The only other person my age that I have distinct memories of is Steve Hines. I remember him, because he seemed to take a liking to me even though we didn’t have anything in common that I could ever see. Steve was brown-skinned, though I don’t think he was Hispanic. Maybe he was American Indian or something, but his facial features didn’t show any of that. I do remember wondering once if he was Italian, but I never asked and I supposed that if he was Italian he’d have a name like Lagorio instead of Hines. He always had his hair slicked back with Brylcreem, because the hairspray companies would not declare the wet head to be dead for another decade. All of us guys carried little black combs in our back pockets in those days. You just didn’t let your hair get messed up and stay that way for long. Guys with hair sticking up and out in all directions were not cool then; they were just unkempt and ‘nice’ girls saw them as sloppy and undesirable.
Steve was always quick to laugh and his eyes always had a little twinkle in them as though he was thinking of a joke that the rest of us hadn’t caught on to yet. Even on the few occasions he turned serious about some topic in discussion, his eyes continued to smile. I don’t know; maybe he did have a little Cherokee in him. Now that I think about it he sort of had Roy Rogers eyes.
The key reason I remember Steve Hines I suppose, is because he showed genuine concern for me when my trouble started. The thing is, I never once saw Steve outside of school except on two occasions. But he stood by me more than once when my trouble came to me there. I remember him for something else also, but I’ll get to that later.
So those are the people who made up my social world during the brief time we lived in Trinidad (the lesser), California. I will now introduce you to some guys who were not by any stretch of the imagination welcome in my little world; but they were there nonetheless.
Much of what I will say of them is not out of knowing them on a personal level, but is information gleaned from observations I was able to make over a long period of time, asking questions, watching them from afar, mainly in the interest of self-preservation.
For the sake of continuity I suppose I should introduce you to this bunch in the same way I got introduced to them.
CHAPTER 3
They lived in a small house just one block north of us and one block to the east. So they were behind us and off to one side but not very far away. If I went to the back, northeast corner of our house and looked in that direction out my bedroom window, I could look kiddie corner across the side street and see their house. They used their garage as a shop to work on the old cars and trucks that always littered their drive, their yard, such as it was, and the street in front of them. I was aware of their presence but never paid much attention to them until the night the trouble started.
Our parents were out for the evening. I was spending my time in my room reading, while Nancy and her boyfriend, Ricky Pindell, watched television in the living room.
All was fine and normal, until we heard the noise of a racing engine and the squealing of tires on the street in front of our house, and then in the parking lot of the church which was directly across the street. I’m talking about the kind of revving and screeching that drowns out the TV.
Nancy’s boyfriend was getting upset, she was getting a little scared, and I was feeling a little like a Hardy Boy. So after this cacophony of mechanics and peeling rubber continued for about 20 minutes, I went to the phone and called the County Sheriff. I asked if they would send someone to tell these guys that they were disturbing the neighborhood and that they should test their engines somewhere else. The lady who took my call said that she could indeed hear the noise they were making even over the phone, and after asking me if I knew where these hooligans lived, promised to send out a deputy.
I might have had second thoughts about calling, had I known that the responding deputy was going to feel obligated to tell them who had called to complain about their driving.
From my bedroom window I watched with satisfaction while a Sheriff’s patrol car pulled up and a cop got out to talk to the guys, who had by then returned to their driveway and had heads stuck under the hood of some old junker.
The deputy finally drove away and I had just returned to reading when the doorbell rang. Nancy answered the door and a few moments later I could hear her boyfriend and some other male voice in an exchange that sounded like it was turning into an argument.
Opening my bedroom door so I could hear better, I caught Ricky saying he didn’t know who had called the Sheriff, and then the strange male voice saying that the call came from this house, that the deputy said so, and Ricky was a damned liar. Ricky was a liar; I just didn’t know it at the time. He wasn’t lying about not knowing who called the cops though. I did that from the extension in my parents’ bedroom and neither he nor Nancy was aware that I had.
Now bear in mind that I was just short of fourteen and alone in the house with my sister and her boyfriend who, in my opinion, was pretty spineless. So I went to my closet and took out my aforementioned .22 rifle. As I neared the end of the hallway and just before turning into the view of the group standing inside our doorway, I worked the bolt on the rifle loudly. Holding it at waist level, I turned the corner and brought it to bear on the stranger, who I now saw was not alone. There were two guys with him, and they all looked big, and dirty, and angry.
Ricky held out a hand toward me as his eyes grew wide. Nancy took two steps back as Ricky said, “Now, Cole…don’t…” but ignoring him completely I said, “I’m the one who called the Sheriff because you guys have no business racing up and down the street and doing donuts in the church parking lot. Now get out of our house. NOW!”
I feel pretty certain I did not present the threatening countenance of Clint Eastwood growling ‘Get off my lawn’. And my early pubescent voice probably sounded more than a little nervous in spite of the boldness of my words. But the damage a .22 round might do from 6 feet is not something a person wants to take the time to predict when he’s looking down the barrel and the weapon is being brandished by a scrawny little kid with a quaver in his voice. So with a few mumbled threats concerning my future and the well-being of my family, the three visitors backed out and went home.
