by David Crow
“I can’t give it to you—my father won’t let me.” We weren’t listed in the phone book, and Dad made us promise never to give out our number.
Her eyebrows shot up. “Oh?”
“If you write a note, I’ll give it to him.”
Walking home, I kept thinking about what Mrs. Salazar had told me—that something might be wrong with my eyes. How could that be?
But everyone in my class could see and read better than me. No one wrote their letters backward. It took me a long time to read the assigned books, and my head hurt from squinting to bring the letters into focus and stop them from moving.
The school nurse gave me a hearing test, but I already knew my ears were bad, so it wasn’t a surprise that I couldn’t hear many of the beeps, especially out of my left ear. When she gave me an eye test, the letters were too blurry to read, which wasn’t a surprise either. It seemed that the only things working in my head were my mouth and imagination.
The nurse sent home the test results with a note saying Mom and Dad had to take me for further testing. Dad said forget it. Cherokees had perfect hearing and vision and didn’t need any of this goddamn nonsense. It took several more notes from school before he agreed to make an appointment with an eye doctor. When I climbed up into the doctor’s large chair and looked through his strange machine as it twisted and turned, every letter sharpened—I couldn’t believe the difference. But Dad refused to buy me glasses, saying he was ashamed of me. More notes came home from school, and he finally bought me a pair. Sam would go through the same thing when he needed glasses a couple of years later.
As for my ears, Dad would never have taken me to a specialist. I could hear enough with my right ear to get by, and that was the end of the discussion. The school didn’t push it.
But they did follow up on my eyes. The letters still jumped around on the page despite my new glasses, so they sent me to a special clinic where they ran more tests. Afterward, they told Dad I had dyslexia, a form of brain confusion that made it hard to read and write, and recommended classes to help me retrain my brain. Dad left without saying a word. On the drive home, he was quiet, his face twisting into different shapes, always a sign he was mad. After Mom’s okra, roast beef, and iced tea dinner, he told me to go into the living room and sit on the couch with him.
“Dyslexia is a fancy word for stupid,” he said, his cold eyes boring into me. “I’m not paying good money to help you read. I can read upside down and backward, so don’t give me any crap about not being able to read left to right. Hell, I didn’t go to school and could read at age four.”
He jumped up from the couch and turned on the TV. “We’re done. I’m sick of talking to you. You’re stupid, and it has nothing to do with your eyes and ears.”
That night, I listened to what Dad said to Mom about me. “Maybe David is just plain stupid like everyone in your dumbass family,” he said in his usual loud voice. “I’m going to find out.”
A week later, he dropped a booklet on the kitchen table in front of me, an IQ test he’d bought from a correspondence course company. “Fill this out as fast as possible,” he said. “Piece a cake. Every blank should have a word or number.” He pushed a pencil into my hand. “I need to know how stupid you are.” He turned the knob on the kitchen timer. “Go.”
After guessing most of the answers, I handed him the booklet, my heart racing. Dad flipped from page to page shaking his head. “Your results are far below average.” He looked at Mom at the sink washing dishes. “David won’t amount to much.” He slammed the booklet down and left the kitchen.
The room started spinning and I couldn’t breathe—he might as well have punched me in the stomach. As I heard the TV come on, I vowed to learn more than anyone in our family and at school—in my own way. I promised myself that someday, when I became rich and famous, everyone would be sorry for making fun of me.
Every night, I read until bedtime. Then I read with a flashlight under the covers until I fell asleep. In the morning, I often woke up on top of a book or magazine, and some of the pages would be crinkled or torn. The reading specialist at the clinic had taught me to read with a ruler, to keep my eyes following the print. I still read slowly, but the ruler helped relax my mind. In time, I learned to memorize everything, even the smallest details.
In addition to the Albuquerque Journal, I read history and adventure books from the school library. I loved reading about people who overcame great odds and handicaps. The Helen Keller book was my favorite. She had more troubles with her head than I did, and she found a way to overcome them. My classmates never made fun of me when I remembered things they had forgotten or never knew. During tests, though, I continued to do poorly, seldom having enough time to finish.
I was happiest alone, either running or reading a book, creating an imaginary world starring me as the hero, a place where none of the kids laughed at me. The people in my dreams became my best friends.
CHAPTER 8
MOM RETURNED TO HER OLD routine of calling on the neighbors. After dinner, she would drag me along to knock on someone’s door to say hello. At first everyone was nice and talked with her, asking her questions about where we were from and what Dad did for a living.
The next time we dropped by, she fell back on her excuse of needing a cup of sugar, like she did at the EPNG compounds. After the neighbors let her in, Mom told them how hard her life had been and that she was always sad. The ladies got her out of the house as fast as possible.
When we visited again, they didn’t answer the door, but Mom was convinced they couldn’t hear her knock. She went back to lying on the couch all day watching TV. Nothing for her had changed.
Not long after we moved to Albuquerque, Sam, now six, started climbing one of the poles holding up the awning above the back patio. Dad called him a little monkey. Mom called him a little daredevil. Sam did it over and over until he could pull himself onto the flat roof. Then he would jump onto the canvas awning, lean over to grab onto a pole, and slide down like a fireman.
