by Jim Beegle
I had known a girl, Vera Walker, who lived on the farm next to ours. Her folks worked their land for the same man my family did. She was about my age and we had dated for about a year. Actually, it wasn’t called dating back then, it was called courting. So Vera and I courted. She was the prettiest girl I had ever known in my life. Not that my exposure was that great outside of my mother and my sisters. But even in her old hand-me-down dress made from feed sacks, she still could make my heart stop when I walked by. So, in September of 1965, wearing the same suit I had buried my dad in, we got married and she moved in with me to the drafty ramshackle house I called home. We weren’t married long before Vera got pregnant. Just a little more than a year after we had said “I do” before the judge at the courthouse, she gave birth to a little boy. We named him after me. I can tell you, Mark, you think that winning the lottery one Wednesday or Saturday night is the only way to get rich overnight, it just isn’t so. There was no man alive richer than I was that night late in October of 1966 when Little David was born.
Things went along for us the way things seemed to have always gone along. The days were long and the work was hard. The best we could do most months was just keep our heads above water. But being with people, having someone around to love and be loved by will help you through the toughest of times, I can assure you. But even when you live with people you love, times can still get pretty hard. In February of 1969, a cold front moved into north Texas and dumped several feet of snow into Eastland County, stranding just about everyone and everything for miles around. After it finally stopped snowing, things just went from bad to worse. We had run out of coal to heat the house and I had to resort to cutting wood and burning it in the stove in the part of the house we called the kitchen in order to try to keep the house warm. All the water was frozen. I had to carry in ice from the well and we would set it on the stove to get it to melt just to have something to drink. After three days of being snowed in, there was no food in the house. Worse still, with no work to speak of because of the snow, there was no money to buy anything with either. I took the only material thing my daddy had ever owned, a 16-gauge Remington shotgun, and left to see if maybe I could find some rabbits or deer that we could live off of until the storm passed. I was out about four hours. I managed to kill three rabbits in that time and I was beginning to think that we might just get through this one this time. When I got home, I discovered that I was going to be the only one to get through this time.
I got back and found Vera and David asleep in our bed. I tried to wake Vera up to help me clean and cook the rabbits. She would not wake up. Neither would David.
The sheriff told me they died from carbon monoxide poisoning. He said they died because the stove was not working right and that it looked to him like the flue had gotten clogged and did not let all the gas out. The roof was pretty heavy with snow and all that snow sealed up the holes and openings up there that had, up until that time, let all the poisonous gas out. He said it was only a matter of time with things like that before someone died. He told me I should be thankful that I had gone hunting. I did not feel lucky.
I buried them a few days later wearing the same suit I had married her in. I never wanted to burn clothes any worse than I wanted to burn those. Vera and Little David are buried several rows over in the same cemetery where I am to be laid to rest. I had bought the plot right next to them when I made their arrangements thinking that, when my time came, I would be able once again to lie down beside them. Complications caused by some of my other choices have made that impossible, as you can now see. But at least they will be close by soon.
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Mark stopped reading and drank again from the now cold cup of tea. He would have cried right then and there if his mind had not been so numb from the multiple shocks he had just experienced. He did not yet know how to react. He wanted to grieve for his friend’s family, but his mind was in an uproar, unable to focus on anything at the moment. His thoughts were interrupted by the return of the young lady who had earlier brought the tea and water. This time she returned bearing fish sandwiches and soda. Mark did not speak to her again and, just as before, she left, closing the door behind her. Mark welcomed the interruption this time. His memories of Cecil, or David, were closing in on him and the room was beginning to feel very small.
He ate slowly, thinking as he chewed and drank. He did not know what to think about the information he had just read. He had no doubt that it was all true. Up until this point, Cecil (he could not bring himself to think of him as anyone but Cecil) had never been anything but truthful with him. Even now, as Cecil had pointed out, he had not out and out lied to Mark. Just chose to withhold some of the story. Mark finished his lunch and returned to his computer. He moved his fingers over the track-pad and waited for the computer to wake up from the nap that Mark’s attention to lunch had caused the device to take. Before he started reading again, Mark repacked his pipe with fresh tobacco, lit it and settled back in his chair to take up Cecil’s story fresh.
* * *
At twenty-two, I felt so old to be so young. I was tired of farming someone else’s land and never seeing any of the benefits from the crops I would bring in. I was tired of Eastland County and all the death that this part of Texas had visited upon me. But I had no means to leave. The hand that I had been playing since I was born into that god-forsaken land had seen to it. So I did what every young man with nothing to left to lose does when he wants to get away from it all. I drove the old pickup truck to the post office in town and joined the Army.
