Whirl

One summer evening in 1988, my childhood friend Bobby Beauford, was murdered on his front porch. Shot in the chest while his wife and children huddled just a few feet away behind a flimsy wooden door. To this day, the crime remains unsolved.

The night he died I was living 70 miles due south, in Bossier City, Louisiana. Living my Air Force life and working with my spouse to raise our kids. I have always felt guilt over Bobby. Guilt because when he died, we were no longer best friends. Guilt because I left him in Texarkana, and guilt because I avoided meeting with his family after the funeral; rushing back to my distant life instead.

If this were televised fiction, I would address my guilt by tracking down his killer and bringing him to justice. Maybe at the last minute he’d pull a knife out of his coat and I’d be forced to kill him. I love it when that happens.

But in this world all I can do is write.

Robert Lee (Bobby) Beauford and I were six when we met. His name was not all that unusual in the 1960’s south. Only much later did I realize how quintessentially southern it was. We lived just a short distance from each other and rode the same school bus. We were both country boys-Bobby much more so than I. His parents owned ten acres of pasture, a huge barn and several dozen head of beef cattle. That seemed like a ranch to me then.

He was a friendly, freckle-faced boy with blondish bangs. He seemed to have the ability to get along with anyone. I think we hit it off because-like most of my friends to come-Bobby was very persistent. Every day he sat next to me on the bus and talked; it must have been two or three weeks of near one-sided conversation. But he was dogged enough to keep talking.

The bus would drop us off at Central Elementary-a magnificent old structure, built in the early 20^th century as the Texarkana Arkansas High School. It’s long gone now, but in the 1960’s it was entering its last full decade of life. If you look at this picture from 1913, you can see the main entrance of the school. As a child, those steps seemed absolutely huge! Just to the right of the entryway you can just barely see a door which led down into storage area beneath the stairs. This is the scene of our first brush with authority.

We found an open can of silver metallic paint. Bobby did not hesitate to make use of it. He wrote the f-word on the side of the building and proudly read it out loud (his reading skills were the best in the whole second grade). I was in awe.

Our principle, Mr. Filogamo, took a different view. Our punishment was to rake leaves at every recess for the next week. This was the first of many such explorations the two of us would make together-usually with Bobby in the lead. If one of us got into trouble, the other was likely involved.

Our mother’s established a hot line.

Bobby was a good athlete and always chosen early for teams. Not so for me. But through my friend, I did get a little exposure to sports and other social activities. Bobby introduced me to other kids and stuck with me if they turned on me. And as we grew, he respected my limits-not pushing for absolute conformance, accepting me as I was. So, though his grades were always much better than mine, I never heard about it. Though I stayed with band through high school, I was never a nerd.

There was plenty for us to do together.  We would play Monopoly and Risk with the Jackson brothers.  If he were winning, the kid could be insufferable-taunting and posturing until one of us (usually me) would erupt in rage.

On hot summer days we’d be gone for hours.  We would hunt the minnow ponds for snakes.  As we entered puberty, we’d hike through the woods to the airport dump.  There we’d find aviation related junk (the moms soon put a stop to our Cessna tire collection) and a new obsession, girly magazines.

We took up hobbies together. Or I should say that Bobby made a hobby of new hobbies. I followed him from stamp collecting, to tropical fish, to model building, then back to tropical fish, then on to coin collecting; the end came when he began to raise beef cattle-this was a little out of my league.

As our daily pre-occupations turned from bicycles to cars, albums to concerts and Penthouse magazine to real girls, my friend was ok that I didn’t follow him down every path he chose.

We explored the world as teenagers–he with vigor, me with trepidation. We each took our different interest and yet, we still remained just as close as when our days were more about playing war and pulling decoy snakes (in the form of bicycle inner tubes) across the road.

As usual, Bobby took the riskier path. He was the first to try weed and booze; the first to have a girlfriend; go to a party and have a job. I held off on all of these things. Yet I was never in his way, never un-cool, always welcome, always greeted warmly.

When we were 14, I think any school counselor would have predicted our future as follows: I was headed for vocational school or the military at best. Bobby was going to college. His grades and attendance outpaced mine by far. He was a solid A and B student. That never changed. Bobby continued to do well academically until the day he dropped out.

That’s right. He dropped out. His girlfriend became pregnant and he quit school to marry her and get a job. He was all of seventeen. He went to work in a mattress factory. Their twins were still-born in the summer of 1976. I suppose I expected the marriage to break up, but it didn’t.

A year went by. When things got too rough between my father and I, Bobby, and his wife welcomed me into their little apartment on Elliot Road and I stayed with them until shortly before leaving Texarkana-running off to join the Air Force.

