In Cold Blood (18 page)

This biography always set racing a stable of emotions—self-pity in the lead, love and hate running evenly at first, the latter ultimately pulling ahead. And most of the memories it released were unwanted, though not all. In fact, the first part of his life that Perry could remember was treasurable—a fragment composed of applause, glamour. He was perhaps three, and he was seated with his sisters and his older brother in the grandstand at an open-air rodeo; in the ring, a lean Cherokee girl rode a wild horse, a “bucking bronc,” and her loosened hair whipped back and forth, flew about like a flamenco dancer’s. Her name was Flo Buckskin, and she was a professional rodeo performer, a “champion bronc-rider.” So was her husband, Tex John Smith; it was while touring the Western rodeo circuit that the handsome Indian girl and the homely-handsome Irish cowboy had met, married, and had the four children sitting in the grandstand. (And Perry could remember many another rodeo spectacle—see again his father skipping about inside a circle of spinning lassos, or his mother, with silver and turquoise bangles jangling on her wrists, trick-riding at a desperado speed that thrilled her youngest child and caused crowds in towns from Texas to Oregon to “stand up and clap.”)

Until Perry was five, the team of “Tex & Flo” continued to work the rodeo circuit. As a way of life, it wasn’t “any gallon of ice cream,” Perry once recalled: “Six of us riding in an old truck, sleeping in it, too, sometimes, living off mush and Hershey kisses and condensed milk. Hawks Brand condensed milk it was called, which is what weakened my kidneys—the
sugar
content—which is why I was always wetting the bed.” Yet it was not an unhappy existence, especially for a little boy proud of his parents, admiring of their showmanship and courage—a happier life, certainly, than what replaced it. For Tex and Flo, both forced by ailments to retire from their occupation, settled near Reno, Nevada. They fought, and Flo “took to whiskey,” and then, when Perry was six, she departed for San Francisco, taking the children with her. It was exactly as the old man had written: “I let her go and said goodby as she took the car and left me behind (this was during depression). My children all cryed at the top of their voices. She only cursed them saying they would run away to come to me later.” And, indeed, over the course of the next three years Perry had on several occasions run off, set out to find his lost father, for he had lost his mother as well, learned to “despise” her; liquor had blurred the face, swollen the figure of the once sinewy, limber Cherokee girl, had “soured her soul,” honed her tongue to the wickedest point, so dissolved her self-respect that generally she did not bother to ask the names of the stevedores and trolley-car conductors and such persons who accepted what she offered without charge (except that she insisted they drink with her first, and dance to the tunes of a wind-up Victrola).

Consequently, as Perry recalled, “I was always thinking about Dad, hoping he could come take me away, and I remember, like a second ago, the time I saw him again. Standing in the schoolyard. It was like when the ball hits the bat really solid. Di Maggio. Only Dad wouldn’t help me. Told me to be good and hugged me and went away. It was not long afterward my mother put me to stay in a Catholic orphanage. The one where the Black Widows were always at me. Hitting me. Because of wetting the bed. Which is one reason I have an aversion to nuns.
And
God.
And
religion. But later on I found there are people even more evil. Because, after a couple of months, they tossed me out of the orphanage, and she [his mother] put me some place worse. A children’s shelter operated by the Salvation Army. They hated me, too. For wetting the bed. And being half-Indian. There was this one nurse, she used to call me ‘nigger’ and say there wasn’t any difference between niggers and Indians. Oh, Jesus, was she an Evil Bastard! Incarnate. What she used to do, she’d fill a tub with ice-cold water, put me in it, and hold me under till I was blue. Nearly drowned. But she got found out, the bitch. Because I caught pneumonia. I almost conked. I was in the hospital two months. It was while I was so sick that Dad came back. When I got well, he took me away.”

For almost a year father and son lived together in the house near Reno, and Perry went to school. “I finished the third grade,” Perry recalled. “Which
was
the finish. I never went back. Because that summer Dad built a primitive sort of trailer, what he called a ‘house car.’ It had two bunks and a little cooking galley. The stove was good. You could cook anything on it. Baked our own bread. I used to put up preserves—pickled apples, crabapple jelly. Anyway, for the next six years we shifted around the country. Never stayed nowhere too long. When we stayed some place too long, people would begin to look at Dad, act like he was a character, and I hated that, it hurt me. Because I loved Dad then. Even though he could be rough on me. Bossy as hell. But I loved Dad then. So I was always glad when we moved on.” Moved on—to Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, eventually Alaska. In Alaska, Tex taught his son to dream of gold, to hunt for it in the sandy beds of snow-water streams, and there, too, Perry learned to use a gun, skin a bear, track wolves and deer.

