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

Also by David Sheppard:

  Oedipus on a Pale Horse

  Journey through Greece in Search of a Personal Mythology

  Novelsmithing

  The Structural Foundation of Plot, Character, and Narration

  The Mysteries

  A Novel of Ancient Eleusis

  THE ESCAPE OF

  BOBBY RAY HAMMER

  A Novel of a '50s Family

  by

  David Sheppard

  *****

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Copyright 2011 by David Sheppard

  Author's Website:

  https://www.NovelsmithingBlog.com

  FOR

  All the kids of Chowchilla.

  Acknowledgements

  A special thanks to Renate Wood in whose creative writing class this novel was initially conceived. She also read the first draft and provided much needed guidance. Renate passed away in 2007 from ALS. The novel was written with the criticism and support of a private novel writing group in Boulder, CO. Thanks to Amy and Sita for midwifing the first draft. I submitted a second draft to the Rocky Mountain Writers Guild's Advanced Novel Workshop under the direction of Dr. James Hutchinson, who provided support and critiquing.

 

  Author's Note

  This is actually my first novel and was written between the years 1988-93. It started out as a class assignment in my first creative writing class at the University of Colorado at Boulder, in which my instructor, the poet Renate Wood, suggested we write a short story about someone as different from ourselves as we could imagine. To satisfy the requirements of the assignment, I wrote and submitted what is now Chapter 2. The concept had its origin in my own childhood with the death of my older brother's best friend in an automobile accident. Later on, I became friends with the dead kid's younger brother. We played high school baseball and drank a lot of beer together. His family never really seemed to recover from the death. But his family was much different than that portrayed here, as is mine. The story had a momentum and direction of its own, and no one I knew actually shows up in the novel; however, anyone who went to Chowchilla Union High during the 1950s would certainly recognize the town, its people, and perhaps an element of themselves scattered about the various chapters.

  Table of Contents

  Part I: Charles Kunze's Gold Rush

  Chapter 1: Rascal at the Cemetary

  Chapter 2: Fight!

