Dark and Bloody Ground

by Darcy O'Brien

  “I ain’t moving,” the man said. “Let’s see you throw me out. Why don’t you clear out and take this slanty-eyed snitch with you.”

  Bartley was emerging from the men’s room as Epperson reached inside his jacket and jerked a .45 semiautomatic pistol from his belt, pumped it, and pointed it at the chest of the other man. People scrambled for cover. The woman hid behind Epperson; Bartley retreated into the toilet. Only Benny stayed put. Crack! Crack! Epperson fired two rapid rounds into the ceiling. In that confined space the noise was terrific, reverberated, hung in the air. Benny did not flinch. He stayed in his chair in the corner, impassive, as if watching a video.

  Epperson stood over his opponent, spat on him, and smashed the toe of his boot into the man’s ribs and kicked him in the butt as he started crawling toward the door. Epperson moved after him, but the woman, her arms around him below his waist and her head against the small of his back, held onto him and told him to let the man go, he would never show his face in there again. Epperson put away his gun and downed his whiskey and ordered a double.

  Bartley poked his head out for a view. He let out a rebel yell and hurried over to embrace Epperson, and led him and the woman over to meet Benny.

  Carol Ellis, as she was introduced, was then twenty-seven, the daughter of Anderson County Commissioner Jack Keeney, an Air Force veteran who had met Carol’s mother, Toshiko, a seamstress, when he was stationed in Japan. Like Benny, Carol was a talented cook, but of a more sophisticated kind, specializing in whole-grain breads and complicated pastries. For a while she had run her own catering business but had let that slide as her associations with drug dealers expanded. She had a four-year-old daughter by her ex-husband, a TVA employee; but her way of life was ill suited to motherhood, so her parents cared for the child. What had gone wrong with their daughter, who was so bright and pretty and full of imagination and who had finished two years at a community college before dropping out, Jack and Toshiko Keeney had no idea. They could only blame drugs.

  Carol had just recently taken up with Roger Epperson, who was a friend of her previous attachment, Terry Phillips, a dealer now in Brushy after a series of busts in which Carol had also been implicated. The most notorious of these, involving the seizure of supposedly a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines and barbiturates at the Norris Resort Motel, had ended up becoming a key factor in the demise of Sheriff Trotter, when the evidence disappeared for several weeks, only to reappear magically just in time for the trial. “I couldn’t find the drugs,” the sheriff had said, “but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.” Because the chain of custody of the evidence had been broken and, possibly coincidentally, the deputy in charge of the drugs had suddenly dropped dead, the judge dismissed charges of possession with intent to resell against Carol and Phillips. The judge convicted them both, however, of robbing a drugstore to obtain the drugs in the first place. Phillips received a total of six years for this and other charges of jail escape, burglary, and assault with intent to kill; Carol pled guilty to petty larceny and was given a year’s suspended sentence.

  The leniency came with a price. Carol agreed to go undercover for the state police as a drug informant. She was issued a new identity, including a driver’s license identifying her as Carol Malone. Many people suspected that she had cooperated in Phillips’s convictions, although she denied having done so. That was what the argument that had just occurred in the bar had been all about, Epperson explained: he was not about to let anyone call Carol a snitch. She had pled guilty, as anyone would to get off; that was all there was to it. As for her working undercover, that was a joke. She pacified the cops with bullshit from time to time and used her phony driver’s license to cash checks.

  Benny was aware of the Norris Resort drug case because it had been highly publicized, Sherry had read about it in the papers, and it had helped to bring down Trotter. Benny also thought he remembered a certain kind of bread that somebody used to supply to the county jail, although he had never met Carol before.

  “Was that your dark rye bread at the Clinton jail?” he asked her. “That was great bread.”

  It was hers, Carol said. She had not baked any in a while. At the moment what she really needed and wanted was something else. She headed for the ladies’ room.

  Benny was favorably impressed with Donnie, Roger, and Carol. They agreed to do business together after the holidays.

