SAFELY BURIED Chapter 15: The Blue Ghetto

I went to the business manager’s desk and borrowed the city directory. In it I found an address for Gary Fromm, but no phone number. The other names I was looking for were not in the directory.

This was going to take some time. I fortified myself with my second cup of coffee, and then, starting with the shortest list of surnames, I began calling people up.

No one answered at the two Apple residences.

A woman named Charlotte Noe told me that Lisa Noe was her sister-in-law and “went out to Texas some years ago.”

A man named Joe Noe thought I was trying to sell him a newspaper subscription and hung up.

Two of the four Shults answered the phone, but neither of them knew Judith Ann Shult.

After three calls to people named Stinson, I got Troy Stinson’s grandmother, who said he was working at the Campbellsville Training Center. I asked what he did there, and she said, “Whatever they tell him to. He’s one of their best workers. He’s real careful when it comes to packing boxes and such.”

The Training Center employed developmentally challenged persons, as they were now called. To make sure I had located the Troy I was looking for, I asked if he had ever lived at the Good Shepherd Home.

“Yes,” she answered with a hint of apology, “a long time ago. His ma ran away, you know. She was a good-for-nothing. And his pa—my son—he had a terrible accident. He worked for the REMC and got electrocuted by a power line. I couldn’t keep the boy with me on account of I had to work. . . .”

I stopped listening. I debated whether to go through the motions and talk to Troy, just in case he could tell me something about the home, but I decided to pass.

I waded into the Davidsons. An hour and a half later, on my thirty-ninth call to members of the Davidson clan, I learned from the wife of one of Rickie’s cousins that he had moved to California after getting out of high school and no one in the family ever heard from him again.

I asked the cousin-in-law if Rickie had graduated from high school.

“Oh yes,” she said. “He was real smart.”

I felt glad for him. “I guess you knew him pretty well then?” I asked.

“Not hardly. I just remember my husband saying that once.”

“Do you have a phone number or address for Rickie?”

“No, I sure don’t.”

“Do you know if your husband does?”

“No. Sorry. You can ask him yourself if you want to call back after five.”

“Thank you very much,” I said. “I might do that.”

I hung up and stood up. My stomach, intestines, pancreas, and gall bladder felt squashed from sitting at the desk. I stretched and yawned. Keyboards clicked loudly in the newsroom. I scratched my forehead, which for some reason felt itchy all of a sudden. Must be dry skin. I went to the men’s room and assumed the position of the Thinker.

It occurred to me that I had an address for Gary Fromm. Maybe I could actually talk to one of the people I was looking for. I needed some fresh air, so I decided to try to find him.

As I drove through town, I wondered if the police had found my car yet. I was tempted to drive by the funeral home to see if it was still parked there, but I didn’t want to take a chance on being recognized. Maybe no one would ever find the car. Maybe it would stay there till I got old and kicked the bucket. Maybe the funeral home would bury me in it.

Gary Fromm lived in the Blue Ghetto, a low-income housing project on the south side of town. There were twelve two-story units in each row of so-called town houses. Their vertical siding, which had originally been bright blue, had been repainted a few years ago and was now bright beige, but no one ever referred to the development as the Beige Ghetto.

I parked in front of Unit G7 and stepped over the shattered toys, cigarette butts, and flattened condoms lying in the parking lot. I rang the bell, which did not ring, and knocked on the door. It was yanked in so fast that I felt as if I was being sucked in with it. A bearded, shirtless man of twenty-three gaped at me with large round eyes and an open mouth.

“Good morning,” I said. “I’m looking for Gary Fromm.”

“You found him. Who are you?”

Just to be giving him something, I handed him my card, which he read with painstaking slowness. Then he handed it back to me. “I’m doing a story on the old Good Shepherd Home,” I said. “I understand you lived there for a while when you were a boy.”

“How the fuck d’you know that?”

“I found a picture of you and some other kids from the home in a back issue of the Gleaner.”

“No shit?” A smile full of broken teeth flashed through his ragged beard.

“That’s right. You were nine years old in the picture. I’m looking for people who lived at the home when they were kids. Someone who lived there around the same time as you has told me some interesting stories about the place. I’m trying to get more information.”

He stood with one hand on the edge of the door as if barring my way. “Whadaya wanna know?” He shifted his weight from one leg to the other. He looked inside over his shoulder.

