Thomas Leverett - plays and writing
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Free Parking
I was working register seventeen at WalMart, which meant that I could see part of the field adjoining it, out by where the rock band parked their motor home, and where a little path leads out toward the highway through a little patch of woods. A lot of police were out there, as apparently they had found a body of a man, and they were roping it off, taking photographs, etc., but I couldn't watch because of the steady stream of customers and the blasted little beeps that threaten to drive me crazy if I don't concentrate on the task at hand. You hear a lot of stuff working there, and I knew eventually I'd hear plenty: who he was, who did it, why they even looked out there in the first place.
By afternoon I'd already heard a few things: a guy in the rock band, I think the organ player, had found him while walking his dog; the victim was homeless and they were trying to figure out who he was; he'd been shot and then dragged out there, or so they thought; and, as far as they knew, it had nothing to do with the property owner's feud with WalMart, or the fact that a wealthy banker had committed suicide up on the highway only three days ago, running his car off the road not too far away from WalMart, or that the leader of the rock band had a shady history involving several ex-wives, all kinds of drugs, and various incidents in countries like the Bahamas and Italy. The rocker could actually be seen from register seventeen, explaining something to the police, perhaps how the organ player was an upright guy, he had nothing to do with this except he walked the dog regularly, which I, at register seventeen, could have verified, by the way. But once again, I was busy, steady stream of customers and all.
It's a small town kind of place, in spite of being a huge store, selling everything from gallons of milk to bicycles, with all kinds of problems, extensive parking lot security and a property line that goes halfway well into the fields and woods in most directions. It's so small town that pretty soon everyone in the break room was sharing notes and half of the people knew the rocker, his drummer, the organ player, or even the banker who had killed himself, and whose wife said it wasn't like him, he wasn't even depressed, he must have been run off the road up by the highway as he'd denied some loans or something. We kind of wrote her off as a hysterical grieving family member, unable to handle the strain of a suicide in the family, but she became the topic of conversation anyway, since nobody knew anything about this homeless guy. Who was he? How long had he been in town? What did he look like? Nobody had a clue.
We were familiar with the police, though, as several of them had been staking out William the meth man, who kept buying suspicious things from the store, presumably to make his own, and had attracted the attention of local law enforcement agents, many of whom liked to talk. William was a sallow man, dark eyes, hollowed out cheeks, obviously guilty of lots of things, if not making meth, and most of us were ready to help the police if we saw him. But he'd altered his patterns recently and wasn't buying the same stuff at the same place and time. And it's not a crime to come into WalMart at 3 am, and nobody really knew where he lived out in the country, though it was surely a trailer and it was way out there. Was he involved in this? Some people freely speculated with the police. I however seemed to get a lot of traffic at register seventeen and was stuck beeping little clothes tags until closing time, when I was exhausted and went home to bed.
By morning they'd identified the guy as one David Clayton Boone, from a nearby town, but still had very few clues about who he knew, why he was in town, why somebody might shoot him, etc. His marriage was on the rocks, apparently, with a court order to stay away from his wife, but she didn't seem to be the shooting kind, according to one policeman, though they were looking into her boyfriend, a trucker who was supposedly away in Oklahoma at the moment, but was well known in the area, especially in the bars, where he frequented certain places on his days off. So he'd fallen in love with this married woman; her husband turns up dead in a field outside WalMart, and he's off in Oklahoma somewhere. Suspicious. This was the talk in the break room when I got into work.
I got register five this time, over by the grocery, and this time I couldn't see the field, or the rock band, but I heard a lot of people talking by the entrance and some of the places where they meet each other, which are not far from register five. At the grocery you get these huge carts full of all kinds of stuff and it's a little different although the beeping is just as relentless and again it doesn't let up all day, whether you go fast or slow. We of course are trained to go fast, and be polite, and be accurate, and all that stuff, but what do they expect for that pitiful wage, of course we're going to listen to the gossip if someone has any. Turns out the property owner, one Johnson Wales, who I did not know personally, had some connection with the trucker, as well as his long-standing feud with WalMart. You can bet he was out there on the parking lot claiming that this dead guy was WalMart's fault, what are they doing building a new SuperCenter right up against his property anyway, shining their lights and traffic all night long and all that. We'd heard it before, apparently, as had the courts. But apparently the rock band had been the last straw, he didn't like a rock band parked right up against his land in the parking lot, day in and day out, and he had hired the trucker to go get a pole barn or some such structure which he was going to put on his land, right up against the parking lot, block out the light and be a little unsightly. Well, this sounded suspicious, but, such kinds of feuds are common in small towns like this, even if one of the feudees is a major corporation like WalMart. The manager seemed to think this Johnson Wales was an evil guy, but I was more curious about the trucker, since he was the only one I'd heard of so far who had an actual motive, that being that the dead guy was married to his girlfriend. Why else would someone kill an old homeless guy and toss him in the weeds? I didn't figure old Johnson Wales would do it- sure he hated WalMart, but why kill some guy over that? Or the rocker. Maybe a couple of ex-wives had overdosed somewhere in the Bahamas a couple of years back, but if he were to just shoot someone and toss him in the weeds, I figure he'd be long gone by now. And the rocker, named Deth Venice, came through register five a lot. He was always buying milk, or toothpaste, or some such little thing, he wasn't organized enough to buy a whole meal at once. And he didn't even wake up until about 7 at night.
