Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild by Novella Carpenter Read Free Book Online Page B

almost burned down an apartment building. My accomplice was my new best friend, a good girl who lived down the street.
    My new best friend and I sat on a bare mattress in the middle of an empty apartment that I had found a couple doors down from my house. We were puffing away. I noticed she wasn’t inhaling but didn’t say anything. I loved going to herhouse because her mom was a homemaker and would often bake us cakes. Their house had hardwood floors and smelled like Murphy wood soap. Our house, in contrast, had funky blue shag carpet that always smelled of cat pee.
    I had filched a pack of matches from my mom’s purse and started striking them, watching the flame come and then burn out. After a while, I held one of the matches up to the lacy curtains that hung in the window. The flame surged and bolted up the curtain, disintegrating the whole thing to the rod. “Cool,” my new best friend and I giggled. I burned another curtain while she watched.
    Some of the unburned curtain fell to the floor and I gathered it into a pile on the mattress. “Watch this,” I said. The mattress caught on fire almost immediately, melting the polyester lining and searing a black hole into the middle. We ran. The blaze and smoke alerted the landlord and we were caught. I had to pay for the mattress and curtains, and she and I weren’t allowed to play together anymore. My other punishment: Although we had had virtually zero contact with Dad since leaving Idaho, I was sent to live at his house for the summer.
    •   •   •
    As it happened, Dad was living in the Rough House. After we left Idaho for good, Mom tried to sell her half of the ranch which included the Rough House and ninety acres. No one was willing to buy an unpermitted house in the middle of nowhere. Then Dad offered to buy it. He had reunited with his high school sweetheart, and though he had almost no money of his own, he cajoled her into buying the house and the land.
    Dad met up with Mom for the daughter handoff inYakima. Riana came along with me, and we brought our cats too. Mom went to Tom’s house in Moscow that summer; Dad took us back to Orofino, up to the ranch.
    It was like we had never left the ranch, everything was the same. We climbed up the wide wooden front porch where Riana and I had learned to pee standing up. I clamped down the front door’s black metal latch and swung the door open into the kitchen. The sink was to the right; the woodstove where Mom cooked us pancakes was still there on the left. I scampered down the low-slung set of stairs that led to the living room and felt the cool red clay tiles. The windows, covered in spiderwebs, looked out over the Idaho hills.
    Though the house looked the same, Riana and I were very different by then. We had fully embraced the greed-is-good ethos of the 1980s. I watched the television show
Dynasty
and fully related to Krystle Carrington. I was a hick girl in a hick town living in a house that smelled like cat piss, but I liked to imagine myself flying in helicopters and striding through my twenty-three-bedroom mansion. When I got rich (winning the lottery), I wrote in my diary, I would buy “mass clothes” and a mansion for my sister and mom. I also planned to buy a three-story condo in California for my best friends. Dad was not included in the distribution of my fantasy prize winnings.
    My sister and I had turned into rabid consumers of trendy garments like Coca-Cola polo shirts and Benetton sweaters. My sister, smelling of Giorgio of Beverly Hills, liked to take a crimping iron to her hair; I rolled mine up in hot rollers and slept on them at night so I would have spiraling princess hair. “The bigger the hair, the closer to god,” was the ideal, and hairspray sealed my tidal wave of hair.
    When Dad picked us up that summer, who knows what he made of us. Disgust, probably.
    The first night back at the Rough House, we sat around the kitchen table eating a pot of Dad’s favorite—creamed corn from a