Not that she was always preying on other women’s men. She had had only two affairs since her marriage, both of them as a way of getting back when she believed her husband had been cheating on her. Both affairs had been with married men, but in her view this had been merely a practical choice. You had better not mess with a single man, because he might want you permanently and cause a big fuss and endanger your marriage. Sherry could have told Dear Abby a thing or two.
She held off until it was already a week into October. She had been watching Benny Hodge for more than three weeks; she could not resist the excitement any longer. She did not care what happened, she had to get with him. They had locked eyes a few times. They still had not spoken to one another, but she was certain that he knew who she was and that he felt something, too—or was she imagining this? She had to find out. Sherry’s way of dealing with temptation was to try to keep calm, devise a plan, see how things played out, and deal with the consequences later. “You can’t change life,” was the way she put it, “but you can learn to live with it.”
CF Oscan Wilde
By ten in the morning, Sherry knew from studying Hodge’s routine, he would be starting to prepare lunch in the staff kitchen. There was a phone nearby which Hodge had the privilege of using and answering. Just after ten on a Tuesday, she rang that phone from another out of sight near the warden’s office.
“Hodge here,” he answered.
“This is Sherry Sheets. You know me?”
“Yeah, I know you.”
“Well, I think you’re pretty cute.”
“Is that right.”
“I do. I been watching you. I have went to a lot of trouble to watch you, and I’m going to miss you so much, it hurts.”
“What, you quitting? They fire you?”
She felt her knees shake, hearing his voice and knowing she could get caught.
“No,” she said, “I ain’t quitting and I ain’t fired and I ain’t no quitter, neither. I’ve got Wednesdays and Thursdays off and what that means is, I won’t be able to see you for two whole days. I don’t know if I can stand it. I mean, all I’ve got between then and now is my husband, and I don’t think he’ll do, know what I mean?”
“You a married woman? You shouldn’t be talking like that.”
“Well, you ain’t nobody to talk, Benny Hodge, Lord knows. You are married, too, and I know what you’ve been up to. You’re as bad as they come. You still haven’t told me what I’m supposed to do. What do you want me to do, Hodge? Aren’t you going to tell me? What’s a girl supposed to do with herself?”
“You know where the men’s bathroom is near the kitchen?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be there. And don’t pay no attention to the guy standing outside the door. Just come on in. I’ll give you five minutes to get there.”
The way he said it, Sherry didn’t think Hodge believed that she would dare. He didn’t know her. Nobody ever accused Sherry Sheets of being chicken.
She covered by reporting to the operations desk that she was going to the commissary and popped into the dining room to make sure that she was seen. Then she shot down a flight of stairs. As Hodge had said, another prisoner was standing by the door to the men’s room. He motioned her inside with his thumb. Sherry understood that he was the pinner, the guy who would keep his eyes pinned so he could warn them if anyone was coming in.
Inside there was space for a urinal and a washbasin, and there was a stall, where Hodge stood waiting.
They started kissing, not saying a word. Sherry was scared and excited. His mustache was as soft as it had looked, and she loved how soft the skin on his cheeks was against hers. He sat down on the toilet, and she crawled onto his lap and propped her feet against the wall so if anyone came in they would see only a man’s pair of shoes on the floor.
“Benny,” she said, enjoying hearing his name in her voice.
“Benny.” She felt his big hard arms.
He was just getting into her shirt when the pinner came in and whispered “Hodge! Hodge, they’re looking for her!”
Sherry jumped up and tidied herself and hurried out when the pinner said the coast was clear. She headed straight for the operations desk.
“What do you all want with me?” Sherry asked, acting annoyed.
“Where have you been?”
“What do you mean, where have I been? I been in the dining room.”
“No you didn’t. We went there looking for you.”
“They was complaining about that men’s room. I made sure it got cleaned up.”
