Random Badness

A novel by Scott Newton

Copyright 1995

Chapter One

            I plan to tell everything. I plan to tell how I escaped from the law in a Cessna 150 airplane and left behind the largest pot-distribution operation ever dismantled by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. I plan to set the record straight regarding the 600 head of cattle stolen from the 60,000-acre Lazy Two Ranch. I plan to reveal who killed the following people: My partner in the drug business, Calvin “Ham” Valian, the cowboy Whoa Brouhaha and the sheriff of Ozone County, Randy Rose.

            These events occurred 15 years ago, when I was 24. I have lived under an alias since 1980. The course of my life has been dictated by acts committed when I was barely more than an adolescent, though I am not making excuses. Merely explaining. My friend Daniel recently died of AIDS, and suddenly I feel a need to get it all down on paper. Putting first things first, I want to tell you about the character of Oregonians as I have found them.

            You see, if you ever plan an escape, what it does is make you consider where you will go and how you will live after your briefcase full of cash, jewels and gold is empty. I always voted for the rainy coast of Oregon. Ham was always voting for sunny Phoenix.

            Ham was correct about the damp Oregon winters, but I’ve found the place perfectly suited for someone on the lam. There are so many tourists, escaped Californians, newly wealthy from inheritance 50-year-olds and backwoods dreamers that most Oregonians don’t care what your story is as long as you don’t fish their favorite salmon stream.

            Most Oregonians, I have found, are clever at making money, at least on a subsistence level. They run backhoes, plant nursery stock and sell fish bait. Oregon has to have the largest underground economy in the United States. For two years, before I started working for Rollo, I cut and sold firewood, not because I needed the money so much as I needed a legitimate front. No one suspected a thing; I was just another Oregonian getting by.

            Another thing about native Oregonians is they know how to network to have fun. On the East Coast, networking is about getting into important prep schools, Ivy League colleges or top law firms. In Oregon, networking is reserved for a higher purpose – having a good time.

            I’ve been with native Oregonians who borrowed rafts to go river running, boats to go water skiing, climbing gear to hike up rock walls and guns to shoot elk. Turnabout is fair play for an Oregonian, and Portland Trail Blazer tickets are the ultimate bargaining tool.

            Two other things about Oregonians before I start my story. The first has to do with rain. An Oregonian will walk, work or play in the rain without giving it a second thought. There are two ways to tell a native Oregonian from an immigrant like myself. For starters, you’ll never see a native carrying an umbrella.

            Conversely, it is only the natives who complain about the weather. Those of us from the bitter cold Midwest or Northeast, smoggy Southern California or stifling hot Texas would never consider complaining about cool, gentle rain.

            The second, important fact about Oregonians is that they do, indeed, dislike Californians. Allow me to explain.

            I arrived in Oregon in a car with a woman, Debbie Polivka, a registered nurse from Lawrence, Kansas, who was my girlfriend for a time when I was at the university. On the night I escaped from the law, I flew a Cessna from southern Kansas to the hilly, wooded Kaw River valley near Lawrence in the north part of the state. I made a crash landing in a remote area, drifted into Lawrence on a raft and walked to Debbie’s.

            There was a massive search for me in Kansas, but I hid out at Debbie’s like the 1970s outlaw I was. Debbie gave notice at her job and two weeks later, we made the drive to the West Coast without a single close call.

            I misrepresented my feelings for Debbie, if you must know, but if you’re a marijuana dealer and your best friend has just been killed, and you’ve flown across the state in an old Cessna by the seat of your pants in a daring escape, lying to a woman to escape seems a small thing. That attitude has since caused me numerous problems, but that’s something I’ll get to later in the story.

            What I want to tell you about, in this first chapter, is Oregonians. What it is to live here among them. I will illustrate with an example. As we drove to Oregon, Debbie and me were discussing what we would tell people once we arrived. Debbie wanted to tell people we were from the Midwest, but someplace other than Kansas. I wanted to tell new acquaintances we were from Southern California.

            Debbie was doing a good job of taking Ham’s place and giving me good-natured arguments for why we should do things one way or the other. With Ham, I was the brains of the operation and he was the muscle, but he always asked for an explanation. With Debbie, she was so happy I needed her she was glad to let me have my way. She was a pushover, but independent enough to press the point.

            She said neither of us knew anything about Southern California and we would be at a disadvantage if we ran into someone from L.A. or San Diego, who could quiz us on landmarks or the location of various neighborhoods. The truth be told, I was so afraid of being found I never wanted to admit I’d been east of the Willamette River.