  Sherry was not pleased by Benny’s account of his new associates; and when he brought Donnie Bartley home to dinner one evening, she took Benny aside and told him that he was making a big mistake, hanging with trash. He had already told her that Carol was an informant, or had been. Once a snitch, always a snitch. And what about Bartley? Hadn’t he copped a plea in Kentucky to get off? It didn’t take a genius to figure out that he must have ratted on his friends—that was the only way somebody like him, with previous convictions, ever beat a rap. You could tell just from looking at him and listening to his bullshit, the scummy little weasel. Snitches hung together, didn’t Benny know that? The next thing you knew, she and Benny would be doing time while the others walked. Her opinion did not change the next time she met Bartley.

  “I’m telling you that Bartley is no good. My grandmother always said, if you want to buy a pig, look it over twice. If you don’t like it the second time, let it go.”

  One morning Benny brought Sherry breakfast in bed—hotcakes, fried eggs, sliced tomatoes, sausage, Karo syrup, biscuits, and white gravy dotted with pepper. She started in again about Bartley; Benny insisted she was wrong. Nor was it any of her business. It was one thing to get after him about his women. Now she was jealous of his male friends, too. What did she want him to do, stay home and cook? She was behaving like a typical bitch, trying to fence him in.

  “Women are like dogs,” Benny said. “They crawl into bed with you and the next thing you know, they’s inching over and over, and you’re on the floor.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Sherry said. “You treat me like a woman, I’ll treat you like a king.”

  Meeting Roger and Carol did not reassure her. Roger’s handshake put Sherry off: Sherry told Benny it wasn’t really a hand at all, more like a shinbone, or a cock with cartilage in it. And he would not look her in the eye. Epperson spoke of doing one big lick that would put everyone on Easy Street, and he acted as if he had the authority to pull rank on everyone.

  They often dropped by the house unannounced. So much for a quiet life between jobs. Sherry still attended therapy sessions; she wanted to convey to the doctors these latest assaults on her sanity; but she could not risk incriminating Benny and herself as they sank in deeper with this collection of drugged-out misfits who telephoned at all hours and descended on the house. She demanded to Benny that he break with them; he told her to shut up or get smacked. Sherry felt hemmed in. The only person she trusted enough to confide in, Pat Mason, had moved to Florida. There seemed to be nowhere to turn.

  Donnie collapsed from hepatitis after the New Year and sacked out at Benny and Sherry’s so as not to be a burden on his mother and sister in their cramped trailer. Benny made pots of soup; Carol delivered bread; momentarily Sherry caught herself feeling sorry for Bartley. He talked about his parents’ divorce, how he had had to go down to the Harlan County courthouse as a kid to collect his father’s mandated child support payments, how he had labored for five and a half years in the underground mines, how life had dealt him blow after blow.

  The stronger Donnie became, the less impressed Sherry was with his whining. She had had her fill of sob stories in her time and had numerous relatives who could tell worse. When Bartley began asking her to telephone various women for him and began bragging that he got more nookie in a month than most men dreamed of in a lifetime, Sherry learned to despise him. If there was one thing she hated, it was a creep who thought he was God’s gift to women. She exploded when he said that he knew she was dying to go to bed with him.

  “You pea-headed little nut,” she told him as she brought him orange juice
. “You put one paw on me and Benny Hodge will bust your head in like a melon.”

  Donnie lingered on at the house after his recovery was well advanced and he was able to begin helping out on burglaries. One girlfriend, then another moved in and out, sharing his bed and drugs. His ex-wife and six-year-old daughter visited. Sherry set deadlines for his departure but, pleading weakness, by the beginning of May Bartley was entering his third month as a nonpaying guest.

  The way Benny looked up to Roger Epperson troubled Sherry. Number one, she hated to see Benny following anyone. He seemed to receive some sort of a lift, tagging after Roger. Did Roger’s big, soft, slow, lumpy, deep-voiced self-assurance hypnotize Benny? Was it because Roger’s parents were rich, or so he said, flush with property and money? Did the attraction derive from the idea of someone from a well-off family who chose a life of crime of his own free will and who had spent years at it without once, except for a couple of arrests, seeing the inside of a slammer? Did Carol, with her equally respectable background, also impress Benny by her devotion to Roger?