His string of bad luck continued. In August of 1978, Bobby’s mother died of cancer. I was stationed in Florida and took leave to be at the funeral. This was the last time I would be the friend I’d always been before. The last time I’d live up to my own expectations.

My friend began to make poor decisions. He began living just to get high. Perhaps he was just trying to get away from a life he must have felt trapped in.

I’d visit them when I returned home on leave. He and Beverly were living in the family home he’d grown up in. Sometimes other friends would join us. We would sit in front of the TV and talk-they high, me straight. It’s easy to make stoned people laugh. I liked that.

The last such visit was early 1980. I was on my way to the Philippines. Bobby had been busted for growing dope in the woods. He got probation and he stuck to it. I think this is the last time he would be arrested. He was now the assistant manager of a barbecue place. This was the latest in a series of jobs, but he seemed to feel this one suited him well. He talked of getting his GED and of a career in the restaurant business.

The next three years would be a time of immense change for both of us. I kept up with Bobby through my mother. She wrote me weekly and always fed me the little bits of gossip she had. So I knew he a daughter he adored. I knew he split up with his wife. I knew he was single for a period of time, partied pretty hard, and then re-married. That’s what I knew.

As for me, the Philippines nearly killed me. In the end, what saved me was family. I married my Filipino girlfriend of two years in January of 1983. She had a 10 year old daughter, so at 25, I was now a father. Now I had responsibility and now I was worried. As we made plans to return to the states in July, I wondered how well my mixed-race family would go over in the racist south.

They welcomed us with very open arms. Bobby and his new wife helped mom to host a wedding shower for us. Most of the community came.

It seemed to me we had gone in totally opposite directions. Now I was the one that smoked dope and Bobby was actually going to church.  But these were good things. Bobby was making progress. He was now an assistant manager at Catfish King, a rising chain store in the area. He felt that in a couple of years he’d be getting his own store.

I could tell he was deeply in love with his new wife.  We met as couples once or twice, but it was awkward and didn’t feel the same. I only saw him occasionally in the next few years.

In 1986 my family and I were re-assigned to Bossier City, Louisiana. Now that we were only an hour away, I vowed I would re-establish my connection with my friend.  But I rarely made the effort to visit him, and he never reached out to me either.

I rationalized it was the job, the family, my schoolwork. Maybe I just thought there was plenty of time. Looking back on it now, I think the real reason was that I found it hard to mix the life I’d built on my own with the life I’d known growing up.

The last time I saw Bobby was in early 1988. I stopped by the restaurant in mid-afternoon. He came out to greet me as though it were just a regular thing. I don’t remember the specifics of our visit, but I left with the impression he was doing OK and that his career with the company was looking good.

And then he was dead. Murdered at 29.

My mother called me at about 6 AM.  At first I was numb to it.  I hung up the phone; put on my uniform, and trundled off to work as though it were any other day.  But by noon I realized I wasn’t really working-just going through the motions.  So I went home to be with my kids; finding compfort in just their presence. 

The funeral was two days later.  I was one of his pallbearers. I didn’t even know the other guys and felt like a complete stranger.  I’d known bobby for 20 years by then, but his was now a different world.  They were so kind and welcoming to me, and yet I couldn’t embrace it.

When we went through the receiving line his father hugged me tight. He seemed so happy I was there.  “We’ve lost our Bobby” he said. He asked us to stop by the house, but I deferred with some poor excuse.

Why?  Why did I do that?

This was a man who had known me for 23 of my 29 years. He’d been a surrogate father to me.  Here was the gentlemen who’d had signed me up for little league and drove me to games-filling in for a drunken father.  In the days before soccer moms, Mr. Beauford, had done his part of the rotation; hauling us in his pickup to the roller rink and the movies on countless occasions.

Now his son, my best friend, lay in the dirt not 20 feet away and I rejected him.

Call it survivor’s guilt, call it selfishness, or call it life. For some reason I’d drifted away from my friend at a time when I could have finally paid him back for what he’d helped me find–the courage and confidence to find my way into the world.

Texarkana is a good place with good people, but it has nary a scrap of economic viability. Those who stay usually stand in one place. Those who leave usually do not come back for good.

I know today that I could not have rescued Bobby. He would have had to do that himself. I just wish he’d had the time.

A few weeks after the funeral I had a dream. In it, I am back in the church where Bobby’s service was held. The casket sits in front of the altar and I am walking down the wide center isle towards it, gliding over the dark-stained hardwood floors. As I reach the casket, I see myself laying inside, wearing my Air force blues.

It’s been 19 years, but Bobby still drifts into my dreams now and again. He and I are usually trying to escape from something: a ship, a horrible factory, a ruined city. We fight through it together but always, just as we reach the end, he simply disappears.

© 2007 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.