by Bryan Mealer
* * *
By then, Preston was property of the United States Army. The previous fall, a commercial bus had taken him from Odessa to Fort Polk, Louisiana. The morning he left, his wife, Linda, was so sick from strep throat she couldn’t even get out of bed. Boot camp was hot and miserable. The swampy climate was supposed to help prepare them for the jungles. The drill sergeant was a lean black man who must’ve had some rabbit in him, Preston thought, because all they did was run. Mornings, after lunch, before bed. Run, run, run. After a month, Preston had dropped fifty pounds.
One day the drill sergeant came to him and said, “You should think about being a platoon guide. Lead these men.” But Preston knew better. The men in his barracks were nothing but scared kids who dreamed at night of waking up alive in body bags. The draftees hated the army, and they took it out on the platoon guides—they beat them in the shower or threw blankets over them while they slept and pounded them with socks full of bar soap. Preston told the drill sergeant thanks, but no thanks.
Near the end of boot camp, they handed everyone a questionnaire that was designed to help place them in war. Nobody wanted infantry. They were asked things like, Have you ever been hunting? Do you enjoy the outdoors? Preston fudged every one. When it came time for assignments, the army made him a cook. Being married probably helped, too.
They assigned him to the Fourth Infantry and sent him to make bacon and eggs on the front lines. The Fourth moved like gypsies through the Central Highlands, setting up in forward-fire support bases carved out of a black mass of vines. Whenever the fighting moved, Preston’s unit followed. They packed everything into a deuce and a half—a two-and-a-half-ton M35 truck—and chased the smoke. His kitchen was a sixteen-by-thirty-two-foot tent called a GP Medium, with a wall of sandbags all around it. There were five cooks in his unit, plus a crew of Vietnamese dishwashers, and together they served two hundred men at a time. Many of them were grunts fresh from combat who ate their meals and collapsed in pup tents with their boots poking out in the rain.
Preston was in charge of main courses. He’d crack six hundred eggs in the morning and flip three hundred burgers in the afternoon. His mess sergeant wanted everything on top shelf, meaning the soldiers ate plenty of beef, which Preston hauled through the jungles in “blood boxes” stacked on ice. On days off, he grew so bored and lonesome that he learned how to bake. From scratch, he made sweet breads and hamburger buns, biscuits, brownies, and other extras for the men. It gave him pride to fill their stomachs with good-tasting food, since each meal could be their last.
Each day he watched the choppers land in front of the mess tent and unload body bags into a line of deuce and a halfs. The walls of his kitchen breathed in and out with the blasts from the howitzers, and at night, artillery rumbled from the hills like muffled thunder.
It was hard for him to sleep at night because the bunkers were full of pot smoke. If Vietnam had a smell, he decided, it was weed. In order to get some shut-eye, he dragged his cot out under the stars, listened to the chatter of the jungle, and prayed, wishing he was home.
It was worse whenever they rotated back to transit base, located in Pleiku. The place radiated with insubordination and the army made you surrender your weapon. Some men were protesting the war and refused to maneuver, and racial tension was extreme. Men were beaten and stabbed and nobody dared venture outside their tents.
In Pleiku, Preston had a friend named Leo who drove one of the deuce and a halfs. Leo’s job was to transport grunts from the transit area to the fire-support base. One day Leo stopped by the kitchen before one of his missions, with his truck full of soldiers.
“Come along, keep me company,” he said, but Preston couldn’t go.
“Gotta work, buddy,” he told him, and handed Leo a big bowl of vanilla ice cream.
On the way out, Leo hit an antitank mine and was blown in half. Many of the grunts were also killed.
* * *
Back in Big Spring, Opal and the family waged their own prayer war over Preston’s safety, pleading with the Lord to bring him back alive. After ten months in theater, the army granted his wish to attend college and rotated him home early. In January 1970, the family met him at the Midland airport, then promptly whisked him home to fatten him up on coconut pie. Within two months, Linda was pregnant with their first child.