But right when he was arguing with the manager about something, along comes William the meth man, this was about nine in the evening, and William also was buying milk and white bread and balogna, basic supplies, none of this Colemans fuel or Iodine tincture, which you supposedly use for your horses. It's certainly not a crime buying white bread and balogna, though maybe it should be, but I half expected the police to jump him right there at register five, as I knew they'd been watching him for quite some time. I raised my eyebrow a little to show I was surprised that he was just buying milk and food; just to see what would happen I mentioned the body that was found out in the field beyond the rock band's motor home, and the police coming and going all hours of the night, but he looked back at me with the hollowest of eyes, not caring, not knowing a thing that I could tell. He wouldn't have known Deth Venice from the greeter, I figured, and most likely the milk and balogna were for his dog, as he clearly hadn't eaten in months. He did however say that he didn't care at all for these police, and if they were marking up his property the way they were marking up that field out there, it would be them that was out there lying face down in the mud. But he said it with such a dull flatness that I couldn't imagine him killing anyone. He certainly had no grudges that I knew of with anyone, although in the meth business, I'd guess, you'd probably have a grudge with everyone.
But just as he turned to grab his meager groceries and go, he almost ran into Deth Venice, who was still speaking in a raised voice to the manager. The manager was more or less telling old Deth to take a hike, though he'd be permitted to wait at least until after his big show, which was well known to be tomorrow night. Deth was telling the manager that he could take his WalMart SuperCenter and shove it where the sun don't shine, he'll just get his groceries down at the Piggly Wiggly like everyone else from now on, thank you very much. But when old Deth almost ran smack into sallow old William the meth maker, it was almost like he'd seen his own ghost. William, you see, was a lot like Deth, long greasy hair, thin as a rail, except he had no confidence, no stage presence, no love of dressing up and prancing around making noise. He was just a poor guy starving out there in the woods who had according to someone started boiling down this crap to make meth all the time, and they were about to catch him, whatever he was doing he certainly wasn't eating much. He didn't even care for Deth Venice; to him, old Deth was just some dressed up clown who was about to run into his hard-bought white bread and ruin his dinner. I was looking for clues in this- I figured, with Deth parked out there on the edge, surely he'd seen something and knew something, and if homeless people were hanging around the parking lot, maybe meth was as good a reason as any, so I figured maybe one of these clowns knew something they weren't letting on. But there was no sign of the police. Deth, you had to figure, was at least a very public character- they'd already talked to him, I'm sure. As for William, I'm sure the police knew he was there, but must not have had anything on him, or they would have sprung. After all, he was just buying supplies.
As I got off work that night I peered off at the path that goes off across Johnson Wales' land, where the body was, up a wooded hill and over toward the highway out of town, where that banker went over the edge. It was not clear to me that anyone in that rock band could have seen anything on that path, anyone coming and going, judging from the way they were parked, though if I were going to drag a body somewhere, I probably wouldn't start in a WalMart parking lot. The band had a number of shady characters; the drummer was a kind of local guy, who had gone to jail for assault at one point but seemed to be ok once he took up with Deth and started getting a steady income from playing the clubs and the concerts in the area. I'd have suspected him, but none of these guys were dumb enough to just throw a dead guy not more than a mile from where their motor home was parked. And I think the police knew that.
But finally it hit me, and I think the police figured this out before I did, because they were still poking around the following day when I got back to work. The murderer didn't drag the body from the parking lot, or they would have found more tracks. They dragged it from the other way, from the highway. As it turned out , the banker's wife was right- the banker had been run off the road, up on the highway, though there were no tracks from another car. He'd been run off the road by none other than Johnson Wales himself, presumably for denying him a loan, or perhaps for giving WalMart theirs; Wales had, in a fit of temper, killed the guy, and the homeless guy was unlucky enough to see it, accidentally, as he was probably just hanging around out there in the woods on the edge of town. So he had to be killed also, or he'd surely tell eventually- and that's when they dragged him back in, toward the WalMart, before dropping him. Johnson Wales had apparently dropped him on his own land, then went out and pretended that he was absolutely furious that someone would kill somebody at WalMart and come onto his property to drop the body.
And that was all there was. The trucker apparently had nothing to do with it, though when he heard about all the fuss back home, he stayed in Oklahoma, never returned the money or brought the pole barn or anything. Deth and his band played their show, but the wind had been taken out of his sails, he sounded like a ghost, a guy who'd spent one night too many in the WalMart parking lot. I heard this from a friend who, rather than working Saturday nights, actually went places like concerts. Right then I tried to picture Deth in front of a crowd, trying to get up a good scream, but being drowned out by thousands of little WalMart beeps of things being bought, and finally giving up and going home. William, I never saw again, maybe he fell off the face of the earth, or just decided that there were better WalMarts than ones that were swarming with police and gossips and rockers, not to mention people so big they had to use those carts to drive around in. And all of this is second hand, by the way, don't quote me on it, you can read about it in the papers, if Johnson Wales ever goes to trial, and find out what really happened.
1-07-07
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