8
Bobby Dean was from Newark, New Jersey. He moved to town in mid-1959 with his father, a geologist whose company had sent him to this remote Texas prairie to search for subterranean formations that might mean oil. Ranching had faltered in the drought of the fifties, and farmers were having trouble making the transition from cotton to wheat, even now, years after the land was declared worn out for fibrous crops. Oil was the crop of the future, everyone believed, but it had to be found before it could be harvested, and seismograph crews and engineers were a common sight in the small town.
Bobby Dean was seventeen, but he was admitted to the high school as a sophomore on the grounds that he had failed too many credits back in New Jersey. He claimed his mother was dead, but rumors quickly spread that his father, Melvin Dean, was divorced. In that time and in that place, to be divorced was one step away from being damned, and from the moment such news was whispered around dining tables and spread to study halls and drugstore soda fountains, it marked the newcomer with a stigma that said he was, at the least, unique, at the most the child of a “broken home.” Such a mark of shame seemed to suit the youngster, and whether he was aware of the rumors or not, he quickly embraced the role of an unhappy and maladjusted kid, one who was always restless, discontent with the way life had treated him.
At the outset, he was welcomed into the community’s youth culture. Handsome and lithe in appearance, his odd accent reminded many kids of Huntz Hall or Jimmy Cagney, maybe Art Carney, and they laughed at most of his comments and gently chided his lack of understanding of the strange geography and flora and fauna surrounding him.
Soon, though, he began to exhibit traits that went beyond being merely unhappy to find himself in Texas and far from familiar climes. And soon he let everyone know it. Although at first he displayed a boyish charm and a disarming smile that initially drew both kids and teachers to him, anyone who talked to him for very long discovered that behind the wide grin and flashing eyes was something darker and too distant to touch. Those who came to know him in even the slightest way found that he could turn the smile and personal charm on and off at will and that he most often used its advantage when he wanted something or, more commonly as time went by, was trying to keep himself out of the range of suspicion for some kind of mischief.
As time went by, kids found out that his only pleasure was in making everyone around him as miserable as himself. He missed his old friends back home—the “neighborhood,” as he called it—announcing it to anyone who would listen. And he made no effort to find new friends or to fit in. His odd accent encouraged some kids to try to correct his pronunciation, something that never went over well. He rejected instruction about his new surroundings, pronouncing most everything to be “stupid” or “dumbassed.” He didn’t approve of anything he saw, and his dark eyes seemed constantly to scan everything around him, as if seeking weaknesses, imperfections, blemishes for him to point out and criticize. Though tall and well built, he didn’t play football, which made him a social outcast in a town that had made a secular religion of the Friday night fall ritual, and although obviously quick witted and intelligent, he barely passed his classes, never putting forth any more effort than was required to remain in school.
As the falsity of his smiling charm was revealed to the teachers, he had difficulty avoiding their watchful eyes. He was in trouble all the time, always being punished for some infraction or another. He was, as one teacher put it, “trouble on the hoof,” a stamp of identity that instantly put people who hadn’t even met him yet on their guard, eager to “wipe that silly smile” off his face, ready to nip any weedy sign of delinquency in the bud before it took flower and began dropping seeds among the more cultivated youth of the school.
Bobby Dean reacted predictably to this projected role. His personal behavior had been merely surly and resentful at the outset, but now he took on a more aggressive hostility toward everything. He announced to anyone who might hear him that he hated everything about Texas. He called Agatite “Hicksburg” and complained loudly about the lack of things to do—no beach, no amusement parks, no bowling alleys, no new movies. He wished constantly for foods—blintzes, calzone, pastrami, Coneys, and pizza—that few of the small-town Texans had ever heard of, let alone tasted. He referred to the residents, all of them, as hayseeds and clodhoppers.
