Mother's Day

by Dennis McDougal

  It would be the last time Terry saw her mother.

  The last time Connie saw her mother-in-law, Theresa appeared to have bleached her hair. “She’d cut her hair real short, ’cause normally it was down past her waist and it was dark brown,” Connie said.

  Theresa was wearing a wig—one of the habits she had developed since Sheila’s “disappearance.” But the wig was convincing. Connie didn’t know it was not real and almost didn’t recognize her.

  Connie and Howard were still married, but separated. She was living off and on with Howard’s best friend, Robert Watson, when Theresa came by to see Robert’s dad. Over the years Theresa had become friendly with Robert and his parents, Bud and Helga Watson. Helga had worked at a convalescent home with her during the 1970s, and Bud shared Theresa’s interest in the supernatural. Whenever they got together, Theresa abandoned her hypochondria and the two of them talked for what seemed like hours about the coming Apocalypse.

  “He was into fortune-telling or something like that because he claimed to have predicted an earthquake in California,” said Robert. “He was convinced that when the big earthquake hit, which could be anytime now, the California shelf was going to sink, we were going to see a very large tidal wave, and eventually parts around Nevada would become beachfront property.

  “She believed it. I guess there were passages in the Bible that refer to this sort of thing, and she was afraid that, should we stay in California, we were going to have to learn how to swim really well.”

  Pack up, she told Robert after she’d spoken with Bud Watson. They weren’t going to stay in Sacramento. Watson himself was planning to escape with his family to Ohio. Theresa wanted to leave before the deluge, too.

  By this time she had made her son quit his job at the Red Lion Inn. She suggested Robert tell his boss that he’d gotten food poisoning and threaten to sue. That way, she reasoned, they might be persuaded to pay him off just to avoid going to court. It didn’t work out that way, but Robert was still out of a job.

  So when his mother told him they were moving to Reno, he put up little resistance. “I also believe she wanted to get me away from Howard, William, and any friends that I had,” he said. “I think she was afraid I was going to pull up and leave like everybody else did.”

  In Reno, Theresa and Robert moved into a rooming house with no name over a mom-and-pop grocery store run by a Korean couple on Second Street near downtown. They had no money and Theresa said she was too sick to work.

  “I had a job within a week at Circus Circus,” said Robert. “My mom threw a fit. She didn’t want me working at Circus Circus because evidently Terry’s boyfriend had family who worked there at one time and Mom was afraid I would tie right back into Terry. She was afraid I would betray her at any moment and that I had purposely gone to work at that particular casino just so I could maintain contact with Terry.

  “She got so paranoid in Reno that she wouldn’t drink water. She said it was poisoning her. I had to lug bottled water up to her or she wouldn’t drink at all. She would accuse me of going to a hose and filling up the jugs with tap water instead of going to buy it at the store and then she wouldn’t drink. She got sores on her tongue from dehydration.”

  Between tending to his mother and escaping into what was fast becoming an addiction to marijuana and other drugs, Robert soon lost his dishwashing job at Circus Circus. Trying to work while on an LSD trip turned out not to be such a terrific idea, although it did not deter him from repeating the maneuver several times. There were plenty of other casinos and Robert had no problem getting hired, even if he was only seventeen. “I was passing myself off as a thirty-nine-year-old man,” he said. “I had a Nevada state ID with the name Ron E. Bullington on it.”

  Theresa had saved at least one useful artifact from her relationship with Ron Bullington back in the early 1970s. She kept his military discharge papers. “I used those to apply for a missing Social Security card because I told Social Security I got robbed,” said Robert. “After I got the Social Security card, I went down to the department of motor vehicles, showed them two pieces of ID, and got a state ID card.”

  With three pieces of official identification, Robert followed his mother’s instructions and sent off to Albuquerque for a copy of Bullington’s birth certificate. Robert Knorr had effectively become Ronald E. Bullington.

