The Escape of Bobby Ray Hammer, A Novel of a '50s Family

  But losing four turkeys is not a big deal. Loretta overreacts to everything. So I grab each turkey by a leg and carry them two in each hand out to the pit I dug for her a couple of months ago. Before I came to live with her, she just threw them off in the weeds and let them pile up and stink until a dog or maybe a stray coyote would drag them off to eat. Her old dog Twinkles use to like chewing on them before he died, but that new German shepherd won't have anything to do with them.

  When I get back inside the shed, she's already broken into a sack of feed and pouring it into the bins. She has to dip a pail into the grain to get it to the bins because she's not strong enough with that bad hand of hers to carry a feed sack. I just pick up the sack by the front-and-back corners and string the feed along. I don't know how she's managed to get all these turkeys fed by herself through the years. She needs Jess. I wonder why he didn't show up this morning?

  "Loretta," I say, and then I have to cough a couple of times because the dust these turkeys are stirring up makes it hard to breathe, "a ring is missing, one that Helen and Lenny got married with." She's just real quiet like maybe she's not going to answer my question. So I just keep on talking. "Lenny was wearing it just before he had the accident. But he didn't have it on when he was buried. Helen and Charles are upset about the ring being lost. It belonged to their mother. I wonder if you know something that would help me find it."

  Loretta is not talking. She acts like I didn't even say anything, so we just go on feeding turkeys. I even think she's a little mad for me asking. I ask her a couple of times about when she plans to sell the turkeys, if she knows what the price is now, how much they're paying a pound. But she is not talking. We finish the feeding and we walk back to the house with her in front like she's mad, doesn't walk beside me like she usually does with her arm on my shoulder. When we get inside, she puts two plates and silverware out on the table. I'm not hungry with all the barbecue I ate at lunch, but then she puts some apricot cobbler in the oven to heat, makes a pot of hot coffee. I can't pass up a cobbler. We picked the apricots off of the tree by the side of the house last July and she canned them. I remember using a ladder but she was like a cat climbing inside the tree. Scared me the way she went to the top and was always hanging out on a thin limb that didn't look big enough to hold her weight.

  "Is something wrong?" I ask. "Have I said something to make you mad at me?"

  She puts on a little smile, one of the first smiles I've seen since Bev was over here with me that day of her birthday party when it thundered and lightninged so bad. "No, Ray. You didn't make me mad."

  I'm getting used to the scars that run up the insides of her arms so I don't notice them much anymore, but I see them now. After we finish the cobbler and have a couple of cups of coffee, she lights a cigarette. I get Lenny's journal and ask her to read a couple of pages. She just turns real red and stares at me. I finally realize that Loretta can't read. That's why she colors in kids coloring books to pass the time at night. And now I have never seen her look so down hearted. I don't mean worried like when she's lost a bunch of turkeys or when the price of turkey meat has dropped a few cents. She's suffering a terrible pain.

  "When Lenny came to me that day, the same day he died, he was desperate. Like I told you before, he was looking to kill someone. I noticed the ring on his hand then. I noticed the ring because I recognized it. I hadn't seen it in eighteen years, but no doubt that was it. That ring was the first diamond I'd ever laid eyes on. I was just a kid when I first saw it, no more than ten years old, and I had no idea such a thing as a diamond even existed. We didn't get out much in Oklahoma. We lived ten miles from a town of two hundred and didn't even get there but once a month if we were lucky. So when Hershel brought that ring home, I felt like he'd bought a miracle. He even let me put it on my finger. 'For just a minute,' he said, 'but only a minute because then it goes on my girl's finger forever.' Hershel was getting engaged to the one girl he'd loved all his life. She was the little Jorgensen girl that lived two miles from us. They went to school together and Hershel had been in love with her since the first grade. When Hershel turned eighteen he drove into Oklahoma City some fifty miles away and bought the biggest diamond ring he could find. You should've seen the roll of money that young man had in his pocket. Hershel had been farming his own land for three years. He didn't go to high school much during those years either. He had too much work to do. He thought he was grown ever since he turned thirteen and talked our Papa into giving him a piece of his own land and the little old tractor. He saved his money and he bought that ring for Heidi Jorgensen. Her family had come over from one of whose European countries, Switzerland, Holland, Austria. Some place like that. So the two of them got engaged, but they never got married. I don't know what happened but they had a falling out. That temper of Hershel's probably had something to do with it. So Heidi dumped Hershel just before they got married, but Hershel wouldn't take back the ring. Guess he figured if she kept the ring she'd change her mind sooner or later. But that's not the way it turned out. The next thing Hershel heard was that Heidi was gone. She'd married someone else, an older family friend is what we heard, and they'd already left Oklahoma for good and moved to California. The man she married was Karl Kunze, and the town they moved to was Chowchilla, California."

