Bad Signs Read online

  But no, he didn’t say a word.

  There was a fraternal angle, a challenge, a thrown-gauntlet of sorts, and it had progressed too far to be reversed.

  Clay made a small prayer. He thought of where his mother was, whether she could see him, and what she would say. He wondered if there was a heaven and a hell, and he wondered if the folks in heaven could see the folks in hell, and if he wound up down there with his father would he ever be able to speak to her again.

  And then he realized how stupid he was being. It was a root beer. He was going to get his brother a root beer. Damn, the number of times Digger had bailed him out crap, this was the least he could do.

  He waited until Shoeshine turned at the end of the row, and then he dropped his shovel and took a step.

  The next boy in line stopped working.

  Digger glared at him. The boy started up again. Seemed like the whole world went quiet. Seemed like the breeze stopped, the dust settled, the birds stayed right where they were in the branches of trees.

  Clay’s heart was in the middle of his chest, in his throat, in his mouth, and he could see everything twice. There were beads of sweat along his hairline. Seemed never to have bothered him before but they rolled down his brow and met his eyes and blurred his vision.

  Three times he asked himself what the damn hell he was doing before he’d even made it two yards.

  Shoeshine was still going the other way, his back to the line, his rifle across his knees, his attention all the way forward and nowhere behind.

  Clay glanced back at Digger. Digger was leaning forward, his shovel in the ground, but he was not moving. His expression was unreadable. Clay wondered what would happen if he turned back. Would Digger forgive him? Would he just brush it off as a great joke that might have played out? Or would he make it a big deal? Would this put some irreconcilable rift between them that would never be healed?

  Dead if he did, dead if he didn’t.

  Clay loved his brother, but hated himself. He feared Shoeshine, but more than that he feared the loneliness that he would have to endure without Digger by his side.

  He looked back at the line of boys. He looked at the tool shed. He crouched lower to the ground and took another three steps. The truck was another fifteen yards. He wondered if he should just make a dash for it. There were boys farther down the line who would stop working as soon as they saw Clay run across the field. Shoeshine would hear him. He would stir the horse and chase him down within a heartbeat. He would knock him over with the butt of the rifle. Maybe the horse would trample him.

  Clay swallowed. He gritted his teeth. He was going to do it. He had to do it. There was no other choice.

  He pictured himself back in the ditch with Digger. He could feel the cool weight of the bottle in his hand. He could see the smile, the pride, the sheer unalloyed pride in his brother’s eyes, and he knew that this was the way to make his mark with everyone else in the line. After this they would see him not as Digger’s sidekick, the weaker brother, the one who was always being defended and protected, but they would see him as an individual in his own right.

  This was his test, and destiny had brought him here.

  He edged forward—another step, another two—his heart racing ahead of him, his pulse quickening in his neck, his temples, feeling the blood in every part of his body, his mouth dry, every hair on his head rigid with fear, but he took another step and he could see the truck getting closer.

  Shoeshine was halfway down the line. He needed to gather pace if he was going to make it there and back. He took three more steps, three more again.

  There seemed to be a united gasp all the way along the line. Eighty boys held their breath. Clay knew he was imagining it, but it was as real as anything he had ever experienced before.

  Now was the moment. Now was his chance to make a dash across the last twenty-five feet and get that bottle out of the foot well.

  Clay Luckman, believing he had broken the spell of bad fortune, held on to his belt and made that run for all he was worth.

  Three yards, no more, no less, and his foot landed awkwardly on a protruding stone. Fist-sized, round every which you looked at it, the sole of his boot skidded off the surface and sent him sprawling.

  Some kid laughed. Others laughed too. It was not so much the sense of ridicule that they found humorous, but the relief, that terrible instinctive reaction when you see some calamity befall another. A relief that it was not you.

  Clay lay there for a second, dust in his eyes, despair in his heart, and then he tried to scoot around and head back for the ditch.

  Shoeshine saw Clay Luckman before he’d made it five feet. He stirred that horse and chased him down just as Clay had envisioned. He did not use the butt of the rifle to knock him down, but rather booted the boy fair and square in the back of the head. Clay went down like gravity. His lights were out before he tasted dirt.

  Shoeshine figured the boy had planned to take off in the truck. That’s how he wrote it up. Clay didn’t argue. Would have served no purpose. Shoeshine and Hesperia were going to believe what they wanted to believe regardless of what anyone said. Clay was up on an attempted escape charge. He went to the solitary block for a month. He stitched pants and shirts with rough thread, he washed piss buckets and shined boots and dug trenches and held his tongue. He didn’t say a damned thing about Digger goading him up for the enterprise with the root beer, and he knew Digger would appreciate that.

  When Clay came out it was May of 1961 and white folks were terrorizing colored folk for taking bus rides in Alabama.

  Digger, having earned himself a reputation for trouble, seemed to now have passed a little of that reputation to his brother. They became even more inseparable, not because of any wish on Clay Luckman’s part to be troublesome, but because they each possessed a need for reliance on the other. Possibly Clay might have survived far better without Digger. He would have taken the beatings that would have come without Digger to protect him, but he would have made it through. He might have figured out a way to exorcise Digger’s influence and attention. As with all things there was a way to do it. As with most things he didn’t know what it was.

