Almost Home (3 page)

Just for the record, my biological father is a lunatic. He is without question insane. When I say that my father suffers from madness, I mean it in the absolute best of ways. He used to make me laugh until I was hurting. His dementia only endeared him to me even more, and I believe I inherited almost all of my sense of humor from him. Some say that’s not a good thing.

When he saw me sitting on the Big Wheel, he cocked his head to the side and studied me like a bird of ill intent before asking, “Want a push?” I had my reservations when I saw the look of glee on his face, but I couldn’t very well give up a free ride—after all, there’s no telling when another would come along. I reluctantly nodded my head, and a grin spread across his face, full of teeth that seemed far too large and numerous. My father could be cleaned up to look presentable for the camera, but on an average day he could have been a stand-in for Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
. Sometimes he could just make a face and it scared me so bad that I’d begin screaming hysterically for my mother. And nothing delighted him more. He lay on the floor laughing so hard that he lost all control of himself. I inherited that laugh. Believe it or not, I miss those days. Perhaps I
Damien Echols

4

became addicted to my very own terror at an early age, which is why I chose a Stephen King novel over the works of Proust, Camus, or Dickens any day.

At any rate, give me a push is exactly what he did. My father always became a legend for his physical strength among those who knew him. He grabbed the back of the Big Wheel, and with all his might sent me hurtling straight down the hill on which we stood. The tree covered hill. How I avoided every tree on the hill is a mystery to me. I was going so fast that everything I passed was a blur, and the momentum made it impossible for me to steer. I did the only thing I could do—scream like a banshee and try to keep from pissing myself. Even over my screaming I could hear my father’s roaring, insane laughter. I shot across the highway at the bottom of the hill and gradually came to a stop on the other side, by which time my mother and grandmother had both ran out onto the front porch to see what was happening. My mother began screaming at my father, who was doubled over from laughter, about how he was going to kill me. When they made their way down to me and my mother was certain that I was okay other than shaky legs and a heart that was beating like a humming bird, my father asked, “Want to do it again?” This time my head nodding was enthusiastic, and he began pushing me back up to the top of the hill in order to do it once more.

II

My memory really starts to come together once I started school. I can still remember every teacher I ever had, from kindergarten through high school My mother and father moved to an apartment complex called Mayfair. We had an upstairs apartment in a long line of identical doors. When I went out to play, the only way I could find my way back home was to peek in every window until I saw familiar furnishings. My grandmother also moved into an apartment in the complex, one row behind us. This was the year I started kindergarten, and I remember it well.

Mayfair was in a rundown section of town, although not nearly as rundown as it later became. We were in the worst school district in the city, and on the first day I saw that I was one of only two white kids in the entire class. The other was my best friend Tommy, who also lived in Mayfair. Our teacher was a skinny black woman named Donaldson, and I’d be hard-pressed to find a more hateful adult. She wasn’t as bad to the girls, but seemed to harbor an intense hatred for all male children. I honestly don’t know how she ever became a teacher, as she seemed to spend all her time racking her brain to come up with new and innova-tive forms of punishment.

I was very quiet at this age, almost to the point of being invisible. I managed to avoid her wrath most of the time, but twice she noticed me. Once, for a reason I never understood, a girl told her that I had my eyes open during naptime. Every day after lunch we were to pull out our mats, lie on the floor, and sleep for half an hour while the teacher left us alone. No one knew where she went or why. For her it was not enough that we lie still, she wanted us to sleep, and expected us to do so on command. She appointed one person to be the class snitch while she was gone, and whoever she chose got to sit at the teacher’s desk like a god, and look out over everyone else sprawled face down on the floor. The chosen person was always a girl—never a boy.

So, one day after lunch I was on the floor as usual, breathing dust and hoping for no spiders. The teacher came back half an hour later and asked the girl at her desk for the daily report—who had and had not been sleeping. The girl pointed straight at me and said, “His eyes were open.”

5

Damien Echols

6

I had not stirred from my mat or made a sound, yet this teacher made me stand before the class as she hit my hands with a ruler. It hurt my hands, true enough, and then there was the shame of having this done in front of the entire class, but the most frightening and traumatic part was the vengeance and hatred with which she carried it out. She was wild and furious, gritting her teeth and grunting with each smack of the accursed ruler. The one other time she noticed me I can’t remember what, if anything, I had done wrong. I do remember the punishment though, and this time I was not alone. I had to once again stand before the entire class, this time along with two other boys, and hold a stack of books over my head for half an hour. All three of us stood with our arms straight up into the air and shaking with effort as we held a stack of books aloft. During the entire punishment she was howling at us in a rage, saying things like, “You’re going to learn that I’m not playing a game with you!”

So much for kindergarten.

III

A couple of strange incidents occurred during this period of my life, both of which I remember vividly, but neither of which I can explain. The first happened while still living in the Mayfair apartments.

One evening as dusk approached my mother told me not to leave the walkway right in front of our apartment door. Being the unlearned heathen that I was, I beat it the moment she was out of sight. I ran around to the very back of the complex where a huge mound of sand was located, and proceeded to dig a hole with my bare hands. This was one of my favorite activities, in which I invested a huge amount of time as a child. I looked up from my digging some time later only to realize it was completely dark. I could see the streetlights on in the distance, and the night was deathly silent. No crickets chirping, people talking, or cars driving by. Nothing but the silence that comes once the movie is over and the screen goes blank. Knowing that I was now officially in trouble, I dusted myself off and started to make my way back to our apartment.

As I walked home I had to pass a place where two sections of the building came together to form a corner. The last time I had noticed this corner the apartment there was empty. Now it was dark, but the front door was open.

