One day Billy Joe, waving a pistol, chased Benny and Queenie out of the house and into the street and shot the dog dead, right before Benny’s eyes. Benny remembered this so vividly, it could have happened yesterday. The first shot hit Queenie in the hind leg. She fell, yelping. Billy Joe walked up, calm as could be, and shot her through the head.
He didn’t know why he hadn’t fainted right there, Benny said, or why he hadn’t run and kept on running. Instead he had rushed inside to his mother, screaming, “Why did he kill my dog? Why did he kill Queenie?” What a mistake that had been! Eula Kate asked him if he wasn’t sure that a policeman hadn’t done it. A policeman! There weren’t any policemen around. “Why would a policeman shoot a dog in front of my young’un?” his mother had wailed. She must have been too terrified of Billy Joe to tell the truth.
So it was that when Warden Davis informed him that his father had died, he had felt more like offering up a prayer of thanks than anything else. Whoever had killed him, Benny wished he could give the guy a medal. When the warden offered to let him go to the funeral, Benny was inclined to say no. But any prisoner will jump for a glimpse of the free world. He had not been on the outside for years. He might get a chance to spit on the coffin. And, you never knew, he might be able to escape.
But the warden attached a condition. He would let Benny go to the funeral in street clothes, and he would even permit the shackles and handcuffs to be removed and would instruct the guards to remain inconspicuous, so as not to embarrass Benny in front of his relatives. In exchange, however, Benny would have to promise not to escape. Warden Davis was giving him this chance to get a breath of fresh air and to prove that he had truly changed, could take responsibility, and was on his way toward rehabilitation. Benny would have to give his word of honor.
He could not possibly do that, Benny told the warden. He knew that Davis was being straight with him and, like a true convict, Benny would do the same. He had to tell the truth, that if he got the chance to run, he could do nothing else.
Back in his cell, Benny gave the warden’s offer more thought. He understood it as more than a gift of one day outside. It was a test, and if Benny passed, he sensed he could expect further rewards. What if he did run? They would catch him anyway, sooner or later, and his parole date would be set back. Why not show the warden that he could trust Benny Hodge? It was a game, like the whole system, and the prize for winning was freedom. He gave the warden his word.
At the funeral home, Benny’s guards waited outside on the steps during the service. Benny was able to chat with his sisters and cousins. He even kissed his mother on the cheek, which wasn’t easy.
A cousin came up to him and whispered in his ear that there was a Camaro parked outside with the keys in the ignition and a full tank of gas and a roll of money in the glove compartment. Benny could slip out the side entrance and get a good start.
Benny said no thanks. He had given his word to the Man, who was trying to help him.
It was after that that Benny worked on his cooking, found he enjoyed it, got appointed cook for the staff commissary, and was permitted to bunk in the White Building. If it hadn’t been for Warden Davis’s showing faith in him, he would probably still be behind bars.
All this pillow talk, which went on in fits and starts over many weeks, deepened Sherry’s attachment to Benny. It gave her a sense of mission about him. He was her man, her lover, but he was still the frightened little boy, needing a chance, hurt into meanness and ripe for healing. It was as the Bible said, be you as little children to enter the kingdom. She determined to devote herself to his healing. One thing she knew she had to do was to try to reconcile Benny, somehow, with his mother and to encourage him to forgive her. There was a saying that you can never trust a man who hates his mother, or a woman who hates her father. Sherry had every reason to believe that the saying was true.
One of the secrets Sherry revealed to Benny—and she had never spoken to anyone about it before—was that she hated her own father. Charles Sheets had never been what you would call much of a provider after he married Samantha Hill and fathered eight children by her in nineteen years. Charles cut timber in East Tennessee most of the year and picked oranges in Florida the rest, so he was often away; and when he was home, he was usually drunk. When her mother died, Sherry’s sister Louise, who was then nineteen, and Louise’s husband, E. L. Smith, agreed to take in Sherry along with her two surviving brothers, who were three and fifteen. Another older sister, Brenda, then eighteen, was on her own. Although the Smiths soon had three children themselves, E. L. and Louise always treated everyone alike. Sherry called them Mom and Dad and loved them, she said, with all her heart. If it hadn’t been for them, she would have ended up in an orphanage.
