Dark and Bloody Ground

by Darcy O'Brien

  Every few weeks the sheriff made a show of destroying material no longer needed as evidence. He would put a match to heaps of drugs at the county landfill—except that what was burned was bogus, the real stuff being back on the street. He would unseal samples returned from the state toxicological lab, sell the genuine narcotics, and replace them with baking soda, sugar, or over-the-counter pills obtained through burglary and hijacking. If open crime got out of hand and citizens began to squawk, the sheriffs underworld connections enabled him miraculously to solve a few cases and return the stolen goods.

  While the structure of Sheriff Trotter’s organization was hardly innovative—muckraking journalists uncovered identical practices in America’s largest cities nearly a hundred years ago; reforming that sort of corruption was the basis of the Progressive Movement—the violent nature of the narcotics trade made it especially vicious and dangerous. It thrived because by no means all of the deputies were on the take or privy to the sheriffs nefarious activities, although many were aware of them; Trotter, like any successful gangster, understood the importance of confiding in only a few intimates. One key was that each raid, whether legitimate or phony, had to be cleared beforehand with the sheriff or his chief deputy, Tim Schultz, who could decide whether to lay off this or that dealer or gambling joint. At least two deputies quit during 1982 but, valuing their health, reported nothing. One of them was asked to resign by her husband, who feared for her safety; another enrolled in a creative writing course and began composing tales of police corruption, disguised as fiction.

  By January 1982, when he was finally released on parole, Benny Hodge was familiar with Sheriff Trotter’s philosophy of law enforcement. Trotter had not been so understanding about Sherry and free with weekend passes merely to foster his trusty’s love life. Technically Benny had violated the conditions of his position and had jeopardized his release date. After the incident at the Family Inn, the sheriff had an arm on him.

  Trotter began using Benny as a bag man, to deliver drugs from the jail and collect payment for them. Benny was not only physically right for the job, the sheriff could make use of him without spending an extra dime. Whether Benny would have been willing to perform these services of his own free will was beside the point. The alternative for him was back to Brushy.

  Once Benny achieved parole, he moved in with Sherry in the house she was sharing; a week later they rented a trailer together at the Cedar Grove Mobile Home Park on Laurel Road in Clinton. He continued on as the jailhouse cook and, occasionally, as the sheriffs bag man, aware of Trotter’s power over him. Sherry urged him to look for another, full-time job, but Benny hesitated. He was unused to being free, and finding other work would not be easy for an ex-con. Cooking was the first legitimate employment he had had since high school.

  One day Sheriff Trotter summoned Benny to his office, which was decorated with marijuana plants and fruit jars of moonshine—evidence, of course. The sheriff sipped from a jar and, patting his beer gut happily, offered some to Benny, who declined, saying he didn’t drink.

  “I guess pussy’s your vice. Right, Hodge? Biggin, I got plans for you.”

  Some people, the sheriff observed, did not understand how important it was to pay their debts. They had no sense of honor or responsibility, and sometimes they needed persuading to cough up.

  Trotter offered Benny a job as an enforcer. Benny could go on as cook if he wished; the sheriff would even see to it that he got a raise. But the real money would be in his new position. He would be guaranteed a percentage of every debt he managed to collect. Whatever techniques he used would be up to him. Big as Hodge was, the sheriff did not think that many delinquents would choose to argue with him. He could carry a gun, however, and use it whenever and however necessary. All in the line of duty, no questions asked. Was it a deal?

  Benny said that he would talk the matter over with his girlfriend. He was just getting started in his new life. He had children to worry about. He didn’t want to mess things up.

  “You do that,” the sheriff said. “Get you some of that butt and talk it over with her. Tell ‘er old Trotter can’t think of a better way for a fella on parole to stay out of trouble than helping the sheriff fight crime, hear?”