            I got my way and we agreed to say we were from Southern California. I was in a good mood because Debbie and me were having great sex. We were young and healthy, and our move to Oregon an adventure. I have to admit sex was merely a distraction, though an excellent one. When I wasn’t thinking of sex, I was thinking of how Tanya Brouhaha – her real name – shot my best friend through the heart. I knew it would bother me later on, and I was right, but first things first.

            We pulled up to a 7-Eleven and Debbie was singing “California” and then a BMW with California plates pulled up right next to us. We looked at each other and laughed. It was one of those you-had-to-be-there things.

            We went in the store and got something to drink. We had another 150 miles to go till we got to the coast and had an attitude that nothing could go wrong at this point. It was damp and dark out, woodsy even next to the 7-Eleven, but not raining. We stood in front of Debbie’s El Camino and sipped our Cokes and enjoyed not vibrating in a car.

            There were two couples in the BMW, all the people being in their 60s. The men were sitting in front and the women in back. We were in the suburbs, and my guess is they were Californians, now living in Oregon, going to Portland for dinner. They were rich; you could tell by their clothes. Only one got out, a woman, and she had on a diamond you could skip across a pond. While she was in the store, a pickup pulled into the parking lot and two good old boys got out. They were in their early 20s, wearing flannel shirts and torn jeans covered with oil stains. I don’t know what they’d been doing, but my guess is it was hard work and they were dirty.

            A beer can fell out of the pickup when the driver got out. He had sandy blond hair and his hands were rough and calloused; you could see it from 15 feet away. He was tall and solidly built, and he had a look. You wouldn’t have bought a horse from him.

            The pickup was comprised of panels of three different colors not including primer gray; it was a beater, but the engine purred. The second man got out and walked around to where his friend was standing. He was maybe five-foot-eight, overweight and starting to lose his curly black hair. The first man was handsome in his own rough way, but the shorter one had already peaked.

            The two men leaned against the pickup and looked at the BMW. I knew the three people inside were intimidated. The shorter man held something in his hand, a packet of something, but I couldn’t tell what. The woman walked out of the 7-Eleven to see the two young men leaning on the pickup, staring at the new, white BMW. I know she was frightened. I was.

            “So, you’re from California?” the tall one said.

            “Yes, that’s right,” the woman said. She smiled weakly.

            The shorter man opened the packet. It was ketchup. He squirted it on the car, going the full length, back to front, and tossed the empty packet on the hood. “Why don’t you go back?” the tall one said, and they both laughed.

            The woman jumped in the car and the driver backed out and sped off. The two men continued laughing, then the tall one slapped his buddy on the back and they went into the 7-Eleven.

            “Are you ready to go?” Debbie said.

            “Yes,” I said, and we got in the El Camino with Kansas tags and drove off. “Look,” I said, “where in the Midwest do you think we should tell people we’re from?”

Chapter Two

            I can remember sitting on my Honda 350 SL motorcycle looking over the thick, green grass of the Lazy Two Ranch. I was 18, my arms were pumped up and I’d just taken a hit of good pot. For miles, all I could see were rolling hills of green, vibrant prairie grasses. The pot created an upward wave, something like heat rising off asphalt. I could hear the wind whistling past me. I could feel the warm sun on my back. My senses were heightened. Pot is life with the volume turned up.

            Some people may see it differently, but I believe my whole life has been about pot. Ham and me used to ride our motorcycles through one corner of the 60,000-acre Lazy Two Ranch. Yes, even in the West, the Lazy Two was a big ranch, one of the largest in the United States. It was owned by a man named Dan Boots, an unlikely millionaire if ever I met one.

            He drank coffee every morning at the Let ’er Buck Cafe. Like other cowboys, it wasn’t unusual for him to have manure on his boots. He drove a pickup, just like everyone else, and fit in with all the other working people in Ozone County, Kansas. A stranger who wandered into the cafe off U.S. Highway 50 wouldn’t be able to tell the millionaire from the other ranchers sitting around drinking coffee.

            I remember eating breakfast one morning at the Let ’er Buck with some of my friends and Dan Boots came in, said a round of hellos and then said to the waitress, “I think I’ll have the left side of the menu.” He laughed, the waitress laughed and all the other cowboys laughed, and another simple day was off to a start in the farming community in which I lived.

            An important fact here is that some of the cowboys at the Lazy Two did indeed wear pistols in the 1970s. The fact was reported far and wide in Kansas and I believe a kind of myth was built around it. In truth, a cowboy was 100 times more likely to shoot a rattlesnake than a rustler. But Mr. Boots, a kind hearted, hard working, solid citizen, did have his millionaire quirk. He seemed to believe by letting his cowboys wear six-shooters at work, it discouraged cattle rustling.

            I always thought that was hogwash, but now I must take at least partial blame for the fact 600 cattle – worth roughly $300,000 – were taken from the ranch during the end of my drug-dealing days in Ozone County. I’ll get to that later.