As time passed, he seemed to insist more and more on being different, of asserting an identity that was, according to him, at least, reflective of his origins. As a result, everything about him seemed odd, out of place. The way he dressed, his whole tough-guy manner—often belied by the quick, phony smile that was so clearly intended to disarm that it instead aroused instant wariness—was alien, almost deliberately designed to distance him from the reality surrounding him. He refused to change any of it, or to adapt, assimilate, even merely to get along. He seemed to take a perverse pride in being deliberately different. He could be found almost any afternoon after school hanging around the drugstore sneaking peeks at the men’s magazines, or leaning with casual arrogance against the side of a building downtown, dressed in his white tee shirt, pegged jeans, and black, pointed shoes. He often wore a leather motorcycle jacket and stared deliberately and rudely at passing cars through thick, aviator-style shades he wore to school one day and refused to remove unless a teacher threatened him with punishment if he didn’t. After a while, even those most dedicated to reforming him, even to breaking him, gave up and stopped wasting class time arguing with him about the sunglasses. The victory, minor as it was, seemed to inspire him. From then on, every expression was a dare. Every smile quick to become a sneer. Every glance a disapproving evaluation. He challenged everyone he talked to, made each statement a demand that questioned not only the authority but also the very integrity of whomever he addressed.
Once the shades had been firmly adopted as part of his image, he started wearing his hair in a slick, heavily pomaded ducktail with a short deliberate forelock hanging defiantly over his high forehead. He began to swear a great deal, peppering his language with shocking curses and oaths even when he spoke to adults. “I didn’t hear such talk when I was in the Marine Corps,” Fred Tallwater, the druggist, said. “I’d have been busted down just for thinking half the things that young punk says.”
Melvin Dean, a tall, distinguished man with prematurely gray hair and a dapper mustache, was nearly as hard to get to know as his son was impossible to come to like. Taciturn and curt in his manner and conversation, he avoided the company of other oilfield engineers who tended to gather at the drugstore or lodge halls in town. Many townspeople tried to draw him out to join churches or the country club, but he politely refused all invitations. He claimed that his job gave him responsibilities that covered a five-county area and kept him away from home a great deal, and he had no time for social activities. This also meant that Bobby Dean was on his own for days at a time. The snug little Cape Cod-style cottage they rented was maintained by a Negro couple the elder Dean hired. Neighbors reported that the pair arrived dutifully every Wednesday, she cleaning inside while he took care of the lawn and shrubs or any other outdoor chores that required attention. Everyone agreed Bobby Dean’s energies would have been better spent in the completion of such labor.
From time to time, naturally, school officials summoned Melvin Dean to a conference regarding his son’s misbehavior and poor scholastic performance. Each time, the father expressed disbelief at such negative reports. He explained that his son had not adjusted well to the relocation, and that he had been advised by “professional school counselors back home” to exercise patience and to indulge what “harmless excesses” the boy might display until he could acclimate himself to these strange new surroundings. The suggestion that some eastern educational authority was “professional” and they were not offended almost everyone at the school. When the comment got out, more were offended by the notion that the small town’s surroundings were “strange” in any regard. The principal and teachers continued to press Melvin Dean to take his son in a firm hand. Almost always, he promised that he would “have a word” with the boy, but none of his words had apparent effect. The teachers concluded that there would be no help from the parental quarter where Bobby Dean was concerned.
Although Bobby Dean was by no means the only teenager in the high school who smoked, he was among the few to do so openly, and he was the first to carry a pack brazenly rolled up in his tee-shirt sleeve as he moved down the halls of the school building. He greeted criticism or disapproving looks with a vile curse or an extended middle finger and a defensive glare from his dark eyes over a snarl of defiance. As with the attempt to ban his sunglasses, teachers soon gave up trying to order him to stop. It was just easier to allow him to go on. “Let him make a fool of himself long enough, and he’ll get tired of being lonely,” Clara Lovelady, the school secretary, advised frustrated faculty who sat around the lounge and lamented their inability to control or change him. “He’s like a dog that barks too much. Ignore him long enough, and he’ll get tired.”
