The Memory Thief (10 page)

Momma’s bones are what made Mr. Swarm insist we move into the trailer in the first place. When Daddy said no, Mr. Swarm whispered
gently, “Your family could use the break.”

Mrs. Swarm nodded. “Joe ran power an’ water out to it two years ago, when we thought the men might wanna cool off in it. That
was before they stacked it full of old parts. Turned it into another one of our sheds. But I bet we could have it empty for
you by sundown.”

It wasn’t being used by anybody but rats, and the old black snake that hunted those rats, until we moved in. Mr. Swarm bought
the trailer because it was a good deal. Two hundred bucks at a farm sale. They carried it home on the back of a hay wagon.

Before harvest, no one could see much of our trailer from the main road for all the thick yellow leaves around it. When I
started kindergarten in early August, kids whispered that me and Janie appeared like magic every morning. The leaves would
part and we’d step through to the waiting yellow bus. Words like
bacca fairies
and
tar ghosts
swirled around us at school. But the name that stuck, the one that followed us until we each dropped out, was Girls of Old
Number Nine.

Old Number Nine was a king’s tobacco. A type of Burley crop that grew so tall the tips would drag the ground as Daddy carried
staked plants, his arms held over his head. That was why everybody called it bacca. It was big enough on its own. It didn’t
need our extra letters.

I knew paths through the bacca that seemed to stretch to the mountains. If Momma and Daddy started to fight and the few dishes
we had started to fly, me and Janie would run. If it was midsummer, the leaves would be so high we wouldn’t have to do anything
but push through them. And if it was early we’d crawl. Our hands and knees dragging through the fresh spring dirt.

If things were really bad, we’d spend the night out there. Sometimes in the mornings, we’d get on the bus without ever going
home again. We’d wear the same clothes as the day before, only dirtier.

When a teacher would ask if things were okay, I’d think of my family. How if Daddy came home late, he always said he was working
the fields. Even if it was the middle of December. If Momma’s lip was busted, she said she fell over a cinder block. And if
Janie got off the bus with purple marks all over her neck, she said she had the chicken pox. Again.

“Yes, ma’am. Things are fine.”

Lies were the same as mercy to us. Even if everything wasn’t okay, even if nothing was, we could pretend different. Sometimes
when a lie would slip off my tongue, easy and warm, I’d think about Mrs. Swarm’s God. How maybe he heard my first cry and
agreed with my tears. How maybe he gave me the only gift that could soothe a hard life, a lying tongue to sneak through it
with.

School never helped me, like the bacca and my lies did. So I went to eat a hot meal. To listen to the pretty music the teacher
played during art time. To stare at all the colors inside a new crayon box. So clean and perfect I hated for other kids to
touch them with their greasy hands. But I didn’t go to school to learn. Because I remembered the black snake, and the waste
of its hard work.

It was four and a half feet long, a legend on Swarm farm. It killed more farm rats than any pack of cats ever could. But that
first night in the trailer, Daddy slapped a hoe on its neck. I ran my hand across its new skin, slick and inky as oil, and
thought of all the shedding, all the growing it had done before Daddy came along.

By the time I was eight, I couldn’t read anything but my own name. Even that was memorized. I didn’t know the sounds letters
made, just that when I saw
Angel
spelled out, it meant me. I had blond hair and the dumb eyes of a baby calf. Teachers whispered, “She’s an innocent, bless
her heart,” as they huddled together on the playground. I didn’t know what it meant. Only that they treated me differently.
Never spoke sharply. Never kept me in at recess if I hadn’t finished my papers.

Then one day Mr. Swarm saw me trying to hold the front door open with one hand and pull myself up with the other. All while
carefully keeping my legs from touching Daddy’s car, parked twelve inches away. Black Snake trailer floated on cinder blocks,
stacked three feet off the ground. Sometimes I’d just stay outside and hope somebody would come along to pull me up.

Mr. Swarm walked over to a pile of scraps, old fences, and tractor parts sitting at the end of our trailer. He pulled out
two cinder blocks and stacked them together. Then put one more in front of them.

“Just made you a set of steps outta farm trash.” He laughed.

That day Mr. Swarm taught me something my teachers hadn’t. Good
answers were out there. And there was no telling where they might be hiding.