They managed to meet a couple of times more during the next few weeks in the storeroom, where they kissed in the dark and got to know each other against flour sacks. Necking was what it was, Sherry said to herself, high school making out and heavy petting where you might get caught and you enjoyed it more because you were “getting over on somebody.” They did not graduate beyond that stage until, on Halloween, Benny left Brushy.
7
IF A PRISONER WAS WITHIN TWO YEARS of becoming eligible for parole and had a record of good behavior, Brushy Mountain Prison sometimes loaned him out as contract labor to local sheriffs, who could use him for anything from washing dishes to polishing patrol cars and sometimes for less wholesome duties. Reformers occasionally denounced these arrangements as a form of indentured servitude, but they kept county taxes down, and prisoners competed for them the way professors do for paid sabbatical leaves. Compared to the claustrophobic regimen of a place like Brushy, half a lungful of fresh air was something to covet.
In the fall of 1980, Anderson County Sheriff Dennis O. Trotter needed someone at the county jail in Clinton to help out with the cooking. The regular cook for the past eighteen years, Minnie Webster, whom everyone called Maw, was eighty-four years old. She wasn’t ready to retire, but she was not as agile with the spatula as she had been. Because he would be eligible for parole in January 1982 and had stayed out of trouble and not tried to escape since being moved to Brushy from Nashville in 1975, Benny Hodge was the obvious candidate to become Maw Webster’s sous-chef. Administrators and staff at Brushy, from the warden on down, were so impressed with Hodge’s work ethic and culinary skills that they hated to see him go and said that they would welcome him back anytime, should circumstances compel his return. He would not have landed his new post, however, had his admirer Hot Pants not demonstrated an understanding of political science by slipping Sheriff Trotter some cash.
Or that was what Sherry believed, because Benny told her so. Sherry kept quiet; she had the same motivation as Hot Pants in wishing Hodge moved toward freedom. But once the transfer was completed, Sherry confronted her rival and warned her to keep her mitts off Hodge from now on or find herself accused of bribing a public official. Sherry was not about to continue sharing Benny with anybody.
She could hardly believe the luck. Clinton was only twenty miles east of Brushy and thirty miles northeast of Harriman, where Sherry lived with her husband and daughter, surrounded by a host of relatives and in-laws. Benny was not quite in the free world, but he was halfway there; he had to live at the jail, but one of his duties was to do the grocery shopping. All he had to do was to sign out, indicating where he was going and when he would be back, and sign in on return.
The first time she visited him at the jail, Benny introduced her to Maw Webster, who treated him like a favorite grandson. Maw said that Benny was nearly as good a cook as she was and had Sherry sample a batch of brownies he had just pulled out of the oven. They were so thick and moist, they melted in her mouth. The rich chocolate smell mingling with pork loin and potatoes roasting and applesauce bubbling on the stove made Sherry say that if she were ever sent to jail, she hoped it would be in Anderson County. She was especially appreciative because she did not cook herself, ever; it was one thing she was adamant about. Another was not eating beans.
Maw said that she had to keep an eye peeled or the deputies would steal Benny’s creations, especially his biscuits, and the poor p
risoners would have nothing to eat. In fact Maw’s eyesight was failing, and she was hard of hearing. Under the pretence of conducting a tour, Benny led Sherry into the pantry and shut the door. They were locked in, he whispered, but he knew how to unlock the door from the inside. Other prisoners had showed him; they were always bringing girlfriends in there. He switched off the light. They embraced and started yanking down each other’s jeans.
They made love for the first time there on that pantry floor. At the height of it, Sherry screamed so that Benny had to clamp his big hand over her mouth.
The next time, they used the ladies’ bathroom.
* * *
When Brushy sent Sherry to Nashville for a two-week training course, she missed Benny so much that she telephoned him two or three times a day and rushed home to visit him on the weekend. As a wife and mother, she knew that there would be hell to pay if she were caught. No one would understand what she saw in a convict. But Sherry’s regard for the opinions of others had rarely governed her conduct, and when it had, she believed, she had always ended up unhappy. She had married her husband to please her relations, who liked the idea of an ex-Marine and ex-football player with a steady job.