Ricky collapsed on the sofa, Nancy just stood looking at me as though she had never seen me before, and I turned and went back to the bedroom with my unloaded .22 and got ready for bed.
Okay, here is what I learned about our visitors over the coming weeks and months, as I said, through personal observation, asking questions of other kids who knew them, and as a result of numerous personal confrontations, my own experience.
The three guys at our door that night were Johnny Clay, 22, his brother Billy, 18 and Ron, their 16 year old brother. Ron was still in school so I got to know him best. We’ll talk about Ron in a minute. The brothers lived with their dad. I never knew where their mother was and I never knew their dad’s name. He was Mr. Clay to me, and he was the manager of the local grocery store. He seemed like a nice man whenever I was at the store and I wondered how he could have such crappy sons. Maybe he wondered that also.
Their situation always made me think of a story in the Bible. First Samuel tells the story of Eli who was a priest serving in the Temple in Jerusalem. He had sons, Hophni and Phinehas, who were evil. The also served in the Temple, but they were corrupt and behaved in contempt of God and in a way that disgusted the people who came there to worship. Eli was bothered by their evil ways, but God held him responsible because he should have put a stop to their practices. It always confused me a little, how Mr. Clay could be such a nice, mild-mannered man, and let his sons be such jerks.
There was also Robbie Clay. I don’t know how old Robbie was. I know he was older than the rest, but he was also retarded. Yep, we used to be able to say ‘retarded’ without being forced to apologize on nationwide television. Robbie made me think of Baby Huey. If you don’t know who that is, Google it. He was very big, and very slow-witted, and didn’t go outside the house much unless he was sittin
g in Johnny’s parked car. I only learned of him later and only saw him on a few occasions. Then there was “Bud” Hardin. I put Bud in quotes because that probably wasn’t his name, but that’s all I ever heard anyone call him. I guess he was Johnny’s friend, because he was also in his early 20’s.
The last guy in the group, and the scariest one, I can only describe to you. I never knew his name and I never wanted to know it. I only saw him when I could see the gang in their driveway, and he was ever-present, but neither working on cars nor, as far as I could tell, really engaging in conversation with anyone. He was thin, blonde, pale in complexion, with pimples and pock marks all over his cheeks and had eyes that I can only describe as empty. He wasn’t as old as Johnny or as young as Ron. I only had one confrontation with him, which I will tell you about later, and it frightened the crap out of me. It was also very painful.
So that’s them. Johnny, Billy, Ron, “Bud”, Scary Guy and occasionally, Robbie. Robbie wasn’t a bad guy; he was too stupid to know how to be bad. But he was there and he had a role to play.
The Monday morning after the confrontation at the house I was walking to school, when I looked up from the sidewalk and saw that Ron Clay was standing still, looking at me and waiting for me to reach his location. This was one of those times wisdom would have dictated running. But I did not.
I stopped in front of Ron, only because he was blocking my path and was head and shoulders taller than I, and wide enough to fill the sidewalk. If memory serves, he said something like, “Hey, big man, where’s your gun?” Then he punched me so hard in the stomach that the shape of his knuckles could probably be seen through the back of my shirt. As my books scattered on the sidewalk I collapsed to my knees, holding my midsection and wondering if I would ever breathe again. Ron said, “We’ll be seeing more of each other, big man” and he walked off toward school.
That was only the first step in Ron Clay’s new personal mission to terrorize my life.
Once I knew who those guys were I was more acutely aware of their movements around town. Although they were constantly working on cars, the only one I ever saw them in when they left their garage was Johnny’s 1956 Chevy 210, with a white roof, trunk and rear fenders, and bright red hood, front fenders and doors. It could be seen three blocks away.
Unfortunately, I saw them in it often. They would occasionally cruise very slowly past our house, especially if I was in front mowing the lawn, or they could see that the drapes for our living room picture window were open. Other times I saw them driving down main street or cruising slowly up the side street going back home. I never saw just one person in the car. It was always at least three of them, if not the entire gang except Robbie, and whenever they went by me all eyes in the car were on me.
Nancy and I were on main street one day when they went by and she smiled and said, “There goes the Christmas car”. I chuckled and said maybe we should call them “The Christmas Club”. It stuck with us and from that day on she and I referred to them as The Christmas Club because of that red and white car. I know it was lame. It was our private little joke and I think it helped ease the fear just a little when we saw them driving around. It’s like when you call a mean and unreasonable boss ‘pig-nose’ or ‘smelly-pits’ behind his back. It’s like calling cancer the ‘big C’. You make a small joke out of that which torments you, or give it your own demeaning nickname and you take away some of its power. You feel just a tiny bit of control against the uncontrollable.
That is really Nancy’s entire involvement in the story, other than her awareness of a series of burglaries in which she and I agreed they were good suspects.
