Blood Games (27 page)

He made a show of good faith by enrolling in summer classes, taking math and German. He rarely went to class, however, and soon dropped math. After a few more weeks, he dropped his German class as well. He played D&D with some of his friends who’d remained on campus for the summer, but he spent much of his time sitting around the apartment with Bart and Opie, watching MTV and drinking wine coolers.

In June, Opie announced that his stepbrother, Hank Foster*, was coming to visit and needed a place to stay. Bart and Neal agreed to let him stay in the apartment. Opie and Bart were sharing the large bedroom; Neal had the small bedroom. A huge closet-storage room would be fixed up for Hank.

Hank and his stepbrother were almost as much unalike as two people can be. Hank’s father had divorced Hank’s mother and later married Opie’s mother, the owner of a popular off-campus gathering spot for students. Hank wore long, lank hair, considered himself extremely liberal, collected
Creepy
magazines, prided himself not only on his dexterity with a skateboard but also on his remarkable ability to consume vast amounts of alcohol and drugs without apparent serious repercussions. Hank had attended college but dropped out “to live.” He had ranged about the country, living a counterculture existence on the edges of campuses in several cities. He’d been living with his mother in Wisconsin until they had a falling out and he headed to Raleigh, where his father, stepmother, and stepbrother lived. His stepmother had promised him a job in her restaurant.

Bart liked Hank much more than he liked Opie, who often argued with him about politics and accused him of being “just a redneck from the country.” In Hank, he found a figure to admire and emulate.

“Hank is very intelligent,” he said later. “He’s probably one of the most talented people I ever met. He could do anything, but he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. I guess that’s the way I am. He had this whole wellspring of ability but it was just kind of going nowhere. You know, you sit at a crossroads trying to make up your mind, and you end up just sitting there. Just sitting around saying, ‘Well, what are we going to do?’”

When Hank moved into the apartment with Bart, Opie, and Neal, so did drugs, primarily marijuana. Neal later would say that he didn’t use marijuana that summer, but Bart began using it regularly.

Bart had first tried marijuana only a year earlier on a traditional post-graduation trip to Myrtle Beach with many of his classmates at Bartlett Yancey High.

“Bunch of people partying, somebody said, ‘Here, you want to try this?’” Bart recalled. “I tried it. I figured if I was going to college, I ought to at least try marijuana before I go.”

Somebody put the
Star Wars
soundtrack on the stereo Bart had carted to the beach, and the whole group sat back and smoked pot and grooved on the music

“It really wasn’t that big a thing,” Bart said later. “I didn’t enjoy it enough that I’d want to go buy any.”

But marijuana’s very illicitness appealed to the anti-establishment sensibilities that had been developing in Bart. Then too, Bart knew that his Uncle Bill had used marijuana regularly and he suspected that his father had used it, too.

By the time Bart had begun using marijuana regularly in the summer of 1987, all of Caswell County was about to learn of his uncle’s use. On Monday, June 29, a team of heavily armed sheriff’s deputies and SBI agents accompanied by a helicopter with a TV news crew, had converged on Hickory Hill Farm and swept through the old house where Bill and Lydia Upchurch lived. The officers had found twenty-nine marijuana plants growing near the edge of the woods, twenty-six plants cut and drying, and eight pounds of bagged marijuana in the house. The officers estimated its worth at more than one hundred thousand dollars. Bill maintained that the marijuana was for his own use, but he and Lydia were handcuffed and taken to the Caswell County jail, charged with manufacturing marijuana and maintaining a dwelling for controlled substances, both felonies. Bill’s half-brother, John, who had just completed law school, bailed them out later that day. Carolyn did not learn about it until she read it in the newspaper the following day. She was horrified and embarrassed to show her face in the county where her own family and the Upchurches always had been so prominent and law-abiding.

She would have been even more horrified had she known that her eldest grandchild, Bart, not only was using marijuana regularly but also had not learned much, if anything, from his previous encounter with the law for theft. Unbeknownst to her, word already had filtered back to Caswell County that both Bart and Neal were stealing their way through college.

