Almost Midnight (5 page)

No one knew better than Darrell that he could have been having a much worse time of it. His unit came under fire often enough, but it was nothing compared to what some of the frontline combat troops were facing. Plus, he had found ways of tuning out the danger—the persistent fear and dread. Prayer helped, but before long he found that booze and drugs helped just as well.

Darrell discovered booze and drugs—
really
discovered them—about two months into his stint, after having gone through basic training and all the rest of it without so much as a single drink. Most of the other recruits couldn’t believe it. Was this hillbilly kid for real? He didn’t drink, he didn’t swear, he acted as if he’d never even heard of drugs. After two months in Vietnam, however, he was drinking with the best of them, beer mainly, sometimes as many as twelve pints a night. He also got heavily into marijuana, usually laced with opium. Most of the marines he knew smoked it this way. They’d put a drop of peppermint extract on it to knock out the odor. The booze, the opium, the marijuana: it was almost standard-issue ordnance in Vietnam. Getting loaded (and staying loaded) seemed part of the job description. If you were there, it was just something you did to relieve the sense of danger, and the loneliness. Also the tedium, the long aching hours of sitting around waiting for the next move, and then the move after that.

As the months passed, Darrell found still another reason for getting loaded. Things, apparently, weren’t going as well on the home-front as he had hoped. While waiting for her husband to ride out his tour, Joyce had moved in with Larry and his wife, Sophia, just newlyweds themselves. In several of her letters to Darrell, Joyce apparently accused Larry of sexually molesting her. Larry had done nothing of the sort, but it still gnawed at Darrell, worrying about Joyce and her state of mind and wondering whether his younger brother was taking advantage of her. The worry wasn’t nearly so bad, he discovered, during the hours when he wasn’t sober.

Alcohol and drugs were one thing, sexual temptation was something else. Here Darrell was absolutely determined to stand his ground. It wasn’t easy—the opportunities were endless and astonishingly cheap. Young Vietnamese women, desperately poor, would walk out to the base and spread their pallets on the ground. Their asking price was usually no more than a ten-cent pack of cigarettes or an orange that any marine could pick up free at the mess hall. At one time or another, just about all of his buddies took advantage of these opportunities, but Darrell succeeded in keeping his impulses under control. His dad had always told him that a real man stuck with one woman. He knew he’d be letting both Joyce and R.J. down if he crossed the line.

Darrell was one of the lucky ones. That, at any rate, was how he saw it. He completed his twelve-month tour of duty on December 10, 1967. He left the service a corporal, and with an honorable discharge. Other than a slight burn to his foot from a piece of shrapnel, he was unhurt. Now he could go home and try to resume his life.

Darrell bumped into Ronnie at the airport in Da Nang the afternoon he was scheduled to fly home. They hadn’t seen each other since North Carolina. Ronnie’s flight wasn’t due out until the next day, and Darrell changed his ticket so they could travel home together. They spent the evening at a bar near the airport. They had a good time, laughing, swapping war stories. They both got lit up pretty good. Ronnie was grateful for the night out, but he couldn’t help wondering about Darrell. He’d never seen his cousin drinking before, much less as drunk as he was now. There was no question about it: Darrell had changed.

W
HEN HE GOT
back home just about everyone thought the same thing. After two years in the marines, Darrell wasn’t the same. There were the obvious things you couldn’t help noticing. Like a lot of returning vets, he now wore his hair long and had grown a beard. In outward appearance Darrell the clean-cut preacher boy had given way to Darrell the scraggly outlaw. To Lexie’s chagrin,
moreover, he was drinking, sometimes heavily, and not making much of an effort to hide it. Within a short while of getting back, he’d become familiar with the interiors of half a dozen local bars he’d previously known only by name. After a few beers he’d sometimes say things people didn’t quite know how to take. One night, not long after his discharge, he was with some cronies at a place called the Queen of Clubs, just south of Kimberling City. “You know, the Marine Corps spent thousands of dollars teaching me how to kill and I still haven’t killed anyone,” he said. He was probably kidding, but no one could tell for sure.

