the Onion Field (1973) (6 page)

After lunch when he would leave here maybe the headache would stop. He would get to do a beautiful yard this afternoon, the best on his route. The yard had some fine specimens of Monterey pine lining the driveway. They were so stately and deep green and symmetrical they hardly ever needed trimming.

The gardener looked at the old woman 7s petunias. They had good color: reds and whites and off-shade blues, but the old woman didn \ understand petunias. They bloomed profusely but they were delicate. You must never forget how delicate they arey he thought. You must be kind to them. Life was a tenuous thing to the gardener.

And then, there in the petunias he caught a picture of himself in a store by an untended counter. Saw himself glancing to his right at a clerk whose back was turned to him. He hadn yt stolen anything big as yet, only pocket loot. Now, though, the bulkily packaged electric knife looked irresistible. Where could he secrete it? Under his coat? Inside his belt? Perhaps in his hand? Yes, brazenly in his hand. Store security men looked for telltale bulges, furtive behavior, but what if you just held the large thing in your hand and simply walked out with it? People don't see the obvious. That was the way, yes.

Now, suddenly, the crimes were almost too painful to recall. He'd continue to think of them later. He had all afternoon. When he started thinking about his crimes, he had to start at the very beginning and think of all of them, the same as when he used to think about the night in the onion field.

He always thought of that night from the very beginning to the end. If it weren't for the trials he wouldn yt think of that night at all. Why should he? It was seven years ago. Besides, he had all his crimes to think about That was the real horror.

Chapter
3

It was Ian Campbell's turn to drive on the ninth day of the partnership: Saturday, March 9, 1963. He and Karl were dressed, as always, in old comfortable sport coats and slacks. Ian's coat was wearing through where it rubbed against the butt of his revolver. They talked about clothes during the early part of the night, both of them ever thrifty, wishing that the department gave a clothing allowance to plainclothes officers.

There were two other young men driving toward Hollywood that night in a maroon Ford coupe, who had begun a partnership on exactly the same day as Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger.

The two young men in the coupe also talked about clothes. The blond driver, Gregory Powell, admired the black leather jacket and cap he wore. The darker man, Jimmy Smith, hated his, but wore it because Greg insisted.

"Fuckin Saturday night traffic," Jimmy Smith muttered.

"Stop griping, Jim," said Gregory Powell, his gaunt face turning toward his partner on the swivel of an incredibly long neck. "Wait'll we take off that Hollywood market. Wait'll you get your han
d
s on some money."

Jimmy Smith grunted and adjusted the Spanish automatic he carried in his belt.

"I just wanna git it over with, is all," said Jimmy Smith in his soft voice, and Gregory Powell smiled, his front teeth protruding slightly over his lower lip, and dreamed past this robbery to much
bigger ones. And dreamed of having enough money to go into legitimate business.

Imagine what they would say then, thought Greg. All the bitterness would be forgotten. They would come to him for money or favors. Gregory Powell chuckled silently as he thought of them-his family.

"I didn't really mature until I was thirty-three years old," Rusty Powell often admitted, but by then his eldest son, Gregory, was already twelve years old, and had attended a dozen different schools before moving to Cadillac, Michigan. Rusty Powell had been pretty much of a drifter during the Depression and early war years, playing in small dance bands whenever possible, while his young wife had a baby every three years until after Douglas was born in 1942.

At age thirty-three, Rusty Powell enrolled in the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. But now, with new time-consuming zeal, and guilt-relieving work, he knew his children less than he did in the drifting dance band days.

For his son Greg though, there had always been the Governor, his maternal grandfather, whose picture he would carry even as an adult, a sturdy old man with deep creases in his cheeks, with white hair and a white moustache, a pipe smoker, fond of comfortable baggy pants and suspenders, and a shirt open at the collar. A grandfather who looked as grandfathers should: strong, wise, patriarchal. Greg would spend hours talking with the old man and many of the talks would be about Rusty Powell. The Governor would try to make the boy understand his father.

"He doesn't have an easy time, your dad. Why, your mom's had every disease and operation known to medicine almost, and what with four kids and all, your dad just hasn't had an easy life. And sure, he's an easygoing sort of man and maybe you think he lets your mom run over him too much, but a mountain is quiet too and I suspect there's great strength in your dad. Maybe just going along with her and not riling her is a way to have peace in this world."

And the boy would nod and say, "Tell me about my dad when he was courting my mom, when he had the fight with the boy that insulted her."

And the old man would tell him once again of how Rusty Powell crushed the other boy in his arms, breaking a rib or two, and Greg would say to the Governor, "Do you think I'll ever get as big as my dad?"

When Greg's mother, Ethel Powell, would unreasonably revoke an agreement that he could go ice skating, or to the movies, he would tearfully drag his father into her bedroom and confront the invalid woman with her broken promise. But she would deny that she had ever made it, and would rail at both of them and remind them of her thyroid and of the Bright's disease and of her nervous condition. Invariably, Rusty Powell would shrug his large sloping shoulders, shortening his long muscular neck with the gesture, and he would yield-to her. And for an instant the boy would hate him even more than he hated her during those years of illness and "nerves" and he would try to think of his father as a boy whipping the tar out of Greg's uncles, showing that he was a man. Greg would make allowances and resume his duties: the shopping, the minding of the three younger children, the ordering of the home.

He didn't always hate his mother. Wh|h she was even partly well, she could manage to look incredibly young and alive. They would go for walks or even skate together and she could he incredibly young, as young as he, and totally enter his child's world. He was intensely proud of her during these times and wanted everyone to see her. He would forget the unreasonable nagging and the hateful lying she seemed unable to control. But then she would get sick and nervous again.

"Listen, Greg," the Governor would say. "I know it's hard with your mom and dad, but a man can abide. It don't matter what others do to you. Why, it just don't matter at all because you can always come to me. The Governor's always here to help you."