She ought to have cashed in her chips on her wedding night, she believed, when she had accused him of being sauced and had thrown her ring at him and gone to bed without touching him. On his part, Billy told her she was a fanatic on the subject because her father had been an alcoholic and she didn’t drink herself. He denied being anything more than a fellow who liked to party, and what was wrong with that? Sherry did not question that Billy was a good provider and a good father, and she admitted that it was probably not easy for a man to live with such an independent-minded woman, who took no guff and refused to cook. But did he have to turn their house into a saloon every weekend? He was never abusive, that was true, and his lapses from fidelity had been brief, especially when she paid him back in kind. But he was the type who had to have his buddies over starting Friday night and into Sunday, going through a gallon of whiskey and God knew how many cases of beer while she shut herself up in the bedroom watching television. The minute she heard those balls begin to click on his nine-foot Brunswick pool table and the ice clinking and smelled the first joint, she knew that she might as well subside into a coma. It was not that anyone misbehaved, usually. One afternoon she had caught a kid in the kitchen tying a rubber tourniquet around his arm, preparing to shoot up, but she had kicked him out pronto. It was just so boring, with nearly everyone drunk or stoned. Billy himself never became obnoxious—it was just that he was more involved in playing host than husband. Football season was the worst. About the only way she was able to make herself noticed was to enrage the guests by rooting for Alabama against Tennessee, irritating everybody by insisting that Bear Bryant was more of a man than anyone in the room. Their house was so well known as a play-ground that the prison guards came to her to buy pot because they knew she knew the dealers. At least she made some spending money from that behind Billy’s back.
Before Brushy and Benny, the principal excitement in any week had come at her job at Kroger’s supermarket, where she fiddled the cash register. Sherry was so quick with figures and her fingers flew so fast that no one could catch her or even suspected her. She cheated less for money than for kicks. Let others drink or smoke or pop pills, she got her thrills through private enterprise. She had numerous accounting tricks. The simplest was to have a girlfriend buy groceries for the both of them. Sherry would ring up half the total and split the difference with her friend, helping her out, saving money herself, and sharing a few laughs in the bargain.
But there was nowhere for Sherry to go at Kroger’s. The woman who held the head cashier’s job was not about to move over; even the assistant manager’s job would always go to a man. She held a certificate from beautician’s school and was skilled at styling hair, but that was tiring work at low pay with zero opportunities to steal, and you had to put up with so many bitches. The other jobs for women in the region were mostly in textile and clothing factories, again with low pay and no chance to help yourself. Her first job out of high school had been at Roane Hosiery, where she worked as a crotch-slitter in a pantyhose factory. The pantyhose came off the line in one piece, crotchless, so you had to make a slit with a razor-sharp knife where the extra piece of material would go between the legs. She was not about to go back to that; the work numbed the brain.
Sherry had been hoping that sooner or later her husband would grow up and pay more attention to her. They never did anything together except take care of little Sherri Renee, to whom Sherry admitted her husband was more attentive than most fathers. He had even changed diapers and prepared the formula; now he enjoyed watching television with her, taking her to McDonald’s and the county fair. Probably he would have enjoyed having more children, especially a son, but Sherry had witnessed too many women in her family worn down by over-breeding. Her mother, who had had hair as luxuriant and long as Crystal Gayle’s, had died three months after giving birth to Sherry, the last of eight children, five of whom had survived infancy. After Renee, Sherry had chosen to undergo a tubal ligation.
Not long before taking the job at Brushy, Sherry had made a last attempt to put some zest into her marriage. Instead of partying away another weekend, she asked, why couldn’t they do something alone for a change?
“Gee, Peaches,” Billy said, “I can’t think of anything, can you?”