  Sherry was strongly opposed, it wasn’t the physical risk; she figured Benny could take care of himself. It was the idea of getting in so deep with Sheriff Trotter, whom only a damn fool would trust and who sooner or later would set Benny up and hang him out to dry. For a few extra bucks, he would be buying himself a one-way ticket back to Brushy.

  Benny told Trotter that he appreciated the offer but preferred to stay on strictly as the cook for the time being.

  “Sure, I understand,” the sheriff said. “Now you can haul ass out of here. You dumb idiot, you’re fired!”

  9

  OTHER THAN THROUGH SHERRY, whose friends and relations were being cool toward her, and through his wife and children, Benny’s only contacts in the free world were people from the jail and former convicts, who for better or for worse maintained a certain solidarity. One former Brushy Mountain prisoner who had managed to start a contracting business gave Benny a job painting apartments in Oak Ridge. Most of Benny’s fellow workers were also ex-cons; the only way to endure the boredom of house painting is to listen to the radio, get high, talk, or manage a combination of two or three of these; among ex-cons the conversation naturally turned to what else they might be doing for a living and who was into what. Benny was not a talker, but he did plenty of listening; and to supplement his meager wages, as well as to gain the satisfaction of some revenge against Sheriff Trotter, Benny visited the Clinton jail from time to time and helped himself to drugs with the aid of a deputy who remained friendly. Sherry approved of this. The drugs had already been stolen, she reasoned, and would soon be on the street again anyway. Why shouldn’t she and Benny sell them, rather than leaving them to fatten Trotter’s wallet?

  But the sheriff took his own revenge, or so Sherry believed, against Benny because of his defiance. On June 28, 1982, deputies arrested Benny. At the jail, an elderly lady identified him as one of two men who had broken into her house on the night of June 16.

  On learning of Benny’s arrest, Sherry went immediately to his parole officer to try to stave off trouble. Merely having been arrested and charged with second-degree burglary was enough to have Benny cited with parole violation. Sherry begged for leniency. This was a setup, she pleaded. Benny was trying to go straight, but Sheriff Trotter had framed him out of resentment at him, she thought. Didn’t everybody know what kind of a crooked bastard the sheriff was?

  The officer reacted sympathetically. For his part, he had more work than he could handle anyway; he agreed not to cite Benny—"I won’t violate him,” was the way he phrased it—unless an actual conviction came down. Sherry assured him that it would not. Not only was there no evidence, the only witness was an old biddy who couldn’t see any better than a common garden mole.

  If Sherry did care for her boyfriend as much as she appeared to, the parole officer said, she should try to keep him on the straight and narrow and make sure he sent in the ten dollars every parolee was required to remit each month to pay for the paperwork. If Benny did that and stayed out of trouble, the officer would be just as happy to mark him reported and clean and to forget about him. Sherry gladly forked over two months in advance and told the officer she would keep Benny honest. It was a pleasure to meet an understanding gentleman for a change. She had begun to think that there were none left in the world.

  With money saved from drug sales, Sherry managed to make Benny’s bond. Whether arresting him had been solely the sheriffs idea, or whether the other suspect, who had been arrested first, had been offered a deal to name Benny was unclear. Benny had been told by deputies that the corruption and misuse of informants was standard practice in this sheriffs office, where criminals were frequently paid, threatened, or induced to incriminate others in order to save their own necks.

  Sherry, who
was by then working as a cashier at the Bi-Lo market in Oak Ridge, claimed that Benny had been in the store at the time of the incident; another cashier backed her up. The victim, moreover, had been unable to identify Hodge from photographs shown her by deputies prior to his arrest and had described him as smaller than his accomplice, whereas he turned out to be taller and heavier. She had caught a glimpse of him by only the light from a television set. There was no physical evidence because, the woman said, the burglars had fled when they determined that she and her husband were armed.

  The judge dismissed the charges for lack of evidence. Sherry and Benny were only slightly relieved. What if, the next time he felt like harassing Benny, Trotter built a better case?