            My best job ever at the Lazy Two was when I was in high school. With a tool that was a combination staple remover, hammer and pliers, I fixed miles of fence at the Lazy Two. My job was to ride a horse along the fence line and when I found a weak spot, pull the wire tight and add a few staples. I’m going to brag a little here, a brag that can be backed up by my foreman at the time. I was a hell of a fence builder. My lines were straight, the wire tight. I could fix a gap along any kind of terrain, or through a creek.

            As a consequence of that job, I learned the back roads – more accurately old animal trails – of the Lazy Two. You see, that ranch was so large even hands-on owner and manager Dan Boots couldn’t keep track of every acre. I knew a corner of the property where Ham and me could ride our motorcycles without ever being seen. The summer after my senior year in high school, we’d jump on our Honda 350s after spending all day pouring asphalt and making what we thought was good money – road work was a step up in pay from cowboying – and go riding. And riding meant smoking a bowl and sitting out there looking over the rolling hills of the Lazy Two.

            We were lean, tan and strong, we rode motorcycles and we were high. We thought we were perhaps the only two people in the universe who really had life figured out. All of life’s wonders lay ahead of us. Good bud, good sex and tequila sunrises. All out there for the taking.

            This would be a good place to add I don’t blame my parents for the way I turned out, nor do I blame Ham, although I must say we were a bad influence on each other.

            My father owned a string of newspapers. He built them up himself, instituting a profit-sharing plan in 1970 – one of the first in the nation – and earning the respect of the people he employed. I’m proud of my parents; they’re good people. I can’t blame my lifestyle at that time on any real or perceived flaws in the way I was raised.

            I’ve pondered a million times the question of how much blame to assign myself for the things that went wrong. I believe I was addicted to pot from the first hit. I’m not making excuses. Merely explaining.

            I don’t know what an addiction specialist would say about an addiction to pot. I know in AA they say all mind-altering substances are a potential culprit. In retrospect, I  don’t know what my parents would say about the whole crazy, lawless era. I’d give any earthly treasure to spend a day with Ham discussing the last 15 years. All I know is that Ham will be forever 24, the age he was when he was shot by Tanya Brouhaha and I made my daring escape in a Cessna 150. I’ll get to that.

            Ham and me spent numerous nights in those hills that summer. In the fall, I attended college at the University of Kansas, but I didn’t last long. I made a connection with a dealer who sold hash oil – we called it honey oil because of its consistency – and Ham and me started a pipeline from Lawrence, in the north, to Ozone County in the south. We were making $2,000 a week and one day I withdrew from all my classes. I was never again on good terms with my parents. That’s a sad thing to think about.

            I believe now, looking back on that time, that the summer I spent riding in the hills of the Lazy Two was the prime of my life. I’ve since learned the nature of things. We are born, we thrive, we deteriorate and we die. I also believe, in some weird way, that I was at the crossroads. I could go with the traditional way, the proven way, the slow way, or I could go for the fast life, the easy money, the instant gratification.

            My life could have changed for the better while attending classes that fall on the beautiful University of Kansas campus. Sober, I might have seen the possibilities. But I was smoking pot, which sapped my intelligence and caused some fuzzy thinking. On the inside, I was an insecure young man who was not completely honest or moral. I don’t know how I got that way exactly, but dealing – being bad – sounded a lot more fun than sitting inside those hallowed, stuffy classrooms.

            Dealing allowed me to live this exciting life transporting vials of hash oil, sheets of LSD and pounds of pot all over the state. I made telephone calls from phone booths. I handled wads of cash. I made time with women who hung out in bars. Ham began carrying a short-handled shotgun.

            As I said, Ham was the muscle. He was my size, five-foot-eight, with muscles like knotted ropes and brutally handsome. There was something about him; deep inside, I think he was always prepared to fight. For a long time, no one messed with him.

            Sometimes, when Ham thought there might be trouble, he’d get out the impressive shotgun and explain in a matter-of-fact way he was anxious to use it in order to establish a reputation as a dude not to be messed with. I think he was prepared to fire this terrible weapon. The word seemed to get around, however, without his ever having to pull the trigger. Little did I know how crazy our lives would become.

            Here is what I know and will take to the grave. Pot is an insidious drug that cost me dearly, yet when I recall that summer when I was 18, I remember that I enjoyed marijuana from the start. In a way, then, I do not blame myself entirely for everything that occurred.

            That summer before all the trouble started, when Ham was alive and my parents had high expectations for me, well, it was a fine time. When you have friends and love, and have had it all your life, you take it for granted. That’s what I find interesting and sad about my own particular downward spiral. It was to take me to a place of incomprehensible alienation and loneliness, a place I’d never been.

