Almost Midnight (7 page)

I
N THE SPRING
of 1983 Darrell’s cousin Joe Dean heard that the Shepherd of the Hills, an outdoor theater in Branson, was hiring new cast members. He suggested that the two of them drive down and see about signing on. Darrell figured he had nothing to lose.

Keith Thurman, the director of Shepherd of the Hills, was looking for extras to flesh out the scenery, real-lifers, guys who could more or less play themselves as authentic hillbillies. Darrell and Joe Dean were about as authentic as could be, but Thurman needed some convincing that they were the right men for the job.

“I guess I was particularly concerned about Darrell,” he recalled. “I didn’t know Darrell from Adam but the Mease boys from up around Reeds Spring had a reputation as being bad dudes, real ornery bastards. So at first I was a bit leery of Darrell. I thought we might have trouble with him. But I sat down and talked with him for ten or fifteen minutes, and then I knew for sure that we’d have no problems. He was as easygoing as anything, a real good guy. I liked him a lot right off.”

Joe Dean quit after a few rehearsals but Darrell stuck it out for almost two full seasons. He played a Bald Knobber, which consisted mostly of riding horseback onto the open-air set in a cloud of menace. He was perfect for the role—so perfect, in fact, that during his second season the company featured his picture on the front cover of its promotional brochures. It was quite a picture, Darrell wearing a black cowboy hat, overalls, and a faded orange-and-white shirt, and looking down the bores of a cracked-open, doublebarreled shotgun.

His second season was cut short when his horse bucked offstage, pinning him against a wall and fracturing his leg. The injury kept him from performing but not from whooping it up at the nightly cast parties. The parties were something to behold. When it came to letting their hair down, the Shepherd of the Hills folks took a backseat to no one. They’d close the bars in Branson as a warm-up and then really let loose at Big Rock on Bull Creek, a picnic and swimming spot near Walnut Shade. One night on the creek, the liquor flowing, someone started shooting off some powerful firecrackers, taking just about everybody by surprise. Keith Thurman remembers almost jumping out of his skin when the first firecracker went off and then finding Darrell huddled on the ground next to a pickup, screaming “Incoming! Incoming! Incoming!”

It was at one of these late-night boozefests on Bull Creek that
Darrell met Donna May. A large, attractive woman, about six feet and almost two hundred pounds, with bright eyes, long brown hair, and sculptured features, Donna wasn’t difficult to pick out in a crowd. She inherited her size from her father, Bill, a giant of a man and a notorious quick-buck schemer, and her good looks from her mother, Jeanie, a sweet and elegant woman who played bass in a local swing combo. She’d come to the party with several friends from the cast but spent most of the night hanging out with Darrell. They hit it off pretty well, both of them big drinkers and big talkers, and before the week was through Donna had moved into Darrell’s house in the hollow. A year later their daughter, Amanda, was born, and a second child, Tyler, was on the way by the time they finally got around to tying the knot.

Darrell’s sister, Rita, who was married by this point and living in Michigan, remembers the wedding as a happy and hopeful occasion. “I’d been away for a while and kind of lost touch with my brother. I didn’t really know Donna. She was a big woman, about ten years younger than Darrell, and really quite pretty. They got married on Halloween and the reception was in a big cave with a beautiful bonfire. They seemed really happy—almost shining.”

It didn’t take long for the shine to wear off. A month or so after the wedding Joyce phoned Lexie from Houston saying Darrell was welcome to come and pick up Melissa, Shane, and Wesley. She’d gotten remarried and was struggling to build a new life. The kids were more than she could handle. Darrell drove down to Houston with his cousin Dale, eager to get his kids back but determined to take no chances. Suspecting Joyce might be setting him up for an ambush, he arrived on her doorstep—in the scalding Houston heat, no less—wearing a military field coat with a bulletproof vest underneath. The precautions proved unnecessary. Joyce was grateful that he’d come and the three kids ran happily from the swimming pool in the yard to greet and hug him. They couldn’t wait to get back home with their dad.

Back home—it wasn’t what the three kids had been hoping for. Within a matter of weeks Darrell’s forty acres in the hollow had become
a militarized zone. Donna made it perfectly clear that she didn’t want this added responsibility. She hadn’t signed on to be cleaning up after Darrell’s first marriage. They were crowded and destitute enough as it was without three more kids thrown into the bargain. But it
was
part of the bargain, Darrell insisted. Donna had always known that he’d jump at any chance to be reunited with his first three kids. He’d been up front with her about this from day one. Sure it was awkward, but they’d just have to make the best of it.

