Dark and Bloody Ground (19 page)

Bartley brought a pitcher of beer to a corner table where they could talk, or where Benny could listen. He told Benny that he was doing some dealing, chicken feed really, and he was anxious to get into something bigger. Burglary was his game; he understood that Benny was looking for a partner. There was a friend of his, Roger Epperson, who had connections, major ones, and whom Benny should meet. Roger was supposed to be showing up that night with his Japanese squeeze. Benny nursed his glass, saying nothing.

Bartley said that he was living in a trailer over in Oliver Springs with his mother and sister and it was bugging him, he had to get a place of his own or hit the road. Up in Kentucky back in January he had been given five years on a burglary rap. It was his fifth conviction and he had figured that this was it, two or three years inside at the minimum, but he had been able to make a deal. They let him go on the condition that he leave Kentucky and not come back. Pretty funny, wasn’t it?

“I’m such a bad dude, they figure, let some other state have me. I figure, hey, I’ll go visit my mom and sister in Tennessee. I’ll take that deal anytime, right? So here I am. But this place is locked up, man. I mean, I’m getting by, but I need more action. You got to meet Roger. He should be here. Excuse me a minute.”

Bartley headed for the men’s room again. He was still in there when a big, amorphous man wearing a Western-cut leather jacket and cowboy boots, trailed by a tiny Oriental woman, entered and ordered drinks at the bar. Benny assumed this was Epperson and watched as another man walked slowly up to the girlfriend and said something to her. She turned aside. Epperson, in a snarl that silenced everything but the jukebox, told the man to go fuck himself and get out.

“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.