There was nowhere for me to go when I aged out of Bell County Baptist Children's Home, but I didn't care. They gave me a list of job openings on my last day there, but I didn't want a job. Jobs are for losers. I was going to be the next Carl Kidwell. Carl aged out of Baptist three years before I did and became a legend. The newspapers said that within a six month period Carl scored over $100,000 from nine banks throughout Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. He died in a hail of police gunfire at the First Fed in Corbin during his tenth bank robbery. I was determined to be just like him—minus the twenty bullet holes, of course.
Todd, Chuck, and Danny said I could stay with them in the abandoned mobile home they were squatting in. Danny was the only one from the Baptist Children's Home, Todd and Chuck were high school dropouts. We had a two acre trash-strewn lot all to ourselves, but no electricity or running water. "Just shit and piss over there behind the Dart," Chuck said, pointing to an engine-less old Dodge Dart up on cinder blocks in the back corner of the lot. There wasn't even an outhouse, just turds and toilet paper on the ground. But who cares? I was out of the orphanage and had my freedom, for the most part. My first day there Todd and Chuck laid down the house rules: Keep my face clean shaven, my hair trimmed, my clothes clean. If you look like a hillbilly, you'll get treated like one. We wanted to avoid scrutiny, not broadcast ourselves like a bunch of patch-wearing outlaws. Made sense to me.
Todd and Chuck made for an odd couple; Todd with movie star good looks and pug-nosed Chuck with a circus strong-man's hairy physique. Danny told me how lucky he and I were—Todd was an expert house breaker and Chuck could strip a car in a just a few hours, and they were willing to take us under their wings. Neither of them had ever been busted by the law, although Chuck had been interrupted while stealing a cache of bootleg liquor from the back of a general store in Harlan. A single punch knocked the store owner unconscious, but they had to stay out of Harlan for a while after that. Danny and I were assigned the easy stuff at first, shoplifting from grocery stores and assisting Todd and Chuck when needed. And at first, things were going fine. Then along came Sarah and things got complicated.
* * *
I'm not really sure what it is about rich kids that make them want to rebel and run away and pretend to be desperate. Is it wealth and privilege guilt? A longing for a sense of adventure, that their lives aren't enough? But Danny had Sarah sitting in the car with him when Todd came out of the funeral reception that they'd crashed to swipe jewelry, prescription pills, and whatever else they could find. Sarah was a niece of the decedent—a rich trucking company owner whose funeral had been announced in the newspapers. Todd had sent Danny out to the car to wait until he could get away from a chatty old woman who'd cornered him in conversation about Jesus and salvation. When he finally broke free, Danny was waiting in the passenger side of the Thunderbird and Sarah was in the back seat. Todd opened the back door and tried to yank Sarah out, but he gave up under the ferocity of Sarah's defensive kicking.
When the three of them got back and walked into the trailer, Chuck and I looked at them in astonishment until Chuck pointed his finger at Sarah and roared at Todd, "What the fuck is she doing here?"
"I need a place to stay, Ham Hock," Sarah said, dropping her duffel to the floor. "Y'all owe me, robbing my aunt's house and all."
"How old are you? Anybody gonna be looking for you?" Chuck asked her.
"Ain't nobody gonna be missing me. I'm eighteen."
Sarah took the smallest room in the trailer as her own after throwing out the trash and junk we'd been tossing in there. She was pretty—perfect alabaster skin, hair tinted with pinkish red highlights cut into an angled bob, petite and muscular as a gymnast. But it wasn't her looks that enthralled me, it was her strut, her attitude. Nights when we'd pass the bottle and smoke the weed, she didn't seem the least bit scared or intimidated to be alone with a bunch of young men. She verbally slapped down any male chauvinism with quick wit but could just as easily show maternal caring with gentle words. When she was in high school she used to fill black capsules with ground up No Doz and sell them as Black Beauties. She was pulling in a hundred bucks a week and she didn't even need the money.
Before Sarah had even been there a week, she seemed to have disappeared. She came back a day later, pulling a red Radio Flyer loaded with canned food, Fritos, sodas, a socket set, and a display rack of disposable lighters. Chuck demanded to know where she'd gotten it. She wouldn't tell him. "Don't worry about it, Ham Hock," she told him. "Y'all been sitting around on your lazy asses all week, somebody's gotta bring home the bacon." Danny and I just watched in amused admiration. Chuck fumed. Todd fell head over heels and made little effort to disguise it.
