A Good Man

I just got a call from Mom. A good man is dead. I’m to look for the obit and send flowers on behalf of our family. Her back prevents Mom from making the trip. I can’t go for reasons I’ll make clear.

The recently departed was married to Mom’s first cousin. She’d had three girls before and they had another together. The first husband went crazy and killed three people in California in the late sixties, not long after the last girl was born. His Mom and Dad ran the Stenchville Western Auto and lived a block over from us. Some years after, another coked up neighbor was tried and convicted of murdering his grandparents. Later, the conviction was overturned. I don’t know if he’s still living.

The eldest of the three girls had her Dad’s personality and has been a career criminal in these parts for thirty years. We hear she’s recently readmitted herself to a psychiatric facility. The other girls wrecked a car when they were teens, leaving the second sister brain damaged. I made the mistake of speaking to her at a funeral and suffered suggestive phone calls for years.

And folks wonder why I never come around. It just occurs to me that although I enjoyed a relatively privileged upbringing, addiction, violence and murder were all around me. My Mom’s Dad died from a bullet to the back of the head in 1957. My Dad was on the VFD and at the scene of wanton slaughters. My childhood is punctuated with vignettes of a phone ringing, being hurried into a car and sitting quietly in hospital waiting rooms. Mom held her stepfather’s head in her lap on her Mom’s kitchen floor as his lungs disintegrated in an orgy of foamy blood.

If we are hard people, these are some of the reasons. Now that I think about it, during the summer of ’87, after laying her husband to rest, Mom spent a considerable amount of time and money trying to keep her brother from serving time for failure to submit payroll taxes. I suppose it was for the best. It gave her something to do. After he got out, my uncle never came around. Just as well. He had a habit of showing up in the middle of the night after wrecking his car.

Mom’s other brother was bush hogging and a piece of barb wire fence flew into his temple, paralyzing him on one side. Remarkably, he breaks horses for a living. Seldom do I go to Stenchville without running into him.

BTW, Mom’s eldest brother was on the periphery of the two greatest criminal enterprises Randolph County’s ever seen. He ran with the Shepards in Asheboro and worked with some folks who did time for receiving stolen goods. He was never charged for either. He was very lucky. It didn’t hurt that his first cousin was head detective on the Asheboro PD.

Some say stolen construction equipment is buried under farmland all over NE Randolph County. I’d tell you more and you’d recognize the names, but it wouldn’t be wise.

For instance, the man who ran all the gambling in Stenchville for decades escaped prosecution by placing his son as a dispatcher for the NCHP. That op got rolled up eventually.

Back to Mom, her sister in Louisiana is married to a sixty-seven year-old man recently diagnosed with advanced dementia from Alzheimer’s. His employer, a ship-builder, is keeping him on until he can retire with full benefits. They are raising the children of an adopted son who disappeared from a boat in the Gulf of Mexico.

Even as a child I was exposed to violence. The local butcher was missing a thumb. I asked about it and was told his Wife shot it off after catching him with another woman. She wasn’t shooting at his thumb. Perhaps that’s the reason I married late and have no desire to be unfaithful.

That reminds me of the local retiree who got fired from Food Lion for soliciting attractive older ladies as he loaded groceries in their cars. He later intimated to a friend that he had no idea who turned him in. He’d been doing it for years – and sometimes they said yes. A corollary later made the rounds that he’d gotten confused and thought there was a special on breasts and thighs.

A childhood friend ran out in front of a car and received a metal plate in the front of his skull. It was like playing with a nine year-old Frankenstein. Years later, an FBI agent interviewed me as a background check toward his application. I remember saying:

You do know he’s got a metal plate in his head?

My Dad’s Father’s car got hit by a train and he died in 1960, the year I was born. A dozen years later we were out playing and saw a car get hit by a train. He died, too.

My next door neighbor, whom I’d played with all my life, was thrown from a car and died on his eighteenth birthday.

The Stenchville physician, Dr. Eller, Mom’s employer and another neighbor, died from a gunshot under very mysterious circumstances. I’ll never forget he had a one-eyed boxer named Pluto, whom he had found run over and stitched up.

Later, Mrs. Eller dated a man who would remove his shirt to display terrible scars inflicted by Japanese swords and sewn up with shoelaces.

About twenty years later a guy I went to school with attacked a local police officer who discharged two .357 rounds into his abdomen. The guy recovered, only to attack a friend of mine who killed him with a knife. He renovated my house while being tried and acquitted of murder.

My friend’s brother is now police chief. My friend, who had apparently worked undercover but never said anything to me about it, was placed outside the Randolph hospital emergency room after ODing on heroin and cocaine. I think it’s called a speedball.

Last year about this time, a childhood friend with whom I’d made music for years, walked out of a bar in an ice storm and froze to death.