Bobby Dean didn’t get tired. Instead, he began extending his impudence beyond the school, reacting even to a casual “hello” or nod from a passing pedestrian with the obscene sign and a snarl of derision. Tyree Golden, the local farm reporter and an aspiring Rock ’n’ Roll guitarist, once said that Bobby Dean’s middle finger got more airtime than Wolf-man Jack. But after he made the remark several times, Tyree was seen sporting a busted lip and a black eye, and he said no more. From that point on, Bobby Dean began developing a reputation as a physical threat as well.
Most of the kids at school said that Bobby Dean carried a large, razor-sharp switchblade knife, although no one had actually seen him pull it out, and during his several trips to the principal’s office he was never caught with it on his person. Word around the school, though, was that no one was brave enough to frisk him when he came in for punishment or detention. Most of the kids in town said Chet Cunningham was afraid of him, too, and while some said that was bullshit, others noted that Chief Cunningham had never taken the trouble to bother with him and seemed to go out of his way to avoid him. Of course, no one knew if anyone had ever filed any sort of charge against him that would merit Cunningham’s attention.
To most, then, Bobby Dean presented the perfect image of a juvenile delinquent, a hopeless criminal waiting to be sent to prison, a character taken straight out of Chalkboard Jungle or West Side Story, only real, and not likely to reform the way most of those kids did at the end of the movies. That was the talk around the high school teachers’ lounge and a large number of dinner tables in town. “They’ve already got a set of stripes measured for him down in Huntsville,” Hap Bailey said. “It’s just a question of time before he gets there for the final fitting.”
“I just hope it’s not after he’s killed somebody,” Maggie Norbitt, the math teacher, put in. It was well known that she was one of the few teachers who was slow to give in to his recalcitrance. Never taken in by his broad innocent smile and claims of helplessness, she failed Bobby Dean twice and reported him tardy constantly. It was less well known that he had threatened her if she dared do so again, and that she had believed the threat enough to stop the tardy reports, at least.
But it wasn’t just Bobby Dean’s appearance or his behavior that defined his outlaw image. There was something else about him, about everything he said or did, that was infuriating, antagonistic, genuinely dangerous. No one doubted that if it came to any sort of contest, he would win—and that if he couldn’t do so honestly, he would cheat.
Bobby Dean made everyone uneasy, and most everybody who had any contact with him, however casually, voiced an open wish that he would get arrested, drafted, run away, move on, disappear. He had a habit of showing up when he was least welcome, of hanging around when he was least wanted, and of making everything and everyone around him seem petty, childlike, small and far less important than he.
At the same time, those who saw him only through others’ eyes and heard about his antics through gossip and stories expressed doubts. Some, including the town’s several ministers and not a few of the rural folks who came in from the country only from time to time and stopped by the various headquarters of gossip to learn what was new, heard the stories and suggested that maybe everyone was being too hard on him. Horace Eldershot, who moved to the county from Nova Scotia ten years before and started a dairy farm, reminded folks of how hard it was for him and his wife to fit in, how no one would give him local credit or cash a countercheck for him until he’d been around for several years. Doctor Schmidt, who had arrived directly from Holland right after the war and introduced chiropractic to the small town, noted that his accent, which everyone thought was German, kept him even from attending church for nearly two years.
“The boy’s just lost,” Schmidt said in his thick Dutch accent. “One of these days, something will happen, and he’ll find himself. You’ll see.”
Such comments occasionally caused people to wonder if maybe they were being too hard on Bobby Dean. And if they’d ever caught him in an unguarded moment, seen him flash that charming smile, they were taken in totally. Maybe, they said, after a longer period of adjustment the chip would fall from his shoulder, he might turn around and come to understand that fitting in was far better than standing out. Maybe he would discover who he was and come to terms with the rest in time, and the boy behind the scowling mask would emerge. But that was a hard idea to sell, especially to anyone he’d confronted or insulted directly.
