Dark and Bloody Ground (20 page)

All they would have to do was to cut out the agents’ actual names and substitute the phony ones, using a camera and a copying machine. The Knoxville fence could provide at least one FBI badge. With this kind of ID, they could gain easy entrance to any home or business. They would not even have to confine themselves to robbing illegals. The whole goddamned United States of America was a target.

“You keep on dreaming, Straw Boss,” Sherry said, “and you’ll get us all arrested in a New York second.”

Sherry had nicknamed Roger “Straw Boss” the first time she heard him talking big. She meant by it a phony, a blowhard, someone like a foreman’s assistant with no authority but a loud mouth—a man of straw. Roger hated the name, whether or not he fully grasped the degree of the insult, but it stuck.

She bored in: “Me and Benny’s went two damn years without us getting caught, doing what we been doing. Why change it? You all is fools not sticking to illegals.”

“We listen to you,” Roger said, “we’ll be doing dipshit ripoffs till we’re ninety.”

“You live to be ninety, I’ll bake you a cake, and I don’t bake. Keep on a-talking.”

“Bug off, Sherry,” Carol said. “You’re just being aggressive because you’re lacking in self-esteem.”

“You defending Straw Boss again? I reckon he needs a woman to protect him.”

Carol showed her loyalty to Roger by responding with her own big idea, a scheme that had been proposed to her the last time she
had been arrested. When Terry Phillips and Carol were being held at the Clinton jail on the Norris Resort drug charges, Tim Schultz, Sheriff Trotter’s chief deputy and the very man who had had the decency to drop dead before the case came to trial, approached her about doing a job for him. The plan, which had died with Schultz, involved crossing the Kentucky border to pull off a robbery up there.

The story Carol told was known to many besides her. It was widely rumored in those parts that there was a miser dwelling in the mountains of Kentucky. An old man was supposedly hoarding a pile of cash in his house. No one knew how much, but it was said to be substantial. The man was so feeble, the story went, that there would be no difficulty, if only you could get inside the house and escape without being seen.

The hitch was, this miser had an alarm system that was hooked into the police station less than a mile away. So many people knew about the money that the old man would have been robbed years before, except for that alarm and the smallness of the town, where everybody knew everybody and neighbors watched out for one another. And so far no one had been able to secure cooperation from the local cops or the Kentucky State Police.

Roger had known about the old man long before Carol had ever heard about him and had been talking about robbing him for years. Roger, born and raised in Perry, the next-door county, was in frequent contact with his home grounds and was certain the rumors were true. According to a friend of his, the miser was a doctor who at one time in the seventies had arranged to have some high-value coal stripped from land he owned. There came a day when he agreed to purchase a bulldozer for fifty thousand dollars; he said he would go to the bank to withdraw the cash. In less than an hour, he returned with the money in a sack, a collection of fifties and hundreds, and handed it over. The joke was, it was Thanksgiving Day. Everybody knew the banks were closed. And what did that tell you, except that he must have been keeping the cash at home? And there were other telltale indications.

Roger said that he planned to look into the matter further. He was beginning to see a way to do the job. He had good contacts up there. He would devise an airtight plan of attack and they would all clean up, if somebody else didn’t get to the old man first.

Sherry hoped somebody would.

14

E
ARLY IN MAY
, Roger, Benny, and Donnie decided to drive up to Kentucky to see about robbing the doctor and other job possibilities. Roger took the wheel of his 1978 Thunderbird, black with a white vinyl top, his destination an obscure spot in the southeast corner of the Commonwealth, down near the Virginia border. Choosing a route that was roundabout but the fastest, he picked up I-75 at Lake City, traveled north over mountains to cross the border at Jellico, and continued through rolling cattle farm country past Corbin to London, where he turned east along the Daniel Boone Parkway into the heart of the rugged Eastern Kentucky mountains—a journey from straightaways to twisting ups and downs, from open skies to shadows.

