A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (10 page)

About two weeks later, Dad told me we were moving. When I asked him why, he said Kenneth was messing with Faith and Crystal.

“Messing with them how?” I asked.

“Touching them in ways he shouldn't,” Dad said.

Usually, when I asked Dad questions about grownup stuff, he just gave me the facts and let me sort out the reality as best I could. That was his approach to questions about drugs, sex, violence, politics—pretty much everything. But for some reason, when it came to sex crimes, he tended to resort to evasions and opaque metaphors. A few months earlier there'd been a string of rapes in Spencer Butte Park, and Dad had taken that opportunity to explain to me that a rapist was a kind of monster who attacked women and children at night and forced his penis into them. The image that conjured for me—a sort of half-bat vampire thing with an enormous erect phallus—was terrifying, but made no practical sense.

On the other hand, things I'd seen on TV and stories other kids had told me had alerted me to the existence of perverts and molesters. Here again, the exact nature of the evil was a little vague in my mind, but I understood that perverts and molesters touched children's genitals—our “underwear area” as my friends said—in ways they weren't supposed to, and that this was probably what Dad was talking about in reference to Kenneth.

“Did Marcy tell you that?” I asked finally.

“No,” Dad said. “The girls did.”

“Did you tell Marcy?” I asked.

“Of course I did,” he said.

“What did she say?” I asked.

“She said the girls were lying. At first. Then she asked them about it. They started to tell her what they'd told me and she flipped out, and they changed their story. Told her they'd never said it. So then she said I was lying, because I'm jealous of Kenneth. And because he's black.”

Another point of confusion for me: among the hippies of Eugene, people talked about Martin Luther King Jr. the same way my grandma talked about Jesus Christ. Even my dad, when I asked him questions about Dr. King, talked about what an incredible leader he was, and how moral and committed he was. But I also knew, based on things Dad had said, that he disliked black people generally. He made fun of how they spoke—or how he thought they spoke. And he thought they were dangerous. It didn't come up very often, if only because I could count the number of black people I'd met in Eugene on one hand, but I knew it was part of Dad's thinking. A few other people were aware of it, too, and Marcy was apparently one of them.

I didn't think it went as far as making something like this up about Kenneth, though. Dad tended to use words to make real things bigger or smaller, but total fabrications weren't his usual way of lying.

“What now?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Dad said. “But one thing is, we might move to Seattle.”

“What's in Seattle?” I asked.

“Jobs,” he said. “Something. I don't know. It can't be worse than here.”

*   *   *

We probably would have left Eugene after the Hayes Street house burned down, but the conditions of Dad's probation barred Dad from leaving Oregon for any reason. It wasn't a small problem; the economy in Oregon was a shambles, and Dad still had a couple of years on his sentence. But Diana had recently told Dad that the state was trying to save money by granting early release to nonviolent offenders, including people on probation for drug crimes. It wasn't a sure thing, but under the circumstances it was all Dad felt he had to look forward to.

So after we moved out of Marcy's house we spent most of the next nine months in a big cheap house at the edge of town, waiting for word to come down from my dad's probation officer that we could go to Washington. We left most of our stuff in the storage unit we'd been using since the Hayes Street fire, so we wouldn't have to move it twice, and lived as simply as we could out in the boondocks of Roosevelt Boulevard.

*   *   *

I'd turned six that summer and started first grade that fall, when we were still living with Marcy. I went to Ida Patterson Elementary, in Mrs. Shoemaker's class. I was enrolled for almost two months before I realized that the giant field behind the school was actually the field I'd lived next to when my dad got arrested, three years earlier, and that the large low building I'd seen in the distance back then was, in fact, the school.

