She held him and stroked his hair and rubbed herself against his beard. He needed her. Her husband didn’t need her, he lived in his own world and might as well be married to an inflatable woman. Somehow she would help Benny get his fresh start. Everything would be new. It would be like rescuing and reviving someone who had been given up for dead.
“Hodge-Podge,” she called him, hugging him. “Now you’ve found me, everything’s going to be all right.”
They were in each other’s arms when the pounding started on the door. Someone was trying to bust in! Benny leapt out of bed, fists clenched.
“Open up, Hodge! We know you’re in there, you son of a bitch!”
Sherry glanced at her watch. Nearly five! Benny had written in the jailhouse log that he would be back from doing the grocery shopping by four.
“Open up! Or we’ll knock this fucking door in!”
The next day two of Sheriff Trotter’s deputies, the same pair, as it happened, who had accompanied the sheriff to find Benny Hodge, transported a prisoner from Clinton for delivery to Brushy Mountain. Filling out papers in Warden Davis’s office, they talked about how funny it had been catching Hodge buck naked in a motel room with a woman. It hadn’t taken ten minutes to locate him. He was supposed to have been buying groceries at French’s market. Right down the street, they spotted his county car outside the motel room door.
“He must’ve been thinking with his pecker,” a deputy said. “Son of a bitch must be some pussyhound. Old Trotter about busted a gut laughing. Hodge ain’t been with us six weeks and he’s already got his-self some poontang.” The sheriff had scared Hodge by threatening to send him back to Brushy, but Trotter would not do that. You had to kind of admire the boy’s determination, and besides, he was a hell of a cook. “We figure Hodge’ll be real cooperative from here on out. I figure we can tie a string around his dick.”
“Put a bell on it,” the other deputy suggested.
Warden Davis was intrigued. Hodge had had quite a reputation around Brushy, too, though he had never given any trouble. Had they happened to get a look at the girl? Did they know her?
They did not know her but described her as frizzy-haired. She had put on a pair of glasses when Hodge let them in.
“She had the sheet pulled up to her chin. Must be a real fine lady, har de har-har.”
“Maybe this will help,” the warden said. He opened a file and took out some photographs of women and spread them across his desk. The deputies immediately pointed to one.
Warden Davis asked his secretary to get him Sherry Sheets’s home number.
“I hate spoiling her Sunday,” the warden said.
8
SHERRY POSTPONED TELLING HER HUSBAND that she had been fired from Brushy. It was not necessary for him to know yet, and it was Sherry’s way to react to necessity rather than to force matters prematurely. She had always taken this circumspect, deliberative approach to life. During her senior year in high school, for instance, when her grades began to fall, she waited until she received her midterm report card and changed the F’s and D’s to B’s with the stroke of a pen. By the end of the next quarter she had discovered the store in Harriman that sold blank report cards; for six cents she was able to convert herself into an honor student. She knew that eventually the people she called Mom and Dad, who were actually her sister and brother-in-law, would discover the ruse. They would be angry and disappointed, and she would be unable to qualify for entrance to nursing school. But all that could be dealt with in its proper time, and meanwhile, there was the thrill of getting away with something for months on end.
She pretended to leave for work as usual, fabricating an erratic work schedule so she could see Benny when she wished, lolling around the house when Billy was at work and Renee at kindergarten. She relished having more time to devote to Benny, but she was resentful. She did not blame Warden Davis; he had no choice but to fire her, and she knew him as a decent and honest man with concern for the welfare of his prisoners and a belief in the possibility of rehabilitation for some of them. But she thirsted for vengeance against Hot Pants, who must have snitched on her. How else would the warden have suspected her? What also galled her was that Benny the jailbird had scarcely been reprimanded—not that he deserved worse, since his only crime had been in acting like a real man—while she, the supposedly free woman, had lost her job for doing nothing more than loving someone. That was what the world called justice. She was out of a job, while Sheriff Trotter was even talking about giving Benny weekend passes if he behaved himself. The next thing you knew, Benny would have himself deputized.