The war in Vietnam was at its peak. It did not take the Army long to decide that I was just the kind of fellow they needed in Asia—able to see lightning and hear thunder. Just a week after I joined, I was on a bus that left Eastland, Texas bound for Ft. Dix, New Jersey, and United States Army Basic Training Center. I got there two days later and was awakened from a sound sleep by one of the biggest men I had ever seen in my life. He began yelling at me to get off his bus before he was compelled to forget what a nice guy he was and kick my ass. I think he yelled non-stop for the next eight weeks. Two other men of like temperament soon joined the drill instructor, Sergeant Lovelady, and they began to teach me all manner of things I never knew that I needed to know. I learned to run with fifty pounds of pack and combat gear. I learned to shoot a rifle and became pretty good at it. My education held a few pleasant surprises too.
I learned that it was nice to go to bed at night dry and warm. I learned that I like taking hot showers and not having to worry, for the first time in my life, where my next meal was going to come from.
Three weeks into training they marched all of us to a building where they administered a series of general knowledge and aptitude tests. They soon discovered that, as far as general book knowledge went, I did not have much to offer. I was given credit with having a fourth-grade level of education. I am not sure if it was that high. All I knew was that you had to have at least a fourth-grade level or they would discharge you from the Army. Everyone in my platoon seemed to be at least that smart because no one was cycled out. What they did discover was that, while I did not have much in the way of book smarts, I had an uncanny way with numbers. A few days after these tests were completed, we were taken to a place called Classification where we were told how important what the Army had just learned about us was going to be. Classification is where the Army lets you pick out what they want you to be. In my case, they had narrowed the choices pretty tightly.
The sergeant in charge of my future on this afternoon in April wanted to know what I knew about computers. I told him that I knew what they were, but had never seen one. He told me that computers would one day run just about everything in our lives, but that they needed people who were good with numbers to make computers work the way they were meant to. He told me that, basically, all a computer does is calculate a lot of numbers really fast, and this is where I would come in. He began to spin a yarn for me about how computers would become one of th
e single most important things invented in this century. I also figured out on my own that the people who knew how to run these new computers would be even more important than the machines themselves. What he proposed was that, if I would agree to stay in the Army for an extra year, three instead of two, the Army would train me to be the master of one of these new wonders of the world. I had already decided that, for the most part, the worst day in the Army beat the best day I had ever had farming, and it did not take me long to agree to the terms of his offer. So, after completing Basic Training, I was shipped off to the Army’s computer school in Ft. Lee, Virginia, for thirty-six weeks of computer training. Just like it did not take me long to decide that I really liked the Army, it did not take me long to decide that I liked working with computers.
After I got out of training, I was sent to Mannheim, in then-West Germany. I was assigned to the payroll branch of the quartermaster, and my job was to make sure that everyone got paid what they had coming to them—not a penny more and not a penny less—and I had to make sure that they got that pay on time. It was not very challenging work, but I liked doing it anyway. I also decided that I liked working with computers and, for one of the few times that I can think of, the Army actually did match the right man with the right job.
At the end of my first enlistment, I reenlisted for another four years. I moved from Germany to Ft. Rucker in Southern Alabama, just about one hundred miles north of Panama City, Florida and the gulf coast. Ft. Rucker is where the Army trains all their helicopter pilots. After two years in Alabama, I was stationed in Japan. I enjoyed Japan. I enjoyed Germany and Alabama for that matter. I was one of the few people raised in Eastland County who had traveled out of the state of Texas, much less out of the United States.
In 1975, I considered getting out of the service but, before I could make up my mind, a slick sergeant whose job it was to talk simple country boys like me into staying in talked me out of civilian life and back into the Army. The fact of the matter was that I was no longer a boy and, even though when I was excited I would still talk with a Texas accent, I had changed a lot as well. I was also not so simple anymore either. I extracted a promise for more training in exchange for another five years of my life. I was specifically interested in learning how to set up large computer systems that could talk to each other remotely. In 1975, it was pretty heady stuff. Today they call that system the Internet. To fulfill their promise to me, I was sent to the Advance Remote Data Processing System School in Ft. Carson, Colorado. First time in my life I had ever seen the Rockies. I was there for almost a year.
My job would still be using computers, but now in a different manner. I was trained in the use of the machines to assist Army Intelligence and the CIA in the ever-growing cold war on communism and its spread into the free world. They used computers mainly to track movements and to analyze communications intercepts. After training, I served eighteen months in the Pentagon before being shipped back to Germany. This time I was in Frankfurt at the headquarters, for not just the U.S. Army, but for our part of the NATO command structure. It was there that I got the practical experience of programming large remote systems.
I would have reenlisted after my third tour of duty, but the war in Vietnam was over and the Army was busy shedding as many people as they could. Besides, despite all the traveling and the places I had seen, I was homesick for Texas. Not that much for Eastland, just for Texas. I had visited my sisters a few times over the years, but not very often and I never stayed very long. So, in March of 1979, I was honorably discharged from the United States Army. In thirteen years, I had risen to the rank of Sergeant First Class, E-7, and had gone from a Junior High School dropout to someone with a good deal of college credit to his name. When I left the Army, I had fifteen thousand dollars cash in my pocket and a two-year-old Chevy Impala. I had more money in my pocket the day I left the Army than my daddy made in his entire life.
