Essay
Scott
We are all a compilation of everyone we meet and all the experiences of our life. It is an ongoing process we sometimes cannot see, or measure, until years later. Such is my experience with my friend, Scott. He was my best friend in my youth. We shared everything during the summer of 1970.
Scott is still with me today. But I didn't suspect it until about ten years ago. This realization came as I took a look at my life and what it meant. Nothing traumatic was happening. I was merely visiting some old stomping grounds of my youth when I saw a willow tree Scott and I used to sit under. The hot Texas summers would chase us there daily.
This is my story about Scott. It is a true story. You may, or may not, have a Scott in your past, or even in your present. If you don't, I won't mind if you borrow him. I know I am a much better person for having known him and having shared experiences with him that are now a part of my life.
I wouldn't realize, until many years later, that a single telephone ring during the night, between two and four a.m., would announce the events that followed. It was not unusual for the phone to ring at that hour as my father was a Postal Inspector. Those calls were usually his agents in the field reporting a trucker's unscheduled sampling of Betty Lou's famous diner pie. Or sometimes just Betty Lou. When his bedroom door shut we all fell back to sleep knowing he didn't need to drive out into the night. But on this night, the ring was accompanied by distant sirens coming up the hill into our subdivision.
I am not sure why I was awake, but I lay in bed in a half sleep as the sirens came closer. At one point, I knew the sirens were on Cockrell Avenue, running perpendicular to Morrell, our street, on the south side of Fort Worth, Texas. An eleven year old knows these things. It was my hill. I suppose that's what woke me. Something was going on in my territory.
I tiptoed through the house and found my father sitting at the kitchen table, very quiet, as was his demeanor. But he seemed different this night. His hands were on the table, rubbing together slowly. His fingers worked between the others, turning his knuckles white. As for myself, I was becoming excited. After all, there were sirens, very possibly those of fire engines, and I thought he should take me to see. But my request was met with a stern, unusually hollow, glare and a simple, and final, "NO." This disturbed me coming from the most loving man I would ever know. He continued to stare across the kitchen table.
Hurt, I watched my father rise from his chair, pull a Spurs baseball cap onto his head -- the cap identical to mine from a minor league ball game just the week before -- and walk to the front door. He never looked back. He slowly opened the door and closed it quietly behind him. I thought this was unusual. He always said goodbye when he was leaving. I discounted it as his being tired or something. What did I know? I was only eleven.
Before I could think much more about it, my mother came into the kitchen and steered me back to bed. I do remember her hand on my shoulder as we walked to my room. And I remember her tucking me back into the bed. There was still time to get some sleep before school in the morning, she told me. Her voice comforted me, assuring me it was probably nothing. I fell asleep trustingly. The sirens had stopped and silence overtook my room again.
Just as I didn't fully understand the meaning of that one telephone ring until years later, neither did I realize my parents' agony during the next couple of hours as I slept. They struggled with how to tell me, how to let me know that my best friend, Scott Wright, his little brother, and his parents had died in a fire that morning in the South Hills suburb of Fort Worth, Texas.
I was taken to school, unaware of the toll in that predawn event. Later that day, I was summoned to the office by a messenger. Laughter and uh-ohs from my classmates filled the air as I hesitantly walked to meet my fate. I had gone this route before. I knew what it meant. There were plenty of reasons for being summoned. But I usually knew the exact violation when my time of reckoning arrived. As far as I knew, no one had seen me rig the water fountain the other day so it wouldn't shut off.
In the office, I found my mother sitting quietly in a straight-backed wooden chair. As I approached, she motioned for me to sit next to her. I asked what was up, but she only replied for me to sit still and listen.
This was very strange coming from my mother. She was an outgoing opera singer with a reputation for making herself heard; the quintessential fat lady. Every afternoon, while sitting at my desk in my room doing homework, I listened to full scales, fifths, and octaves as she taught voice in the living room. We shared these sounds through my childhood. But the sound we were about to hear was not a pleasant one. I looked up at her. She turned to me and told me it would just be a moment. This scared me to no end. She was never secretive. I took a deep breath, and waited.
The sound of the principal's voice spoke softly over the morning loudspeaker, announcing the deaths of Scott Wright and his family, save one - Scott's infant sister. Surreal cries could be heard down the hallways. This was devastating news for the middle school kids who had known Scott.
I took the news like a little man. I excused myself from my mother, went to the bathroom and cried like a baby. In the next stall, another boy was crying also. We talked back and forth, never showing our tears. He didn't know Scott like I did. I couldn't understand why he was crying.
