Chapter Six

            I remember the morning of September 15, 1980. I was staying with Amy Kilter, a cowgirl who lived in a trailer in the red hills outside Medicine Lodge. The sunlight that morning made the canyon golden; I remember the birds singing, looking out the window and seeing horses playing in the pasture. I had showed up at Amy’s four days earlier following a 24-hour cocaine binge. She took one look at me, hid the drugs and put me to bed. When I woke up, she said we were going to clean up our act for a while. I said OK. Of course it was only me, not us, who needed a respite from the cocaine.

            Her parents were out of town, so I helped her those four days, mornings and evenings, with the chores at her parents’ ranch. We had to put the suction cups on the teats of the cows, look after 30 or so calves and feed an assortment of dogs and cats.

            The night before I left for home, I remember, she rode her horse for me. Now, I can ride a horse. I rode broncs one summer – a wannabe on the small-town rodeo circuit – and I’ve been on a few wild runs and long jumps over low creeks, but my experience pales compared to Amy’s. She simply jumped on this cutting horse of hers, no reins or saddle, and raced around barrels in the pasture at full speed tilting, with the horse almost parallel to the ground on the corners. You can call it showing off if you want, but if you’re the state champion barrel racer, sometimes you just need to go fast on a horse.

            The truth be told, I was crazy about Amy Kilter. The way I think of her, she’s the woman who chose me over Ham. Ham and me were drinking at a tavern in Medicine Lodge with our dealer there, and spotted Amy and some of her friends. She had short, black hair and a strong body. She made eye contact with me immediately, and Ham and the other fellow with us noticed. It was six months before the shootings.

            The Medicine Lodge dealer made a big deal out of Amy. He called her the queen of the rodeo circuit and said I could never get into those tight jeans and even if I did, I’d never settle her down. Ham just laughed because he had seen the look Amy gave me, and knew I was just about to hit my stride.

            Amy did indeed go out with me, and we had a good thing going, although it was far from a traditional relationship. Neither one of us committed fully to the other. I was incapable of making a commitment in those days. Just thinking about it now, I wonder if Amy misses me half as much as I miss her. It’s a lot harder to be on the lam than you think.

            That fall day in 1980, I spent all day with Amy fixing fence on one particularly rugged and secluded corner of her parents’ 2,000-acre ranch. It was located a few miles from her lonely, picturesque trailer house. In the mid-afternoon, we made love on a blanket in the tall grass and she told me a secret. She said she was falling hard for me and would I consider giving up the fast life if she gave up the bull riders and steer wrestlers on the rodeo circuit? I said I would give that proposition a serious think, and that seemed to make her happy.

            We ate a picnic lunch at dinnertime. She complimented me on my ability to fix fence and I was beaming. At 6 p.m., I took a shower, put on clean jeans and headed for home. Ironically, I was giving serious consideration as to whether I could change my life. I wondered if I could invest the money Ham and me had salted away, and settle down with the queen of the rodeo. I was almost to the farm when the news came over the radio telling about the discovery of the body of the sheriff of Ozone County, one Randy Rose.

            When I got to the house, Ham was sitting in our lookout room in the attic, a single room with windows on all four sides. It was hot up there, and he was sweating. A bottle of scotch sat open on the table, nearby a bowl of ice mostly melted, and a mirror had several fat lines of cocaine already drawn out. Ham looked awful, as if he had been up for days. Every gun we owned was out and loaded. “What’s the matter?” I said.

            He shook his head. “I killed Whoa Brouhaha,” he said. “He came over here looking for cocaine and money, said he had to get out of town for a while. I said we could go out to a place where I had a stash of both. We went to Henry Lake on the Lazy Two. I spoiled the place where we used to ride motorcycles.”

            “Oh, Ham,” I said, sympathetic because of his worry that he’d ruined a place of teen-age memories, but recognizing repercussions of the murder were going to haunt us for life. Cocaine, I knew, could make a person do things he’d never consider if sober, especially combined with a lack of sleep. We both knew of cases where men, on a binge, were found wandering naked and unaware. “What happened?”

            “When we got to the pond, I shot him. Tied a cement block on his chest with bailing wire and threw him in the pond. Too goddamn many loose ends in this business if you ask me. You know the Kansas Bureau of Investigation is going to audit the Lazy Two. Have you seen Randy Rose?”

“Let’s get out of here, use the plane,” I said.

            “I’m just a drunk,” Ham said. “You go on. I’m going down for this. I know.”

