Burn Down the Ground (23 page)

Across the cafeteria, I noticed a few cute boys huddled together staring at me. One of them smiled and coolly cocked his chin.

“That’s Terry,” Michele told me as I climbed over the bench. “He told me he thinks you’re cute.”

Had I heard her right? Terry thought, I, Kambri Crews was
cute?
Nobody every thought this about me except my relatives. Everyone in Montgomery, who had known me since I was seven years old, knew I wasn’t cute. I was Kambri, the girl who stood too close to a mud flap, could cut glass with her shoulder blades, and threw a football like Roger Staubach. Now in Fort Worth, I was worthy of the attention of boys my age. Gloria Vanderbilt was already working her magic.

My chest swelled and I looked back at Terry with a devilish grin. Smiling, he slid on a pair of black Ray-Bans.

“All the boys keep askin’ me who you are, and, boy, Casey doesn’t like you at all.”

My face flushed. “Who?”

“Casey. She’s one of the cheerleaders. She’s a snob.”

“Why doesn’t she like me? I don’t even know who she is.”

“ ’Cause.” Michele grinned with wicked glee. “She likes Terry, but Terry likes you.”

By the end of my first week, I realized my education in Montgomery had been better than I thought. I was more than six weeks ahead of the curriculum in every single class. I breezed through homework and aced quizzes with a minimum of attention.
This was a blessing because it allowed me to focus on navigating the social scene of junior high.

Unlike Montgomery, where all the kids were integrated, Smithfield was divided into cliques. There were the Jocks, or athletes and cheerleaders like Casey; the Freaks, the kids who wore concert tees, smoked, and sported long hair; and the Ropers, country-and-western lovers named for the type of cowboy boot they paired with Wranglers. Since I wasn’t used to such a rigid caste system, I drifted from group to group, able to get along with everyone, with the exception of Casey, who always snickered to her posse as I walked by.

One afternoon in geometry class, my teacher returned our graded quizzes and said, “My teacher’s aide marked these so if y’all see a mistake, let me know.”

I bristled. I knew Casey was his aide and I didn’t like the idea of her grading my work. Fishing through the pile, I found my test and saw the grade of 100 written in the right-hand corner. My name had been crossed out and replaced with “BAMBI” in big red marker. I was mortified and quickly stuffed the paper into my binder. Casey had done this to belittle me. I was bewildered by her contempt. We had never exchanged a single word.

My confusion faded and turned into enormous satisfaction when I deduced the reason for her scorn. She was jealous. Casey didn’t know about our repossessed trailer or my trouble with the law. She saw the nice clothes I was wearing, and knew I made perfect grades and that all the other kids liked me. Her vindictive “BAMBI” scrawled on the top of my test was evidence that my makeover had been a success.
I was in a good mood returning home from school one Friday afternoon, but when I opened the front door a strange sensation swept over me. “David?” I called, tiptoeing through the house. I passed through the kitchen and noticed glass broken out of a window pane in the back door. I bolted to my room and grabbed my piggy bank from its perch above my bed, tore off the rubber stopper on its bottom, and discovered what I already knew in my gut: It was empty. I had just cashed a Showbiz Pizza paycheck and every penny of it was gone.

I was gonna buy Ozzy tickets with that money!

“Damn it!” I screamed. I called the police to report the break-in. Mom and David came home to see a police car in the driveway and officers wandering through the house asking questions.

“What’s goin’ on?”

“Somebody broke into the house! You better go check your stuff to see if they took anything.”

The officer filling out the report asked, “All right, what’s missing?”

David emerged from his room and said, “They took some of my cassette tapes!”

Cassettes? But not the TV or the microwave?

In that instant, I knew who did it. The house was neat and tidy, and, other than my cash, nothing of value was taken. My piggy bank wasn’t even broken. It had been carefully replaced in its original position behind a few dusty dolls. No robber would have cared about some silly ceramic pig, but David knew I had made that bank by hand at a pottery store Mom had taken me to near Webb’s. I had used special paints, then had it glazed and fired in a kiln. It had taken me weeks to make that pig and was
one of the few things I salvaged from the shed before Dad set fire to the stuff we didn’t haul to Fort Worth. It was special, and David knew it. I glowered at him, hoping he would realize that I knew he did it and he should feel guilty.

