Burn Down the Ground

by Kambri Crews

  His chatter was followed by the muffled sounds of my father and the woman signing and handling the receiver before she finally slurred, “He saysshh he loves and missshhes yew.”

  “Okay, tell him I love him, too, but it’s three in the morning and I have to go to work in a few hours.”

  More whispers as Helen relayed my words to my father. “It’s only ’bout two o’clock here. He forgot you’re in New York City.”

  It was true. I was in New York City. Alone.

  When a seventeen-year-old gets married nobody expects it to last, but Rob and I gave it a decent try. After our courthouse ceremony, we continued living with Mom in her apartment to save money while I finished high school. When my senior prom rolled around, I begged Rob to go with me and let me use some of our savings to buy a gown. I’d been nominated for “Most Talented” senior, after all, and I had to be there to accept the trophy if I won. Needing everything from a microwave and dishes to toothpaste and toilet paper, we had no business spending money on a prom.

  “Please?” I pleaded. “Prom’s only a few days away. I have to get a dress now before they’re all gone!”

  After everything I had been through, Rob didn’t have the heart to tell me we couldn’t afford to go. He drove me from boutique to boutique in search of the perfect gown. When I finally found the one I simply couldn’t live without, Rob balked. At almost four hundred dollars, the purple sequin dress, more suited for a drag queen than a prom queen, was more than one month’s rent on the apartment we were going to lease. I grew indignant at his hesitation. Most of our meager savings came from the money I’d collected as congratulations on my upcoming graduation. Technically, it was my money, and the dress was so glitzy, I knew I’d outshine my peers.

  I offered a compromise. “I’ll sell it at a consignment shop and get most of the money back.”

  “Okay, but you promise me you will sell it.”

  I squealed with joy and threw my arms around his neck. “I promise, I promise, I promise. Thank you!”

  Our money blown for the dress, Rob wore his dress blues instead of a tuxedo. We didn’t quite match but Mom assured me that a grown man in uniform would look better than any teenage boy in a rent-a-tux. At twenty-three years old, he was far more mature than any of the other girls’ dates.

  That purple explosion of satin, taffeta, and sequins hangs in my bedroom closet to this day. It rests in peace next to my high school letterman jacket and dozens of cocktail dresses I’ve amassed over the years.

  Shortly after the prom, I graduated from high school forty-sixth out of nearly seven hundred students. The ceremony was held in the same convention center where I had seen Ozzy Osbourne, AC/DC, and Metallica. This time I was the one onstage as Mom and Rob sat in the stands with Mom’s parents, who had driven my brother to Fort Worth for the occasion.

  David was unnaturally subdued, almost comatose. Where was the rabid dog I had come to know as my brother? I didn’t know what they were doing at the Jesus detox camp but I preferred him this way. Dad wasn’t there. In fact, he didn’t know about the ceremony because I didn’t send him an invitation. I predicted that David would be a handful enough. As I glided across the stage to receive my diploma, I was announced, “Kambri Dee Crews, summa cum laude.”

  “Summa!” David bellowed from the stands. “Summa girl!”

  He was prouder than any father would have been. I smiled at my brother’s joy before I sulked to myself. Summa, pfft. What’s that gonna get me?

  After Rob was honorably discharged from the navy in March 1991, we relocated to his hometown of Akron, Ohio. Since the Internet wasn’t around, my taking his last name and moving cross-country served as a homespun Witness Protection Program. Like the time we moved from Boars Head to Fort Worth, I had another shot at reinventing myself. This time I aimed for normalcy with Rob and his close-knit family.

  No longer a dashing sailor in crisp navy whites, Rob took a job cleaning carpets. As I predicted, my diploma with highest honors was worthless for landing anything other than menial jobs, so I found part-time work as a bank teller. I told my co-workers, all middle-aged women with children, that I was a year older than I really was so they wouldn’t figure out I was married before the legal age of consent. That would prompt unwanted questions.