  “I worked all up and down the strip,” he said. “I went in under Ron E. Bullington’s name. I was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My father’s name was Robert Q. Bullington. I had been an accountant when I was in the service at Mather Air Force Base in California, where I was discharged. I memorized all this.”

  He hadn’t gotten past the eighth grade, but Robert was a seasoned con man before he had turned eighteen, thanks to the survival skills his mother taught him.

  “Working bureaucracy is the same thing as working a con,” he said, recalling his mother’s sage advice. “If you know enough information about a given subject, people will see what they expect to see.

  “If you go in with the right bearing, and act like you know what you’re doing, they usually have so many customers that they don’t want to mess with you. Unless they have a really concrete reason to hold you up, they won’t because they want to get to their next coffee break.”

  But Robert didn’t always get away with things. Each time he mixed it up with the police, Theresa grew a little more paranoid. He and his mother had lived in Reno less than three months when Robert’s drug habit and druggie pals began getting him into trouble.

  “I was arrested the first time for vagrancy and prowling,” he said. “I was on acid at the time, and me and a guy named Sean Dixon went looking for a gun that he ‘shoved up a bush’s ass,’ as he put it. He had broken into a car and gotten the gun, a ring, and some methamphetamines. Basically, he got this guy’s little drug pouch and a found a nine-millimeter to boot.

  “So when the cops found us, we were looking for where he’d stashed it all and the cops got us for prowling. I spent five days in the Reno County Jail. I believe that was sometime around December of 1987.”

  A few months later Robert and a friend were arrested for breaking into a school and trashing it. Later that same year he and two others were busted for attempting to break into a car.

  His trouble with police wasn’t the only thing that disturbed Theresa. Robert’s income from the minimum-wage jobs that he kept losing weren’t paying the rent. Most of the time they had no car. When Theresa got a little money from Social Security or Robert worked some overtime, they would get a clunker by the week from Rent-A-Duck auto.

  After stiffing the landlord at their first place, he and his mother kept moving from apartment to apartment in Reno’s shabby downtown area. Theresa took to visiting soup kitchens and homeless shelters, like the one operated out of the parish hall at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Cathedral, catty-corner from the El Cortez Hotel and Casino in the heart of Reno. But she finally had to face the inevitable. In order to eat, Theresa finally had to go to work.

  “Mom was cooking at John Ascuaga’s Nugget in Sparks near the end,” said Robert.

  As Ron Bullington, Robert had found a job as a dishwasher at Harrah’s. Not only did he not get fired this time, he seemed to do well enough and made enough friends that he and another guy who worked in the kitchen decided to get an apartment together. His mother took the news badly. She demanded to see the head of personnel at Harrah’s. Robert was summoned from the kitchen to join Theresa, who was seated across the desk from an employee representative. Theresa revealed that her son was not Ron Bullington.

  “She told them I was an ex-felon, which at the time wasn’t true,” he said. “She said that I was working under a false name, I was a drug addict, and a big-time criminal. The lady in the personnel office looked over at me and said, ‘Well, do you still want to work here?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And she said, ‘Well, we can just go ahead and change this over to your legal name, and you can continue working.’

  “And Mo
m went off. ‘Oh, no! That’s falsification of his application! He can’t work here! It’s right there in your rules. You’ve got to fire him.’”

  Robert kept his job at Harrah’s, but even his mother’s treachery did not drive him away from her after his plans to move out and live with friends fell through. He continued to help with the rent and the groceries and take care of his mother as best he could.

  “We were like two weeks behind in our rent at the Virginia Street Hotel, and one day she comes home from work with a bruise on the inside of her arm,” Robert recalled. “She said that I had someone kidnap her. They injected her with some kind of drug and threatened to kill her, so she no longer wanted to live there with me.

  “So she left and came back the next day with the cops. She tried to antagonize a fight out of me while she was taking what she wanted to take from the place while the cops were watching.

  “The next day she left a couple bags of groceries for me, and that was the last I ever heard from her.”

