With renewal cards, however, Sherry had to make sure that they had not been reported lost or stolen or were not over their credit limit. Her experience as a cashier and as an observant shopper taught her that the access numbers for Visa, MasterCard, or whatever were kept beside the phone next to the cash register. She would ask to use that phone, pretend to make a call, and memorize or copy down the number. From another phone she verified the card’s validity, rapping out the lingo and code and reporting that Mrs. Whatsit’s purchase of lingerie was for such-and-such an amount.
She was careful always to present the appropriate appearance. “I can hang with the best and I can hang with the worst,” she liked to say. In some high-dollar department store at the Oak Ridge mall, she would wear a Rolex and diamonds from a recent robbery and act as if she had arrived in a limo, demanding service in an upscale accent and in general playing the bitch. Did the clerk ask for additional I.D.? Sherry knew the rules. “I don’t have to show you my driver’s license. I have never been so insulted in all my life. I been trading here for fifteen years and my mother before me.” If things got nasty, all she had to do was turn on her heel and stomp out. She played on everyone’s wish to avoid a fuss.
But trouble was rare. All she needed was plenty of nerve to see her through. Usually the clerk, lazy and therefore deserving of deception from Sherry’s point of view, failed to bother to check the signature or even to read the name on the card. Sherry was able to use a man’s card nearly as easily as a woman’s. It helped to snivel and whine and paw the ground and say she hoped her husband would approve of whatever she was buying. Being abject, playing the cringing wife—no one was about to challenge that.
She never used a card for more than a day or two before tossing it into a Dumpster. Caution was key. Nor did she ever shoplift, which, like hanging paper (writing bad checks), was a rube’s game, designed for people who were fixing to get caught. Sherry believed that the credit card game could last as long as she kept on playing it because she was so much smarter than the run-of-the-mill criminal and took such pains with her work. It was only when you thought you could never get caught that you started getting busted. Take advantage of stupid people, that was the ticket, and don’t run with dumbbells.
What with helping dear, sweet Benny and doing her own thing, it was a wonderful life. Sherry took to teasing friends who were punching cash registers or peddling underwear or answering a phone or beating biscuits all the day long, “Whyn’t you all get a real job that pays you some real money? You want to count pennies till you’re senile? Fork over half your damn check to the damn government that’s living high off the hog spending your damn money? Get you some sense. I could tell you how it is you could get you a right smart of money, but I ain’t a-talking.”
She wished she could tell the world how living illegal, as she called it, beat the tar out of punching a clock and your so-called Social Security. Let me be free was her theme song. Armed robbery was a kick and a hoot. By God, it was a natural high.
11
ON THE DOMESTIC FRONT, Benny and Sherry lived the life of any upwardly mobile couple. They stocked their house with television sets, VCRs, a four-speaker sound system, scores of tapes. Benny’s preferences, grounded in his pre-Brushy days, ran toward basic rock, anthems of rebellion such as Led Zeppelin’s eight-minute-long 1971 hit “Stairway to Heaven,” with its counterpoint lyrical-pastoral acoustic guitar and savage, amplifed aggression. Another of his favorites was ZZ-Top’s The Eliminator album, Texas-Southern rock with a whang of scumbag whimsy, as in “Pearl Necklace,” a song that celebrated tit-fucking and ejaculation against a girl’s neck.
Sherry shied from rock. Country was what moved her—Patsy Cline, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty, and younger singers such as Reba McEntire. Alone in the house, she might even play bluegrass, Flat and Scruggs—fiddle-and-banjo mountain music that Benny scorned as fuddy-duddy. Her preference for country went beyond the mournful melodies and tear-choked voices. When George Jones sang “Walk Through This World With Me” or The Hag recalled when Daddy played bass and Momma played fiddle and there was harmony everywhere, Sherry heard her own dreams; those were renditions of her own stories and wishes. Benny could not bear them. “Booger,” he would say, “why do you keep on playing that stuff? It’s too sad.”
