Promises That I Broke 205 Marvin Miller
Chapter 1
All I wanted was a happy, normal life; the Army was all that I had known for the past three years and I was eager to get back to being a civilian. In my mind, my life could be divided into two parts; my childhood for the first seventeen years and my military life which covered the past three. A Vietnam Veteran at nineteen and now here I was driving home from Fort Knox newly discharged from the service and still not even twenty-one years old. It occurred to me that I had never had a civilian life before, but I was more than ready to start one. I drove on to Texas with a pocketful of high hopes.
I drove all night and part of the morning to get to my Mom’s house and once I was there I still could not rest because my mind was on my first big date that night celebrating my new life. Kathy was a local Lawn girl that I had met back in the summer when I was home on leave. We had spent an afternoon together back then and had written each other regularly since. I had fallen head over heels for her, but there were a couple of problems with our budding romance.
The first problem was that she was just sixteen years old, soon to be seventeen. She was mature beyond her years thanks to an alcoholic parents who were divorced. Her Mom was in and out of treatment centers, her Dad had remarried a woman with a ready made family. Kathy lived with her Grandma out on the old family farm.
The second problem with Kathy was she was the girlfriend of one of my old school buddies. I had known Freddy since the first grade and we had always been friends up until the time I went into the army. We had seen each other one time while I was in the service, he had fixed me up with a date and we double dated with him and Kathy while I was home on leave. It was the first time that I had ever seen her and I didn’t know what it was, but I was drawn to this blonde haired country girl and after spending that afternoon with her that time, I had to make her mine. It didn’t matter that Freddy was my friend and it didn’t matter that there was a girl in Kentucky that loved me; I would do what I had to in order to be with Kathy.
When I was in Vietnam and married to Betty; our relationship was going downhill fast, but instead of trying to make it to last long enough for me to get back home and maybe work things out, I fantasized about living the single and free life when I got out of the army. While I was in Kentucky, I met and fell in love with Debbie. It was never the kind of love that a person needs to marry, but we did talk about marriage anyway and were still talking about it before ink was dry on my divorce papers from Betty. Debbie and I were still talking about getting married when I came home to Texas that summer on leave, but when I met Kathy; it was all over between us.
The time for the big date finally rolled around and I went to pick up Kathy who was dressed as cute as a button. We went out to dinner and then to a movie. It was an enjoyable date and we laughed a lot. I didn’t want to the evening to end, but I returned her home by midnight. As soon as I left the farm that night I saw a car coming down the deserted dirt road. No one else lived out there so I knew that it had to be Freddy. Kathy had told me that he was obsessive and possessive, but I had no idea of what a sick puppy he was. As soon as our cars passed each other, he immediately turned his around and followed me.
He followed my car closely all the way down the three miles stretch of dirt road before I turned left on the highway at the intersection. I drove on with this madman on my tail and after driving a few miles, he began flashing his lights for me to stop. Fearing no one, I pulled over to the side of the road. Freddy parked behind me and got out walking up to the passenger side of my car. He opened the door and got in.
“When did you get in?” he asked as he sat down in the bucket seat of my Mustang.
“This morning,” I answered.
“So, you’re out of the army now?”
“Sure am.”
“Kathy told me that you were getting out. In fact, she broke up with me because of it. She said that ya’ll have been writin’ each other for a few months and when you got out, she wanted to start datin’ you. I just wanted to talk to you and ask you not to do that. Kathy’s my girl and we’ve been in love for awhile now and we were talkin’ about gettin’ married until you came along and screwed everything up. So, I’m askin’ you to please not date her. Don’t come between us.”
Freddy sounded as if he had rehearsed those lines several times and I sat there listening to him without any interruption. “Kathy’s a big girl and she can date who she wants,” I told him.
“You’re gonna break us up,” he said raising his voice.
“Instead of talkin’ to me about this, don’t you think that you should be talkin’ to Kathy?” I asked.
“I have talked to her and she’s sold on the idea of datin’ you so, you see, you have to be the one to break it off with her,” he explained.
“I’m not gonna do that,” I said shaking my head. “We went out tonight and had a really good time and so I don’t see any reason not to do it again.”
“I don’t wanna have to fight you, but I will!”
“What?”
“I know that you’re a Vietnam Vet and you’re trained in hand to hand combat and all of that, but I’m not scared of you.”
“Freddy, I don’t want you to be scared of me and I’m not gonna fight you.”
“If you don’t stay away from her, I’m damned sure gonna fight you,” he threatened. He suddenly opened the door of the car, got out and slammed it shut.
