Daughters of the Shadow Men

If memory serves me well, I had not lived in Phoenix long until Mother told me I had a phone call from Bruce.  He had learned I had separated from Dean and was living in Phoenix and he wanted to come to see me.  I protested saying that he was married and I did not want to receive any visits from a married man.  Then Bruce told me something to the effect that I was the only person in the world standing between him and a plunge off into the canyon in his car in a suicide he had long considered.  He had to talk to me, so he was coming anyway. 

I went back to my apartment to consider how I might handle Bruce.  Bruce was married to a Boulder girl my sister Ann's age, and they had four children.  When I lived in Boulder, I had decided that I would try to get better acquainted with Bruce who I had heard was a brilliant fellow despite some very disturbing behavior involving his youngest child, a daughter.  She had left home while still a child and gone into foster care, saying that Bruce had molested her. She must have had some of his fierceness in her to take such a step.  I was sure that her mother probably had gone along with her decision because she could not protect her. 

Bruce had bought property in Boulder and had settled his family there while he was still working in Salt Lake.  He worked as a computer programmer and trouble shooter for the armed services and flew all over the country, this was after he had retired from the service. As soon as I got acquainted with Bruce I found out that he was far more brilliant than I had even imagined. I was really quite astounded.  I don't quite know how it was that we began to exchange letters as I started thinking what a good mind he had and talent, but I had already perceived that he was an alcoholic and appeared to be well under the influence most of the time he was home.  My sisters and I were all exchanging huge long letters all the time and I thought we should somehow get Bruce writing, too. 

My sister Linda was the same age as his youngest sister and had stayed in their home quite a few times. My sister Ann had always been good chums with his wife. My sister LaRae was just a couple of years behind him in school so she knew his school history, his penchent for getting in bad fightsand other trouble. I considered that Bruce had a very serious problem from what his youngest daughter had reported to her counselor and he might be a dangerous man to befriend, but on the other hand, I thought he could become a lot more dangerous if nobody interacted with him.  He and his wife Donna tended to isolate, which I did not think would defuse him one bit, and was certainly not good for the other kids, three boys. I doubted that Bruce had been very good for them either, in certain of his moods.   

You will have to remember that I considered my father capable of molesting and was always on guard against him.  The second man who molested me still lived in the community with a good job working for my aunt now that my grandfather was dead.  He was as a matter of fact Bruce's wife's uncle.  I thought other men in the community were molesters. Molesters were very hard to punish by law. I did not think that it was wise to ever think that the law would take care of molesters or other criminal types.  At most some of them might serve jail time, but then they would be out again, living in the communities they had always inhabited. 

No, I thought people had to get the idea of getting involved themselves in the lives of the offenders and their families.  I thought the best way to protect his kids was to go into the mind of that brilliant father and see what his thinking was, proceeding with great caution of course.  For this was how I handled my own brilliant father.  To think the law could do anything with him was laughable.  The only ones that could possibly affect him were the ones who interacted with him. 

When I talked to Dean about this, he went along, because I pointed out to him that he was a very troubled man that I had even married and had kids with. He had gone insane time and again while drunk and attacked me. In my country, perhaps the last frontier, there were a lot of outlaw men like Dean and Bruce.

Dean knew quite a bit about Bruce's early history, too, having gone through school with his oldest sister Marie.  In fact, Marie was the one he had been drawn to while I was pregnant.  She was sitting up front with us, and I caught Dean with his arm behind my back, his hand caressing Marie's beautiful neck.  He did not know I had seen him doing this until we got home, and I hissed at him I was done with him, this behavior was the last outrage as far as I was concerned.  Dean cried when he saw my resolve to terminate the marriage on the spot and apologized, probably the first time he ever apologized for anything. 

Anyway I figured Marie must have been as fascinating as her brother Bruce in her own way, or Dean would not have taken such a risk.  Dean said she was very smart, but very wild.  She was the one who had run away while still in high school and gone to find her mother.  Together Dean and I pieced together the gist of that family's tragic history.  It seems that Bruce's mother, an outsider had married his father, considered a very smart but rather eccentric man, and had gotten involved with the local CCC doctor.  She ran away with him, taking her three kids with her, who weren't very old.

Months later an orphanage notified Bruce's father that she had left all three kids plus the twins she had just given birth to in their care. Bruce's father rushed back there and in spite of the fact that he was told by the errant mother the twins did not belong to him, he insisted on taking them all back home.  Nor had he ever given up the twins despite pleas from the mother later on.  One of the twins was my sister Linda's friend.   

I thought this was a history that somewhat explained Bruce's troubled personality.  He had gotten in very serious trouble a few years previous by getting into a fight with another guy from Escalante, about his age, an alcoholic, too, and after he beat him up, breaking his jaw, he knocked him into a hole fifteen feet deep and left him.  This was on the mountain where an annual dance and mutton fry was taking place.  Gerald, the victim, could not climb out of the hole, and if someone had not heard his feeble cries the next day would have died in there.  It was thought that Bruce had committed a near murder.  I believe he was charged but I don't think he served any jail time. 

Anyway Bruce was invited to some of our parties to which Donna, his wife at first refused to go.  Dean was singing one night I remember as Bruce and I discoursed about everything.  Dean knew I was writing to Bruce at times, and so did Donna, his wife.  She knew she needed all the help she could get with Bruce, so she did not protest.  Bruce, by this time, was telling her that I was a brilliant soul, someone he could finally talk to. 

One night Bruce came by wanting Dean and me to go to Panguitch with him and Donna to some sort of celebration dance over there.  Imprudently we agreed to go.  Bruce kept us all highly entertained, as his sense of humor was the blackest and wittiest I had run into for a long time.  He was brilliant all the way over there, until suddenly we ran into a fellow he was feuding with in his car on the road.  He and Bruce exchanged hot angry shouts as they repeatedly passed one another. Before our eyes Bruce turned into a homicidal maniac. He drove at breakneck speed down the road saying that he was going to kill the bastard. The other fellow probably sensing great danger disappeared. 

Bruce was so obssessed with his war with the other guy I knew to be another outlaw from a more distant town, that he could not have a good time at all to the dance, so I was relieved when we started back home.  Bruce was still so angry and by that time so drunk, that he drove all the way home at a terrifying speed.  I remember him going around a turn on the wrong side of the road at 80 miles an hour.  Once we escaped from that car, both Dean and I vowed once again never to get into a car again with a drunken outlaw at the wheel.  Dean did not like to be at the mercy of another outlaw like himself any more than I did. 

Bruce showed up in Phoenix so fast that I figured he must have driven 90 miles an hour down the road.  I was still so wary of him, without Dean, I was reluctant to let him in the apartment.  It was late and I told him I had to go to work the next morning and he needed to go find somewhere else to stay. Then he said something despicable as far as I was concerned, he said if I did not let him in and talk to him, he would go next door to my mother's!  Daddy was gone and I knew quite well that she would let him stay and even sleep with her if he so desired.

I just could not have taken that, so I told Bruce to come in and we would talk awhile.  We did talk an hour or so, with Gary Dean lying asleep on his couch bed as protection.  Then I got Gary up, telling Bruce he could have the couch, and I took Gary into the bedroom to sleep with his brother Raymond.  He and I slept in twin beds in there.  I did not sleep very well, but Bruce obligingly got up very early and left.  We did have an illuminating talk.  Bruce was an extremely good talker, but oh so stressful.  I was relieved that he seemed satisfied enough just to go back home without even visiting my mother.        

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• #1 Comment from chat2missie 
  4/7/08 10:19 AM | Permalink

  Enjoy your day.
  Missie