Burn Down the Ground (33 page)

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.

Dad embraced the swinging bachelor lifestyle, but from reading his letters it seemed he was unlucky in love. Years of late nights, excessive drinking and drug use, and a two-pack-a-day smoking habit were stealing his good looks quickly. His itinerant ways and lack of steady work made it that much harder for him to snag a woman and, if he did, it never lasted for long. He blew through a few failed romances in quick succession, one with a woman he said looked like Xena, the Warrior Princess. “She has an inseam of thirty-six inches as long as me W-O-W!” But Xena didn’t last after Dad “found out she had too many men in seven days.” Dad didn’t say how many was too many. No rest for the wicked, however, because in the same letter he wrote about his latest love, a woman he described as a never-married, big-boned forty-five-year-old with dirty blond hair and bright blue eyes. After they broke up, Dad chalked it up to her jealousy and wanting him to pay her bills.

Then he met Helen.

Dad gushed about Helen, calling her kind and sweet. They had been dating for a few months and decided to move in together into a cheap one-bedroom apartment. Now that he was settling down, he ached to be a family again. Every letter asked
when I would visit them in Texas or what my holiday plans were, and had him wishing I lived closer so we could visit more, “as much as once monthly.”

It had been more than twelve years since Mom and Dad’s divorce, and I was thankful to be hundreds of miles away. I had been so studious and dependable, growing up too fast, handling adult tasks for my deaf family, being married so young. Now I just wanted to keep it light, to have
fun
, finally.

While I still worked at the bank during the day, I ensconced myself in a frivolous life at night. I took side jobs in event marketing. Sometimes I was a model, a title that made me uncomfortable. Others complimented me on my beauty, but I still saw myself as an ugly, freckled tomboy. I wanted to be respected for my intelligence, perhaps overly sensitive that I had been denied my dream of a college degree.

I preferred being in charge of an event, hiring the models, and organizing the affair. We promoted everything from Pepsi and Lipton Iced Tea to Winston and Camel cigarettes to liquor like Stolichnaya vodka and Jose Cuervo tequila. Our on-site projects took us to fabulous locations. One weekend, I’d be in the Cleveland Indians dugout during a home game, another I’d be in a race car at a NASCAR tour stop, yet another I’d be in a private jet returning home from the Kentucky Derby. Knowing how much Dad and Helen liked to drink and smoke, I sent them care packages of free swag like T-shirts, hats, pens, and photos from the events.

In just a few years, I was recruited for better-paying banking jobs that moved me from Akron to Columbus, and then Cincinnati.
I was making enough money to rent a penthouse apartment with a rooftop pool overlooking the Ohio River and Paul Brown Stadium, home of the Cincinnati Bengals, and drive a VW Cabrio convertible. To some, it may seem extravagant, but I was careful to live within my means. I carried little to no debt and paid cash for everything I could. I even had a savings account and a 401(k).

Then Dad dropped a bombshell. Helen was pregnant, due on Christmas Day. “Are you in shock?” he asked in his letter. “We have a baby because I can’t wait for you and David to make me a grandpa.”

My reactive emotion was jealousy. When Mom remarried so soon after her divorce to Dad, I felt ditched. She had rebuilt a new life with a different family. Dad having a baby with Helen meant he would do the same. Even though I wanted my distance, I wondered where my brother and I would belong.

Soon jealousy was replaced with fear for the future of my unborn sibling. Dad had no business bringing a kid into the world. I had a fleeting fantasy that social workers would rescue the infant and give me custody. Not long after Dad broke the news, I received a letter from Helen.

Dear Kambri,

Things have been a little crazy around here and I have been real bad about getting in touch with people, but more on that later.…

On the 29th I started bleeding & on the 30th I lost our baby. Oh, by the way, if he doesn’t kill me (just kidding), we want to get married. We hope you will be able to be there.

We love you.

I felt sad for Helen and worried about her health. I knew her loss was devastating, but I still couldn’t help but be relieved. Now things could get back to usual, with occasional inebriated phone calls or letters filled with their latest hardship.

In the summer of 2000, I was hired as a marketer for Jose Cuervo for a promotional tour that was stopping in Cincinnati. There I met a man from New York who was also on the tour. He sensed I was ready for a change and raved to me about opportunities in New York City, where he lived. I had been to Manhattan a few times with friends of mine from the theater. We’d rent a van, share a hotel room in the theater district, and attend as many as five plays in four days, making the most of our visit. The Broadway excursions inspired me, but New York was extremely expensive.