We talked about them on occasion but I never told even her about any further contacts I had with them. As time went by and Nancy became more and more involved with Ricky, eventually eloping with him to Reno, she was less and less aware of the Christmas Club, or me, or Trinidad, California.
Thinking back on it later it occurred to me that Johnny and Bud never had any contact with me after that first night. They were smart enough to know that they shouldn’t be caught harassing a kid in his early teens. On the other hand, I have no doubt that Ron was doing their bidding as he went about making my life Hell.
CHAPTER 4
I never enjoyed school the way some people do. It seems that whenever I’ve heard someone in adulthood speaking fondly of their school days, that person is a very intelligent professional type, who probably maintained a very high grade point average throughout the years of their education. So of course they enjoyed it.
I could have done better than I did. Over the years I had several teachers tell me that they knew I could do better if I applied myself. I got to where I almost hated the very word ‘applied’. “Cole, you are an intelligent young man. I know you could do so much better if you simply applied yourself.” I got a lot of ‘c’s and more than a few ‘d’s. I got an occasional ‘b’ if it was a class I liked, and I flunked out of Algebra twice. It wasn’t that I couldn’t understand it; but because I didn’t want to understand it. The subject bored me to tears, so I flunked out the first semester for two years in a row, and picked up an extra wood shop class instead.
If I did not enjoy school up to this point in my life, I absolutely hated it now. Going to school was now a point of very high stress for me. I dreaded going out the door in the morning, because more often than not I would be accosted by Ron Clay, faithfully delivering his morning stomach punch, and I dreaded being at school because recesses were always a game of cat and mouse; Ron the cat and I the mouse. If he found me, he’d drag me to a corner somewhere and terrorize me with words and a slap in the face or a punch in the stomach. In P.E. class if we were playing some kind of team sport he would find a way to body block me or sit on me or twist an arm behind my back. I had no defense against the jerk, who was twice my size. The one and only exception to that was my speed. If I could get around and out front of him he couldn’t catch me. So whenever I saw him coming, all he saw was me going. Once I was home and inside I was safe.
One day, during lunch, I was on the school ground with Steve Hines. He had been telling me about a girl in the 10th grade named Charlotte Painter. I didn’t know her, but I knew who she was. Every boy with eyes and a normally developing libido knew exactly who Charlotte Painter was. She was just simply the shapeliest, most beautiful girl I had ever laid eyes on. She was also very well-liked by everyone in the school, staff and students alike, because she was such a pleasant, unpretentious, cheerful person to be around. Well, she hadn’t been in school for a few days and Steve was filling me in on the rumors, which said Charlotte had been physically attacked the previous Friday night when caught alone in a theatre parking lot after a movie in Stockton. The story was that she was raped and that whoever did it had also beat her up pretty badly. As I listened to Steve’s story we were taking a shortcut behind the wood shop to get back to the main building from the baseball field, when Ron Clay stepped out from behind the oak tree that shaded the shop’s storage shed. “Hey, big man,” he started, and I felt my lunch trying to make an encore appearance. By then Steve knew the whole story so he wasn’t surprised to see Clay there. “Ronnie, why don’t you leave Cole alone?” he asked. I wasn’t very encouraged because physically Steve and I blended together didn’t have enough mass to make one Ron Clay. But I was very appreciative and decided I would like to hang around Steve a lot more when at school.
Clay’s eyebrows curled and he turned a questioning stare to Steve. “Are you looking to get pounded along with your big man friend here, Hines?” he taunted. In my peripheral vision I saw Steve shrink about two inches in height. But although I knew he was as frightened as I was, and I knew he couldn’t do anything to stop Clay, his presence and maybe his boldness must have had some influence, because Ron issued a threat, peppered with cuss words, to the effect that if Steve didn’t mind his own business he might find himself hammered into the dirt, then slithered back under his flat rock somewhere and we headed for class.
&nb
sp; I wasn’t always so lucky. There was the day at the lockers in the gym that Ronnie somehow managed to get the tip of my finger between the hasp and the hole of my combination lock and squeezed until I thought my finger was going to burst at the end. A substitute teacher walked out of a nearby office and, seeing the intense expression of pain on my face, stopped and asked “What’s going on here?” Ron let go of my hand and with a smile told the aide that he was helping me get my lock closed. The sub’s face clearly showed that he didn’t believe the story, but he just moved on down the hall. That was when it occurred to me that I wasn’t going to get rescued by any teacher if and when Ron decided it was finally time to tear my arms off and beat me with them.
My only release from the sense of impending doom with which I now lived, was when I was able to escape to the river and spend some time exploring and just being alone.
There was a day when my solitude was infringed upon. At least, that’s the way I felt. My parents and a couple from the church close to their age planned an afternoon swim and picnic at the river on a Saturday. They were friends of my parents not mine, so I did not get to know them well and therefore have long since forgotten their last name. He was Jerry and she was Marsha and their little six year old girl was Fern.
The Everman Journal Page 2