  When the deputy who had been giving Benny access to drugs was himself fired, Benny and Sherry, reduced to living on their salaries, fell behind in the rent on their trailer and moved in with a friend, one of the ex-cons Benny had met- house painting. The man’s apartment was a rathole, so filthy and depressing that Sherry could not bring Renee there to visit. Under the circumstances, and because Billy Pelfrey had refused to pay child support while Sherry was shacked up with an ex-con—a position Sherry considered unfair but one she knew that the court would uphold—she gave up seeking custody of her daughter. If she had been able to accept that this loss of her child would be permanent, she would have been more upset. She believed, however, that she could regain custody after she helped Benny get back on his feet—or onto his feet for the first time in his life. As it was, she began having nightmares in which Renee was snatched from her arms and carried off. She awoke to find Benny beside her and took comfort from him. Somehow she knew, or hoped or tried to believe, they would work things out. His wife was divorcing him. Sherry went down to the court every month to make his support payment, when they had the money.

  She also believed that for the time being, not forever but during this trying and tumultuous transitional period, Renee might be better off without her. Benny himself was like a newborn child requiring all of her attention. Not that he wasn’t a man. To her he was a man like no other. They made love day and night. She would wait naked in the bed for him to come home from work and crawl in with her. There was nothing she had to do to attract him. It was enough for her to be there. Sometimes she would manage to get through to him on the phone while he was working and she would tell him what she wanted and what she planned to do to him when he got home, and by the time he arrived there was no stopping him. He would get a little rough sometimes, plowing away and yanking her hair and calling out blunt words, but that was fine, it thrilled her, and it made her all the more his, she thought, the one person in the world he could say anything to and do anything with.

  When they lay exhausted between bouts, she called him Honey and Hodge-Podge and Sweetpete. He was especially tender when they were totally fucked out. He called her Booger, as in “You little Booger,” his snot-nosed kid, and other endearments she loved hearing. I have lived thirty years on this earth, she thought, and I never knew what it was supposed to be like, and it turns out to be more than I could have imagined. Sometimes her Sweetpete, he was so dear and seemed so lost in the world. He wasn’t like her husband, who could never be alone with her; Benny wanted no one else around, just the two of them. At times she felt more like the mother of this homeless boy, the big abandoned baby. She wished she could nurse him.

  They were like two kids in a rowboat, she told him, floating down the river of life—but that was funny, because he was such a big strong boy, his arms the size of her thighs. She asked him how and when he had started building himself up. When he stood and posed naked for her, it took her breath away; and she noticed that he was always looking at himself in the mirror. Why not? His pride was in his body. He had worked out daily at the county jail, as before at Brushy; now he was anxious to join a health club as soon as they had the money. He never took a drink and smoked a joint only once or twice a week. He did go through about a pack of Camels a day, and Sherry smoked, too. That’s our only vice, she told him, that and each other.

  He told her that he had started lifting weights when, at nineteen, he had been convicted on a robbery charge and was sent to prison at Nashville. He had been in the reformatory before, but never prison, and he had not been prepared for it. The first week, three black prisoners had jumped him and tried to rape him. He had managed to fight them off long enough for the guards to come and rescue him, but he knew that this was the way it was going to be if he didn’t do something about it. He wasn’t strong enough to defend himself.

  In desperation he managed to escape but was quickly caught, with extra time tacked onto his sentence. He was facing at least two years before parole. Another prisoner showed him the weights and how to work with them. It had not taken long before nobody dared touch him.

  When, a year and a half after his release, he was caught robbing a store with a gun and sentenced to twenty years, he had all the more motivation to keep strong. Of course he had thought about escape, every day, but once he was moved to Brushy Mountain, he knew it was futile. He had seen what had happened to James Earl Ray and others who had tried. There was no way to break out of Brushy.

  And then something happened that changed his attitude about doing time.