But while the family had been busy praying for the return of Big Boy Blue, Bobby was drifting from their reach. After his friend Ronnie left for college, Bobby started running with a guy named Mike Butler. He was several years older and, like Ronnie, cast a powerful spell. Butler’s big brother Tony had been an all-state fullback for Coahoma, then played three seasons at Texas Tech. But Lubbock was a big city for small-town boys, and before long, the school booted him out for disciplinary reasons. Tony was now back in Big Spring working at the furniture store.
Mike Butler had played some football himself, but didn’t have the coordination for it. Even so, he was big and loud and commanded whatever ground he stood on. He still lived with his parents out on the Snyder Highway and would roar into town demanding to party. The younger boys in his entourage called him “Der Butt” and had no choice but to obey. Being a wuss earned you a knock on the head from one of his meaty knuckles.
Der Butt was the kind of guy who swung by your house and yelled, “Let’s go for a ride!” and then told you, once you were on the highway, that you were going to Mexico.
“Mexico? Man, I can’t go to Mexico! I got a date!”
“Well, you ain’t gonna make it.”
Which is exactly what happened to Bobby one Friday afternoon. Four hours later he was shooting tequila in a scary Juarez bar, no idea how or when he was ever getting home. Hanging with Der Butt was like being in a gang. There was no easy escape.
Der Butt was such the undisputed boss of good times that nobody, not even Opal, could stand in his way. One night he showed up at the house at 1 a.m., blasting his horn in the driveway, shouting, “Get yer ass out here! Let’s go!” Then he did it again and again.
The first couple of times, Opal met Bobby at the door. “You aren’t going out with him!” she said. He’d never seen her so angry.
But Bobby fought her. “Let me go, Mama,” he demanded. I’m sure they both expected Bob to come out and put Bobby in his place, but that never happened. Opal finally moved aside, and out went her baby into a beer-soaked Tuesday night.
Bobby did wonder why his father never tried to stop him. The answer probably lay in the fact that Bob was an old rounder himself. Even now, Davey Jones would swing by the house in his dump truck and Bob would duck out for a while, never telling Opal where exactly. Sometimes they just sat together in the cab, sipping whiskey from a paper sack.
In Bobby’s mind, his father must’ve considered him a man, and a man stayed out of another man’s affairs. And wasn’t he a man? Now in his senior year, he’d enrolled in work-study so that he left school each day at lunch. No longer working at the commissary, he’d taken a cashier job at a bigger grocery store in College Park. “Give me forty hours a week,” he told his boss, and he got it. He graduated high school in January 1971, a semester early, having never taken algebra or geometry and having never read the classics. What was the point?
“When I was your age,” he used to tell me, in a tone that implied a lesson was coming, “I always had money in my pockets.”
And he did, enough to plunk down cash for a new car. But just not any car—a black Maverick, two door, straight six, with a fastback roof and a short deck. He loaded it with a Craig Pioneer stereo and a set of speakers that tickled the fillings in his teeth. And every other month, he walked into the men’s shop downtown and dropped another two hundred dollars on clothes. Stepping out of the house in his new threads, he would spot his father sprawled beneath one of the trucks, his stained coveralls crusted in grime, and feel a sudden shame.
But he was young and unaware of his family’s history. His own father had never sat him down and explained where they were
from, what had happened in the years up to this point—never described the trail of indignities that had led him to the oasis of shade beneath the old Ford. His father hadn’t told him about Julia dying, other than the obvious; about growing up on the road, motherless and hungry, and how it had turned him mean; about railroad bulls throwing him off the train, or the day they lowered his brother Bud into the ground. Did Bobby even know how that sadness still lingered to this day?
Bobby knew his uncles John and Leamon out in Arizona, but Flossie and Frances were virtually unknown, just names on Christmas cards his mother received. He knew nothing about the family farm they lost in Eastland; he’d never been told about the banker Frank Day or how people nearly starved to death back in the bitter days of ’17. Perhaps it was because John Lewis had never told Bob about any of these things. And so in Bobby’s selfish adolescence, knowing only the here and now, his father merely seemed pathetic.