Chapter Three

            Had the stars, moons and planets aligned differently on the day Ham was born, maybe he would have gone to Hollywood instead of hell. He was handsome with smooth skin and brown hair that ended in blond ringlets. Ham turned a dark brown every summer without ever getting a burn. He had well-defined muscles and not a single hair on his chest or back, only a light fuzz on his forearms.

            I went to school with Ham, Randy Rose, Whoa Brouhaha and a host of others. What I mean is, we went all the way through school together, from kindergarten to the 12th grade. When you do that, you get to know your friends pretty well. Ham was fun from the beginning. I remember when the principal of our grade school substituted and Ham managed to get behind him during the lecture and imitated his body movements perfectly. The principal was slender and well dressed with slightly effeminate movements, and Ham would swing his arm around and thrust his hips just like the principal.

            When members of the second-grade class observed this parody, they appreciated it so much they tried to hide their smirks so the show could continue, but then we all started laughing. When the principal looked behind him, Ham was wearing a most innocent expression, the subtlety of which made us laugh even harder. All the way through school, Ham was able to make us laugh with his facial expressions, body movements and imitations of others. It was a purely physical comedy. He could wiggle his ears.

            By the time a person is in the eighth-grade, I believe, he begins to understand who he is and what separates him from his friends. I discovered I could communicate on paper as well as anyone in the class, which is not a great skill for an eighth-grader. We had books, magazines and newspapers in our home and I believe this influenced me. That same year, we came to recognize Ham as a gifted athlete, a skill that is infinitely more useful. It not only helped us win games, it got him noticed by girls.

            Ham, really Calvin Valian, managed to play hard and have fun at the same time. The football coaches who taught us were trying to get a bunch of eighth-graders to treat the game as a serious pursuit. As I look back on it, I realize Ham had a good perspective. He played hard and liked to win. I think Ham would have cheated at Monopoly in order to win, but he was never one to be surly, or cry, after a loss.

            He played hard, then he was looking for whatever was next. Flirt with a girl, get some food or tease Whoa Brouhaha, who was always bigger than the rest of us but would never fight Ham. We all knew what the outcome of that fight would be. Ham was an instant-gratification machine; he always needed stimuli, and usually he found it.

            People who follow football will know what an end-around reverse is, but for those who don’t I’ll explain it because it’s important in the story of how Ham got his nickname. What you need to imagine is a football team lining up on one side of the field and all the players running toward the nearest sideline. One player on the offense, an end, goes the opposite direction toward the open field.

            We were playing a team that ran a reverse and it was working. Ten of us followed the flow of the play and headed for the sideline, looking for the runner with the ball. But Ham picked up on the movement in the opposite direction and went against the grain. The predictable occurred, then, with Ham and the ball carrier from the other team coming face to face in the open field.

            They were both running at full speed and Ham hit the ball carrier with such force the opposing player’s helmet and the ball shot more than 10 feet in the air. By this time, everyone on the field was watching, along with about 50 classmates and parents sitting in the stands. The helmet and the ball fell to the ground, bounced, collided and rolled to a stop as spectators, players, officials and coaches looked on in stunned silence. Finally, a referee blew his whistle. It was so much after the fact, I find this detail humorous all these years later.

            Randy Rose, who spoke fewer than 200 words his entire school career, ran to where the ball carrier was lying – perfectly still – and shouted, “He hammered him.” Then he began pumping his fists in the air and performed some kind of a tribal dance. My teammates began to laugh, Randy settled down and the officials helped the stunned ball carrier off the field. For a while, everyone at my school called Calvin “The Hammer,” but later it was shortened to Ham.

            Ham turned out to be a great high school tailback, which is not all that important a part of the story. Nor is it all that important that Whoa Brouhaha was also a gifted athlete. With nearly white-blond hair, Whoa was truly a golden boy. He grew to nearly six-foot-three and was a natural, too, though his gifts were not as wondrous as Ham’s. With the two of them, and a decent cast of backups, Plains High School had good sports teams in those years. But no matter how well we did – and we did well, but not great – Whoa was always overshadowed a little by Ham and didn’t like it.

            There’s a story I should insert here if only because it speaks to the character of Ham and Whoa. We were seniors, undefeated in league play and set for a showdown with our rival, Kingman High School. On the night of the conference title game, our team warmed up but Kingman didn’t show. For an hour we stretched, sprinted and ran our plays at half speed. We talked of the missing opponent. Finally, it was 7:55 and still no sign of Kingman.