            I knew what he meant when he said he was just a drunk. I had seen his father so drunk once on the back porch of his parents’ house he couldn’t get up to get his bottle of whisky on the washing machine. Ham never said it, but I knew he was afraid of becoming what he feared most, an alcoholic of the same variety as his father.

            He had wanted me as his friend in the early days, but now that he was hours away from being wanted for murder, Ham was being a friend and wanted me to leave. From that attic office, we saw Tanya’s 1964 Ford Mustang flying down the dirt road, leaving a rooster tail of dust. I liked that cherry Mustang of hers. “Does she know?” I said.

            “No,” Ham said. “We had a fight yesterday, when I wouldn’t give her any more cocaine. I slapped her pretty hard. Why don’t you go out and open the gate. Leave it open. I’ll give her some cocaine and maybe she’ll leave in a hurry.”

            “What are you doing in the attic with all these loaded guns?” I said, but I didn’t wait for an answer.

I went out and opened the gate. Tanya was all sweetness and light, but I was worried the moment I saw her. She was wearing a gown decorated with ivory in such a way as to look like a shark’s mouth on her bosom. Ham had a fear of sharks; it was something he dreamed about. Don’t ask me how a Kansan comes to have recurring nightmares about sharks. Ham never saw the movie “Jaws.” He didn’t even want to hear about it. I didn’t know if he told Tanya about the nightmare, but my guess was he hadn’t. Ham didn’t share much personal stuff.

            After opening the gate, I got in the car with Tanya for a ride to the house. “Uh, nice dress.”

            “I’ve got a date; it’s formal,” she said.

            “What are you doing here?” I said.

            “I need to talk to Ham.”

            She pulled up to the house and got out quick. She was on the porch as I got to the first step. Her hand was in her black purse when Ham opened the door. She didn’t say a word. She stepped back and shot him in the heart. I’ve thought about that moment a million times, the way she stepped back, away from him, when he opened the door. I’m no expert, but in my opinion a gun is not an intimate way to kill someone. Tanya turned around, gave me a cool look in the eye, ran to the car and sped off. It happened that fast.

            Now, some people might say I didn’t try very hard to save my best friend, but here is how I see it. Your friend is lying on the porch, blood shooting several feet in the air, you’re 14 miles from town and the house is full of drugs, cash and weapons. What kind of a chance did he have? I figure if a guy dreams about sharks, and it’s the last thing he sees, that’s pretty much a sign he’s been called away to a better place.

            This is where I head for the Cessna 150, but one more thing about the shootings before I get into the escape. Whoa killed Randy Rose, who was about to implicate him for cattle rustling. Ham killed Whoa, maybe because he’d tired of the outlaw lifestyle and everything it represented. But more immediately because he was a pest and owed us money. Tanya killed Ham, probably because from a woman’s point of view he was a worthless son-of-a-bitch.

            But consider this: None of the three knew definitively about the chain of events that was unfolding. Probably the only person who sees the connection entirely is me. And, I don’t want to get cute here, because we’re talking about people who committed serious crimes, but in my opinion that was one powerful wave of random badness.

Chapter Seven

            Herb is a guy who knows about random badness, although he may not express what happened to him in those terms. I don’t think he even feels bad about having his idea ripped off; at least he never seemed bitter to me.

            Herb is Ozone County’s local inventor. That is, if he’s still alive. People who have driven through the Midwest have seen those big, round bales of hay. Well, Herb came up with the idea for the machine that makes those bales. Came up with the idea right in the big barn behind his junky house not 20 miles from where Ham and me lived. He designed the machine, made a few prototypes and a national company whose logo you’d recognize stole the idea and made millions. Herb didn’t get a cent.

            Like I say, Herb neither carried a grudge nor hired a lawyer. People respond to random badness in a variety of ways.

            I think I mentioned earlier that by the late 1970s, Ham was obsessed with plans of escape. He floated the creek near where we lived during the high-water month of May, but determined escape by that route would be too slow. He calculated the logistics of digging a tunnel, but he really didn’t want to do the work himself and that’s hardly the kind of thing you hire out and keep secret in a small community.

            It doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to guess that Ham would eventually turn to air power as the solution to our problem, and since Herb was building homemade airplanes on his farm, we decided to pack up some money and pay a visit.