“Christ, it was cold,” Perry remembered. “Dad and I slept hugged together, rolled up in blankets and bearskins. Mornings, before daylight, I’d hustle our breakfast, biscuits and syrup, fried meat, and off we went to scratch a living. It would have been O.K. if only I hadn’t grown up; the older I got, the less I was able to appreciate Dad. He knew everything, one way, but he didn’t know anything, another way. Whole sections of me Dad was ignorant of. Didn’t understand an iota of. Like I could play a harmonica first time I picked one up. Guitar, too. I had this great natural musical ability. Which Dad didn’t recognize. Or care about. I liked to read, too. Improve my vocabulary. Make up songs. And I could draw. But I never got any encouragement—from him or anybody else. Nights I used to lie awake—trying to control my bladder, partly, and partly because I couldn’t stop thinking. Always, when it was too cold hardly to breathe, I’d think about Hawaii. About a movie I’d seen. With Dorothy Lamour. I wanted to go there. Where the sun was. And all you wore was grass and flowers.”

Wearing considerably more, Perry, one balmy evening in wartime 1945, found himself inside a Honolulu tattoo parlor having a snake-and-dagger design applied to his left forearm. He had got there by the following route: a row with his father, a hitchhike journey from Anchorage to Seattle, a visit to the recruiting offices of the Merchant Marine. “But I never would have joined if I’d known what I was going up against,” Perry once said. “I never minded the work, and I liked being a sailor—seaports, and all that. But the queens on ship wouldn’t leave me alone. A sixteen-year-old kid, and a small kid. I could handle myself, sure. But a lot of queens aren’t effeminate, you know. Hell, I’ve known queens could toss a pool table out the window. And the piano after it. Those kind of girls, they can give you an evil time, especially when there’s a couple of them, they get together and gang up on you, and you’re just a kid. It can make you practically want to kill yourself. Years later, when I went into the Army—when I was stationed in Korea—the same problem came up. I had a good record in the Army, good as anybody; they gave me the Bronze Star. But I never got promoted. After four years, and fighting through the whole goddam Korean war, I ought at least to have made corporal. But I never did. Know why? Because the sergeant we had was tough. Because I wouldn’t roll over. Jesus, I hate that stuff. I can’t stand it. Though—I don’t know. Some queers I’ve really liked. As long as they didn’t try anything. The most worthwhile friend I ever had, really sensitive and intelligent, he turned out to be queer.”

In the interval between quitting the Merchant Marine and entering the Army, Perry had made peace with his father, who, when his son left him, drifted down to Nevada, then back to Alaska. In 1952, the year Perry completed his military service, the old man was in the midst of plans meant to end his travels forever. “Dad was in a fever,” Perry recalled. “Wrote me he had bought some land on the highway outside Anchorage. Said he was going to have a hunting lodge, a place for tourists. ‘Trapper’s Den Lodge’—that was to be the name. And asked me to hurry on up there and help him build it. He was sure we’d make a fortune. Well, while I was still in the Army, stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, I’d bought a motorcycle (murdercycles, they ought to call them), and as soon as I got discharged I headed for Alaska. Got as far as Bellingham. Up there on the border. It was raining. My bike went into a skid.”

The skid delayed for a year the reunion with his father. Surgery and hospitalization account for six months of that year; the remainder he spent recuperating in the forest home, near Bellingham, of a young Indian logger and fisherman. “Joe James. He and his wife befriended me. The difference in our age was only two or three years, but they took me into their home and treated me like I was one of their kids. Which was O.K. Because they took trouble with their kids and liked them. At the time they had four; the number finally went to seven. They were very good to me, Joe and his family. I was on crutches, I was pretty helpless. Just had to sit around. So to give me something to do, try to make myself useful, I started what became a sort of school. The pupils were Joe’s kids, along with some of their friends, and we held classes in the parlor. I was teaching harmonica and guitar. Drawing. And penmanship. Everybody always remarks what a beautiful handwriting I have. I do, and it’s because once I bought a book on the subject and practiced till I could write same as in the book. Also, we used to read stories—the kids did, each one in turn, and I’d correct them as we went along. It was fun. I like kids.
Little
kids. And that was a nice time. But then the spring came. It hurt me to walk, but I could walk. And Dad was still waiting for me.”