My mother determined it would be better for me to stay with friends at school and have the opportunity to talk about the tragedy. She went to the auditorium and sat for the remaining eight hours of school with several other parents. We all knew they were there. That, in itself, helped me make it through the day. A black ribbon was hung on Scott's locker.
Somebody laid flowers in front of it. I wished I had thought to do that. The remainder of the day was pretty much a fog. I remember feeling hurt several times by kids who didn't seem affected. In fact, it made me angry.
Nothing much was accomplished at school that day. Or even that week. At home, it was very quiet until my father asked me, a couple of days later, if I would like to go by Scott's house to learn the details of the fire. For some reason, I agreed.
We stood at the curb as my father, his arm around my shoulder, explained to me that the fire was started on the sofa by a burning cigarette. He also explained he would no longer bring his cigars into the house. The fire was fully developed by the time Scott's father realized what was happening.
Scott's father dragged his wife out of the house and put out the flames on her body. She had been fully consumed as she was the one on the couch. He ran back into the house, pulled out Scott's baby sister and handed her to a neighbor near the curb. He returned again looking for Scott and his little brother and never came out. It seems Scott's bedroom windows were too high for he and his brother to climb out; the smoke choked them all as they tried to open the faulty 1960s windows. All three -- Scott, his little brother, and his father -- were found in the hallway, dead from smoke inhalation. His father was in the lead, Scott clenching his father's pajama bottom, and his little brother holding Scott's hand. My father and I walked through the house, and there, in the hallway, was the outline where their bodies had kept the smoke from entirely staining the carpet. I can still see this image 30 years later. I'll never forget it.
As we continued walking through the skeletal remains of the house, I recognized baseball gloves and a collection of rocks taken from the creek called Westcreek. Scott and I would place our heads under the short waterfalls in the creek during the Texas heat the summer before. Scott was the brave one, with the blond flattop and galaxy of freckles. He had two front teeth the size of a thirty year old's. Scott's daring led us down the steepest hills on our bikes. He would stick his hand in any hole, pulling out nothing, but surely scaring anything that might have been down there.
He knew more words than I did. We were the same age, but he was so smart. So quick. And he was my friend, never putting me down, but pulling me along with him to new adventures. Down the hills we went. Steeper. Faster. And when we stopped, he always said, "The wind felt good in my face." This was why I liked Scott. And why today I can look back and say, I loved him.
As my father and I walked home, I wondered what Scott would have become. I still wonder. From that very day, I have always felt Scott's presence. I have always felt it was my job to take Scott to all those places he would have wanted to go. Though I don't think of him everyday -- my sanity can't afford that -- I truly believe my sense of adventure and humor comes from Scott. And it hasn't always been a blessing. Three marriages attest to that.
But I know the time I ran, with the first aid kit, across a baseball field in front of 400 spectators, only to fall and have the sterile kit fly open and mix with the infield's red clay dust, was his doing! And when I ran out of gas in my old '76 Vega during a funeral procession, it was because Scott was there. He was even with me the time a pretty girl told me what a great basketball game I played, only to have me whirl around, full of myself, and proclaim, "I KNOW!"
To this day, Scott allows me to look upon all those things and laugh, just as he laughed when he rubbed grass on his scraped knees, having found a hill too steep even for him and his red bike.
Still, I often wonder what became of Scott's baby sister. My wife has always asked me why I would remember that Scott's sister survived. I've never had an answer for her, until now. Obviously adopted, I would like to tell her someday what Scott was about, and what he is still about. And I would give her Scott's Spurs baseball cap, instead of hiding it from my boys at the top of my closet.
I have had my share of success in life. But it is always with the understanding that half of the struggle is enjoying the feel of the wind in your face. That, I know, is Scott's doing. And I am forever grateful.
Thanks Scott. But could you do me a favor? Cool it with the wives, would ya?
Swan Michael Hunter grew up as Mike to all his school friend pals. Some three decades after traveling the East Coast via promotions and divorces, he returned to his boyhood home of Fort Worth, Texas and unpacked a dusty Smith Corona. Retired from the retail wars and a veteran of Cabbage Patch Hill and The Battle of Tickle Me Elmo, Swan heisted his ten year old son's new bike and wound up in Kellis Park through which a creek named Westcreek still runs and feeds a thirsty willow tree.
Mike's work has appeared in the Arlington News newspaper where he wrote a twice weekly human interest/humor column entitled "Tangents." He is currently writing a book called, "Last Cry of a Baby Boomer."
Willow Walk by Dubravko Raos is available at Art.com
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