As time went by, Bobby Dean began to find his associations outside the school. He started hanging out with dropouts and street hoods, older guys who nevertheless found a role model in this tough talker from the East, one they strove to emulate while they waited to be drafted or arrested, or whatever would take them away from the town they, too, could never fit into. Some began imitating his dress and manner as they tried to get close to him. But few really came to know him at all. Aside from the myopic Charlie Pruitt, Bobby Dean’s most loyal admirer and a boy with troubles of his own, the “punk kid from Jersey” remained a loner, more to be feared than pitied. After six months or so, his constant complaining about being uprooted, moved across the country, and dropped with nothing to do and no way to do it apparently wore his father down. Melvin Dean bought his son a car. Bobby Dean found himself.
It was a 1957 Chevrolet Belaire Airliner, a two-door hardtop, baby blue with white side panels and wide whitewall tires, low mileage, and a stock Chevy 283 V-8 that ran smoothly through the gears of the column-shift three-speed transmission. It had been owned by an elderly Presbyterian minister who died soon after the purchase. His widow was pleased to sell it for the cash Melvin Dean offered, and nearly as pleased to learn that he was making it a gift to his son.
“Maybe it’ll turn him around,” the elder Dean muttered as he signed the papers and handed the widow a check.
With the aid of his dropout friends, particularly Charlie Pruitt, who claimed to know almost everything there was to know about cars—although he had never owned one himself—the preacher’s Chevy went through a marvelous conversion. For several weeks, Charlie could be seen in the Deans’ driveway leaning over Bobby Dean’s new car, working it over, his white tee shirt stained with grease and oil, a wrench or screwdriver in hand, a dwell-tach perched on the fender, his thick, bottle-bottom glasses crusted with sweat and grime.
Bobby Dean was also seen there, sucking on a cigarette and often nursing a beer he made no effort to conceal, watching and learning while Charlie labored on the car. “It’s going to be the hottest wheels in the country,” Charlie bragged to anyone who would listen. “All it takes is know-how and guts.”
Charlie’s boasts were proved to be fact. Bobby Dean was soon humming the Chevy around town with the angry growl of a genuine street rod. A bright silver church key replaced the small wooden cross that had previously dangled from the rearview, and some suspension work brought the rear up, the front down. The original steering wheel was also replaced with a smaller, racing model, and Bobby Dean took to the pose of a rod master quickly, tooling down the city streets with a cigarette dangling from his lip, his left elbow casually bent out the window, his right hand lazily draped over the wheel, his fingers playing with a suicide knob that had a skull and crossbones embedded in the clear plastic. The fender skirts disappeared, as did the Carlsbad Caverns bumper sticker—and the bumper.
It was a foregone conclusion what would happen next. One morning, Bobby Dean proudly drove his newly customized car up to the high school, stepped out, lit a cigarette, and leaned against the fender, offering an open challenge. Soon, he found himself out on the Loop, trying to prove that the car was as hot as it sounded, much hotter than it looked, and that he had the guts to prove it.
Despite its rumbling motor and altered appearance, the car couldn’t do much. No amount of Charlie’s tinkering could make the car fast enough to win even half the drags Bobby Dean accepted. And he was a sore loser. When the race was over, and the cars glided to a stop, he would jump out of his car and yell jeering invitations at his opponents to come over and fight. He accused them of cheating by getting an early jump off the line or by using other maneuvers designed to give them an unfair advantage. But even with Charlie serving as a “flagman,” standing between the lined-up cars, headlights bouncing off his thick glasses and his arms outstretched to signal the start of the race, and even with him giving Bobby Dean a slight edge by tilting his head slightly before he dropped his arms, the Chevy rarely passed the quarter- or half-mile markers ahead of its competitors. When it did, the losers were usually driving smoky old junkers, or they were younger drivers who were out skylarking in their parents’ heavy sedans and station wagons.
The Chevy was built for looks, for comfort, not for speed or performance. And speed and performance were what it took to win out on the Loop.
The high school kids, especially those who had been in some way picked on or victimized by Bobby Dean, were delighted to discover this chink in his armor. They started calling the car “the Sunday Chevy,” when they had some safe distance between them and the juvenile delinquent owner, who openly threatened to put anybody who called it that in the hospital. He sometimes made good on his promise.
