The Memory Closet Read online

  The waitress came to the table with Dusty’s cup of coffee and warmed up mine, though I’d only taken a couple of sips.

  “You sure you don’t want any?” she asked Amy.

  “Well, Ok. Sure. Why not? And bring some creamer, too, will you? A lot. Like in a bucket.” She laughed good-naturedly, then took up the story again when the waitress walked away. “So we all came back later dragging garden hoses we got out of our garages.”

  “Or unhooked from where they were supposed to be watering the yard,” Dusty put in. “My mother had just set out a sprinkler and I snatched the hose right out from under it. Left the sprinkler just sitting there.”

  He was enjoying the story, but he was studying me, too. Not in a hostile way. Just looking. Wondering. “I got my butt tanned for stealing that hose. You always got me in trouble, Annie.”

  “We all got together in your back yard and attached the first hose—no, I guess the first hose was already attached to the faucet on the back of your house.” Amy wasn’t sitting in the restaurant anymore. She was 10 years old, standing beside a little girl with blonde braids next to a chicken house. “And you took the second hose and screwed it on the end of the first …”

  Slowly, the scene formed in my head. It was dim, shadowy. But it was there!

  A group of children. Lengths of garden hose, like coiled snakes. The first length of hose stretches from the house to the back of the yard by the fence around the chicken house where there is an opening between the hedge of trees and the fence.

  I screw the second hose to the first and we squeeze one at a time through the opening and stretch the hose out beyond the trees into the open prairie. Wendy is beside me, her dark eyes dancing. She tries to help, but everybody wants to screw their own hose on next and she gets shoved out of the way.

  Then I say something and the other kids let her through and she’s beside me again.

  “ … came running up with three or four Mason jars, so we could catch the squirrels in the jars and make pets out of them.” Amy rolled her eyes. “Like our parents would have let us keep them!”

  “And like they wouldn’t have buried their sharp little teeth in our fat little fingers if we tried to pet them.”

  “Joey Callison said we’d need more jars than that, so somebody …” Amy looked at Dusty and he shrugged. “Well, somebody went and got more.”

  Dusty picked up on the change in the blank look on my face. “Do you remember any of this?”

  “Well, yes, sort of.” My heart was pounding, with the general consternation of sitting there with two strangers and with excitement over the memory. “We’re all, a bunch of us are out in the prairie behind my house. And Wendy’s there and some kids shove her out of the way.”

  “The other kids were mean to Wendy,” Dusty said. “Pushed her around a lot. She was so tiny and so pretty; she looked like a little doll instead of a kid.”

  “And, of course, her being Indian and all. Back then, my parents were openly prejudiced.”

  Indian? Wendy was an Indian!

  “Even toward people just half Indian like she was.”

  She had dark hair and eyes and I assumed her mother was Mexican.

  “You always stood up for her, though,” Dusty said. “You were like a mother bear, wouldn’t let anybody hurt her.”

  I was too flummoxed to say anything more than, “And then what happened?”

  The two went on with the story while I scrambled to assimilate the information that my little sister had been a native American!

  I wonder what tribe.

  DustyandAmydescribedhowthechildrenspreadoutandsearched for holes, looking for the entrances to the tangle of below-ground tunnels dug by the small, burrowing creatures we called ground squirrels.

  The little rodents that inhabited the open plains around Goshen were smaller than prairie dogs, longer, thinner and spotted, like hot-dog-shaped chipmunks. But like prairie dogs, they set out sentries that warned the others of danger, and they all vanished below ground if anyone came near. Every evening, just at sunset, they stood at the entrances of their holes and called out to each other with a distinctive, high-pitched chee ee ee, a sound as lonely as the cry of a chicken hawk high in the empty sky.

  “ … and as soon as we had somebody holding a Mason jar over every hole, you gave the signal for the kid stationed by the faucet on the back of your house to turn on the water,” Amy said. “Then we just waited.”

  “Seemed like it took forever for the water to get to the end of the last hose,” Dusty said.

  Then he and Amy got into a discussion about what heartless little monsters children were, said we probably drowned two or three ground squirrels for every one that made it to an entrance alive.