            You see, Ham and me found nearly everyone accepts cash. You know the cliche, everyone has a price. We bought our 80-acre farm from the local banker for cash. We paid cash for the two pickups at the local Ford dealership. Honda of Wichita accepted cash for two motorcycles. Still, we were a little nervous. We didn’t know what Herb knew about us and he was an odd old coot, so it was plenty unpredictable, but in Herb we found a kindred spirit.

            He had four planes, and I wish now we had purchased all four and I’d earned my pilot’s license. Ham and me could’ve built an airstrip at the farm – we had the makings of one anyway – and maybe we could’ve eased out of the pot business into legitimate freight. Delivery services have become a big deal, but that’s beside the point.

            Here’s what you need to imagine. A wild-haired, aged inventor showing us these airplanes he’s built in his rickety barn. Someone with more sense would’ve refused to fly with him, but not Ham and me. We had a great afternoon. Three of the airplanes were restored craft with stories behind them. I’d try to relate a little of the background, but I couldn’t do old Herb justice. I know for a fact he was once friends with Walter Beech.

            What we did was take the most reliable one, the Cessna 150, and had Herb teach us to fly it. Well, mostly I was the one who learned to fly. Ham gave Herb $6,000 in cash and he flew it to our farm, where we quickly rolled it into the barn.

            The airplane became the focal point of our lives. We fixed the rollers on the barn door so that one person could pull the big door open quickly. We made the area where we stored the plane weatherproof. We kept the grass on the runway mowed. We only flew at night, and we stayed away from other airports and planes because we weren’t registered – either the plane or the pilot. Ham was a decent mechanic, and we managed to find an airport manager who would trade airplane fuel for cocaine.

            Ham and me did a lot of illegal stuff, but here is what I know. The airplane was a secret. We got away with it. We had that airplane for more than a year, sometimes flying it on clear nights, and no one found out. Until I crash landed it, of course, but I’ll get to that shortly.

            Let’s go back to the evening Ham was shot. Like I said, I knew there was no saving him. I knew there were murders all over Ozone County and the only person who could tie them together was me. I could envision getting tried for stuff I didn’t do, not to mention serving time for the stuff I was guilty of. Taken all together, I wasn’t man enough to face the music. And, this might sound weird, but I think Ham would’ve wanted me to try the escape plan. Just as he was ready to fight and ready to use his short-handled shotgun, I think he was prepared to die. I don’t think he ever thought it was actually going to be him that escaped. That’s just my opinion, of course. He never said as much.

            So, with Ham lying on the floor, blood just shooting out of his heart – that’s my last image of him – I went to the basement, removed the bricks hiding our safe, opened it, took the briefcase of cash and headed for the plane. I left the rest of my life behind.

            It was 8 or 8:30 when I ran for the barn. The sun was beginning to set, casting a nice red glow over the grass, house and barn. I swung open the barn door, started the plane, rolled out on the runway and asked for help from the patron saint of lost causes and sharks. Saint Jude, I believe, is who that’d be.

            It was a home-built plane, made from pieces of crashed Cessna 150s. That’s something you think about when you are escaping alone at night in an airplane.

            Now, I knew the area around Ozone County pretty well from the air, but I’d never flown over the air space of Wichita, or as far away as Lawrence. I knew the plane had the range, but I was pretty much making up the plan as I went along. I had an idea of what I’d do, but I’d never actually flown the route. I worried about whether the plane would hold together for three hours.

            I followed the highway to Wichita, then skirted the city on its east side. I knew the airport was on the west. By the time I’d circled the city, it was dark outside. I followed a highway heading northeast and prayed it was I-35, which leads to Lawrence. The highway was headed in the right direction, so I was pretty sure I was doing OK, but I did worry that something might go wrong. Maybe the compass was wrong. That’s something you think about when you have too much time alone in a plane at night.

            For the most part, I managed to keep my mind off disastrous scenarios and stuck with the task at-hand. Ham would’ve been proud.

            I saw the University of Kansas campus. From the air, it was unmistakable. Stately old buildings made of brick and covered with ivy were well lit amid islands of manicured grass. I felt a twinge of regret because I hadn’t graduated. My father and grandfather were journalism majors there, and only six months earlier my sister had graduated with a degree in business. I figured, well, that’s one family tradition down the drain.

            I found the Kaw River, which is north of the football field. The football field was not lit, but I could make it out in the dark. It was all pretty easy, really. I flew low, upriver along the Kaw for a few miles into a secluded area I knew about, then circled a few times until I found an area where I thought I could land.

