Two Lost Boys

by L. F. Robertson

  “You say your dad,” Dave asked. “Is he not Leonard’s father?”

  “That’s right. Leonard and Walter are my mom’s kids from her first marriage.”

  “Leonard has a brother?”

  “Yep. Walt. He’s a couple of years older.”

  “Who is their father?”

  “His name was Delmore, I think. Delmore Hardy. My parents met after he died. Killed in a logging accident, I think they said.”

  “What was Leonard like, generally?”

  “Just bad, a lot of the time. Cut school all the time. Stole things. He had kind of a mean streak, too. He used to pick on me a lot. I never liked him. Walt was a different story. He was really like a big brother to me. A good man when he grew up. Not the same after Vietnam, though. You might want to talk to him; he and Leonard were close.”

  “Do you know where he’s living?” Dave asked.

  “Not that far from here, actually. You better go see him in the morning, though. He’s probably drunk by now,” she said with a roll of her eyes and a short laugh.

  Dave thanked her for the advice. “So are you all from around here?” I asked.

  “Yes. Born and raised, all of us, in northern Idaho. My father worked his whole life in the lumber mills.”

  Dave asked a few more questions and got directions to Walt’s place and to the nearest town with a motel. “I can’t give you a phone number for him, ’cause he doesn’t have a phone. Phone company cut him off for not paying his bill, and neither of us has the money right now to get his service back.”

  * * *

  The next morning, after a night in a motel and breakfast at the diner, Dave set his GPS for Eastland Ranch Trail, where Gladys had said Walt lived. “It’s not the best road,” she had warned. “Better than it was, though. It’s oiled now. Used to be just dirt. But the county doesn’t do much to maintain it.”

  The roads to the trail wound gradually upward into the mountains above the lake. The area had been logged over once, but tall evergreens now grew close together around the occasional stump still visible among them. We kept missing turns for side roads barely visible in the woods, and it took the better part of an hour before we finally found our way to the road down which Walt lived. It had a green county street sign at its juncture with the paved county road. A row of battered mailboxes stood near the intersection.

  Walt’s was the last house in a scatter of log cabins, shabby prefab houses, double-wides, and old house trailers half hidden in the woods along the road. The clearing in which it stood was half covered in a mat of blackberry vines and other brush and littered with rusting bits of machinery, broken furniture, and old appliances. I saw a plastic cooler, a Coleman camp stove and a white china toilet. An old gray pickup truck was parked on a spot of bare earth near the cabin, and most of another, half taken apart, was rusting away in the brush nearby.

  The cabin was made mostly of logs, blackened with age. At some point a room had been added to one end of it, with siding that looked like plywood, painted rust brown and stained with age and damp.

  Dave turned the car around at the end of the road and parked facing back toward the county road. He and I looked at each other. “Well, at least it isn’t raining,” he deadpanned. Nervous, I began sputtering with laughter, hunching my shoulders and staring down at my knees, in case someone was looking out at us. When I’d recovered, we got out and walked back toward the cabin.

  A couple of dogs began barking at us, interrupting each other in a syncopated duet—a big yellow mongrel of some sort and a slightly smaller, darker mutt, pulling at the ends of long chains attached to a big eyebolt next to the steps to the porch. The dogs moved between us and the steps as we approached, and as I was wondering how we were going to get past them, the door above us opened and a man shouted at them, “Shut up, you two!” He stood on the porch, squinting at us for a few seconds, and then asked, in a gravelly voice, “What can I do for you?”

  He looked like a mountain man. He was about middle height, but a little stooped, as if he had a bad back. He was wearing old Levis and a faded plaid flannel shirt, half buttoned over a dingy T-shirt and a beer belly. His gray hair stood up in tufts around his head. The lower part of his face was covered by a bushy mustache and tangled beard, and the rest was wrinkled and weathered brown. He blinked in the gray daylight and kept one hand on the door frame, as if to steady himself.

  “Mr. Hardy?” Dave asked. The man nodded. “My name is Dave Rothstein, and this is Janet Moodie. Ms. Moodie is one of the defense attorneys for one of your brother Leonard’s sons, Andy Hardy. Your sister, Mrs. Clancy, said you might be able to help us.”

