Sorry I Worried You

Rip His Head Off

121 Rip His Head Off ”Jason,” Aunt Peg said, “did you know that ants scream? “No, they don’t,” I said, but she was raking the anthill at the edge of our yard level with the grass and weeds around it, and I moved two steps back to put more distance between my feet and the black, scurrying ants. She stopped raking but stood among the ants as if to show me what a sissy I was to retreat onto the Kresses’ lawn. “You have to listen close,” she said. “Put them right up beside your ear.” I looked at the ants, sure she was going to ask me to pick one up. “They scream just like babies. They’re smarter than you think.” If they were so smart, I thought, they’d be able to say something else besides “Eeeeeee!,” but I was keeping quiet about ant intelligence because she’d fooled me once before about them, the summer before second grade, when my parents were still alive. During a church picnic, she’d warned me that I’d be in for it if I fell asleep 122 on the grass. She said ants would crawl up my nose, don’t you laugh, because she knew a woman who ended up with an anthill in her forehead because she’d slept outside and let ants find their way into her sinuses. I was two months from my seventh birthday, old enough, she probably thought, to disbelieve her fable, but I started brushing myself every time I sat outside because Aunt Peg had finished her story by telling me that woman needed an operation to clean out the colony of ants that had settled in her head. “Our skulls are full of tunnels,” Aunt Peg said. “Any ant would be happy to have a house ready-made like a trailer.” For the rest of that summer, I stared down and saw how the grass teemed, how there were nightmares of ants that would explore my head and approve of it for a house. And when I walked on anything but the sidewalk or the street, I brushed myself like somebody half trained at putting out fire, not knowing to drop and roll, but not running himself into a cindered fool. Eighteen months ago, my Aunt Peg moved into the house after my parents died. “This is better for the two of you,” she said, including my older sister Diana. “Your mother and father wouldn’t want you growing up in my apartment on the North Side,” and I was happy with that choice because Aunt Peg told us stories about her old neighborhood, making it sound as if she was lucky to be alive. “You can’t go out after dark,” she said. “You can’t go out by yourself.” Her neighborhood sounded like Lake Worthy at the church camp I attended each summer—we could never swim after dark, and even in full daylight we couldn’t stray more than an arm’s length from somebody who’d pledged to stay beside us in return. The plane crash that killed my parents on November 1, 1955, had made them famous for a few weeks because it turned out there 123 was a bomb on the plane, that it hadn’t just blown up because something went wrong with the engines. Nobody had ever heard of such a thing, Aunt Peg said. She hoped they’d shoot the man who confessed . Better yet, she hoped they’d blow him up on television to show people what you deserved if you exploded a plane full of passengers . “Insurance,” Aunt Peg said. “That son of a bitch wanted to cash in on his own mother’s policy.” After a year, the story of the bombing returned like a holiday. When a reporter drove up, Aunt Peg did all the talking. She said she still wished somebody would go ahead and rip the head right off that bomber, but since that was none of her business, she was doing the best she could to raise her sister’s two orphans. A man took a picture of me and Diana that was published with the caption: “Tragedy’s Children.” The same photographs of my parents were in the newspaper again—my father’s picture taken six years before the explosion, my mother’s only a month before, so he looked more like...