I was thrilled that something really important was happening but too groggy from sleep to understand this as a child’s greatest horror.
What? Someone? Outside?
“Someone is trying to break into the house. Be quiet now.”
“Mama?”
I was waking to someone trying to get into our house.
I looked at my window and saw the outline of a man. A living shadow, moving to our door to invade our safety. He was trying the doorknob! Was it locked? Even though it was locked, I was terrified. The stranger moved from the door to the windows—he was looking into our living room windows.
I was in every scary movie with rattling doorknobs and strangers’ shadowy faces in the window. “Stay by me,” Mom said. We began to crawl across the living room floor toward the kitchen.
Danny was in the living room, laughing like he always did. Mom was crawling on the ground, something we had never seen before. That was funny, too. Mom was laughing. Why were they laughing?
Sometimes laughter is the only way to stay sane. A child laughs at a shot in the dark, a dog beaten, a sudden raging father. It’s the only way to stay inside your skin, to not be jettisoned out of it, possibly forever.
Mom was unnaturally loud now to scare away the intruder. She bravely yelled at the door, “We called the police. You better go, get out of here!”
He did not go. He pulled harder on the front door. I was making a sound of primal fear, like the one animals make before they die. A kind of uurrruuuuuuhhh. This noise is only heard by the thing that kills them.
Hush now.
Was I crying?
The intruder was looking in more windows, looking for the voices he heard. He was looking for us. We were the prey and we were hiding in the shadows just like every little critter hid from me. I looked for help. The television rabbit ears. The velvet chair. I’d hit him with the chair. If I could pick it up.
Danny got on the phone to the police, and the dispatcher said, “They’re on their way. Stay on the phone.” Dan shouted, “Get out of here, mister!” Then, “I can’t stay on the phone, he’s going to the back door.” Danny yelled:
“The police are coming!”
Were the back doors locked? We never locked our doors. Mom hissed, “He’s going to the kitchen.”
Quick! We got up and ran to the door and he was almost there. Oh my God it wasn’t locked. Just in time we locked the kitchen door. The man tried to open it but quickly abandoned it for the back bedroom.
Dan went there in an instant. The man was at the door, furiously turning the handle. I was sure he would tear open the door somehow. We were separated by three feet and a very flimsy lock.
“Danny get the gun.”
Now Danny was searching for the key to the gun cabinet. He finally found it and got the cabinet door open. The man was like an unstoppable monster—he kept coming no matter what we did. We were doomed, the intruder didn’t care about us, or the police, or that we were going to shoot him. Danny was holding the shotgun. “I can’t find the bullets.” He was laughing because he was scared to death. Then the bullets fell to the ground but they were the wrong bullets. Wrong bullets!
Where in the world were the goddamn shotgun shells?
My brother turned to face the danger with an unloaded gun and a child’s bluff. “I got a gun, mister. You better get out of here. I’ll shoot you if you come in.”
Mom was more direct and more afraid: “You son of a bitch! The police are coming!”
That just pissed him off. He responded by kicking the door. We were braced now with Danny, our empty gun, and the door that separated us from . . . from . . .
The phone was ringing.
Suddenly the man stopped and we heard the scuffle of footsteps. The police were everywhere.
We heard them yelling, “He’s running!”
The police tackled the invader in the dark field next to the house. The police weren’t as alarmed as we were. “He was drunk, an easy arrest.” “He’s Mexican, he doesn’t speak English.” “He’s drunk. He thought this was his house.” We were all speaking at once:
“He did not think he was at his house.”
“Then why did he run away when you guys came?”
“He saw the gun from the window. He knew this was not his house.”
“I think he knew exactly where he was.”
The police weren’t scared like we were. There were more of them, and they had plenty of guns. We were two kids and a mother. I remember the officer telling my brother, “Good thing you didn’t have any bullets. We’d have to be taking you in now instead.”
Outside our door were our hillbilly neighbors who gathered once again to see the Jones family show. They went back inside their homes to talk about us some more before my mom would yell at them.
That night Danny and I slept in Mama’s bed. It seemed to me that sparks were flying from our fingertips. We eventually grew quiet. Before I fell asleep, I watched the lights of passing cars scrawl on the bedroom wall with the urgent movement of people going somewhere. I wondered where they were going and I wished I were going somewhere too. We fell asleep to the touch of our mother, with Danny’s loaded BB gun leaning against the wall.
The next day we recast our terror as comedy as we told the story to each other over and over again. I felt that giddy exultation of the survivor and thrill seeker. It was like my body was firmer somehow, or the air was lighter inside of me. The danger had made us closer as a family. Danny, Mom, and I. Mom started locking all our doors every night, which was unheard-of in 1963. Danny started weight lifting. I simply placed the event where I would not trip over it. Somewhere back in dreamland. Deep in dreamland.
My dad quit his job with Bekins Moving and Storage and, at last, returned to our house. By the summer of 1964 we moved again. I would never again know the gluey feeling of family I had felt on Orangewood Avenue, the endless hours as I seemed to grow inward instead of onward, and stretched the time in every direction it would go.
Geronimo the quarter horse did not make the move with us. He had tried to kill my mother one morning while we were grooming him. He put back his ears and squeezed Mom into the wall. She yelled at me to get out of the stall, and then kept him at bay while I ran under the fence. Then she deftly ducked under him and made a run for the fence herself with the horse right behind her. No time for the gate, Mom hit the fence at full speed and flipped over the top rail. It was incredible. All that gymnastics in school really paid off.
It was terrifying but I laughed. It was the first time I laughed at something that frightened me. A giddy kind of laugh that kids do when things are too terrible. Mom was more hurt that I laughed. We sold Geronimo to a cowboy who said he would teach him to herd cattle. He said he would not geld him and that my horse would be a father to all the quarter horses of New Mexico.
Geronimo!!
A Summer Song
Father, Janet, Danny, Mother (pregnant with Pamela), and little Rickie Lee, 1963
My baby sister was born five or six weeks early. Premature Pamela went from Mother to the intensive care unit and stayed there for weeks. When she finally came home, she had an embryonic serenity but she was such a tiny creature that she seemed too small to be a human infant. A blanket of fuzzy hair