I started the Mustang and drove on home thinking that he was a fucking weirdo.
Now that I was out of the army I thought I had the world on a string, but in reality I had nothing other than a few dollars in my pocket from my discharge pay. I had no job, no idea of what kind of work I wanted to do and no idea of where to look. If it wasn’t for my Mom, I wouldn’t even have had a place to stay.
Back before I had entered the army I desperately looked for any job I could find to support Betty and me. I found nothing and expected as much now. I wasn’t disappointed; every place in Abilene I applied told me that they didn’t need anyone. I finally got a job as Gibson’s Discount Center as a stock boy on the laundry soap aisle for a dollar and sixty cents an hour and hated every minute of it. The hours dragged by as I carted cases of Tide and Cheer out on the aisle and neatly stacked the boxes on the shelf.
I still hated the army with a passion, but I missed the days that I had an actual mission. It seemed to me that one day I was hauling ammunition around Vietnam on convoy, the next I was guarding the gold at Fort Knox and now I was stacking boxes of detergent neatly on a shelf. It just didn’t feel right.
In fact, there were a lot of things that just didn’t feel right about being home. I felt out of place, I missed my army buddies and felt lonesome. My old school pals viewed me as different and thought I had changed. They really didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with me. Maybe it was all in my head, but I didn’t think so. That was okay with me too because I really didn’t want hang out with them either because I felt like I didn’t have anything in common with them anymore.
All was forgiven one Saturday afternoon when I came home from work. All of my school pals came by the house. There were three carloads of them and for the first time since I had come back, I felt welcome at home again. I walked out in the yard smiling and wanting to talk with them. There was another car that drove up, but I didn’t turn to see who it was, I just thought the more the merrier. Just then Freddy came up from behind me and grabbed me around the throat. He choked the crap out of me for a few moments and slammed me into a car hood. He beat me about the face with his fists as I desperately tried to fight back from my disadvantage. I grabbed him by the head and beat his head against the car fender a few times. He knocked me to the ground and pounded me in the head. Then the fight was over, he got to his feet and went back to his car, started the engine and took off.
I slowly stood up and looked around at my so-called friends; my lips were busted and bleeding, my face bruised and cut. “What the fuck is this?” I asked them as I made my way back to the house. They all wandered toward their vehicles and within a few minutes were gone. It was obvious that they had only come to see that fight that everyone knew about except me and now I was painfully aware of it.
One friend, a guy named Chris, came in to see about me. “What the fuck, Chris? I asked as he walked in. “Did everybody come over here just to see me get my ass kicked?”
Chris nervously sat down in a kitchen chair. “Freddy’s been drivin’ around town tellin’ everybody that he was going to whip your ass when you came home.”
“Well, they saw it,” I shouted frustrated as well as humiliated and stormed into my bedroom. I came back with my short-timer’s stick that I had brought back from Vietnam and sat it down on the kitchen table where he was sitting. I went over to the cabinet and got a full roll of electrical tape and began wrapping the stick with the tape for reinforcement just under the dragon’s head on top of the short stick that was just about a foot long.
“What are you gonna do with that?” Chris asked looking me over.
“I’m gonna beat that motherfucker to death with it,” I shouted in a rage and then continued with my taping. “If that motherfucker wants a fight, I’ll give him a fight.” I looked over at Chris. “When you leave here you go tell that son of a bitch to meet me Monday night out at the old Murphy house. Tell him to come alone, don’t bring anybody with him, I don’t want a fuckin’ audience to see what I’m gonna do to him.”
“Are you gonna kill him?” Chris asked uneasy.
“If I don’t I’m gonna damned sure make him wish he was dead,” I answered. “You tell him seven thirty at the old Murphy house on Monday night and tell him to come alone.”
Chris stood up from his chair and started for the door. “I’ll tell him.” He quickly walked out the front door and I went on making a few more reinforcements to my stick. I swung it in the air a few times to test it out and imagined I hit Freddy each time in the head with it.
The old Murphy house sat a couple of miles outside of Lawn in the country. No one had lived there for several years. I thought the isolation of the place would make a great location to beat Freddy to death for what he had done to me. I was preparing for the fight at home when there was a knock on the front door. I opened the door to find Chris standing there. It was late afternoon so I knew he wasn’t there for the fight.
“I just came from Freddy’s house,” he said as I opened the door for him to come in. “He told me to tell you that he ain’t comin’.”
“That chicken-shit son of a bitch,” I shouted. “Why the fuck not?”
“He thinks that you’re gonna try to kill him,” Chris said.
“Well, he damned sure got that right!”
“He just wants to call a truce.”