  Chapter 3: Leroy's Lies

  Chapter 4: Voices in the Dark

  Chapter 5: The '48 Hudson

  Chapter 6: Expelled and No Football

  Chapter 7: Charles Resurrected

  Chapter 8: First Leroy and Then Bev

  Chapter 9: Where Lenny Died

  Chapter 10: Sonnett Again

  Chapter 11: Lenny's Pistol

  Part II: Everyone Has a Story

  Chapter 12: The Field Late at Night

  Chapter 13: Aunt Loretta Has a Story to Tell

  Chapter 14: Trish Has Some Answers

  Chapter 15: Leroy and His Uncle Jesse

  Chapter 16: Hot Night Out with Brenda

  Chapter 17: Breaking Ground at Night

  Part III: Taking Chances and Reaping the Consequences

  Chapter 18: Oklahoma Credit Card

  Chapter 19: Halloween and a Little Dynamite

  Chapter 20: Swapping Lies with Charles

  Chapter 21: Mary Has a Little Something for Everyone

  Chapter 22: Another Fight, Sort of

  Chapter 23: Leroy Bites the Big One

  Chapter 24: Another Funeral

  Part IV: Coming to Terms with Charles

  Chapter 25: Waking and Worrying

  Chapter 26: Digging Post Holes

  Chapter 27: The Slap in the Library

  Chapter 28: Aunt Loretta Knows More and She's Talking

  Chapter 29: Fighting Niggers

  Chapter 30: With Charles in Nigger Town

  Chapter 31: Shooting Roof Tops

  Chapter 32: Flood a Coming

  Chapter 33: Dog Rescue

  Part V: Chasing Down Lenny's Journal

  Chapter 34: A Little About Bridges

  Chapter 35: Papa's Problem with Delbert

  Chapter 36: Helen's Ring

  Chapter 37: Bobby Ray's New Mama

  Chapter 38: Gretta's Baby Girl

  Chapter 39: Rumors of Chelsey

  Chapter 40: Papa in Trouble with Mama

  Chapter 41: Papa Wants to Shake Hands

  Chapter 42: The Fight Without End

  Chapter 43: Now Jesse Has Something to Say

  Chapter 44: Confrontation with Mr. Sonnett

  Chapter 45: Trip to the Junkyard

  Part VI: Mama Shuts Off the Water Pump

  Chapter 46: Trouble Following on the Heels of Trouble

  Chapter 47: Trish and Curt Have a Niece

  Chapter 48: Loretta and the History of the Ring

  Chapter 49: Riding the Hammer

  Chapter 50: Putting the Pressure on Mama

  Chapter 51: Charles in Danger

  Chapter 52: When Words Fail

  Chapter 53 Bonfire

  Chapter 54: Bobby Gets a Haircut

  Chapter 55: Waylaid on Robertson Boulevard

  Chapter 56: Graduation

  Chapter 57: One More Stop at the Cemetery

  THE ESCAPE OF

  BOBBY RAY HAMMER

  A Novel of a '50s Family

  Is not my word like as a fire?

  saith the lord; and like a hammer

  that breaketh the rock in pieces?

  Jeremiah, 23:29

  PART I

  Charles Kunze's Gold Rush

  CHAPTER 1: Rascal at the Cemetery

  Memories of May 1952

  Papa had a pistol. He hardly ever carried it, but I knew he had it on him that day. I saw that black metal barrel and the little round cylinder with the shiny gold bullets that turned when he fired it. I didn't see it sticking out of his back pocket which it sometimes did when he was going out in the field to target practice or maybe in his hand hanging down at his side when he was going out to shoot something that needed to be shot, like when a dog got its legs caught in the hay mower and was yelping and stumbling around on bleeding stubs and dangling pieces. I didn't see the pistol that way. That day it was more like the time he carried it inside his jacket when he was paying the hired hands for picking cotton, and they didn't like the way the weights were adding up. It was like he was expecting trouble. I didn't actually see the pistol, I just saw it in his eyes.

  Not that Papa looked at me. He hadn't looked at me or said a word to me in three days. But he'd been thinking a lot about the police. He argued with them about how Lenny died. "It was no accident," Papa said. "Lenny was too good of a driver to make that kind of mistake." I thought he was going to hit Brock. Papa backed Brock up so that he had to get in his police car and leave.

  I knew I'd done something wrong, but I just couldn't remember what. Maybe someone else was going to get blamed for it. And Papa kept on, so I knew he knew something. 

  It was all my fault.

  Mama was grief stricken, so I didn't blame her for not keeping Papa from bringing his pistol, and I didn't blame her for what happened at the Chowchilla Cemetery. She was all torn up inside and kept Trish and Curt close. She just couldn't quit screaming. For three days after my older brother Lenny was killed, she'd been that way. It would be quiet in the house, quieter than usual because she wasn't working in the kitchen like she was most times, washing dishes or maybe banging pans baking chocolate meringue pies or just frying up a mess of fresh-caught perch. She was in her bedroom being
real quiet, and then she would scream and just keep screaming like she'd forgotten that it happened and then remembered he was dead all over again.

  That is the way it was with me. Every time I thought of it, it was like I had just found out all over again. While Mama was locked in her bedroom, I'd go into mine and sit on the bed with my head down. Sometimes little Curt would come in and sit on the floor at my feet. He was nine. Then Trish would come in. She was ten. She would sit by Curt on the floor, and we wouldn't say a word. Just listen to Mama scream. I felt like I should do something. I'd replaced Lenny as the oldest boy, but I didn't know what to do about things like he had.

  Leroy was my best friend then but I didn't like him much. His daddy brought him over to see how I was doing. First he wanted to play catch, but I said no. Then he wanted to play with the dog, Lenny's dog, Rascal, and I said no again. So he sat on the bed beside me, and the two of us looked down at Trish and Curt as they looked up at us, Trish with those big blue eyes. With Mama letting out a scream once in a while, we didn't have to say anything.

  "I don't want you here," I told Leroy after a little bit. "Go home." Leroy always irritated me, but I'd never been mean to him before.

  And I was still mad at Lenny for hitting me with a baseball, even though he was dead. I was playing catch with him only the week before. He was throwing the ball really hard, and I got afraid because he'd hit me with the ball before. Charles was there too. He was Lenny's best friend. We were playing three way catch.