They united, however, on a devotion to fitness, riding around on new ten-speed bikes and working out religiously at the Oak Ridge Nautilus and Racquetball Club, where they joined other young professionals and several officers from the Oak Ridge Police Department as members. Benny introduced Sherry to a bodybuilding program. He lifted for three solid hours four or five days a week. Sherry drew the line at three days, and never on Sunday, but soon noticed the difference in her hard, flat belly, sculptured legs, arms that packed a wallop. With the hearty meals Benny prepared and their mutual abstinence from alcohol, they were as impressive stripped as any couple on a California beach. Sherry added glamour shots of a shirtless Benny to her family albums.
They passed many an hour playing video games at one or another of the amusement arcades in and around Oak Ridge. To Sherry, who considered herself rather mature for this level of entertainment—nearly all the other players were children and teenagers—Benny’s fascination with shooting down planes or vaporizing enemy tanks on the display screen was an aspect of boyish charm. He had never had much of a childhood, she reasoned; nor had the video revolution penetrated Brushy Mountain, apart from the small black-and-white TV sets in every cell. Playing with him was like having a son.
Not that she lacked her own girlish impulses. Nestling in Benny’s arms, she felt protected as never before; and when he brought her breakfast in bed, as he often did, the aroma of his flapjacks and bacon fried just so made her think that waiting all her life to be pampered had been worth it. She had always loved dolls, and now she was able to add at will to her collection, which ranged from Barbie and Betsy Wetsy to porcelain-faced antiques.
It was an active life. Their house, while unpretentious, was large enough to accomodate visits from the children of divorce and separation—Benny’s second wife, whether through indifference or the persistence of hope, held off filing against him. She permitted Dawn to visit on alternate weekends, when she got acquainted with her half-sister and, occasionally, Renee. Benny’s ex-wife and nearly-ex had a higher opinion of his “parenting” potential than did Billy Pelfrey, who persisted in viewing Benny as an inferior kind of stepfather for Renee and saw Sherry as an irresponsible mother. Sherry considered these unfair judgments; she would never have given up custody of her daughter had Billy not forced her to do so. She resented Billy’s attitude toward Benny as typical of the prejudice against ex-convicts.
She did feel guilty about Renee. When she watched a mother bird in the tree in the yard bringing worms to her young, Sherry brooded about her maternal failures. She told herself that she had made her choice and would have to face up to the conflict of trying to be loyal to Renee and Benny at the same time. Life was more complicated for human beings than for birds.
When he cooked for them, showing the clearest possible evidence of his capacities as a family man, Benny won Sherry’s relatives over. Her mom adored Benny’s fried chicken and asked for the recipe, which he copied out for her—omitting, as he always did when granting a request for kitchen secrets, one key ingredient, so that the dish remained inimitable and everyone fretted over why his tasted so much better. At Christmas, Benny bought gifts for all, including Sherry’s numerous nieces and nephews. Sherry described how Benny had selected each gift himself. He had gone wild, she said, at Toys “R” Us, racing up and down the aisles like a kid. It had been all she could do to drag him home to wrap the presents and keep him from messing with them. At Easter, Benny baked a ham with sweet potatoes, colored eggs, and like a giant bunny led children in the hunt. Sherry took pictures and pasted them into her album.
If E. L. and Louise wondered how Sherry and Benny could afford to be so generous and to live so comforta
bly on his supposed wages as a painter and hers as a part-time cashier, they did not pry.
When Sherry staggered into her parents’ house one night in June 1983, weeping, with black eyes and deep bruises all over, E. L. and Louise decided that they had been right to mistrust Benny and urged Sherry to leave him immediately. She was lucky he hadn’t killed her, a big brute like that.