“A truce?”
Chris nodded his head.
“You tell that motherfucker if he wants a truce he can have one, but he’s better stay the hell away from me and from Kathy because I’ll never be unprepared again and I will beat the livin’ shit out of him if he ever comes around me again!” I meant what I said; I would do my best to kill Freddy if he ever crossed me again.
Chapter 2
The fight with Freddy made me certain of one thing and that was the fact that I had no real friends. I was alone and that was okay with me. I already knew that the best friends that I would ever have in my life would be the guys that I knew in Vietnam. I continued living in Lawn, dating Kathy and working at Gibson’s. I minded my own business and expected the same from everyone else in that damned little town.
Kathy and I had our problems, but the one thing that we did agree on was that we wanted lots of sex. We would have sex in the car, on the ground in the country, in the house with her grandmother in the next room. It didn’t matter to us; we would have sex anywhere, anytime. I was now twenty-one and Kate was still sixteen. It never occurred to me that it was considered statutory rape.
The phone was ringing when I came home from work one evening after working the late shift. Knowing that it was Kathy I answered. “We’ve got a problem,” she began sounding worried.
“What is it?”
“I’m five days late for my period and I’m scared that I might be pregnant.”
My heart sank down below my knees, but I tried to sound optimistic when I said, “You’re not pregnant, you’re just late or something.”
“I’ve never been late before!”
We talked on for about an hour and I tried to reassure her that she was not pregnant. I made the excuse that I was tired and after we hung up I sat there on my bed mad at myself. When an I gonna learn to keep my dick in my pants? I sat there remembering the other times that I had heard that same bad news. Of course, I had heard it from Betty and that deal it ended up as a divorce and made me a daddy to a kid that I never got to see, but I had also heard it before.
It was a beautiful sunny day in Kentucky and I had just come back to the barracks from guard duty. I stopped by the mail room to check to see if I had gotten any letters from home when the clerk informed me that I needed to report to the Orderly Room. I walked down the hall and inside the office to find Debra sitting there waiting for me. I was shocked to see her waiting there; I had not seen her since we had broken up two months earlier.
“What are you doin’ here?” I asked wondering what in the world was going on.
She smiled and stood up from her chair. “I just wanted to see you,” she smiled.
“Well, let’s go outside and talk,” I smiled wanting her to get out of the office. She followed me out and down the hall through the doors that led outside. I went down the steps and toward the parking lot. “What the hell? I mean we broke up. You just can’t come here, this is an army post. Come on, I’ll take you home.”
“I just wanted to talk to you Dewayne,” she said as we walked toward my car.
“What for?”
“I just wanted to see how you were doing,” she said as she got in the Mustang.
“I’m fine,” I told her as I started the engine. “What are you tryin’ to do, get me in trouble?”
“I just wanted to talk to you.”
“What for? We’ve already said everything we needed to say.”
“I’m pregnant,” she blurted out.
My world stopped spinning for a moment while I was driving her toward Muldraugh. “No, you’re not! “
“Yes, I am and I just wanted to tell you about it.”
“You ain’t doin’ this shit to me,” I said with my anger rising and feeling my imaginary civilian dream world crashing down. “I’ve got five months here in this fucked up army and I’m gettin’ the hell out and I’m goin’ back home and you ain’t stopping me! I ain’t gonna marry you,” I shouted.
“You don’t have to marry me,” she said trying to calm me down.
“Then why the fuck did you come to tell me this shit for?” I shouted wanting to understand.
“Because I love you and I wanted you to know,” she said softly.
I shook my head. “You don’t love me!”
“Look, Dewayne, what I said to you the last time we saw each other was out of hurt and anger. You had me believing that you were gonna marry me, but I’m sayin’ right here and right now that I love you, but I know that you don’t love me back and you don’t want to spend the rest of your life with me, but before you go back to Texas I want you to know that I do love you and I’m gonna have your baby and for the rest of your life no matter where you go, no matter what you do you’re gonna know that you left a good woman in Kentucky that has a child of your’s.”
We drove on to her house in silence and once we got there she opened her door and turned to me. “Won’t you come inside for a minute?”
I knew that it wasn’t a good idea, but I followed her to the house knowing that her parents were not there. She walked over to her closet and searched for something on the top shelf. At that point in time I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been a pistol and she shot me, but it wasn’t, it was a camera.
“I want to take a picture of you so the baby will know what their daddy looks like,” she said turning toward me and getting the camera ready. She snapped the picture and then pitched it down on her bed. “Can I ask you one last thing?”
“Sure.”