  While my friends were attending college and pursuing their dreams, I was a cashier at a bank. The best I could hope for was a full-time assignment as a real teller instead of working the drive-through. Every waking moment was spent regretting what could have been. I dwelled on an elaborate fantasy life I dreamed up for my high school classmates. They must be in dorms, performing in university theater productions, rushing sororities, and going to frat parties. While they were living the American dream, I was dealing with senior citizens who smelled of mothballs and didn’t trust those newfangled whatchamacallits. “ATM machines,” I’d grumble. “They’re as dependable as I am.”

  In all the years on Boars Head, Mom and Dad had prided themselves on not taking handouts when money was tight. They had taught me to endure and I suffered in silence, berating myself over my lost potential. My start-up life was adequate but far short of my dream. I didn’t know where to seek out help. The only scholarship organization I’d ever heard of was the United Negro College Fund and I didn’t qualify.

  While Rob scoured the classifieds looking for a more stable, better-paying job, he came across an ad for “The Academy of Court Reporting and Paralegal Studies.” I had never shown any interest in the law, but it sounded interesting and, more important, it offered a program that I could complete in less than two years. The name was clumsy, but it was an accredited school. The academy offered night classes, cut out the superfluous required electives that add to tuition cost, and used practicing attorneys to serve as teachers. As an added bonus, the bank reimbursed me for selective books and courses depending on my grades. The goal of making straight A’s finally had cash incentive, so I buried my nose in my studies.

  Rob began driving an eighteen-wheeler and while the pay was better and the work steady, it meant he was rarely home. I juggled work, classes, and homework while taking care of our one-bedroom rental home in Rob’s absence. Days blurred together, punctuated only by holidays, which were spent with Rob’s family, since mine had splintered. The grueling two-year-long schedule was like counting grains of sand on a beach. It was overwhelming and tedious, but I finished, graduating with an associate’s degree as a paralegal. It was no Ivy League diploma, but it meant I no longer had to skip the education section in employment applications, which had always felt like a twist of the knife.

  My love of theater hadn’t faded; it had merely taken a backseat to my adult responsibilities. The next week, certificate in hand and school loans abated for six months, I scoured the Akron Beacon Journal for audition notices. A listing for Weathervane Playhouse’s production of Noises Off! caught my eye and reignited my dream of working in showbiz. I was used to spending every waking hour studying so I poured that effort into preparing for the tryout. It paid off when I was cast in the role of the young ingénue Brooke Ashton, who ran around in lingerie for the entirety of the play.

  One taste of the stage was all it took. I was hooked. I quit smoking again (and for the final time), was cast in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, volunteered backstage for Annie, and even won an acting award for my portrayal in Noises Off! After years of being chained to work and school with no time for socializing, I was immersed in a new circle of friends who shared my love of the arts. My independence, coupled with Rob’s long absences from home, spelled the end of our lackluster six-year marriage. We rarely saw each other and when we did, we had nothing to say. We were roommates, plain and simple, and misery oozed from my every pore.

  Rob had rescued me. He had been a life preserver when my family’s ship was sinking and he had taken me in as a refugee. I owed him my life. I couldn’t leave him. Feeling trapped, I brooded and nitpicked until Rob finally grew fed up with my complaining and asked the question I had be
en waiting for: “Do you think we should get a divorce?”

  An audible sigh of relief escaped me. “Yes.”

  After six years together, I left him the house and everything in it. I hadn’t wanted any of that stuff anyway. I wanted a clean slate. I had childhood dreams to reclaim.

  Since my graduation from high school, Mom, Dad, David, and I had become independent satellites orbiting around the black hole that had once been our familial universe. With each of us living in a different state—me in Ohio, Mom in Texas, David in Indiana, and Dad in Oklahoma—our paths rarely crossed one another’s. Each person did the exact same thing I did, in his own unique way: built a new life far away from what had been “home.” As we had done on Boars Head, where we had scorched the earth, we were waiting to see what grew.

  I was disappointed when Mom remarried soon after her divorce from Dad—one year after I was betrothed to Rob at the courthouse. I felt let down. I had hoped that my marrying Rob and leaving home would have freed her up to finally take care of herself. But Mom was really happy to have someone new in her life. She met her new husband while out dancing with friends three months after her divorce from my father was final. He didn’t smoke or do drugs and rarely drank, which made him a keeper in her eyes.

