Dark and Bloody Ground (15 page)

When things were slow, it was easy enough to pinpoint the major dealer in any town. It did not take any supersleuth. What did people think, that drugs were scarce? It amazed Sherry how obvious narcotics were in the life of every town, while everyone pretended that what mattered was high school football, the minimum wage, Jesus, trailer park rents, and the Dairy Queen. All you had to do was hang around the high school parking lot to see which kid was dealing dope. Probably he was fencing mom’s cardigan from last night’s break-in, too.

Benny and his partner would follow the kid and pretend to bust him—the blue light was useful for this. The kid would be scared shitless, and he would be quick to confess the name and address of his supplier in return for being set free. If the dealer turned out to be a
nobody, the scam was to fake busting him and proceed up the ladder. By hook or by crook, eventually they arrived at the major dude. Nearly always, the head honcho in any town was not some weirdo pervert criminal à la Hollywood but a legitimate businessman, somebody with a phony front. Among the people from whom Benny confiscated drugs were a Chrysler dealer, a judge, a member of a school board, a furniture store owner who personally advertised bargains on BarcaLoungers on TV, the president of a local Lions Club, and a pediatrician.

To track these people, Benny and Sherry made use of police contacts, who could run checks on license plates, to identify the owners of cars and reduce the possibility of raiding the wrong house or staging a bust when guests or innocent relatives were at home. Interesting, wasn’t it, Sherry thought, how easy it was to identify the entire structure of narcotics distribution in any town. Yet the police failed to make headway against the dealers, concentrating instead on busting some teenager for possession. It was enough to make you lose faith in our system of justice.

The one exception to Sherry’s paying cash was when she used someone else’s credit card. After she and Benny moved to a three-bedroom house in a modest section of Oak Ridge, Sherry struck up a friendship with someone from the local post office, engaging him in chat over the weather or the U.T. Vols. One day they got to talking about the way credit cards arrived through the mail. The issuing banks and companies used plain unmarked envelopes of various dull colors, as if they hoped to conceal something. But all you had to do was feel one to know that there was a card inside.

Sherry asked whether her friend wasn’t ever tempted to steal a card and use it, to buy himself a new pair of shoes and socks. No, the friend said, he wouldn’t care to take a risk like that, but he wouldn’t be surprised if there were people who would—if a card got delivered to the wrong address, for instance. It would be almost like finding a sack of money. What a person did in those circumstances, it was anybody’s guess.

Sherry began giving her friend ten or twenty dollars and, soon enough, the cards were misdelivered to her, three and four a month. Another foolproof scam, she figured.

The most desirable were cards issued for new accounts. These
arrived accompanied by a welcoming letter assuring the recipient of his or her valued membership and, helpfully, specifying the credit limit, if any. Sherry understood that she could charge on one of these cards without the owner’s knowing that it had been stolen until the bill came due. Some surprise.

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

O
N 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 comfortably 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.