As for the women, Bartley’s girlfriend was staying out of sight somewhere in the Tennessee hills, apparently. Carol was a mess, yapping and intolerable. Early in the day, clean and with black hair shining, she did present allurements—sinuous, exotic as opium, she was plausible as an attraction in some joss house, an amber-skinned geisha mindlessly open to possibilities. Nor, in a sense, was she ignorant, her druggie but grammatical prattle sprinkled with references to oddball books, pop psychology. Lester classed her as a fading flower child turned crook.
Among them, men and women, only Sherry might be an actual human being. Her eyes showed weariness and worry. She seemed the most intelligent. She was kind of a loner.
6
SHE WAS BORN SHERRY LORAINE SHEETS on January 15, 1951, in Rockwood, Roane County, East Tennessee, a region similar historically, culturally, and geographically to Eastern Kentucky, which lies immediately to the north. The accents are alike. When hill people from either place say, “The far truck blowed a tar afore Ah pulled mah paints awn and Ah shouldah took thet kaemper of urine,” they mean, “The fire truck blew a tire before I pulled my pants on and I should have taken that camper of yours.” The economy of East Tennessee is more diversified and healthier, but it is also a high-crime area, most of it drug-related; and as in Eastern Kentucky the linchpin in the drug trade is often the county sheriff.
Roane County, where Sherry Sheets was still living when she met Benny Hodge, was known among local criminals as Little Chicago, and not because of the wind or stockyards or even a city. It happens to be a convenient tankful of gas from Central America, and on a given night you might spot a plane loaded with cocaine touching its pontoons down on one of several wide rivers and lakes created by the TVA. Interstates 40 and 75 provide links west to Nashville, east to Knoxville, and north through Kentucky to Cincinnati and other mid-western markets. It is pretty country, romantic when the black CSX trains come barreling out of the mountains and rumble over bridges that cross the Clinch River and the Tennessee; but the drugs are everywhere.
Sherry did not take drugs, or hardly ever. Although she had done a little selling here and there, and one or two other things that could have landed her in jail or, at least, lost her a job, she had managed to stay out of trouble through her twenty-nine years. “I put forth my best effort, whether it’s legal or illegal,” she liked to say, “and ain’t nothing’s illegal till you’re caught.” For Sherry, however, nothing was ever the same after the day she first laid eyes on Benny Hodge, September 3, 1980. Her daughter, Sherri Renee, happened to be celebrating her fifth birthday on that date; but a child was one thing, Benny Hodge another.
On that Wednesday, Sherry drove up to Brushy Mountain State Prison, in Morgan County, to apply for a job as a guard. The pay was good—eight hundred and forty-seven a month take-home, plus full benefits—and Sherry thought it sounded like a better way to earn a living. Where else could you get paid, as she expressed it, to sit on your butt all day watching men? It beat being a cashier or a beautician, jobs she had held since her 1972 marriage to Billy Pelfrey, a welder at one of the big government plants in Oak Ridge. Billy’s sister, Charlene, had told her about the opening at Brushy. Charlene was already a guard there and described it as a piece of cake—a little scary sometimes, but what was wrong with excitement? Sherry had an itch. She was as bored with her marriage as with her work.
Years ago Brushy Mountain had been notorious for its harsh treatment of prisoners. You could still see the corner of the exercise yard where men were hung up by their thumbs and whipped. It remained one of the few prisons in the country from which no one had ever escaped, owing mainly to the physical situation of this castellated fortress, surrounded on three sides by sheer rock cliffs and rugged hills thickly forested and infested with snakes. James Earl Ray, who for a few months was Benny Hodge’s cellmate at Brushy, made an escape attempt in 1977. Along with several other inmates, Ray staged a fight during a baseball game and scrambled over the rear wall while the guards were distracted. One prisoner who bolted spontaneously without his shoes fell and was quickly captured. Ray and others scattered up into the mountains.
