Chapter 7

A Sadistic Little Boy

Julie Frame, a second-grader, was fidgeting in her seat when her glasses fell off and banged along the floor of the bus. They landed somewhere under her seat.

Across the aisle, sitting one row back, her classmate and neighbor, Wayne Nance, a freckled, redhead who was also eight years old, reached down to pick them up.

Julie and Wayne were on the schoolbus, headed home. In the seconds that it took for Julie’s glasses to slide across the floor underneath her, she hoped they hadn’t been broken, because maybe her mother would be mad. Wayne could see as he lifted them from the floor that they were intact. But Julie’s relief just as quickly evaporated. She saw the tease in his eyes.

“Give ’em back,” she demanded.

“Sure,” said Wayne.

“Give me my glasses!”

Wayne held her plastic frames up in front of him. And somehow Julie knew what he was going to do even before he did it. She watched in anguish as he snapped her glasses in two and threw them back across the aisle, where they landed in two pieces—on her lap and on the floor.

Julie broke into tears, thinking for the rest of the short ride home about what her mother would say, and fitfully trying to protect what was left of her precious broken eyeglasses.

Marge Frame was indeed mad when her daughter walked through the door, sobbing, telling her what Wayne had done, reaching out her hand to show her. Elmer Frame, Julie’s father, was angry, too, and he decided it was time to have a talk with the boy’s father.

“Aw c’mon, Elmer, boys will be boys,” George Nance said, standing in the doorway of the trailer. “What do you expect from an eight-year-old boy?”

Marge and Elmer didn’t really know, because they had girls. But they knew there were many other boys Wayne’s age at El-Mar Trailer Park, which they owned and operated, and none of them seemed to get into as much trouble as Wayne.

The couple had given their place its name, El-Mar, a shortened combination of both their names, out of the great pride they both took in the park they had started on a bit of unincorporated city land on Missoula’s northwestern outskirts. It was the first of its kind in Missoula, because it was designed at the outset as a trailer park. There would be fifty home lots, each abutting a paved street. No other park in Missoula had paved streets yet. Elmer and Marge screened prospective tenants carefully. There was an application process, complete with interview.

When George and Charlene Nance applied for a place at El-Mar, they were living in a house at 540 Kent Avenue, on Missoula’s expansion-bound South Side. But their family was growing and they needed more room.

To Marge and Elmer, George and Charlene seemed industrious people. They both worked. George was a trucker, Charlene a waitress. Their children were attractive. There was no hesitation. The family passed muster. The trailer the Nances had purchased was moved to a rented space on Tina Avenue, the main artery of the park. They lived on Lot number 8, and in time they would trade trailers with another family and move to a different lot on Kathy Jo Street, one of the park’s tidy lanes off Tina Avenue.

Marge watched the redheaded, freckled Wayne develop into a cute little boy, running around their planned neighborhood, playing cowboys and Indians just like all the other children. But she detected something in Wayne that she didn’t see in the other children, or in her own girls. It was a mean streak. She presumed it was because he was a little boy, but it bothered her. It didn’t sit well, either, that Wayne’s father always explained away Wayne’s misbehavior by saying that it was somehow Julie’s fault. Julie was picking on him, he would say, because her dad owned the park. Julie and her sisters had gotten on Wayne’s case. That was the explanation.

The Frames were not privy to the goings-on in the Nance household. While they sometimes got to know families quite well, there were fifty families living in El-Mar. Whole towns in Montana sometimes had fewer people to get to know. And there was no reason to inquire. There was no trouble with the rent. But when the time came for the Nance family to move on, Marge and Elmer weren’t sorry to see them go. It wasn’t because of anything to do with George and Charlene. It was because of Wayne. It was something he once had done. Elmer had witnessed it.

It was a bone-chilling winter day. The sky was crystal clear, a light sapphire blue overhead that turned a shade darker, almost cobalt, as it reached to the horizon. Elmer was outside, performing one of the many chores that had to be done to keep everything ship shape, which was just the way he liked it.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Wayne coming, though Wayne didn’t see him.

