Body Parts (5 page)

In 1970, Karen said, she and Gene had another argument about sex, this time at two in the morning while the boys were asleep.

Again, memories vary drastically among the Ford family members.

Karen told it like this:

She always kept a .38-caliber Magnum in the house, careful to hide the bullets in a separate place so the boys wouldn’t shoot themselves. Karen said Gene got the gun out that night. “If I can’t have you, nobody is going to,” he said.

After trying unsuccessfully to wrestle the weapon away from him, she ran to hide the bullets—only, Gene got to them first. She was scared he was going to kill her, the boys, then himself, so she ran next door and asked the neighbors to call the police.

When she came home, she still didn’t know if the gun was loaded.

“Don’t do this,” she told Gene.

Luckily, at this point, the police pulled up.

“I’m divorcing this man,” she told them. “Take him right now. I don’t want him in the house.”

She said the police took Gene away, and when he came back a few days later, he said something Karen would never forget.

“You won,” he said.

According to Gene, this description of events is another of Karen’s fantasies. “That’s quite a story,” he said. “I’ve never been in jail in my entire life.”

Gene said he’d bought a gun for Rodney to use, once Rodney was old enough to be responsible. And yes, he said, he kept the bullets in a separate place. After an argument at the end of the marriage, Gene recalled, Karen gave the gun to their next-door neighbor, saying she was afraid Gene was going to hurt her or somebody else.

He said he and Karen had sex one last time at her encouragement, but it wasn’t enough to hold them together any longer.

“It’s not working, is it?” Karen told him over breakfast the next morning.

“No, it’s not working.”

“How ’bout thirty days? Is that enough time for you to clean up your affairs and leave?”

“How ’bout today?” he replied.

Rodney said Karen gave him the news in the hallway that morning, saying, “Your father and I are getting divorced.”

Both he and Gene said the police never came to the house.

CHAPTER 3

D
IVIDED
A
TTENTIONS

Within days of his parents’ split, Rodney said, Karen’s new friend Steve Shurtluff came over to the house. Rodney and Gene later shared the belief that this relationship had been going on long before the breakup.

Karen, however, said she didn’t meet Steve, a twenty-four-year-old Vietnam veteran and postal carrier who was seven years her junior, until a year later. She said she introduced him to the boys after they started dating, and they all seemed to get along well.

After about six months, she said, Steve started talking marriage, but she wanted to live together for a while first. They ended up getting married, anyway.

During this time, Gene would take one or both boys to his house in Healdsburg, in Sonoma County, for his weekends with them, often fighting with Karen when he picked them up.

Rodney said he and Wayne always looked forward to those weekends, when Gene would teach them construction skills or take them flying. After leaving the military, Gene had begun buying fixer-upper apartment complexes and remodeling them. He would move into the worst unit while he worked on the others. He’d rent out the finished units, fix up the one in which he’d been living, then sell the whole complex.

One year, Karen said, Gene was supposed to pick up Wayne for his birthday, but he never came.

“Wayne was sitting out on the front doorstep, waiting for his dad, and his dad never called and never showed and [Wayne] was very depressed,” Karen said. “It was a really sad moment for Wayne. It really hurt. His dad was always making promises and letting him down.”

Gene said he didn’t remember doing that, but it’s possible that he could have missed one of Wayne’s birthdays if it fell on one of the alternate weeks that Karen had the boys.

In Steve’s view, Wayne was a nice, shy kid who didn’t know how to express his feelings in a positive way. Rather, he would throw temper tantrums, leave class, or skip school entirely. Steve said he and Karen never talked to Wayne about why he behaved this way; Karen had no ability to communicate about private, intimate things.

Wayne didn’t understand the dance between the sexes, so he was put off when girls would tease him because he couldn’t figure out whether they liked him.

One day, a girl gave him a card at a school party that said, “Wayne, you have too much kindness.” He brought the card home, embarrassed, not understanding why a girl would do or say something like that.

Steve recalled that Karen showed no emotions toward the boys and never hugged them. If one of them got hurt, she would simply try to talk them through it.

By the time the boys were teenagers, Karen and Steve could see that Gene favored Rodney over Wayne, and Wayne could feel it.

“I never saw Gene outwardly shun Wayne or anything like that, but I knew that he didn’t quite understand Wayne,” Karen said. “He didn’t have the rapport with Wayne that he had with Rodney.”

Gene later said that he and Rodney were a lot closer in many ways because they were so much alike, but he always paid more attention to Wayne so as not to hurt his feelings.

“He was a pretty envious or jealous person, as was his mom,” Gene said. “If anyone was treated unfairly, it would have been Rodney, and he never complained about it.”

Rodney, who always felt that Wayne got more attention, often called him a mama’s boy. “If we were both in the same spot and trouble happened, I’m the one that got it,” he said.

Karen’s separation from her sons—when Wayne was twelve and Rodney was fourteen—is another example of contrasting perceptions of events among family members. Wayne, Rodney, and Gene have always felt that Karen abandoned her sons, and yet Karen said this accusation amazed her.

According to Gene, twelve-year-old Wayne called him up in tears one day, saying, “Dad, can you pick me up? Can I live with you?”