            Now, touching down on a pasture is one thing, but landing on what you think is a pasture in the dark is quite another and I’m not embarrassed to admit I was scared. Major league scared. It was a bumpy landing, and when I was just about stopped the landing gear hit something, which swung the plane 180 degrees. The right wing hit a tree, making a loud banging noise – some glass broke, too – and the plane came to a stop. I grabbed the deflated raft we kept in the plane, and the briefcase full of money, and headed for the river.

            I pumped up the raft on the sand bank, but actually had no idea how far I was from Lawrence. It looked different on the ground. I knew I needed to go downstream, so I pushed off.

            Now, I simply don’t recommend rafting at night. Until this point I was doing pretty well, but being in the quiet of the woods was spooking the hell out of me. Trees lined the river and so even though it was a clear night, down on the river it was dark beyond belief. The river twisted and turned, and I lost all sense of direction. I heard animal noises. In the day, a coyote might look like a cute little dog, but at night you imagine a much larger, fiercer, hungrier animal. My mind was racing.

            Then, the sun came up, ever so slightly, and it was a beautiful river scene. The sky was red, the trees were silhouetted black and the river was red, reflecting the color of the sky. As quickly as the red came, it passed into blue and I saw hundreds of American white pelicans fishing near the shore. Then, as I rounded a bend in the Kaw River, in the shoots of green grass, were several Great Blue Herons. I passed within 10 feet of them.

             This marvelous show was over, and in front of me was a park I knew from when I attended the university. It was four blocks from Debbie Polivka’s apartment. Until that point, I hadn’t considered where I’d go in Lawrence, nor did I expect to land in a location where I immediately knew where I was. I did the logical thing; I combed my shoulder-length hair with the rake of a comb I used to carry. I felt the hair on my shoulders, shook it and laughed outloud. I’d made it.

            I nearly skipped to Debbie’s house. There was no possible way the police could be looking for me yet. I was confident my old girlfriend would hide me out; she had had quite the crush on me. She was alone – thank you, God – and she was, as I hoped, happy to see me. She was wearing an oversized T-shirt and her hair was wild; I’d wakened her. She let me in and I explained what happened. She said she’d help me.

            It was not two hours later clouds moved in and the town of Lawrence was socked in. It rained for several days. I believe this cover helped keep my plane from being discovered. It was just one of a series of events that seemed to be planned from above.

            Debbie fed me, hid me and made love to me, and it seemed unfair that my life in Lawrence was so good while people back home were full of grief. I was smart enough not to question it at the time. I knew that that last look I had of Ham would be back to haunt me.

Chapter Eight

            In my family, we read. Dad had stacks of newspapers arriving every day, newspapers he owned or that he thought were essential reading, such as the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor. We also received several magazines. Mom is a librarian, and so there were always books in our home. I recognize the elements that can keep a story on the front page day after day, and the story of the shootings in Ozone County were a textbook example of how a breaking story can titillate interest and sell papers.

            First, the newspapers reported that Randy Rose, a young sheriff, had been shot and killed. That alone is front page news in any community, maybe even for several days running. The next day, they found Calvin “Ham” Valian, and on the third day, they were looking for me. On the fourth day, they were looking for Whoa, on the fifth day they found him. On the sixth day, police thought there might be some relationship between the murders of Whoa, Ham and Randy. Duh.

            The next day the media found Weather Smith and tied in the cattle rustling to the murders, and when you have cattle rustling in Kansas, the national media get involved. People magazine loved the part about the cowboys wearing pistols at the Lazy Two. Sidearms in this day and age.

            The Kansas Bureau of Investigation was investigating and started floating all kinds of theories. One official said Randy Rose may have tipped Ham and me off about an investigation. I wondered how they came to that conclusion, but the story I read wasn’t clear on the point. I don’t think they knew.

            On the eighth day, they arrested Tanya Brouhaha for the murder of Ham. The police used videotape from our camera to determine that Tanya was at the farm on the day of the murder. “Well,” I told Debbie, “that’s one they won’t try to pin on me.”

            On the ninth day, the police announced I had escaped in an airplane, got away with all the money, and that they still hadn’t located the plane. I was surprised, but pleased, to learn they hadn’t found the plane.

            On the 10th day, there was considerable speculation as to how much money I got away with. The woman who wrote the story for the Wichita Eagle-Beacon, I thought, was clever. Without one shred of solid evidence she wrote a piece that was all over the map. Everybody in Ozone County had an opinion as to how much I got away with. Everyone I knew, it seems, was quoted. So, in setting the record straight, here’s the truth. I had $148,000 in cash in the briefcase, and diamonds, jewelry, gold and silver worth less than $20,000 total, at least in the pawn shops.

