Blood Games (24 page)

22

Joanne knew that something was troubling Bart. For several days, he had seemed nervous, distracted. She asked Emory if he knew what the problem was, but he didn’t.

“Something’s eating at Bart,” she told Jim one afternoon in late February 1986, Bart’s senior year in high school. But both knew that it would do no good to quiz him about it. He simply would deny any problems and retreat into himself as usual.

The answer to what was troubling Bart came with the ringing of the telephone after school on Thursday, February 26. It was for Bart. As her son talked quietly on the phone, Joanne knew that something bad had happened. His neck flushed, he looked frightened.

“Mom, I’ve got to go to the sheriff’s department,” he said after he’d hung up. “A friend has been arrested for something he didn’t do and I can testify to where he was.”

Joanne was not about to let him leave the house. “You’re not taking the car and going up there by yourself,” she said. “You sit down here and tell me what’s going on. Something’s wrong, Bart. Something’s been wrong. What is it?”

His friend had been charged with breaking into the high school eleven days earlier and stealing a computer, Bart told her. It had happened the night Bart and three other boys had gone camping at the lake. The boy who had been arrested was one of the camping group, along with his brother, so Bart knew he couldn’t have done it

The fourth member of the camping group, Joanne discovered, was Gary Hampton*. She should have known. Gary was the one friend of Bart’s whom Joanne distrusted and disliked. She really didn’t want Bart to associate with him, but she’d been reluctant to forbid it.

She’d sensed that Hampton was trouble from the first time she saw him. He was older than Bart. He’d dropped out of high school, joined the navy, been kicked out after only a few months. He lived in a trailer beside another trailer in which his grandfather lived. Joanne had driven Bart there to play Dungeons and Dragons. Later, she’d heard that other high school boys went to Gary’s trailer to drink beer.

Joanne had expressed her feelings about Gary to Jim and suggested that he needed to talk to Bart about it.

“He said, ‘Leave him alone,’” she recalled later. “‘Let him make up his own mind. You can’t choose your children’s friends.’”

Now, as Bart told her about his friend’s arrest, Joanne realized that Bart knew more about what had happened than he was telling. When she pressed him, he finally admitted that he had taken part in the break-in, too. Joanne broke into tears. Distress and anger burst from her. She was angry not only because Bart had participated in a burglary but also because he had been ready to lie to cover it up.

Jim came home from work to find Bart quiet and sheepish and Joanne “almost hysterical, ranting and raving and crying.”

“It was the magnitude of the screwup that astounded her,” Bart said later. “She was hopping mad. She told me that was what I got for hanging around with people like Gary.”

“I was very upset,” Joanne admitted later. “I knew with the company he was keeping something could happen, and it had. I felt responsible”

“Look, let me handle it,” Jim told Joanne when he managed to get out of her what had happened.

“Did you do it?” he asked Bart.

Bart looked away from him and nodded. He clearly didn’t intend to talk more about it.

“Bart can turn you off like a light,” Jim said later. “The madder you get, the more he closes you out.”

Jim called a friend, Osmond Smith, a lawyer who lived nearby, and told him what had happened. Smith advised Jim to take Bart to the sheriff’s department, let him admit his part in the break-in, and tell what he knew about it. This was a serious matter, a felony, Smith pointed out. Although it was unlikely that a first offender would be sent to jail, it was possible.

Before Jim had a chance to take Bart to Yanceyville, the telephone rang again. A sheriff’s department detective asked to speak to Jim. Jim knew the man. He knew everybody in the county government. In an apologetic tone, the detective told Jim that he had a warrant for Bart’s arrest. He wanted to extend the courtesy of allowing Jim to bring in his son. They would be right there, Jim told him.

Jim was angry, too, although he tried not to show it. “Bart, the best thing to do when you’ve made a mistake is face up to it, pay the price,” Jim told him. “Your mother and I’ll support you. We’ll get you a lawyer.”