Ida Patterson was a short walk from the Fillmore Street house. Isaac and I used to make the walk together, cutting through the parking lot of the local National Guard detachment. The Roosevelt place was a lot farther out, and there were no school buses, so I depended on Dad to drive me in one of the loaner cars he borrowed from Sean—which meant I only made it to class about half the time. Other kids made friends and formed little groups. Then I'd show up once or twice a week and spend the day getting picked last for dodgeball, sitting alone in the lunchroom, and not understanding the lessons. The teachers talked a lot about how school was supposed to encourage kids to grow and learn, but it felt to me like everyone in that place either was out to get me or wanted nothing to do with me.

“Don't worry about it,” Dad would say. “School just trains you to be a good little worker bee. A good drone. They crush your spirit and your individuality.”

Which I supposed was a fair description of my experiences at school. But the alternative wasn't much better. After a couple of months sitting by myself in our big empty house on Roosevelt, I'd started to think I'd gladly let someone crush my spirit if they'd just play checkers with me.

I got passing grades that year in spite of my abysmal attendance, but I wasn't looking forward to having to go back at the end of the summer. Then, in the summer before I turned seven, my dad's probation officer told Dad that the state of Oregon had washed its hands of him; we could leave any time we wanted.

*   *   *

Dad and I left Eugene early that fall, right after my birthday. There were a couple of factors that contributed to the delay in leaving town. One of them was Dad's strange obsession with getting the Vega fixed up. After having it towed to Eugene from Portland, he'd had it towed from Marcy's house to the Roosevelt house. When the time came to make the move to Seattle, he insisted we were going to do it in the Vega. He never explained his reasoning, but I assumed he was just mad at himself for having totaled his first new car. Or for having screwed up the pot delivery. Or some combination thereof. It wasn't exactly surprising. Hanging on to things that would be better let go of was kind of a cultural through-line among my people.

We didn't have the money to pay a regular garage to fix the car, so Dad made a deal with Sean, the shotgun-crazy drug buddy he'd wanted to give Charlie to. Sean took Dad's $500 and the job, which he accepted as a sort of challenge against his prowess as a mechanic and a friend. The Frankenstein contraption he gave back to us a few months later was more or less Vega-shaped and capable of moving forward under its own power, if not much else.

We packed light, just some bedding and a few changes of clothes. Everything else went into the storage locker with the stuff we'd put in there after the house fire on Hayes. Dad's plan was to spend our first night camping out by Fall Creek, then head north and look for a house in Seattle.

We found a good spot that night, at a bend in the creek where the water ran over giant sheets of volcanic rock and shaped the stone into natural pools and rapids. We roasted marshmallows and drank tap water out of old milk jugs. Then we crawled into the back of the Vega, cuddled up under our Pendleton blankets, and went to sleep.

Dad woke up in the middle of the night because he was hot. He couldn't figure out what was wrong until he noticed something was off about my breathing. He put his hand on my forehead and I was burning up with fever. He woke me up, and I was lucid enough to answer his questions so he decided to wait until morning and see how things looked.

When the sun came up it was obvious that something was pretty far wrong. Every nick, cut, and scrape on my body was swollen red. When Dad touched an old cut on my arm, it immediately popped open and started discharging a mixture of pus and blood. That was bad, but the part that really freaked him out was that I didn't cry. I just stared at the gunk coming out of my arm like it was happening to somebody else.

He packed up the car and drove straight to Sacred Heart Hospital in downtown Eugene. The ER doctors said it was a staph infection. They loaded me up with antibiotics, and acetaminophen to bring my fever down. They also prescribed a special soap to use against the infection. They said Dad should check my temperature every hour, and if it got above 104, he should bring me back to the hospital.

Dad stopped at the pay phone in the hospital lobby and called everyone he could think of, looking for a place for us to stay. But most of our friends in Eugene had kids. None of them could risk having the infection spread to their family. I sat on a green vinyl chair next to the phone and watched Dad go through a pile of change. He never raised his voice. His face just got redder and redder.

“I'm thirsty,” I said.

“In a minute!” he snapped.

I lapsed into silence until we were back out at the car.

“What's staph infection?” I asked.

“It's bad,” he said.

“How bad?”

“Really bad.”

“Oh. Okay.”