            Now, I think 10 days on the front pages of the newspapers in Kansas is pretty good for a couple of 1970s marijuana dealers from little Ozone County. I mean, if you overlook the fact that one-twentieth of our original kindergarten class was murdered, there is some humor in what Ham and me accomplished. If I see Ham in the afterlife, the first thing I’ll tell him is that the escape plan was brilliant. Lucky might be a better word.

            There are a couple of things to consider when looking at the scope of our operation. Yes, we had $148,000 in cash, but also we had paid for 200 pounds of marijuana and 40 milliliters of hash oil we had stashed and not yet sold. Plus we paid cash for our 80-acre farm, two new pickups and two new motorcycles.

            I have decided in recent years that my plane was probably not discovered for a long time because it slid to a stop along a row of trees. Therefore it would’ve been obscured by shadows in the mornings, and anyway, an overhead plane would’ve had to have been at just the right angle to see the wreckage.

            I had friends in Lawrence at the time of the escape, and I’m sure the police talked to them, but my parents never knew about my relationship with Debbie Polivka and apparently the police never found out. She was never questioned.

            My senior picture from high school was on the news for several days, but more recent pictures of me, taken at Christmas gatherings by my parents, didn’t provide a great look at my face. My father may have been a top-notch newspaper man, but he couldn’t take a photograph for beans. Plus, I looked different at 24 than I did at 18, so even though I was in the news, and people thought they knew what I looked like, I actually looked more mature and had longer hair.

            Shortly after I arrived at Debbie’s, she agreed to move West with me and gave a notice of two weeks at Lawrence Memorial Hospital. I stayed inside her apartment the entire two weeks, and Debbie purchased extra groceries and every newspaper and magazine available at the Mount Oread Smokeshop. The night Debbie and me left Lawrence, I stayed hidden on the floorboard for a while, but after we crossed the state line into Colorado, I drove or rode next to her on our way West. Interest in the story had waned a little.

            The truth be told, I got every break in the book. You know when you meet a wrestler who was a high school state champion that he was good, but also you know he got some breaks along the way. I felt the same way about the escape. It was a good plan, but luck played a large role.

Chapter Nine

            There’s a joke I make when people ask me, as a logger in the Northwest, if I’ve ever killed a spotted owl. “No,” I say, “They fly out of the tree when I start my chainsaw.”

            Logging with Rollo isn’t really like that, though. I arrived in Oregon in time to see some of the old-time loggers cutting down eight-foot on the stump Douglas fir trees. I’ve even wielded a chainsaw and made a few face-cuts myself, but what I do for Rollo today hardly fits the mold of logging as most people think of it. That is, rough-looking characters in cork boots cutting down ancient forests.

            In fact, what I do is more like playing a video game than it is the hard work that was once logging. I run a timber shearer. It has tracks, like a tank, and will climb steep grades. And it has a boom, like the shovel on a backhoe. So, you drive it with your feet, pushing the pedals to go forward and backward, and operate the boom with your hands. What I do is reach out with the boom, latch onto a tree, cut the bottom with a circular saw located on the boom, and put the tree in a stack for the log skidder, who drags it to the landing. From there it is sorted according to size, loaded onto a truck and taken to the mill.

            Here is what you have to imagine: Lots of loud, heavy equipment cutting and handling 30-year-old Douglas fir on huge parcels of land located on remote, rolling hills. We don’t even take all the trees; what we do is thin the stand. When we’re done, it looks like a park and the remaining trees grow faster than if the stand was left un-thinned. The only thing I have to feel guilty about, as an environmentalist, is burning more diesel per day than 100 men should have a claim to.

            In a way, Rollo – my boss – saved my life. Debbie Polivka, of course, saved my life first by hiding me and then bringing me to Oregon. I suppose I should start at the beginning. In 1980, Debbie and me found a tiny house to rent three blocks from the beach in Oceanside. It’s an original name for a beach community, I know.

            Though we were three blocks from the beach, we were on a hill and could see a long stretch of the ocean from our living room. We loved it. The first 10 days we were in Oregon, the weather was 70 degrees each day and we’d get up, walk on the beach, eat breakfast and make love. Then, we’d repeat this series of events.