The kids continued baiting him, although from a safe distance and almost always in groups. When they came too close, he lashed out, and none wanted him to catch them alone. Over the next several weeks, there was a flurry of fistfights on the school grounds. Then, when Hap Bailey threatened the next combatants with immediate expulsion, they moved to the city park and sometimes were staged in alleyways behind night-darkened buildings. Some altercations became serious and hurt many who were foolish enough to accept Bobby Dean’s vengeful challenges. If a fight didn’t go his way and he was bested by some bigger, quicker, and more athletic kid, he still never gave in. He stood there, bloody and bruised, heaving with exhaustion, but he refused to shake hands and forget the whole thing. Instead, he began seeking other methods of revenge. More than one kid was shoved from behind and crashed painfully into a wall or tripped on the stairs at school, and several boys who had landed enough punches on Bobby Dean’s jaw to send him reeling off in sweaty defeat found themselves coming out of the Dairy Mart, their hands full of burgers or cold drinks, suddenly accosted and sucker punched before they could react. When those tactics failed to stop the continued taunting, though, more violent means appeared.
One night, two hours after Dallas White outboxed Bobby Dean in the alley behind the IGA food store and left him with a broken nose and a smashed pride, Dallas was assaulted on his way home from a date. There were no witnesses, and Dallas never saw his attacker, who came up behind him and used a tire iron to break Dallas’s arm, fracture his skull, and leave him unconscious in the yard for most of the night. Things had gone too far. Chief Cunningham was called. All rumors that he was afraid of Bobby Dean were dispelled, for as soon as he came to the hospital and took one look at Dallas’s bandaged head and arm cast, he went looking for the town’s chief delinquent. But the youth in the black leather jacket and his stripped-down Chevy had disappeared.
The same night Dallas was attacked, someone broke into the Dairy Mart and rifled the flimsy office safe. More than three thousand dollars was missing. Herbert Conroy sheepishly admitted to Chief Cunningham that he had been neglectful making deposits, but he had never been robbed before, never thought about the possibility of being burgled. Although it was outrageous for Conroy to have so much money on the premises, the undeniable fact, verified by Conroy’s ledger, was that it had been stolen. Cunningham, along with almost everyone else, suspected Bobby Dean, but, as with the assault on Dallas, no one saw anything, and nothing could be proved. Melvin Dean was in Houston that week on business and had left his son alone. When he returned, he was, for a change, furious with his son and as eager to talk to him as everyone else. But Bobby Dean was gone, and that, everyone said, was that, and good riddance to boot.
Dallas eventually recovered, although the basketball team lost a great center, and his parents were unable to press charges, as there was simply no evidence to prove that Bobby Dean had been his attacker. That didn’t stop people from saying he was, and it didn’t allay the relief everyone felt now that the troublemaker was gone. “He’s somebody else’s problem now,” Dallas’s father said, when anyone asked him about it. Everyone, even Melvin Dean, who offered to write out a personal check to cover Conroy’s loss but was refused—Herbert was, after all, well insured—assumed the boy, who was now over eighteen and legally an adult, had just stolen the money, hit the road, and would never be seen again. They were wrong.
One Friday night, about three months later, Bobby Dean rolled back into town. The first thing everyone noticed was the Chevy. It was no longer a preacher’s car, and nothing about it suggested that it ever had been. It had a new solid-black paint job, and the exhaust no longer just rumbled. It roared. It was so completely different that at first, everyone assumed he had traded in the old one for a similar model. But a closer look revealed the truth. It had been seriously, professionally customized. The suspension was adjusted, pushing the rear up almost thirty degrees. The rear tires were oversized and slick, with just enough tread to keep them street legal. An ugly air scoop decorated the hood, and sleek chrome lake pipes flew down the sides. The windows were now tinted black, and both bumpers were gone.
