Dark and Bloody Ground (17 page)

She heard him emptying the cylinder and the spent shells hitting the ground and fresh bullets sliding in. The cylinder clicked shut.

Would he gun her down if she ran? Would he shoot her in the back if she tried to make it into the woods?
This time he is going to do it and everything will be over.

The next shot cracked so loud, she was sure he had moved closer. Again. Three, four—rapid-fire, but still at her feet.

She opened her eyes to see him taking aim at her heart.

“You ready?” he shouted.

“I am. Do it. Please do it. I love you.”

At the last split second he jerked the barrel down and hit the ground once more. Then he was sort of grinning at her with his
ragged, discolored teeth. He so rarely smiled. He came to her with open arms.

“Come here, Booger,” he said. “You are one damn fool. If that’d been me, you’ve hit my ass or my elbow, ‘cause I’d’ve been moving!”

The wind was terrific up there. They held each other and saw how beautiful everything was below.

Money was always short. So, right after Buzzard’s Bluff, Sherry became a Wong. It was a practical rather than a sentimental decision. Benny and Sherry frequently ate dinner at a Chinese place in Oak Ridge. What with one thing and another, they fell into conversation with a waiter by the name of Wong who was an illegal immigrant, as he confided to them between courses. Wong was anxious to become an American. If the U.S. government sent him back to China, the Communists would throw him into jail and re-educate him to a standstill.

Wong wondered whether Benny and Sherry knew of some woman who would be willing to marry him, so that he could qualify for citizenship. He would require nothing of her other than her goodwill, and there would be something in the deal for her. He had managed to smuggle some gold bars out of China. His dream was to open his own restaurant some day (Szechuan); in the meanwhile, he would pay big to become an American.

Should they steal the fellow’s gold outright, or should Sherry marry him? Wedlock seemed the safer, more profitable option. So it was that Sherry, in an Anderson County Courthouse ceremony, acquired her Chinese husband and surname. In return, Wong forked over close to fifty thousand dollars over the next several months and split for South Carolina. One of her friends asked Sherry whether she worried about getting caught. “The government’s a diaper,” Sherry said, “full of shit and always on your ass.”

Why the government began to sniff her out, Sherry was unsure: their incoherent life, maybe a snitch, possibly a neighbor fed up with the late-night screaming, gunfire—whatever it was, one afternoon in 1983 a pair of Oak Ridge police officers showed up waving a search warrant. Renee was visiting that day. Benny answered the door.

“You Benny Holt?”

“No one here by that name.”

“This one-twenty-seven Utah?”

“Yeah.”

“Name don’t matter, we got the right address. You better let us in.”

Just then a local boy ran up to the porch holding a fistful of dollars. Sherry shooed him away.

“You don’t owe me no damn money, hon,” she said. “Go home to your mommy.”

The boy scampered away. He would settle his debt for weed later.

To begin with, Benny and Sherry suspected that someone was trying to pull the phony-cop scam, but these officers were legit. They looked as if they were about to tear up the house; they didn’t have to. They found a quarter-ounce of pot in a plastic bag taped underneath the bathroom sink and placed Benny and Sherry under arrest for intent to sell.

“You gonna put my mama in jail!” Renee burst into tears.

The officer, who said his name was Foust, got down on one knee to comfort her, saying that it was no big deal, she shouldn’t worry, her mom would be out of jail in no time.

Officer Foust was correct. The case never went to trial. Sherry and Benny hired a lawyer who convinced the judge to dismiss the charges because of the improperly executed search warrant, which listed the wrong name for the suspect.

But it was a scare. A few weeks later they had a bigger one. Sherry’s credit card ruse had worked so well for more than a year that she became careless and greedy, using cards to pick up spare change she did not need. In partnership with a girlfriend, she started swindling Howard’s Discount Store out of four or five cartons of cigarettes a day, selling them to a beer joint at a discount from wholesale. The cashier became suspicious, kept track of the different names Sherry was signing, and one day stalled long enough to run a check. Sherry’s friend managed to escape out the back as Sherry tried to act cool, telling the cashier to forget it, but by the time she reached the street she was aware of being followed by two Howard’s employees. She ducked into Kroger’s, spotted a fellow she knew, and quickly handed him her wallet, asking him to hold it for her.