Todd's talent was home break-ins, and he was fucking good at it. He seemed to always know the perfect time to strike. It was if he had a sixth sense for where the valuables would be inside any given home and zero right in on them. Not even the dogs would bark at him. And now that he had Sarah to impress, he wanted to really step up his game. But he would need an assistant to do it. No, not Sarah, he couldn't trust her to pull of a burglary, not yet. Chuck was too big to fit through windows and too impatient and prone to senseless vandalism. Not Danny, he was to timid. He picked me to go with him. It would serve a double purpose for me—I would learn from and surpass the best, and I'd become a legend and get the girl. Sarah and I would be the next Bonnie and Clyde. Or so I hoped. I'd still have to contend with Todd's male-model good looks.
I wasn't expecting it when it came. Todd just nudged me awake one night and jerked his thumb toward the door. He explained to me in the Thunderbird that we were going to a two-story brick mansion in Wasioto set back from the highway, ironically just a short walk from the sheriff's home. He backed up the driveway, around the side of the house, and parked between the back door and a swing set. It astonished me how quick he gained entry with his improvised screwdriver/crowbar tool that fit between the door jamb, the strike plate, and the latch. I was disappointed when he told me to wait there just outside the door. Within a couple of minutes he came back with a mop bucket filled with whiskey and wine bottles. He told me to load them in the trunk and bring the bucket back. When I got back to the door he handed me a laundry hamper full of watches, jewelry, a pistol, and a box of ammo. We went on repeat for about fifteen minutes and when we were done the trunk and backseat of the Thunderbird were bulging with loot. As we drove back down US Highway 119 we went by a Chevy Suburban coming in the opposite direction. "Holy fucking shit," Todd said.
"What?" I asked.
"That was Glatstein. They came back earlier than I thought. That was fucking close."
* * *
The Glatstein job was Todd's biggest at the time. We drank for days on the liquor, but we went through the $500 cash in no time flat. We sold the bank statements and social security cards to a friend of Chuck's in Knoxville. We divided up the loot, but Todd gave a special little gift to Sarah; a sapphire and diamond tennis bracelet. She thanked him and he shyly said It's not like we're married or anything like a schoolboy with a crush. It became readily apparent I was going to have to accelerate my learning curve if I didn't want to be regarded as a beta. Still, I was the only one Todd wanted along with him on his jobs. We hit two houses over the next two months that got us hauls nearly as big as the Glatstein job. Then we hit the mother lode.
The house was barely more than a shack, obviously occupied by a hoarder. It was the first time Todd had me go inside with him, he needed me to help clear the junk and look for anything worth taking. In the corner of the bedroom behind mounds of clothing Todd found a dozen manila envelopes, all stuffed with cash. Damn near fifty thousand dollars worth as we found out after we got back home and counted it. "Damn!" Chuck said. "If I'd known having a girl around would make you this good, I'd of brought a bitch in here a year ago!" We partied the whole night, talked about what we could do with the money, Todd repeating his story on how he knew that shack had something good in it, Todd lighting Sarah's cigarettes for her, pouring her drinks for her, complimenting her hair color even though it was too dark to really see it in our electricityless trailer. I made eye contact with her as often as I could in the dark, but kept my mouth shut. And I could tell by the way she looked back, it was me, not Todd, that was going to win her affections.
I got up off the floor a little before noon the next day and decided that the first thing I'd buy with my share of the money would be a fucking bed. Goddam, my back hurt. I staggered out to go take a piss and thought I heard something from behind the dump-truck bed on the other side of the lot. I peeked around it to see Sarah's combat boots in the air and Chuck's hairy ass pumping up and down between her legs. All of a sudden I didn't have to piss anymore. Todd was coming out of the trailer as I was going back in. My face must have betrayed something because he said "What?" when he saw me. I yanked my thumb in the direction of the dump bed. He went over—his reaction was the same as mine.
That very night Todd took me with him to go hit another house, but he pulled off to the side of the highway and started nipping at a vodka bottle. "I know you like her too," he said. "But I'm gonna win her fair and square. No hard feelings, okay?" We sat there for an hour in silence passing the bottle back and forth, but in the second hour I started refusing it. I didn't think it was a good idea to be drinking this heavily before hitting a house, but I thought I would be stepping out of line to say anything. When we'd been sitting there almost three hours I asked him if we were going to hit a house. He got out of the car without answering me, so I followed him. He stumbled a little as he walked. We left the Thunderbird out in the open on the side of the highway. I should've questioned all this. I didn't.