  “If a child tried something like that today, somebody from the SPCA would be standing on my chest, demanding that I throw the kid in jail.”

  Suddenly, I could see the scene again. I didn’t even think about remembering; it was just there.

  Little kids scattered out over an expanse of prairie the size of a baseball field. Each holds a Mason jar over a hole in the ground. I hold a water hose with the end stuck way down into the biggest hole, the one we think is the main entrance, and suddenly water gushes out of it, backed up from the tunnels that are rapidly filling.

  Joey Davenport stands over a nearby hole, the one closest to me, and he suddenly squeals, “I caught one—I caught a bunch of ‘em!” before he falls backward. He drops the Mason jar containing two small, wet ground squirrels, while another four or five rush out of the hole and scatter.

  Then it’s pandemonium. Ground squirrels are scrambling out all the holes now and none of the kids is really prepared to catch them. The little blonde general in charge of this tactical maneuver made some grave miscalculations, leaving critical holes in her strategy. For one thing, it didn’t occur to her that a Mason jar isn’t nearly big enough to hold an adult ground squirrel! Then there’s the issue of lids for the jars; nobody brought lids. As soon as the few squirrels actually caught in jars start struggling to get away, the kids drop the jars before the ground squirrels can sink their teeth into some available appendage.

  But a little boy off to my left—it’s Dusty!—catches one, a small ground squirrel, probably a baby, and he has the presence of mind to turn the jar upside down on top of it and put his foot on the jar. Then he shouts, “I got one…”

  “ … I was yelling ‘I got one!’ at the top of my lungs,” Dusty said. “I was holding the jar down with my foot—”

  “And that’s when Allison started screaming,” Amy said.

  A dark-haired girl with brown freckles is screaming. She drops her jar and stumbles, scrambles backward, shrieking, and she knocks Wendy down in her frantic effort to get away from the hole in the ground. I can see something dark there in front of the hole.

  “ … didn’t have sense enough to figure out there might be something else in those holes besides ground squirrels,” Dusty said. “When that tarantula crawled out of that hole, Allison turned so white her freckles stuck out like pepper on a fried egg.”

  The huge tarantula crawls fast, running from the water flowing out of the hole. It heads straight for Wendy, who’s lying on her back in the dirt. She sees it, screams, tries to scoot away, but it gets to her before she has a chance and crawls up on her bare leg, looking for high ground. She kicks at it with her other foot as she continues to scoot backward in the dirt screaming. But it keeps climbing. Up her leg, across her belly, she swats at it with her hand. Misses. Now, it’s on her face and she is totally hysterical.

  Suddenly, I’m beside her. I reach down and grab the hairy, black spider off her face, throw it to the ground and stomp it. It is crushed, but its mangled body struggles to crawl away and I stomp it again and again and again as Wendy continues to scream.

  “Annie?” Dusty’s voice summoned me back to the real world. “Are you all right?”

  My face must have registered the terror and horror and loathing I was feeling. />
  “I stomped it, the tarantula.”

  They nodded. They knew that; they’d been there.

  “I grabbed it, touched it, picked it up!” I shuddered in utter revulsion. I was suddenly dizzy and nauseated. “You don’t understand,” I whispered in a ragged gasp. “I’m terrified of spiders.”

  “Well, you sure weren’t scared of spiders then!” Amy said, but I caught the look she shot Dusty and I yearned to shrink back deep into myself, away from them, away from their assessment of me, their judgment that has informed them, albeit belatedly: This woman is definitely not dragging a full string of fish.

  “I’m scared to death of snakes,” Dusty said.

  Amy turned to him, confused by his non sequitur. Attention off me, onto Dusty.

  “Do you know why the sheriff’s posse was late in the Fourth of July parade last summer?”

  “I didn’t know it was late.”

  “Well, it was—because Brett Robertson, Joe’s youngest, the little one with glasses, was standing beside my horse with this snake in his hand. A bull snake, harmless. But I wouldn’t get anywhere near it! I told Joe if he didn’t get that boy and his snake away from me and my horse I’d arrest the kid on the spot and charge him with assaulting a police officer.”