But I didn’t want David arrested. Besides, I couldn’t prove anything. Like our dogs Duke, Duchess, and Cookie, who remained forever at Boars Head, David was too wild to make the transition from country to city. In Fort Worth, he found trouble, or trouble found him. Either way, he didn’t have a job, didn’t have money, and apparently had helped himself to mine.

David only attended Richland High a few weeks before he decided it wasn’t for him. He was eighteen years old, practically living with his new, older girlfriend and didn’t have to abide by any rules. The addition of the pool table turned our house on Grove Street into his regular hangout spot.

We bought the table for a hundred dollars at our neighbor’s garage sale. Our neighbor had been diagnosed with cancer and was selling off nonessentials to raise money for her medical bills. We carried the table across the driveway and put it in the garage. Dad was already an expert billiards player, entering tournaments and sniffing out bars where he could run a hustle. With our own table, he could spend hours honing his skills. David and his slew of new friends, who all had long hair and wore concert tees and ripped jeans, loved the new pastime. They played game after game of pool, getting high and chain-smoking while Metallica’s
Kill ’Em All
blared in the background.

One Sunday afternoon, I begged Dad for a chance to play. “David’s always hogging it,” I complained. “I want to be able to play against his friends.”

Dad agreed and spent the next few hours teaching me the
tricks of his trade. The secret, he told me, was simple: Apply the laws of physics and geometry. I was a whiz at math and took advanced level classes all through junior high. In ninth grade at Montgomery High, I was in the same geometry class as David, who was in eleventh. I even helped him cheat by signing answers in ASL, before we got busted and were made to sit apart.

Dad started with the basics of trajectory and impact, and how the angle at which the cue ball hits the rail is equal to the angle at which it will leave. With my solid conceptual mathematical skills and my father’s dedicated coaching, I quickly moved to combination shots using more than one ball to sink another and applying English, a billiards technique that puts a spin on a ball. Dad even shared his strategy when it came to hustling at a new pool hall. “Don’t let them know you can play. Bet just a little to start with and lose a few games. They’ll think they can beat you. That’s when you raise your bet and clean them out.”

Using his tips and tricks, I spent hours on my own practicing so that when David’s friends came over I could play. I pretended not to pay attention to the game and flirted and laughed like a ditzy blonde, flipping my hair and giggling at everything. I missed easy shots and lost my first game. As his buddies got stoned and drank Busch beers, I raised the stakes from a measly two-dollar wager to five dollars a game, and ran the table. Dad had taught me well.

I was also working as often as possible at Showbiz, taking on extra shifts before school to prep the salad bar. I was an enthusiastic and industrious employee, much to everyone else’s annoyance since I made them look like slackers. All my co-workers
made me feel like one of the guys, just like on Boars Head. One day as I chopped mushrooms, Kerry, another employee, entered the kitchen practically glowing.

“What’s up with you?” I asked. “You look like you’re in love.”

“I got a new car!”

The boys in the kitchen nearly knocked one another down racing out the back door to scope out Kerry’s new wheels.

“Oh man that’s rad, dude!”

“It’s an IROC-Z,” he offered even though the name was spelled out in a decal at the bottom of each door.

It was shiny black and the coolest car owned by anyone I had ever known, including Cash Price. Even the font of the lettering was sleek. The other guys fawned over it, pushing buttons, opening and shutting every contraption before the manager leaned out the door and yelled at us to get back to work. The IROC-Z was the most important topic of conversation at Showbiz until the day Dwayne smacked a kid in the head with the plastic tail of the Chuck E. Cheese costume and got fired.

That week, Kerry took turns giving everyone rides. On my turn, he drove me the two blocks to our home on Grove Street. Mom asked, “Who was that?” when she saw him pulling away.

“Kerry. His parents gave him that car for graduation. Nice, huh?”

Mom, not wanting to be outdone by a high school kid said, “Well, we’re getting a new car, too.”

Even though Dad had found work as a cabinetmaker, his salary and Mom’s paycheck were not enough to keep the Toyota from draining our bank account.

“We just can’t afford it anymore so we’re trading it in for a new Thunderbird.”