  None of these reasons added up, because Sherry understood that Benny was oblivious to Roger’s and Carol’s origins and past lives. He did not think that way, did not ask questions, was as incurious about the past as he was indifferent to the future, living for the moment. The problem was that beneath his muscles he thought next to nothing of himself—and was therefore an easy mark for an arrogant bullshit artist like Roger. Benny was like a kid doing push-ups at the command of a football coach, never asking why.

  In prison, where only brawn and silence counted and where you survived by following the code, Benny could endure, even prosper. In the free world, he had to be led. Would it be by Sherry or by Roger, that was the question.

  In Sherry’s view, Roger and Carol both had screws loose and had fried their brains so often that neither could distinguish shit from Shinola. Carol was living on a moonbeam. Often during her druggie monologues, directed at no one in particular, she talked about Patty Hearst and identified with her as if she, too, were some kidnapped heiress rampaging through the underworld with a drugged-up gang. Roger thought himself a big-time gangster; Donnie had the mentality of an untrustworthy slave.

  Let things play themselves out, Sherry decided. What happens, happens. Hang on, something big might go down, you never knew.

  The boys’ work together began with an insurance scam. Jim Millaway (an alias) owned a gold, silver, and jewelry shop in Knoxville. Millaway, in turn, was close to a big-time mall developer who had a cash flow problem. The developer’s young third wife was bananas for diamonds and sapphires. When the couple was off sailing in the Caribbean, Millaway arranged for Roger, Benny, and Donnie to rob the developer’s house. The gang took a percentage of the goods, Millaway fenced them, and the developer collected the insurance. Everybody was happy, except the bride.

  They did other jobs for Millaway. The way Roger explained it, only the insured people took any real risk. Sherry pointed out, to no effect, that if the person who was insured were caught, he or she might easily be induced to name Millaway, who could then be induced to name the actual burglars—who, if things worked out as they usually did, would end up taking the rap. But Sherry’s was a lonely voice.

  One evening at the house, Roger talked of the opportunities awaiting them if only they would set their sights high enough. They were just getting started together; they needed to range more widely and hit a greater variety of targets. On the dining room table he spread out several calling cards he had collected from inquisitive FBI and IRS agents. It was a cinch to make these cards into official-looking IDs, Roger explained, bearing their own photographs and fake names.

  “Snapper Hall,” Donnie said. That was his favorite alias. A snapper was the brakeman on an underground coal car; that had been Donnie’s job in the mines. Roger suggested that it did not seem appropriate for a government agent.

  “Shane Hall,” Benny suggested. He identified with the solitary blond gunman played by Alan Ladd.

  “Cool,” Roger said. ‘"Come back, Shane.’ Saw that on TV.” He did a line of coke.

  All they would have to do was to cut out the agents’ actual names and substitute the phony ones, using a camera and a copying machine. The Knoxville fence could provide at least one FBI badge. With this kind of ID, they could gain easy entrance to any home or business. They would not even have to confine themselves to robbing illegals. The whole goddamned United States of America was a target.

  “You keep on dreaming, Straw Boss,” Sherry said, “and you’ll get us all arrested in a New York second.”

  Sherry had nicknamed Roger “Straw Boss” the first time she heard him talking big. She meant by it a phony, a blowhard, someone like a foreman’s assistant with no authority but a loud mouth—a man of straw. Roger hated the name, whether or not he fully grasped the degree of the insult, but it stuck.

  She bored in: “Me and Benny’s went two damn years without us getting caught, doing what we been doing. Why change it? You all is fools not sticking to illegals.”

  “We listen to you,” Roger said, “we’ll be doing dipshit ripoffs till we’re ninety.”

  “You live to be ninety, I’ll bake you a cake, and I don’t bake. Keep on a-talking.”

  “Bug off, Sherry,” Carol said. “You’re just being aggressive because you’re lacking in self-esteem.”

