Burning Down
by David Golden
Smashwords Edition
© 2010 by David Golden
You can’t really blame me. It was the summer of 1987, that should say enough to you to let you know, you know, that it really was out of my control. I mean, do you know what they were going to do to us in 1987? Give me a break.
In July of 1987 I was seven and a half years old, and Reagan was president, and Thatcher was prime minister, and Gorbachev was the devil. They had nukes. They were gonna bomb us, and any day now, and it wasn’t really a question of if, but really of when. I mean it was really terrifying. So you have to believe me when I tell you that it totally wasn’t my fault that Mrs. Pendergrast’s house got burned down. That was, I don’t know, that was fate, I guess, was what it was.
What a total fucking bitch. I mean, this woman was like the Wicked Bitch of the East. Or the South. I always wondered why people called North Carolina the South even though it was right there on the east coast at the time. I wasn’t old enough for civics class yet, I didn’t know Mason from Dixon, but I had been to the beach. Anyway, Mrs. Pendergrast. She was a complete fucking bitch. She had no kids of her own. That’s the only way to really understand it.
My dog Bitsy used to get loose all the time. Bitsy, short for Itsy Bitsy, mutt runt of a mutt litter, Rest In Peace, we put her down blind and deaf and pissing herself at the age of seventeen. Bitsy was really a sweet dog, she just didn’t like, you know, being tied up all the time. She was born to run. Goddamn leash laws. But one time – and it was only really one time that she did this – she got loose and ran down the street and took a left up Waxhaw Court and into Mrs. Pendergrast’s garden and barked at her and scared the shit out of her. And Mrs. Pendergrast fell over in the garden and got a faceful of marigolds and topsoil, the really rich black stuff you can’t get unless you either crap in your own garden or you go to the store and buy it, topsoil not crap, and you’d think that someone who spends an entire afternoon squatting and kneeling in the sun and the heat and the dirt wouldn’t get too upset about getting a little dirty, after all the bitch was working in dirt.
But Mrs. Pendergrast took exception. Mrs. Pendergrast threw her trowel at Bitsy and got her right in the ear. The point actually went into Bitsy’s ear, too, and the vet said it punctured something in there or something, cause Bitsy was bleeding from the ear when she came home, and couldn’t really keep her balance. And the vet said she’d be deaf in that ear for life, and she wasn’t all that old yet, only about a year and a half old, which is like teenaged in dog years, and imagine if you got a fucking spade shoved in your ear when you were 15 and you’d know, plus she had equilibrium problems the rest of her life, too. It got so bad in the couple of years before we put her down that she used to bump into walls and fall over into the puddle of dogpiss she’d inevitably have created out of incontinence and fear at not being able to find her food bowl by herself.
So you’d think I’d be happy that the fucking house burned down. You’d think I’d be dancing in the street. I mean, it wasn’t like harpooning a puppy was the only or even the worst thing Mrs. Pendergrast did to or at or because of or in retaliation against the kids in my neighborhood. One time she stole Parker’s pants.
***
Now this was weird. How, you might ask if you knew both of them, and you will by the time this is over, did Parker Durgas’s pants, which resided along with Parker and her big brother and their Siamese cats and her mom and her stepdad Bill on Brackenbury Lane, right next door to me on the other side of my house from Waxhaw Court, come to be in the possession of Mrs. Pendergrast from, as I said, down the street and on the left on Waxhaw? This is a very good question.
By the way, remind me to tell you about the time me and Parker got caught in the neighborhood lake. That’s a really good story.
Parker’s middle name was Parker, which was like her mother’s grandmother’s maiden name the first time around or something. Her first name was Anna, but so was everyone else’s first name or middle name, it was always Catherine Ann, or Anna Elizabeth, or Elizabeth Kathryn, or Anna Elaine, and so Parker named herself Parker. Parker also decided that her natural hair color was blue, and used half a gallon of oil-based paint to make it so. That’s how Parker Durgas got to be the only bald-headed girl in Rocky View.
That was the name of our subdivision. In the suburbs, the real-deal suburbs, nothing’s a neighborhood. Rocky View was a subdivision, the older part of the development. New Rocky View, or Rocky View East as the signs insisted it to be named, wouldn’t be built until Parker and I were fifteen and sixteen respectively, wasted out of our minds on Wild Vines and swimming in Rocky View Lake.
Incidentally, remind me to tell you about that. That was hilarious.
Parker was the prettiest girl I knew, and also she was my best friend, and also she was my blood sister. Not like my actual blood sister, who was dumber than Bitsy’s shit and just as good-looking and poor thing died of ovarian cancer in the tenth grade and made me feel terrible for saying she was dumber than dogshit and just as good-looking every day of her life until the tumor appeared.
I never said I was a good person. I’m trying to redeem myself. You’ll see.
But man, was Parker pretty. Even at eight, you know, with teeth missing and new ones growing in and scabs on her knees just above that hair that grows on little kids’ shins, you know that fair hair that little kids get that girls always seem to get before boys and you look at them and you think about the boys, Oh, he’s growing up and you look at the girls and you think about them, Oh that poor hairy thing. Even at eight, and I was only nine myself, but you looked at her even from down the street and you said to yourself, there goes a knockout. Jesus Lord God and All The Saints and Angels Too, you would have said, she’s gonna be beating them off with a stick once her hair grows back. And you would have been quite literally right. Parker hated being hit on.
Here’s what happened, before I tell you about what happened with Parker’s pants, let me tell you about what happened with her hair. It was, I think, the summer or two summers after my family moved to North Carolina that her parents let me and her paint the storage shed out back of her house. They had all kinds of paint in the garage and we each got to pick one color. We each got one gallon of paint with which to fully express ourselves on the walls inside and outside and the door too but not on the roof of the Coopers’ storage shed.