He walked off onto a single lane paved road past one house, then another, and then stopped in front of a large clapboard home with a neatly trimmed lawn. "What do you think?" he asked me. What the fuck was he asking me for? He always planned out what we were going to hit ahead of time. But he was the master—I couldn't question him and I damn sure wasn't going to tell him whether or not it was a good house to hit. He walked right up on the front porch, not bothering with stealth, I stopped at the porch stairs. "Wait here," he said. His voice was slurred. He sliced the window screen, slid the window aside, climbed in and fell over the sill. I couldn't believe all the noise he was making, but I still had faith that he knew what he was doing. I waited as usual. The car was about a two or three minute walk away.
The pop of the gunshot was enough to make me jump, but Todd's hideous scream caused me to lose control of my bladder. His scream was completely silenced in short order by a second gunshot. I couldn't use the car to get away—Todd had the keys with him. I ran back to the storm drainage ditch that paralleled the highway and made my way back to the trailer as fast as I could through all the brush. It took until a little after dawn the next morning, my progress slowed after an eastern racer bit my ankle. There were three Bell County Sheriff's Office vehicles with lights flashing all around our little home. I just slid back down in the ditch and massaged the snake bite while I tried to come up with a plan for what to do next.
* * *
It turns out that the FBI had us under intermittent surveillance and a few hours after the homeowner shot Todd, the FBI contacted the Sheriff's Office to let them know where our trailer was and who we were. They cuffed and stuffed Chuck, Danny, and Sarah before tearing the place up and cataloging all the stolen shit. A sheriff's deputy picked me up behind Hall's Grocery later that afternoon as I was having a meal of Doritos and cherry Coke. My lower leg was swelled up like a butter churn, but he wouldn't get me an ambulance because the bite wasn't venomous. After they figured out I was with Todd when he got shot, they told me I would be charged with his murder—unless I testified against Chuck. There was also an implication that they would not let me see a doctor for my now-infected snake bite unless I agreed. I agreed. Although I didn't know it at the time (we were all separated in the jail), Danny and Sarah also agreed to testify against Chuck. When I finally got my copy of the case documents, it looked like they were charging him with every car stolen within the last ten years within a thousand miles. When the day came to testify, Chuck glared at me from the defendants table as I sat in the witness stand spilling it all. Sarah wasn't there, she didn't have to testify. Her parents paid for her lawyer and got her her own deal. Chuck got a twelve year sentence; Danny and I got time served.
* * *
So much for my plans to be a big fucking legend. My first job when I got out of jail was cutting dark fire tobacco in Tennessee. After the end of the season I came back to Bell County, Kentucky and tried to get a job at a wildcat coal mine, but the fucker looked at my name on the application and told me they don't hire rats. I finally got a job in Middlesboro washing dishes at Joanie's Pizza and Burgers, but Joanie keeps 10% of my pay or she'll tell my probation officer I was stealing out of the cash register. One more year of this shit.
I wasn't sure if it was her or not, a little plumper, no dye in her hair, walking in through the door with a little rug rat clinging to her leg. I went out into the dining room on my break, and sure enough it was Sarah. Her kid was the spitting image of ugly Chuck. I slid in the booth across the table from her, pointing at her pack of smokes on the table and asked if I could have one. She slid the pack over to me. I asked her if Chuck was out of prison yet.
"Don't know," she said.
"Does he even know he's a daddy?" I asked, pointing my cigarette at her kid playing with the free toy that comes with kid's meals.
"Nope."
I blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. "Heard from Danny?"
"Heard about him."
"What?" I asked after she finished chewing a mouthful of pizza.
"He's doing fifteen years in Eddyville. The Hurley brothers gave him a .32 and told him to hold up the Texaco in Pineville. The clerk shot him in the back as he was leaving through the front door. He's paralyzed from the waist down."
"I guess I better get back to work," I said, jabbing the cigarette out in the flimsy tin ashtray.
"That police report on you and Todd was pretty fucked up. Todd really tied up that couple?"
The police report was full of lies made to make Todd look as bad as possible. It said he held the married couple in the house at knifepoint, tied them up, and then ransacked the house. Then it claimed the husband freed himself, retrieved his pistol and told Todd to get out of the house, but Todd charged him forcing the homeowner to shoot. "Let me tell you what happened to Todd," I said, taking another cigarette from her pack. I told her about us seeing her behind the dump bed with Chuck, Todd falling into a lovesick depression, and then breaking into the house while drunk—getting shot ten seconds after falling through the front window. Joanie gave me a dirty look from across the dining room floor as she wiped down a table, letting me know break time was over. Sarah noticed it, too. The old Sarah would've zapped me with some humiliating zinger about being a minimum wage pizza boy. I probably would've felt better if she did.