* * *
Around that time, one of Bobby’s buddies at the grocery store turned him on to weed, and he never looked back. After work they would hop into his Maverick and drive around town passing a joint, road beers tucked between their legs, blasting Zeppelin. Later he’d meet Marie and she’d gripe that he stank like cigarettes.
He was caring less and less about, well, everything, including Marie and her games with his emotions. It was sad, he thought, the way he’d let her do him. She made him so upset that he’d drive around for hours, then go to her friend Merlee’s house and bang on her bedroom window. He’d sit outside in the flower bed and complain through the window screen about his love life while she tried to stay awake. Poor Merlee was caught between the two of them and strove to be impartial. At some point she’d cut him off, deliver one line that sliced to the quick, then send him home feeling better.
“I shoulda just gone with you,” he told her once.
Finally, instead of venting to Merlee, Bobby exacted revenge. He’d met a girl at a youth rally and asked her out—a cute brunette from Snyder with big brown eyes. He drove fifty miles and picked her up, then took her to dinner and miniature golf, and at the end of the evening, even got a kiss. But their date never made it back to Marie, so what was the point of it?
The piano player at church had a cute niece from Stanton who visited one Sunday. After the service, Bobby walked right up and asked her out in full view of Marie. They went to Herman’s for dinner, where everyone could see them, then to a movie at the Ritz. The damage to Marie was delicious. She came back to him sparkling like Sheba, wearing every piece of jewelry he’d ever given her. Up on South Mountain, looking out over the lights of Big Spring, she cradled her precious head in his arm, talked about college and marriage, and it was fine.
A few months later, Bobby drove to Midland and bought Marie a life-size teddy bear for her birthday. He was ready to surprise her when he discovered she’d been two-timing with a baseball player. So he gave the bear to Preston’s wife, got drunk with Der Butt, and ended the night at Merlee’s window, fooled by love again.
* * *
That May, both Marie and Merlee graduated with their class, and by August they were gone. Merlee enrolled at Evangel University in Missouri, while Marie went up to Waxahachie with Ronnie. After Marie left, her father resigned from First Assembly and left to pastor another church—some say because of the fallout from Ronnie’s affair with the married woman.
Meanwhile, Bobby was left in Big Spring with Der Butt and his friends from the grocery store. But in March they’d found Der Butt’s brother, Tony, dead in his apartment, shot five times in the chest by an acquaintance over a drug dispute. “Ex-Gridder Slain,” read the headlines across the state. After that, Der Butt didn’t come around much.
Still stewing over Marie, and with no plans, Bobby started using speed. One of the night stockers at work had a hookup for Black Beauties and other pills. Bobby favored L.A. Turnarounds because they delivered on their promise, though the farthest he ever went was around the Wagon Wheel and back, his heart thrumming like a straight six, the beer going down by the gallon.
If he sold the pills himself, he could get high for free and even make money, so he did. He bought them for a dollar and unloaded them for three, mostly to older guys he knew he could trust.
One of them was a hippie carpenter named Chuck who sold him weed. Chuck liked Pink Floyd and he also dropped acid. He and Bobby would gobble a hit on Friday night, then shoot the spectral galaxyway of Gregg Street on a soundtrack of Ummagumma. They uttered wild, half-baked truths from atop South Mountain while the skyline spun like a Ferris wheel on its side. Chuck was a cool guy, but Chuck had no idea how Bobby’s spirit could rage against the flesh.
* * *
Zelda was having dreams about her baby brother. They were strong and vivid, heavy with meaning, and woke her up at night. In one dream, she saw Bobby in the back of a pickup along with others who were smoking, drinking, and shouting. Nobody in the pickup knew where it was going, but in the dream, Zelda could see that it was headed into a wall of darkness and only gaining speed. Whenever the dreams awoke her like this, she stayed up and prayed, her heart full of dread. In the mornings she called Opal and told her what the Lord had revealed.
“All we can do is lift him up,” Opal said. And just like Little Opal had done for Homer, Bobby’s mother took it to the altar, asking God to guide her boy toward the light.