  “You defending Straw Boss again? I reckon he needs a woman to protect him.”

  Carol showed her loyalty to Roger by responding with her own big idea, a scheme that had been proposed to her the last time she had been arrested. When Terry Phillips and Carol were being held at the Clinton jail on the Norris Resort drug charges, Tim Schultz, Sheriff Trotter’s chief deputy and the very man who had had the decency to drop dead before the case came to trial, approached her about doing a job for him. The plan, which had died with Schultz, involved crossing the Kentucky border to pull off a robbery up there.

  The story Carol told was known to many besides her. It was widely rumored in those parts that there was a miser dwelling in the mountains of Kentucky. An old man was supposedly hoarding a pile of cash in his house. No one knew how much, but it was said to be substantial. The man was so feeble, the story went, that there would be no difficulty, if only you could get inside the house and escape without being seen.

  The hitch was, this miser had an alarm system that was hooked into the police station less than a mile away. So many people knew about the money that the old man would have been robbed years before, except for that alarm and the smallness of the town, where everybody knew everybody and neighbors watched out for one another. And so far no one had been able to secure cooperation from the local cops or the Kentucky State Police.

  Roger had known about the old man long before Carol had ever heard about him and had been talking about robbing him for years. Roger, born and raised in Perry, the next-door county, was in frequent contact with his home grounds and was certain the rumors were true. According to a friend of his, the miser was a doctor who at one time in the seventies had arranged to have some high-value coal stripped from land he owned. There came a day when he agreed to purchase a bulldozer for fifty thousand dollars; he said he would go to the bank to withdraw the cash. In less than an hour, he returned with the money in a sack, a collection of fifties and hundreds, and handed it over. The joke was, it was Thanksgiving Day. Everybody knew the banks were closed. And what did that tell you, except that he must have been keeping the cash at home? And there were other telltale indications.

  Roger said that he planned to look into the matter further. He was beginning to see a way to do the job. He had good contacts up there. He would devise an airtight plan of attack and they would all clean up, if somebody else didn’t get to the old man first.

  Sherry hoped somebody would.

  14

  EARLY IN MAY, Roger, Benny, and Donnie decided to drive up to Kentucky to see about robbing the doctor and other job possibilities. Roger took the wheel of his 1
978 Thunderbird, black with a white vinyl top, his destination an obscure spot in the southeast corner of the Commonwealth, down near the Virginia border. Choosing a route that was roundabout but the fastest, he picked up I-75 at Lake City, traveled north over mountains to cross the border at Jellico, and continued through rolling cattle farm country past Corbin to London, where he turned east along the Daniel Boone Parkway into the heart of the rugged Eastern Kentucky mountains—a journey from straightaways to twisting ups and downs, from open skies to shadows.

  A few miles east of the Daniel Boone National Forest, he left the parkway to turn south at Hazard, a town that could boast of a Wal-Mart, a two-story McDonald’s, a liquor store, La Citadelle ("Kentucky’s Most Magnificent Mountaintop Motel"), and the sinking Holiday Inn. Roger did not stop to visit with his family, who he knew would not have been pleased to meet his new companions, nor even to see him. From Hazard, Highway 15 snaked past the Viper turnoff, running alongside isolated houses and trailers with their narrow patches of corn and tobacco, and paralleled the CSX tracks past abandoned and active underground and strip mines—with their heaps of coal, called tipples, their gob piles and clusters of bulldozers, backhoes, towering power shovels, and heavy trucks loading up and lumbering onto the road showering clumps of mud. After bridging over Carr Fork Lake and Irishman Creek, the highway crossed into Letcher County near the village of Isom, where a sign pointed to the Mountain Motor Speedway, a dirt oval where on Saturday nights NASCAR hopefuls thrilled as many as three thousand highlanders and irritated the residents of Race Track Hollow, who complained that the roar of engines and crowds kept them awake until three o’clock on Sunday mornings. From Isom it was another eight miles to Whitesburg, the county seat, a brick-faced town remarkable for its cleanliness and enterprise. Roger, Benny, and Donnie had no business there.