Weldon Slayton had heard as much from several students. Two Bartlett Yancey students who had gone to visit Neal at State had returned with a tale of Neal taking them on a shoplifting mission to a bookstore. Slayton couldn’t resist bringing it up when Neal came home on a visit.

“Picked up any good books lately, Neal?” he inquired sarcastically.

Neal had acknowledged his guilt and sat meekly through Slayton’s outraged lecture. “Don’t you realize how stupid and childish that kind of thing is? There’s no sense to it.”

“I know, I know,” Neal said. “I was just trying to show off.”

Later, Neal and Bart would disagree over who was the greater thief, each downplaying his own thievery and enhancing the other’s. Bart stated that Neal regularly broke into apartments and that he shoplifted on assignment. “Somebody would say, ‘Look, Neal, I need some CDs.’ He’d say, ‘Give me fifteen bucks and tell me what you want,’ and he’d go out and come back with it. Neal was getting by on stealing and shoplifting and he was doing a pretty good business.”

Later, Neal denied that he regularly broke into apartments. The only time he ever did was during the summer of 1987, he said, and that was at Bart’s suggestion. He and a couple of friends were sitting around drinking one night, he said, and Bart came in and said, “Hey, there’s a place over here with an open sliding door and nobody at home.”

All four slipped into the apartment and stole tapes and stereo equipment, he said.

“It was like an exaggerated, drunken cartoon, everybody joking around. Imagine the Keystone Kops going in somewhere. It was that silly.”

Shoplifting was another matter, Neal acknowledged, something that always gave him an adrenaline rush. He did it several times with Bart, he said, once with Opie, and another time to impress some friends from Caswell County, the ones who later told Weldon Slayton about it.

“Once I did it, I’d let people think I did it a whole lot more than I did to build up an image,” Neal said of the shoplifting. “Sometimes I’d buy something and throw away the bag and claim I stole it so they’d think I was cool. It was just a little bit of stuff, really, but we talked about it a whole lot. Boy, we talked about it like we were hot stuff. That way I got more respect from them than I ever got any other way.”

Bart stole more than anybody in the group, Neal claimed. “He would come and tell me a lot of stories about what he was doing, breaking into cars and things like that. I had seen him steal CDs and tapes to sell to the Record Exchange. I saw him come home two or three times with car stereos he would sell to friends on campus. One time he stole some speakers and was carrying them down Mission Valley Road and the police stopped him, but he talked his way out of it.”

Bart later acknowledged stealing car stereos “a couple of times.”

“Neal kept telling me how easy it was,” he said. “I’d be coming back drunk from some party, go by a car that was unlocked, pull the thing out. Usually, I had to be really drunk because I couldn’t get up the courage otherwise. I did it just because it was so easy and I was so drunk. I probably sold them to somebody on campus to get some gas, but I didn’t steal for money. I did it because I was bored and it was something exciting to do for the time being. No greater or lesser reason than that.”

Kenyatta, Bart’s cousin and Neal’s off-and-on girlfriend, knew that Neal and Bart both were thieves. She had seen both of them steal, and it made her furious. She and Neal revived their relationship late that spring, and that summer she came to spend several weekends in the apartment that Neal shared with Bart, Opie, and Hank.

Neal showed her a telephone that he said he had stolen from an apartment, she said, and she saw him shoplift on several occasions. “I was always mad at him,” she said. “Stealing, he just didn’t think anything about it. He said, ‘A lot of people steal. What’s the big deal?’”