Warden Herman Davis directed his men to forget about the other escapees until Martin Luther King’s assassin was run to ground. Fifty-five hours later, a mile or so into the forest, they heard twigs snapping, and the bloodhounds found Ray in a hole, trying to cover himself with leaves, dehydrated and exhausted. At Brushy a man may make it over the wall, but he soon discovers that he has nowhere to run. This absence of hope could partially explain why there were seven murders at Brushy between 1976 and 1980.
When Sherry filled out her application, she already knew from her sister-in-law something about how it was on the inside; and Sherry had been selling marijuana and Quaaludes (downers) to two other guards, a fellow she knew from high school and his buddy. (She was able to buy the pot from friends at a hundred and eighty dollars per quarter pound and sell it to the guards for six to eight hundred dollars; the pills she bought for two dollars and fifty cents each and sold for twenty dollars apiece.) She understood how the prison’s microeconomy ran on drugs at wildly inflated prices. Still, she had much to learn.
When she passed her interview, Warden Davis told her she could start work in two weeks. She and Charlene were walking through the front gate, heading for the parking lot, when a state car pulled up. In the back seat, staring straight ahead, was the best-looking man she had ever seen. The sight of him made her gut flip.
“Who’s the hunk?” she asked Charlene.
“That’s Benny Hodge.” Charlene explained that Hodge had been let out for the day to go see his new baby at the hospital in Knoxville.
“He was messing with some girl,” Sherry asked, “while he was locked up in here?”
“He sure did. He married her, too. That’s Benny.”
“Lord have mercy.”
For the next two weeks Sherry thought about Benny Hodge. She tried to imagine how he had managed to knock a girl up while he was behind bars. There were no conjugal visits allowed at Brushy and besides, they hadn’t even been married when she became pregnant. Had he sneaked her into his cell? Had Benny been able to slip it to her in the visiting room under the eyes of the guards? It must have been some quickie, that was for sure, and Benny must be hung like a bull. Sherry dreamed about him day and night.
She spotted him again on the job at Brushy. She was in Shack Number One, a wooden structure directly in front of the main prison building, with a clear view of an alleyway to the left. Through a window she watched Benny Hodge unloading big cases of canned produce from a truck and carrying them down the steps to the basement storeroom. The other prisoners working with him staggered under a single case. Hodge was lifting three and four cases at a time and carrying them effortlessly. He barked at the other men, directing them like a foreman.
If Sherry had not known Hodge for a prisoner, she would have thought he ran the place. She watched him bending and lifting, never breaking a sweat. When he turned toward the stairs with his load, he was only fifteen or twenty feet from her window. She admired his forearms and saw the muscles in his back working under his denim shirt. The bright early-fall light made his hair shine brownish-blondish and look so soft when it fell forward that she wanted to feel it on her face and smell it.
He was different from the other prisoners. Except when he shouted orders, he spoke to no one, and no one to him. Sherry had not been close enough to him to look into his eyes, but she saw that they were a pale blue, baby blue she guessed, and she thought that she detected in them a pent-up anger that she understood. He had a soft-looking Fu Manchu mustache that she liked. His only flaw that she could see was that his chin was maybe a little weak and gave him a baby face—not that she minded; it made him seem sweet. But she thought he might look even better and stronger with a beard. Sherry was crazy about beards.
Sometimes his eyes looked sad, then they would go cold. She bet that he could be ruthless when somebody crossed him, yet he look
ed as if he needed love and could accept tenderness, the poor guy, who must have known precious little love in his sad life.
She learned that Hodge had been at Brushy for five years and was serving the ninth of a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery. Nine years! He was only twenty-nine, seven months younger than herself; they had been born in the same year. He had had no life to speak of. If there was something in him that made him mean sometimes—there must have been, or he would not have received such a stiff sentence— it wasn’t God-given. He must have been hurt. She could sense his goodness and bet that she could bring it out if she got the chance.
The authorities helped to set Hodge apart, permitting him greater freedom than most of the other prisoners. He slept in what was called the White Building, at the front of the prison complex with only a wire fence between it and the road, set up like a dormitory with beds in rows and no barred cells. He had discovered a talent for cooking while in jail and lately had been appointed chief cook for the staffs commissary. Sherry found herself going back for seconds of his chili and cornbread.