  Walt stood for a moment, swaying slightly, as if absorbing the information. “Gladys sent you?”

  “Yes,” Dave answered.

  He was silent for another second or two. “So. You’re the kid’s lawyers?”

  Dave nodded.

  “He’s in trouble with the law, then.” He moved to the side of the door. “Come on in. I don’t know that there’s much I can help you with, but you can ask.”

  We clumped up the sagging steps, the dogs watching us from the yard. The landing was crowded with boxes of ropes, rusting chains, jack stands, wrenches, and electrical wire. Walter waited at the door until we were inside, then closed the door behind him. I felt a stab of anxiety as it shut.

  The cabin was dim inside and cold. The smell of dog and old cigarette smoke congealed in the chill air. Smoke-yellowed blinds covered the windows, and one or two had ragged curtains pulled across them as well. Clothing, tools, books, ashtrays, and empty beer cans seemed to be piled on every surface.

  Walter led us down a path between small tables and bookcases heaped with the detritus of his life, to a round oak table where the debris had been shoved aside to create a clear space a little bigger than a place setting, with a coffee cup on one side and an ashtray half full of cigarette butts on the other. The smell of alcohol and unwashed clothing followed in his wake.

  “Have a seat,” he said. He took the chair by the cleared space, and Dave and I pulled out a couple more old wooden dining chairs and sat down. Walt pulled a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches out of his shirt pocket. He knocked a cigarette out of the pack with a practiced tap of his fingers on its bottom, put it between his lips, and lit it. On the first exhale, he bent over, coughing, for an alarming half-minute or so. I could smell his breath, an ugly compound of unbrushed and decaying teeth, tobacco, and whiskey. “Gotta stop smokin’ these things,” he said in a voice full of gravel, as he sat up again, his eyes watering, the cigarette in his fingers. “So Len’s boy is in trouble. Which of ’em is it, again?”

  “Andy—Marion—the older one,” Dave said.

  “Andy, huh? Wasn’t he the kind of slow one? I’d’ve kind of pegged his brother—Emory—as the bad one. He had more of his old man in him. Must be pretty big trouble to bring you all out here.”

  He took another drag on his cigarette, went into another coughing fit, and then pushed heavily up from his chair. “’Scuse me,” he said and walked into his kitchen. “Can I get you some coffee?” he called from inside, without turning.

  “No thanks; we’re good,” Dave said, and I nodded in agreement. Walter picked up a glass from the overloaded counter and filled it with water from the sink tap. He took a drink and brought the glass back to the table.

  “He’s been convicted of capital murder in California fifteen years ago,” Dave explained.

  Walter’s shoulders slumped, and his leathery cheeks seemed to sink a bit in his face. “Aw, shit,” he said. “Who’d he kill?”

  “Two women. Or so the jury said.”

  Walter shook his head sadly. “That’s bad. I’m sorry to hear it. He about to be executed? Is that why you’re here?”

  “No, nothing like that. His case isn’t nearly over. We’re trying to get at least part of it reopened by finding mitigating evidence.”

  “Oh?” Walter looked uncertain, as if he didn’t understand what
Dave was saying.

  “We’re trying to find evidence about Andy’s life and background that might have made jurors feel more sympathetic to him and persuaded them to give him life in prison instead of death.”

  “Uh. Like whether he was abused as a kid sort of thing?”

  “Right.”

  “Well I don’t know about that. Len had a temper, for sure. But I wasn’t around enough to see how he treated his boys.”

  “You said you thought Andy was slow,” Dave said. “That’s something that might help him. He didn’t commit the crimes alone—Emory was involved, too—and we may be able to show he was following Emory’s lead.”

  “Emory,” Walt said. “He on death row, too?”

  “No, he’s doing life without parole.”

  “Damn,” Walt said. “Both of ’em in prison. That must be tough on Eva.”

  “It is,” I said.

  “You’ve met her then.”

  I nodded, and Walt turned his attention back to Dave. “Sorry,” he said. “You were talking about Andy.”