It was Sherry who handled the family finances—just as she was always the designated driver and the one who went down to bail friends out when they were DUI’d and the one who did the shopping and took Renee to the doctor—and she prided herself on her skills in the field of domestic economy. But with her salary stopped, she quickly ran into a cash-flow problem.
The Pelfreys’ house, three bedrooms and a carport, had been willed free and clear to Billy and his two brothers and two sisters by their mother. Sherry and Billy had taken out a mortgage to buy up his relatives’ shares. At the end of each month, Sherry went to the bank to make the payment in cash. What with only Billy’s salary coming in and buying presents for more than a dozen relations and decorating the house with a tree and lights and stocking up on holiday goodies, Sherry was flat broke by the end of December. She thought of selling or pawning something, but Billy might notice. A scheme to stall for time formed in her fertile mind.
At the loan window to the bank, she asked the teller to check the balance on her mortgage. She said that she and her husband had come into some money and were trying to decide whether to pay down some of their debt or refinance. While the teller was off looking up the figures, Sherry reached through the window and snatched up the stamp used to mark her payment book and slipped it into her purse. The teller returned with the numbers; she thanked him and said that she would discuss the matter with her husband.
At home, she stamped the book “Paid” and filled in the date in a hand copied from previous entries. At the end of January, she stamped the book again.
One day in February, Billy confronted her. What in hell was going on? Mr. Terwilliger had called from the bank today at work. They were two months behind in their mortgage payments. If they didn’t pay up, the bank would plant a For Sale sign in their front yard. What had Sherry been doing with the money?
“Terwilliger’s a fool,” Sherry said. “You can tell him his horse-and-buggy bank’s fouled up, and it’s no surprise, some of the morons he’s got working for him. You wonder how they stay in business.” She had been paying up faithfully, as always. To prove it, she showed him the payment book. There was her receipt, in black and white. Nor did she appreciate Billy’s making accusations.
Billy was convinced. There was quite a to-do, but the bank gave in and marked their account current. As Sherry had assumed would happen, the teller had never reported the missing stamp, undoubtedly having blamed himself for misplacing it; he would be afraid now to admit his mistake. You could get away with a lot, Sherry took satisfaction in knowing, never underestimating how timid and slow-witted people were.
At the end of the month she was still broke and out of ideas. A notice arrived that the electricity was about to be shut off, then the phone. Circumstances dictated that it was time to tell the truth.
She told her husband everything, or almost. She announced that she was in love with another man and wanted a divorce. She would file herself. And yes, she would ask for custody of Renee.
Billy was more stunned, at first, than angry. Sherry refused to say who the other man was. He was no one Billy knew, she assured him. If he didn’t mind, she would stay on in the house until she located a place of her own.
Billy tried to talk her out of her decision, but no, she said she had to do it, she was deeply in love and Billy ought to admit that their marriage had been in trouble for a long time. “You
have a drinking problem, and I have a running-around problem,” was the way she put it. Her advice to him was to “bow out gracefully.” She was asking for very little, only her personal belongings, her car, and her daughter.
When Billy found out who his wife’s lover was, he vowed to fight for custody of Renee, and he and Sherry could no longer speak without screaming at each other. She was counting on the courts to recognize the sacred bond between mother and child.
Sherry took a job in Clinton with Protective Apparel, a factory that manufactured bulletproof vests, camouflage jackets, and other paramilitary fashion items. She worked as a cashier in the retail shop. She also moved to Clinton, into one room in the house of a girlfriend whose husband was working in Arkansas. Benny was able to visit her there because Sheriff Trotter, a broad-minded man, had made good on his promise of weekend passes.
Renee remained with her father for the time being, but Sherry took her on outings and began telling her about Benny and preparing her to meet him. The prospect made Sherry anxious. Benny had often said how much he liked children and animals, but you never knew how a man would react to your child, especially when he had his own. Stepchildren caused trouble in every instance she could remember.