A few miles east of the Daniel Boone National Forest, he left the parkway to turn south at Hazard, a town that could boast of a Wal-Mart, a two-story McDonald’s, a liquor store, La Citadelle ("Kentucky’s Most Magnificent Mountaintop Motel"), and the sinking Holiday Inn. Roger did not stop to visit with his family, who he knew would not have been pleased to meet his new companions, nor even to see him. From Hazard, Highway 15 snaked past the Viper turnoff, running alongside isolated houses and trailers with their narrow patches of corn and tobacco, and paralleled the CSX tracks past abandoned and active underground and strip mines—with their heaps of coal, called tipples, their gob piles and clusters of bulldozers, backhoes, towering power shovels, and heavy trucks loading up
and lumbering onto the road showering clumps of mud. After bridging over Carr Fork Lake and Irishman Creek, the highway crossed into Letcher County near the village of Isom, where a sign pointed to the Mountain Motor Speedway, a dirt oval where on Saturday nights NASCAR hopefuls thrilled as many as three thousand highlanders and irritated the residents of Race Track Hollow, who complained that the roar of engines and crowds kept them awake until three o’clock on Sunday mornings. From Isom it was another eight miles to Whitesburg, the county seat, a brick-faced town remarkable for its cleanliness and enterprise. Roger, Benny, and Donnie had no business there.

They had come some two hundred miles and had about another twenty minutes to go. They could have taken any of several more direct routes, but these were tortuous roads much of the way, and two of them would have meant cutting directly across Harlan County, where Bartley could easily have been recognized and arrested, or pumped full of lead, or all of those.

From Whitesburg Roger drove along the Virginia border east on 119, then branched off northeast through the twists of an obscure secondary road, paved but splashed with mud and not much wider than a pair of buggies. On all sides the woods grew thick, the hills rose and steamed with damp. As spring advanced, thunderstorms came nearly every afternoon to the mountains, and floods were a threat to isolated houses and villages. People stared at them from the porches of occasional shacks and from the few cars and pickups that passed. A story often told in those mountains captured why traveling back roads was a jittery business. There once was an old man living in a hollow who lay in bed all day staring out a window through a rearview mirror salvaged from some wrecked car. He sprawled there, a finger crooked through the handle of a moonshine jug, watching. When he heard the noise of an unfamiliar engine or spotted a stranger on foot, he grabbed his shotgun, shoved it through the window, and opened fire. It passed the time, he said, between Christmas and the Fourth of July.

Donnie asked Roger if he knew where he was going. The road seemed to be headed nowhere, twisting back on itself, confounding any sense of direction. They ought to have put Kentucky plates on the T-bird. At least they had guns. Donnie did some coke. “Man, where the fuck
are
we?”

Roger told Donnie to shut up. This was home territory for Roger. He had worked in the vicinity stripping coal, scheming to steal trucks. They were halfway between Whitesburg and Jenkins, was where they were.

They passed through Seco, not much more than a grocery store with a pair of gas pumps but once the headquarters of the South East Coal Company, hence the acronym. Roger made a sharp left onto another narrow road. Suddenly they were in Neon, what was left of it.

A new pinkish-brick bank building, its freestanding sign embedded in petunias, contrasted with the other structures along Main Street—a Super 10 variety store, a Radio Shack outlet, a GE appliance shop, a storefront library, all housed in crumbling brick buildings two and three stories high, images from the Great Depression. Many windows were broken or boarded up. At the intersection, ankle deep in muddy water from a recent flood, Roger turned right, passed over railroad tracks, and was in Fleming. Sometimes called Fleming-Neon, the two dingy towns, with a combined population of under two thousand, shared a post office and police and fire departments. In all of Kentucky there was not a more forlorn place.

Many years ago, the towns had known prosperity. Fleming, named after an Elkhorn Coal Corporation executive, started as a company town, built more or less overnight in 1912 when the Louisville & Nashville Railroad reached that point. It consisted mostly of a line of rickety two-story wooden duplexes stretching all the way to McRoberts, some three miles up the road. These housed two miners’ families, with each allotted half the front porch and covered rear stoop. As long as the men and boys could work, a family could stay; death or permanent disability meant eviction. Lured by steady wages, mountaineers abandoned their log cabins and their independence, which, once lost, could never be recovered. They found themselves better clothed, housed, and fed, for a while, but at an unimagined price.