She walked over to where I was standing and stood close in front of me. “Make love to me one last time,” she said looking in my eyes.
“I can’t,” I said. “It’s over between us and that will only make things worse.” I stepped back away from her.
“Then kiss me goodbye.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I leaned forward giving her a passionate kiss. She kissed me aggressively and I pulled away looking at her.
“Goodbye, Dewayne, have a good life.”
I turned and walk out of the house feeling like I couldn’t get to my car fast enough. I started the engine and drove away. In the coming weeks I began drinking and smoking weed heavily always paranoid that she would come back to wreck my plans of starting my new life. She never did.
Back when we were dating, Debra told me a secret that was became a deciding factor in my breaking up with her in the first place. When she was fifteen she had gotten pregnant by some guy in the Marines. When she told him, he disappeared off the face of the earth and left her. She had the baby and gave it up for adoption. Here I was doing the same damned thing to her.
Now that I two pregnancy nightmares over with, here I was starting a third with Kathy. I was disgusted with myself for even having this problem, I was an idiot. It seemed that I was always doing something to screw up my life. Much to my relief, Kathy called the next to day to let me know that she had started her period. I would have married her if I had to, but, thank goodness, I didn’t.
Kathy was really a sweet girl and I did love her, but after the pregnancy scare I began to realize that she just wasn’t for me. I started thinking about moving on. I was in a relationship with a girl and I wanted a more mature woman. I also wanted another job, so I quit Gibson’s and went to work at Foremost Diary plant there in Abilene as an ice cream packer. It only took about a day before I realized that wasn’t for me either, but I held on for a couple of months before I enrolled in a business college to study to become an accountant. It seemed like a good idea and a step in the right direction at the time, but the cold, hard truth was the fact that I really sucked at math and I just was not ready to be in a structured environment.
Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, I pretended to listen to the instructor in my classes, but I really wasn’t paying attention. I was thinking about Vietnam and how to clear up all of the other messes that I had made so far in my life.
It was while I was attending the business college that I met a pretty woman with a man’s name, Sammye. Sam was a beautiful twenty-one-year-old with red hair and a model’s figure. With her good looks and her sporty MG Midget, I figured she was way out of my league, but she started smiling at me when we would pass each other in the hall. She saved me from a couple of embarrassing moments in the one class that we took together when the instructor asked me a question while I wasn’t paying attention. In turn, I asked her out to lunch.
That lunch with Sammye inspired me to finally break it off for good with Kathy. It was for the best because at that point in time we were fussing and arguing a lot. Kathy took it hard and cried and finally left with the promise, “I’ll love you forever.”
Our lunches soon became all afternoon instead of just an hour. I was a bad influence on Sam as we would both skip classes just to be together. We became inseparable as we would hang out with each other until the wee hours of the morning. Sam had two sisters; one was married with a kid, the other was a wild child that had a baby out of wedlock and gave it up for adoption. She was still living with her parents in Mississippi.
Sam’s dad was an oil man with Shell Oil Company and moved the family everywhere he went. Apparently the longest duty station was in California because Sam had grown up there. Her Mother was having bouts of anxiety and Sam was asked to come home for a visit. Now, Meridian, Mississippi is almost seven hundred miles from Abilene, Texas and Sammye didn’t want to make the drive alone so she asked me to go home with her and spend a few days there while she checked on her flake of a Mother.
The family seemed less than enthusiastic about my coming; her Dad was a know it all kind of guy that the rest of the family dared not to argue with. I tried to make conversation with him, but his one word comments to my questions and statements gave me the impression that he did not want to talk to me and that I was not really welcome there.
On the second day of our visit I was sitting alone in the back yard when Sammye came out of the house to talk to me. “Are you about ready to go back?” I asked more than ready to leave.
“Dad wants me to stay here,” she answered.
“And do what?” I asked.
“Help take care of Mother.”
“Hell, there ain’t nuthin’ wrong with her. Besides, your sister is here.”
“She’s not much help according to Dad,” she replied.
“What about school?”
“Dad said that he would pay for me to go down here.”
“What about me?”
“Dad said that he would be more than happy to buy you a bus ticket home.”
“I’m sure that he would,” I said shaking my head thinking that the man had way too much power over his family which caused me to wonder how much power I had with Sammye. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do; I’ll stay here for a few more days until you get your Mom on track, but I ain’t goin’ back to Abilene without you.”
Within a couple of hours we were on our way back to Texas in her MG with the top down and we were going to drive all night until we got there. Somewhere in the middle of the night on a long stretch of road in-between towns I recited “Celebration of the Lizard” by the Doors as I drove along and Sammye gave me a blow job. It was a great feeling.