By the end of second grade, I was reading on a first-grade level and digging through all the trash around me. I looked at
everything, even the silly dot-to-dots our teacher liked to call art. I listened to everything, even the old DAR women who
came to brag how their dead great-granddaddies fought in some war. I could never be certain where my next cinder-block tower
would come from. The one that would help me up. Lift me to a higher place.

I wish I could show you Janie next. I wish I had tucked her, along with the other memories, safe inside my pocket. So I could
hold her up to the light between us and make her shine again. Like she must have once, so many years ago.

Momma and Daddy liked to pretend it was the State’s fault. That somehow the State ruined Janie after it took her for a few
months when she was a baby.

“She used to be the best girl,” Momma would sob on a bad whiskey night. “Sweet baby, never cried when her diaper was wet.
Slept through the night right from the beginnin’. Some Nosy called the State, though. Said she was too skinny. That lady came
with her clipboard, had the nerve to open up my fridge and look in my cabinets without askin’. Took Janie that same day. Didn’t
see her for near six months. Till Daddy got better work and we could show off all the new milk in the fridge. When Janie came
home, though, she was different. Was a danger in her eyes. No tellin’ what was did to make her that way.”

Momma and Daddy liked to threaten that the same thing was going to happen to me, was going to ruin me, too, every time a teacher
sent a note home for them to stumble through.

“You gittin’ lazy at school?”

“No, Daddy.”

“You mopin’ round like a broke-down dog?”

“No.”

“Keep it up and the State’ll come. Give you to strangers. Gave Janie to a gook family. Ain’t no tellin’ what they done to her all them months. Made her eat dog and such.”

Once, I asked Janie about it.

“They’re lyin’ ’bout the dog part,” she said. “I was just a baby, but if I ate dog I’d know it. You hear me, Angel? I’d know
a thing as big as that.”

I nodded. Janie always spoke with the force and grit of a strong cussword, even if she was just saying hello. That force alone
made me believe her. And compared to my own baby voice and to Momma’s hoarse whisper, I wondered if it was the gook family
that taught her how to do that. And I wished they’d teach me, too.

In spite of being ruined by the State, it was Janie that taught me the important things a girl needs to know. Like how to
dance sexy. How to swallow a strong drink. And how to be a thief and a sweet little girl at the very same time.

Her dancing lesson came late one summer night when I was prowling through the bacca. I heard noises coming from an old shed
on the corner of Swarm field. Laughter. Cusswords. I crept up to the side of the shed and peeked through the slats.

I saw Janie. Dancing in the middle of every farmhand I knew except for Daddy. She was singing Elvis, like Momma did whenever
she felt sexy. The farmhands were passing brown bottles around, reaching out and tugging at her bra straps. Yelling
whoo-eee
if they got the job done, before she tugged it back. But my eyes kept returning to Janie. Beautiful fifteen-year-old Janie.
The way she slid her hips in circles, the way her flat hair was curled and teased like a dark crown on her head.

I followed her home that night and finally named the smell around her. The one I’d wondered about for months. It was dead
flowers. Like the ones Mrs. Swarm refused to water at summer’s end.

The next morning I opened Janie’s underwear drawer. Tried her black bra on. Looked in the mirror, at the way the cups dangled
on my flat chest. I tried to slide my hips in circles. Whispered Elvis.

Janie walked in and saw me. My first thought was to run. Because she’d know I spied on her and cuss me good. Then I saw her
smile. She walked over to me, joined in the song.

“Like this, Angel,” she said, as she slithered so sexy around the room. “Move your body like this.”

We spent the morning singing Elvis and being sexy.

“You’re too young now,” Janie said. “But look at this.” She pulled out
a sock from her underwear drawer. It was filled with money.

“One day soon, you can do this, too. An’ if we put our money together, you and me, we could git out of this place, easy. We
could make more than Daddy in a week, the two of us. You’re too little to know it now, but men are gonna love you for that
white hair of yours.”

We practiced in the bacca. The two of us twisting and sliding up and down the rows. In her mind, Janie was dancing herself
as far away from Black Snake trailer as she could get. I was just dancing to be like Janie. After harvest, we went to the
barns. We kept warm humming Elvis and dancing for each other. When winter ended, I could move like a woman.