            “Stay warmed up,” shouted our coach, a wide Italian man who had once been a lineman at Oklahoma State University. “Stay warmed up.” Despite the urgency in his voice, we relaxed a little. On a cold, clear Midwestern night in November a forfeit sounds like an easy way to win the league title. We stood around as our coach talked to officials and members of the administration of the two schools.

            Then, at 8 o’clock on the dot, the Kingman bus pulled up and the opposing players ran out of the warm bus and onto the field, the coin was tossed and they kicked to us. We were cold and three plays later we were punting from our own 14-yard line. Kingman scored four plays later. They seemed ready to play. We later learned they warmed up in a pasture four miles away under the lights from the school bus, then drove to town, taking turns stretching in the aisles.

            One of our tackles was Randy Rose, who was six-foot and weighed 160 pounds. Now, in his spare time, Randy would turn his hounds loose on the river bottoms to search for raccoons. He’d chase those hounds all night at least one night a week. Any farmer who had chickens, and that was most of them, welcomed him on their land. Randy could run through thigh-high weeds, plowed fields and sandy river beds all night long, so blocking for a couple of hours on a Friday night was no big deal.

            The player opposite him, however, weighed 200 pounds and, we would learn later when he made the Wichita Eagle-Beacon’s all-state team, could throw a bail of hay over a loaded hay truck. From a psychological point of view, it seemed Kingman wanted the game. I’m sure the strategy of jumping out of a bus at the last minute all warmed up and lining up for the kickoff took on a life of its own. But, quite frankly, they had the horses.

            It was the fourth quarter, we were behind 28-14, and I’d like to say we turned it around and won the league title. Instead, we lost it in the trenches. You learn more from losing, and we saw Whoa sit out the fourth quarter with an elbow injury while the rest of us took a beating. I thought we did well to stay within 14.

            I should state now, and this is the truth, that I never liked Whoa Brouhaha, but my dislike of him began years before the championship game. It was rooted, instead, in several years of spoiled acting out. My opinion is that he never had to work hard for much of anything.

            Maybe this stuff from the school years is important and maybe it isn’t, but here is the essence of growing up in a small town. Whoa could have gone on to become a nuclear physicist, but we’d always remember he wimped out – “hurt his wing” – during the Kingman game. Small towns are unforgiving in that way. There’s no pretending you’re something you’re not in a small town; people judge you by the whole of your actions.

            There’s one other thing you need to take note of here. Whoa’s father, Roger, was one of the managers of the Lazy Two Ranch. When Dan Boots died of a heart attack a few years after we graduated from high school, Roger – who was tall and handsome – was able to convince a consortium of bankers and investors to buy the ranch and put him in charge.

            Roger Brouhaha, in my opinion, is one of those men who can be charming and makes a good first impression. I’m sure the investors thought they’d hired John Wayne himself to run the Lazy Two. But sometimes people who get things too easily find they can’t hold onto them. I’m getting ahead of myself.

            Whoa, after playing basketball for a few years at a small college, came home to settle into the life of a ranch manager’s spoiled son. That’s the way I see it, anyway.

            What I’m leading up to is cattle rustling, and I’m getting ahead of myself because there’s one more thing you need to know about Ham. The Valian family secret was that dad, Mr. Valian, was an alcoholic. He was pretty damn functional, and he was a nice guy, but when Ham went home, it was to a father who was in an alcoholic stupor. That fact influenced Ham in ways I wouldn’t understand for years.

Chapter Four

            I told you about Oregonians, and now I want to tell about the character of the people from the small community in Kansas where I grew up. Then I will tell about the cattle rustling, shootings and my daring escape in the Cessna 150. I think it’s important to tell you about the place where Ham and me grew up because you might think it’s flat and windy and not a place where one would want to live. We knew outsiders felt this way and so we gave the place an unofficial motto, “Kansas: Yours to Drive Through.” Well, Kansas is flat and windy, but make no mistake. I love it all the same.

            I grew up in a nice, unincorporated corner of the earth where people have known each other for generations and where you are defined by whether or not you live up to the standard set by your father. My standard, of course, was rather high, and Ham’s was exactly the opposite. I’ve already said I do not believe my parents are responsible for the way I turned out, but the flip side is Ham trusted my judgment innately simply because of who I was.

            I can’t speak for the entire Midwest, but where I’m from rugged individualism and risk-taking still exists and my father was an example of that. Starting with nothing but a college education, he modernized dozens of dying little newspapers, adding color, computers and new presses. All across Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri he provided forums for debate by insisting upon good writing and objective journalism. He treated women and people of color with respect. He shared the profits. On his days off, he put on overalls and raised tomatoes. There was no putting on of airs for my dad, Carl William Webster.

