Almost Midnight (6 page)

Darrell and Joyce, it might be added, weren’t working from an entirely new script. Marital problems such as theirs were hardly rare in Stone County. The stubborn pride and hardscrabble self-reliance
of the region’s inhabitants frequently made marriage a difficult proposition. Raised to fend for themselves and to take guff from no one, the hill folk tended to chafe at the thousand and one little surrenders and compromises that are the routine stuff of protracted domestic life. Men especially were ill disposed to having their freedom shortened. Marriage was a good and useful thing, providing it didn’t get in the way of what you wanted to be doing—and what you considered you had an unfettered right to be doing.

There is a legal case from Stone County that helps color the point. In 1959 a fellow from Galena named Lowell Moore filed a petition for divorce on the grounds that he had suffered “general indignities” at the hands of his wife, Minnie. Lowell told the court that Minnie, who wasn’t a native of the region, had occasionally insulted his friends and relatives by calling them “hillbillies.” Even worse, she had proven herself less than fully enamored of the Four Freedoms that have traditionally been recognized in Stone County, or the “The Kingdom of the James,” as the county, after the James River, has sometimes been referred to. The Four Freedoms, inscribed in the cultural landscape of the region, may be boiled down as follows. A man has the right to be master of his own house, and the rights—without interference from his wife—to hunt and fish, drink, and trade livestock with his friends.

In their six years of marriage, Lowell claimed, Minnie hadn’t exactly taken these rights to heart. She had sometimes come looking for him late at night when he was drinking with his buddies. Two or three times she had tried to tag along on his fishing outings. She had occasionally questioned the wisdom of his trading practices. And once she had even had the temerity to tell him, right in front of his friends, that she didn’t want him going on a turkey shoot. He went on the shoot anyway, of course, but that was hardly the point. Minnie had humiliated him, made him look almost horsewhipped. His buddies couldn’t believe it. Eventually some of his friends stopped calling on him, or stopped calling as often as they were accustomed to, because the reception they were getting from Minnie, as one of them told the court, “was a little on the cool side.” Finally,
after announcing, “I just want my soul back,” Lowell had filed for divorce.

The Circuit Court of Stone County awarded Lowell his divorce, but the judgment was reversed by the Springfield Court of Appeals the following year. The appellate court agreed with Lowell that Minnie hadn’t been as respectful of the Four Freedoms of Stone County as she might have been, and that she had sometimes “wanted to tie the stake rope a little too short.” Nevertheless, she had not inflicted any great or lasting injury upon Lowell, and her interventions, while not always prudent, had generally been well intentioned. As for calling his friends and relatives “hillbillies,” the court concluded, Minnie had likely meant this not as an insult but rather as “an expression of envy.”

There’s no confusing Lowell and Minnie Moore with Darrell and Joyce. Lowell and Minnie weren’t threatening each other with pistols or breaking up family dinners with choking sprees. They weren’t accusing each other of horrible betrayals or sending out midnight calls for help to heard-it-all-before relatives. Most of the time, in fact, they seem to have gotten along pretty well. Even Lowell himself, in his courtroom testimony, conceded that Minnie could be “a pretty good lover and a pretty good wife.”

But this is precisely the point. Marriage in Stone County, even under the blandest of circumstances, could be a tough haul. Men in general didn’t think it should cut into their freedom, and women who thought otherwise were sometimes in for a rude awakening. If mild-mannered Minnie Moore could run into so much trouble, then what about Joyce? By almost all accounts, Joyce was volatile and tempestuous and ferociously stubborn. No way was Joyce going to kowtow to Darrell or anyone else. And no way was bullheaded Darrell going to dance to Joyce’s tune. Their marriage was damned by cultural circumstance, and damned again by a fundamental clash of personalities.

There was one thing that might have been able to save them. If Darrell or Joyce, either of them, were still going to church, it may have made a difference. Pentecostalism in the Ozarks was a religion
of repentance, redemption, and reconciliation. Over the years it had helped more than just a few unhappy couples survive the nasty weather. But Darrell and Joyce had both left their religion far behind. They were out in the cold now, with nothing but booze and drugs to see them through.

So they kept fighting. Sometimes it was serious stuff: Darrell attacking Joyce, Joyce attacking Darrell, the two of them attacking each other. Sometimes it was just petty arguing: Darrell getting on Joyce for her constant carping, Joyce getting on Darrell for his drinking and whatnot. Darrell thought Joyce was always putting him down and sabotaging his plans. Joyce thought Darrell was flaky and unreliable.