One night that spring, Janie went to the dancing shed. I knew what she was doing, and I wanted to come with her. She told
me I wasn’t old enough.

“I know all the right moves,” I begged. “See, watch this.”

I let my face melt into what Janie called her naughty smile. I kept my shoulders still as my hips began to move round and round.

“You ain’t old enough,” she said.

“But think of all the money we could git,” I tried.

She shook her head. “Soon. But not yet. You’re just ten years old.”

“I turn eleven tomorrow.”

“Well, look at you,” she said with a smile. “Almost a woman after all.” She hugged me. “Listen, I’ll buy you somethin’ good
with the money I earn tonight. For your birthday, okay?”

I nodded sadly and watched her walk across the field. Toward that falling-down shed, where men and money waited. The next
day, though, I didn’t think about my birthday. Something much more important than me was taking all of the attention. Daddy’s
car.

It wouldn’t start. It sputtered, clanked, and smoked. But it would not start.

“Needs a real mechanic,” Momma yelled. “Not a man that tinkers on tractors.”

Daddy slid out from underneath it long enough to yell back, “Woman, you need to git more money from ’em. You know you could
if you scared ’em enough.”

It was The Birthday Fight. The one they had every year. About the money and where it all went. Whether they could demand more.
But that day the fight was worse than before. It was Saturday; there was no escape for us in school. Momma and Daddy had started
drinking early. And then the car died.

Momma stormed out of the trailer when she heard the gears grind and then
bang
as something misfired. She yelled at Daddy about how he had ruined the one chance life had given them.

“Had one good chance to make a go of it. And all we got left is a broke-down car. We had a fightin’ chance in this life, handed
down like a gift from heaven. And you blew it. Just like you always do.”

He threw a wrench at her. Missed. She threw it back with good aim. We could hear him groaning as he dug in the car for more
weapons. Me and Janie were sitting on the couch sharing a box of dry cornflakes. Janie turned to me as she grabbed her purse.

“The bacca,” she whispered. “Run, Angel!”

Hand in hand we ran through muddy fields. We stopped for breath and listened. Heard Momma scream and ran farther. Until it
was quiet, and we knew that we were safe.

It was a spring night. I’d been ready for bed, dressed only in an old T-shirt and underwear. Sitting on the ground, I started
to shiver. And sob. Janie rolled her eyes and cussed.

“Sorry, Janie. Don’t know why.” Momma and Daddy fought like that all the time. Maybe I cried because it was my birthday. Or
maybe it was that I knew what the fight was really about. The word they used was
money
. But all I heard was
Angel
, yelled over and over.

Janie pulled a bottle out of her purse. Took a long drink and handed it to me. “This makes it better,” she whispered. “Drives
’em out of your head. It’ll drive the cold out, too. Happy birthday, Angel.”

It took some practice, but Janie was a good coach. I slept well that night. I found warmth. I felt safe, too, more than ever
before. And from that night on, whenever I’d find Momma or Daddy passed out drunk, I’d slip the whiskey from their hands.
Pour just enough to not be missed into an empty coke bottle. Then, if it was summer, I’d bury it in the fields. Winter, I’d
hide it in the barn. Like a teddy bear, or a best baby doll. Something to get me through the darkest nights.

I never ran out of whiskey, because Janie taught me how to be a good thief. Under her watchful eye, I took whatever was in
reach. She taught me how to escape if I was caught. Like when a teacher caught me sneaking snacks home in my pocket. “Next
time, tell her you want to mail ’em to the hungry African kids you saw on TV. Teachers love that kind of thing,” Janie told
me. She taught me how to be sweet and good around the Swarms, so that they wouldn’t ever suspect me of thieving. “Open up
your eyes wide, don’t let ’em ever squint, it looks like you’re plottin’. And find ways to say things like ‘Good mornin’,’
‘How are you,’ and ‘God sure gave us a lovely day.’ ”

Her lessons began that first supper under the sycamore tree, when I was five years old. Janie whispered in my ear, “If we
ever gonna git anything good in this world, it’s gonna be ’cause we’re smart enough to take it when nobody’s lookin’.”