Thomas Leverett - plays and writing
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The Old Home Place
The Old Home Place
There was a guy I knew in high school who had taken a lawnmower engine and put it in a Volkswagen body- this car would not go very fast, but was unique in its general construction and of course got great gas mileage, though it sounded kind of funny. At one point he needed a horn and didn't have one, so he put an old bicycle horn on it, which sounded even funnier, and I remember him using it once in the high school parking lot. He only drove it to school that once; mostly he kept it around his family's place and used it to carry things like wood and bricks, like you would use a wheelbarrow. He and his family lived in the woods way back behind the bluffs of the river, and they made do in all kinds of ways which we cannot even imagine. They were avid hunters and also fished the river; they cut wood; they very rarely had to even come out when the weather was bad; they'd just stay holed up back there for weeks. There was Roger, his brother Ray, and their father and mother, who were getting very old but still healthy.
These brothers looked kind of alike, but were very different. Roger was able to stay home, hunt, fish, and virtually make a living selling what he caught; he probably would have never enjoyed one of those town jobs where you run a lawn mower shop or something, even though he could have done that perfectly well. Ray, on the other hand, had a drinking habit, so he had to work at a landscaping business to keep the money rolling in. And they had to support their parents.
The brother, Ray, had a feud with a local policeman that nobody cared for, a guy who would search people for no reason, hide behind the bar waiting for drunks to come out, and in general abuse his power. This guy's name was John Bobwater, or JB. JB had a thing against Ray, and the town being small and people having nothing else to do, sometimes these feuds got escalated. Sometimes I imagined JB and Ray actually being in the same high school class, but I couldn't swear that for certain, maybe it was Roger that shared the class with him. Anyway you can bet there had been some hostility going way back, to the point that who knows where it started, and surely both sides had been unreasonable. But JB had the law on his side, and also another policeman by the name of Getman. One time Ray had been present at a fight in the bar, and JB took that as an opportunity to go find him, beat him up, and get some information out of him. Only knowing JB you could be sure that the beating up would be much bigger than the getting information. Roger and the family were well aware of this and the father told JB and Getman to get lost, when they arrived at the house. Ray was at work, he said; mother was at the store, and Roger was off hunting somewhere. In fact Roger's truck was parked at the house, though, an old Ford, and JB knew this, and that made him mad, so he began cussing out the old man, and pushing him around with the butt of his gun.
Now this was kind of disrespectful, since the old man was one of these guys from the old school, that thought a young jerk like JB ought to show some respect even if he's about to search you or arrest you. But the old man didn't say anything, and neither did Getman, who was new on the force and following JB's lead at the time. JB got madder and madder and announced his intention to search the place; he'd always been curious what they had out there and was sure he'd find some ammunition, a stockpile or something. He started using the butt of his gun to paw through stuff on tables, and then he started turning over little endtables and things, just to make the old man mad. The old man's eyes burned but he said nothing. Finally he told the old man to take him out to the barn where he was sure he'd find Roger. But out there, all was quiet, except that Ray's truck was out there too, and now JB knew that both boys were on the property, but didn't know where. Now he became enraged, and he told Getman to hold the old man while he began punching him, trying to get information out of him. At this point Getman and the old man were under a large loft, whereas JB kept retreating kind of beneath the loft, between punches, so it was impossible for someone who was hiding in the loft to jump on JB, or at least this is how the story goes. In any case, Ray appeared out of nowhere- Roger was apparently hunting somewhere on the land- and Ray, from the loft, dropped down on Getman and began to fight with him, getting his hold loose on the old man. The old man began fighting at this time also.
This was all the excuse JB needed, and he drew his gun, and shot the old man; all the while, he was aiming for Ray. Aiming for Ray again, this time he shot Getman, and Getman died on the spot. Dead policeman, this was already very serious. Ray was in a panic, but JB still had the gun; JB was doing all the talking.
Now I'm giving you the mother's side of the story, because she came home from shopping at some point, and JB was knocked out on the floor of the barn, not too far from the dead people. She was in a panic due to the fact that her husband was dead, but she readily believed Ray and Roger, that Roger had just appeared sometime in this confrontation, had hidden, and knocked JB out with a door. There's also some question about who actually killed the two men, but, there was only one gun, and only one set of fingerprints on them; it was pretty clear that JB had killed them both. Later, he said it was self-defense; that the old man and Ray were charging him, and that at one point Ray had grabbed the gun and killed Getman.