We got into the car and he made sure my seat belt was locked in. Then he sat quietly with his hands on the steering wheel for what seemed like an hour before he started the car and drove us back out to Fall Creek.

I was in and out of consciousness for the next two days. I was too hot, then I was too cold, and I was always hungry in spite of being sick. We didn't have any food and Dad was afraid to move me to get any. I kept complaining about being hungry, and he just kept feeding me marshmallows and boiling creek water for me to drink. And checking my temperature; it hovered around 104, but never went over. I used the special soap twice a day and rinsed off in the creek. By the time my fever started to drop, my skin was also clearing up. The infected cuts dried out and started to heal. The inflammations went down. By the third day, my temperature was close to normal.

Dad left me alone at the campsite and went into town to get food. I spent the day swimming in the creek and trying to catch crayfish with a washcloth. Dad was back well before dark. There was a cardboard box full of food in the back of the car. I ate almost an entire box of graham crackers by myself.

Dad said we couldn't go to Seattle for at least another two weeks; that was how long I was supposed to keep using the soap, and Dad didn't want to get caught out on the road if I had a relapse. So we stayed at our campsite on Fall Creek. I spent most days off by myself, swimming and chasing wildlife. Dad sat by the car and read science fiction paperbacks.

The banks of the creek were steep and rocky. On sunny days, the exposed granite and basalt turned the valley around us into a kind of tropical hothouse. There were shallow caves to be explored, and mossy old trees to climb on. I usually swam in my underwear or naked, and I spent most of that two weeks imagining I was the only person in the world. At one point I noticed that I'd gone a whole day without speaking. I couldn't recall ever having done that before. Even in the isolation of the Roosevelt house I'd talked to myself, just to hear a human voice.

Then one day Dad announced that it was time to go.

“Go?” I asked.

“To Seattle,” he said.

“Oh. Right.”

“Listen,” he said. “I've been thinking. How would you feel about spending a couple of weeks with your grandparents up on Camano Island?”

My dad's two brothers and their families had all moved up to the Stanwood–Camano Island area over the last couple of years, and his parents had joined them after Grandpa's heart attack. The island was about eighty miles north of Seattle, and Dad and I had snuck up there once to visit my uncle John and his family, in spite of Dad's probation. It had been a quick overnight trip, driving up in a solid eight-hour stretch, then back home the same way the next day. I'd seen my grandparents and my cousins, but mostly I remembered the steep cut-back trail that ran down a cliff behind Uncle John's house to a thin strip of rocky beach. I'd seen the ocean before, in Los Angeles, but the waves there had been too large for me to swim. The water around Uncle John's place was calm, almost like a lake, so I waded in fully clothed and swam around during the dead of winter. In the process, I drank enough salt water to make myself violently ill the next morning and for the whole trip back. Uncle John had been stoic and quietly judgmental, like Grandpa. Dad had done his best to emulate his older brother.

Dad had talked a lot afterward about how beautiful Camano Island was, but this was the first I'd heard about staying with Grandma and Grandpa. My mind flashed to Grandma's awful cooking, and her hateful little dog.

“Why?” I asked. I wondered if I was being punished for getting sick.

“Well,” Dad said. “We're pretty much out of money. I didn't save as much as I'd hoped to before we left town, and that soap was expensive. So was the doctor. So we don't have enough for first and last on a new place. I was thinking I could leave you with Grandma and Grandpa, just for a couple of weeks. Get a job. Get us a place to stay in Seattle. Then I could come get you.”

I realized we were up against it, and that Dad didn't like the idea of sending me up there any more than I liked the idea of being sent.

“I guess that'd be okay,” I said. “Just for a couple of weeks?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Sure. That sounds like fun.”

*   *   *

Two days later, Dad pulled up in front of Grandma and Grandpa's house. The four of us had an awkward lunch together. Dad stayed the night in a room in the basement, and I slept in the guest room upstairs. The next day he got back in the Vega and headed down to Seattle.