  “When I lost my sisters at that age, it didn’t set in like it has now, if you can understand that,” said Terry. “It didn’t sink in that they were actually dead and how much I really loved them, until now. In my adult years I [understand] how much they really meant to me.”

  Most of the time Terry tore through her adolescence either high and dreamy or sober and angry. There was hardly time for her to be introspective because she was too busy fighting with ham-fisted boyfriends, scrounging up enough money to buy food and shelter, or looking for a drug and alcohol escape from the horrors of her past. When she’d had enough to drink, the memories from which she was trying to flee often played tricks on her. Instead of staying hidden away in pickled silence, they dredged themselves up and out of her subconscious, often leaving her huddled in a corner of the room sobbing uncontrollably.

  “Lena1 [a friend] heard me once—I guess I got good and slobbery—and I told her what happened to my sisters,” said Terry.

  Lena Jackson was a shrewd, stiletto-thin blonde from Sacramento’s rural outskirts who had figured out early how to overcome her hick roots by using male ego and lust to her advantage. Even in high school, she vied to become a beauty queen with a difference.

  She had her share of physical flaws, but she learned how to whisk them away by spending a little extra time on a diet and a little more time in front of the vanity each day before she stepped out into the world. Before she was eighteen, Lena learned through trial and error how to be a knockout.

  By the time Terry met her, she owned her own lingerie boutique—Trashy Fashions. She was a fox in her early thirties, and she wasn’t married. She was too smart to turn over what she had going for her to any man. Instead, she dated the men of her choosing—those with extra cash to spend on her often getting the edge.

  The rest of the time she built her business with regular businessmen’s luncheon “fashion” shows that featured scantily clad young women wearing the kind of lingerie first made famous by Frederick’s of Hollywood. The men who attended her shows ran the gamut from attorneys to bus drivers. They usually said they were coming to watch young women walk down the runway in their underwear because they wanted to get a little something for their wives and needed to know how it would look on them before buying.

  Lena was more than willing to accommodate their wishes. For a short time Terry became one of her models and came to live with her and another of her models, but not before Lena did a makeover and taught her what her mother never did. “When Terry first came to me, she had her hair hacked short, wore no makeup, and had on layered clothes,” recalled Lena. “She had no self-esteem. She was crying all the time. I fixed her up, showed her how to use makeup. She was really a very pretty girl.”

  But Terry’s makeover was only a partial success. She still cried herself to sleep at night. When Lena demanded to know the problem, Terry told her.

  “She didn’t believe it,” said Terry. “At that point, I thought I was an accessory. I thought I’d get in trouble if I went to the police. Lena said she really didn’t know if that was true, but she knew a lawyer who would.”

  Lena did not dismiss Terry’s story out of hand because she dimly recalled the news reports about a burning body in the Sierras back in 1984. The following day Lena gave Terry half a Valium to calm her down and drove her to the law offices of John Virga.

  “He told me that legally I was a minor, there was nothing they could do to me, I had done nothing wrong, and that he would check it out for me,” said Terry.

  Virga taped Terry’s statement and promised to get back to her once he’d talked with the authorities.

  Before he could do so, Terry cracked up Lena’s car.

  “I’d never driven before, and she asked me to pull her Cadillac out of the garage for her,” said Terry. “Instead of putting it into reverse, I put it in drive and ran it right into the garage wall.”

  Terry was convinced that Lena’s business involved more than lingerie sales. Lena herself never said that her Trashy Fashion runway shows were designed to encourage prostitution, but Terry believed that to be the case. So, when one of the other girls heard that she’d cracked up Lena’s car, Terry was told she’d probably wind up in white slavery at a brothel in Vallejo, or perhaps the Mustang Ranch in Nevada, in order to pay off her debt.

  Terry did what she had learned to do so well when trouble stalked her in the past. She ran, and left no forwarding address.