A policeman was already after her, however, saw everything, arrested her, and retrieved the wallet, which held several cards, each bearing a different name.

At the station, who should be on duty but Detective Gene Foust, who asked Sherry what had inspired her to pay him another visit. She launched into the biggest, most elaborate lie she could invent. She knew nothing about those stolen cards, she said. A guy named Popeye had given her the wallet at Jefferson’s Tavern. She had not even known that there were cards in it. She had beaten Popeye at a shuffleboard game, and he had simply handed her his wallet and left.

Detective Foust started to laugh. “Popeye?” he asked. “Popeye who?”

“I didn’t know him by nothing but Popeye,” Sherry said.

“If you think the fools around here will believe that,” Foust said, “I’ll let ‘em believe it.” He was laughing hard. “You’re lying.”

“No, I am not.”

“You’re the biggest liar I ever saw. A nice gal like you, why I bet you’ve never been in a place like Jefferson’s Tavern. And you never met a guy named Popeye outside of the funny papers.”

Sherry stuck to her story. She had to, now that she had told it, and she had the sense that Gene Foust rather admired her for her defiance. When the case went to trial, her attorney talked the judge into reducing the charge from grand theft to shoplifting, and she received two years’ probation.

Detective Foust started dropping by the house to chat. Sherry and Benny were not sure what he wanted. He was friendly enough. Sherry liked him for the way he had treated Renee and for his sense of humor about her big lie, but it was obvious that he hoped for something from them. He had run against Sheriff Trotter in a previous election and was planning to challenge him again in 1984. Probably, Sherry believed, Foust was trying to turn them into informants so that he could make a couple of big busts and jack up his reputation. But she could not be sure that he was not also prepared to set them up and bust them, which would serve his political ambitions equally well.

Foust was a tough man to pin down. Physically he was Mr. In-Between, neither tall nor short, neither dark nor fair, with colorless thinning hair, enough overweight so that his features softened into the nondescript. He managed to be talkative, jovial, and blah all at once. He rattled on about cash changing hands all over the county from drug deals, without naming names or locations. When he indicated that on an evening in the near future a suitcase full of cash of
an undetermined amount would be left in a doorway and could be exchanged for an empty suitcase and that there were foolproof, but unspecified, ways to launder money, Benny was all for pursuing the matter. Sherry convinced him to back off. Either Foust was letting them in on a deal or he was setting a trap, there was no way to know. If it was a setup, they would face a choice of jail or becoming fulltime snitches. That was the way the system worked.

Because she thought it might do some good, Sherry did tell Detective Foust where the proceeds from the robbery of a prominent automobile dealer could be located. Her information proved accurate, and Foust was appreciative. Now you owe me one, Sherry thought.

Unfortunately her next slipup occurred over in Knox County, where Foust was in no position to help. She was working the credit card scam at a mall on the outskirts of Knoxville when her companion, the same woman who had escaped from Howard’s Discount, was stupid enough to attempt to shoplift a leather jacket and was caught. This time it was Sherry who made it out the door—but the security officer recognized her from when they had been guards together at Brushy, followed her into another store, and tipped off the manager, who called the police as Sherry presented a phony Visa card.

Again she received two years’ probation, the leniency this time the result of confusion over whether Mrs. Wong was actually the previously convicted Miss Sheets or was in fact a Mrs. Hodge. Sherry blamed herself for being so careless—she ought to have hightailed it out of that mall the minute her friend had been caught. But she also blamed her troubles with Benny, the sleepless nights, the fighting, the constant anxiety about his skirt-chasing and the way girls swarmed to him. A condition of her previous sentencing had been that she leave Anderson County and take Benny Hodge with her, but they were still on Utah Street six months later. “I’ll get out when I’m good and ready,” was her attitude. Now it seemed prudent to relocate, before Anderson authorities connected her to the Knox conviction. She also believed, or hoped, that fresh surroundings would encourage Benny to settle down.

