My dad had a house on Husband Street in Stillwater.  When my parents were together and we were not roving the country as Army brats, we normally lived there.  The house was old, probably built in the 1920s or 30s.  It was situated on a bit of a hill with an impossibly steep drive-way that perennially held a dull, red Ford Pinto hatch-back with gray furry seat covers.  There was a big tree in the front yard that had a U-shaped branch that we’d sit in and pretend to be Captain Kirk piloting the enterprise while the rest of us where scattered in other branches pretending to be at our battle stations.

The house was just down the street from Hardy’s (which later became Carl’s Jr and then a Thai restaurant and now something else entirely) and a little further from the public library (which was since bought by an IT company).  We’d walk down the block during the summers in our shorts and T-shirts, grab a few mushroom-n-swiss burgers, and then spend an afternoon in the library playing the in large castle playset in the basement.

In the backyard of my dad’s house there was an old, rustic, wooden shed.  And one day during one of those summer afternoons, we set it on fire.

My family was girl-boy-girl-me.  I was the baby and as the youngest I was super eager to play with the big kids.  Trish, the eldest, was too busy with her paper route and sports to spend a lot of time around the house during the day and she was seven years older than me.  Her play skills were seriously lacking.  For instance, like the time she cheated when she created Skeletor’s death trap.  Didn’t she know that He-Man (ahem … me!) was supposed to win?

That left Randy and Wendy.  Each of us were spread out by two years, so we were close enough to enjoy playing with GI Joe’s, watching afternoon cartoons, or sitting at the table with stacks of RPGs.  One day, when playing in the backyard, we kept eyeballing that old shed, beckoning to us ominously.

It looked like it belonged in a black and white Ansel Adams photo.  Dry timber boards warped by the weather, doors leaning in on each other, half a dozen rusted bicycle rims stacked by entry.  To the unsupervised imagination, it was the undiscovered country, a hall of adventures.  We couldn’t resist.  We were Oklahomans, red dirt and bare-footed like all should be, and our manifest destiny called us to the ancient structure.

Though my memory grows hazy now at the age of 32, I’m going to blame my brother for leading us in there.  Afterall, he DID have all the good ideas.  So what transpired that day is completely his fault.

Inside of the shed, we discovered a trove of treasures.  Old science fiction books, paint cans, broken yard tools, and more.  It was covered in a heavy layer of dust so old that not even the spiders bothered to cast their webs.  There was an open staircase leading to a second floor.  Quietly and carefully we scaled the steps, testing our weight on each step.

I believe that I was chosen to go first … because I was the lightest.  Thinking back, I’m convinced that made no sense.  If the step were to break, let the baby of the family plunge to his death on a stack of old rakes.  If I were to step on a rusted nail, let the littlest get tetanus.  Or if the next kid (and thereby heavier) broke the steps, then I’d be stranded at the top of the stairs.  But at the time, I felt brave … like I was on point for my platoon.  And I guess that’s how the youngest kid gets tricked into doing the dangerous stuff.

At the top we found a box of old games.  In particular we found a stack of old Bingo cards that had been hastily tossed into a box and cast into the shed.  What were we to do with these old, dry pieces of stock paper?  Burn them of course.  Somehow my brother produced a small Bic lighter and we began to burn them.  The group of us were clustered around a rotten hole in the floor on the second story of the shed, holding the burning card like it was a lure in ice fishing.  As it burned, we’d let it drift down to the floor below … where a stack of paint thinner and varnish rested.

Now, I’m not sure what clicked in my head that didn’t in the others.  I was probably only five years old … but something told me “GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE!”  It wasn’t a safety precaution I assure you.  My feet, legs, and hands are covered with enough scratches, bruises, and scars to prove that I jumped first and cried later.  It never occurred to me that those cans with their lids half-off just below us were flammable.

