Dark and Bloody Ground (12 page)

The judge dismissed the charges for lack of evidence. Sherry and Benny were only slightly relieved. What if, the next time he felt like harassing Benny, Trotter built a better case?

When the deputy who had been giving Benny access to drugs was himself fired, Benny and Sherry, reduced to living on their salaries, fell behind in the rent on their trailer and moved in with a friend, one of the ex-cons Benny had met- house painting. The man’s apartment was a rathole, so filthy and depressing that Sherry could not bring Renee there to visit. Under the circumstances, and because Billy Pelfrey had refused to pay child support while Sherry was shacked up with an ex-con—a position Sherry considered unfair but one she knew that the court would uphold—she gave up seeking custody of her daughter. If she had been able to accept that this loss of her child would be permanent, she would have been more upset. She believed, however, that she could regain custody after she helped Benny get back on his feet—or onto his feet for the first time in his life. As it was, she began having nightmares in which Renee was snatched from her arms and carried off. She awoke to find Benny beside her and took comfort from him. Somehow she knew, or hoped or tried to believe, they would work things out. His wife was divorcing him. Sherry went down to the court every month to make his support payment, when they had the money.

She also believed that for the time being, not forever but during this trying and tumultuous transitional period, Renee might be better off without her. Benny himself was like a newborn child requiring all of her attention. Not that he wasn’t a man. To her he was a man like no other. They made love day and night. She would wait naked in the bed for him to come home from work and crawl in with her. There was nothing she had to do to attract him. It was enough for her to be there. Sometimes she would manage to get through to him on the phone while he was working and she would tell him what she wanted and what she planned to do to him when he got home, and by the time he arrived there was no stopping him. He would get a little rough sometimes, plowing away and yanking her hair and calling out blunt words, but that was fine, it thrilled her, and it made her all the more his, she thought, the one person in the world he could say anything to and do anything with.

When they lay exhausted between bouts, she called him Honey
and Hodge-Podge and Sweetpete. He was especially tender when they were totally fucked out. He called her Booger, as in “You little Booger,” his snot-nosed kid, and other endearments she loved hearing. I have lived thirty years on this earth, she thought, and I never knew what it was supposed to be like, and it turns out to be more than I could have imagined. Sometimes her Sweetpete, he was so dear and seemed so lost in the world. He wasn’t like her husband, who could never be alone with her; Benny wanted no one else around, just the two of them. At times she felt more like the mother of this homeless boy, the big abandoned baby. She wished she could nurse him.

They were like two kids in a rowboat, she told him, floating down the river of life—but that was funny, because he was such a big strong boy, his arms the size of her thighs. She asked him how and when he had started building himself up. When he stood and posed naked for her, it took her breath away; and she noticed that he was always looking at himself in the mirror. Why not? His pride was in his body. He had worked out daily at the county jail, as before at Brushy; now he was anxious to join a health club as soon as they had the money. He never took a drink and smoked a joint only once or twice a week. He did go through about a pack of Camels a day, and Sherry smoked, too. That’s our only vice, she told him, that and each other.

He told her that he had started lifting weights when, at nineteen, he had been convicted on a robbery charge and was sent to prison at Nashville. He had been in the reformatory before, but never prison, and he had not been prepared for it. The first week, three black prisoners had jumped him and tried to rape him. He had managed to fight them off long enough for the guards to come and rescue him, but he knew that this was the way it was going to be if he didn’t do something about it. He wasn’t strong enough to defend himself.

In desperation he managed to escape but was quickly caught, with extra time tacked onto his sentence. He was facing at least two years before parole. Another prisoner showed him the weights and how to work with them. It had not taken long before nobody dared touch him.

When, a year and a half after his release, he was caught robbing a store with a gun and sentenced to twenty years, he had all the more motivation to keep strong. Of course he had thought about escape, every day, but once he was moved to Brushy Mountain, he knew it was futile. He had seen what had happened to James Earl Ray and others who had tried. There was no way to break out of Brushy.

And then something happened that changed his attitude about doing time.

