“When we were little kids, her mom worked down at the American Legion in Everett. She was a bartender, and she would never give the kids a dime. All of us were hungry. We’d be lucky to get a can of tuna fish out of her. We’d go over after school, and Cindy would have to beg like hell till her mother threw out a can of tuna fish just to get rid of us.
“When Cindy was just a little girl, her mom started going out with a guy named Dick. I seen Dick and Cindy’s mother get in a fight and all of a sudden Dick hauls off and smashes her in the face—right in front of Cindy. When she was eight, her mom got married to another guy, and a couple of years later, her new stepfather tried to mess with her in bed. Cindy finally told her mom when she was barely eleven years old. The stepdad just told the mom he was drunk and when he crawled in bed with his daughter he must have thought it was his wife. The mom believed her husband and didn’t believe Cindy and the two of them finally kicked her out of the house when she was almost twelve. From then on, Cindy was always the black sheep of the family. They called her a ‘box of rocks,’ and they still do.
“After she left home, she moved in with a guy named Mike—he’s a notorious ‘cedar pirate’ up in Monroe, Washington. He used to drive his old World War One meat wagon down to the lumberyards and go over the fence and toss back blocks of cedar shingles and shakes that he would sell for drug money. Then, a few years later, Cindy lived with another guy named Abe and the two guys together were both notorious coke dealers. Cindy would live with the one who got her the most coke.
“Years later, Cindy and Abe were stealin’ aluminum guardrails and tryin’ to sell ’em at the metal scrapyards for drug money. They got caught. While they were out on bail, they went out to get an eight ball of cocaine and they ended up sellin’ it directly to an undercover cop. Those were the crimes that made Cindy decide to hightail it out of town and run off to New Mexico.
“I started dating her when we were both sixteen. I owned an old beater Chevy, and one afternoon I saw her walkin’ down the road and I pulled over and asked her out for the first time. I said, ‘Hey, you want to get in my car and go drink beer in the gravel pits?’ She looked me over real good and said, ‘Sure’
“I remember she liked sex rough and hard. She’d dig in her fingernails and I’d have these big ole scratches on my back and it would take a long time until the claw marks would go away. She liked to have her ass slapped. She liked me to hold her down and tell her I was going to rape her. She always wanted to partner swap. She’d say to me that maybe we should ‘rape somebody, maybe a prostitute.’ I told her that shit might be fun to think about, but I wasn’t gonna do it—ever. I told her flat out, ‘I’m not gonna go to jail.’
“She was never ashamed of anything. She’d take her clothes off right in front of other people. She’d stand on the side of the road and take a piss. She really got off on ‘doing it’ in public.
“What really pissed me off was when she’d have sex with other men. I’d be comin’ home from work and I’d see some other guy jumpin’ out of the bedroom window. You could never trust her. I had a rich friend, a guy named Frank, and he had a real nice black Corvette. She latched on to him and he moved in a few days later and she stayed with him for about a month and then split.
“She’d even screw old men for money.
“One time we got into a fistfight and she went over to Marysville and looked up this old man named Walter. He’s in his sixties now. They came back with a U-Haul truck and backed it up to the house and hauled everything out. He’d give her money and she’d give him sex. She stayed with him for about a week.
“Another time Cindy was screwin’ some ‘Chink’ doctor for painkillers. She’d trade the pain pills for coke.
“She’d even trade sex for dental work. A long time ago, she went downtown and had some doctor declare her mentally incompetent and she’s been collecting SSI welfare money ever since. I swear she hasn’t worked a day in her life. She’d spend all her money on booze and drugs and there wouldn’t be any left over for her teeth. So when her mouth got sore, she’d go over to this place right outside of town. Every time she went there, the dentist would fill her teeth and she’d give him a big ole blow job.”
The woman in the bar sat quietly and listened to the man talk. She’d known Cindy Hendy for twenty years and currently was a born-again Christian, a far cry from her lifestyle when she used to drink all night with Cindy in the downtown bars.
“She and her sister are two of a kind,” she said. “Their mother was married six times to six different men, and between the two daughters, they have eight kids by eight different men. She even had sex with her sister one time and another time they were both in a motel room and they had sex with the same man. Cindy had all her kids raised by other people. She’s had at least fifty boyfriends since I met her.”
The ex-boyfriend interrupts.
“Her whole life revolved around cash registers—ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching! I had a real nice black Camaro one time. It was fast and I could always outrun the cops. She talked me into signin’ the car over to her name, and then she sold my car and told me she never wanted to see me again.
“When we were together, she got pregnant by another guy. She’d always just sit around the house all day tryin’ to figure out how to get high. She never paid for anything. One afternoon this guy comes over to clean the carpet and she’s so horny she screws the goddamn carpet cleaner! His name was Eddie and seven months later baby Shane was born. He only weighed two pounds when he was born. He was in the hospital for five months. He almost died.
“When Shane was a little boy, Cindy and Eddie just passed him back and forth. One time, when he was seven years old, Cindy overdosed on sleeping pills, and I guess it was pretty scary for Shane. She was out stone-cold on the floor and he was shaking her. Shane’s a good boy—he’s still got a big heart. That night, he had to call the nine-one-one operator all by himself.
“Shane, he was never given nothin’. He was never given a brand-new bicycle or new clothes—or nothin’. Cindy would go off partyin’ and leave him with her mother for days. He started stealing things. When he’d get in trouble and go to jail, Cindy would go into his bedroom and steal all his stuff, like his stereo, and sell it off and buy drugs.
“When he grew up, he turned into a thief, just like his dad. His father has been in and out of prison his whole life. He is illiterate. He can’t even read or write his own name. Eddie’s on the run from the law again right now—probably for burglary. He’s the best thief in Snohomish County and that’s what Shane does, too.
“They don’t know how to do nothin’ but steal.
“One time Shane was robbin’ an elementary school and the cops sent in a German shepherd and he was all chewed up. Another time he stole firecrackers and set them off in the front yard and he caught the whole yard on fire. I remember one time he robbed a greenhouse down the street and Cindy was real happy with all the nice shrubs he brought home.”
This time the woman interrupted the man.
“I know Cindy fought a lot with her boyfriends. Like cats and dogs. They’d hit each other in the head with lamps, throw television sets or whatever was in their way. Shane told me one time he was hiding under the bed and she kicked him in the head. He also told me that after years of fighting, he thought, she got used to the beatings and he wondered if she even enjoyed it in a strange kind of way.
“He’s twenty-two years old now and he just got out of jail for having sex with some little fourteen-year-old girl.
The man in the black-and-blue plaid shirt had a lot more to say about the rest of the family. “Heather is nineteen and she belongs to me and Cindy. She’s pregnant and just about ready to give birth to a baby boy. She talks to Cindy more than anyone else. When she was growin’ up, though, it was real tough on her. Cindy used to read a lot of true crime and she’d always have these witchcraft books layin’ around her trailer. She’d try to pawn ’em off on the kids. She and Heather used to get in these big arguments, and if you pissed her off, she’d