I could see this was not going to be a long interview. “Well, for starters, how long did you stay there?”

“Let’s see. . . .” He scratched his hairy chest. “I don’t know for sure. About a year maybe.” He looked past me at someone in the parking lot. He raised his fingers to his mouth, let out a sharp whistle, and yelled, “Hey, Buck, don’t forget about tonight.”

“Don’t you forget,” Buck yelled back.

I said, “I won’t take a lot of your time, Gary. I know you’ve got things to do. I just have a few more questions.”

“So ask ’em.”

I took out a pad and pen. “How did you like living at the Good Shepherd Home? What was it like there?”

“I didn’t much care for it,” he said.

“Why not?”

“It was too strict. And we had to pray all the time.”

“Really? The home wasn’t run by a church, was it?”

He glanced over his shoulder again. It was a nervous glance, as if he was afraid someone might be listening to us. “I don’t know. Different preachers came in on Sunday. But that’s not what I’m talkin’ about. Every few hours, every day of the week, it was prayer time.”

“What if you didn’t want to pray?”

“Ha!” He laughed sarcastically. “You only didn’t want to pray once. If you didn’t want to pray, or if you just didn’t pray along with the others, you got locked in a small room in the cellar for hours with nothin’ to eat or drink. And God help you if you took a leak down there.”

“It sounds like a dungeon,” I said.

“That’s what it was, a freaken dungeon.”

“The people who ran the home, Mr. and Mrs. DeLong—apart from being strict and making you pray, how did they treat you? Did you feel they were trying to help you?”

“As long as you obeyed their rules, it was all right. It was just too strict is all.” He glanced behind him a third time.

“They were supposed to be your foster parents. Did they act like parents who cared about you?”

He fluttered his lips. “Hell no. They was more like drill sergeants. Or slave drivers. They made us do chores around the house and work on the farm. One of my jobs was to clean out the pig pen in the barn. We didn’t get paid nothin’. They said we had to earn our keep. When we were in school, we had to get our homework done before we could play games or watch TV. There wasn’t much we was allowed to watch on TV.”

“Gary,” I said, “you might find this hard to believe, but your description of what it was like to live there makes it sound a lot better than what other people have told me.”

“I can’t help that. I’m just tellin’ you what it was like for me.”

“I appreciate that. That’s exactly what I want you to do. But let me ask you this. Did you ever see a policeman take one of the kids out of the home and then bring him—or her—back the next day? Did that ever happen—”

He cut me off: “No.”

“Are you sure? Because—”

“I answered your question.” He glanced backward again. “Look, I’ve got stuff to do. My wife’s gonna start bitchin’ at me.”

“Please. This is important,” I said. “Do you know if any of the kids there were ever sexually abused when they were taken out of the home?”

He reared up and shook his head. “No! If somethin’ like that ever happened, I never heard nothin’ about it.”

“I’ve been told that a sheriff’s deputy used to come to the home and take a little boy to some guy’s house for ‘playtime.’ Did you ever hear anything like that from the other kids?”

His lips curled as he bared his broken teeth and struggled to control his voice. “What the shit’s wrong with you? Don’t you understand English? I said no! Period!”

A young woman in sweatpants and a T-shirt that bulged like a watermelon appeared beside him. She looked as if she was due any minute. “What’s goin’ on, Gary?” she said. Her eyes met mine for a moment, then fell. She was about eighteen, and she had a pretty face—a lot prettier than her scruffy husband seemed to deserve. Her hair was rumpled from sleep.

“Go back and lay down,” he said. “Everything’s okay.”

“It don’t sound okay,” she said. “Who are you, mister? Do we owe you money? If we do, you’ll get it. We won’t cheat you.”

“You don’t owe me any money,” I said. “I’m very sorry if I disturbed you.”

“He’s sellin’ insurance,” Gary said. “I told him we don’t want none.” He gave me a silent snarl and shut the door in my face.

So Gary was ashamed of whatever had happened to him more than half his life ago, so ashamed that he didn’t want his own wife to know about it. I wondered if he could be made to testify in court. The way he had carried on made me think a good lawyer would have little trouble getting the truth out of him. On the other hand, he had a certain dullwitted stubbornness that might withstand attack. Time would tell, perhaps.