Throughout his first few years in prison, Benny had thought of little else but escape and had kept to himself, shunning contact with authorities and with fellow prisoners. He was with the convicts, not the inmates, but he was not a leader and had not developed his cooking skills beyond performing routine tasks in the kitchen. Then in 1977, a few weeks after James Earl Ray’s escape attempt, Benny’s father died, killed in a bar fight. This was not his real father, whose name was Vernon Troubaugh—that was about all Benny knew about him, because he had disappeared so long ago. The man killed in ‘77 was the third of Benny’s seven stepfathers and the one he remembered the best, because his mother had been married to him for six years while Benny was growing up, and he was the most hateful person Benny had ever met, in or out of prison.

His name was Billy Joe Hodge. The first thing Benny hated him for was forcing him to take the name Hodge. Benny hated his mother, too, for allowing this to happen; but there were numerous other reasons to hate her, such as her marrying Billy Joe to begin with. She ought to have had enough sense and enough regard for her children not to have married a man who had made his reputation in Morristown at the age of sixteen when he had slit open his brother’s stomach with a knife and watched the entrails spill out onto the sidewalk. Everybody in Morristown knew about that incident.

On the other hand, once she had married him, his mother could never have stood up to Billy Joe, who beat her something awful, in front of the children. She ought never to have left Benny’s previous stepfather, Junior Hickey, who was the father of Benny’s half-sister, Donna Kay. Sometimes Benny would run and hide at the Hickeys’ house when Billy Joe went berserk beating his mother, Eula Kate, and taking whacks at Benny and his two full sisters, Carol Sue and Patricia Ann. Billy Joe was such a jealous man, he hardly ever let Eula Kate out of the house and beat her if she so much as acknowledged her firstborn, Donna Kay Hickey, on the street.

So when Billy Joe marched over to the school and had the records changed so that Benny Lee Troubaugh became Benny Lee Hodge, Eula Kate did not dare object. Billy Joe never actually adopted Benny. The truth was, his name was legally still Troubaugh, but it was too late to change it back now. Every time he heard the name Hodge or signed it, he had to think of that son of a bitch.

Benny told Sherry that he had never talked to anyone else about these things. He tried not to think about them, but they haunted him. Now as they lay in bed, smoking a cigarette or maybe a joint, Sherry urged him to unburden himself. It was a way of getting over something and going on, and she cajoled him by revealing secrets of her life, too. Benny said that in facing up to the past, he was beginning to realize what an effect Billy Joe had had on his life.

Oh, yes, he could thank Billy Joe for introducing him to crime when he was only twelve years old. Billy Joe had written a bad check to a hardware store in Morristown. That night, he took Benny by the hand and dragged him to the store, which was closed at that hour, the street deserted. He handed Benny a brick and told him to heave it through the window. “Go ahead, son, do as I say, or I’ll beat the hide off of you.” Benny broke the window. He was terrified. Billy Joe lifted him through the window, pushed him in and told him to retrieve the check from the cash register. It was his first crime. Up till then, he had been just another kid, a good boy as far as he could remember. His teachers had liked him and had been kind to him. Neither of his sisters nor his half-sister had ever been in trouble.

By the time he was in high school he was in hot water all the time, fighting and stealing, and he ended up being sent to the state reformatory. Billy Joe, he knew, was happy to have him out of the house and off the grocery list. When, after six months, he was due to be released, his mother failed to sign the required papers saying that he had a home to go to and was wanted there. He could never forgive her for that, because it meant that he had to stay another six months in the reformatory. Billy Joe must have threatened to beat her if she did sign, but still, Benny hated his mother for having done that to him.

Benny’s happiest childhood memory was also his saddest, because of Billy Joe. Benny had a dog named Queenie, black and white and mostly St. Bernard, who ate too much, or so Billy Joe complained. Every time Benny petted Queenie and talked to her and let her up on the bed to snuggle, Billy Joe became so jealous that he flew into a fury and called Benny a sissy and an ingrate. He said he hated that dog so much that he was going to kill it.

