Burn Down the Ground (37 page)

“Thank you,” I’d say. “He was a lot of fun. I’m sure he’s listening to Elvis in Heaven right now, where they say the Deaf shall hear again.”

The day I received word of Dad’s twenty-year sentence, I returned to my apartment after work, ran to the bathroom, stripped off my clothes, and collapsed into a heap in the bathtub. I lay there as scorching hot water pelted me, hoping it could burn each layer of shame and grief from my skin. I sobbed and gasped for air, anguished at the thought of my father behind bars alone and loathed, his life wasted and reviled.

I grieved, I presume, as one might for a father who had unexpectedly died without saying goodbye. A father who had been unnaturally stripped away in a swift, deadly blow, leaving his family to wonder what had been the last words said. When was the last “I love you” and had they meant it?

This was my father’s due, but I was devastated. Despite everything, I loved him. Then I received a letter. It was from Dad and was filled with rage. Dad described fighting with other inmates. He was bitter with the system, asserting his innocence and complaining about everything. He didn’t think he should be in jail. I thought back to my lunch with Greg and his take on things as he munched on tuna. “Hey, at least now you’ll know where to find him.”

So, I wrote back. Other than an infrequent note from David, I was the only one who did. I thought that maybe by writing to him, he wouldn’t be so angry or fighting so much. But his letters weren’t cutting to the heart of the matter: Why couldn’t he take responsibility for his violence? How did one child of ten become the blackest of sheep? I asked myself over and over. Just how could someone with so much charm and talent fall so far?

Over the course of several phone calls with Mom, I grilled her for the uncensored answers. I knew that with Dad in jail she no longer had to worry about breaking social mores by bashing her ex-husband to their daughter. There was no more reputation to protect; nothing more to fear. It was time for the truth.

“Do you remember the time Dad threw your necklace into the bonfire and we had to sift through the dirt like we were panning for gold?”

“Yes.” Mom seemed leery of where this conversation was headed.

“What were y’all fighting about? What made him throw it?”

“Oh, I don’t remember, Kambri. It was usually the same thing over and over. Your daddy would drink too much and start accusing me of cheating on him. He was so suspicious.”

From Dad’s letters, I knew what she meant without her needing to elaborate. His insecurity about being born deaf exacerbated his paranoia. He always feared that people were talking about him or keeping secrets.

“If we were at an event,” Mom continued, “he might come by and squeeze my arm so tight to let me know, ‘I’m watching. Be careful what you do.’ I always had bruises that were hidden. There was another time when my mother and father, the Sloans, Aunt Carly and Uncle Doug, and your cousins were all visiting from Oklahoma. We used the leftover logs from the cabin to make big bonfires. We would sit around and talk and have such a good time. This year everything went berserk.

“We had a few drinks, then all of a sudden your daddy just went crazy. He accused me of cheating on him and grabbed me by my neck and broke my necklace. All hell broke loose.

“My daddy and your uncle Doug tried to stop him but he was
too strong. I fell to the ground to look for my chain. I didn’t know this until afterward but your uncle saw your daddy was aiming to stomp my head with his cowboy boot. Just as he swung his leg, Doug intervened and stopped your father’s boot with his own foot. Doug actually saved my life!”

My grandparents were there? My aunt and uncle, too? They witnessed something as frightening as the heel of a cowboy boot coming within an inch of Mom’s skull, and yet I never knew a thing about it
.

“My God, Mom! Why didn’t anyone do anything?”

“Everyone was upset. Carly and Doug left for home the next day. Carly said she never wanted to be around if your father was there. He was always mean to her and she was tired of it! The next day he told everyone how sorry he was and he really meant it. You could see that he was really ashamed of himself. My parents stayed to make sure things had cooled down. I should have left and gone home with my parents, but I didn’t. Why didn’t I? I don’t know.”

So he just got away with it
.

I thought about my grandfather and how he had convinced my mother she didn’t need to go to college. Getting married, raising children, and helping her family were her purpose in life. I wonder if he carried guilt or if he figured working through these family issues was just a fact of life.

“That time you had a black eye, you told me you slipped and fell on the ice: I’m guessing that was a lie.”

“Yep,” Mom said matter-of-factly. “Your daddy did that to me, too.”