Chapter 3
Sammye and I were married two weeks later in September by the Justice of the Peace. We lived in an apartment and I went to work as a collector in cheap, weekly life insurance policies commonly sold to people that could not afford insurance. I was making $125 a week and thought I was on the road to getting rich. My clients were mostly poor black folks, Hispanics and some white trash. Although I hated the job; it did give me a lot of alone time in my car listening to the radio and I enjoyed that. “Jump into the Fire,” by Harry Nilsson was one of my favorites at the time and wondered sometimes if I didn’t jump out of the frying pan into the fire when I married Sammye.
Driving up to people’s homes, knocking on their doors and asking for money that they didn’t have was not my idea of a good time. I began looking for another job and found one at Wolfe Nursery where I got hired as a manager trainee. I enjoyed the work for the most part because a lot of it was outside and I did learn a lot about plants. Sammye went to work as a tennis pro’s assistant at a tennis club and we did alright.
We thought that living in an apartment was too confining for us and so we soon rented a house. We both enjoyed the space and the back yard, but even with the bigger place, I felt restless. What was I doing wrong? I was married, had a decent job, a beautiful wife and was living in a good house, but I was still not satisfied.
Tired of putting up with the buying public, I quit my job at Wolfe and went to work for the City of Abilene as a water meter reader. It wasn’t much of an improvement, I worked with a gang of idiots, but what I did like was walking my route alone. So I was in the alleys of Abilene all by myself in the mornings and the afternoons. Alone with my thoughts and memories of the past reading meters and marking it down on an IBM card.
As I walked alone each day among the barking dogs in the yards, my mind would drift back to my military experiences. I would walk along humming and singing to myself. My singing would soon stop as my mind recalled a certain army experience and I would remember what was going on and what was said. I thought I should start writing these thoughts down on paper and maybe write a book someday. That idea appealed to me and so I bought a spiral notebook and began write daily about my army days from start to finish in my spare time in the evenings while Sammye watched TV.
Staying busy was important for me; it seemed that I always had to be doing something no matter what it was. When she wasn’t at work, Sammye liked to watch TV and sleep late on the weekends. Since I didn’t care about watching TV, I listened to my music with my headphones on so I wouldn’t disturb her. On the weekends when she would sleep late I would drive out to my Dad’s ranch and go hunting or fishing and would sometimes take a walk. On Sundays I would go play tennis or go down the area football field and kick field goals. No matter what the activity, I usually was back home before she got up. It was during this time that I started drinking again.
When I got out of the army I promised myself that I would not drink or do any drugs and so far I had done pretty well on that promise other than drinking an occasional beer from time to time. Now the beers were more than occasional and I started keeping them at home. It seemed to help with my restlessness. I could not figure out the source of my discontentment. I loved Sammye, but I hated staying home and enjoying quiet evenings with her; I wanted to get out and do something. We would go out to dinner, we would go to movies and while those things helped, I still did not feel satisfied.
There was a time that whenever Sammye and I were in the mood we would strip off our clothes and get down to business no matter where we were. Now sex was routine and expected. We just seemed to be going through a nightly ritual, there didn’t seem to be anything exciting about it. Not that I would ever turn it down, I was young and always in the mood, but everything in my life seemed to be lacking something and the most frustrating thing was I couldn’t figure out what it was.
I began to pal around more with what few friends I did have. There was Al and Ken from work. Al was a young guy that wanted to be a guitar player in a rock and roll band. He was married to a cute girl and Sammye and I tried to be friends with them as a couple, but she didn’t really like either of them.
Ken was an older guy that had retired from the Air Force; he was funny with a great sense of humor. He died suddenly of a massive heart attack at the age of forty-three.
There was Glen who had just got out of the army. I had known him since school, he was a comic and he could make me laugh just from the expressions on his face. He was probably the most intelligent guy that I had ever known and Sammye could tolerate him, in fact, she even liked him.
Then there was Cecil. Of all of my friends, he was the most accessible mainly because he lived next door to us. He was in his late thirties, owned his own home and drove a new Lincoln Continental. He worked at the hospital as an anesthesiologist. The only problem with him was that he was the biggest queer I had ever met in my life and Sammye immediately hated him.
I found Cecil to be a good Sunday Morning coffee pal. When I would come home from my activities and was still waiting for Sammye to wake up, I would go over to his house and have coffee with him. He was an intelligent soul, always jolly. He was a stereotypical gay guy with his immaculately furnished home complete with a baby grand piano. He was in the closet, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. Although we were friends, he never talked about being a faggot.