  "Take it easy when you throw to Bobby," Charles told Lenny.

  Lenny was almost five years older and always called me a sissy. He was a senior and I was in the eighth grade, even a little small for an eighth grader.

  "Hold it, Lenny," said Charles, but it was already too late.

  Lenny, he laughed because after it hit me in the head, the ball went straight up in the air like a pop fly and he caught it. "Funniest thing I've ever seen," he said. "A real high pop fly. When a ball hits a sissy in the head, the higher it goes, the bigger sissy he is. This one went a hundred feet high and I caught it."

  The ground floated on me, and it was hard to stand.

  "You shouldn't have done it, Lenny," said Charles. Charles is the only one that ever took up for me. But he was mad at Lenny that day anyway. I didn't hear all it was about, but I thought they were going to start hitting each other over a couple of girls.

  I was dizzy for days. Mama said that if the dizzy spells didn't quit, they'd have to take me to the doctor. She took my temperature, and even it was running a little high. Then Lenny got killed.

  But after him hitting me, I decided that one day, one day when I got big enough, I was going to get Lenny. I had already started the countdown. The only thing I could hurt Lenny about was that he used to keep a little notebook where he wrote things. He didn't like me making fun of him for doing that. I used to sneak it out, read parts and then laugh. He hid it from me, hid it from everyone. So I would have to wait till later to get back at him. When I got to be a senior in high school, like he was then, I'd be big enough to kick his ass. But then I remembered that he laughed when Papa shot Tangi, so I didn't know if I could wait that long. You'd think that after he was dead, I wouldn't have had to be mad at him anymore. Him being dead didn't seem to help a bit.

  But, Rascal triggered what happened at the Cemetery. Papa was primed for sure, but Rascal set him off. Lenny's dog was named Rascal. Rascal had the hots for Lenny's Block C jacket. Lenny had four white stripes on the left sleeve, one for each year he lettered in varsity baseball. Mama was always sewing a patch on it because Rascal liked to chew and that jacket was his favorite for chewing. He got mad when Lenny tried to take it away from him, and he'd growl and pull on a corner of it, or he'd stand on it with his front paws and bark in Lenny's face real loud. Lenny liked to tease him that way. Once I even saw Rascal try to mate it.

  Aunt Loretta could see it coming. She kept telling me to stand back a little more from the coffin. Mama asked her to watch me because I had a bad case of the flu. I get nervous around Aunt Loretta. She always dresses weird. You'd think she could have worn something a little different for a funeral. Maybe it wasn't the way she was dressed so much as it was the fact she didn't have a bra on underneath. And she is so sloppy because she's just a turkey farmer. She hadn't even made sure she had all the buttons buttoned and a couple in the middle wasn't, so her blouse stood open a little. If you looked real close you could see inside. I mean, this was a funeral. At least her skirt was black.

  So she was standing next to me, and I smelled a strange mixture of perfume and turkey shit as she patted me on the shoulder now and then and said, "Stand back a little, Ray." And Papa kept ignoring me to the point where I knew I'd done something wrong. For the life of me, I couldn't remember what it was. If he knew, why didn't he do something to me?

  I could tell that Papa was irritated with Charles when he showed up late and had on those dark sunglasses. He could've at least been on time. Lenny and Charles played baseball at the high school together. Played a lot of things together for that matter. And one of them was Helen, Lenny's girl. She was one of the girls he was arguing with Charles over just before he got killed. She was there, right in the middle of things, all that red hair piled high up on her head so her long white neck and ears showed, and her face an absolute mess, as wet as it was, and her eyes still pouring tears. Her nose was so red I wondered if it was bleeding, and she kept rubbing on her face so hard that it seemed like her eyes, nose and that fat mouth of hers had all changed places. Didn't even look like a face and she wasn't usually that bad looking. Charles came over to say something to her, but she hit him before old Charles even got a word out. Slapped him hard in the face so that it echoed all over the Cemetery, almost knocked his sunglasses off. Even the preacher, Brother Hensen, turned to look, but he turned back real quick like he didn't want any part of it. Papa looked like he was going to help her for a second but then thought better of it. Helen kept at her nose so that it did start bleeding, and it was a while before she noticed. She had blood everywhere in no time. That side of Charles' face got real red like he was blushing, and he kept looking from side to side, turning his head like he was confused, and it was like "now he's blushing and now he's not." Then Charles noticed me, and came over and put his hand on my shoulder, but Papa shoved him back over by his father. Papa didn't want anybody feeling sorry for me.