None of the other prisoners bothered Hodge or challenged his status. Everyone said that he was strong enough to snap a neck with one hand. He had built himself up and kept in shape by lifting weights.
The social strata at Brushy were clearly defined. Authorities and prisoners alike made a distinction between two kinds of prisoners: convicts and just plain inmates. An inmate was someone who was merely doing time and had neither allegiance to nor power over his fellow prisoners; nor was he trusted by them. Convicts, by contrast, were tightly knit, organized within their own society and its hierarchies, arranged informally but like the military into ranks. The more physical strength, aggressiveness, and cunning you had, and the more cigarettes, marijuana, and other dope you controlled, the higher up you were in the convict pecking order. Those at the highest level even had “green money” (actual currency) hidden in one place or another. Once you understood it, Sherry decided, the organization of life within the prison was a mirror of life on the outside, minus hypocrisy.
The convict-inmate split did not cut across racial lines. At Brushy the ratio of whites to blacks was a fairly steady sixty-forty. Both groups divided into convict-inmate segments; blacks and whites, as on college and university campuses, mixed hardly at all, eating and socializing separately, but on the basis of spontaneous mutual aversion, rather than distinct and formal gangs. (Tennessee prison populations, to this day, have never organized themselves into the gangs—Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican Mafia, Black Guerillas—that dominate West and, to a lesser extent, East Coast prison life. Random drug testing and the segregation of violent and sexually aggressive prisoners have, since the mid-eighties, altered prison hierarchies somewhat. Prison officials continue to observe the convict-inmate division, but it is less of a factor than before. As in the outside world, loyalties have come to count for less than individual interests. Violence toward certain kinds of offenders, particularly “baby rapers” or child molesters, continues, but with far less frequency. The prevailing prison ethos is a fashionable moral relativism.) The threat of racial conflict was constant. A few months before Sherry began working there, three white prisoners smuggled a gun inside, climbed up an air shaft, and shot two blacks dead in their cell. From what authorities could determine, the motive was purely racial.
Sherry preferred the convicts to the inmates or the male guards. The guards resented her because she was a woman and were constantly hitting on her and making ugly remarks. The convicts were con artists, so they were polite, and she enjoyed the way they bullshitted her with rapid-fire chat and had her thinking that she was the grandest thing that ever put on shoes, with their “Yes, ma’ams” and “Thank you, ma’ams” and cornball endearments—"A gal like you could cause the world a heartache.” She could see how they studied her, that was what they did best, reading people; they were so street smart they could fool you upside down six ways a minute with sweet talk and flattery, and they were always manic-high on something. The next thing you knew, one of them had sliced somebody open with a homemade knife or split somebody’s skull with a meat cleaver. They were liars, first and foremost; all criminals were, that was the point and purpose of their existence; but once you were onto their game, and they knew it, they could be fun.
“I’m gonna marry you when I get out,” one called Lefty would say. “We’ll head for California and you’ll be in the movies.”
“You know why there are no left-handed people in the insane asylum?” Sherry would shoot back. “Because they drive everybody else crazy.”
The ordinary inmates, Sherry thought, were nothing but slime and as boring as nine-to-five types anywhere, putting in time and always ready to snitch. The convicts were her allies in a system that ran on lies and accomodations, threats and power. She knew enough, for instance, to turn a blind eye to the wall-to-wall homosexuality, as to the drugs. What else was a locked-up man supposed to do? Like most people, most of them were sheep and went along with the sex because it was the accepted thing. A handful were brutally gay, punishing the sexual slaves they called punks; some took on girlish-looking boys as punks and pretended they were women. Others merely did what they could to fill the isolated hours with the human warmth available, which happened to be male. It was no different from becoming a cannibal if you were starving to death; it didn’t mean you would pass up ham and eggs if they were offered. A man who wasn’t a natural fruiter, Sherry was told and believed, would go back to women once he was free. She thought that people in prison understood human nature better than hypocrites on the outside. At Brushy you had to face reality. There was nothing else.