The boy seemed to be more or less aimlessly making his way down the street, and he was about to pass by the incinerator, a cone-shaped affair with a hinged door near the top of the firebox, where everyone burned their trash. The box was pretty well stoked when Elmer left it, and he hadn’t bothered to close the door. He knew that the family of kittens that scampered around his feet would soon climb up to the makeshift shelf that was created by leaving the door open, and that there they would huddle against the cold, staying warm by the blazing fire.

Elmer saw Wayne stop to take a look. The kittens were curled up, just as Elmer knew they would be. In the same moment that Elmer felt a chill, as he wondered what Wayne was thinking, his mind was horrified. The boy walked over to the firebox. Elmer had no time to shout at him. In the blink of an eye, Wayne lifted the door on its hinge, and the kittens slid down into the fire.

Elmer wasn’t sure whether to tell his wife about it, but he did.

“Maybe boys do that,” she said, her tone resigned. She was trying to understand. “But maybe he has a sadistic streak.”

It was difficult for the hard-working, value-driven Frames to understand. After all, weren’t George and Charlene hard working, clean people, who just like everyone else were trying to scratch together a life in these promising times? These heady Eisenhower years.

In the 1950s, even Hollywood had come to Missoula to make a film that would romanticize the place. Timberjack, a story about life in America’s logger camps, starred Sterling Hayden, Vera Ralston, Hoagy Carmichael, and Chill Wills. And on Missoula’s main thoroughfare, in the fall of 1955, the making of this movie, which portrays a son’s search for his father’s killer, was the talk of the town. While the movie entertained a nation at large that ate up its gee-whiz true grit, it also served to commemorate a historical fait accompli that Montanans were well aware of. These were boom times. Montana’s vast stands of Douglas fir, spruce, and Ponderosa pine had steadily become more and more important to a building boom and had provided a growing source of employment. By 1955, the lumber industry was at its peak. The number of men working in the woods and in the mills would decline as the decade closed out, but the foundation had been laid for a diversified wood products industry. Big money was once again discovering Montana, just as the rich copper kings had done before.

In the midst of this emerging prosperity, on October 18, 1955, Wayne Nathan Nance was born. To Wayne’s parents, this was the big event. George had a son. They had been married nearly three years earlier, on December 28, 1952, in a small ceremony at the North Side home of Charlene’s parents, Nathan and Marva Mackie. Charlene Mae Mackie was a child bride. She was sixteen. George Edwin Nance was twenty-four. The announcement of their marriage appeared in the society pages of the Missoulian, right along with the photographs and marriage notices of other high-school girls who had recently been betrothed. These were simpler times. Eisenhower would soon be sworn in as president, setting the economic pace for the decade.

Eight and one-half months after their marriage day, on September 10, 1953, a first child, Desiree, was born. Charlene was now seventeen. When Wayne was born, almost two years later, his then nineteen-year-old mother gave him her father’s Christian name as a middle name. On September 9, 1960, a second boy, William, was born. On November 15, 1962, a second daughter, Veta, arrived.

By the time George and Charlene had moved their family from El-Mar, in the early years of the new decade, it would be a significant step. The move took them beyond the immediate environs of Missoula, out beyond Hellgate Canyon, past East Missoula, and into the unincorporated tracts of the county. There, in another trailer park, Tamarack Court, named after a tree, the larch, they would make their new home. The neighborhood was called Pine Grove, and Tamarack Court was a shade down-scale from El-Mar. It was located nearer to the roadside and its orientation was to the east, toward West Riverside, Milltown, and Bonner, home to mostly blue-collar families, many of whom also lived in mobile homes but who aspired to live in the sunny suburb of Missoula’s South Side.