Sometimes he was downright giddy such as the time he came over to the house and I played Cheech and Chong’s “Pedro and Man at the Drive In” for him. He laughed so hard that his face was beet red and tears were rolling down his face. He quickly began trying to control himself when Sammye came home. Perhaps because he could easily see that she was not happy about him being there. He made it a point to leave after she went she went to the bedroom to change her clothes.
“What was he doing here?” she asked after he was gone.
I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know, he just came over.”
“I don’t want that man in our house,” she said angrily. “You know he’s a queer, don’t you?”
Her question angered me. “Yes, I know he’s a fuckin’ queer,” I said raising my voice. “So what? It’s not like he’s tryin’ to fuck me or somethin’!”
“Well, why do you want to hang around with people like that?” she asked with her face turning red and equally as angry as I was.
“Because he’s a friend of mine and I ain’t got that many friends,” I answered.
She turned and left the room heading for the kitchen. The fuss was over and now I could look forward to several days of her not speaking to me. That was the way she and I handled our fusses. We would give each other the quiet treatment.
Sammye was not the reason I ended my friendship with Cecil. No one could ever tell me who to be friends with. I did that on my own. I went over to his house one day for coffee and out of the blue he started talking about his friends and how he jerked one of them off until he came. That was enough for me; I couldn’t be friends with a guy that liked jacking off other guys.
Glen was about the last friend I had left and his fall from Sammye’s grace came one Saturday night when we stopped by his house. He had some other friends over and we all decided that it would be a good idea if we took a drive through the country and smoked a little pot. We drove out in the hills, parked on the side of the road and fired up a joint. We ended up smoking several joints that night as we sat there laughing, talking and drinking a few beers.
I had a great time and I thought Sammye did too until she said, “Promise me that you will never do that again.”
“What?” I didn’t understand.
“If you could have only heard yourself last night out there with Glen and those people. You guys were just ridiculous sitting there laughing and talking like a bunch of high schoolers.”
I looked at her as if I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “You just really don’t want me to have any friends, do you?”
“Not if they’re going to be potheads or homosexuals or whatever the hell,” she said. “Don’t you realize that there is something wrong with each and every one of your friends?”
“Well, nobody’s perfect,” I snapped.
“There all losers!”
“So am I,” I said so angry that I felt like slapping the shit out of her, but I controlled myself. “That doesn’t say much for you, does it? Since when did you become so high and mighty? You couldn’t even fuck until you met me,” I said knowing that would hit a hot nerve with her.
Sammye didn’t say anything else and I knew that I was going to get the silent treatment for about a week for that remark. She had been married before she met me, I was her second husband. She had married some jock from Southern California, they had a big church wedding at her Dad’s expense and everything was going to have a fairytale ending until the honeymoon. Sammye had been a virgin and on her honeymoon she found that she couldn’t have sex with her husband because it was too painful. Every time they tried it would hurt and it became a psychological problem for her. Instead of being patient and understanding about the situation with his new bride, her husband soon filed for divorce. She was still a virgin when we met, but that didn’t last long. All she needed was an experienced partner.
Sammye soon found a job at one of the large banks in town in the proof department. Her hours depended on the amount of work they had to do, but she started at eight in the morning. Most of the time they were able to quit at five, but sometimes she would work as late as ten or twelve.
I continued on with the water department and if she worked late I would busy myself with my writing and my music. In addition to my book writing I also fancied myself as a song writer and wrote several tunes during that time. On our nights together we would usually go out. Still, I was restless and didn’t know why and began to wonder about changing jobs.
In early 1974 we bought a little two bedroom frame house, I also bought a new Toyota pickup truck and I was surely a man that had it all. Life was good or so I thought, I had a house, a nice car, a small truck and a lovely wife. Although I was not an experienced carpenter, I was learning and I worked tirelessly on fixing the house the way we wanted it. Everything was going the way we wanted. I would tell myself that I was happy and that is what mature people do.
Sammye was happy in her work and was thinking about making the banking industry her career. I wanted to do something other than being a water meter reader so I enrolled in the local college and took courses in law enforcement with the notion of becoming a narcotics officer. Still, there was something missing in my life. I was discontented and I couldn’t understand why. I felt paranoid like there was someone out to get me. I slept with a loaded gun by our bed. Sammye would gripe at me about it, but I did it anyway. She would remind me that I was not in Vietnam anymore and tell me that we live in a good neighborhood where no one was going to break into our house. I would tell her that it was just as much for her protection as it was for mine.
