Velociworld

MAXINE

The bitter, sad story of Maxine Smith has haunted me for decades. I've started to write about it several times, but it always seemed a callow exercise at best, a James Ellroy exploitation at worst. But she's dead these long years anyway, I doubt anyone gives a shit anyhow.

Maxine was a year ahead of my oldest sister, Class of '68, Effingham County High. The schools were small enough in those days everyone rode the same 1940's era Bluebird to school, from first grade to twelfth. Maxine lived even farther north in the county, near the Screven County line, in Egypt.

I remember Maxine vividly as a fifth grader, because she always saved a seat for me. The Futch clan also boarded the bus in Egypt, and Johnny Futch always got carsick and puked his cooked cabbage breakfast on a seat, meaning the rest of us had to triple up, seats being at a premium. Maxine always let me sit next to her. She was continually studying her Gregg Shorthand textbook. I suppose she had ambitions of being a secretary, and leaving the stinking shithole that was her home in Egypt. There were people with money in Effingham, but none of them lived in Egypt. That hamlet was God's Little Asshole.

So Maxine wasn't really pretty or anything, but she had a certain charm about her. A nice country girl. And she graduated that spring, and I knew I'd miss her on the bus the next year.

There was, and is, a spring that feeds into the Savannah River in Newington, called Blue Spring. It used to be a very primitive carve-out in the woods, where one could throw a watermelon in the frigid waters, or a six-pack, and enjoy fresh cold spring water in a private glade. It is now clear cut, and the lack of shade trees means the water only stays cold around the very center of the springhole, but that's life, and progress. Back then, though, you could comb the banks for arrowheads, and the sun never hit your back.

So Maxine, fresh out of high school, went to Blue Spring one night, a week or so after graduation. With friends or alone, I'm not sure. I am sure her luck ran out that night. An escaped felon by the name of Suggs accosted her, and raped and carved her up, and left her dead by water's edge. I remember my father saying the next day, even before Suggs had been caught, that he was the perpetrator. He knew, somehow. My old man was a criminal defense attorney, and knew every scumbag for a hundred miles.

Suggs was caught, of course, and died in prison a few years ago, in his sixties, with a fucked up pair of kidneys. As I recall he was doing 20 for armed robbery when he escaped, and they just tacked on life for the vicious murder of Maxine Smith. His family was aggrieved when he died for lack of a kidney transplant. Imagine.

Maxine's death was my first encounter with murder, and rape, and escaped pyschotic convicts roaming the land. It was, as they say, an eye opener. All those horror stories I'd been told around camp fires, writ huge and real in one fell swoop.

I think about Maxine, and her hopes and dreams, and the brutal crushing day when her parents were told their little girl was savaged by a madman, off and on. I've never dwelt on it, but it's never truly gone away.

Do I believe in the death penalty? Oh, I don't know. Penalty makes it sound like society is guilty of something. I prefer to think of it as the death reward. Suggs did not get his reward.