  “We’ve found some evidence—tests and such—that he may be mentally retarded.”

  “Mentally retarded.” Walter mulled that. “Well, I don’t know. I didn’t see them that much growing up, maybe once a year. Andy was kind of slow, but I don’t know as I’d call him retarded. He seemed like a normal enough kid—just a little behind the curve, that’s all.”

  “How was he behind?” I asked.

  “I don’t know—just slow.”

  We asked Walter a series of questions about Andy as a kid. Walter remembered trying to explain baseball to the boys and Andy not getting it at all, and he remembered Evie saying she couldn’t send Andy to the store because he’d always get the wrong stuff, even when she gave him a list.”

  “Do you remember how old he was when she told you that?”

  “Hmm—twelve or thirteen, maybe? Not long before Len got out of prison. It was when we all went to see Len together—some holiday.”

  I asked him some questions about his own early life, and Len’s.

  “We had a pretty lousy time, growing up,” he said. “My dad—Len’s and mine—was a logger and a drunk. Got killed falling off the back of a truck. I was old enough to remember him, but I don’t think Len was.

  “Then Mama married Joe—Joe Ecklund. He worked at the mill, became foreman later. He was a good man, in his way. Provided for us, treated Mama well. Didn’t drink at all, which was pretty unusual up here. He’d been raised in the Mormon Church. He left it before we knew him, but I guess that part stayed with him.” He paused, as if something had interrupted his train of thought.

  Dave asked, “What did he do that made growing up with him so bad?”

  Walter, recalled to the conversation, knit his brows and thought for a few seconds. “It was his personality, I guess. He was kind of a cold sumbitch, sort of a control freak, if you know what I mean. Didn’t like us boys. I think he resented having to raise us. We was too rambunctious for him, Len especially. He and Len got into it a lot, and Joe’d lose his temper and hit him. Len started running away, and that only made things worse. After I got drafted, Len left for good, and went out on his own. We kept in touch, though. He got drafted, too, soon enough—it was the middle of the Vietnam War, and they were gettin’ all of us they could.” He laughed, a short, humorless chuckle, and coughed again for a while before going on. “I was in ’Nam by then; I re-upped so’s he wouldn’t have to go.”

  “That was a big sacrifice to make, even for your brother,” Dave said.

  Walter shrugged. “Nah—I was in country already. I knew I could handle it—or I thought I could. Young and stupid, I was then. Now I’m old and stupid. But, knowing Len, I figured he’d get out there and do something off the wall. Never could control himself, especially when he was drunk. He was always like that, even after he got out. Killed a man in a bar fight, but I guess you know about that if you’ve talked with Eva. He didn’t treat her too well, neither. I felt for her and the boys. Used to try to talk to Len about it, but I never could make an impression on him—he was too hard-headed. I never could figure out why Eva let him move back in with her after he got out of prison.” He stopped talking again for a couple of seconds, and then asked, “By the way, did you ever find out what happened to him?”

  We both shook our heads. “No luck at all,” Dave said. “We were hoping you might know something.”

  Walter looked disappointed. “I’m sure he’s dead,” he said.

  “It seems like a good possibility at this point,” Dave agreed.

  “No, I mean I’m pretty sure of it. Len and I were always close. I lived with him and Eva for a few months after I got out of the army, and Len tried to help me get my disability. Didn’t manage it at the time. Took fifteen years before they’d give me full disability for PTSD. But he’d go in and tell them all about how different I was after Vietnam and all the shit I was goin’ through.” His voice rose a little and took on an edge of old anger, for a moment, then fell back. “We stayed in touch. I’d go visit them every once in a while, and I used to call Len every couple of months or so. He asked me to call collect, let him know I was still okay, ’cause I was out on the streets a lot of the time before I got my disability.” He stopped and picked up his cigarette and put it back down again. “Damn things gonna kill me,” he said again, and went on.