Chapter 4
I was walking in a jungle somewhere in Vietnam with my old friends Groover and Looney Les. I didn’t know what we were doing in that jungle, but we all acted as if we were alright with it. Our M-16s were locked and loaded as we walked along and suddenly there was what sounded liked three loud squawks and as soon as the squawks ended we found ourselves under attack with shots being fired from several directions. The shooting ended in a matter of moments and a strange looking Viet Cong stepped out from behind a large tree. He was certainly no ordinary gook; he had a wild look about as if he were demonized. His eyes were crazy, his face contorted and his movements were fast as he walked toward us. Les stepped out to stop him, but the VC shot him in an instant blowing Les’ face off with a single shot.
“He killed Les,” I called out to Groover and then noticed that he was no longer with me. Suddenly Groover came out from hiding and grabbed the man from the rear holding him in a choke hold.
“Kill him, kill him now,” he shouted at me while choking the man.
I pitched my M-16 down and quickly grabbed my .45 from my ammo belt. I ran up to where Groover was wrestling with him and quickly put all nine rounds into the gook’s head. Not a single one of them penetrated his skull; he was unscathed. He reached around and threw Groover into a tree like he was a toy. Groover’s broken body hit the ground like a rag doll and he looked up at me just before he died. “You’re next!”
I ran backward in horror looking at this Viet Cong. I was terrified of him and what he was going to do to me. I knew at that point that I was going to die. I wanted to shout, but I could not make a sound. The gook looked at me with his wild eyes and made the three loud squawking sounds again.
Out of breath and with my heart pounding so fast that it felt like it was going to explode, I quickly sat up in bed wondering where I was. Realizing that I was safe at home in bed with Sammye I reached over at got my .12 gauge shotgun and held it close to me like it was an old friend that I had not seen in years. I laid back down holding the gun like it was a lover and wondered why I would have such a god-awful dream. As I lay there I began to have the feeling that I was being watched and as I glanced over to the window I could see a man standing there looking in. Using the quick kill method, I quickly threw up the shotgun and fired blowing out the window.
Sammye screamed as she quickly sat up in bed. “Get under the bed,” I yelled at her as I jumped up and ran through the house into the kitchen where I ran out into the backyard. I ran over to the window, there was no one laying there on the ground, not even any blood and I started realizing that it was all in my imagination. As I stood there questioning my sanity, Sammye came running out of the house. “What the hell is the matter with you?” she shouted when she saw that there was no body laying there.
I didn’t know what was wrong with me so I didn’t answer her. Disgusted, she turned and walked back inside the house. I slowly turned and followed after her. “What is this all about?” she asked sternly in the kitchen where she was waiting for me. “I’m not gonna put up with this kind of shit!”
I shook my head and said nothing and she walked out toward the bedroom. Not knowing what else to do, I followed after her. “I want you to unload every one of your guns. There’s just no sense in keeping loaded guns in the house. Let me ask you something, Dewayne, what if you had shot me or some other innocent person?”
I got back in bed wishing that she would just shut up and leave me alone.
I never really talked about Vietnam with Sammye or anyone else for that matter. It had been my experience so far that if anyone found out that you had been in Vietnam they tended to treat you like you were from another planet. It was like they thought that you were some kind of psychotic killer. Of course, the real dumb-asses would always ask, ‘How many people did you kill over there?’ Equally annoying was the ‘What was it like over there’ question just like you could sum it all up in a sentence or a paragraph and while you were at it you were going to tell them about all the people that you shot as if they were nothing more than trophy deer or turkey during hunting season.
Part of that was the media’s fault, they portrayed Vietnam Vets as if we were all either bitter, drug addicted and homeless souls devastated by the fact that we did not get a coming home parade or psychological nut jobs ready to kill at the drop of a hat. Most of us were treated as if we had attended the Massacre of the Innocents mentioned in the Bible thanks largely to the television networks flashing images of the Mai Lai Massacre across the screens of television sets in America. Whenever a vet would screw up and go off the deep end, no matter what they did whether it was rob a bank or kill some people, the news anchor would always bring the story to conclusion by saying in a dramatic fashion, “…and he was a Vietnam Vet.”
No, I did not talk about the Vietnam War, I wanted to forget it, but what was causing turmoil in my mind was the fact that I knew that I could not. Vietnam was part of me and I would never be the naïve little kid that I was before I went there again.
We got ready for work the next morning without talking about the shooting incident. I stopped by the lumber yard on the way home and bought glass and putty to repair the window. I was standing there at the window working on replacing the glass and drinking a beer when Sammye came walking out.
“You know, something that plays over and over in my mind is what if there had been someone standing at this window last night?”