            We were two Midwesterners on vacation and we began to branch out. We drove the entire length of the Oregon coast, staying at beach-front resorts. We drove to Mount Hood, hiked in the Columbia River Gorge and shopped at Powell’s Books in Portland. The bookstore takes up an entire city block. We ate expensive meals at the fine seafood restaurants in Portland. I had fresh shark, salmon, Dungeness crab and halibut. I spent my money freely. The truth is, I figured I’d get caught and go to jail, and I wanted to enjoy my last taste of the good life.

            Then, the November rains moved in and if you’ve been to the coast of Oregon during the winter, you know the meaning of wet. Everything was damp. Debbie got depressed. She wanted a commitment from me and she wanted to go back to work, so we began to plan for the long haul. I told her, by the way, that I’d stick with her and that made her happy. This may sound funny, but I’d never made that much of a commitment before in my adult life. She went to work at the hospital in Seaside, and I bought a used pickup and a chainsaw.

            She immediately made friends while I was frustrated daily learning to use the small chainsaw I’d purchased. There’s a trick, for example, to sharpening a chain, just as there’s a trick to putting a chain on a bar and a trick to adjusting it. In my first week, I’d be surprised if I cut even a full cord of firewood. Ed at the chainsaw shop became my first friend in this new life, and he called me Flatlander.

            Flatlander is a hard nickname to live with when you’ve turned the lives of a dozen people upside down and made a daring escape in a Cessna 150. A part of me wanted to tell Ed what a dangerous outlaw I was.

            Instead, I fumbled over such rudimentary criminal exercises as giving myself a name. After I had visited Ed’s shop for the third time seeking advice, he asked my name. I said, “Uh, Terry?” It was, quite simply, the first name I thought of. Debbie later agreed I could use the name Terry Polivka. In fact, as you may remember, my name is Thomas Webster. There is more trouble coming with this name business as you shall soon see.

            Another goal of mine, as a man on the lam, was to make trips to Portland to hock the gold and jewelry. I wanted to save some of the cash in case I had to flee again at a moment’s notice. In the beginning, Ham and me ran a strictly cash business, but near the end we began accepting jewelry and precious metals. For some reason, Ham was obsessed with planning escapes. He figured jewelry would travel well, and if you could sell an eight-ball of cocaine for a diamond ring, well, that was a hell of a profit. We were, after all, businessmen.

            But, as I began hocking the jewelry, I discovered I had a conscience. I knew some of it had been stolen and I began to make up scenarios whereby the jewelry was stolen from some friends of my parents, brought to Ham or me and traded for cocaine, and was now in a hock shop in Portland, Oregon.

            When Ham and me were taking the jewelry, we rationalized it by pointing out to each other we had not stolen the goods. But, during those drives to Portland, it was hard to remember that fact. I also worried about the jewelry being traced or discovered in some way and leading law enforcement officials to Portland.

            Also, on that 150-mile drive to Portland, I worried about what I would do if the Portland police pulled me over for accidently running a stop sign. There wasn’t much law enforcement on the coast, but I worried about the city. Further, it was dark in rainy Oregon at night, and running a stop sign due to poor visibility was entirely possible.

            Finally, I worried about what I’d do when I ran out of money because the truth be told, I hated running a chainsaw and couldn’t imagine actually making money selling firewood. I felt trapped because my entire life was in Debbie Polivka’s name and though she was a nice enough person, very smart, she was no Amy Kilter, queen of the rodeo circuit.

            Also, at about this time, I began having a nightmare that would recur for the next 15 years. It always startles me and causes me to sit up straight in bed, wide awake. I’m in a grocery store and sign my name, Thomas Webster, on a check, rather than using my alias. The store clerk, a nerdy 17-year-old boy, looks at the check and pronounces my name clearly and loudly, after which all the customers stare intently. They know who I am. Then I wake up.

            One afternoon after Nurse Debbie went to work in December of 1980, I tried to get motivated to cut firewood but the rain made me too depressed and so I walked to the tavern instead.

            Until this point, I hadn’t taken a drink or smoked a joint since my escape. I figured being in an altered state could get me in trouble. That that day I rationalized, well, I’d outrun my troubles and drinking a little wouldn’t hurt anything. I went to a tavern and ordered a scotch and water. There was a woman at the bar flirting with me and that put me in a good mood. In 1980, no one had heard of AIDS and it was pretty easy to get someone to have sex with you. I didn’t really know if I’d sleep with her, but I was considering the possibility. Being in a relationship had never stopped me before.