  Together they bought a large three-bedroom, two-story home in the southwestern suburbs of Fort Worth. It was bigger and nicer than any home we had dreamed of back in Montgomery. She also distanced herself from the Deaf community, possibly out of embarrassment or to avoid running into Dad. Besides, her new husband didn’t know ASL, so my mother would have to serve as his personal interpreter when they attended social events at the Deaf club rather than relax and enjoy time with friends. Instead Mom preferred spending her free time on adventurous road trips with her husband in a travel trailer. Over the years they would explore forty-eight of the fifty United States. She also spent most holidays visiting with his family, who all lived much closer than our own. But what was “our own” family anymore, really?

  Since rehabilitating himself, David had replaced his drug habit with a feverish addiction to Jesus Christ. He proselytized to anyone and became a counselor at Teen Challenge, the facility that helped him get clean. Eventually he settled in Indiana and his preaching tapered to a modest level where I wasn’t afraid to sneeze in his presence, lest I be barraged with a slew of scriptures.

  Defeating his addictions is something he is proud of. He even spoke at churches testifying about what God’s mercy had done for him. Now he had earned his GED, was attending college, and worked with troubled boys who were like he had once been as a youth.

  He hadn’t witnessed the violent end of our parents’ marriage. He couldn’t understand why I was reluctant to write or visit Dad. “He misses you,” David told me time and time again. “Why won’t you talk to him?”

  I tried to tell him about what our father had done, but he refused to listen. He acted just like Mom did when it came to my father’s misdeeds: He pretended it never happened. “I don’t wanna hear it, Kambri,” he’d say as he walked away.

  Killing his demons had been battle enough. David didn’t seem to want to acknowledge that our dad was far from perfect. He had idolized our father like I had, maybe even more. He was a boy, after all, and had been Dad’s sidekick. He had triumphed over his demons and was not looking back. I respected his decision. I also feared the truth might have made him relapse, so I dropped the matter.

  My relationship with my dad was complicated. While my life had been tough at times, it was generally good, wasn’t it? Everyone had done the best they could under the circumstances. I always had a roof over my head, even if it was made of sheet metal. It’s not like my parents wanted their lives to turn out this way. What kind of bitter, unforgiving daughter was I? Wasn’t it better for me to have a cordial relationship with him than hold a grudge? Dad had never intended to hurt me anyway; he barely raised a finger to me my whole life. I was the collateral damage in his fallout with Mom.

  Time and distance helped me forget the wounds. Besides, there was one law Dad couldn’t escape: Murphy’s. He’d send me letters with news consisting of another broken-down vehicle, car wreck, failed relationship, and just overall bad luck. Dad shrugged off the misfortunes and said if it had tits or tires it was bound to cause him trouble.

  His money woes and lack of steady work forced him to live on his parents’ farm in Oklahoma in a cast-off dilapidated and moldy Airstream trailer. It was decorated with stolen road signs and had a shower so small he had to bend at the knees to fit in it. We kept our relationship superficial through sporadic phone calls from his drunken lady friends and a handful of brief face-to-face visits.

  If Mom or David or the state of Texas didn’t condemn him, why should I?

  After six years of marriage, I said goodbye to Rob and I was free. Sort of. I had worked my way up the corporate ladder. Quickly rising through the ranks at the bank, I went from being a teller to a legal secretary to a paralegal. The board of directors appointed me an officer, then, two years later, an assistant vice president of the Credit Quality Department, where I dealt with delinquent commercial loans valued over fifty thousand dollars.

  Once I was divorced I wanted to see the world. Here I was, twenty-six years old, still working at the bank and demanding money from people who were more than double my age. I loathed bill collectors. They had stripped me of my trailer that was nothing more than scrap metal to them, but a world to me.

  Oh, sure, I wasn’t collecting against the average mom-and-pop debtor; they were usually distinguished middle-aged men on entrepreneurial missions building their own businesses, securing patents for environmentally safe packaging, or restoring historical landmarks. They had one thing in common: They had defaulted on large commercial loans. Sometimes I seized their personal assets to offset their business debt. I repossessed yachts and even helped uncover a stash of more than twenty thousand dollars in cash stuffed into the door panels of a DeLorean. But these high-flying debtors were still people. They had hopes and dreams not unlike my own father’s plans for Boars Head. I rebuilt their loans with payment plans so lenient they had no excuse not to pay on time, and pay on time they did. I watched over them like they were books in my long-forgotten library. Each was worth putting back on track instead of tossing into the trash pile to be set ablaze.