The drinking and the long hair, these were just two of the more obvious ways Darrell had changed. But people back home suspected there was something else too, something that was tough putting into words. It wasn’t anything that jumped out at you, but it was there nonetheless. You could sense it especially in his more sober moments, when he’d had only a beer or two or hadn’t been drinking at all. He seemed less carefree than before, a bit reserved, and there was a certain tension in his shoulders, like he was straining under the weight of some secret burden. People didn’t know whether it was Vietnam, his marriage, or maybe something else entirely.

In truth, it was probably a combination of things. Darrell didn’t like talking about it, but he was having nightmares after returning from Vietnam. They were always alike, just different versions of the same thing. He was being chased, alone and unarmed, by Vietcong through the jungle, or he was scrambling for cover during a rocket attack. Some nights he’d wake up in a panic, and it would take several moments before he realized he’d been dreaming. He’d grab a pistol and go searching for his tormenters, opening dresser drawers, looking through closets, checking under the bed. Darrell suffered nightmares of this sort intermittently for more than a decade, but he kept them a closely guarded secret. He thought there was something shameful, almost cowardly, about the entire business. After all, he was one of the lucky ones.

The marriage was another matter. He and Joyce weren’t getting along, and it was easy to see. They weren’t very good at concealing
their differences. Darrell wasn’t even a month out of uniform and they were already going at it, arguing and fighting about everything and anything. It rapidly became a way of life. Their friends and relatives couldn’t help wondering what in the world they’d seen in one another to begin with.

They were still practically newlyweds, of course, and some of the things they fought about, such as money and jobs and sex, more or less went with the territory. When Darrell got back home, Joyce was living near Kansas City with Larry and Sophia. Larry and a couple of cousins, Lonnie and Dale Mease, had gone up a few months earlier looking for work and had found jobs at the big Ford plant in Claycomo. Joyce had then moved and taken a job with the telephone company. After checking in with his folks in Stone County, Darrell went to Kansas City himself, thinking he could take his time looking for a job, maybe find something he really liked. With Joyce working, there was no need to settle for the first thing that came along. It sounded good in theory, but almost as soon as he arrived Joyce quit her job, saying it was now up to him to take care of business. Darrell was flabbergasted. This wasn’t the kind of welcome he’d been hoping for. Just out of the service, and now he was under big-time pressure to bring home a paycheck. He tried to convince Joyce that she was being unreasonable, that he deserved some leeway before taking a steady job. She held her ground, however, and Darrell was forced to go knocking on doors.

He caught on at the Ford plant, working the assembly line in the body shop. He figured he might as well try to make the most of it and save some money, so he grabbed as much overtime as he could get. After a while, he and Joyce moved into a little frame house in Winwood Lake, a low-rent community near the plant. Their life settled into a deadening routine. Darrell would drive straight home from work, sometimes stopping along the way to load up on whiskey. He’d then drink until he fell asleep. He’d learned to cope with tension in Vietnam by drinking; now he was hoping for the same results at home. Joyce would hit the bottle pretty hard herself, and several times a week they’d veer off into drunken quarreling.
Sometimes it was over money. Why were they always broke? Who was spending how much on stuff they really didn’t need? As often as not it was over sex. Now that he was back in Missouri, Darrell was hearing disturbing stories. Joyce, according to some accounts, hadn’t kept her end of the bargain. He heard that she’d been playing around while he was over in Vietnam trying his best to walk the line. She insisted that she’d been true to him and that the stories were outright lies. Darrell didn’t believe her. Whatever slender trust they’d once shared now lay in shreds.

A couple of months later, Joyce phoned her older brother Robert and asked him to come up to Winwood Lake to get her. She said she’d had enough of Darrell and wanted to come home. Robert Barnes was a small, intense, intelligent man with a reputation for decisive action and unflinching opinions. He loved his sister and he’d known and liked Darrell for years. He was rooting for them to sort out their differences and move on with their marriage. But rooting for them didn’t necessarily mean betting on them.

“No one wanted it to work out more than I did,” he recalls, “but there wasn’t much give in either one of them. Joyce was only five two, but when she got mad her temper was uncontrollable. She wouldn’t back down from a mountain lion. She’d go toe-to-toe with Darrell or anyone else who got in her way. Now Darrell, I always thought Darrell was a sweet kid with a real nice disposition. He had some peculiar ideas, but you couldn’t hold this against him. He once told me that the Social Security system was all messed up. They give you an old-age pension when you’re too old to enjoy it, he said. They should give it to you between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. He was dead serious. The thing about Darrell was, he changed when he started drinking and doing drugs in Vietnam. When he came home, he was a different guy. The two of them together, Joyce and Darrell, they were a couple sticks of live dynamite.”