Instead of making the best of it, however, Donna and Darrell fell into endless bickering and all pretense of domestic civility soon vanished. Sometimes Darrell would try to cope with the tension by going emotionally AWOL, firing up a joint after work and hiding out in his bedroom. It was tough on Melissa and her two brothers, knowing full well that they were living where they weren’t wanted. And it was tough on Donna, Darrell brooding half the time, fuming the other half, the kids—not even her own kids!—openly defying her, stretching her to the breaking point. Finally, Darrell arrived home from work one evening to discover that the kids were gone. There had been one altercation too many, and Melissa had phoned Lexie asking her to come get them and bring them to her and R.J.’s house.

And so that was that. The reunification experiment had ended up a dismal failure. Over the next few years Melissa and her brothers led a nomadic existence, shuttling back and forth between Lexie’s place and Larry’s, moving to Houston for a month here, a couple of months there, sometimes spending a troubled week or two (but not longer) with Darrell and Donna at the two-room house in the hollow.

It’s difficult for Melissa, almost twenty years later, to think back on these unsettled times. Some of the details are scrambled, others mercifully forgotten. She remembers feeling most at home at R.J. and Lexie’s house and wishing she and her brothers could have stayed there year-round. She also remembers silently rooting for her dad, this troubled man she’d never really gotten to know, all the
while sensing he was fighting a losing battle. “Donna was big and strong and she’d fly off the handle and slug him. I never saw him hit her back, but there was probably a lot going on that I wasn’t aware of. The thing was, I really couldn’t discuss the situation with my dad. I couldn’t confide in him. I loved him, and I knew he loved me, but we didn’t have a bond of trust. He was gruff, drunk a lot of the time, stoned. So we were like strangers—father and daughter, but strangers. It’s funny the things that stick in your mind, little things, stuff that stays with you. He had a pit bull named Diablo—I remember that. And the skull—he had a human skull on a ledge of the stonework in the basement of the new house he was building. It was wearing a purple knit hat and sunglasses and had a necklace draped around its base and a joint stuck in its mouth. That was my dad—I guess he had his own way of doing things.”

Neither Darrell nor Donna had seen it coming, this onset of hostilities; it took them both by surprise. They’d actually been getting along quite well since hooking up at Bull Creek, not exactly lovebirds, but respectful and solicitous, neither one wanting to mess up what seemed a good thing. Darrell was happy to have a woman who gave every indication of being supportive and sympathetic; and Donna was pleased to have a man who, in her own words, was “sweet and witty and very thoughtful—a really considerate guy.” But then the crash came and no more sweetness, no more sympathy, nothing but rancor and recrimination and a flaunting ugliness. There were the predictable scenes, booze-fueled, mouth-foaming confrontations—nothing quite so bad as Darrell and Joyce at their most harrowing, but nasty and unnerving enough. It eventually reached the point where simply spending time together proved, for both of them, an unendurable ordeal.

Looking back, Donna says that Darrell changed colors once they’d gotten married and the first blush of romance had faded, revealing a dark side that she hadn’t imagined existed. He would sometimes fall prey to bottomless depression, burrowing into his bed for days at a time. Once she apparently found him lying naked, clutching a red wasp by the wings and stinging himself all over his body. Those days when he succeeded in rousing himself were
hardly much better. He’d talk endlessly about Vietnam, getting shot at, never having a chance to shoot back, or else hunker down with his latest issue of
Soldier of Fortune
and fantasize aloud about becoming a mercenary or a hit man.

But living with Donna toward the end couldn’t have been much fun either. By most accounts she had a ferocious temper and was fully capable, especially when drunk, of fighting like a man. She had a formidable arsenal, at one time or another breaking Darrell’s nose with a head butt, blackening his eye with a sucker punch, and coming close to crowning him with a bowling pin. Only once did he return fire, an open-handed blow to the side of her head after she’d hit him from behind with a heavy purse. A friend once asked Darrell if what he’d heard was true, that Darrell had said he could whip Donna in a fair fight. “Nah, I never said that,” Darrell answered. “What I said was
maybe
I could.”