Things finally fell apart completely when Darrell came home one evening just as Joyce was packing the three kids into her old Pontiac. She told him she was leaving for good this time. Her dad had given her some money and she was going to Houston where she planned on staying with relatives. Darrell blew his stack. He took out his pistol and sprayed the hood of the Pontiac with bullets. He was aiming for the carburetor, trying to put the car out of commission, but he was drunk and couldn’t find the mark. Joyce drove over to her dad’s and showed him the bullet holes in the hood. Old Roy was infuriated. He wanted to go after Darrell but was talked out of it by Joyce’s brother, Robert.

Joyce went to Houston and not long afterward, in June of 1978, she and Darrell got a divorce. Darrell wanted the kids but he didn’t even think of fighting for them, so Joyce got custody. The father almost never got custody in Stone County.

The divorce was rough on Darrell. He missed his kids desperately. He knew they’d gotten a rotten deal growing up with Joyce and him fighting all the time. He regretted not showing them more love and affection. As a father he’d been stingy with his emotions, distant, brusque, revealing just the tough outer shell of himself. He’d been raised thinking this was the proper way for fathers to behave. But now, having lost his kids, he wanted another chance. He wanted to make things right with them.

For a couple of years before Darrell and Joyce split up for good, they were living in a little two-room house Darrell had built on his forty acres in the hollow. The house was tiny and ramshackle, and the rust-streaked trailer Darrell had attached to an outside wall for extra space didn’t add much in the way of glamour. But Darrell had meant this as a temporary arrangement only. During the waning months of his marriage he’d dug out a basement and laid a concrete foundation for the dream house he’d long planned on building. When the divorce was finalized he buried himself in the project, putting up walls, making a fireplace and a bathroom, trying to see the project through. He took carpentry work around the county whenever it came along, but mostly he could be found at his property, atop a steep rut road leading off Route 248, hammering and sawing away, drinking whiskey, listening to the Eagles and Credence Clearwater Revival on a transistor radio. Anybody dropping by unexpectedly did so at his or her own risk. Like his grandfather Frank, Darrell didn’t believe in overdressing for the occasion. His work boots and a tool belt: If the weather cooperated, why bother with anything else?

For entertainment there were always the cockfights, with an atmosphere straight out of a hillbilly’s dream. The tangy smell of sweat and reefer, burgers on the grill, the friendly roughhousing, the calling and matching of bets—“Twenty on the red,” “Fifty on black hat.” And then the bouts themselves: the ten-second flurry, a riot of brown and red, the quick strike to the head maybe, lightning fast, long knife or gaff, payoff time. Or the drawn-out fight-to-the-finish down in the drag pit, the referee counting, marking the dirt with a stick, the birds beat up and bloodied, wobbling, pecking halfheartedly, too gone now for spur action, their handlers picking them up and sweet-talking them, cooing, cooing, blowing on their necks. Then back in the pit, the real test of mettle—
Bring it on, baby, let’s see what you’ve got left
—more side bets all around.

Darrell loved the action and would go as often as two or three times a week. The open-air pit at Travis Clark’s spread in Lampe, Lloyd Lawrence’s arena down in Blue Eye on the Arkansas line,
weekend jaunts to arenas in Oklahoma, occasionally all the way to Kellyville south of Tulsa, thirty to forty bouts on a card, up all night drinking, betting, kibitzing. Always the feeling that you were right in the thick of it, not missing a beat, hanging with the bad boys. Darrell knew all the big-time cockfighters in the area: Travis and Bush Clark, Wally Hall, Darrell’s cousin Joe Dean Davis, who lived right across Route 248 in the hollow. And Lloyd Lawrence, the biggest operator of them all, a tough and wickedly gregarious guy from over near Shell Knob with deep connections to the game-bird racket nationwide. Most of them were dangerous men, working side deals, drugs, guns, testing the margins, seeing how much they could get away with, sometimes paying for their miscalculations with stints of state or federal time.