The problem, Sherry explained when she was able to stop crying long enough to speak, was Benny’s interest in other women. She had tried to believe him when he denied fooling around, had wanted so to believe him, but the signs were everywhere. What was she to think when she started to put his gym clothes into the washing machine and noticed that they had not been worn? “For what he’d been up to,” Sherry said, “you don’t need no jockstrap.” She was sure she knew who the girl was this time, some jailbait teenager who’d been making eyes at him at the arcade. Sherry said that she ought to have gone after the girl, who was really to blame. She could understand Benny; she could even forgive him, if only he’d tell the truth. He had been locked up so long, he was like a kid in a candy store. But he would have to learn to control himself. She was too jealous to accept it; she loved him too much. She confronted him, and he beat her up.
To tell the truth, she had done more than confront him. When he denied everything, giving her his “Who, me?” routine as he always did, even when she showed him his clean clothes, she saw red and hauled off and socked him right in the face. Not just a slap, either, but a sidewinder that would have dropped anyone else. He went wild. He threw her down on the floor and slammed his knees into her chest and beat on her face and banged her head against the floor. She was screaming so, she was surprised someone hadn’t called the police. She was more frightened than anything else. Benny had told her some of the things he had done to people in prison. The second he stopped, she ran out the door and jumped into her car.
Sherry kept saying that it was her own fault that Benny had lost his temper. If she had not hit him first, he might never have beaten her up. They would have to work things out.
E. L. and Louise saw things differently. The next time, they told her, she might not live to tell the tale. But when Benny phoned, full of apologies, Sherry went home to him. He promised never to fool around again.
It was not long afterwards that Sherry began finding notes on the windshield of her car and receiving phone calls asking Benny to call a girl named Penny at a certain number. When Sherry phoned herself and asked if this was Penny speaking, the woman hung up.
Benny said that the caller and whoever was leaving the notes must be some nut. He did not know anyone named Penny. If you’re going to do this to me, Sherry told him, can’t you be a little less obvious about it? Can’t you spare my feelings? Benny stonewalled.
I can’t whup him, Sherry told herself, so I’ll have to try something else. One day when Benny was at the health club, Sherry arranged for a male friend of hers to call this Penny. Benny had driven Sherry to work, the man told the girl, and would meet Penny at Jokers Arcade at two o’clock.
Accompanied by her friend and another man she had known since high school, Sherry drove to the arcade at the appointed hour and, telling her friends to wait in the car but to rescue her if trouble started, walked in and asked around for a girl named Penny.
“Are you Penny?” Sherry asked a tall blonde playing Pac-Man. A smaller, younger girl was beside her.
“Yeah,” the tall one said, and introduced her sister.
“You know who I am?” Sherry asked.
“No.”
“Well, I’m Benny Hodge’s old lady. How do you like that?”
“I don’t know no Benny Hodge.”
“Oh, yeah? Then how come you been leaving notes for Benny on my car, bitch?”
When Penny told Sherry to go to hell, Sherry slapped her across the mouth. Penny’s sister grabbed Sherry, Sherry hit her, too, and the three of them fell into a pushing and shoving and hair-pulling brawl. Sherry’s friends rushed in to break up the fight with the help of the arcade manager.
That would have been that except that Penny and her sister, who was only sixteen, went to the police and swore out a complaint. A few days later, Sherry was arrested for disturbing the peace and assaulting Penny and a juvenile.
At the hearing, the judge listened to this story of jealous rivalry and asked who had struck the first blow. Sherry did not hesitate to admit that she had but defended herself. Here this woman had been trespassing on private property to leave notes and pestering a loving woman with phone calls. What was she supposed to do, sit back and take it and give up her man without a fight?
The judge must have been impressed with Sherry’s candor. Noting that Penny stood at least five-feet-ten in her stocking feet, he remarked that Sherry must have had to do some leaping to land a punch. He dismissed the complaint, ordering the women to stay away from one another.
Benny said that he was so moved by Sherry’s devotion and the lengths to which she would go to keep him that he had come away from this incident a chastened man. From now on, he would keep his hands to himself and his pecker in his pants, he promised.