Waiting, but not idly. By the time Perry arrived at the site of the proposed hunting lodge, his father, working alone, had finished the hardest chores—had cleared the ground, logged the necessary timber, cracked and carted wagonloads of native rock. “But he didn’t commence to build till I got there. We did every damn piece of it ourselves. With once in a while an Indian helper. Dad was like a maniac. It didn’t matter what was happening—snowstorms, rainstorms, winds that could split a tree—we kept right at it. The day the roof was finished, Dad danced all over it, shouting and laughing, doing a regular jig. Well, it turned out quite an exceptional place. That could sleep twenty people. Had a big fireplace in the dining room. And there was a cocktail lounge. The Totem Pole Cocktail Lounge. Where I was to entertain the customers. Singing and so forth. We opened for business end of 1953.”

But the expected huntsmen did not materialize, and though ordinary tourists—the few that trickled along the highway—now and again paused to photograph the beyond-belief rusticity of Trapper’s Den Lodge, they seldom stopped overnight. “For a while we fooled ourselves. Kept thinking it would catch on. Dad tried to trick up the place. Made a Garden of Memories. With a Wishing Well. Put painted signs up and down the highway. But none of it meant a nickel more. When Dad realized that—saw it wasn’t any use, all we’d done was waste ourselves and all our money—he began to take it out on me. Boss me around. Be spiteful. Say I didn’t do my proper share of the work. It wasn’t his fault, any more than it was mine. A situation like that, with no money and the grub getting low, we couldn’t help but be on each other’s nerves. The point came we were downright hungry. Which is what we fell out over. Ostensibly. A biscuit. Dad snatched a biscuit out of my hand, and said I ate too much, what a greedy, selfish bastard I was, and why didn’t I get out, he didn’t want me there no more. He carried on like that till I couldn’t stand it. My hands got hold of his throat.
My
hands—but I couldn’t control them. They wanted to choke him to death. Dad, though, he’s slippery, a smart wrestler. He tore loose and ran to get his gun. Came back pointing it at me. He said, ‘Look at me, Perry. I’m the last thing living you’re ever gonna see.’ I just stood my ground. But then he realized the gun wasn’t even loaded, and he started to cry. Sat down and bawled like a kid. Then I guess I wasn’t mad at him any more. I was sorry for him. For both of us. But it wasn’t a bit of use—there wasn’t anything I could say. I went out for a walk. This was April, but the woods were still deep in snow. I walked till it was almost night. When I got back, the lodge was dark, and all the doors were locked. And everything I owned was lying out there in the snow. Where Dad had thrown it. Books. Clothes. Everything. I just let it lie. Except my guitar. I picked up my guitar and started on down the highway. Not a dollar in my pocket. Around midnight a truck stopped to give me a lift. The driver asked where I was going. I told him, ‘Wherever you’re headed, that’s where I’m going.”

Several weeks later, after again sheltering with the James family, Perry decided on a definite destination—Worcester, Massachusetts, the home town of an “Army buddy” he thought might welcome him and help him find “a good-paying job.” Various detours prolonged the eastward journey; he washed dishes in an Omaha restaurant, pumped gas at an Oklahoma garage, worked a month on a ranch in Texas. By July of 1955 he had reached, on the trek to Worcester, a small Kansas town, Phillipsburg, and there “fate,” in the form of “bad company,” asserted itself. “His name was Smith,” Perry said. “Same as me. I don’t even recall his first name. He was just somebody I’d picked up with somewhere, and he had a car, and he said he’d give me a ride as far as Chicago. Anyway, driving through Kansas we came to this little Phillipsburg place and stopped to look at a map. Seems to me like it was a Sunday. Stores shut. Streets quiet. My friend there, bless his heart, he looked around and made a suggestion.” The suggestion was that they burglarize a nearby building, the Chandler Sales Company. Perry agreed, and they broke into the deserted premises and removed a quantity of office equipment (typewriters, adding machines). That might have been that if only, some days afterward, the thieves hadn’t ignored a traffic signal in the city of Saint Joseph, Missouri. “The junk was still in the car. The cop that stopped us wanted to know where we got it. A little checking was done, and, as they say, we were ‘returned’ to Phillipsburg, Kansas. Where the folks have a real cute jail. If you like jails.” Within forty-eight hours Perry and his companion had discovered an open window, climbed out of it, stolen a car, and driven northwest to McCook, Nebraska. “Pretty soon we broke up, me and Mr. Smith. I don’t know what ever became of him. We both made the F.B.I.’s Wanted list. But far as I know, they never caught up with
him
.”