As You Were Read online

  It’s summer, so it’s hot out, so you are in a pair of tighty-whities because they are just as good as swim trunks, so the tar gets everywhere. You try to run to the lake and wash it off, but, like a good dog, Scrappy won’t let you go more than knee-deep out into the lake. The downside of Scrappy’s heroism is that it allows Grandma Audrey to get a hold of you. She’s always been what could best be called a take-action kind of gal, so she won’t wait for the tar to dry and peel it carefully away from the skin. Instead, she sits you in a plastic tub in the sink and puts a kettle on the stove.

  The tar comes off easily enough for her with some scalding hot water and a Brillo pad. Debbie scrambles into the kitchen when she hears you scream. No one ever knew what Grandma was doing until she was already doing it, and there is no way to stop her, even when Debbie’s screaming joins in a duet with yours.

  Screaming does nothing but make Debbie sick and puke on herself a little. Once she’s able to catch her breath, she runs off into the woods beside the cabin and hides in the tree fort she and some of the big cousins built. There she stays until your crying can no longer be heard coming from the cabin’s kitchen window.

  There are no witnesses who can say how long it took for the tar to come off, or if Grandma Audrey took breaks, or if your tears caused her any tears. No one stuck around to witness the scene, save the green ceramic frog that sat speechless on the side of the sink with mouth agape.

  That must have been the summer of 1981.

  DEBBIE DO

  A ROOSTER CROWS ITS COCK-A-DOODLE-DO and wakes the wolves and the dogs, setting off a chorus of howls and yelps and barking, which makes Dad belt out, “Shut the fuck up!” at the top of his lungs because he believes doing so will silence the animals and not startle those of the children who managed to sleep through the sounds of the waking zoo that is your childhood home.

  Mom’s voice clamors down the hallway of the trailer, yelling back a simple, “Fuck you, Richard!” followed by her cackling like a witch, as if he’s too hungover to rise from the recliner and retaliate.

  The only answer to Mom’s outburst is the sound of some falling birdseed and the clank of Charlie’s metal ankle bracelet against the bars of his aviary when he hops from his perch to the side of his cage, making the most racket he can.

  His flight feathers have grown back again.

  Your big sister, Debbie, is the oldest of you kids but scared to death of him. She’s not going to let him out; she’s too busy taking care of you and watching Sam.

  She gave you a bottle at noon—like she was told to do—but Dad’s ferret took it out of the crib, again, and hid beneath the recliner, again. Historically, he attacks anyone who gets too close or tries to retrieve it, so Debbie sits cross-legged alongside Sam on the couch, where they share a box of King Vitamin cereal and watch an episode of Captain Kangaroo.

  Flower, Debbie’s skunk, curls up next to her, along with one of the cats, the one that can’t meow anymore since Dad sent it flying into the screen door when it tripped him one time too many. With her one hand, she takes turns petting the two. With her other hand, she reaches toward the bottom of the box of King Vitamin to find Sam’s left nothing but dust.

  You kids are all right by yourselves as long as Charlie keeps up his impressions of Mom and Dad yelling at one another. A passerby would never know there are no adults home.

  As if on cue, Charlie screams, “Dammit, David!” sounding every bit like Mom. It’s a nudge for Debbie to check on you. Charlie likes to snitch when you make it out of the crib. He’s not the only help she has—Brutus makes a nest of the baby-blue, blue-ribbon-winning afghan Aunt Bobbie crocheted, and lies on the floor between you kids and the front door. But this is back when you lived on a dead-end road on the outer edge of the rez—not a bad neighborhood where some questionable character can come knocking at any given moment.

  Debbie is ten-ish, and already well-versed in temporary living conditions as well as taking care of herself. She wasn’t even a year old when her mom left Dad. The next day, he brought Debbie to Aunt Bobbie, and Grandma Audrey took over following the news about her mother dying in a head-on collision somewhere in Kansas. Somewhere is still all anyone knows. Grandma Audrey is the only mother Debbie can call to mind.