But Charles Sheets was a hateful man and, unfortunately, never left the picture until he died in 1976. He contributed nothing; the family survived on E. L.’s salary from an Oak Ridge government plant, but Charles would show up every so often and act as if he had rights in the house, drinking and cursing and behaving like such a pest that everyone was always glad to see him leave.
He would get drunk and turn on Sherry, making fun of her hair, which wasn’t long and straight and shiny as her mother’s had been. He would hold up a photograph of Samantha and taunt Sherry with it, asking her why she couldn’t look like that, or like her sister Brenda, who was the beautiful one and the successful one. It wasn’t only her father who compared Sherry unfavorably to Brenda; everyone did. It was as if no one expected Sherry to turn out anything but bad. Brenda was admirable, Sherry admitted; she was now the head of security for the entire K-25 plant in Oak Ridge; and she was beautiful, except for her butt, which was flat. If she had a butt, she’d be perfect, and she was still a lot prettier than Sherry, with creamy skin and straight dark hair. Sherry had darker skin. She wasn’t so dark that she could be taken for a Negro, but at school she had been called an Indian.
When Sherry’s father would get thoroughly drunk, he would blame her for her mother’s death. “If it hadn’t been for you, you no-good frizzy-headed little bitch, your mother would be alive today. I should’ve pinched your head off when you was born.” He blamed Sherry for Samantha’s death at least once every time he visited. You could count on it.
And he was always complaining about her hair. She remembered her father cursing her unruly hair and spitting in his hands and rubbing the spit all over her head. Her mom and dad had asked him to leave when he did that, but the damage was done. It made her feel filthy and rotten and worthless, and she hated him.
But she truly hated him for something he had done one night when she was eleven years old. Her father had been visiting, misbehaving as usual. He came in one night drunk when everyone else was asleep. There was no bed for him, with five children in the house at that time. Usually he slept on a couch, but that night he stumbled in and crawled into bed with Sherry. She pretended to stay asleep, but he began fondling her, and before she knew it she could feel his hard thing against her back and he was turning her over and crawling on top of her and trying to rape her.
Sherry screamed. Everyone woke up and came running. Her father whispered to her that she had better say she had been dreaming.
“A nightmare!” she managed to choke out. “I been having a nightmare!” So her mom made her some warm milk.
She kept her distance from her father after that. It always irked her when Louise asked why she wasn’t nicer to their father, but Sherry never said anything. Maybe someday she would tell them, to let them know how she felt. They ought to have figured it out. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to understand what Charles Sheets had been after, drunk in the bed with his own daughter.
That was the way her mom and dad were. E. L. and Louise were Christian people, church every Sunday, always finding the good in folks, leading a life that to Sherry was uptight but that she was sure was how life should be lived, even if she couldn’t quite live it without throwing up. They were good to her. They sent her to the eye doctor to
get glasses as soon as they figured out she was shortsighted; nor did she mind being a four-eyes, it was what she was, and anyone who made fun of her, she was ready to punch out, so they stayed clear. It was just that her parents didn’t understand her. They loved her and raised her as their own, when it would have been so easy for E. L. to turn her out, saying that is not my child, that girl already has a father. It was just that they made her feel like some kind of a prisoner. Not their fault.
E. L.’s idea of a good time was sitting at the family dinner table. When she looked back on it, she loved it; but at the time, she had wanted to roam the woods. Everyone took meals on time,, fingernails clean, at the table, period, the end. She remembered this with joy, even though at the time she wanted to be off to meet Tarzan. One of the things that had bothered her about Billy Pelfrey and his family was that they would grab a plate and go their separate ways as if they lived in a zoo and didn’t know what a table was for. Monkeys! Maybe when you didn’t have a real mom and dad, you didn’t take eating at a table for granted. When they got a place of their own, she would insist that they sit down to meals together. It would be an example to the children.