For sheer down-and-dirty kicks, the dogfights ran a close second. Most of the cockfighters also raised and trained pit bulls for contract fighting. There was nothing like it for speed and power: two highly conditioned forty-pound snarlers getting it on in a dirt ring over at Joe Dean’s, maybe, or down at Travis Clark’s. Darrell had always liked pit bulls, their spunk, their fearlessness, the real good ones, the gamers, with absolutely no quit in them. He’d raised several of the dogs himself over the years and he knew that the real champs always fought just as hard from the bottom as from the top. Something to keep in mind, he’d tell himself: a lesson worth drawing on somewhere down the line.

L
IFE AFTER JOYCE
, then, followed a predictable pattern: hanging out at the cock- and dogfights, getting high on whiskey and grass, working on his house in the hollow, taking paying jobs whenever opportunity came calling. And, of course, the old standbys: hunting, fishing, and shooting. This was pretty much the sum of it. Single again, his kids a thousand miles away in Houston, with no prospects and no plans, Darrell was living with a straitened sense of time, without thought for yesterday or tomorrow. Each day he faced the challenge of making ends meet, drumming up some fun and excitement,
getting through the day—the challenge, quite simply, of being Darrell.

Being Darrell
. In the years after Joyce this meant several things. There was, first of all, the Darrell open to public scrutiny, the Darrell most everyone thought they knew: Darrell the wisecracking hillbilly, curly black hair and beard, humorous, adventuresome, inveterate prankster, the life of the party, never one to turn down a dare. Darrell the good ole boy. But there was another, less obvious side to him that his buddies and the women he occasionally dated very rarely saw, and that he worked assiduously at covering up. Beneath the happy-go-lucky façade, Darrell was bleeding bitterness and resentment. He’d always been sensitive, alert to the tiniest of slights, but now he felt thoroughly put upon. He existed in an almost perpetual state of grievance. The marriage, Vietnam, the broken promises and lost opportunities: What had he done to deserve all this? What might he have done to prevent it? And the stupefying poverty—always broke, just scraping by. Was this what he had to look forward to? More of the same—and nothing else?

But this was stuff Darrell mostly kept to himself. More often than not, he played his good-ole-boy role to the hilt, drinking and carousing—nothing in moderation, everything to excess. Like the infamous donkey basketball game in Spokane, just a few miles up the road from Reeds Spring.

Playing donkey basketball was one of the ways good ole boys earned their stripes in the Ozarks, and so after finishing work and getting juiced one Friday evening Darrell and five of his pals swung by the school gym in Spokane and challenged the hometown boys to a contest. The hometown boys weren’t impressed; these Reeds Spring castaways thinking they could beat them on their own turf, with the bleachers full and their wives and girlfriends cheering them on no less. There was only one thing to do: accept the challenge and put the intruders in their place; make quick work of them. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Just look at those clowns: too drunk, half of them, even to climb up on their donkeys.

Indeed, it was true. Of the Reeds Spring contingent, only Darrell
and two other guys, Bruce Broomfield and Bobby Lewis, were able to answer the bell. Outnumbered by the hometown side by seven to three, they looked to be in for a good thrashing. Fifteen minutes into the contest, however, Darrell knew his team couldn’t lose. Pouring it on, up six to zip already, they were an unstoppable force. Everything was clicking; they’d taken only three shots—not so easy getting into position for a decent shot while commandeering a donkey—but made all three. Their donkeys, clad in the usual rubber boots to protect the hardwood floor, seemed to have a nose for the opposition basket. Normally it was a major accomplishment simply getting the animals pointed in the right direction, but tonight donkey and player, at least on Darrell’s side, seemed almost of one mind.

Twenty minutes in, eight to zip now, Darrell’s team was threatening to run away with it. Hooting and hollering, laughing and scratching—the rout was on. The fifth basket was the one that did it. When Bruce sank the shot that ran the score to ten to nothing, the scene turned ugly. Apparently the hometown side had taken as much humiliation as they could stand. Somebody knocked Bruce off his donkey with a straight-arm smash and then two other dudes started pummeling him on the floor. Darrell ran over to his buddy’s rescue and got in a few good licks of his own before he, too, found himself on the floor with a tough dude named Wild Bill sitting on top of him windmilling at his face. Then half the bleachers emptied and a few dozen guys swarmed the court, everybody looking for a piece of the action. Darrell and his pals, bloodied and bruised, eventually made their way out to the parking lot and escaped in their pickups, but not before being warned against coming back. The local townsfolk didn’t want heathen of their sort showing their faces in the Spokane school gym again.