The vindictive little boy in me just wants to shut the whole fucking thing down. Take my unappreciated marbles and go home. Except I can't. As bad as shit gets, as underwhelming as response may be, I made a decision to put my words in this space. Keeping my promises has never been my greatest ability. Truth to tell, I have a pretty poor history of that. So I desperately need at least one instance in my life where I stick to my guns, and this is that.
And so here is the next chapter of my memoir, Making Sh*t Up: An Improvised Life. Promise. Fucking. Kept.
Chapter Thirteen
Spear Hunting on a Budget
In my head, it was totally going to be like this.
When you’re poor, you do things as
a family that other families don’t do. One Sunday my dad was up earlier than
usual, doing something very industrious-sounding on the carport. I walked out
there to see him sawing an old broomstick in half. Next he made a notch in one
end of each of the halves. He then took a long steel nail, and placed it
head-side into the notch, leaving the pointed end of the nail exposed. The
finished product looked just like a short spear, which I thought was very cool.
Holy shit. Was Dad about to take me
hunting WITH SPEARS? Turns out the
answer was yes, but not the kind of hunting I’d envisioned.
Dad piled us all into the
Impala, including my mom and little sister (she couldn’t have been more than
six, making me around ten), so I knew right away this wasn’t going to be any
kind of father/son spear-hunting expedition. We drove out of our neighborhood
at Artesian Lakes (the neighborhood with the lake that wasn’t really a lake),
and onto FM 2854, also called Old Montgomery Road, a long stretch of two-lane
blacktop that connected Conroe to Montgomery, Texas. We’d been driving down
this road for about ten minutes when Dad slowed the car, and pulled off onto
the shoulder. He ordered everybody out, and that’s when he announced what our
family outing was going to be: a treasure hunt for old bottles and cans by the
side of the road.
Dad explained that there was a
place we could take bottles and cans to that would give us money in return for
them. And that people were always throwing their empty soda and beer cans out
of their car windows, so finding them on a much-used stretch of road like this
would be easy. Then he opened the trunk and withdrew one of his newly built
spears. He looked around for a moment, located an old Dr. Pepper can, and
neatly speared it, placing it in a heavy-duty garbage bag he’d tied on to his
belt loop. He gave each of us a garbage bag, then pulled the other spear out of
the trunk – and handed it to Mom. When I asked where my spear was (I didn’t ask about my sister’s; she was just a kid),
Dad informed me that Larenda and I didn’t need spears, as we were much closer
to the ground. When I asked him if he at least brought gloves for us to wear,
he began to look cross. So I shut up and started looking for bottles and cans.
Time moves maddeningly slow
for children, particularly when they are engaged in an activity they’d really
rather not be doing. I tried to make some shit up in my head; I was a treasure hunter. I was the last man
on Earth, looking for anything I could use to survive. I was Iron Eyes Cody,
the Native American from those “Keep America Beautiful” ads, who had finally
stopped crying, got down off his horse, and started cleaning up the country. But
I kept getting pulled out of my imagination by the cars that were flying past
us on this farm-to-market road. They seemed awfully close, and they seemed to
be going awfully fast. I kept looking for Larenda, hoping my baby sister wasn’t
straying too close to the road. Mom and Dad were engrossed in the task, and Dad
seemed to get angrier as the day wore on. And wear it did.
A couple of memories stick out
from that day. I remember spotting a Miller Lite beer can. I scooped it up,
except I grabbed it upside-down, and realized too late that it was still
half-full. Rancid beer came pouring out of the mouth of the can and on to my
jeans, and it smelled like the devil’s own piss. (It might also be why I do not
drink Lite beer to this day.)
Later in the afternoon, when
all four of us were covered in dirt, grime, and the remnants of many bottles
and cans, a car slowed near us, pulled over and stopped. The man behind the
wheel I recognized as one of the deacons at Mount Calvary Baptist Church. I
didn’t know what a deacon was, but I did
know that I didn’t like this man very much, because he always seemed to be
smiling in a way that suggested he was better than you. I was close enough to hear part of their
exchange.
Him: “Hello, John. We missed y’all in service this morning. What’re you and
your family doin’ out by the side of the road on a day like today?”
Dad (chagrined): “Just, uh,
you know…collecting some bottles and cans for recycling.”
Him: “Is that right?
Well…bless your heart.” And he was smiling that smile, which nowadays I
would classify as a shit-eating grin. They exchanged a couple more words and
the man drove off, and I could see Dad seething with a barely controlled rage.
I was old enough to understand that he was mortally embarrassed. I was also old
enough to know that we would be the likely targets of his anger.
Just at that moment, from what
seemed like very far away, we heard a scream. Dad and I both looked back the
way we had come to see my little sister, maybe fifty yards away, jumping around
and dancing like she had ants in her pants. Which, in fact, she did. Larenda,
in her earnest efforts to please, had been dutifully picking up roadside
garbage all day. Like the rest of us, she was filthy, sunburned, and tired. But
she had evidently found a treasure: a shiny new Coke can that was partially
buried in a mound of dirt. She was too young to identify the mound for what it
actually was: a fire ant hill. When she successfully pried the can loose from
the ground, the little fuckers attacked en masse. Mom reached her first, and as
Dad and I arrived Mom was literally stripping my sister down to her underwear
on the side of the road.
Add
to this indignity the fact that we had been walking away from the car all day
in our search for “treasure.” Dad had, once or twice, gone back to the Impala
and driven it along the shoulder to where we were. But at some point he had
stopped bringing the car up to us. While Mom was slapping fire ants off my
little sister’s skin, I looked back over my shoulder – and realized I couldn’t
even see the car. There was no way
Larenda could walk that far, so Dad – utterly raging silent by this time –
started the trek back to the Impala. I have no idea how long it took him to
retrieve the car and pick us up, but it seemed a very long time. And all that
time cars were passing us on the road, and slowing, and staring at two dirty
little kids, and their dirty mom. And the littlest kid was wailing like a
banshee, and the oldest kid was zealously guarding four giant bags of trash –
our treasure from a Sunday Family Outing.Next Week, Chapter Fourteen: Cancer, Leprosy, Honesty, Sympathy, and Skipping School.
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