  Grandma Audrey doted on Debbie when she was little, even when they would argue, and she’d say, “Debbie, don’t.” Debbie would counter her with a concise “Debbie, do!” and both would laugh.

  Your mom is only twelve years older than Debbie—still technically a teenager—so Debbie doesn’t like listening to her. But she won’t have to for long. She’ll leave for Grandma’s house again right after Mom takes you and Sam and goes into hiding.

  She will grow weary of Dad’s disappearing acts and his mistaking her for a punching bag when he magically reappears. Luckily, like most bullies, all she’ll have to do is hit him once for him to stop. She’ll take hold of his leather Brunswick bag and slap him in the ear. For extra credit, she’ll neglect to remove the bowling ball beforehand. This is what she means when she says, “Hell hath no wrath like when your mother really gets pissed off.”

  Debbie won’t go back to Grandma’s house after that, but will find herself living under the roof of Grandma’s second husband, Grandpa Bub. Leroy is his legal name.

  You will go there to live, too, a little less than a year later.

  Debbie’s superpower is saving you from Grandma’s split pea soup by saying she wants mac and cheese with hot dogs for dinner instead. If you said something of the sort, Grandma would fire back with, “What do you think this is, a goddamned restaurant?” and punctuate it with a backhand swing if you were within her wingspan. But Debbie can get away with it. Partially because she is old enough to make it for herself and partially because she is a girl and Grandma raised boys and girls with entirely opposite approaches.

  Grandpa and Grandma finish off the split pea soup without complaint, but they did both survive the Depression, so it almost serves as comfort food. Grandpa Bub also puts his bowl down by his feet, where the dogs congregate, once Grandma excuses herself from the table.

  In exchange, you save Debbie from Grandma finding her extra pack of cigarettes while she is at school. You can hide things a whole lot better than Debbie. That’s the end result of being too strict with a kid: they become sneaky. They learn how to construct a plausible lie; they learn to think ten steps ahead, to think of every conceivable scenario both logical and illogical before they ever act or open their mouths to answer a question. They never stop playing the what-if game.

  Grandpa Bub’s house is old. Come springtime, it rains a lot. The ground is already soft from all the snowmelt, so the house shifts some. On one rainy afternoon, Grandma hears a stack of pots and pans fall inside the cupboard between the stove and the fridge. After she investigates the scene of this most heinous crime, she calls you downstairs and waits for you in the kitchen with her arms folded, tapping her toes on the floor—almost pointing them at what’s got her pissed.

  “Why’d you stack them like that?” When you look to see what she is talking about, you don’t answer. You try to fix it, make it right. “I don’t want you to fix it,” she says, swatting you in the head, so you come out of the cabinet and look up at her from the floor. “I asked you why you stacked them that way. If I’ve shown you once, I’ve shown you a million times how to stack them, now haven’t I?”

  This is a crime you didn’t commit, and when you tell her so, she stoops down and grabs you by the collar and warns you, “Don’t lie.”

  It’s not a lie, you tell her. You promise.

  “Those pots and pans?” she asks. “You didn’t stack those pots and pans?” she says again and reaches a hand into the cabinet.

  “No, Grandma, no.”

  “Don’t you tell me no.”

  She beats you for lying to her, and when she gets so winded she needs a break, you confess to the crime, defeated. You lie about lying. You want her to stop and you want her to be happy to have you as
a helper. You want her to trust you, too.

  But by telling her you did it, that you didn’t do as she said when she showed you how to stack the pots and pans a million times, and that you lied about ignoring her instructions—she becomes reinvigorated. All you can do is wrap your hands around your head and bury your face and chin into your chest and wait for it to be over.

  If memory serves, this all took place around 3:30 in the afternoon, because that’s when Debbie comes in from school and is greeted by the sight of Grandma cracking you with a saucepan over and again, and she says, “No, Grandma, no!”

  She wants to know what you did this time. Grandma says you stacked the pots and pans wrong, and they tipped over, and now the whole cupboard is a mess. Debbie says, “He didn’t put away the dishes last. I did.”