He wheeled into the Dairy Mart parking lot, sat idling for a moment, and allowed every eye to rest amazed on the transformed Chevy. Then he got out and leaned against the transformed vehicle, basking in the collective amazement around him. The familiar false smile spread across his handsome face. The words “Sunday Chevy” were whispered, and loud enough for him to hear, but he seemed not to care. He casually lit a cigarette and simply waited, a snide but satisfied expression turned toward his detractors. On both sides of the car in blood red and yellow letters fanning out in flames were the words “Black Sabbath.” No one would call it “Sunday Chevy” again.
Slowly, as curiosity overcame trepidation, a loose circle of kids formed around the smug Bobby Dean, who stood quietly smoking, letting everyone take it all in. Kids had customized their cars before, even, when allowed to do so, turned their family autos into powerful street rods. But this looked more like racing stock: big, mean, powerful.
“Beautiful,” Michael James said aloud, and a chorus of low whistles and murmured agreements answered him.
Bobby Dean crushed out his smoke and smiled a broad, warm grin. Now he was ready to talk. “You goddamn right, she’s beautiful, hayseed,” he said. “And she’ll run that piece-of-shit jalopy of yours to hell.”
He spread his arms and turned in a circle to the crowd around him, loudly offering a new set of challenges to race. The other young drivers, moving in closer, could see why. The Chevy had more changes than merely a new paint job and outer accessories.
“What all did you do to it?” James found the courage to ask.
Bobby Dean grinned, lit another cigarette, and then, in the manner of a teacher explaining a complex series of accomplishments, announced that he had taken it to Dallas and enlisted the aid of some expert racing mechanics who knew their stuff. They worked over the engine, he said, gesturing to the scoop, added dual carbs, a supercharger, and gave it almost 30 percent more power than it had before. But the big difference, Bobby Dean claimed, was the conversion of the old three-speed column shift to a four-on-the-floor transmission and the addition of a big-slip rearend. This, he explained as if he were talking to drooling idiots, not car-savvy kids, not only bought him a quicker jump off the line, but also gave him more power, more speed in the top end.
“I get rubber in all four, and rpms to burn,” he bragged as the crowd of kids came closer to stare, admire, marvel at the Sunday Chevy’s transformation. “She’ll do one-forty on the straightaway, and she corners like a ten-dollar whore. I can blow anybody here off the road. I’ll fucking shut you down.” No one contradicted the boast. It was, as they would all agree later, the hottest looking car they’d ever seen outside a professional drag strip.
“I’ll give it to you, man,” James said, whistling again and glancing at his own ’55 Plymouth with a forlorn expression of loss. “It’s a rod.”
Bobby Dean grinned a genuine smile for once. He was back.
Not everyone was so easily convinced as Michael James, though. Almost immediately, challenges were accepted, and races were run. No one beat him, and within a few weeks, Bobby Dean was the unquestioned champion of the Loop. He could make zero to sixty in six seconds, even on wet pavement, and he left even the best competitors so far behind, it was like they never started. And he kept it in top form all the time. Even at idle, the Chevy’s engine growled low and mean. Some said it sounded like the snarl of a tiger. Bobby Dean and Charlie Pruitt were forever tinkering with it in some gas station’s garage, adjusting the timing or changing the spark plugs or resetting the powerful carburetor’s mixture, changing the oil to a lighter grade to squeeze even more speed out of the modified Chevy V-8.
After a while, no one even bothered to accept Bobby Dean’s challenges. He had beaten everyone in town at least twice, and few were interested in risking damage to their engines by trying him again. Even when he made it “more interesting” and handicapped himself by taking on passengers to add weight, or gave his opponent a two-length head start, few dragsters could even finish with their front fenders even with his taillights. It was pointless to race him. He couldn’t be beat. Soon, no one in town even bothered to acknowledge his brags. They just shook their heads when he dared them to drag.
Black Sabbath was the hottest car in the county, maybe in the whole state. He was the all-time King of the Loop, the biggest man in town. And there was no one, apparently, interested in challenging him for the title.