There was no trace of any light and the inside of the apartment was as void of illumination as some sort of vacuum. Standing in the doorway, propped against the frame with his arms folded across his chest was a man in black pants and no shirt. He had black, shoulder length hair and wore a shit-eating grin. His eyes followed my progress as I passed, until I stood right in front of him. “Where you goin’, boy?” he asked in a way that said he was amused, but didn’t really expect an answer. I said nothing, just stood looking up at him. “Your mamma’s looking for you. You know you’re going to get a whipping.”

After a moment longer I continued on my way. When I encountered my

mother, she had a switch in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I did indeed receive a whipping.

I never thought about this incident again, up until a day or so before I was arrested and put on trial for murder. I was eighteen years old, and the cops had been harassing me non-stop for weeks. My mother asked me one day after lunch, 7

Damien Echols

8

“Why don’t you take your shirt off and go in the back yard so I can take pictures?

That way, if the cops beat you we’ll have some before and after photos.” Nodding my head, I made a trip to the bathroom where I took my shirt off. When I looked into the mirror over the sink, it hit me that I looked exactly like the man I’d seen all those years before in the dark apartment. Mirrors have always made me a little uneasy for some reason and this incident did nothing to change that.

The other bit of bizarre happenstance took place after we had moved from Mayfair and into a small trailer in the countryside. I slept in a tiny bedroom at the very end of the hallway. There were no windows, and only one way into or out of this bedroom. Fire exits? We don’t need no stinkin’ fire exits.

Late one night something woke me up. It wasn’t a noise, as the entire place was deathly silent. I rolled over and found myself face to face with a strange woman who appeared to be fast asleep in my bed. I was paralyzed with fright. So scared that I couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, couldn’t do anything. All I could do was stare at this sleeping woman, my eyes bulging in terror.

When the fear gave way to self-preservation I jumped from the bed and fled to my parents’ room, wailing like a fire engine. My mother and father bolted straight out of bed to the sound of me screaming, “There’s someone in my room!” My mother gave my father a scared look, but he was already on his way down the hall.

There was no woman found, and no way that anyone could have gotten past my parents’ room to leave. There was no window to crawl out of and no back door to flee through. My parents pointed out these facts to me numerous times over the subsequent weeks, but I still couldn’t sleep more than an hour at a time.

I never slept the whole night through until after we moved, which we fortunately did very soon.

As I write this now I’m reminded that strange things happening in the night weren’t all that uncommon in our house, no matter where we lived. In her teenage years I remember my sister waking us all up by screaming at the top of her lungs. Even a wordless shriek of terror would have been less jarring than what she screamed. Imagine being awakened in a dark house at two AM by bloodcurdling screams of, “There’s snakes in the bed!” It happened to me more than once. She still insists they were there.

IV

Now I believe my mother and father just weren’t meant to be together. Perhaps they weren’t meant to be with anyone. My father has now been married and divorced about five times, and my mother follows closely behind in her number of failed relationships. The trouble between them began when I was in second grade.

My grandmother had gotten remarried the previous year to a respectable man named Ivan. He’s the one I always remembered as being my grandfather on my mother’s of the family. After the wedding my grandmother moved from her apartment to Ivan’s house, which was in the nice, middle-class section of West Memphis. He was a nice man, in a nice house, in a nice neighborhood. There’s not a hell of a lot more to say about him, other than that I grew to love him over time and cried like a baby when he died a few years later.

They hadn’t been living together long when we moved in with them. By “we”

I mean me, my mother, my father, and my sister. It was supposed to be a short-term arrangement while my father found us another place. We had been hopping from place to place recently, and in a period of months we moved to six different states before finally crashing to a halt with my grandparents.

My mother and father slept on the bed in the guest room while my sister and I slept on the floor next to them. I remember my father’s strong arms picking me up off the floor on more than one occasion when he had been awakened by the sound of me gasping for breath, having an asthma attack. He’d carry me to the emergency room, which I despised because I knew a great many needles awaited my arrival. Now I actually look back on those days with a warm feeling in my heart, and I miss them. Times were simpler then.

We were there for a few months when my mother and father began to fight, though I still to this day do not know what they fought about. Perhaps it was the usual strain of being broke and on hard times. Whatever the reason, my father moved out and into a motel room.

They tried to work through it at first. My father came to pick us all up on weekends and take us out to eat, or to a drive-in movie to watch the latest horror release and fill up on hot dogs and popcorn. We always watched horror movies.

9

Damien Echols

10

As a child I remember sitting up into the early hours of the morning watching horror movies with my father. Even now, on the eve of my thirtieth birthday and with a son of my own, I still watch horror movies and read horror novels because they remind me of “home.” Nostalgia, you could say.

At any rate, it didn’t work. I knew things between my parents weren’t going to work out when I was walking home from a friend’s house one day and saw my father’s car in the driveway. As I approached I noted that the driver’s side door was open and my father was sitting on the seat. One leg was on the ground, the other was in the car, and his face was hidden behind his hands as he cried so hard that his entire body was shaking. At first I thought he may have been laughing, until I looked up at my mother. She was standing outside the car next to him, with bloodshot eyes. When I got within reaching distance my father grabbed me and held me while he continued to cry. It scared the hell out of me, and I had no idea what to do.

My mother gave me a saccharine sweet explanation of how my father wasn’t going to be living with us anymore, but that he’d still come by to see my sister and me on weekends. And he did for a while. He would come get us and take us to visit my aunt or grandparents on the his side of the family. It all came to a halt soon enough, though.

V

It wasn’t long before my mother started seeing someone else. I was in third grade at the time. I felt a great deal of resentment towards her for this, and I clearly recall one day when she found me crying and she asked me what was wrong.