I had known Mom’s excuse sounded odd, but I was just a ten-year-old girl. When she said she slipped on the ice, I had wanted to believe her.

“I went to work and people asked me what had happened,” Mom recalled. “I told them I fell and hit my face on the steps. Some came right out and asked, ‘Are you sure it wasn’t your husband?’ ”

She had told them the same lie as me, but they weren’t naïve like I was. What’s more, they had witnessed Dad’s predatory behavior before.

“There was a time a few of us were working late. Your daddy came strolling in, acting like he was Mr. Big Shot. When I think back, he was alerting the guys there that I was his and to stay away from me. Later a few people would ask me, ‘Are you okay? Everything good at home?’ I never let anyone know what was happening in my marriage, but I guess they could tell.”

After years of keeping up appearances, Mom was skilled in self-delusion.

“When your father and I first got divorced, he started dating a cute young blond deaf girl that I always saw him teasing and flirting with at the Deaf club in Dallas. One night at the Deaf club she came up to me with a very distressed look on her face. She asked me if your daddy had ever hurt me. I told her, ‘No. Never.’ She was really upset and asked again, ‘Really? He never threatened you or anything?’ She said your daddy had been hurting her. That he would grab her by her hair and shove her around. He was really scaring her, but I told her, ‘No, he never did anything like that to me before.’ I didn’t want the Deaf to know. I was too proud, I guess.

“But I also lied out of fear because I just knew that your father would come after me and threaten me again. I hoped the girl knew I wasn’t being honest. After that he only dated hearing women because the Deaf knew what kind of a man he was and wanted no part of him.”

After hearing about Mom’s volatile marriage, I began searching through public records for Dad’s name. The list of discoveries of his past offenses grew so long that I stopped being surprised. My father was a felon, a petty criminal, and a predatory domestic abuser.

He was also a serial adulterer. Mom said the first time Dad cheated on her, David was only six months old. Forty years later, she still got so choked up thinking about it that she was barely able to tell me the story. They were newlyweds with a baby. It was the late 1960s, and failed marriages were stigmatized, symbols of shame and failure. She didn’t want to be a divorced, single mom, so she took him back.

“I knew your daddy was still messing around, so when I found a woman’s coat in the back of our car I took it inside. I went through the pockets and—hey, do you remember my jade ring?”

“Sure I do,” I said. I had always loved Mom’s jewelry. While she and Dad were out dancing, I rooted through her closet and played dress-up with her clothes, high heels, and rings. Mom was allergic to anything but real gold, so I knew everything I was touching was genuine, not to be trifled with. The jade ring was always one of my favorites. It was bold. Its oversized green face demanded attention. “Look at me!”

“Well, I rifled through the coat and that jade ring was in one of the pockets, so I snatched it.”

That beautiful jade ring I had admired all those years was stolen from one of Dad’s tramps?

“Your daddy came home and asked if I knew what happened to the coat that had been in the car. I smiled and said it was hanging in the closet. He disappeared for a second, then came back looking real anxious and asked, ‘Where is the ring?’ I told him I
took it and he said, ‘No, it’s not yours. I need to give it back.’ I told him, ‘No! It’s
my
ring now!’ ”

She had challenged Dad’s audacity at wondering about his lover’s coat and she had won. The jade ring was her trophy.

“I should have made him buy me something for every woman he had an affair with. Wow, the jewelry I could have had!”

Mom and I cried and laughed and cried again as we recounted old stories about life with Dad on Boars Head, focusing on the good times. We recalled fond memories of movie nights at the Sloans’, trips to Galveston, developing our land on Boars Head from scratch, building that bridge, how he could tell a story so funny your sides ached from laughing.

I was feeling better about the situation, that my dad wasn’t pure evil. Even Mom, who had every right to string him up by his balls, could still see some good in him. I joked, “At least Dad only
tried
to kill you and Helen and didn’t
actually
kill somebody.”

“Well,” Mom said. “That we
know
of …”

My heart stopped. “Ummm, what do you mean ‘that we know of’?”

“Well …” Mom sighed. “There was the time he wrecked the Thunderbird. He had disappeared for a week and came home with the Thunderbird stinking to high heaven.”