            He was, predictably, a Republican. The grocer down the street was a Democrat. Over coffee at the Let ’er Buck, the errors of the government were always blamed on either the Republicans or the Democrats, depending upon whether my father or the grocer had the floor. There were other Republicans and Democrats in Ozone County, of course, but all jokes of a political nature were laid at the feet of these two.

            I remember one presidential election year when the grocer put a toilet seat on a box and put it up in front of the newspaper office with a sign that read, “Republican Ballot Box.” They know how to have fun in a small town.

            You’d think I could’ve learned from my father’s example. He was honest, had foresight, simple tastes and a lot of friends. I have a theory for what went wrong with me, a theory I call “Random Badness.”

            I see Random Badness as being like a wave of nuclear energy. We don’t see the energy propagated through space or matter, but we know it’s there. It can be beneficial, shrinking cancer tumors or showing cavities on film, but it can also be extremely harmful.           Read a little history and I think you’ll find the Random Badness theory explains a lot, such as the Holocaust. I remember when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and a wave of sadness settled on the nation. Look at the physical damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. Tell me evil winds weren’t blowing.

            In this community where I grew up, pre-Random Badness, people who had the misfortune of being odd or mentally ill were not only accepted, but provided for in sometimes touching ways.

            I remember Ebenezer Boodle, an odd character who was old even when I was a child and yet was the father of a young son a few years older than me. The entire Boodle family was odd. Ebenezer talked to himself all the way to and from the Let ’er Buck and his son inherited the trait. Mrs. Boodle would talk you to death and was therefore best avoided. There was an older daughter, but she moved away before my time and I never knew her.

            Mr. Boodle, the story goes, was retired from an electric utility back East and therefore lived on a pension. Some speculated he was rich beyond dreams, and wore old clothes either as a cover or was rich because he never spent any money. I know two things about Ebenezer Boodle for sure. He was a pain in the ass to every shopkeeper in that small community because of his inane questions about why things were done the way they were. And, he was always treated with kindness. He was a reminder to the rest of us, those of us with the full use of our faculties, that we had it made.

            Mr. Boodle’s son, Ebenezer Jr., painted houses and made a decent living. Like his mother, he could bore you to death with last week’s gossip, but he too was tolerated.

            When Mr. Boodle died, everyone in Ozone County attended the funeral for this simple man. A few days later, Ebenezer Jr. made the rounds, personally thanking everyone who was there. I’d never heard of this and it made me proud. Ebenezer Boodle Jr., by the way, kept painting houses after his mother died – a year later – which makes me think there was no great inheritance.

            In a small community, I believe, everyone finds a niche. Our town had one midget, Mr. Roar, who worked at the service station, where they sold fuel for tractors and cars, and propane for rural houses. The business was Fast Brothers Oil Co. It was run by Rick and Ron Fast. Fast Brothers never had a bad debt problem. When someone owed them money, they’d send Mr. Roar to collect. No head of the household, you see, would beat up a midget.

            Mr. Roar would go to the door and explain the problem of the unpaid bill. Occasionally, of course, he was given some kind of logical excuse as to why the bill couldn’t be paid. Perhaps there had been an unexpected expense not planned for in the family budget. Mr. Roar would listen politely, then sit down on the porch and wait for his money. He’d leave at 5 p.m., but at 8 a.m. the next day he’d be back and he’d sit on that porch day after day until he collected.

            If you lived anywhere within the service area of the Fast Brothers Oil Company, you didn’t want the midget sitting on your porch.

            The quirk millionaire Dan Boots had, which endeared him to many, was that of always taking along his dog, even on trail rides and roundups. Dan would put the little dog on the rump of his horse, then climb into the saddle. Whenever the horse was in motion, the dog would bite into the back of Dan’s saddle in order to stay on the horse. It was a sight, I’ll tell you.

            Some people say if you live in a small community, such as our strip of shops and houses in Ozone County, your destiny has already been determined. Randy Rose would go into law enforcement because his father was municipal judge, his other brother a sheriff’s deputy, his sister a jail-keeper and his brother-in-law, the county attorney. In Ozone County, the saying used to go, don’t mess with the Rose family.

            Whoa Brouhaha, then, was destined to be a cowboy. I, Thomas Webster, was destined to be a newspaper man, and Ham was destined to be a drunken carpenter. But in our community in the 1970s, Ham and me changed all that destiny crap and believe me, it wasn’t pretty.

Chapter Five

            Most cattle rustling doesn’t occur on a large scale because that would involve too many people working odd hours in small communities, where they’d be noticed. It’s not unusual, however, for a cowboy to butcher a steer in the field, take home the meat, put it in the freezer and justify it because of the low wages he’s paid. Normally, that’s about as exciting as cattle rustling gets.