She was soon to have firsthand experience of being ripped off. Kenyatta had been a bicycle rider most of her life, and she had two bikes. She noticed that Bart was collecting bicycles as well, bikes she was convinced that he was stealing. He kept them chained on the patio of the apartment to prevent other thieves from making off with them before he could sell them, she said. That summer, Kenyatta let Neal borrow one of her bikes while she was gone on a long-planned bicycling trip to the West. She made the trip with her uncle Jim, cousin Emory, and a group of other riders from Caswell County and Danville in mid-August. Emory had developed an interest in bicycle racing, and Jim had taken up bike riding so that he and his younger son would have an activity to share. In the spring, both had ridden in the “Assault on Mt. Mitchell,” the highest mountain in the East, a 6,600-foot peak in western North Carolina. That was considered to the toughest bicycle race in the East, and both had been proud of finishing, Emory well ahead of his father. Now they were ready for higher mountains. For eight days in August, they undertook a 600-mile run from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to southern Colorado, staying in the mountains all the way. They even made a run up Mt. Evans, a 14,260-foot peak. Kenyatta went with them and had a wonderful time. She returned to find that the bike she had loaned to Neal was missing. He said it had been stolen. She was sure that it had been. She also was sure that she knew who had stolen it: Bart. She was convinced that he had sold her bike with the other bikes he had stolen to help pay his share of the apartment rent. He denied it, but she didn’t believe him. She hardly believed anything he said anymore. And the theft of her bicycle was an offense she never would forgive.

25

When fall semester began at N.C. State in August of 1987, Neal moved out of the apartment and returned to a campus dorm. Bart was pleased to have Neal not only out of the apartment but out of his life as well. They would not see each other again for nearly a year.

No longer welcome as a student and always short of money, Bart took a five-dollar-an-hour third-shift job at a convenience mart on Western Boulevard, Fast Fare, just across the street from the campus, within walking distance of his apartment. The job left his afternoons and early evenings free, and he and Hank often spent them in front of the TV, watching classic movies and old situation comedies on cable, or listening to heavy-metal rock music, drinking beer, smoking pot, and talking.

“We spent a lot of time just sitting around shooting the shit,” Bart later recalled. “Hank is a weird type of guy. Nine times out of ten, he’s going to get ragingly drunk after work, still get up, and go to work the next day. I sort of admired that about him.”

Bart felt that he had more common ground with Hank than with anybody he ever had known. They agreed on almost everything. Both saw themselves as being outside convention and society. They believed in living for the moment and not worrying about the future. Neither could picture themselves old or settled or—specially—married.

“Hank looked at marriage as being right along the lines of life imprisonment,” Bart later said with a chuckle. “I used to kid him, say, ‘Yeah, you’re going to end up married with a houseful of kids and a station wagon.’ Terrorize him with the idea of a Ford station wagon.”

Bart looked at women as objects to be desired and pursued for the physical pleasures they could provide, but he shied from relationships with them. Although he boasted of one-night stands (his cousin Kenyatta later claimed that these were with girls he met at parties who were too drunk to resist), he never dated, never had a girlfriend, and was wary of any young women who showed an interest in him.

“I wasn’t looking for a relationship,” he said later. “I didn’t like planning that far ahead. When you make long, drawn-out plans, something’s going to come along and screw it up. I guess I had some sort of phobia toward relationships. I just didn’t want to get involved.”

Yet he was about to become involved in a relationship with a woman he had no desire to meet, a decidedly unromantic relationship that would prove to be long, tumultuous, and ultimately, at least for Bart, binding. In November, a file bearing Bart’s name landed on the desk of Christy Newsom, an overworked probation officer for Wake County.

Christy Newsom was only four years older than Bart. She was five feet two and a half inches and 116 pounds of intensity and fierce determination that showed in her powerful, almost mesmerizing eyes. At times, she appeared to be all eyes, their color changing from green to topaz according to her moods, which often were dark when she had to deal with Bart.

Born in Sumter, South Carolina, she had moved with her family to Spring Hope, thirty miles east of Raleigh, when she was thirteen. Like Bart, she had been in gifted and talented classes in high school. Unlike him, her ideas were decidedly establishment, her politics conservative. Her father operated a Western Auto Store, served as an auxiliary police officer, and was strict with his three children. When his only daughter grew old enough to date, he insisted that the first date be spent in the living room in his presence—torture sessions, Christy came to think of them. He always took down the boys’ car tag numbers and never failed to drop into the conversation that he liked guns.