I took another sip of beer before answering. “Then he would be a dead son of a bitch.”
“Have you unloaded your guns?” she asked.
I nodded my head yes, but I really hadn’t and she wasn’t going to change my mind now matter how much she bitched. She turned and walked back into the house knowing that.
Thank God the weekend rolled around and I left to go out to the ranch to camp and just to get away. I pushed in a cassette of my favorite tunes that included “Brain Damage” by Pink Floyd in the player as I drove along thinking that song pretty much summed up my feelings at that time. Sammye was still upset over the shooting incident and she would be even more upset if she had known that I had been over to a drug dealer’s house and bought some goodies just for my camping trip.
Of course, I couldn’t help but think about Vietnam as I sat there in the dark at the campsite holding my shotgun and waiting for the acid to kick in. I had already smoked a couple of joints and drank a few beers. I felt like I was on guard duty out on the perimeter. On this night I was going back to Vietnam. After a while I got my night vision and went off on patrol in the darkness without a flashlight.
It felt great to be out there in the woods in the darkness walking along with a gun in my hand. I was going to kill anything that crossed my path and I was going to enjoy it. The only difference is out here the predatory animals of the night would be taking the Viet Cong’s place. I stopped in the cedar bushes and as I sat down, I pulled my trusty fox call from my pocket and began blowing on it. After about ten minutes, I could see a fox moving in a clearing a few feet away from me. I lifted my shotgun and fired, the fox fell dead and I sprung to my feet running toward him. I pulled out my hunting knife and pounced on him stabbing him repeatedly, but in my mind I wasn’t stabbing the dead fox’s body, I was stabbing that demonic VC from that dream that I had. Suddenly I felt as if someone was watching me and I stopped stabbing the animal. I looked around in the darkness for a moment; my eyes searching for any kind of movement and slowly stood up and began walking back to camp. Once I made it back I sat there alone in the darkness, listening for any sound and nervously humming the song, “Paranoid” by Grand Funk Railroad.
Unhappy with my work, I began filling out job applications to a few select places and was more than excited to get a letter from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department stating that they wanted to interview me for the position of Game Warden. The interview was to be held in San Angelo and I was to report in at 8am. My friend Al told me that he would cover for me at work and tell them that I had called him saying that I was sick. That way, I could leave home at 6am and be in San Angelo in plenty of time.
It was after ten before I was called in for my interview which was being conducted by three older, experienced Game Wardens. It began by them asking a few light questions followed by one of them asking me, “Let’s say that you’re at home in bed one night and you get a call from a landowner about some trespassers that are camped on his property and he wants them to leave. What would you do?”
“I’d go out there and tell them to leave,” I answered confidently.
“What if they wouldn’t leave?” the second Game Warden asked. “Let’s say that these ole boys are drunk.”
“I would explain to them that they are trespassing, that they are there illegally and the owner wants them off,” I answered still confident.
“What if they tell you to kiss their ass?” the third one asked. “Not only are these ole boys drunk, they’ve got a bunch of loaded guns around and they act like they would just as soon shoot it out with you than leave.”
“I would arrest them,” I answered.
“What if they resisted? What if they drew their guns? How would you get them in the car? Would you have a shootout with them?”
I didn’t know how to answer his questions. What did they want me to say? I felt my chances of getting through favorable with this interview slipping away. “I would get it done somehow,” I smiled thinking that I would shoot the bastards if I had to.
I walked through the water department office and reported to the supervisor as ordered. “Well, if it isn’t the superstar of meter readers,” he said as I sat down in a chair in front of his desk wondering why he would say that to me. “Tell me, where were you yesterday?” he asked.
“Sick.”
“Why didn’t you answer the phone? I called you about twenty times,” he asked knowing that I was lying.
“I had the phone off the hook,” I answered.
“That’s bullshit,” he raised his voice. “Al came in and said that you had called him early and said that you were going to be sick. I didn’t believe his story and when I started questioning him about it and threatened to fire him, he told me the truth.”
Knowing that I had been caught I told him the truth about the interview that I went to and told him that I was looking for another job. “You’ve got a choice, he said after I was through explaining. “You can either quit or I’m gonna fire you.”
“I quit,” I said quickly standing up from my chair and walked out of the office. I walked out to the parking lot wondering what I was going to do next and dreading telling Sammye the news that she certainly wouldn’t be happy to hear. I would once again get to hear about the house payment, the car payments, the utility and all of the other bills that we struggled to pay each month. I would have to assure her that I wouldn’t stay unemployed long and that I would find a job in a couple of days.