The neighbor lady who had driven me to the hospital was surprised that I didn't run in the opposite direction from any fire I saw. "Why the hell would she?" Dad bellowed with a proud grin. "She already fought the fire once and won."
I started stealing matches from Dad. I'd go behind the trailer and light them. I loved the scratching sound of the match against the sandpapery brown strip when I struck it, and the way the flame leaped out of the redcoated tip with a pop and a hiss. I'd feel its heat near my fingertips, then wave it out triumphantly. I lit pieces of paper and little piles of brush and held my breath until the moment when they seemed about to blaze up out of control. Then I'd stomp on the flames and call out the curse words Dad used, like. "Dumb-ass sonofabitch!" and. "Cocksucker!"
One time I went out back with my favorite toy, a plastic Tinkerbell figurine. She was two inches tall, with yellow hair pulled up in a high ponytail and her hands on her hips in a confident, cocky way that I admired. I lit a match and held it close to Tinkerbell's face to show her how it felt. She looked even more beautiful in the flame's glow. When that match went out, I lit another one, and this time I held it really close to Tinkerbell's face. Suddenly, her eyes grew wide, as if with fear; I realized, to my horror, that her face was starting to melt. I put out the match, but it was too late. Tinkerbell's once perfect little nose had completely disappeared, and her saucy red lips had been replaced with an ugly, lopsided smear. I tried to smooth her features back to the way they had been, but I made them even worse. Almost immediately, her face cooled and hardened again. I put bandages on it. I wished I could perform a skin graft on Tinkerbell, but that would have meant cutting her into pieces. Even though her face was melted, she was still my favorite toy.
DAD CAME HOME IN the middle of the night a few months later and roused all of us from bed.
"Time to pull up stakes and leave this shit-hole behind," he hollered.
We had fifteen minutes to gather whatever we needed and pile into the car.
"Is everything okay, Dad?" I asked. "Is someone after us?"
"Don't you worry," Dad said. "You leave that to me. Don't I always take care of you?"
"'Course you do," I said.
"That's my girl!" Dad said with a hug, then barked orders at us all to speed things up. He took the essentialsa big black cast-iron skillet and the Dutch oven, some army-surplus tin plates, a few knives, his pistol, and Mom's archery setand packed them in the trunk of the Blue Goose. He said we shouldn't take much else, just what we needed to survive. Mom hurried out to the yard and started digging holes by the light of the moon, looking for our jar of cash. She had forgotten where she'd buried it.
An hour passed before we finally tied Mom's paintings on the top of the car, shoved whatever would fit into the trunk, and piled the overflow on the backseat and the car floor. Dad steered the Blue Goose through the dark, driving slowly so as not to alert anyone in the trailer park that we were, as Dad liked to put it, doing the skedaddle. He was grumbling that he couldn't understand why the hell it took so long to grab what we needed and haul our asses into the car.
"Dad!" I said. "I forgot Tinkerbell!"
"Tinkerbell can make it on her own," Dad said. "She's like my brave little girl. You are brave and ready for adventure, right?"
"I guess," I said. I hoped whoever found Tinkerbell would love her despite her melted face. For comfort, I tried to cradle Quixote, our gray and white cat who was missing an ear, but he growled and scratched at my face. "Quiet, Quixote!" I said.
"Cats don't like to travel," Mom explained.
Anyone who didn't like to travel wasn't invited on our adventure, Dad said. He stopped the car, grabbed Quixote by the scruff of the neck, and tossed him out the window. Quixote landed with a screeching meow and a thud, Dad accelerated up the road, and I burst into tears.
"Don't be so sentimental," Mom said. She told me we could always get another cat, and now Quixote was going to be a wild cat, which was much more fun than being a house cat. Brian, afraid that Dad might toss Juju out the window as well, held the dog tight.
To distract us kids, Mom got us singing songs like. "Don't Fence Me In" and. "This Land Is Your Land," and Dad led us in rousing renditions of. "Old Man River" and his favorite. "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." After a while, I forgot about Quixote and Tinkerbell and the friends I'd left behind in the trailer park. Dad started telling us about all the exciting things we were going to do and how we were going to get rich once we reached the new place where we were going to live.
"Where are we going, Dad?" I asked.
"Wherever we end up," he said.
*
Later that night, Dad stopped the car out in the middle of the desert, and we slept under the stars. We had no pillows, but Dad said that was part of his plan. He was teaching us to have good posture. The Indians didn't use pillows, either, he explained, and look how straight they stood. We did have our scratchy army-surplus blankets, so we spread them out and lay there, looking up at the field of stars. I told Lori how lucky we were to be sleeping out under the sky like Indians.
"We could live like this forever," I said.
"I think we're going to," she said.
WE WERE ALWAYS DOING the skedaddle, usually in the middle of the night. I sometimes heard Mom and Dad discussing the people who were after us. Dad called them henchmen, bloodsuckers, and the gestapo. Sometimes he would make mysterious references to executives from Standard Oil who were trying to steal the Texas land that Mom's family owned, and FBI agents who were after Dad for some dark episode that he never told us about because he didn't want to put us in danger, too.
Dad was so sure a posse of federal investigators was on our trail that he smoked his unfiltered cigarettes from the wrong end. That way, he explained, he burned up the brand name, and if the people who were tracking us looked in his ashtray, they'd find unidentifiable butts instead of Pall Malls that could be traced to him. Mom, however, told us that the FBI wasn't really after Dad; he just liked to say they were because it was more fun having the FBI on your tail than bill collectors.