            It is my opinion the cattle rustling that occurred at the Lazy Two Ranch was an inside job perpetuated by none other than Whoa Brouhaha. I don’t know if my theory is correct, or if I could prove it if given the chance, but I want to get my version of the story on the record. I’ll bet I’m not far off.

            When Ham and me first started selling pot, Whoa was a big customer and a small- time dealer in his own right. He’d purchase enough for himself, plus make some sales to his buddies back at the small college he was attending. Then, when he began working at the ranch, he’d sell to the other cowboys. These were men, remember, who still wore sidearms as a holdout from the Dan Boots days.

            Dan Boots was an old-fashioned, hands-on cowboy who expected hard work, but also had a heart of gold. He inspired loyalty from his employees. Roger Brouhaha was a hard-drinking womanizer who expected hard work and gave little of himself in return. The times they were a changin’ at the Lazy Two.

            Roger Brouhaha was able to trade for years on the reputation established by Dan Boots and one person who suffered because of it was an old farmer by the name of Weather Smith, a nice guy who was known far and wide for organizing the county fair each summer. Now, Weather Smith was a wheat farmer. That’s simply what he did best. But each year, he would invest money to buy a certain number of calves and turn them over to Dan Boots, who would brand them, castrate them and shoot them full of antibiotics, vaccine and growth hormone. In 10 months to a year, depending upon the price of cattle at the time, Dan Boots would put them in the feedyard to fatten them up and send them off to butcher. Weather Smith would then receive a check.

            This was a good arrangement for Dan Boots because he got a cut and it kept his cowboys busy, and it was good for Weather Smith because it allowed him to concentrate on what he did best, which was raise wheat. Over a lifetime, Weather Smith had built his money into a nice retirement investment. He’d started buying 20 calves each spring as a teen-ager and now, in the twilight of his life, he was up to 600 calves.

            If you wonder whether I feel remorse over the havoc I wreaked in Ozone County, the answer is an unqualified yes.

            By early 1978, Ham and me were handling only large transactions. All the pot, LSD and speeders in circulation in Ozone County were sold through a couple of local, small-time dealers we supplied. There were a few exceptions and Whoa Brouhaha was one. He was a pest, but he purchased decent-sized quantities for himself and other cowboys so we allowed him on our farm, which we had purchased a year earlier.

            Also, Ham was occasionally sleeping with Tanya Brouhaha, Whoa’s sister. She was a beautiful young woman with cascading red-blonde hair and a show-stopper body.

            When we purchased our farm in 1977, we thought we were simplifying our lives. Whoa and Tanya were always placated by good drugs. We allowed a couple of dealers on the property, my girlfriend – a cowgirl from Medicine Lodge – and our dates and a few other assorted friends.

            Otherwise, we were protected behind a secure gate with a speaker phone. Guests had to call the house and ask us to unlock the gate before they could enter. We had a surveillance camera hidden in the field. We kept a few cattle, for the appropriate look, and a couple of horses because they’re great for picking up women.

            I’ll tell you what our attitude was. All that money we were making and the risks we were taking weren’t worth it unless we used it – the money and the dangerous lifestyles, I mean – to meet women. And it worked. You wouldn’t believe the number of women who are attracted to successful, dangerous men.

            Our house, build in the 1950s, was simple but in good repair, two stories with an attic, which had windows all the way around where one could get a good look at the surroundings. It was small, but had four bedrooms and two bathrooms. We had 80 acres of pasture with a creek at the bottom of the property.

The sheriff, Randy Rose was a clean-cut looking young man who never drank at the Crossroads and did not associate with Ham or me in public. Early in 1974, Ham and me established our niche with Randy. He’d call us – he was a deputy right out of high school – and we’d meet him on a secluded road on the backside of the Lazy Two and he’d smoke pot with us and watch the thick grass dance in the wind. All these years later, I can still picture thick prairie grass whipping in the wind along the ridges of the unspoiled, rolling hills of the Lazy Two.

            When Ham and me started dealing, Randy said he couldn’t afford to take a chance being seen with us, and we said we understood. But we made up little packages of good pot, and sometimes some pharmaceutical speeders if we had them, and we developed a number of elaborate ways to get them to him.

            Ham and me saw it as an investment, and it paid off. Randy’s older brother, who was a sheriff’s deputy, went to work for the Kansas State Police and another deputy moved to Denver so in 1975, Randy Rose was appointed the sheriff of Ozone County by the Board of County Commissioners. The next year, he was elected to the four-year post. To understand everything that was going on, you need to look at it in the context of the times. Marijuana wasn’t seen as a huge threat to society. Property seizure laws weren’t in effect. AIDS was unknown. And, due to the recent Vietnam War, law enforcement and other uniformed trades weren’t exactly popular. So, the county commission appointed this clean-cut young man with family ties to law enforcement almost by default. The 1970s were a lawless time, meaning it was the best of times, and it was the worst of times.