  Late at night, the sweltering darkness, the sound of dogs punctuating the throaty pitch of cicadas, Digger would whisper things.

  “I seen enough bad in men to know that they could never really have been created in His image,” he said. “Couldn’t have been. And most folks think one way, say another, and then act in a fashion that contradicts both. Don’t make sense to me.”

  Another time, saying, “There’s a little bit more to being smart than just knowing how to get out of trouble. Real smarts is never getting into trouble in the first place. And unhappiness? Unhappiness is like a sediment. You don’t know it’s there until you empty everything else out. And when something good looks like it’s gonna happen, well, you take it slow. Don’t rush it. Don’t drink that thing too quick or you’ll get a mouthful of inevitable bitterness at the bottom.”

  And then he would reach over and prod Clay in the shoulder. “You listenin’ to me? You listenin’ to me there?”

  Clay tried to hold on to his optimism, his wishes for the future, but too much of what Digger said made too much sense. He had seen his share of bad things. He had experienced his share of rough fortune and disappointment. If the first decade of his life had been a portent for the rest, well, there was a great deal more heartache and hopelessness on the way.

  Clay didn’t try to dissuade Digger from his monologues. He just lay there listening awhile, and then he slept the best he could.

  Hesperia was a shadow of some other distant and better place. Children came and went. Sometimes faces would appear for weeks, days even, and then they’d be shipped off to some other facility on the West Coast. Seemed to Clay Luckman that he and Digger were part of the great unwashed and unwanted, a tribe of misfits. No one ever said the thing directly, but it was evident that such people as they were consigned to short lives filled with j
ail, with violence, with hardship and awkward death. Perhaps, early on, he decided it would be somehow different for them. They were not criminals like the other kids. They were boys with no parents that no one had wished to adopt and no one knew what else to do with. Clay, it seemed, was unaware of the bad star, thus ignorant of the bad sign that followed him, and though ignorance was never a worthy defense, it at least gave some small respite for the time it remained.

  Digger had his darker moods, and during those times he would talk his bitter talk. He had a chip on his shoulder sufficient to break it, but most times it didn’t show. Only thing that Digger ever said that Clay really took to heart was about being stupid. Worst kind of stupid is the failure to learn from experience. That was something Clay could understand. That was something that felt like a truth.

  The quiet passage of weeks and months became the relentless passage of years. Both Clay Luckman and Digger Danziger became hardened in their own ways. Clay resolved in himself the desire to be free of Hesperia once he had gained nineteen years in June of 1966. Digger was still uncertain of his fate, whether he too would be released, or if they would send him up to the big house as they had threatened so often. Digger told Clay that he intended to escape before this happened. Escape or die trying. He was going out to Eldorado, Texas.

  “You what?”

  “Eldorado, Texas,” Digger said.

  “What the hell do you know about Texas … or anyplace, for that matter?”

  Digger crouched to the ground and ferreted his hand beneath his mattress. He withdrew a folded piece of something-or-other, and when he spread it out on the bed Clay saw that it was some kind of magazine advertisement. “The Sierra Valley Estate,” it shouted in big sunshine-yellow letters. Every house was picture-perfect, the adults were smiling, the kids were laughing, there were shiny silver barbecue sets on emerald-green lawns and sapphire-blue pools in every back yard. In that picture Digger saw everything he’d never had. Clay saw it too. It was enchanting beyond words. They saw what they wanted to believe, and each of them—in their own very different way—imagined this place, this “City of Gold,” to be representative of everything they had been denied.

  “Where d’you get that?” Clay asked.

  “There was a magazine in the infirmary. I tore it out.”

  Clay reached out and touched the page. He could feel the warmth of the sun through the tips of his fingers.

  Eldorado. Where kids have moms and dads. Where the grass is green and the sky is blue and you are never hungry and you can smile without someone wanting to wipe that smile right off of your face.

  Eldorado, Texas.

  Yes.

  “We gotta got there,” Digger said.

  Clay looked at him. He couldn’t have agreed more.

  “That’s what we gotta do, Clay … We gotta find someplace like Eldorado and make our fortunes and find some good things after all this crap we’ve been through.”

  “Eldorado,” Clay whispered, and it sounded like just the sort of place where you had to leave all the bad stuff behind just to get there.

  It was everything that they’d been denied, and how their intentions to remedy that denial became inextricably linked, and the consequences for both brothers could not have been foreseen. It was all related to a man that neither of them knew, nor had ever met. A man who came to Hesperia in a thunderstorm in the late fall of 1964.

  DAY ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  Earl Samuel Sheridan was a man who cared little for anyone but himself. His was a narrow and claustrophobic world, and beyond the borders of his own needs and wants there was little that engaged his attention. Earl had a quarter century of impatience embedded in his bones. Somewhere inside him was a nerve that was irritated by pretty much everyone. What they did, what they said, how they looked. Folks who knew him, even those who raised him up, understood it was only a waiting game before Earl Sheridan killed someone. Perhaps it was nothing more than an accumulation of minor incidents, but those who understood some aspect of human psychology knew that the power of small things should never be underestimated.