            There was a huge, circular saw over the bar, painted with a mountain scene. I figured it came out of a lumber mill and it reminded me I didn’t fit in here, in this tavern in Oregon, but I was going to give it a try. I had a strong need to belong somewhere. I ordered another drink and thought about straight fence line.

            The woman was playing pool – she was pretty good, a useless skill – and the bartender pointed out she was married. Perhaps he was trying to spare me some grief. I was afraid to strike up a conversation with any of the locals because I might reveal something. I knew I’d been on the news earlier in the fall and I didn’t want anyone to recognize me. So, I drank my drink and listened to the music and smiled at the woman playing pool.

            On the third drink, all I could think about was the rain, how it kept coming down hour after hour, day after day. On the fourth drink, all I could think about was how I kept nicking my jeans with the chain of my chainsaw. Owning nice, faded Levi 501s was important to me, but every time I got a pair broke in, I nicked ’em.

            On the fifth drink, I was thinking of how I hated those greasy guys who work at the hock shops. I’d lumped them all into one slimy category and I was getting depressed. I hated hocking jewelry. I hated those security cameras they all had. I was drunk and knew I should go home, but I didn’t know what to go home to. It’d be five hours before Debbie got home. I’d watched the news hundreds of times more than I wanted already. I didn’t want to read any more books.

            The woman playing pool smiled at me, so I ordered another scotch and water. Then it happened. I pictured Ham and me climbing over the fence of the municipal public swimming pool at 3 a.m. on an August night in Ozone County. The pool was closed, of course, but Ham and me were 16 and figured breaking into the public pool to swim was something teen-age boys were supposed to do. A rite of passage.

            We played dozens of football games in a six-year period. We worked together on a paving crew. We talked about every girl and woman who ever threw a smile our way. We rode motorcycles together on the Lazy Two.

            In my mind’s eye, I saw Tanya Brouhaha at the front door of our farm house. She was wearing that formal gown, black with some kind of fake ivory designed to make her bosom look like a shark’s mouth about to bite you. Sinewy, handsome Ham opened the door. I wanted Ham not to open the door. I could not stop it in my mind.

            What you need to picture is me in a dark, damp bar at five in the afternoon, the rain pouring down outside, the painting on the saw is lousy, the woman playing pool is married and I have a girlfriend at home anyway. I’m drinking scotch and water and all I can see is Ham, images of him both dead and alive. I miss him and realize for the first time I am going to mourn this death. I didn’t talk and I didn’t cry. I just had this depressed feeling. I think I was hoping I could drink the images away.

            Sometime later, I don’t know when, I came to in the dark and the rain. I’d been sleeping on the sidewalk of Oceanside in the rain. I don’t know for how long, but I was cold and wet and wanted to die, wanted to get it over with and be with Ham in a better place. A place we hadn’t created. But instead of dying, some guy in logger’s clothes was helping me up. He put me in his nice, clean pickup and took me to his cabin, which was warm and dry and nicely decorated. He had money, I knew that.

            “If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, I might be able to help,” he said. I remember thinking, “I only have a problem when I run out.” That was a joke Ham and me used to make. But I was too sick, too tired to tell Rollo, and anyway I was glad to have someone watching out for me.

            Later, Rollo would become my boss, not to mention a good friend. He was more than six feet tall, strong and kind. I was thinking at that moment what a great asset kindness was. “If you knew the things I’d done, you wouldn’t help me,” I said. I remember that much; when you’re drunk, you can’t be too corny or melodramatic. He smiled, and I knew there was nothing I could tell him that would surprise him.

            I laid down on his couch and he covered me with blankets. “Is there anyone I should call before you fall asleep?” he said. “No,” I answered with all the self-pity I could muster, “I’m all alone here.”

Chapter 10

            Rollo probably thought I was a hopeless alcoholic of the same variety as Mr. Valian, but of course I knew that wasn’t the case. It was just the circumstances in which he found me, blacked out and sleeping on a sidewalk in the rain. He said if I didn’t want to drink again, I should try a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, a support group for people who want to quit drinking. Today, a lot of drug addicts in recovery use AA, but at the time it was pretty much what I call old-time AA. That is, sober old people who smoke too many cigarettes.

            Debbie, who had been worried by my disappearance, thought about AA after she got over being mad at me for not coming home. As a nurse, she was used to counseling people. She said maybe I should go to a meeting to see what it was like. In a gentle way, she pointed out I had smoked pot daily for six years.