  Robert had no idea where his mother had gone, so he stole a car and drove back to Sacramento in the spring or early summer of 1988, as near as he could recall. He was drifting and felt very alone, even though his mother’s sudden disappearance had given him a curiously pleasant, if somewhat frightening, taste of genuine freedom. He wasn’t headed back to Sacramento to find Theresa necessarily. He thought he might be able to find Howard or Terry or Bill, though, and figure out what he should do with his life, as well as with his nagging nightmares.

  Cruising the streets of the old neighborhood turned up nothing. Howard was out of jail, but unreachable because he was still in a work furlough program. Robert couldn’t find Bill and Emily either. And Terry had simply disappeared. No matter which old haunts he visited or which mutual acquaintances he questioned, he could find no trace of his little sister.

  Finally he showed up at the front door of Connie’s mother’s house. “When I went up to the door, I was dressed in army camouflage, I had my head shaved, my eyebrows were gone, and I was wearing a boot knife,” said Robert. “That’s just the way I was at the time, so I’m sure I struck a handsome figure. They couldn’t get me out of the house quick enough, but they were really polite to me.”

  Before they hustled him away, Connie and her mother brought him up to date on his brother’s life.

  Howard had been in trouble with the police almost nonstop since the child-beating conviction. He’d been arrested for trespassing with intent to commit larceny, driving under the influence, and most recently, wife beating.

  Connie explained that she and Howard had reconciled once again following her tryst with Bud Watson. It was a mistake. Howard got drunk and tried to stab her while she was in the shower, she told Robert. They were legally separated on November 19, 1987, but Howard returned and beat her. On November 29, he was taken into custody and wound up spending Christmas and New Year’s in the Sacramento County Jail.

  Once he was out, Bud Watson and several of his friends exacted Connie’s revenge by cornering him one night and pounding him as badly as Howard had once pounded the Casa Robles High student who jumped his little brother Bill. Howard spent several days in the hospital, according to Connie.

  Robert returned to Nevada uninspired and unenlightened.

  One person who might have had some answers for him, had Robert bothered to track him down during his Sacramento sojourn, was Chester Harris. He could not have told the boy where his mother had fled to, but he probably would have been able to explain why. There had been witchcraft in his short marriage to Theres
a, but—as Chet was quick to explain to anyone who might have asked him at his beloved American Legion hall—he was not the practitioner.

  The retired newspaperman still got to the American Legion when he could and still put down as much beer as his failing health would allow, even though cancer had taken his tongue, jaw, and most of his throat. In his waning years, he could not speak, but he could still drink and communicate with notes and nods.

  His daughter, Terry Smith, flew from New York to California for a visit a few years before his bout with cancer. She walked into the American Legion hall much the same way as Mrs. Theresa Pulliam once did, asked the bartender which one was Chet Harris, and then sidled up to the man with the two beers at the end of the bar.

  “Dad and I never got along when I was younger, and I hadn’t seen him in more than twenty years,” she said. “I sat down, put my purse on the bar, and asked, ‘How about buying a girl a drink?’”

  Now pushing seventy and totally retired from the Union except for a coin column that he wrote for the Sunday hobby pages, the portly Chet Harris thought he was being hit on. He perked up, smoothed back a make-believe wisp of hair, and growled; “I’d like to, but you’ve got to tell me your name first.”

  Before he embarrassed himself any further, Terry extended her hand and shook her head. Some things never seemed to change. “Dad,” she said, “it’s been a long time.”

  Chet finished his beer and took his daughter to his house. He introduced her to his collies and had her stay over a few days. It was a bachelor’s place—cluttered, not particularly tidy, even downright dirty in spots—but there was nothing in the way of witchcraft or black robes or satanic literature lying around. From all that Terry could see, her father had simply become a lonely old man whose life revolved around his dogs and his pals at the Legion hall.

  On the wall, he did have portraits of all five of his wives, neatly framed and smiling down on him as he shuffled in from the bar each afternoon. There was no doubt that he appreciated women, even if he never learned how to live with them. It also looked like he had developed a kind of respect for his wives, now that it was too late. If he had pornographic photos of any of the ex-Mrs. Chester Harrises, they were not out for company to ogle.