  “When Leonard was in prison, I wrote to him, and he’d write to me when I was someplace for long enough to get a letter. I visited him a couple times when I had the money, and saw Eva and the boys a few times, too. I was gonna go see him after he got out, but I was broke that winter. I knew he’d moved back in with Eva, and I called him there a couple times. Then once I called, and Eva said he’d left, just like that, after they’d had a fight. She said they found his pickup parked near the Greyhound stop. Said his parole officer was lookin’ for him. I called her a couple times after that, but he never showed up, and then they all moved to California. I had my disability by then, and this place here, thanks to Gladys. I gave Eva my address so Len could write to me if he came back, but never heard a word. I wrote to her a few times, called a couple times a year for a while, just to let her know I was still here. Told her to tell me if she heard anything about Len.”

  “And she never did,” Dave said.

  “Nope, nothin’.” He frowned at Dave. “It’s not like him just to disappear like that. I can’t believe he wouldn’t have contacted any of us after all this time. That’s why I think he’s dead.”

  “Makes sense,” Dave said. “Apparently he was involved with some bad people after he got out of prison.”

  “Huh,” Walter said. He bent his head forward, as if stretching out a kink in his neck; when he raised it again, his eyes were red-rimmed and filmed with a layer of tears. “I miss the little bastard,” he said. “I was kinda hopin’ you’d have some word of him.”

  “If we hear anything, we’ll let you know,” Dave said.

  “Yeah,” Walter answered, without conviction. “But I guess you’re more concerned with helping young Andy. Anything else you want to know?”

  Dave shook his head. “I don’t think so, at the moment,” he said. “Would you be willing to sign some records releases and a declaration for Andy’s habeas corpus petition?”

  Walter looked puzzled. “His what?”

  “It’s the court paper he has to file to ask for his death sentence to be overturned,” I said. “He needs to present evidence with it—paperwork and declarations from witnesses. I think what you told us about Len and your stepfather may help us explain how Andy turned out the way he did.”

  Walter made a face. “I don’t understand all this court stuff,” he said, “but if it’ll help Len’s boy, I’ll sign whatever.”

  We sat in silence, Walter smoking his cigarette and coughing, while I turned my notes into a hand-printed declaration on lined paper and showed it to Dave. After rewriting a couple of pages, I gave the final draft to Walter. Walter pul
led a pair of smeared eyeglasses out of his shirt pocket, put them on, and read through it, his face screwed up into a frown of effort. “Looks okay,” he said finally. “What’s the date today, anyway?” Dave told him, and he dated and signed the declaration and the releases and handed them back to us. Dave and I thanked him, and stood up. When Walter stood, Dave put his hand out; Walter clasped it, and they shook hands. “We may want to talk with you again,” Dave said. “I hope that’s okay.”

  “Sure,” Walter said, without enthusiasm. “I don’t have a phone—don’t know when I will again—but you can write me or get word to me through Gladys.”

  After thanking him, we threaded our way to the door. In the daylight, Walter’s face was a mass of seams, wrinkles, and age spots, his eyes almost lost in folds of skin. “I’m sorry about young Andy,” he said, lingering in the doorway. “Wouldn’t want to see nothin’ bad happen to one of Len’s boys—even if he did do wrong. If you see them or Eva, tell ’em Uncle Walt said hi.” He backed inside and closed the weather-blackened door.

  26

  Back home from Idaho, I made a packet of background material about Andy for Dr. Moss and sent it to him and called to reserve the prison’s psychiatric interview room for two days of testing. As usual, it was booked up for months; the earliest available date was the week after Thanksgiving. Dave flew back up to Washington and interviewed as many teachers as he could find from the schools Andy had attended. Nancy Hollister, our psychologist, read the background materials I’d given her and interviewed Andy, Evie, and Emory, with me present. I’d warned her beforehand about Emory’s blowup when Dave and I had seen him, and I watched in admiration as she steered and soothed Emory through his story of his childhood and adolescence and his recollections of Andy. The anger Dave and I had seen threatened to push to the surface again when Nancy asked about Len’s molesting Carla, but Nancy calmed him. “Mama said he did,” he told her grudgingly. “I never saw nothin’.” He managed to answer questions about Len’s walking out on them without much visible emotion. “I didn’t feel too bad about it,” he said, almost defensively. “He wasn’t any kind of father anyway.”