* * *
Bobby’s friend Doug had gotten hold of some Orange Sunshine—the gold standard of LSD, which was making its way east from California. Big Spring was small, but the air base and oil field made it lucrative for trafficking. One Friday night Doug met up with Bobby and asked if he wanted to share.
“It’s four-way,” he said, “so I don’t see why we can’t each swallow two.”
They ate the acid over at Doug’s house, then smoked a joint to ease them into it. At some point Doug began to laugh and so did Bobby, and soon they were both weak from it, unable to stop, which is when Bobby looked up and saw that Doug had turned into the Devil.
Startled, Bobby wiped the tears from his eyes to see better, but he wasn’t mistaken. Lucifer himself sat directly across from him, cloven hooves and all. But before he could flex his dark powers, Bobby jumped up and flew out the door.
He started his car and screeched out of the drive, just as the Devil appeared in the doorway waving his arms. He managed to go a couple of blocks before the windshield dissolved into patterns and forced him to stop. Up ahead he could see his friend Chuck’s house, so he got out and ran.
He beat on the front door. When Chuck opened it up, he took one look at Bobby and said, “Holy smokes.”
Bobby tried explaining the situation at Doug’s house, but Chuck just laughed the same way Doug had, and then Chuck became the Devil, too. By the time Bobby reached his car again, he was convinced he was dying. His heart raced and he struggled to breathe. He’d never been so afraid. Suddenly a familiar voice penetrated the nightmare: Billy and Suzy could have chosen heaven, but instead they chose hell. It was just like the preacher described it: salvation presenting itself. Bobby knew: Only one thing can save me now.
He started his car and crept down the back roads, heading for the only safe place he could think of.
He drove to the preacher’s house and rang the bell.
6
Bobby and Sharon … the Sea of Death … Bobby makes a pledge … Bryan arrives …
For Bobby, the situation, as horrible as it sounds, went down in the best possible way.
“I took LSD and I’m having a bad time,” he told Brother Randall Ball, the new preacher at First Assembly, who answered the door and saw Bobby with his eyes bugged out.
Rather than rebuking the boy, the preacher invited him inside and sat him on the sofa. And over the course of the night, they talked and prayed together until Bobby was calm and the drugs had left his system. When he got home the next morning, Opal did not ask where he’d been. If the preacher called her, she never said.
The experience wo
rked to turn him around—at least for a while. He stopped selling speed and even cooled out on the beer and weed. In fact, he stayed away from his old crowd for so long that they became suspicious—especially after Chuck got arrested for possession and went looking for the rat.
Bobby’s brush with damnation had sent him back to the Lord—his head bowed, his soul laid bare. And when he returned to church, it wasn’t a festive robe or a fatted calf that greeted him but a long-legged brunette named Tina Danko.
Her father had just married a woman who attended First Assembly and started bringing them, and Bobby asked her out that very first morning. She was a stunning beauty, in a league of her own. Bobby soon discovered that Tina had no real girlfriends, not like Marie or the others he’d dated, though plenty of guys called on her. And she’d gone out with a lot of them, not that he really cared. What mattered most was that now she was with him.
For Christmas that year, he went downtown and bought her a pair of red patent leather boots that hugged her calves just below her knees. She’d wear them with a miniskirt or pair of hot pants (which were no pants at all) and he’d have to stop and just watch her walk.
Mind you, the attraction was not purely physical. Pretty soon he was in love with Tina, or at least he thought he was. She was good to him, loyal and caring, and she didn’t care whether he got high or not—so he did—which made her perfect by any definition he knew. And when his appendix burst, it was Tina who rushed him to the emergency room while he moaned and wailed on the floorboard of the car, rolled up in a ball.
But Tina’s love could be intense, and sometimes it took him by surprise. She talked about getting married, and the ferocity of her plans went over his head like a stampede. “What do you think?” she’d ask, breathless, and Bobby would grin and nod his head, too chicken to tell her otherwise.