Everybody at the sheriff’s department was obviously embarrassed for Jim as the warrant was served and his son was taken away to be fingerprinted.

Afterward, Bart was taken before a magistrate, another acquaintance of Jim’s, who released Bart to the custody of his father without bond. Nobody had any doubt that an Upchurch would appear for trial.

Bart was quieter than usual after his arrest. He went to school the next day seemingly untroubled about the prospect of facing his teachers and fellow students, who surely would know about the charges against him. Word spread quickly in Caswell County.

Later, Bart would admit to feeling embarrassed at the way teachers looked at him that day, although none said anything to him about it. From friends and classmates he took a lot of kidding. “Hey, man, know anybody who’s got a computer they want to sell? You really fucked up this time.” But the kidding was good-natured, and beneath its surface was a certain awe at Bart’s nerve and daring.

That night, Jim Upchurch got another call from the sheriff’s department. Another warrant for Bart. This one for burglarizing a lake house on the same night of the school break-in and stealing five cases of beer, four bottles of wine, a TV, a set of binoculars and two clocks.

“I thought, shit, what in the world’s going on here?” Jim said later. “I was getting real mad.”

Bart admitted this one, too. The reason he hadn’t mentioned it the day before was simple: he wasn’t sure the authorities had connected the two crimes. No sense in asking for more trouble.

For the second night in a row, Jim had to take his son to Yanceyville for another hearing before the magistrate. This time, Bart assured his seething father that there would be no more surprises.

Although Bart remained quiet about the details of the break-ins at the time, he later claimed that they were unplanned, merely a lark.

The camping trip was supposed to be an adventure, a test of endurance, sleeping out in the bitter cold in the middle of winter, cooking over an open fire. It was planned spur-of-the-moment, something to do on a Sunday night of President’s Day weekend with no school on Monday.

Bart had picked up the other boys in his mother’s beige Ford Escort station wagon. They burdened the small car with tents and sleeping bags and headed for a cove on Hyco Reservoir, not far from Bart’s house, where his uncle, John Thomas, Jim’s half-brother, had a lot and kept two canoes.

At the lake, the boys loaded the gear into the canoes and set out across the muddy red water in search of a campsite. Darkness was nearing, the wind was bracing, and the water was so cold that it had begun to form a skim of ice in spots sheltered from the wind. Although all the boys were bundled in heavy jackets, they began to shiver at the thought of spending the night on the cold ground in sleeping bags. Why should they do that, somebody asked, when right by the lake, unused, were so many summer cottages where they could build a fire and sleep in comfort?

They picked a likely house, set back in the trees, landed their canoes, and scouted out the place as darkness was settling. Nobody was anywhere around. They knocked out a downstairs window. One of the boys went inside and opened the door for the others. They found the power box and turned on the electricity, brought in wood, built a fire, turned on a small black-and-white TV. Meanwhile, a treasure trove had been discovered in the house: cases of beer and several bottles of wine and champagne. They started drinking beer, scavenged the cabinets for food, popped the cork on a bottle of champagne.

“At first, everybody was saying, ‘Oh, hell, we’re going to get in trouble for this,’” Bart recalled. “After everybody had a few beers, it was ‘Hey, this is fun.’ Out in the middle of Caswell County. Wasn’t anything else to do. It was something we did. We just got a little adrenaline rush out of the whole deal.”

The rush soon died, however, and somebody suggested that they go for a ride. Bart and Gary hiked back around the lake and got his mother’s car. Then they ferried his uncle’s canoes back one at a time, sticking out of the back of the station wagon. Finally, they loaded up the remaining cases of beer, the wine, and the easy-to-carry items that they found in the house, and set out whooping and hollering. They were talking about video games as they rode into Yanceyville.

“Somebody said, ‘Well, hell, let’s go get a computer while we’re at it,’” Bart recalled. “I don’t know whose idea it was.”