I didn’t know what a Thunderbird was; I just know Mom mimicked the sound of thunder as she rumbled her voice for the word “Thunderbird” like it was ten times cooler than any old IROC-Z. I pictured a hot rod with a shiny new coat of paint and chrome grille.

Now that I knew that teenage boys were impressed by cars, I went to work ready to share my good news. “We’re getting a new car, too.”

“Oh yeah? What kind?”

“A Thunderbird.” I vibrated the word the way Mom did.

Kerry seemed interested so I kept on bragging. “Yeah, my mom said it’s silver with a maroon interior. They’re picking it up from the lot on Friday.”

“Drive it over when you get it so we can check it out.”

When I came home and found a strange gray car sitting in the driveway, I was confused. This wasn’t the car mom described.

“Whose car is in the driveway?” I asked.

“That’s the Thunderbird,” Mom said. “Pretty nice, isn’t it?”

Mom had made the Thunderbird sound so enviable. As it turned out, it was the unsexiest vehicle around. It was a boxy, ugly hunk of metal, something a grandparent might drive. To top it off, ours was used and the silver paint was more of a dull gray, almost like a primer coat.

“It doesn’t look new.”

“It’s a few years old.” Mom smiled. “But it’s new to us.”

Mom’s willful optimism annoyed me, because it placed me in an awkward predicament. Every day at Showbiz, Kerry asked me when I was bringing by the Thunderbird to show him. I would have rather run a marathon in the Chuck E. Cheese suit than have anyone at Showbiz see that gray heap of metal. It screamed
hardship, which was not befitting the new “Kambri Crews” image. I came up with a different excuse each time. By the end of the week, it wasn’t an issue. Dad had been in an accident.

“Where’s that new car you were talking about?”

“My dad wrecked it!”

“Already?”

“Yeah, my mom said he hit a deer.”

“A deer? Where’s he gonna hit a deer around here?”

I shrugged. My father’s explanation to Mom seemed plausible to me. Dad had wrecked nearly every car we owned except for the Toyota. Once he totaled a Caprice Classic driving it home from the sales lot. I thought he was just cursed to be accident prone.

The Thunderbird collision had left the driver’s side looking like a peeled-open sardine can. Mom and Dad weren’t bothering to get it fixed. The headlight still worked, so I guessed it wasn’t worth the money to worry about the aesthetics.

One evening, as my father drove me to run an errand, we were waiting at a red light when a police car pulled up behind us. Dad kept his eye on him in the rearview mirror. When the light turned green, I waved to get his attention. “Green light.”

Dad signed the ASL word “officer,” then mimicked using a CB. “The officer is on his radio.” He shook his head angrily and continued: “He’s watching me.”

We weren’t speeding and hadn’t done anything else illegal, so I shrugged.

“I hate cops,” Dad signed, baring his teeth.

I knew he did. He made sure to remind me of that anytime a police officer was anywhere near. “Once I got pulled over for speeding. I pointed to my ears and shook my head no to show the officer I was deaf. I acted out writing on paper and pointed to
the glove box. When I reached for it,
whack!
He hit me on my hand with his baton and then shook his finger at me. Again, I pointed to my ear and shook my head and signed writing on paper. I reached to open and
whack!
He hit me again. D-I-S-C-R-I-M-I-N-A-T-E,” Dad spelled.

As we drove through the intersection, the lights on the police car started flashing and the siren began to wail.

“Told you,” Dad signed, and shook his head, lips pursed and nostrils flaring.

“You interpret what I tell you.” Dad had a cautious look on his face and repeated, “Don’t ask questions, you just say what I tell you, okay?”

“Okay,” I signed, annoyed that he didn’t trust my interpreting.

When the cop approached he took a slow walk around the Thunderbird, inspecting every inch of it.

“What’s he doing?” I asked.

Dad shrugged as he fished out his driver’s license from his wallet. The officer approached my father’s window, and Dad handed him his license. He then pointed to his ear, shook his head no, and pointed at me.

“He’s deaf so I have to interpret.”

The officer looked over Dad’s license and said, “All right, tell him I pulled you over because you’re missing a front license plate.”

That didn’t make sense to me. The cop had pulled up behind us. How had he seen the front of the car? But he was an officer of the law, so I didn’t want to question him or make things worse for my father.