As soon as we got home from school every afternoon and changed into play clothes, Sam would run to the backyard and jump onto the awning yelling like a wild man. With each jump, the small tears in the canvas got bigger and bigger.
I screamed at him to stop and so did Mom and Lonnie, but he ignored us. Then it happened. I was in the front yard when I heard the loud cry and dull thud. I raced around to the back and found Sam sprawled on the concrete, blood pouring out of the side of his head. His face was full of gravel. Looking up, I saw the large hole in the awning.
“Lonnie! Mom! Come quick.”
Lonnie and I carried Sam inside, and Mom tried to clean his head wound and pull out the gravel. Lonnie called Dad. Luckily, he was in his office.
“Dad, hurry!”
Within minutes, he pulled up to the house—like old times. We all rode with him and Mom to the emergency room. In the front seat, wrapped in a blanket, Sam stretched across Mom’s lap and didn’t make a sound. She sobbed, muttering something about not knowing how a six-year-old could get on the roof. Dad remained silent, but the Y vein pulsed on his forehead and his eyes bulged, ready to explode out of his head.
At the hospital, Dad carried Sam in his arms, and Mom followed. Again, we weren’t allowed to join them. Lonnie held three-year-old Sally on her lap while I walked around looking for tiles to count, but this waiting room had stained, worn carpeting. How many more emergency rooms would we have to visit before Sam grew up—if he made it that far?
Dad and Mom came out after a while and told us that the doctors were operating on Sam’s head. They sat apart from each other, Mom shaking and Dad muttering to himself, his face tight and dark.
A few hours later, a doctor came out to speak with us. “Your son has two skull fractures and a concussion,” he said. “He’ll need to remain sedated until the swelling in his brain goes down.”
We’d heard that before.
“Several pebbles are embedded in his skull. The tissue will
remain tender for some time, and there’s a risk of infection.”
We visited the hospital every day. Sam lay silently in a bed. His head was red and swollen, his eyes just slits in his puffy skin.
On the day Sam could leave the hospital, all of us piled into the Rambler to bring him home. Dad said he’d be okay, but he had to be really quiet for a while and couldn’t go outside to play.
I followed Dad into a big office where he signed the medical release forms. The doctor behind the desk asked him, “Mr. Crow, how did your son get on top of the house and fall onto the concrete? He’s only six years old.”
Dad blasted out of the chair, waving the forms in one hand and the pen in the other. “The little son of a bitch thinks he can fly,” he said. “And his mother sits on her ass all day watching TV.”
The doctor frowned. “Sir, that’s—”
Dad leaned over and jabbed the pen into his white smock. “All of you goddamn doctors are capitalist frauds making money off people’s misery and suffering. You bastards don’t care if you cure anybody as long as they keep coming back to spend every last dollar you blood suckers can extract.”
What was Dad talking about? Every time Sam got hurt, the doctors patched him up. It was Mom’s fault he kept getting hurt.
That night, long after everyone had gone to sleep, Mom’s screeching voice filled the house, waking me up. “Thurston, we need to talk!” she yelled. Then the front door banged, and I knew Dad had gone out to the car. I met Lonnie in the hallway, and we watched from the front porch—as we had in Belen.
After Mom waited until Dad fell asleep and then went outside to bang on the windows. Dad got out of the car and smacked her in the face. She ran back into the house howling, “You don’t love me.” And again, the neighbors’ lights came on.
It was like watching a rerun.
After that, none of the kids were allowed to play at our house, or at least that’s what they told us. And when the neighbors saw Mom outside, they turned the other way.
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG FOR Mom and Dad to have another yelling-and-hitting fight in their bedroom. Once things quieted down, I listened outside their door.
Sniffling, Mom said, “The judge warned me about your violent temper. He called you a coldhearted killer. They should throw you back in prison where you belong.”
“No one can touch me now. I’m clean as a whistle. It’s like the whole thing never happened.” He used his braggy voice, which probably meant only part of it was true.
“How can that be? What you did to Cleo was wrong—the judge said so.”
“The son of a bitch needed killing, and if your whore of a mother had testified, I would have been given a medal instead of a prison sentence.”
“Who says they can’t put you back in prison?”
“The governor of California, that’s who. I applied for a pardon, and he gave me one. I have the letter to prove it.”
“But you were guilty!”
“Doesn’t matter. I had to put a notice in a couple of LA newspapers for a month to see if anyone objected to the pardon. Nobody did—hell, old Cleo is blind, and his wife must not read the back of the paper. So now the violent felony is gone from my record, which means I’m free to do whatever I want and go wherever I want. I never should have been there in the first place.”
“But what about George?” Mom shrieked. “He’ll find us here and kill us for sure!”
“Our number and address aren’t in the phone book. He’d have to get awfully lucky to find me. He isn’t that smart, and I’d probably get him before he got me. Anyway, my bosses at Woodmen think I’m a fine, upstanding citizen, and that’s all that counts.”
ONE EVENING AFTER WORK, Dad burst through the front door, and I ran out of my room to see him. He stood in the living room holding his black-and-silver briefcase, staring at Mom on the couch in her nightgown.