George continued to work as a trucker. Charlene still worked as a waitress. The family’s life seemed as if it had unfolded from the pages of a dime novel. The teenage bride. The first child arriving before the requisite nine months had elapsed. The husband, a hulking brute, a truck driver. The wife, who sometimes drank a little too much, a hard-working waitress. More children. No permanent roots. All the routine ups and downs of a marriage not made of money. Charlene yelled a lot at the kids, especially at Wayne, who was always getting into trouble. She would complain to her coworkers in the kitchen at Ming’s Restaurant downtown, as she threw her hands up in despair, that she ought to put him in reform school.

But Wayne always redeemed himself. Despite all his run-ins, he was a good student. His grade-school teachers recognized right away that he was academically inclined. And because he got good grades, he held a certain sway over his classmates. He read a lot. He knew things. He knew more than anyone else did about sex. Whenever anyone had a question on that taboo subject, Wayne seemed to know the answer.

Wayne was physically precocious, too. Though he was of average size and weight, by the time he reached the eighth grade his biceps were as big around as cantaloupes. He was stronger than his overall appearance would suggest, but he lacked athletic finesse to match his strength and he wasn’t much of a team player. Wayne would often throw a basketball too hard at close range for a teammate to catch. But he was a fleet runner and he definitely had a hard head. Once, when he accidentally flipped head over heels on his bicycle, vaulting over the handlebar and landing smack on his head, he skidded across the pavement on his skull. But he just rolled over, stood up, and got right back on the bike. His buddies were amazed one more time.

Most of all, he was provocative. At show-and-tell, he often brought in snakes. When his younger brother Bill had friends over on Saturday afternoons to watch creature films, which they enhanced by pulling the curtains in the living room to make the room darker, Wayne invariably pulled a stunt. Often he would wait for the right moment, and then leap through the door, hoping to spook everyone a little bit more.

Charlene’s big problem was Wayne’s temper. From the early grades on, he was a belligerant troublemaker, and she didn’t know how to stop him. Her bright, studious, oldest son was prone to fistfights, ready to swing at the slightest queer sidelong look. George didn’t help the situation by laying the fault on the outside world, as he did the time Wayne got kicked off the bus for fighting.

When Leo Musberger, the principal of Bonner Elementary School, where Wayne had been enrolled the year before as a third grader, called George to tell him that his son was going to have to find some other way to get to school, because he was being temporarily suspended from the bus for fighting, George blew his stack.

“What authority do you have to kick my son off the bus?” the father blasted back.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Nance, but your son has caused trouble more than once on the bus. He’ll have to get to school some other way for a while.”

“Well, I’m gonna put him on that bus myself. Tomorrow morning. And you better be on that bus yourself if you wanna do anything about it. Just try to stop me,” George warned, hanging up the phone.

Musberger had been told about the latest fight on the bus by the driver, George Otto, who was also the school’s janitor. In both these jobs, he had contact with Wayne throughout the day, and he, too, had lost control of this incorrigible troublemaker. He was rough and mean to the other kids. Otto said he couldn’t manage him on the bus anymore. After Musberger heard George’s antagonistic challenge, he decided to ask the members of the school board whether he should ride the bus himself to enforce the sanction.

On their advice, Musberger decided not to ride with Otto the next day, and when the bus pulled up at the Tamarack stop the next morning, there they were—George and his ten-year-old son Wayne, standing in the snow. George peered through the windows, looking for Musberger.

“Is he in there?” he called up to Otto.

“Nope,” answered the driver, one hand on the wheel, the other at the ready on the door guide.

A nervous moment passed, and George thought the better of it. He turned to Wayne and signaled that it was over. The bus pulled away, and George put Wayne in his pickup and drove him to school.

But whatever lesson Musberger hoped to give Wayne was soon revealed to be a lesson unlearned. Later, as Wayne swaggered past Otto in the hallway, Wayne stopped and looked him right in the eye.

“My dad told me, you gotta get them before they get you,” the little boy said, turning to walk away, speaking now over his shoulder. “That’s my motto.”