It was the same with the dope: she ignored it unless it was blatant, and even then, she’d tell a guy to get smart rather than bust him. She had stopped selling to the guards once she became one; she did not trust her male fellow workers not to snitch on her just to get rid of a woman. They had other sources, and the wives and girlfriends of the prisoners smuggled in plenty of dope, usually inside a condom or a balloon hidden in pants or vaginas. The men swallowed it or inserted it into their rectums, in case they were cavity-searched. (Visitors were never cavity-searched unless strongly suspected.) It was a game that was more or less ignored. Marijuana or downers, after all, kept the men calm. They could get away with smoking pot in their cells in any number of ways, combining it with apple-scented pipe tobacco, smoking it with the water running in the basin so the fumes went down the drain, perfuming the air with spray deodorant or baby powder.
Sherry’s growing infatuation with Benny Hodge helped her catch on fast. He was obviously a convict, a general who took orders from no one. She gathered that he controlled a lot of dope but was himself clean, being so health-conscious. Nor did he resort to men for sex. Apart from visitors—the story was that Hodge had made his new wife pregnant when she sat on his lap at the prison picnic grounds—he was also involved with another woman who worked at the prison with a face like a bad stretch of road but a great figure.
This woman was always disappearing with Hodge. A prisoner was supposed to be accompanied by a prison employee whenever he left the cellblock, so Hot Pants, that was what Sherry called her, was always saying, “I’m taking Hodge down to bring this here stuff up,” and down they went together into the storeroom. She would come up looking mighty smug. What did she think people thought they had been doing, taking inventory?
Sherry was jealous. It didn’t seem right that a man like Hodge was doing the Texas two-step with a pruneface.
The exercise yard was at the rear of the main building. Beyond the yard lay the ball field, the wall, and the mountains. Sherry discovered that she could stand on the third floor at the end of a row of cells and look down into the yard to see Hodge lifting weights. He was there every afternoon, stripped to the waist, lifting.
Sherry wondered about the wisdom of leaving those weights where anyone could pick them up. A couple of years before, one prisoner had been heaving a barbell over his head wh
en another ran up and smashed down on his face with a hundred-pound weight. The victim had required extensive plastic surgery. But no one came within thirty feet of Hodge when he exercised. If someone dared, Sherry imagined, they could feed the guy to the dogs, for all that would be left of him.
As often as she could, Sherry stole time to watch from her perch as Hodge lifted. She guessed that he must be pressing four hundred pounds. It was the most gorgeous body she had ever seen, perfectly proportioned, with more muscles than you would have guessed from the way he looked with his shirt on; but his was an athlete’s body, not a muscle freak’s. She heard his grunts echoing off the concrete and dug her nails into her palms.
He lifted standing first, straining, grimacing, triumphant. Then he lay on his back on the bench with his crotch toward her, legs bent, sweat streaming. He was not too hairy, just some on his chest.
All around her there were men, five hundred of them, men in their cells jerking off and touching each other men swabbing floors, men in the kitchen working and in the dining room eating in shifts, always eating, men watching from the towers. And in the center was Benny Hodge.
It wasn’t easy at home at night in the marriage bed, thinking about Hodge in the yard or Hodge in the basement with that horny old bitch.
Sherry had been a tomboy. She had never thought of herself as pretty; an older sister was the beautiful one. But Sherry didn’t think she had to be a prom queen to be attractive to men. She wore no makeup; it was her way of saying take me as I am or leave me the hell alone. She believed that she had certain qualities, including more determination than the next ten women combined, that compensated for whatever knockout looks God had neglected to provide her. Another thing she knew about herself was that when someone told her that she could not have something, she found a way to get it. She had been that way as far back as she could remember, like a running back who found a way around when he couldn’t go straight through. And when someone had something else she wanted, especially when that something was a man, then watch out.
Dark and Bloody Ground Page 6