  “Oh, you did not!”

  “Did too. Ask Joe if you don’t believe me.”

  Dusty proceeded to tell Amy the saga of finding a rattler in his garage when he was a kid, embellished the story, kept her laughing, never once looked at me. But I sensed he was aware of me all the same. He was reading me. And when he decided I was ready, he turned and pulled me effortlessly back into the conversation.

  “I think sometimes it’d be great to forget all about things like that,” he said. “But it’s not, is it Annie? It must feel awfully, oh I don’t know—empty, not to remember.”

  “It’s the emptiest feeling in the world,” I said quietly. But I’d stopped trembling and I no longer looked like I had recently escaped from the Terminally Befuddled ward of the Rutherford County Hospital. “I really appreciate you, both of you, helping me remember. It means a lot.”

  “Well, it certainly wasn’t no trouble at all,” Amy said pleasantly. I could tell that she’d figured out there was something fragile about me. Everybody saw it eventually, spotted Anne Mitchell’s flashing neon sign: handle with care. “You’re welcome to come back anytime and we’ll talk about the past, well, I’ll talk about the past and you can listen. I’ll pick a more enjoyable experience next time—promise.”

  Dusty reached into the pail, pulled out a handful of peanuts and piled them in front of him on the checkered tablecloth. Then he selected the biggest one and began to peel it.

  “What else are you doing to help yourself remember?” he asked.

  I tensed.

  Please don’t give me the you-really-need-professional-help speech.

  “I’ve talked to my grandmother. But … well, she’s 84 years old and she has a lot of fried circuits.”

  Dusty picked up on the tension. The man didn’t miss a thing. Amy blew right by it.

  “My Mee Maw’s got a weak bladder,” she said matter-of-factly. “In the wintertime, she stands on the floor furnace and you can hear it going pssst, pssst!”

  There was a beat of silence, then Dusty and I burst out laughing! His was a rumbling, unrestrained laugh that warmed up the air around him.

  “What?” Amy asked indignantly, looking from one of us to the other.

  That made us laugh even harder. It felt good to laugh. I’d forgotten how good.

  “Thank you so much for that mental image, Amy,” Dusty said as soon as he had enough air to speak. “I’ll treasure it always.”

  “Well, I don’t know what’s so funny about it,” Amy said, pouting. “It stinks!”

  That set us off again.

  She looked at us, shaking her head. “You two … “ Then she spotted the other waitress motioning for her. “I got to boogie. Don’t have too much fun without me, hear.”

  Then she was gone and it was just Dusty and me, and he continued the natural flow of the conversation. Easy. Gentle.

  “If your grandmother’s anything like mine—and like Amy’s—I suspect you didn’t get much dependable information out of her.”

  “Actually, she told me she found my diary, the one I kept as a kid, but I don’t know if there really is a diary or if she’s just out there cruising off the coast of Fantasy Island. She says she doesn’t remember where she put it.”

  “You kept a diary as a kid?” Then he realized what he’d asked and smiled. “How would you know? Guess you’ll find out if the diary turns up, huh.”

  “And I have the artwork Wendy and I did. We wallpapered the whole attic with sketches and crayon drawings and finger-painted masterpieces.”

  I reached over for the first time and picked up a peanut. When I squeezed the shell, one of the nuts squirted out and hit Dusty in the chest.

  “Nice shot.”

  I smiled.

  “I took the pictures down yesterday, all the pieces I could get to.” I popped the remaining nut into my mouth. “But I haven’t had a chance to sit down and look at them and see if anything rings a bell. I don’t remember a thing about painting them.”

  Dusty leaned forward, rested his forearms on the table and said earnestly, “I think I know somebody who could help you.”

  I froze.

  Here it comes, the shrink speech!

  “I have a friend, a child psychologist, who has testified for me at lots of trials over the years, cases where the victims were children.” He took a sip of his coffee and grimaced; it was cold. “Dr. Carlton uses art therapy to get at what’s bothering the kids. You’d be astonished at what a trained therapist can tell you from some stick-figure drawing. If you want, I could get the doc to look at those pictures, might be able to tell you a whole lot about the kids who drew them.”