Her idea was to find a house remote enough to be away from the constant gaze of the cops and to cut down on Benny’s roamings. If she could discover a place big enough and nice enough, Benny might become more of a homebody.

She found her dream house in Roane County, deep in the hills
near Harriman. Under the railroad bridge across the Emory River, a narrow road branched west, running along the south bank for five or six miles and ending in a dirt track. The houses along this seldom-traveled road to nowhere were few; one of those farthest from town was for rent, unfurnished. It sat on thirty-two acres of forest, up a curving driveway lined by a fieldstone wall, and it could not be seen from the road. For four hundred a month they would have privacy and space galore: three bedrooms upstairs; a living room with a stone fireplace all across one wall and a view of the river; a den with another fireplace and a downstairs bedroom with still another; a separate dining room; and surrounding woods perfect for burying firearms and money. Best of all, the lease included an option to buy. Sherry could imagine nesting there forever. She hoped her parents would think better of Benny when they saw what a wonderful provider he had become and would forgive him his violence and other peccadilloes such as wrecking a car registered in E. L.’s name and borrowing, without asking, one of E. L.’s guns, which unfortunately had turned up as evidence in an armed robbery committed by an unreliable friend. Poor E. L. had been distressed at having to identify the weapon as his and to profess ignorance of how it had escaped his possession.

As for decorating the house, Sherry had a vision of crystal and brass for the living room, where she installed brass sconces and candlesticks, crystal vases and bowls, and a crystal chandelier. A white velvet sectional couch curved eighteen feet around the fireplace. To her it was heaven, and nearly as difficult of access, off limits to everyone except during holidays.

She graced the dining room, where she insisted they take all their meals, with a brass and glass table and a glass-fronted oak hutch, in which she arranged her doll collection and stored her new china, crystal stemware, and silver. In the downstairs master bedroom she placed a king-size cherrywood four-poster bed for Benny and herself. The upstairs bedrooms were reserved for the children and other visitors. Renee. now had her own room and four-poster canopied bed. As for the den, she conceived of it as Benny’s playroom. There he could blast his rock and play Nintendo to his heart’s content, undistracted by the temptations of teenage sirens. To further occupy him, Sherry bought Benny a powerful motorcycle and wrapped her arms around his waist as he tore up and down the river and into town.

In an event that Sherry hoped was a good omen and that gave her
and Benny great satisfaction, Sheriff Trotter was arrested by the FBI in May 1984 and forced to resign from office. He and three other men were indicted on numerous drug conspiracy charges and were tried, convicted, and sentenced to from ten to fifteen years in prison. The FBI had infiltrated the sheriff’s coterie and bugged him on numerous incriminating occasions, including a drug-financed excursion to the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas, where Trotter unwound in his suite rolling joints and unveiled a scheme to use a fruit and vegetable stand on Highway 61 as a front for cocaine and other drug dealing as well as for prostitution. He and his cohorts also hatched plans to improve their methods of peddling evidence.

Trotter complained that law enforcement was not what it used to be. In the old days, he lamented, a sheriff could do absolutely anything he wanted and get away with it. Nowadays, he had better be careful. These and other recorded statements became the basis for one of the first indictments and convictions of ten East Tennessee sheriffs on narcotics charges during the next five years.

Count one against Trotter alone involved a hundred and nineteen separate overt illegal acts, including discussions about the importance of murdering people foolish enough to try to stand in the sheriffs way or to horn in on his business. Although still unsure about Gene Foust, Sherry and Benny rooted for him in the special election held to replace the fallen Trotter, hoping they might at least gain a sheriff who did not have Benny on his hit list. Foust lost, however, to the FBI agent who had exposed the previous administration.

Just as she and Benny were moving into their dream house, Sherry reached a point of desperation over his philanderings. No longer able to cope, in May 1984 she enrolled at the Ridgeview Psychiatric Center and Hospital for the first of twice weekly outpatient therapy sessions.

She tried to convince Benny to accompany her or seek counseling himself; he told her that she was nuts and that if she cared to submit herself to the shrinks, she was on her own. He had had his bellyful of psychological counseling and testing in prison. And she had better watch what she said to the doctors, who were not to be trusted.