One bright blue Saturday in May, Sherry picked up Renee and drove to the Clinton jail, where Benny was waiting for them and climbed into the car. They were all in the front seat. Sherry noticed that when Benny tried to put his arm around Renee, the child flinched and started nattering on about the Flintstones. Benny let her talk. Sherry pulled into the drive-up window at McDonald’s and ordered Big Macs, fries, and shakes for everyone to go and headed for a spot she had picked out on the banks of the Clinch River.
There were yellow and blue flowers everywhere in the new grass. A houseboat drifted by on the wide, dark river, a man and a boy taking the sun on the deck. On the opposite bank a man fished from the end of a dock, and upriver you could see two or three big houses that looked as if they had been there forever, with lawns sloping down to the water’s edge. Sherry spread out the blanket she had brought and handed out the food. She couldn’t think of anything to say.
Then, only a couple of bites into her own, Renee asked for a bite of Benny’s hamburger. Sherry was about to tell her not to be so greedy, but before she could get the words out, Benny handed his hamburger to Renee. She took a big bite and offered it back to him.
“You can have it if you want,” Benny said. “Does it taste better than yours?” he laughed.
Sherry swallowed the lump in her throat. Billy would never have done that, she thought, he was too selfish. Now she knew that everything was going to be all right.
The only serious complication in this new life, from what Sherry could see, was Benny’s wife, Lona Kay, who brought his one-year-old daughter, Krystal Dawn, to visit him at the jail. There had been more than one unpleasant confrontation when the wife had appeared with the baby when Sherry was there or just leaving. No words had been exchanged, but Lona Kay had looked at Sherry with hatred.
Had she been unfair to Hot Pants? Sherry wondered. It could have been Lona Kay who had tipped off Warden Davis. The woman was no stranger to Brushy, after all, having met Benny there when she had been visiting another prisoner. The warden, according to Benny, had been about to remove her from the approved visitors list when Benny had managed to get her pregnant. Once he married her, she was safely back on the list, as a wife was normally not prevented from visiting her husband, the prison’s gesture toward family life. Benny had baked the wedding cake, chocolate mint with cherries on top.
Benny also had another daughter, Sharon Annette, by a woman he had married just before he had been sent to Nashville State Prison. Sharon, who was now eleven, lived in Benny’s hometown of Morristown, east of Knoxville. She had never seen her father out of prison. She visited him several times a year and wrote to him every week without fail. Sherry had read some of the letters, which had drawings on them of father and child and told him over and over that he was the greatest daddy in the world. Benny cared a lot for little Sharon. Sherry looked forward to meeting her.
He cared for little Dawn, too, and it was clear that he had room in his heart for Renee. It would take time to straighten everything out—to achieve what up-to-date therapists choose to call a “blended family.”
Maw Webster fell ill in October and relinquished her post to her apprentice. She vowed gallantly to return, but it looked as if Benny could be the head cook as long as he wanted the job. He was only two months short of eligibility for parole, which would be a cinch. His behavior had been exemplary except for the one incident of unauthorized absence.
On Christmas Eve 1981, the Clinton Courier-News carried a front-page story about the new jailhouse cook. A photo showed Benny posed plunging spoons into a bowl of stuffing, wearing a Snoopy sweater Sherry had given him for Christmas. His hair and beard were neatly trimmed. He looked into the camera with sad, suspicious eyes. He was preparing a dinner of roast turkey, baked country ham, green beans, mashed potatoes, giblet gravy, cranberry sauce, hot rolls, and pecan pie for twenty prisoners.
The story referred to Benny’s “culinary magic” and suggested that the dinner the prisoners “will sit down to is bound to be as good as many would get if they could be at home for the holidays.
‘"My main concern is I want to see prisoners fed right. I didn’t get fed right when I was a prisoner,’ the quiet-spoken, friendly Hodge said over a cup of coffee in the jail kitchen.”