And Greg would nod and be comforted because it was true. The Governor managed to abide all these years, and his wife, Greg's grandmother, was a Christian Scientist, to Greg a fanatic. He thought the old man was right, he could live in peace with someone he didn't respect as long as he just didn't show them how he felt. He only had to pretend to go along and do things his own way when he could. The Governor was always there to help, except that the Governor died in 1947.

They were in the big two-story wood frame house in Cadillac then. It had a large yard and there was a fish pond in back, room for dogs and cats and birds and fish, and even without the Governor things were bearable. Except that his mother started to get well.

At first it was a subtle change. Douglas, the youngest, was now well past the toddler stage and with Rusty teaching music, life was indeed much easier. Ethel Powell began fixing her face every day, paying attention to her hair, and her clothes and person. Then there were touches to the house here and there. Bright things, a preponderence of reds, lots of bright cloth-wrapped wires which only remotely resembled plants, and would later give way to a taste for plastic gimcracks. And then she, not Greg, started disciplining the younger ones: Sharon, Lei Lani, Douglas. Ethel Powell began to do the shopping, and assumed responsibility for paying the bills, and suddenly it was all too much for Greg, who was now fourteen. The fights started and were only bitter at first. Finally, outright warfare ensued.
_
*

"Why should you listen to her?" Greg would say to tfie younger ones. "I always told you right, didn't I? I took whippings for you when you were bad and never opened my mouth, didn't I? I took care of you all your lives, didn't I? How come now you got to do what she says? You always did what I said, didn't you? It's not gonna change around here, you hear me?"

"But Mom says, Greg. Mom says"

And tearful battles were waged over the dinner table for many months to come.

"You're just gonna have to learn who's the boss around here, young man," Ethel Powell would warn. "You don't just run things around here no more."

"I don't, huh?" the boy would answer, his blue eyes sparking, his head turning on the swivel of a neck longer than his father's.

All of the children were blonds and rather fair, and the other three were better looking than Greg. They would remain silent during the flare-ups, not certain whose side to take, not certain whose authority was supreme.

"Now all of a sudden you start bossing the house, huh?" he said, tears of wrath spilling. "Well how come you wasn't bossing when Doug needed his drawers changed, or when the girls needed help with arithmetic, or when somebody had to get up an hour early every morning so's to get them all off to school? I wanted to be a crossing guard and couldn't because I had to get the kids off to school. You wasn't the one taking care of them. It was me. Me."

"You sound like you don't care that I'm well now. Like you wish I was still sick."

"I don't give a damn either way."

"That's enough," his father would thunder. "No one's had an easy time around here."

"You can't side with her now, Dad. You can't. Who'd you always come to with the money for the shopping? To me, that's who. Who'd Sharon and Lei Lani and Doug always run to if they was hurt? Huh? Did they go to her? To you? No, they damn sure didn't. To me, that's who. To me!"

Greg would sit in class that year, in junior high school, and his thoughts would be in the big two-story frame house: She's a liar, that's what she is. She's always been a liar and he's a coward and takes anything she hands him and now they're trying to turn the kids against me. Against me.

It was about this time that his performance began to suffer both academically and in extracurricular endeavors. He no longer asserted himself in sports. He'd always considered himself a good athlete, especially in winter sports, and now he didn't seem to care. He even lost interest in his saxophone and in music in general. He began losing weight and dropped off the football squad.

Then, when he was fifteen, he ran away. There were many times on the road that he regretted his decision, especially when he stood on the mountain highway in Kentucky in the rain, and the rain turned to sleet and made heaps of gray-brown slush, and the sky blackened before his eyes so that the boy had a feeling that the sun would never return. All the cars passed without slowing and he counted his money for the tenth time, but it still totaled three dollars and some pennies. He was wheezing, rattling, ripping phlegm from deep within. Then a big sedan stopped, skidding a little on the wet asphalt.

"Want a lift?" asked the man holding the door open and Greg splashed through a puddle and fairly leaped into the car.

"Thanks," said the boy when his teeth stopped chattering.

"Going far?" the man asked, and for the first time the boy looked at him. He wore a black topcoat and black pants. He had dark hair and eyes, wore glasses, was both tall and big.

"I'm going to Florida."

"Well." The man laughed softly. "You have a ways to go. Do you have money?"

"Enough," the boy said suspiciously.

"Where do you come from?"

"Cadillac. That's in Michigan."

"Thumbing all the way?"

"No, I came by train most of the way."

"Where're your parents? Michigan?"

"I don't know where my parents are and I don't care. Now maybe you better just let me out if you care so much."

"Hold on." He laughed. "Don't get angry. I didn't mean to pry. What's your name?"

"Greg."

"I'm Father Charles, Greg," the man said, and it startled the boy. For the first time he noticed the Roman collar barely showing beneath the black topcoat.

"I never met a priest," said the boy. "Do they call you 'Father' or what?"

"Most people do." The priest laughed. "Some less charitable Protestant neighbors call me other things. I have a parish in Georgia. You can ride a piece of your journey with me."

And then the priest began suggesting, gently at first, that Greg should at least call his parents, and he was saying something else, something about traveling like this, and the conversation seemed to have religious overtones but Greg couldn't tell. His eyelids were closing and his head was nodding forward onto his chest. He woke up in the state of Georgia.

"This is where I stay, son," said Father Charles as Greg rode with him to the rectory, planning to leave after a promised hot meal. It was a small poor parish in a region of Baptists and Methodists, but the parish house was clean and warm, and there was a part-time housekeeper to help the priest keep things tidy. Despite his long sleep in the car, the boy was glad to accept the invitation to stay another night. He slept thirteen hours in a warm clean bed.