Sherry said that as a child she had never been permitted to leave the yard without permission. That was the way it should be; she wished she still had that yard. When she fought with her brothers, which she had to do to keep from being crushed, she was so rebellious, with such a sassy mouth on her, that no one could keep her down, not even her dad when he whipped her. There was no one who could restrain her, no matter who or what. Nobody messed with her. She might stay in the yard, but she was king of it, or queen.
She remembered the time that she and her brother had fought at the table over a piece of cornbread. It was the last piece. He took it off her plate and she socked him, hard, on the shoulder.
Her dad jumped up and grabbed the two of them and said if they didn’t stop fighting, he would whip them both.
“You all going to fight at this table anymore?”
“I will,” Sherry said, “if he eats my cornbread.”
From then on, every time they sat down, her brothers stole something from her plate, and she bopped them in the nose.
“You don’t tell me you ain’t going to fight at this table,” E. L. said, “I’m going to have to whip you.”
“Then whip me for telling a lie,” Sherry said.
“Why is that?”
“Because if he keeps stealing, I’m going to keep on fighting.”
Spanking and whipping never worked with her. If she thought she was right, you might as well have been talking to the wall as to her; and if you whipped her, she would wait until it stopped hurting and then go on doing whatever it was that she had been punished for.
She didn’t know what had made her the way she was, always ready to stand up for herself and fight, and always wary of trusting people. Maybe it was not having a real father and mother; maybe it was what her father had done to her and how little others thought of her; maybe it was just the way people were. She considered herself naturally generous, just like Benny; but at school she had soon noticed that the other children always tried to take advantage of her giving nature, the way her brothers did. If some kid whined that he didn’t have milk money, Sherry would give it to him; the next thing she knew, that kid would be demanding milk money from her every day. She’d have to fight to hang onto her own lunch.
Benny agreed with her about people. You could not trust anybody. The only thing that counted was strength.
“And brains,” Sherry said. “Don’t you never try to fool me, Hodge-Podge, ‘cause I’ll be three steps ahead of you. I can outsmart anybody, but ain’t nobody outsmarts Sherry. With those muscles of yourn and my brains, we’ll make a team nobody cain’t beat. But don’t you never try to cross me.”
“Who, me?” Benny said. “I ain’t that dumb.”
Men were the worst, Sherry said, except for women, who would sooner stab each other in the back than say how do you do. It had taken her some time to figure men out, because she had had so little experience of them, outside of her family, before marriage. E. L. and Louise were so strict, Sherry had had to learn to be a good liar even to get out of the house at all. She remembered one time when E. L. was working the second shift and had forbidden her brother and her to go to a basketball game. They had conned Mom into letting them go, as long as they got back before midnight, when E. L. was due home. Unfortunately, they’d had a car wreck.
The next morning, E. L. asked Sherry what was that cut on her chin. She was prepared.
“I was in the bathroom at school,” she said without hesitating, “and the bell rang to go to class and I was getting up to run quick and this girl stabbed me with a pencil.”
The lie had worked. The secret to lying was, you had to get it out quick and you had to make it big enough and interesting enough for people to buy it. You had to use a little imagination, so that the person you’re fooling gets involved in the story enough, he forgets you might be making it up.
Because E. L. was so strict, Sherry had had only one real date in high school, and that was with a hoodlum she asked to the prom just to upset her parents. She had gone out with the dude to spite them; she had married Billy Pelfrey to please them. That made her a two-time loser, the way she figured it.
It was after she had dated the hood that her grades had begun to fall. She supposed that she had started failing in school in order to bug her mom and dad, too. E. L. had been so keen on her going to nursing school that he had helped her get a summer job at the hospital, something she had enjoyed, even if it paid next to nothing and was mostly emptying bedpans, because helping sick people made her feel good. E. L. had personally selected her high school courses for her, tough ones like chemistry and advanced algebra, which she would need to qualify as an R.N. It was not that she couldn’t handle them; she had always found math and science a breeze. She had deliberately chosen to fail. She did not like anyone telling her what to do, and there were other reasons. Why not piss them off?