  "You mean that wasn't Mama that Papa got engaged to?" And I get out of my chair and go to the stove to get another piece of that apricot cobbler and another cup of coffee. I have to have something to help wash down this story.

  "Nope. It was the woman that Karl Kunze married. It was Charles' and Gretta's mother before she married Karl. And don't you go telling Louise this either. No sense in her knowing what Hershel did before they got married. Hershel liked to died over Heidi. He moped and lay around like an old dog on his last legs, and Hershel wasn't like that, always up and going. So your grandpa kicked him out of the house. They hooked the tractor to the outhouse that set out back and drug it over onto the little piece of land he'd given to Hershel, put a floor in it and told him that outhouse was his home from then on and that he couldn't come back on our property until he'd married and had a kid."

  I have to laugh at that and she laughs with me. "You mean my papa, who's really my uncle, got his start living in an outhouse?"

  "Well, it was big for an outhouse anyway. Even had enough room for an easy chair and the cot that Hershel stole from home during the night after we were all asleep. Your grandpappy was always going overboard. It's a shame you never got to know your grandmother and grandfather, Ray. You'd have loved them. When your grandfather built that outhouse, he said he wanted the best goddamn outhouse in the state of Oklahoma, so he built a five-holer. Why five holes, God only knows cause there was only four of us and us two kids were so big that we never used it but one at a time. I used to sit in it and laugh imagining all four of us, Mama and Papa, me and Hershel all four sitting in that outhouse at the same time, all lined up like birds on a perch, sitting and grunting and the fifth hole sitting empty. Then I thought that maybe Papa put in the fifth hole because he was expecting company. I just split my sides.

  "Hershel was mad at the whole family. He lived in that outhouse and didn't set foot on our place for six months, but we'd see him out in field plowing, dust just boiling up around him like it was his anger. Then one day we saw fresh lumber sticking up above ground level, and there was more than one person living there. That's when Mama got the preacher to go see about Hershel and whoever it was living with him. But the preacher already knew because he'd married them. Brother Hensen told Mama..."

  "Loretta," and I hate to interrupt this story but I just have to know, "is that the same Brother Hensen who preaches down here in Chowchilla?"

  "One and the same. I wish he'd stayed in Oklahoma, but I don't get all my wishes. He came here a little after the rest of us. His life hasn't been easy either. His wife died in childbirth no more than two months after they got to Chowchilla. The baby died too. He never remarried."

  "Oka
y, tell me some more about Papa. I just wanted to know a little about Brother Hensen."