            When Randy was appointed sheriff, then elected, Ham and me started putting $50 a month in his care package as a reflection of his new status. In return, we were warned about undercover investigations by the state police. Twice we shut down our operation waiting for things to cool off. Mostly, though, business was booming. We had contacts in nearly every city in the state, finding college towns most prosperous. We also found a contact in Denver, so we had to take a Rocky Mountain vacation every couple of months. It was not unusual to transport 100 to 200 pounds of pot per trip and the profits from all these operations were obscene.

            Ham and me both had new pickups and dirt bikes, and with legitimate businessmen taking our money, we began to think we had become members of the establishment. Ham would ask me if I thought, at some point, I could invest our money wisely enough for us to retire from dealing and live off the interest. We talked about buying a hotel in Nederlands, Colorado, or a tavern in Lawrence, Kansas. Lawrence was a special place for us. We made a lot of money for our connection, and we liked to party in a town with college women.

            No one was more resentful of our success than Whoa Brouhaha. Despite being second in command at the Lazy Two, he was in no way playing in the same league as Ham and me. He built a house on a small pond on property near the Lazy Two. It was nice, and I’m sure it impressed some women, but still he had to go to work every day while Ham and me ran this seemingly glamorous business. We set our own hours and could vacation when we wanted.

            In the summer of 1978, Ham and me began selling cocaine. We had tried it on a half-dozen occasions and our connection convinced us it was the next big thing. “Everything goes better with coke,” he said. Well, in my opinion, cocaine was trouble from the start. We’d started loaning people money to build little greenhouses to grow pot, and we thought we were really onto something. When pot was legalized, we’d have a network for growing it. We’d be the R.J. Reynolds of marijuana.

            But with cocaine, everything was wild and surreal. Our profits shot up and we quit paying attention to the revenue-expense details that had made us successful capitalists in the first place. We began giving Randy Rose $100 a month and an eight-ball of cocaine. Here’s a telling example of how things went. In the middle of the month, instead of asking for more money, Randy Rose would ask for more cocaine.

            It seemed every woman in the territory was drinking at the Crossroads on the off chance Ham and me would invite her to a cocaine party at the farm. The parties had become legend for debauchery and excess. Despite the profits of the cocaine trade, there were times when we ended up with no money at all.

            Tanya Brouhaha was dating a doctor in Wichita as well as Ham. The doctor was giving her prescription pills, a downer called a Quaalude, which made her behavior erratic. Once, Randy Rose found her passed out on the lawn of the library. He picked her up and took her home. Despite our reservations about Whoa, I never questioned Ham dating Tanya. She was tall, perfectly built with cascading red-blonde hair, and pretty. She knew how to turn on the charm and I know Ham enjoyed her company. She was always nice enough to me.

Lately she had been indulging in long binges and would come begging for cocaine. Whoa, independent of Tanya, was doing the same thing.

Ham talked to me about Tanya. She was whiffing up so much cocaine we didn’t know how long we could keep her around, despite her great body. Whoa was just as bad, but Whoa knew not to show up without cash. The rumor started to spread that he was having financial problems.

            In early 1980, I was drinking a beer at the Crossroads with a cowboy from the Lazy Two, and he told me sometimes Whoa told them not to brand all the calves. I thought that was a little odd, but didn’t piece it together until later. Here’s what I think happened:

            Whoa Brouhaha put his own brand on a few calves, made a few bucks extra, and no one noticed the losses, which were attributed to illness, rattlesnake bite and coyotes. The consortium not only had agreements with dozens of farmers like Weather Smith, but owned thousands of cattle on its own.

            I suppose large companies expect a little pilfering; I know Dan Boots wouldn’t have put up with it. Regardless, my best guess is greed raised its ugly head.

            In the spring of 1980, Whoa told the crew not to brand the 600 calves purchased by Weather Smith, a trusting soul who never went out to the Lazy Two to actually look at his cattle. Either Whoa turned around and sold the calves to someone else, or he put his own brand on them planning to profit later. In any case, he was planning on a payday. In the fall of 1980, Mr. Smith for some unknown reason calls Roger Brouhaha and asks to see the cattle, and Roger finds 600 head are missing.

            The sheriff is sent to investigate, but Randy Rose doesn’t want to implicate Whoa too quickly because Whoa, with his back against the wall, might tell the Kansas Bureau of Investigation about the flood of cocaine into Ozone County. Randy was paranoid for obvious reasons. Meanwhile, despite all his problems, Whoa keeps coming around asking Ham and me for more cocaine. We know we have a problem, but before we can solve it the shooting starts.