“Of course,” Gene said. “When do you want me to come get you?”

“Right now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I’m on the porch with my bag. She threw me out.”

Gene said that when he talked to Karen about this, she told him, “I just can’t control him anymore. I don’t want him around me.”

Rodney said he stayed behind to try to ease the tensions between family members and please his mother, but Karen soon kicked him out, too. He said he was fourteen when he came home one night to find the front door locked.

“Let me in,” Rodney said.

“Nope, you’re not getting back in this house,” she declared.

Rodney said Karen told him he was uncontrollable and that “I was just like my dad and she wasn’t going to have me around anymore.”

Rodney went to live with a couple of families in the neighborhood, a few nights here and a few nights there, but that only lasted until his father found out. Gene decided Rodney should come and live with him, which didn’t go over very well with Wayne. Gene said Wayne started acting out because he no longer was the sole focus of his father’s attention.

Gene expected the boys to help with his construction projects when they came home from school. If they didn’t do what they were told, Gene came down on them—and hard.

Not surprisingly, the brothers handled this differently. Rodney enjoyed learning everything he could, while Wayne struggled. He couldn’t do what his father and his teachers wanted and take care of his own needs at the same time.

At a loss for how to handle Wayne, Gene approached his friend Keith Hale, saying Wayne had totally shut down. He asked Keith to talk to Wayne and see what he could do.

Keith found Wayne in his room with the shades drawn, sitting in the middle of a heap of clothes, schoolbooks, and papers. Wayne was rubbing his feet.

Keith asked what was going on and Wayne replied that his feet hurt.

“When he took his socks off, his feet were covered with open sores that had become infected,” Keith later recalled. “He said it had been months since his last shower or even a change of socks.”

Asked if he would like to move into Keith’s house for the summer, Wayne said yes.

“He went to work with me most days,” Keith said. “He got stronger and things were looking good. At the end of the summer, he went back to his dad’s.”

Gene said Wayne was fine until Gene met the woman who would become his wife in 1976. Wayne didn’t like his new sister or Gene’s new wife.

“That upset him, that changed him,” Gene said later. “He didn’t like getting the divided attention, just like way back when, with his mother.”

Keith said there was never a doubt that Gene loved his sons. He just expected them to work as hard as he had growing up. “The big difference I see is that Gene’s family was solid. What he was able to provide the boys was anything but.”

Time periods seem to blur together for this family, so it’s difficult to tell how long Wayne stayed where, but he was traded back and forth between his mother and father and his uncle Jimmy before heading off on his own to Redding when he was about fifteen.

Karen had an entirely different take on Wayne’s adolescent and teenage years.

According to her, Wayne had problems with some of his teachers, with whom she and Steve had met several times. One said that Wayne seemed angry and that he was taking it out on them by being aggressive and belligerent.

When Karen and Steve tried to talk to Wayne about this, he denied there was a problem and refused to discuss the matter further.

Then, Wayne came to her one day and said, “Mom, I want to go live with my dad.”

When she asked Wayne why, he said that his father would teach him how to fly and they could work construction together. So she thought about it for a few days, then told him to go ahead, even though she figured Gene would ultimately let Wayne down.

A few months later, she said, Gene told her that he was having issues with Wayne.

“[He] called me and said there was some problem with Wayne having broken into a store and there was a gun involved and he was pretty angry with Wayne. And he said, you know, ‘He’s an idiot, blah, blah, blah.’”

After that incident, Gene was able to work out an informal arrangement with some friends in the police department so that Wayne would wash police cruisers every day after school for six weeks as punishment. Soon afterward, Wayne stole a car and went joyriding, causing the punishment to be extended by four weeks. Gene said Wayne would not only wash the cruisers, but also rewire them so they didn’t work properly.

Karen said Wayne called to say he wanted to come back to live with her because he was upset with his father. He claimed that Gene had promised to pay him for his work but never did; he felt used.

After Wayne came back, it all went downhill from there. He started staying out late, prompting Karen and Steve to drive around looking for him so he didn’t get picked up by police for breaking curfew. When he’d finally come home, he wouldn’t tell them where he’d been. He only grew more and more defiant.

Then one of his teachers called to complain that Wayne had hit her—an offense worsened by the fact that she was pregnant. She advised Karen to get Wayne some counseling. The incident earned Wayne a weeklong suspension, but Wayne refused to see a counselor.

The tension peaked when Wayne grabbed his mother in the garage during an argument over his behavior. For the first time, Karen felt scared of her own son.

“Don’t ever do that again, Wayne,” she recalled telling him. “Next time, I’ll get up on the chair and I’ll punch you out.”

Years later, Karen would acknowledge that perhaps Wayne felt neglected because she and Steve went out so much; she was having fun for the first time in her life. She said they tried to include the boys when they went bowling or to baseball games, but neither one usually wanted to go. Rodney had his friends and Wayne was involved in wrestling.

Nonetheless, Karen was at her wit’s end, so she called a lawyer for advice on what to do with her out-of-control son. Karen was told that as long as he was living at home, she would be legally responsible for his actions. She didn’t remember whose idea it was, but Wayne went to live with his uncle Jimmy in Eureka.