  "So Brother Hensen told them about the girl that Hershel had married. You know Louise doesn't have a family. No mama, no papa. She was a little orphan girl that the Hensen's brought home from an orphanage in Norman. Your mama that raised you was a orphan. She was a beautiful little girl, and I can understand why Hershel took to her right away. They had a baby nine months to the day after they got married. Hershel had trouble getting that house he was building finished in time for the baby. When Lenny was born, Hershel brought the baby and his new wife to see Mama and Papa. Your grandpapa was the happiest man I've ever seen. He kept slapping Hershel on the back. "A wife, a baby and a five-holer," is what Papa said. Hershel had converted the outhouse back into an outhouse after he finished his home. So everything went pretty good until the next spring, when the wind began to blow. And let me tell you something about the wind in Oklahoma. It never stops blowing. Twenty miles an hour, day and night. But then it was more like thirty to forty. And the rains never came that year. And the next year, they never came either. That next spring was when the twister came and killed your grandmother and grandfather, took them out of our lives forever. I was over at Hershel's helping Louise with baby Lenny when the twister came or I'd be dead too. Hershel was beside himself, lost all interest in life. He'd been working with Brother Hensen on a new church. Hershel had even taken to teaching Sunday school. Brother Hensen told him he thought Hershel had a natural calling for the pulpit. Brother Hensen was thinking of sharing that new church with Hershel. But the twister and drought changed all that, changed Hershel. Hershel got restless. That's when he bought that black pistol of his. Louise was real worried. 'You've always talked about moving to California ever since we've been married,' she said. 'Well, now we don't have anything to keep us here.' So when the other farmers got restless too, Hershel was ready to leave. They were talking about moving out west. All the talk was about oranges and California. No one knew where to go in California, but Hershel did. Evidently he'd been brooding about Heidi every since she left. Hershel never told anyone why he wanted to go to Chowchilla. Even I didn't know Heidi was in Chowchilla or I would've changed his mind. Hershel brought us all straight here. Karl had never met Hershel. And Hershel and Heidi never let on that they knew each other. When the four of them started getting together to play pinochle, I scolded Hershel, even though I was still a little girl. But Hershel wouldn't listen. The rest I've told you. Heidi and Hershel had a secret romance. When Louise found out, I thought it was the end of Hershel's and Louise's marriage but Louise wasn't a quitter. She fought hard for Hershel, and in the end, she had her way."

  I look up at Loretta from my empty plate. I can only eat so much apricot cobbler. I used to think that I had a family background that sort of held my life in place. I never thought about it that way, never really realized it, I don't guess, but I know now that that was the way I felt. Everything I've found out about my family is letting my life slip away. I already feel like I don't have a home. Living here with Loretta just seems like a place to hang my hat. Mama's and Papa's place doesn't seem like home since Papa ran me off. I can't depend on anything anymore. Everything I learn about my family takes something else from me. I feel like I'm being forced to give up the only life I have known.

  "So the ring," I say, "that Lenny had on his little finger when he died, was actually the ring Papa gave to Heidi Jorgensen who became Heidi Kunze when she married Karl."

  "The very same, Ray. The ring Louise wears, the one that Hershel married her with, is the wedding ring matched with that engagement ring. Hershel bought the two at the same time. Came in the same box. He never gave Heidi the wedding ring because he was going to do that at their wedding ceremony. So he gave the wedding ring to Louise when Brother Hensen married them, and Heidi kept the engagement ring. Hershel's heart has been split between those two women ever since."

  "So Heidi kept that ring, hid it from Karl and the rest of her family, until she died in an automobile accident. And then Gretta and her sister found the ring somewhere in her personal things. When Charles wanted to give Helen a ring, he gave her his mother's ring. And when Helen broke up with Charles, she kept the ring and told Lenny that it belong to her grandmother. She used it when she married Lenny."

  "Every woman that has ever seen that ring, falls in love with it."

  "It's easy to put together the rest of the puzzle. When Lenny had his accident and Mama and Papa were called to the scene, Papa must've seen the ring on Lenny's finger, and took it off to keep Mama from seeing it and asking questions because it matched her wedding ring. Papa knew Lenny had married Helen and didn't want anyone to know. He thought Helen was trash. And Papa probably also took the ring because it belonged to him. He'd probably wanted the ring back ever since Heidi died. Papa had lots of reasons for taking it. Papa must have the ring. Charles is not going to like this if he finds out. And Charles is not going to leave this alone. That's for sure. He knows Papa and Heidi had a fling. But he doesn't need to know the rest. And then there's this thing about Samantha. If Mama and Papa don't accept her as their granddaughter, the trouble will continue. Lenny made some mistakes, and the only way to set things straight is to have them recognize Samantha. It can be cleared up if they'll just accept the truth."