I bummed around for about three months. Sleeping late and staying out all night. But even if money were no object, that kind of life gets old pretty quick and, in June of 1979, I found myself in Houston with about two thousand dollars left. I decided it was time to look for a job. I went to the State Employment Agency. They really didn’t have anything besides low-wage construction jobs or high-paying eighteen-hour-a-day jobs working as a roustabout on offshore oil rigs. But the gentleman I interviewed with recommended I try some of the local banks. He had heard that they were beginning to convert all their operations over to computers and he thought that they might have work more suited to what I might be looking for. He was right.
The first place I applied, the Southwest Bank of Houston, hired me on the spot. I reported to work the next day as the new System Analyst for the fledgling Management Information System (MIS) Department. It was work I knew I could do, and pretty soon I proved to them that they were not wrong in hiring me. Over the next few years, we converted the whole bank’s accounting and deposit system from hand-kept ledgers to a large and expensive computer system. When the oil boom hit in the mid-seventies, the bank went global.
We were doing business with all the oil-producing and oil-consuming nations of the world—the Middle East, Europe, Burma, Mexico, and Canada. The biggest problem doing business on such a large and far-flung scale was speed. Back in then the price of oil changed hourly. Money that had been moving from one side of the world to the other in a week now had to make the same trip in a matter of hours. Huge fortunes could be won or lost by having money on the wrong side of the world when the price of oil futures changed. Texas was awash in oil money. The assets of the Southwest Bank of Houston went from three hundred million in 1979, when I joined the bank, to over one billion by the end of 1980, and to five billion by the end of 1982.
My career rose right along with the assets of the bank. In late 1980, I was in charge of the whole MIS operation and had over two hundred people working under me. For all the success, I stayed pretty much the same, though I got rid of the old Impala several times over and bought a house in one of the sprawling suburbs of Houston. I had begun to dislike living by myself and devoting all my waking hours to the bank. When I was younger, new to the Army, and even after I had gotten out and sought my fortune in the world outside of the service, I seemed to be driven, haunted as it were, by the visions of my wife and son sleeping peacefully in the bed. Mark, when I left Eastland, I promised myself that I would never be poor again. The visions of my dad and mom, my brother and my sisters living from crop to crop and meal to meal drove me to forget about anything but succeeding. I have met people who lived through the Depression who are this way. You can look at them and see that they have that hungry look in their eyes. But I guess that sleeping inside where the rain didn’t leak in and eating on a regular basis began to cause me to realize that there were other parts missing in my life. I guess that I had avoided getting seriously involved with anyone after Vera. Oh, I had dated a few women, but I never could shake the feeling that engulfed me the day I buried her and Little David. I could not stand the thought of having to go through losing someone again. But, late in 1981, as the holidays drew closer, I began to feel shackled by the loneliness that my chosen lifestyle had created. I guess you could say that I was vulnerable. I was in a position to drown in the slightest attention paid to me.
I met a woman at the bank who was ten years younger than I was. Soon after meeting, we got very serious about each other. The romance was one of instant passion and it totally consumed me. We dated for just a few months before we got married in a civil ceremony in New Orleans, in February 1982. Her name was Wanda. She was from Lubbock and had gone to school in Houston. The marriage was her idea and, at the time, it seemed like a good one to me. At first, things could not have been better for me. But within just a few months, the relationship got stormy. She was given to drinking a good deal and, when she was drunk, she had trouble with her memory. Especially where it concerned her marital status. The Fourth of July was extremely tough. She drank from the time she g
ot home for the long weekend until the Monday we both had to be back to work. As far as I know, she did not stop partying even then. I say as far as I know because, when I woke up that Monday morning, she was gone. Along with my car, everything of value in the house and the twenty-five thousand dollars I had in the bank. I was devastated. Even though I knew that she had cleaned me out, I still could not bring myself to turn her into the police. Something in her leaving, though, broke something in me.
The old fears that I thought I had left in Eastland came crashing down on me. Even now I don’t know why the memories came back to me with such force like that. While twenty-five thousand dollars was a lot of money, it wasn’t the end of the world. I had a good job and a good home and, while losing the car was an inconvenience, it wasn’t that hard to replace. I think it was the fact that, once again, someone I cared for had left me, and taken everything of value with her when she did. Vera didn’t go without David, and Wanda didn’t go without the other stuff. I began to realize that all of it was my fault. I had killed Vera and David. I had driven Wanda away. With this new truth hanging over my head, I slipped into a deep and serious depression. I began to feel trapped by the choices I had made in my life. The walls of my house and of my office at the bank began to close in on me. It began to prey on my mind all the time. I would wake up at night in a cold sweat dreaming about how my first wife and son had died. It got to the point where I could only sleep for an hour at a time before I would wake up fighting to get a lung full of air. The only way I could get any rest was to fall asleep on the patio on a lawn chair by the pool. This went on for a month and a half until finally, I decided I needed to get out. So, just before Labor Day weekend in 1983, I got out. If you would, please open the envelope labeled No. 2 now.