He was planning to open his own restaurant after he received parole but said he would continue working at the jail until Maw Webster returned. “’I’m more interested in getting my own place than anything. I’d like to have it in Anderson County. That’s home now. Everybody is friendly around here and I’m just not used to that.... I’d like to be a chef but it would take some training. I can make it taste good but I can’t make it look pretty.’”
Bena Mae Seivers, a secretary at the sheriffs department, disputed Benny’s self-deprecations. His meals were not only delicious and nutritious, they were pleasant-looking. ‘"He doesn’t just fix those all-white plates, you know.’”
The prisoners’ plight, the story concluded, “may not give them much to be cheerful about but they at least can dig into a holiday spread prepared by a future professional who has personal reasons to see them enjoy it.”
A sign posted on the wall outside the entrance to the Anderson County Sheriffs Department read:
Through These Portals Pass
The Finest Law Enforcement
Officers in the World
Professional Dignity
PRIDE.
With the possible exception of Maw Webster, a generous soul, no one who worked for Sheriff Dennis O. Trotter or who had been arrested by his deputies could take the sign as anything but a joke.
The sheriff, who was into his second term of office by the time Benny Hodge went to work for him, maintained his perennial popularity with voters by insisting on a liberal policy toward motorists. He instructed deputies to treat county residents who exceeded the speed limits with the utmost courtesy, forgiveness, and understanding. His concept of law enforcement was based on a principle of fairness, that is, that if he did a favor for you, it was only fair that you did him the favor of voting for him. To receive anything more than a warning for speeding in Anderson County, you had to be either an outsider or guilty of some additional offense, such as being imprudent enough to display a bumper sticker supporting one of the sheriff’s opponents. Trotter was also popular with drug dealers, fences, moonshiners and bootleggers (Oak Ridge was the county’s only wet city), prostitutes, bookies, and operators of poker machines and other illegal forms of gambling, all of whom paid protection to him if they cared to stay in business. Four hundred years ago, when freebooting chieftains along the Scottish border exacted tribute in return for freedom from plunder, the way Sheriff Trotter operated was called blackmail. In the eighties in East Tennessee, they called it politics.
Of
the sheriff’s several sources of payoffs, drug dealers were by far the most lucrative for him. Aside from its geographical and topographical advantages to the drug trade, the presence of Oak Ridge within its boundaries meant that Anderson had more cash floating around than other counties in the area. Oak Ridge, which used to call itself The Atomic City, is home to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, the American Museum of Atomic Energy, and numerous government plants. It has been the nation’s leading center for nuclear research since the forties, when, because of the abundance of water and power nearby, the government created it as part of the effort to make the bomb, displacing more than a thousand local families and bringing in scientists and technicians from around the country. Its population once exceeded fifty thousand, later dwindling to around thirty thousand—a well-paid, highly educated group, distinct from and with more money to spend than most East Tennesseans on everything, including recreational drugs.
Oak Ridge had its own police force, but Sheriff Trotter’s jurisdiction included smaller communities and unincorporated areas favored for their obscurity by drug drealers and other crooks, who could slip into the larger city on business or let the traffic come to them. People in the know understood that Sheriff Trotter and his chief deputy controlled Anderson County. And the sheriffs power derived from more than taking bribes. Several of his deputies and plainclothes enforcers spent a good deal of their time making the rounds to collect payoffs, but another key to his success was being able to get the drugs back into circulation once they were seized in a well-orchestrated raid. Recycling, some called it; through it Trotter was able to share in the actual profits from drug sales, horning in on the retail end of the action.
Typically a dealer, or sometimes a lower-level snitch, would tip off the sheriff to where a cache of drugs could be found. The sheriff would stage a raid, making sure reporters knew about it so he could reap publicity. The headline might read DRUGS SEIZED, SUSPECTS FLEE. If anyone was actually arrested, a portion of the drugs would be kept for evidence, the rest returned immediately to the street. Deputies routinely stored evidence in their lockers, from where it had a way of disappearing.
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