No, instead something in my head said that we were doing bad.  In the Curtis family, doing bad on any level meant you got whipped.  Getting whipped meant you did the Dance.  My dad would grab either an arm, an ear, or your neck and whip you with a belt as you tried to pull away and dodge his blows.  Of course, he was too strong to get free, so the two of us – whipper and whippee – danced in a circle as he scored welt after welt on our butts, legs, and back.

My dad would bite his tongue when he whipped us and sure as shit he looked pissed as hell each time.  Normally, we’d all line up to one side and he’d call us one by one.  As we approached, he’d crack his belt like a whip as if he enjoyed the intimidation.  Of course, our feet would shuffle, our knees would buckle, and we’d start apologizing and begging frantically.  It didn’t matter.  As soon as we were within in range, he’d snatch us and start wailing.  The number of strikes was a complex algorithm based on 1) how pissed he was, 2) how much we resisted getting whipped, and 3) if we cried too early as if appealing to his sympathy.

Basically, I was terrified of getting in trouble.

And I had this whisper in the back of my head, call it karma, call it intuition.  I knew instinctively I had to get out of there.  Immediately.  So I mumbled about going inside and left.  Neither of them moved from their squatting position, holding a lighter to the corner of the Bingo card as it peeled and cracked in growing flame.  I remember that they looked like two neanderthals starting a fire for the first time in their cave.

I went inside and played on the side of my bunkbed.  Before I continue with the story, I need to say something – thank you Lord Jesus for sending me inside.  Within about twenty minutes, I heard the sounds of fire trucks and panicked shouts from the backyard.  All hell was breaking loose outside.  You’ll have to ask Randy and Wendy what happened exactly, but the shed was smoldering in ruins with black smoke covering the neighborhood.

I was called into the living room with Randy and Wendy sitting on the couch, their faces covered in soot.  You know that cartoon, The Peanuts, with Charlie Brown?  When Charlie Brown would fall down after throwing a pitch on the mound and he’d have little criss-cross marks on his cheeks to indicate the dirt?  My brother and sister looked just like that.  And they were holding their heads down sheepishly, hands folded in their lap, though my brother had a glint in his eye towards my dad that secretly said, “screw you.”

They were uninjured thankfully, but not by any effort of my dad.  I know that he unloaded on my brother, his anger was unchecked.  When we messed up, it was typically my brother that took the brunt of it … sometimes my dad forgot that he was only 12 years old and not some drunk in a bar.  I wasn’t there when my dad found them and not much was spoken of what happened between us kids afterwards .. so I know that it was bad.

What pissed my dad off the most and he said as much to me right at that moment was not that the lives of his children were endangered or that the property had been damaged, even though it was a decrepit shed.  No, it was because our nextdoor neighbor called the fire department.  It embarrassed him to have all the sirens pop up in the alley behind his house and get a stern talking to from the fire chief.  Oh Lordy.

When I was called in there into the living room to view those waiting on Death Row, my dad pointed to my brother and sister, asking me if I could believe how stupid they were.  They burned down the shed!  Those idiots!  I didn’t say a word.  I only thanked God, Allah, Buddha, and L. Ron Hubbard for my salvation.

I’d like to think that my intuition, the Spider-sense that pulled me out of that shed just before the approaching disaster, has served me throughout my life.  Who knows how many times I wanted to go right, but went left instead, avoiding catastrophe.  Or when I slept through a Computer Science final, only to take the hand-written, make up test and still miraculously pull a B after an entire semester of snoozing.  Maybe I would have been stung by a cloud of angry bees on test day had I actually made it.

Maybe it’s guardian angels just steering me through the worst bits.  I’m not sure, but I know that out of the collective experiences of the kids in my family – I was given the lightest load.  I was spared a lot of the trauma that the others received.  I always thought it was because I was the youngest, but now I’m not so sure.  Whatever it is or how its helped me to this point … I feel that it started back on that summer day back in Oklahoma.

The day that the shed burned down.

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