One day Billy Joe, waving a pistol, chased Benny and Queenie out of the house and into the street and shot the dog dead, right before Benny’s eyes. Benny remembered this so vividly, it could have happened yesterday. The first shot hit Queenie in the hind leg. She fell,
yelping. Billy Joe walked up, calm as could be, and shot her through the head.

He didn’t know why he hadn’t fainted right there, Benny said, or why he hadn’t run and kept on running. Instead he had rushed inside to his mother, screaming, “Why did he kill my dog? Why did he kill Queenie?” What a mistake that had been! Eula Kate asked him if he wasn’t sure that a policeman hadn’t done it. A policeman! There weren’t any policemen around. “Why would a policeman shoot a dog in front of my young’un?” his mother had wailed. She must have been too terrified of Billy Joe to tell the truth.

So it was that when Warden Davis informed him that his father had died, he had felt more like offering up a prayer of thanks than anything else. Whoever had killed him, Benny wished he could give the guy a medal. When the warden offered to let him go to the funeral, Benny was inclined to say no. But any prisoner will jump for a glimpse of the free world. He had not been on the outside for years. He might get a chance to spit on the coffin. And, you never knew, he might be able to escape.

But the warden attached a condition. He would let Benny go to the funeral in street clothes, and he would even permit the shackles and handcuffs to be removed and would instruct the guards to remain inconspicuous, so as not to embarrass Benny in front of his relatives. In exchange, however, Benny would have to promise not to escape. Warden Davis was giving him this chance to get a breath of fresh air and to prove that he had truly changed, could take responsibility, and was on his way toward rehabilitation. Benny would have to give his word of honor.

He could not possibly do that, Benny told the warden. He knew that Davis was being straight with him and, like a true convict, Benny would do the same. He had to tell the truth, that if he got the chance to run, he could do nothing else.

Back in his cell, Benny gave the warden’s offer more thought. He understood it as more than a gift of one day outside. It was a test, and if Benny passed, he sensed he could expect further rewards. What if he did run? They would catch him anyway, sooner or later, and his parole date would be set back. Why not show the warden that he could trust Benny Hodge? It was a game, like the whole system, and the prize for winning was freedom. He gave the warden his word.

At the funeral home, Benny’s guards waited outside on the steps during the service. Benny was able to chat with his sisters and
cousins. He even kissed his mother on the cheek, which wasn’t easy.

A cousin came up to him and whispered in his ear that there was a Camaro parked outside with the keys in the ignition and a full tank of gas and a roll of money in the glove compartment. Benny could slip out the side entrance and get a good start.

Benny said no thanks. He had given his word to the Man, who was trying to help him.

It was after that that Benny worked on his cooking, found he enjoyed it, got appointed cook for the staff commissary, and was permitted to bunk in the White Building. If it hadn’t been for Warden Davis’s showing faith in him, he would probably still be behind bars.

All this pillow talk, which went on in fits and starts over many weeks, deepened Sherry’s attachment to Benny. It gave her a sense of mission about him. He was her man, her lover, but he was still the frightened little boy, needing a chance, hurt into meanness and ripe for healing. It was as the Bible said, be you as little children to enter the kingdom. She determined to devote herself to his healing. One thing she knew she had to do was to try to reconcile Benny, somehow, with his mother and to encourage him to forgive her. There was a saying that you can never trust a man who hates his mother, or a woman who hates her father. Sherry had every reason to believe that the saying was true.

One of the secrets Sherry revealed to Benny—and she had never spoken to anyone about it before—was that she hated her own father. Charles Sheets had never been what you would call much of a provider after he married Samantha Hill and fathered eight children by her in nineteen years. Charles cut timber in East Tennessee most of the year and picked oranges in Florida the rest, so he was often away; and when he was home, he was usually drunk. When her mother died, Sherry’s sister Louise, who was then nineteen, and Louise’s husband, E. L. Smith, agreed to take in Sherry along with her two surviving brothers, who were three and fifteen. Another older sister, Brenda, then eighteen, was on her own. Although the Smiths soon had three children themselves, E. L. and Louise always treated everyone alike. Sherry called them Mom and Dad and loved them, she said, with all her heart. If it hadn’t been for them, she would have ended up in an orphanage.