Now killing a policeman is a pretty stiff charge, so there was a national hunt on for Ray, and you can bet they combed the property, one side to the other, but no sign of either boy, or their trucks. The mother had called 911; they'd come and got the bodies, had the whole crime scene investigation and everything; the mother told them Ray and Roger's story, which only differed from JB's with respect to who actually killed Getman. But JB never knew who hit him over the head with the door; even he admitted that. It could have been the mother, he always said.
So both trucks and both boys disappeared without a trace that very evening, not to be seen for years. They always suspected that one of the boys was around, because the widow always had fresh venison and was well supplied, but they kept their eye on the property, and found nothing. The boys were extremely good at hiding, if either one was around. One of the trucks, Roger's, appeared in Wyoming a few years later; police tracked down a traveler who said he'd bought it off one of the brothers and put his own plates on it. Police had no reason not to believe him and then believed that at least one of them had gotten away.
The mother had an old rambler and drove around town, freely telling her version of the story and staying away from JB. But Ray was wanted for killing Getman; Roger was wanted for hitting JB on the head with a door. They were both most wanted fugitives in the state for years. JB made sure there was a camera on the road from their house, and that that camera was watched at all times; nobody could leave by way of the road, without passing both the camera and the police station further down. Whenever JB heard stories about venison being eaten out there he'd hit the roof and do another round of searching, but come up empty. The mother would drive all over, so that no one knew if maybe she didn't get the venison from some generous neighbor; why not? There was no sign of the boys anywhere on the land or anywhere nearby.
About ten years went by, and I was thinking about the case, when sure enough, the other truck turned up, buried in the river. That would be Ray's truck; no other evidence was gained from it, and it had been there about ten years, or at the bottom of the river anyway. Now, upon thinking about the case, I figured that if anyone was hanging around, it was probably Roger, since Ray couldn't make it more than a few days without alcohol, and was a sociable type who enjoyed the company of people in a tavern. A person like that is going to surface eventually, not spend ten years in the hills. Roger, on the other hand, would be perfectly content to live without the truck, or anything else, hunt, fish, deliver food to the mother, and do it all without being seen. So I suspected that Ray had taken Roger's truck out west and sold it and disappeared, maybe to Mexico or wherever, but I had no evidence.
When the mother died, still eight more years later, interest in the case flared up again, but once again they found no trace of either boy; they buried the mother, sold the house and barn and land, and cleared the place of every trace of the family. There still were miles and miles of hiding places, caves, ravines, where someone could have been hiding, but nobody would have known it; the land was bought and occupied; people watched the cameras, and nobody left.
But at the funeral, a traveler showed up and claimed that he had in fact been there that night; he'd actually hit JB with the door. He said this directly to me as I stood at the outside edge of a small crowd at an outdoor funeral, in January, out by the old Salem Baptist Church, with old JB, looking terrible, having trouble living with himself maybe, and half a dozen other policemen. This traveler said that he had happened to be staying at the boys' place at the time, had been with Ray in the area of the barn that night, had come across the scene, and had hit JB with the door; the statute of limitations was up, though, and they couldn't get him now even if I turned him in, which I wouldn't. He said the mother's story was right, the best he knew. According to Ray, JB had shot the father out of spite; he was on the ground, unarmed, and JB was sick of his stubborn defense of his boys. He'd shot Getman by accident, as Ray was fighting with him at the time, and he had been aiming for Ray. JB was about to kill Ray too, but the traveler himself had walked in and hit JB with the door. Roger had appeared later with food that Ray and the traveller then took with them when they left. The mother had actually protected the traveler, not mentioning him to the police, as he was the one that got Ray out of there, relicensed the truck, made sure Ray had enough money to get away, etc. Ray, he said, was doing well, but he wouldn't say where he was; both boys wanted it known that they were sorry they couldn't attend the funeral. There certainly was no sign of them that gray January day as they buried the mother's body, policemen looking furtively in every direction.
But later that spring, there was a blinding rain shower, visibility was reduced to zero, and I was forced to go out on the highway by the bluffs for some reason, I can't remember now. Out there, the rain was driving so hard I could barely see the line in the middle of the road, but I drove on toward town anyway. And then, at one moment, the Volkswagen with the funny lawnmower engine came the other way. It was leaving town, going the other way, and perhaps he'd used the storm to slip past the cameras, or maybe they weren't even watching anymore. I couldn't see who was in it; it was past me in a flash, but I did hear that bicycle horn. Decades had gone by, but every memory was right in place, right where they'd always been.
1-21-07
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