Robert drove to Winwood Lake and found Joyce, her face puffy and lips swollen, waiting on the front porch with her suitcase. He recalls going inside and finding Darrell sitting on a rocking chair in the living room. “He was drunk out of his gourd. I was mad. I
grabbed him by the shoulders and started shaking him violently. ‘Goddamn big tough marine,’ I said. ‘Is this what they taught you in the service, you sonuvabitch?’ He didn’t say a word because he was ashamed. He knew he did wrong. So I took Joyce home to Stone County, but after a few days Darrell came down and they made up.”

Darrell remembers it a bit differently. He thinks he must have been blacked out while all this shaking and berating was going on. Otherwise he almost certainly would have mustered a few words in his defense.

It wasn’t long afterward that Darrell came home from work one evening and told Joyce to pack her things. They were moving back home. A year and a half of Kansas City, and he’d had enough. He was sick and tired of the whole scene. He wanted to go home where they could make a fresh beginning, maybe buy a piece of land, build their own house, start living like they were meant to live. Joyce found it hard to disagree. She figured they had nothing to lose.

So they moved back to Mease’s Hollow, into the same little house across from R.J. and Lexie, where they’d first started out. In 1969 their daughter, Melissa, was born, and two years later they had a son named Shane. In 1972 Darrell bought forty acres of land for two thousand dollars from the postmaster general of Reeds Spring, a good and honest man named Nelson Holt. It was a nice parcel, just down the road from where Darrell had grown up. Right away he started clearing a space for their dream house.

CHAPTER THREE

T
HE MOVE BACK
home didn’t work out as Darrell and Joyce had hoped. After a few years they had a third child, Wesley, but they still weren’t anywhere close to realizing domestic bliss. Their battles were becoming the stuff of local legend. They found it tough restraining themselves even at family get-togethers.

Darrell’s brother Larry vividly remembers an altercation that took place during dinner one Thanksgiving at R.J. and Lexie’s. Darrell reached over and took some food off Joyce’s plate. Joyce was incensed and started choking him. Darrell choked her right back. They kept at it, gasping and grimacing, until Larry and a couple of other people at the table jumped in and pulled them apart. Sometimes they’d pull guns on each other. One night Joyce held a .45 Magnum (with a cocked hair trigger) inches from Darrell’s face. If
she’d so much as twitched, she’d have blown him away. Darrell talked her down, then took out his .22 Ruger semiautomatic, which he’d emptied of bullets the night before, and pointed it at her temple. Joyce broke down and cried, and they declared one of their periodic, and highly fragile, truces.

Money was a constant source of tension. They were almost always broke, stuck in a rut of hard poverty. Good steady work was scarce in Stone County—especially for good ole boys like Darrell almost a decade out of school and without much to show for it. It’s not that Darrell was lacking in skills. He was a good carpenter and stonemason—and getting better all the time. R.J. had taught him a lot, and he’d been picking up more along the way from how-to books and on-the-job training. The problem was converting these skills into some kind of a steady income. He was forced to scuffle about, taking odd jobs wherever he found them. Sometimes they had to hit up Joyce’s dad for grocery money just to make it through the week. The tough grind wore them down. It frustrated and demoralized them, and they took it out on each other.

Alcohol was another constant—alcohol and, eventually, marijuana. Darrell had stopped using marijuana upon leaving the service, but a couple of years after moving back to Stone County he took it up again. It wasn’t tough to find. By the early 1970s marijuana was one of the region’s leading cash crops. Backwoods boys who in a previous era might have been tending stills were now busy cultivating “Missouri gold.” Everyone knew somebody who was in the business. Simply put out the word that you were interested in buying, and you’d be taken care of. Darrell liked getting stoned. It took his mind off his marital problems and gave him a renewed sense of boyish innocence. Even Joyce figured there were worse things he could be doing. She thought he was less mean when smoking pot than when drinking. Darrell thought Joyce was deadly mean all the time, regardless of her state of incapacitation.