  "Karl," that's Karl Kunze, Charles' father, "you get that kid out of here," Papa told him, meaning he wanted Charles to leave. "And get the hell out of here yourself." Papa didn't want any of the Kunze's at Lenny's funeral for some reason. Karl's a short little fellow, wide as he is tall, and he didn't have a wife there with him because he didn't have one. She died in a car wreck four years before. He had on his overalls just like he had to stop milking cows to come to the funeral and was planning to go right back afterward. Since Papa was getting madder and madder at Charles, I got to thinking that maybe it was because Charles was still alive and Lenny wasn't. I know I sure felt like it wasn't right, me being alive and Lenny dead. Then Papa turned from Charles and looked at me, and I thought he was going to hit me. But then I saw that Papa was crying, and I'd never seen him cry before. I knew Papa didn't know what I'd done. But he acted so strange toward me that I even thought maybe I'd made a mistake, maybe I shouldn't be there at all. Maybe there was a thing that said kids shouldn't be at their brother's funerals. If there was, Mama and Papa wouldn't have thought to tell me because they weren't thinking straight. Trish and Curt were there, but they were little kids.

  Papa was mad about something else, that something else was Charles. Charles stood tall and straight in his new pair of graduation pants and white shirt with his fists clenched, standing a good head taller than his father. He kept clenching and unclenching those fists and looking from side to side like if he got his chance he was going to straighten out something with Papa.

  Then there was Gretta, Charles' younger sister. "Take that whore," Papa said, mean
ing Gretta, and there wasn't any doubt who he meant because he was pointing, "with you as you go," he told Karl. I didn't know what 'whore' meant then. I thought maybe she'd been chopping cotton for some farmer and that instead of 'whore' he was saying 'hoer' and Papa just called her that because he knew what she worked at but didn't know her name. Papa was mad, but I didn't think he could be mad at her. She was just standing off in the background, looking a little big around the middle for a girl her age. I remember hoping she'd get to stay because she had a big black hat shoved down on top of the fluffiest golden hair I'd ever seen. I really hated to hear that Gretta and Charles had to leave. She was the other girl Lenny and Charles were arguing about before Lenny got killed.

  So Brother Hensen started his "ashes to ashes, and dust to dust" thing, and I was waiting for Charles and the rest of the Kunze's to leave like Papa told them, when up ran Rascal. Papa had left the pickup window part way down so Rascal could get some fresh air. But he got out through the window, and what he was dragging with him was why Mama started screaming again. It was Lenny's Block C jacket. Just before he was killed, Lenny had been looking for it. I heard him and Mama arguing. He accused Mama of hiding it because she didn't want to patch it anymore. The jacket had been lost for weeks. Rascal had found the jacket behind the seat in the pickup and was bringing it to Lenny for his final send off.

  Now, Rascal hated Charles more than any dog has ever hated a human being. I don't know what Charles had done, but it must've been something bad. Charles was the only one Rascal ever bit, and he'd bite him every time he came over if Lenny didn't hold him off. Lenny was a little slow about it, and Charles always got mad. So Rascal came running into the Cemetery with Lenny's jacket like he'd just found the one thing to make this occasion perfect, and he looked like he was glad to get to do the last good thing anybody could do for Lenny. Then he saw Charles.

  Papa'd quit harping on Charles being there and Brother Hensen was getting into all the fine words he brought that would put Lenny to rest, and Mama had quit screaming again and was just crying softly when Rascal ran up with Lenny's jacket, dropped it by the coffin and lit into Charles. "You mangy sonofabitch," is what Papa said when Mama screamed and I thought he was talking about Rascal but then realized that Rascal had just set him off on Charles being there again.