To guarantee subservience, the corporation issued scrip against future wages, requiring workers to purchase groceries, coal for heat and cooking, and everything else from their employer. This tyranny forced miners into perpetual debt, as Tennessee Ernie Ford sang in “Sixteen Tons,” with its line about owing your soul to the company store. The stranglehold on goods and services gave birth to Neon—like
Argon and Krypton, named after the “noble gases"—a merchandising center that sprang up at the end of the L & N tracks as an alternative to Elkhorn Coal’s monopoly. There miners could pay cash for goods at competitive prices and enjoy the forbidden pleasures of liquor and bordellos.

When the price of coal plummeted in 1928, however, both towns sank with it and declined further through the Depression, until World War II brought a new boom that lasted until the late forties. Just after the war, old-timers recalled, Neon was still a bustling, rip-roaring place, where a carton of cigarettes could buy you an hour with a woman. Except for the boomlet of the seventies, it had been going down the tubes ever since, along with Fleming, where the curse of company scrip gave way to food stamps and welfare. The Appalachian balladeer Jean Ritchie mourned the plight of Neon and Fleming when she sang, “The L & N Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.”

It was along that line of miners’ shacks in Fleming that Roger Epperson searched for the doctor’s house. The old duplexes still stood, peeling and rotting, many of them empty, most occupied by old folks or a single struggling family. Here and there the hopeless gazed out from porches strewn with broken furniture, rusting washing machines and refrigerators, bottles and cans. Tires and trash littered the ground. A few of the desolate were blacks, descendants of railroad workers brought up from the Deep South a hundred years ago, John Henrys who had wailed,

Cocaine done drove me crazy,

Morphine done kill’d my baby,

An’ I ain’t a-goin’ to be treated thisaway!

The majority of the tenants were the remnants of white miners’ families, people weakened by economic collapse and welfare checks. Cynical, indifferent, and defeated, they lolled and wasted away. The idea that a miser hoarding anything more valuable than bottle caps might live among them seemed incredible.

But beyond the scruffy field of Fleming-Neon High, around a bend in the narrow road, sat a house unique in the town. Roger slowed as he passed it—one story, ranch-style, sturdily built of thin slices of sandy-colored Crab Orchard stone, with a low-pitched shingled roof and white trim. It was immaculate and had no litter anywhere around it, an island of order in that backwater.

“That’s it,” Roger said. “That’s the doctor’s.”

The house extended from a two-car garage, past a bay window and three dwarf evergreens in square stone planters, a white front door recessed under a porch supported by a pair of wrought-iron posts, and ended in a wing partly concealed by a trimmed hedge. A low wall of matching stone fronted the road and framed the driveway with stout square posts topped by big glass globes. Bland and severe, geometric and antiseptic, it held dominion over slovenly surroundings. On either side of it, the old shacks stood.

Roger continued up the road about a quarter-mile to pause at the doctor’s clinic, a wooden shack set back in a graveled lot. No sign announced its function; only the heavy wire mesh across the windows hinted that there might be something worth stealing inside, but thieves in the know had hit it numerous times. So simple, so modest, the clinic evoked the hard life as the house did not. It was so evocative of depression that location scouts had chosen it for scenes in
Coal Miner’s Daughter,
the 1980 movie biography of Loretta Lynn, filmed in Letcher County with locals hired as extras.

Roger circled the parking lot in front of the clinic past pickups and cars, some battered and others new and bright, and headed back down the road. He slowed again at the doctor’s house, but the big T-bird, with its Tennessee tags, was too obvious to allow for a thorough, professional reconnaissance. They would return, Roger said, when the time was right. They would work out a plan, and they would need a different car.

The boys lingered for days in the mountains. Roger was at home. With the idea of finding a car likely for FBI or IRS agents, he and Benny visited an auction one evening, leaving Donnie with a girl he had met in a Hazard bar. Cars were Roger’s family’s business; he knew these auctions well. One took place Thursday nights off Highway 80 near London, the center of the used car trade for Eastern Kentucky. In a grassy field full of automobiles—shined up, the tires Armor-Ailed, odometers optimistic—a canny breed of men roamed and haggled. It was no different from the horse fairs of another century. Knowing many of the dealers since childhood, Roger mingled with them, Benny silently following. No one rushed up to greet Roger. A few returned his hellos. Bobby Morris, from Gray Hawk over in Jackson County, was more or less friendly.