Bart knew that a physics teacher at the high school always left a classroom window slightly open. They went through that window and snatched an Apple computer, complete with color monitor and keyboard, from a classroom. Bart dropped the keyboard and broke two keys on it as he was running back to the car.

The four boys then went to Gary’s trailer, where they hooked up the computer and played with it while they polished off more of the beer. Lulled by alcohol, they finally slept for a few hours. After they awoke, Bart drove his two friends home, then went home himself to proclaim his camping trip a cold but satisfying success.

Bart was keenly aware of his parents’ anger about his arrest. “They were mad for a good long while,” he said. “At the time, I couldn’t say very much to them. I couldn’t do anything but hang my head and be real meek and humble.”

“He didn’t show a lot of guilt,” his father said later. “He was mainly concerned about the outcome.”

A month after his arrest, Bart appeared before Recorder’s Court Judge Peter McHugh in the old white courthouse in Yanceyville, where his great-grandfather once had been so prominent. Jim had again hired George Daniel, who had helped Joanne out of the wool business mess, and Daniel had worked out a plea bargain with the district attorney. The charges would be consolidated and reduced to misdemeanors in exchange for Bart’s plea of guilty. Judge McHugh sentenced Bart to a year in prison, suspended on the following conditions: that he be on supervised probation for three years; that he remain in school in good standing or be employed full-time; that he not associate with Gary Hampton and the other two boys with whom he committed the break-ins; that he perform 150 hours of community service in the next six months; and that he pay court costs and restitution. That was a considerably lighter sentence than the maximum twenty years in prison.

“I don’t think anybody wanted to prosecute Bart to the fullest extent of the law,” his father said later. At the same time, he was concerned that he had been lax in disciplining Bart. He had left it to Joanne to be the disciplinarian in the family, and she often had been frustrated in reprimanding Bart.

“Bart was her match,” Jim said later. “He was always a discipline problem, from the time he was real small. Tell him something, he wouldn’t do it. He just didn’t mind very well.

“He knew how to push you, knew how to get your temper up. He used to make Joanne terribly mad. She’d say, ‘I’ll be glad when he turns eighteen and leaves home.’ It would just drive her bananas. Sometimes I think he just wanted to see how mad he could make you before he gave in. It was almost a game sometimes, I think. By the time he got to high school, it was more like an attitude problem, like he just resisted anything you wanted him to do.”

Weldon Slayton thought that Bart had an attitude problem, too, and he was afraid that Bart had moved beyond the point where his behavior could be greatly influenced by parents or teachers. “James just had no moral compass to go by,” he said later.

Slayton had regrets about Bart. Bart was so smart, so capable, yet he had no direction, no goals. His grades were barely above average. He rarely exerted himself to accomplish anything. Slayton could recall only one time that Bart had really thrown himself into a project, an oral presentation on Mark Twain, in the first semester of Bart’s junior year.

“He talked about his life so convincingly,” Slayton said, “as if he actually were living it.”

“That’s the type of thing I really wish you all had done,” Slayton told his class after Bart had finished.

He gave Bart an A on the assignment and a 99 for the semester, the highest grade Bart ever got. It helped Bart to get appointed to the Governor’s School for special students the next summer, after he was named a National Merit semifinalist. If Bart had applied himself more to his studies and less to Dungeons and Dragons, Slayton knew, he probably would have been chosen to attend the School of Science and Math. Science was his one genuine interest. He always watched the
National Geographic
specials and science-related shows on TV. He read a lot about astronomy. His mother knew that he really wanted to go to the School of Science and Math and that he was hurt when his friend and dungeon member James Long was chosen and he was not. Nobody other than his mother would know that he cared at all about whether he was chosen, though, because he never showed his disappointment.

Slayton couldn’t help but wonder if Bart had applied himself and received more of the recognition he was so capable of achieving, if he still would have taken such great pleasure in thwarting the system to show he didn’t care. He was always doing outlandish things to draw attention to himself, such as listing in the school yearbook all kinds of clubs to which he never belonged and activities in which he hadn’t participated.