  I relaxed. A shrink, yeah, but to probe the pictures, not me.

  “Thanks, I’d like that very much. A lot of the pictures look like the floor after a dozen monkeys had a paint fight. They don’t tell me a thing but maybe a child psychologist could make something of them.”

  Suddenly, the radio clipped to a strap on his shoulder bleated out a burp of static. He reached up, turned it toward his mouth and spoke into it. Code this, unit that, a language I didn’t understand. He stood as he talked, then looked back down at me, but his mind was already somewhere else.

  “Sorry, I’ve got to answer a call,” he said. “I’ll swing by your house sometime tomorrow and pick up the pictures, Ok?”

  He took the $5 bill out of his shirt pocket and placed it on the table. “Coffee’s on Amy.”

  Then he turned and headed out the door, left me with half a pail of peanuts, three cups of cold coffee and a wealth of information I didn’t have when I sat down there just a little over an hour before.

  Wendy was an Indian. Why didn’t anybody tell me?

  Chapter 7

  “Well, did you ever ask? It ain’t like nobody was trying to keep it a secret. I thought you knowed she was a Indian.”

  Bobo was crocheting, swinging slowly back and forth in the rickety old front porch swing. Her flipper fingers deftly maneuvered the hooks, creating an intricately woven thread like a spider spewing out a strand of web.

  After I’d carried the groceries into the house and put everything away—Grape Nuts, granola bars, yogurt, a big bag of Granny Smith apples, Jif Peanut Butter, Earl Grey Tea and three vanilla-scented Yankee candles to minimize the Mantholatum/Vicks Vaporub stink—I sat in the wicker rocking chair across from the front porch swing and told Bobo what Sheriff Walker had told me.

  “Her mama wasn’t nothing special—Apache, or Comanche or Arapaho or nothing like that.” Bobo’s voice was as scratchy as the creaking of the swing. “Just plain old Navajo. Full blood, though. She and Jericho wasn’t never married. But they was living together in some little house in Socorro when Wendy was born and she went to c
ourt to get child support—and Jericho’s last name.”

  Her dress was on right-side-out now and she smelled clean, at least the Mentholatum smelled fresh. Her wisps of hair were shiny. I could hear Julia in the house running the vacuum cleaner.

  “Folks said Wendy was the spittin’ image of her mama, ‘cept her hair was curly instead of straight. I never seen the woman, but those that had said she was so pretty she’d take a man’s breath away.” She pulled more thread off the ball beside her on the swing. “It was shore a lead pipe cinch Wendy didn’t take after her daddy!” Jericho’s hair was red, his eyes a faded blue, the color of old denim. “‘Course that was part of the problem, that she looked so much like her mother.”

  “What problem?”

  “Between Jericho and your mama. I think ever time Susan looked at that child she seen Little Dove.”

  Little Dove. Wendy’s mother was Little Dove.

  “Jericho made it worse. He never stopped talking about that squaw and ‘course he was over at that trailer house of hers all the time a’picking up Wendy.”

  “How often did he get her?”

  “Friday night to Monday morning on weekends, that’s what the judge said. But it was usually a sight mor’n that. Little Dove worked off and on in the commissary at Cannon Air Force Base, and sometimes she’d leave Wendy with Jericho—’cept he wasn’t never around to see to her, didn’t spend no time with her. That’s why your mama never believed for a minute that the reason Little Dove moved to Goshen when Wendy was just a pee-tincy thing was so’s Jericho could see his baby girl. Little Dove was here ‘cause Jericho was here, that was the truth of it. Wendy was just an excuse.”

  I rocked back and forth slowly, staring out into the front yard. The air was warm, without so much as a sigh of breeze. Huge black-green thunderheads gathered in the west. A storm was brewing.

  I tried to appear only mildly interested in the conversation. I was learning how to walk softly with Bobo, not push. Put on any pressure at all and it was like squeezing a bar of wet soap—her mind would squirt off in some other direction.