  Grandma lets go of your shirt collar and tells Debbie, “You shouldn’t stack them like that, you know better. You know how they go.”

  Deflated, Grandma hands you the saucepan she’s been swinging and tells you to put it away—the right way. Debbie, down on the floor on her hands and knees, helps you put them away, whispering “Sorry, sorry” more times than you can count.

  Sometimes it’s torturous to have a sister a decade older than you. Debbie finds it funny to straddle you and pound her pointer finger into your sternum, forcing you to laugh until it’s impossible to breathe, until it’s impossible to hold it in any longer. She hollers out, “David peed on me,” and Dad yells back, “Bet you won’t do that again.”

  He’s right. She won’t. She’ll pick on you one day and beat up someone else who does the same the next. The Miller kid, across the street, sticks you up on top of a garage roof for flicking him off, and Debbie gives him a bloody nose for being mean to her little brother. Your broomball coach busts your teeth during practice, and Debbie throws her a blanket party. Debbie sees Grandma has you cornered in the bathroom, demanding to know the name of the centerfold model in the foldout you hid behind the radiator, and Debbie tells her, “It’s from a girlie magazine, he wouldn’t know. How would he know her name?”

  Still, Grandma’s question needs an answer, so you open it up to read the woman’s name aloud until it becomes obvious no one is listening, they’re too busy arguing amongst themselves. Grandma is too upset by it all and tells Debbie, “You deal with him.”

  Debbie chases you down the hallway, calling you a pervert, laughing, bouncing around in a boxer’s stance. When she swings, so do you, and she screams, “David broke my hand!”

  Grandma yells back, “Good God, what now?”

  Debbie tells her, “I tried to hit him.”

  That hand turned so green, and swelled so fast, you swore Debbie was secretly She-Hulk.

  A few short weeks after, she showed up at Dad’s front door. When he opened it, she told him, “I ran away from home.”

  “You are home,” he said, and unlatched the storm door.

  Debbie might not have been at Grandma’s house to protect you anymore, but it should never have been her job anyway.

  FORCED ENTRY

  REMEMBER YOUR FIRST GIRLFRIEND?

  Not the forbidden love you hide away from the world because she is in the first grade and you are in kindergarten but still only weeks apart in age. Your bedroom looks across the alley into hers, and seeing her silhouette move from one window to the other makes being grounded in your room seem less lonely.

  Not one of the girls you walk with on the way home from school because there aren’t any boys in your grade who live on your block.

  Not the girl who walks three blocks and waits outside every evening while you eat dinner, and Debbie sings, “Your girlfriend’s here.” You blush and grit your teeth and growl, “She’s not my girlfriend.” But you’d like her to be. There’s something about her impossibly blue eyes and her black hair she cannot cut and the denim dresses that stop at the ankle and the collared shirts she cannot change out of no matter how hot the summer sun gets.

  Not the first girl you see naked. She keeps telling you not to look while she changes into her swimsuit beneath the deck in the backyard of her parents’ house. It’s not like you know what to look for, and this happens long before you notice she even is a girl—back before you understand the difference between boys and girls.

  Not even the first girl to hold your hand and kiss you on the lips and call you her boyfriend, even if it is only when she comes to see her mom every other weekend the summer before seventh grade.

  No, this girl is the first girl to go out with you on a date. A real date. The two of you take the city bus downtown and transfer up to the mall. She sneaks you into your first R-rated film and nudges you toward the center seat of the back row. You can’t remember what movie it was. She shoves her tongue down your throat and guides your hand up her shirt and under her bra and whispers into your ear how she wants you to tease, twist, tug, and pinch her nipples. She wants anything but gentle. When you finally get it right, she unzips you and snakes her hand through the flaps in the front of your boxers and gives you your first handjob.

  She yanks on it.

  She’s touching your penis, but handling it the way you handle the joystick when you get down to your last guy on Yars’ Revenge. It doesn’t feel good until it does, and then you explode all over her hand and inside your boxers, and that doesn’t happen again until boot camp, when you wake with your sweatpants stuck to your thighs, and the fire watch says you were jacking off and snoring at the same time. They don’t stop laughing until you ask why they would stand there watching you jerk off and then loiter while you lie satisfied in the afterglow.