The embattled couple had plenty of people rooting for them to sort out their problems. Darrell’s brother Larry thought that Donna was a fine person and just about everybody in Donna’s family thought the same of Darrell. Her mother was especially fond of him. “I always really liked Darrell,” Jeanie recalled. “I thought he was very, very nice—a sweet guy. I always got along well with him even though I knew he and Donna were having troubles.” At Jeanie’s suggestion, the couple gave marriage counseling a brief shot but by this point they were already too far gone for it to make any difference. In the spring of 1986 Donna finally called it quits, checking out of the little house in the hollow with her two kids, vowing never to return.

Once again it hit Darrell hard, maybe even harder than the first time with Joyce. A two-time loser in the marriage department, he now felt thoroughly defeated, a failure to his family and friends, a joke to himself. But even a failure and a joke has to carry on somehow, and the circumstances of Darrell’s life presented two obvious options: he could either take refuge in religion or throw in with the local outlaws. The second option won out easily. It didn’t even require a change of clothes; Darrell was already almost there.

If an outlaw was what you were, or what you wanted to be, you
couldn’t go wrong hanging out at Joe Dean Davis’s place, just a quarter mile down the hollow from the edge of town. Joe Dean knew practically every desperado in southwest Missouri, all of whom seemed to enjoy his company. And little wonder. He was a colorful guy, with a rich fund of amusing and lusty stories, and a talent for bending himself to the occasion, interacting with people on terms they felt most at ease with. He may have inherited this talent from his dad, Green Berry Davis, who was a born talker with an itch for politics. On those occasions when he was running for some local office or another, Green Berry would go canvassing door-to-door with a bag containing his campaign props: a Bible and a bottle of whiskey. Once invited inside he’d quickly size up the situation and then, depending on the proclivities of his hosts, he’d either take out the Good Book for some impromptu sermonizing or crack open the whiskey and settle in for an exchange of ribaldry. Either way, Green Berry would usually come off as a guy whom you’d feel comfortable trusting with your vote.

Joe Dean was a guy whom local outlaws felt comfortable trusting with their secrets. Cock fighters, bootleggers, drug dealers, gunslingers, counterfeiters: drop by his place often enough, you’d be sure to catch them all. It was a rare day when there weren’t at least two or three dudes from the nether side of the law hanging out—sipping home brew, smoking grass, hatching schemes. And it was rare nowadays that Darrell wasn’t hanging out with them. Darrell had always enjoyed visiting Joe Dean, one of his favorite cousins, and after his breakup with Donna, he was visiting more often and sticking around longer. Coming across the rickety old bridge onto Joe Dean’s property and wending his way past the one-room log cabin, the fighting roosters in cages or tied up to leashes and scrabbling on the ground, the horses nickering in the makeshift corral—wending his way past all this glorious scruffiness and plopping down on the front porch of the little frame house set out back, he felt like he was exactly where he was supposed to be. He enjoyed rubbing shoulders with Joe Dean’s outlaw pals, many of whom he’d known half his life anyway, and the outlaws seemed to enjoy rubbing
shoulders with him. And why not? It wasn’t as if he was lacking in outlaw credentials himself. Darrell had a reputation for being tough and fearless, and everybody knew he could shoot a pistol like ringing a bell. Everybody knew he was someone you’d want on your side in the rough going; definitely not a guy you’d want to risk antagonizing.

Some days Darrell would check into Joe Dean’s in the early evening and then go out honky-tonking, hitting roadside joints all the way down to the Arkansas line. He might start out at the Nite Hawk in downtown Reeds Spring, a creaky old dive with a leaky roof, a place that only the rowdiest of townsfolk mourned when it finally burned to the ground. Then on to Betty’s Tavern on Route 13 just south of town, a hard-core joint with a sign above the bar—CUSTOMERS MUST CHECK GUNS AND KNIVES WITH BARTENDER BEFORE BEING SERVED—that no one with any sense paid the slightest attention to. Just about everyone knew that sitting in Betty’s unarmed was a serious health risk. He might wrap things up at Hoppy’s, an outlaw hangout south of Kimberling City, with a few beers, a couple of games of pool, quarters in the jukebox, a little George Jones, some Allman Brothers, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Lynyrd Skynyrd. And then home, usually alone, Darrell not much of a lady’s man at this point, with a little bit of a buzz on, just enough to beat back the demons for the night and hopefully grab some sleep.