  I didn’t want to slave away another day behind a desk. I confided my dissatisfaction in a journal. “Being young is feeling the pull of unlimited possibility. As long as there are books unread, seas uncharted, mountains unscaled, lands untouched, there remains endless opportunity. Therein lies the secret of youth. I will drink from her fountain.”

  I just needed a shove off the dock.

  Events in my life just seemed to happen to me. Now, however, I wanted to make life happen. I composed a list of things to do before I died. Included were grand plans of scaling mountainsides and sailing the seven seas, along with dozens of mundane things I never tried, like riding a train or eating sushi.

  I wrote letters to Dad highlighting efforts to cross things off that list. Having my father as my pen pal helped us reconnect. I got to know him and vice versa. I wrote about my escapades attending parties and sporting events, foreign travels to Mexico and the Virgin Islands, and aversion to being tied down to a job or relationship. “You are just like your daddy,” he wrote back. I learned I had a lot more in common with Dad than I had realized. Both our childhoods had been spent in a kind of prison: his in the form of a dorm at deaf school; me isolated in the woods on Boars Head. We both had a “wild and free” spirit and deep wanderlust.

  Dad’s letters made it seem that life was good. He may not have been walking the straight and narrow, but he didn’t seem to be the dangerous man I had seen in our apartment some years before. Oh, sure, now and again his exploits included a run-in with the law, like the time he took a road trip to Houston and his truck broke down, forcing him to ride a Greyhound bus back to Dallas. On the way home, he snuck a few puffs on a cigarette
in the rest-room. When the bus made a pit stop, cops were waiting to arrest him for smoking. Dad spent twenty-four hours in jail before they let him go, which he laughed off as part of life’s adventure.

  Growing up, he had lived with strict rules governing his day-to-day activities at Deaf school. As an adult, he was rid of housemothers, cherry tree switches, and razor straps and wanted the spontaneity that freedom granted. He was living by the principle that it was easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission. Walking that fine line and taking risks was part of his charm. I had been such a serious student and hard worker that I missed out on a lot of fun. I crack a smile whenever I think of him “singing” and writhing around on the stage as Elvis. His antics were the most memorable moments of those theater trips. Maybe I could learn a thing or two from Dad’s impetuous ways. Focusing on his charming side allowed me to minimize his faults.

  While I was antsy in Ohio and searching for a way out, Dad married an older woman nicknamed JB. She worked for a bail bonds company and possessed the traits my father loved: big breasts and long fingernails that she accentuated with tight clothes and lots of jewelry. I only met her once during their three-odd-year union. Like most events in my father’s life, I never knew the exact details of his relationship. I discovered they divorced when I received a letter from Dad. JB had shot a pistol at him during an argument. He claimed she was schizophrenic and, as luck would have it, a bad aim. Her shot barely missed, whizzing by his ear. Corresponding in longhand lends itself to truncated reports and I was left wondering what he was leaving out. Namely, why would she shoot at him? Whatever the facts were, I never knew. His letter moved on to more routine topics like car troubles, construction projects, and travel plans, as if dodging a bullet was no more or less interesting than the weather.

  After almost two years of complaining that Bowlegs, Oklahoma, was a dead town, Dad was done with his childhood home and moved back to Texas. He was holed up in a room at Motel 183, a dingy inn that let him pay by the week, which he paid for using his disability benefits. It was located in the suburbs of Fort Worth, not far from where we’d lived on Grove Street and Weyland Drive. There he became a regular at dive bars. During a trip back to Texas for my twenty-year high school reunion, I drove to his favorite haunt, called the Cobra Club. I thought I’d slip in, have an ice-cold beer, and maybe even meet someone who knew Dad from his days in the Free World. The place was a sleazy dump with a handwritten sign taped to the door that warned “Member’s Only!!!” I was too afraid to go in, sure that the “members” were carrying weapons they were not afraid to use.