  Earl Sheridan, all of twenty-five years old, was a handsome man. A little shy of six feet, broad-shouldered, fair-haired, he had the look of someone who spent most of his life in the sun and took to it well. He fell in with a girl who went by the name of Esther Mary Marshall. She could have just been plain old Esther, but no, she was Esther Mary, and that was the way she wished to be addressed. Her language was loose and slutty, and she wore makeup in church. Esther loved Earl. Her love was clear and uncomplicated. He lit a fire in her somewhere, and she knew she wanted him even though he was a violent man. The anger was in his bones and his blood, and she knew it was only a matter of time before he started sharing it with her. She was smart enough to leave him before it happened. One thing she wanted to say was that whatever he might have been guilty of, he never did inflict violence upon her. It was her departure that did it, almost as if her strength of character served to highlight Earl’s own weaknesses. He could not keep a girl. She had left him. Deserted him. Despite the fact that they had been together for less than six months, this betrayal lit a slow fuse in Earl Sheridan’s mind.

  The next girl he charmed wasn’t so smart. Her name was Katherine Aronson. She possessed a quiet and unfailing optimism, and perhaps believed that with good sense and persistence she could get a light to shine in amongst Earl’s darkest thoughts. She was heard to say one time that all it took to make a bad person good was for someone to expect it of them. That kindness and encouragement could be the best sort of discipline. She was never to prove her theory. Earl Sheridan felt no need for any higher emotion. Anger and bitterness had carried him thus far, perhaps would carry him all the way. He beat her senseless with his bare hands a month after she met him. She could have pressed charges, but she didn’t. Earl Sheridan was a patient man, if nothing else. His patience was matched only by his anger. However many years he might have served for what he’d done, he would never have forgotten. Katherine knew he would have found her and killed her. Earl would have made it his reason for living. Additionally, Katherine believed that such things were a test of her faith. The brightest stars attracted the darkest shadows. She believed that Jesus had died on the cross for her sins, and that everyone had to make amends in their own individual ways. Sometimes those amends required the salvation of another’s lost soul.

  So they let Earl Sheridan out with a warning, and Katherine took him back. He said he was sorry, and he called her sweet baby, and she forgave him. Three weeks later he cornered her in the kitchen and put a boning knife through her heart. She was dead before she realized what had happened, dead before she hit the linoleum. Earl Sheridan did nothing by halves, especially relationships.

  That action irritated the nerves of twelve jurors, a judge, and the state of California, and they decided to kill Earl right back. They had him up in Baker, had arranged a welcoming committee in San Bernardino State Penitentiary. Here he would reside while due process dragged its heels, and here he would remain until the necktie party. So that afternoon, November 20, 1964, they had Earl Sheridan meet with a doctor from Anaheim University Hospital. Earl was asked if he’d be willing to bequeath his eyes. They were making great progress in the field of optical surgery. “Don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Earl Sheridan told the Anaheim doctor. “Reckon most folks would best prefer blindness than to see the world through my eyes.”

  They handcuffed and shackled him. They put him in an armored vehicle with a black-and-white up front, a second one in the rear, and they began the one hundred-and-twenty-five-mile southward drive to San Bernardino at five o’clock in the afternoon. The storm came up unexpected and strong. It should have been a straight run along 15 all the way, nothing more than a dogleg turn where they connected with 138, but the rain came like a barrage of fists, and for a while they were down to ten miles an hour, little to see ahead of them but rain-hammered windshields.

  Stopping in Barstow was
out of the question. Barstow could provide them with little more than a sheriff’s department holding tank. Victorville had a facility for orphaned girls and unwed mothers fallen on hard times. It was secure enough, but not to the standard required for a man on his way to hanging. Hesperia it would have to be, and by the time they reached it they had managed the ninety miles from Baker in three hours and twenty-five minutes. Sheridan had bitched all the way, and had it not been for the sound of rain on the roof of the car they might have listened to him. It was a little after eight thirty when the convoy pulled through the outer gates of Hesperia Juvenile Correction Facility, and they had all of eight warders awaiting that boy. Earl Sheridan had never seen such a welcome in his whole born life. He made some crack about how many half men it took to guard a whole man, at which point the convoy chief, a retired Death Valley Junction deputy sheriff named James Rawley grabbed the chain between Sheridan’s cuffs and twisted it until Sheridan near pissed his pants with the pain. Each one looked at the other for a good thirty seconds, and then Rawley smiled all high, wide, and handsome with his broken, tobacco-stained teeth, and said, “Reckon about one ought to do it.”

  Had that challenge not taken place, had Sheridan not gone to his isolation cell with a sense of humiliation burning through his very being, then the events of that night, the subsequent events that would terrorize California, Arizona, and Texas, might have never happened. People were going to die, people who were utterly unaware of this inevitability, and even had they known—well, there was not a thing they could have done about it. That night had been scheduled to mark the departure of Earl Sheridan to his intended final residence, care of California State, but in reality it marked the beginning of the worst regional murder spree to date, a murder spree that would not be outdone until Evan Sallis went on a roll almost thirty years later.