  "That may be," says Loretta, "but Hershel and Louise are set in their ways. You can talk to them if you want, but don't expect much."

  "They might if we both talked to them. And I have the journal. They'll have to believe Lenny's own words. Will you go with me?"

  She looks at me for a long time like I just asked her to help me commit a murder. "If you want me to, Ray. But let's don't do it now. Wait a few days, until the Fair's over. I'll talk to Louise with you, if you still think we should. Can't start with Hershel. He might explode on us. We'll feel her out. But not a word about the ring to either of them. No sense in stirring that pot."

  CHAPTER 49: Riding the Hammer

  It's Sunday evening and even though I'm tired from being out in the field all day helping Papa, I'm back at the fairgrounds. This is the last day of the Fair. This time I have come alone. Papa really has a problem with his crops. The nut grass has taken over one field. He couldn't cultivate it soon enough to get the dirt on the grass before it got almost as tall as the cotton. And one field has just started dying on him. We walked out a ways in the field together. He showed me. The roots are rotting off of the stalks. The plants just slip out of the ground like they don't have a hold of the earth.

  The wind kicks up a little dust, trash blowing around. Hardly anyone here at the Fair anyway and some of the lights have been shutoff. Even turned off the searchlights. That's what I miss most, the searchlights. The tilt-a-whirl is still going. The guy who runs the Ferris wheel is using a wooden mallet to knock out the bars that hold the seats. All the fish bowls are gone and the stand empty. A man with a wife and baby, people I've never seen before, is throwing at the metal milk bottles.

  I hear someone behind call my name, so I turn around and see Uncle Jess, my father, coming toward me. He's walking funny and I smell him from ten yards away. Why does he eat so much garlic? His shirttail is out and shirt unbuttoned up the front so his tattoos show. When he gets close he tries to talk but no words come out. He still has his arms going though, and it's as if he's letting his arms do the talking.

  "Money, Bobby," is what he mumbles at me. "Just a little money. Maybe seventy-five cents for a bottle of wine." I don't see how he could be sweating so much with it so cold. I swear, he looks like he's shrunk six inches since I saw him last. I have to look down at him. "I have the shakes. A little wine 'll simmer me down."

  So I stick my hand in my pocket, but I don't have any change. I reach for my wallet, pull out a five.

  "No. Not that much," he says. "Don't trust myself with that much money till I get on the wagon again."

  So I pull out a single.

  "Ah, that's a good boy, Bobby. I hate f
or you to see me like this, but I'm in a pitiful state. You take care of yourself now, you hear?" And then he walks off, but he's limping.

  I can't stand this, so I go after him. Grab him by the arm. "Jess? What's wrong with your leg? Are you hurt?"

  "Na. It's an old injury. Bothers me at times like this."

  "Do you need a ride? Can I take you home?"

  "I'm okay, I tell you." And I think maybe he's a little peeved at me. "Now don't let me embarrass myself any more than I already have. Goodnight, Bobby. I'll see you in a couple of days."

  I just stand here for a minute watching him walk away and letting what just happened sink in. Jess has always seemed sensible and upstanding. I'm not sure that was even him. Seemed so old.

  I walk past this horse race booth where the little horses are made of wood and move in straight lines along the back wall. It's one of the few places still open. I pull my jacket around me a little tighter, zip it halfway.

  The Hammer's at the back of the fairgrounds, where the rides end and the darkness starts. But the Hammer's lights are off too, so I guess I'm out of luck. I might as well go on home because the Hammer is the reason I came. I see a big dog, or at first I think I see a dog, round back eating something dead on the ground. See a tail wag. Then I see it's that scraggly sucker who operates the Hammer, picking through his tools. I figure, what've I got to lose, so I go on around back, stand off to the side waiting to get his attention. I don't. So I kick a little dirt, start to walk off.

  "You wanting me?" he calls out.

  "I need a ride," I tell him, looking back. I'm figuring it's going to cost me some money so I'm ready to go five, maybe ten bucks.

  "Fresno? Bakersfield? Yuma's where we're headed. It ought to be hot enough for ya down there." He never has turned to look at me.