“I hit a deer,” he had explained. I remembered the incident. I had used the accident in my excuse to keep Ken, my co-worker at Showbiz, from seeing our dreadfully ugly car. Mom hadn’t bought it. We were in the city by then and the stench of death on the car wasn’t like anything she had gotten a whiff of before. “That smell. I’ll never forget it.

“Just a few weeks later, he went out drinking at the Deaf club and I stayed home. I was asleep in bed when I felt the vibration of the garage door opening and shutting, but your father didn’t come to bed, so I went to check on him. I opened the garage door and your dad was just covered in blood, scrubbing the car clean. I said, ‘Oh my God! Are you okay? What happened?’

“He said he broadsided the whole left side of the Thunderbird on a concrete divider on Airport Freeway while trying to avoid an accident on his way home from the Deaf club. A woman in another car was hurt and he stopped to help her. That’s how he explained why he had blood all over him and the car was wrecked.”

“If his accident wasn’t his fault, why didn’t we ever get the Thunderbird fixed? Didn’t we have insurance? What happened to the woman? Was she okay after the ambulance got there?”

“I have no idea. It’s one of the many stories he told. We bought the Thunderbird from a used car dealer, the type where you might not have good credit so they charge you an arm and a leg. We let it get repossessed and never heard from the dealership again.

“Imagine what they must have thought when they saw the car!” At this, Mom laughed. “But really, who knows how many other wrecks he caused? What if he was killed? What if he killed someone?”

“I wonder if that’s why that cop pulled us over when Dad drove me to work at Malibu?” I recounted the scenario where my father and I had been pulled over by a policeman. The officer supposedly stopped us for missing a front license plate, but that hadn’t seemed genuine. “Maybe our Thunderbird had been reported as being involved in a hit-and-run.”

“Yeah, maybe …” Mom’s voice trailed off. We sat quietly, each mulling over the possibility. After a minute, Mom broke the silence. “Do you remember Donna?”

Oh no, there’s more?

“Yeah, of course, I do. I worked at her fireworks stand and she had that foxy son, Cash.”

“Well, she was your daddy’s mistress.”

I had no idea my father was such a cad. Over the years, different friends in the Deaf community had told her about Dad’s catting around. Stealing the jade ring from one of his trollops had been her one defiant act. She finally got fed up and packed our things in storage. That was days before we made the trip to Oklahoma for the National Deaf Bowling Tournament, which I thought was an ordinary trip. Our move to the woods was Dad’s opportunity to refocus his wandering eye on Mom, and it had worked, for a while at least. Then he fell back into his old ways and met Donna at Johnny B. Dalton’s, one of the two bars she managed.

“So all those times he was gone for days …”

“He was with Donna.” By then, Mom and Dad were having serious money troubles and she was planning on leaving Dad. “Then one day Donna calls me to ask me if I know Cigo Crews.” (Dad had begun using the nickname Cigo in the mid-1980s, saying he no longer wanted to have his father’s name. He preferred the unusual moniker, which Mom said stood for “Can I Go Out.”) “I told her, ‘Yes I do. I’m his wife.’ She apologized and said she did not know he was married and we talked for a while about how your daddy seemed to be a nice man. He had never said anything about a wife and family.”

My hours of pacing the driveway wondering about Dad were unnecessary. Mom had known where he was. She could have allayed my fears.

Mom continued. “I worried the entire time he was out,” she said. “He was always drinking and driving. I would stay awake worrying until he came home, then get up early and go to work the next day. I was tired. I thought if Dad had to confront
you
, his baby girl, seeing how upset you were, he would know firsthand what his gallivanting was doing to the family.”

I was dumbfounded that not only had my mother agreed to let my father carry on this way, but that she ended up working for Donna at her fireworks stand.

“Why didn’t you care that he had a mistress?”

“I told her that he and I were not getting along anyway and that she could have him if she wanted him. I was hoping that if he got involved with another woman, he wouldn’t mind if I left. I would finally have a way out.

“Well, when your daddy wanted to be with Donna, they used to hang out at her other bar Cooter’s. There was this pretty, young blond bartender that your dad was infatuated with. He used to flirt and tease her. You know how he is. Well one day her body was found dumped under a bridge on Highway 2854 over the San Jacinto River. She had been raped and strangled with her own nylon stocking. I thought maybe your daddy did it, but I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know the answer.”