Stolen Life (24 page)

There are questions I should have asked Clarence Johnson about why, in 1977 and 1978, Yvonne had such a difficult, ugly life while trying to live with him in Butte. It is clear that much of the time she lived in the dirt cellar under the house; she attempted several suicides; she ran
away twice, the first time in the early summer of 1977, when she lived hand to mouth and wandered across twenty states, wherever her temporary friends would take her. Clarence did not even explain why he hadn’t notified the police when Yvonne disappeared; if I were to be generous now, I’d say he had forgotten to tell me. Yvonne thinks that her mother did come to Butte while she was gone, worried about her, but as far as she knows her parents did nothing. Cecilia returned to Canada and they filed no “Missing Person” statement; perhaps they were afraid that, if they reported it, the Butte cops would make sure Yvonne stayed missing for good.

What Clarence did tell me—he has a good memory for money-was that Greyhound had a special on that summer. For seventy-five dollars you could travel one way anywhere in the United States; when he heard Yvonne was in Indianapolis, he sent her that ticket to come home.

Yvonne tells me she was back in Butte by late September 1977, and tried to overdose on pills again, but it didn’t work. She turned sixteen on 4 October, so she was no longer legally required to attend school; a volunteer organization called Teen Challenge tried to help her: twice a week a neat woman with styled hair took her swimming at an indoor pool. Two hours a week, but there were 166 hours left to live. She was looking for possible work beyond random babysitting when Clarence told her that Grandpa “Fightin’ Louie” Johnson was confined to a retirement home. He was 101 years old, and Yvonne felt sorry for him. At the same time, she realized he might help her to a different life.

Clarence shows me a picture of his bald, ancient father with a smiling woman of about twenty leaning against him, she with a cute baby on her knee. At the age of ninety-three, “Fightin’ Louie” had declared he was the father of the baby, the young woman said that yes, he was, and so Blaine County gave her both child support and welfare. By 1977 Louie was still the independent individualist he had always been: whenever he could possibly get out of the senior citizens’ home, he’d run away. Several times the Montana Patrol found him two miles out on the shoulder of the highway, bobbing doggedly along with his walker, heading for the town of Chinook. In late October 1977, public health services, not knowing what else to do, had him living in a hotel room. Yvonne volunteered to care for the old man.

“The nurse in Chinook,” Yvonne explains to me, “found us an apartment and I went up and moved in. It was one large room with cooking facilities on one side, and on other side my bed was separated from his by two chests of drawers. We shared the bathroom with the woman next door, a former madam of the local whorehouse, Grandpa told me—no messing with her. And taking care of him was no big deal: all he wanted me to do was get him to the bar. As soon as the bar opened, every day.

“He had a buddy there as regular as he, and they played checkers. His old buddy was blind and Grandpa’d try to out-cheat him in checker cheats. They’d sit with a twenty-sixer of whisky on the table and play all day. They must have been alcohol-preserved, and cheating, more than checkers, was the going game between them, blind or not. I’d play pool by myself, and occasionally Grandpa would sneak a shot of whisky into my pop. One day a cowboy hat called Wilt showed up, he talked and laughed with the old men. Grandpa told him to marry me.

“I went to a movie with him, but I didn’t like him much. He held my hand crooked the whole evening; it was painful and I didn’t know how to tell him. Grandpa questioned me when I picked him up at the bar, said he’d fix me up to marry this guy, but I said nothing. In bed Grandpa drifted off into some nightmare—he drank steadily but never appeared drunk. He always had a big bottle in the apartment and the only way I could stop him drinking was to place it too high for him to reach—remembering a nightmare long past, either reality or dream: ‘I didn’t shoot that man. It was a fair fight, fair and square.’

“Grandpa Louie didn’t like the handsome Native cowboy who started to play pool with me, but the two of us started visiting anyway. After a while I brought him home. Grandpa thought it was the hat he wanted me to marry, but when I told him it was my Native friend, he hit the roof! He called me bitch, whore, Indian squaw; he swiped his cane at me and I begged him, ‘Grandpa, don’t do this to me.’ I got down on my knees: ‘Please, please.’ But he slammed me with the cane and I swore, ‘That’s enough!’ I grabbed the neck of his whisky bottle off the table just as he called me something else horrible and swung that around at him. If I’d hit him I’d have split his skull. I intended to miss, I just wanted to scare him, but he wouldn’t scare, and in the
mêlée I backhanded him, knocked him sideways onto his bed. Fuck this, I thought, I’m outa here—run, my usual way of handling a problem—I tucked the blankets under tight so he couldn’t fall out and hurt himself; he kept on yelling and spitting, and I left. I went to the Elks’ bar and told them Louie wanted a twenty-sixer. They gave it to me, but I couldn’t open it in the bar. I played a few games, walked out, cried, felt angry and useless, and ashamed. Then I went back.

“He was still yelling murder. I gave him some whisky, but he wouldn’t calm down. He swore he wanted to move into a flophouse with his buddy where no bitch would tie him up. I called the nurse. I begged him again, but he kept cursing me, and when the nurse finally came towards morning to help patch things up, he just jerked his hand away from me. So the nurse called an ambulance to take him back to the home. And then, in front of the nurse and the two attendants carrying him out, he called me a fucken whore who’d sleep with any bastard that got his hands up between my legs. I couldn’t stand any more, a whole night of being yelled at.

“ ‘If I’m a whore,’ I screamed, ‘you’re the one who taught me, you did it first!’

“ ‘You little bitch, you wanted it.’

“ ‘I was four years old! I wanted it? You were ninety!’

Yvonne shakes her head as she tells me this; her voice is barely audible as this memory rasps over her raw remembering. She has not yet described how Grandpa Johnson fits into the long abuse of her childhood, but I know she will, eventually.

“We were both howling by then, the men carrying him out the door into three feet of winter snow, belted to the stretcher and everyone in the apartment house watching and listening. I put the cowboy hat he always wore on his head. I bent down and told him I loved him, and I kissed his cheek, I felt so dreadful. He’d loved having me care for him, wash and shave him, give him enemas and bathe him all over, help him onto the toilet, feed him, take urine and stool samples, tuck him in at night, everything, and now when I kissed him he head-butted me! ‘Fightin’ Louie’ Johnson all right. He liked me spunky, but on his terms.”

Yvonne sighs, looks at me. “One stubborn Johnson against another stubborn one—a hopeless idea, I guess. Like most of my ideas. I’ve never had any luck. Seven months later he was dead.”

A slight twitch plays at the corner of her mouth; I’ve noticed it before when she refuses to break despite memories too painful to speak of. “He died because he fell, crashed down the staircase in the old folks’ home in his wheelchair. Dad figured the nurses couldn’t stand him any more and gave him a nudge.

“Or maybe he cashed himself in. I think only he himself could finish off Fightin’ Louie.”