But there were always other women, one after another. Sherry and Benny fought, made up, made violent passionate love, fought again, often physically, with Sherry naturally ending up black and blue from head to foot. Rather than upset her parents, she took refuge with friends after a beating. All of them urged her to leave Benny, but no, she said, she was not a quitter, and she had faith that he would reform. She was not the type to run off and abandon someone because he had a problem.
She often became depressed. Even the thrills of armed robbery began to pall. She contemplated going to see a marriage counselor or a psychiatrist. Then matters improved, until the next incident.
The friend whom Sherry sought out more than any other during these times of trouble was Pat Mason, who sold cars on a lot in Oak Ridge. Pat was a striking woman in her early thirties, slim and trim, with short, straight dark hair and a manner that gave off independent vibes. She was the only woman Sherry ever saw thumbing through copies of Playboy and Penthouse at the market magazine rack; occasionally she bought one and, unlike many of the men, did not appear the least embarrassed. Sherry could see that Pat Mason was the sort of person who took shit from nobody.
Sherry felt that Pat was someone she could trust. Of all her friends, Pat was the most adamant in urging her to leave Benny. Pat put the matter with characteristic bluntness: if Benny and Sherry stayed together, one of them would kill the other.
Sherry suspected that Pat was correct in her analysis and prediction. Maybe for one of them to die was the only way for their love to end.
When Benny began hanging out day after day, night after night at Frosty’s service station, coming home grinning like a possum eating shit, Sherry did not believe for a minute that it was because of the ambiance or, as Benny insisted, that Frosty’s had superior video machines. There had to be a girl involved. She concluded that it must be a certain redhead named Carla, who was pretty and just happened to be at Frosty’s every time Sherry went there with Benny.
On a hunch one evening Sherry left work early and drove home to find Carla’s car parked brazen as brass in the driveway. This is it, Sherry thought. Pat Mason was right. I am going to kill one or both of them or myself or maybe all three of us. She went quietly to the backyard, dug up the ammunition box, made sure the .38 was loaded, and entered the house through the back door.
She found them in the bed, the same bed she shared with Benny. They had not even bothered to turn out the light. They sat up. Blind with rage, Sherry pointed the gun at the bed, cocked it, walked toward them and shouted, “Prepare to meet your Maker, you sons of bitches!”
She was ready to fire. She didn’t care which one she shot first. But Carla leapt up in a flash and knocked the gun from Sherry’s hand. It exploded as it hit the floor, the bullet smashing into the wall.
Sherry and Carla fought, falling down on the bed as Sherry tore
at Carla’s naked breasts and screamed that she would kill her and Benny next.
Benny seized both women by the hair and managed to separate them. Carla grabbed her clothes and left.
“Booger,” Benny said. “Have you gone nuts?”
“I have,” Sherry sobbed. “You done made me crazy!” She wept in his arms.
Benny promised never to see Carla again. To try to regain some dignity, Sherry turned up the stereo full blast with Tanya Tucker’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing to Me.” Benny said he understood how Sherry felt. He was deeply sorry.
No longer confident of Benny’s sincerity, Sherry began to think that he simply could not help himself, but that did not mean that she could bear to put up with his infidelities. One way or another, they would have to stop. She asked someone at Frosty’s to tip her off the next time Benny was in there with Carla.
A few nights after the incident with the gun, Sherry came home to find the phone ringing. It was her informant from Frosty’s. Benny and Carla were in there together. Sherry asked to have Carla come to the phone.
“Where’s Benny?” Sherry asked.
“I don’t know. Why are you asking me? Benny and me is through.”
“Don’t lie to me. I happen to know he’s right down there with you.” There was silence. “I think it’s time you and me has a heart-to-heart talk. You get your ass over here, now.”
Carla slammed down the phone. In a few minutes Benny came bursting in, demanding to know what Sherry’s problem was. Couldn’t a man spend a few hours with his friends without his woman making trouble?
“I’m not the one with a problem. You and Carla’s got the problem. She is coming to this house tonight, and me and her’s going to have a talk.” She phoned Frosty’s and told Carla that she had five minutes to get her rear end over there.
Dark and Bloody Ground Page 12