When she came up with the idea, he agreed to take her off-roading in the mountains. They would pack a lunch, Billy could take a six-pack if he liked, and make a day of it, tearing through the hills in a cloud of dust.
Sherry borrowed her brother’s four-wheel-drive truck. They weren’t a mile from the house when Billy spotted a friend, a black guy called Wild Man, standing on a corner drinking beer out of a can in a sack. He looked as if he didn’t know what to do, with the usual Pelfrey party cancelled. Billy pulled up. Oh, no, Sherry thought.
“Hey, Wild Man!” Billy called. “Whatcha doing? Wanta go four-wheeling?”
Wild Man jumped into the truck and that was that. Sherry tried to enjoy herself, but by the time the men were into their third six-pack she was angry and depressed, and she ended up being the one to drive home. It was as if Billy was afraid to be alone with her. Did he need protection, for Christ’s sake? Did he think she was going to bite his balls off? He knew how pissed she was when she didn’t speak to him all day Sunday after church.
On Monday when she got home from work he greeted her with a microwave oven with a ribbon tied around it. He must have thought that this would appease her and maybe even inspire her to nuke a frozen dinner from time to time.
Sherry was not mollified. On previous occasions, he had demonstrated contrition by buying her a new TV, a Mr. Coffee, a dishwasher, an electric can opener, ultimately a trash compactor. She had everything to make the little woman happy. What a dope.
One Saturday afternoon in mid-December, Sherry shouted through the smoky din that she was going Christmas shopping, leaving Billy and the boys and the scattering of zonked bimbos in charge of Renee. As she drove off she noticed the cars lined up halfway around the block. It looked like honky-tonk Saturday night, and I ain’t nobody’s honky-tonk angel, she muttered, scanning the radio dial and settling happily on Willie Nelson’s “Stardust” to put her in the right mellow mood. She had not slept a wink last night, but she was alert and did not even mind that the rain was turning to sleet. Because in my heart the sun is shining, she thought, was that from a song? Thinking of what the next day promised was what had kept her awake all night, not the partying. Around four, with Billy snoring in the bed, she had gotten up and gone outside in the cold to feel the mist rolling down off the mountains and listen for a train. She had checked on Renee and given her a kiss, silently wishing her health and happiness and love, most of all love.
At a stoplight in Oliver Springs she fumbled in her purse for her perfume and dabbed some behind her ears. She reminded herse
lf to put some in the crooks of her arms and behind her knees and elsewhere when she could get out of her jacket and jeans.
At Clinton she passed the jail and headed straight for the motel next to the McDonald’s. It was called the Family Inn. She registered as Loraine Sheets. In the room she telephoned Benny to tell him the room number and to hurry. Then she took off everything except her bra and panties, put on what she decided was too much perfume and tried to wash some off, and got into bed to wait. She had asked for a king-size. It was going to be their first time off the floor.
Standing in the doorway, dripping from the rain, Benny took her breath away. He looked so fantastic in the beard he was growing just for her and that she had promised to keep trimmed for him, she wanted to throw herself on the carpet and die down at his feet. He tore off his windbreaker and sneakers and climbed into bed with his clothes on to let her undress him.
When he took her, something gave way, a check, a barrier that had always been there before with everyone else, a burst dam that could no longer hold back the flood. She made so much noise that Benny kidded her and said that she’d better calm down or someone would call the police; and when he rolled over she saw that she had made four long scratches down his back with her nails. She told him that it was the first time for her, like that; with him it was as if everything were for the first time. This was the first day of the rest of her life. She knew she wasn’t that pretty, she said, but did she make him happy? He said she was beautiful. She had a body that was perfect for—it. If she walked into a room naked, every man would jump on her. She said that was such a nice thing to say.
“Oh, Benny, what’re we going to do?”
“I’m getting out,” he said, “and I ain’t never going back to jail no more. You got to help me.”
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