guess. Some mornings, I get up and I want to say to my reflection in the mirror, “I’m schizophrenic,” and hear the reflection reply, “and so am I!”

  A little girl lives in my head who wasn’t there a six-month lifetime ago. And I’ve discovered something enormously endearing about her—she is her grandmother’s child. She is Bobo in a little girl suit. She is irreverent, brash, pushy, stubborn and unable to stomach any shading of reality less than the truth still in the husk.

  She jumps with both feet right into the middle of life, like a little kid jumping into a puddle, and doesn’t concern herself at all with where the mud may splatter when she does. She scares me, this little girl does. But every day, I like her better. And every day I have to deal with the issues associated with integrating this audacious, rambunctious child into the quiet, reserved, unengaged observer of life that her body—but not her spirit—grew to become.

  Dusty says there’s no difference between the two, the little girl and her grown-up self. To which I respond, “You’ve been smoking crack again, haven’t you.”

  He says th
e little girl was always in there, but I kept her in a cage, like Petey. Well, now the door’s open—the door’s been ripped off the hinges—and she’s free to fly around and around in circles, leaving little piles of Annie dookey on every surface in the room.

  But the free Anne Mitchell still spends a good portion of her time sitting in the cage. Flying wears you out if you’re carrying dead weight. And right now I’m still hauling around in my head two different women I call Mama. One of them was a saint; the other was a monster.

  I’d yell into the void, “Will the real Susan Mitchell please stand up?” if I honestly believed there was one. But I suspect the real Susan Mitchell was both and neither of the women I knew, as conflicted and fragmented as her only daughter. In her own sad way, my mother was as schizophrenic as I am.

  How much of what happened in the old white house on the last street in Goshen, Texas, 25 years ago was Mama’s fault? Is Joel retarded because she drank too much or because of some chemical cocktail his own father slipped into his mother’s after-breakfast martini?

  I’m still trying to strain the ugly memories of my mother’s brutality through the filter of speed, crack and PCP. Again and again, I lie awake in my bed in the deepest ditch of the night and launch the same question out into the darkness: How much control did Mama really have over her own behavior? And I wait in vain for an answer.

  The only thing I know for certain about my mother—beyond the fact that she loved me and Joel “all the much”—was that Susan Mitchell’s whole life was structured around the single worst thing she ever did. She went to her grave believing she was a murderer. Like Dusty said a long time ago, a lifetime of remorse is a pretty stiff sentence.

  I told Dusty the other day that I was thinking about doing something radical. That put the fear of God into the poor man. You could tell he didn’t know which of the amazing Annie twins he was dealing with and the look on his face was so comical I laughed out loud.

  We’d just finished supper. Bobo had made fried chicken. Big surprise there. Dusty had been sneaking chickens into the chicken yard for weeks or Bobo would have killed off the whole herd of them a long time ago. In the nebulous world of Bobo Land, the chicken house is a magic pitcher. No matter how much you pour out, it’s never empty.