  But this girl, man—this is the girl who trounces other girls for leaving notes in your locker and pulls a knife on you when you tell her you’re moving to your mom’s house on the other side of town for high school. She says, “No, you’re not,” and you plant your size ten into her gut and grab the knife. No one says anything to any teachers, so neither of you gets detention. Besides, the two of you are holding hands on the way to your next class, anyhow.

  At thirteen, she has the curves and the endowments you know a woman is supposed to have, courtesy of the French nudes featured in Grandma’s Time-Life books. But the insides of her forearms look like the etched walls of a prison cell, each individual cut counting the days of her hell. See, her dad is a gambler and a drinker. And he hosts poker night. And he can’t hold his liquor. And he gets blackout drunk every single time. His buddies leave him where he falls.

  One evening she wakes with one of them on top of her, inside of her. Then they all take a turn. When she tells him, her father, a cop, he won’t believe her. She’d been bitching about how loud they were and how tomorrow was a school day and how she wanted them all to leave. They were, all of them, cops.

  It was forced entry.

  Nothing happens to them, so it happens to her again and again and again until she loses count. You’re the only one who’ll listen to her. The only one who’ll let her tell her story.

  She says all of this in a drunken stupor. She’s not old enough to buy alcohol. She’s not even old enough to drive. She never gets old enough to buy alcohol for herself. Her father finds her hanging before that can happen. She told him what they did to her one last time. She wrote it all down this time. She would not be interrupted this time.

  Yeah, that girlfriend. Let’s not forget her.

  YOU THINK THIS IS A JOKE

  THREE GUYS WALK INTO A bar: a cowboy, an Indian, and this Black guy. It’s a dingy, dimly lit dump of a place. Dad doesn’t give much more detail than that, but it matches every bar he’s brought you into, so the setup is believable.

  They all belly up to the bar and order a drink. The cowboy orders a glass of Colorado Kool-Aid. The Indian and the Black guy ask the bartender to line up a few shots for them. While the cowboy sips away at his beer and watches the television above the bar, the Indian hoists the first shot glass into the air and says, “Once we were many, now we are few,” in a flat and somber tone, before slamming a
mouthful of whiskey and swallowing hard.

  While the Indian exhales a long, slow breath, the Black guy nods and snatches up one of the shot glasses and says, “Once we were few, now we are many!”

  The cowboy clears his throat, itches his nose, sniffs, leans forward, looks down the bar and says, “That’s because we haven’t played Cowboys and Negroes yet.”

  Dad knows no other way to teach you about the loss your ancestors endured.

  There’s this big Hollywood production company filming a movie about outer space in the desert. A week into production, an old Indian man walks into the middle of the set while they’re shooting an action scene on the desertscape. The instant the director notices him, he yells, “Cut!”

  All the actors go silent and stare at the old Indian man, who looks at the director, realizing he is the man in charge, and says, “You go, rain come. Make big flood.”

  The director laughs and others join in. Security escorts the old Indian man off camera.

  Half an hour passes, and the sky goes black. The director loses his light, so filming is done for the day. The actors retreat to their trailers. Then the rain comes, and a flash flood washes across the desert, destroying the movie set.

  Everyone goes back to wherever they call home.

  Six months later, the film finds new investors and the director brings his cast and crew back out into the desert. This time they decide to shoot the film in the driest days of summer.

  Once again, a week of filming passes, and the old Indian man walks into the middle of all the action. He stands in front of the camera and says, “You go, ice fall from sky. Break camera. Break everything.”

  Once again, the director yells, “Cut!” from behind the monitor and calls security to escort the old Indian man off the set. But the laughter is enough to make him leave on his own.

  Half an hour later, hail the size of golf balls falls from the sky. They grow bigger and bigger the longer the storm continues—some the size of grapefruits, even. A couple of the actors are injured before they can retreat to their trailers. The lights and the cameras are all destroyed. The set looks like Swiss cheese.