“I take responsibility for everything I do,” Sherry said. “If a man wants me instead of his wife, I don’t blame him. I know it’s something about me, or maybe I’m coming on to him. It’s the way I am. Good or bad, I don’t believe in whining and blaming other people for my mistakes. Hell, it ain’t wrong till I’m caught anyway, and if I’m caught, it’s my fault. I hate a whiner.”
Why would she have wanted to spite her parents, Benny wondered, if they had been so good to her? He wished he’d had parents like that. Hadn’t she told him that, give or take a few things, she’d had a happy childhood?
“I’d give up my life for my dad,” Sherry said, meaning her brother-in-law, “anytime. As for my mom, I’d have to think twice about it.” Sherry often made this statement. She’d pause, let it sink in, let curiosity simmer, then go on, as if it were a rehearsed speech. “She’s jealous of me. Always was. Because E. L. loves me so much. My mom thinks he loves me more than he does her. Maybe he does. And I love him. I love to see the way he sits on that porch when the leaves change in the fall, that’s the best time, when he’s painting pictures of trees and animals and birds. He’s a real good artist, you know that? He paints on wood and on rocks and saws and everything. Do you know E. L. give me this picture of a eagle he painted on a saw?” She started to cry. A big sob welled up and broke. “It’s so pretty. I wish I didn’t have to do nothing to hurt him. I wish I hadn’t’ve had to fail my grades. I had to do it. I wish I hadn’t’ve had to do a lot of things and disappoint him and fail him. It’s the way I am. I wish I could help him. He’s sick. His lungs don’t work no more.
“I don’t want to hurt him. You do things. Never mind.” She was having trouble speaking. “Maybe I’ll talk about it some day. Maybe I won’t. You better let sleeping dogs ...”
And Benny, being less inquisitive a person than she, asked no more. Sherry reached for him in the bed and told him that she loved him.
“Come here, Outlaw. You are
my outlaw. Let me do something for you.”
“I love you, too, Booger,” Benny said. He confided that he had truly loved only one person before in his life. That had been a long time ago. Her name was Sandy. Poor Sandy, she had been messed up in a drug deal and got her throat slit.
10
THE BURDENS OF THEIR PASTS, low horizons, shady companions, Sherry’s capacity for rationalization, prejudice against ex-convicts, infantilism, delusions of grandeur, a commitment to progress, dissatisfaction with the minimum wage, the corruptness of public officials, the prevalence of narcotics, the sheriff as role model, the chaos of modern American life, defects of character, weakness of will, the habits of lifetimes, an outlaw tradition, circumstance, biology, fate—numerous factors must have figured into Sherry and Benny’s taking up crime as their principal source of income. The immediate reason was that they were short of cash.
As long as they were living in that cramped dump with Benny’s friend, who was a slob and proud of it, they were able to make it financially, taking into account the regular payment to the parole officer, money Benny sometimes sent to his wife and ex-wife for his daughters, eating in restaurants because there was no stove in the apartment, and the occasional amusement. But any unexpected expense, as when Sherry’s car broke down, was a setback. Luxuries such as presents for each other or family members were out of the question. Worst of all, they had nowhere to bring the kids for a visit.
When they scraped up the money to see the movie E.T., they were so moved by the story of the cuddly alien and his earthling companion, the boy living in a suburban heaven chock-full of toys and friends and relatives, that they wept—or at least Sherry did. Although she saw aspects of herself in the bug-eyed, scaly creature, she identified more with the boy who was so eager to help and protect his strange friend: E.T. was her Biggin. E.T.’s cry of "Home!”, his plaintive longing to return to an extraterrestrial hearth, was meant for them, they both felt. It was time to create for themselves the home they had never known, a place of their own they could fill with love and laughter and material goods. The quickest and surest means to this end, they decided, was armed robbery.
Dark and Bloody Ground Page 10