            So I went to the noon meeting Rollo told me about; he said it was the best meeting in the area. The group meets every day but Sunday in the basement of a church. It was an unfinished room then, full of smoke, and the coffee was the worst. But the people were friendly and I heard funny stories. I was not called upon to talk. In those days, the old-time AAers took it upon themselves to “give the message.” They weren’t interested in any newcomer talk therapy. Not talking, of course, was a blessing for someone on the lam.

            I had to think hard about this alcoholism thing because I liked to drink and I liked to snort cocaine, although for some reason I hoped never to smoke pot again. Interestingly, what I really had was an unusually severe marijuana bottom. I mean, nobody has such a rough time with marijuana they have to run from the law.

            The first meeting I went to, sitting in the back of the room with a cup of coffee, it occurred to me I probably wasn’t an alcoholic of the old-time variety. Maybe I was what they now call an addict-alcoholic. That is, someone who cannot take mind-altering substances of any kind without getting in trouble. The fact of the matter was, I had no idea whether I belonged, but I did like the idea of complete and total abstinence – sobriety. In a way, Rollo – in his nonjudgmental way – had told me the right thing. “If you don’t want to drink again…”

            I added the noon meeting to my routine, although I kept it in my mind I could leave Alcoholics Anonymous behind at any time. Just forget the alcoholism stuff.

            I’d get up, work in the woods cutting firewood, go to the meeting and drink a cup of coffee. Then I’d go to lunch with my new friends, go home and do the laundry and clean the house. At night, I took comfort from sleeping with Debbie; she was happy coming home to a clean house. I did a lot of nice things for her. I gave her long back rubs, bought her flowers and packed her lunches.

            Debbie said she was content with our lifestyle and life went pretty well. In addition to selling and stacking firewood, I began performing odd chores for older, retired people who were unable to do physically demanding work. I was actually beginning to build a pretty good little cash business.

            I loved the work, too. I’d replace a broken window for a widow and then she’d invite me to sit down for coffee. I’d hear some great tales from the old days, before indoor plumbing and antibiotics, when going to the bathroom was an ordeal and almost everyone lost a sibling in childhood.

            I met a World War II veteran who drove General Patton across Europe at the end of the war. Patton issued an order for the U.S. troops to stop camouflaging the vehicles at night when they stopped to camp. “We’re chasing the Nazis, not running from them,” Patton supposedly told this 18-year-old boy from Gunnison, Colorado. It was his brush with greatness and I enjoyed sharing the moment with him. The truth be told, I was lonely.

            I believe I developed a skill for drawing people out without revealing much about myself. I know I would’ve made a good newspaper reporter if I hadn’t been an outlaw. As for what I revealed about myself, I had it down to a simple story line. I told people I grew up in a tiny town, population 40, in the Ozarks, on a cattle ranch. I told the story so many times, I began to believe it myself. Whenever I got in a jam, I talked about fixing fence.

            One old guy who invited me in for tea and cookies had been in the Ozarks and asked me questions about the area, trying to draw me out. I launched into a spiel about fixing “water gates” through creeks. I so changed the subject he never again mentioned he’d been in the Ozarks. Maybe he thought I was manic.

            At the first – and it turns out only – Christmas party Debbie and me attended with the hospital staff, I started telling a story about working cattle. We had a young bull that jumped a seven-foot fence, leaping off the back of another soon-to-be steer. I was so animated in my storytelling, Debbie lectured me later for being the center of attention.

             “You seem to forget you are wanted for, at the least, accessory to a murder and possession with intent to distribute,” she said sternly.

            I took a look at myself after that. Here I was living a good life, getting a second chance I had no right to, and it turned out I was a big liar and showboat. Although the events of the story were essentially true – the Michael Jordan of bulls did indeed jump the seven-foot fence – I’d thrown in some extras about being a former bronc rider and mentioned in passing I was riding a cutting horse that was a cousin to the somewhat famous race horse, Lickety Split. I had been drinking, so maybe the AA stuff wasn’t rubbing off on me. I decided maybe I was pathological, one of those people who can commit crimes without remorse. I vowed to try to be honest in all my affairs, but knowing how you are and changing what you are are two different things entirely as I will explain shortly.

            For now, suffice it to say I’d settled in and it was beginning to occur to me I might not get caught. That took a lot of tension out of my life, which most people would think was a good thing. But I liked chaos. I’d lived with it at pretty much full volume for the past six years, and it would take me less than a year to get myself in trouble again.