Dad had changed a lot in our short time in Albuquerque. He smoked a pipe now like the smart guys on TV and wore suits instead of the usual EPNG uniform. That day, he had on a white shirt, a red tie, and polished black shoes. Even his voice seemed different, smoother somehow.
“Dad, did you sell policies to anybody famous today?” I asked.
He rubbed my head. “Not today, but I’m working on it.”
I glanced at him and then at Mom and couldn’t believe how different they were.
“Is dinner ready, Thelma Lou?” Dad asked. “It doesn’t look like you’ve even started.” He rolled his eyes in disgust.
“I’m too tired to fix dinner.” Mom pushed her straggly hair away from her face, groaning as she sat up on the edge of the couch, leaving behind a large crater from lying there for hours.
“Tired from doing what?” Dad laid his briefcase on the newspapers scattered across the coffee table. “Sitting on your ass all day watching TV?”
She jerked to her feet, waving her arms. “You work with gals who talk pretty and finished high school. You’ll go for a young one who looks like I did when we first met. Let’s move back to Belen. We knew who we were there. People here are too fancy and stuck up. None of the neighbors like me.”
Dad shook his head and walked out of the room.
“I wanna go back,” she yelled after him.
Mom didn’t belong anywhere.
EVERY WEEKEND, WHILE LONNIE WATCHED Sally and Sam, Mom and I went to the laundromat. The parking lot was filled with men who didn’t work and sad-looking women dragging dirty laundry and kids behind them. Getting out of the car, Mom would say, “Your daddy needs to make enough money to buy a washer and dryer so I don’t have to drive to the crummy part of town to clean our clothes.”
One Saturday, I followed Mom into the place, lugging a big duffel bag of laundry. After I sorted the colored and white clothes into separate piles and put everything into the machines, Mom poured in the soap powder and reached into her purse for quarters. She mumbled something about not having enough change and told me she’d look in the car.
But she never got out the door. Instead, she stood in the middle of the laundromat trying to make eye contact with the other customers. No one paid attention to her. Then she fell to the floor in a heap, closed her eyes, and began crying.
I ran over to her. “Mom, please get up. Let’s go home and get more quarters from Dad.”
She acted as if she couldn’t hear me, but I knew she was okay. “I hate it here,” she muttered between sobs. “We don’t have enough money for anything because your daddy only gets paid when he sells policies. We’re broke.”
“Get up, Mom. The manager is staring at you. He’ll want us to take our dirty clothes out of the machines.”
She tucked into a tight ball and closed her eyes. I shook her hard. “Mom, everyone is looking at us, and we have to go.”
The manager came over to me and nodded toward Mom. “What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We don’t have quarters for the machines, and I guess she’s upset. Don’t worry. I’ll get her up.” I tugged her arm, but she wouldn’t budge. Several minutes went by, and Mom wouldn’t get up or open her eyes.
“I’m calling an ambulance,” the manager said, walking over to the pay phone on the wall.
I dropped down next to her. “Mom, get up now!” I yelled into her ear.
“I’m not sure what’s wrong with her,” the manager said into the phone, “but her eyes are closed, and she’s been on the floor for nearly ten minutes.”
“Mom, an ambulance is coming for you!”
She didn’t move.
I raced over to the machines, yanked out our dirty clothes, soap flying everywhere, and stuffed them into the duffel bag. After hauling it to the car, I ran back across the parking lot. By then, Mom was walking out. As we drove into the street, an ambulance sped past us.
“Mom, why did you do that?” I yelled. “We could have gotten in trouble with Dad if he had to get you out of the hospital.”
“Do what? I was just resting for a minute.”
She shrugged. “Why would he do that? There was no reason for that. I was going to get up.”
I thought about all the times she woke Dad up in the middle of the night and pretended the next morning that she hadn’t done anything. And how she always asked Sam what happened when he had a terrible accident, as if she weren’t the parent. Something was seriously wrong with her. She didn’t know it, but the rest of us did.
CHAPTER 9
AT BELEN STATION, THE OLDER boys threw firecrackers at lizards and ants in the desert, but they wouldn’t share them with me. When I discovered you could buy them year-round in Albuquerque, I stopped thinking about how crazy Mom was and started making plans.
As soon as Sam recovered, he and I headed down Lomas Boulevard with some of my paper route money. About a mile from home, we found a fireworks stand in the parking lot of a small shopping strip. A skinny Mexican kid with horn-rimmed glasses and a pimply face smirked at me when I pulled change from my pocket.
“How can I help you boys today?” he asked.
I pointed at a package of Black Cat firecrackers.
“Nope.” He shook his head. “You have to be eighteen to buy firecrackers. Or bring your mom or dad.”
The only thing he’d sell us were Black Snakes, harmless little tabs that expanded into “snakes” of ash when lit. They barely made smoke much less blew up anthills, our number one goal, but we bought a pack anyway and walked back home.
I sneaked into the kitchen and grabbed the matches Dad used to light his pipe. On our front porch, we lit three tabs and watched them rise in a tiny anticlimactic arc of ash. We didn’t get to blow up anything or even make some noise. It was the biggest waste of a nickel ever.