  Throughout his first few years in prison, Benny had thought of little else but escape and had kept to himself, shunning contact with authorities and with fellow prisoners. He was with the convicts, not the inmates, but he was not a leader and had not developed his cooking skills beyond performing routine tasks in the kitchen. Then in 1977, a few weeks after James Earl Ray’s escape attempt, Benny’s father died, killed in a bar fight. This was not his real father, whose name was Vernon Troubaugh—that was about all Benny knew about him, because he had disappeared so long ago. The man killed in ‘77 was the third of Benny’s seven stepfathers and the one he remembered the best, because his mother had been married to him for six years while Benny was growing up, and he was the most hateful person Benny had ever met, in or out of prison.

  His name was Billy Joe Hodge. The first thing Benny hated him for was forcing him to take the name Hodge. Benny hated his mother, too, for allowing this to happen; but there were numerous other reasons to hate her, such as her marrying Billy Joe to begin with. She ought to have had enough sense and enough regard for her children not to have married a man who had made his reputation in Morristown at the age of sixteen when he had slit open his brother’s stomach with a knife and watched the entrails spill out onto the sidewalk. Everybody in Morristown knew about that incident.

  On the other hand, once she had married him, his mother could never have stood up to Billy Joe, who beat her something awful, in front of the children. She ought never to have left Benny’s previous stepfather, Junior Hickey, who was the father of Benny’s half-sister, Donna Kay. Sometimes Benny would run and hide at the Hickeys’ house when Billy Joe went berserk beating his mother, Eula Kate, and taking whacks at Benny and his two full sisters, Carol Sue and Patricia Ann. Billy Joe was such a jealous man, he hardly ever let Eula Kate out of the house and beat her if she so much as acknowledged her firstborn, Donna Kay Hickey, on the street.

  So when Billy Joe marched over to the school and had the records changed so that Benny Lee Troubaugh became Benny Lee Hodge, Eula Kate did not dare object. Billy Joe never actually adopted Benny. The truth was, his name was legally still Troubaugh, but it was too late to change it back now. Every time he heard the name Hodge or signed it, he had to think of that son of a bitch.

  Benny told Sherry that he had never talked to anyone else about these things. He tried not to think about them, but they haunted him. Now as they lay in bed, smoking a cigarette or maybe a joint, Sherry urged him to unburden himself. It was a way of getting over something and going on, and she cajoled him by revealing secrets of her life, too. Benny said that in facing up to the past, he was beginning to realize what an effect Billy Joe had had on his life.

  Oh, yes, he could thank Billy Joe for intro
ducing him to crime when he was only twelve years old. Billy Joe had written a bad check to a hardware store in Morristown. That night, he took Benny by the hand and dragged him to the store, which was closed at that hour, the street deserted. He handed Benny a brick and told him to heave it through the window. “Go ahead, son, do as I say, or I’ll beat the hide off of you.” Benny broke the window. He was terrified. Billy Joe lifted him through the window, pushed him in and told him to retrieve the check from the cash register. It was his first crime. Up till then, he had been just another kid, a good boy as far as he could remember. His teachers had liked him and had been kind to him. Neither of his sisters nor his half-sister had ever been in trouble.

  By the time he was in high school he was in hot water all the time, fighting and stealing, and he ended up being sent to the state reformatory. Billy Joe, he knew, was happy to have him out of the house and off the grocery list. When, after six months, he was due to be released, his mother failed to sign the required papers saying that he had a home to go to and was wanted there. He could never forgive her for that, because it meant that he had to stay another six months in the reformatory. Billy Joe must have threatened to beat her if she did sign, but still, Benny hated his mother for having done that to him.

  Benny’s happiest childhood memory was also his saddest, because of Billy Joe. Benny had a dog named Queenie, black and white and mostly St. Bernard, who ate too much, or so Billy Joe complained. Every time Benny petted Queenie and talked to her and let her up on the bed to snuggle, Billy Joe became so jealous that he flew into a fury and called Benny a sissy and an ingrate. He said he hated that dog so much that he was going to kill it.