The faded Polaroid picture of her with her best smile on, the smile in which she kept her mouth closed and had a grin, was her best look in photos. When she smiled like this, it looked like she was up to something. This smile remained with her. In her dying days, when this smile appeared, you still felt like she was up to something. Even though she could barely get out of her recliner.

The photo was obviously from the 80s, and from the background, it was somewhere in the desert.

I found a handful of desert photos taken in a similar style and with the same background; there were even a few of her with a sun-tanned hombre I did not recognize. In that photo, she laughed wildly while the man had his arm around her, squeezing her tight. They were standing by a concrete picnic table in a desert park. It looked like they were having fun.

Cornbread was behind the camera, and this motley trio was somewhere in Mexico or Central America, picking up a load of marijuana. A couple of, “keys”, as in kilograms.

The Cessna that brought them here was retrofitted to carry two people, the pilot and drop-pilot, and a 2,000-pound load. The drop pilot was the one who would kick the bales of weed out over the drop zone; hence, the “drop pilot” moniker.

Three people could have made this journey. A pilot, a drop pilot, and a skinny girlfriend going on a trip. But you never discover that Sandra Lynn was along for the ride for these delivery escapades. You never hear a mention of her name.

But the photographs?

When you ask her about Cornbread now, at the end of her life, she projects that mischievous grin and a twinkle comes into her eyes. She deftly denies any involvement at all. We both know better, and we let the silence sit with us for a little while.

Towards the end of her life and during one of her medical emergencies, she had a long, slow, painful last few years battling the charred remains of her cancer-ridden body; I took it upon myself to do some housekeeping at her house. I had the feeling that this was going to be the last time I was going to see her alive, and I thought I could put some of the time I had in between her waking up in pain and dosing on fentanyl and morphine to clean up her house.

So my next visit could be more efficient. Cleaner. Quick exit.

I started with the bill box, all the receipts and notices, and unopened mail that was gathering dust. I organized it the best I could in a paper bill box and created a handwritten spreadsheet to figure out her meek financial situation. That was the good news: when you are broke, there isn’t much of an estate to plan.

I hesitated to dig too much into her stuff because she would become notoriously angry when someone pried into her private life. This time was different, I thought. She was near death, and being the executor of the “estate,” it was my duty to get her house in order. After organizing her finances on the work desk in the dining room, I moved into her vacant bedroom. At that stage of her dying, she only found comfort and sleep in a worn-out recliner she had positioned near the TV and close to her one true faithful friend: her cigarettes.

My mother was neat but had messes she liked to keep out of eyesight, like the dilapidated garage filled with keepsakes from my grandmother’s passing decades ago. I raided that space a few years back on one emergency medical situation journey to see her. I had taken away my favorite objects from those messy boxes in the garage for my recollection and to share with my family one day. 

Her room wasn’t messy, but it was full of stuff. The debris of her everyday life and piles of things stuffed here and there. I feel the same pull of “stuff” now that I’m getting older: you sometimes don’t know what to throw away. That stuff starts stacking up until you throw it away one day, or your oldest son decides to make an executive decision and organize it all for you.

In her room was a tall four-drawer dresser, a small three-drawer bedside table, and a beautiful old cosmetics desk with a giant round framed mirror as the centerpiece. It was a lovely piece of furniture. I remember it at my Grandmother’s house. My mom had kept it, and going through it was like stepping back in time.

On each side of the make-up desk were four drawers, each drawer growing slightly taller as it descended towards the floor. Of the eight drawers, only the bottom two had enough depth to hold anything of any size. The other drawers were filled with old coins, paper clips, jewelry, and other little trinkets we affectionately call junk. These were her junk drawers.

I pulled the random clothes out from the back of the left bottom drawer and found a money box that was hidden underneath. It contained her checkbook and bills in their original envelope with the words “important” scribbled across the cellophane opening.

The contents of the left bottom drawer were unremarkable and expected – she had to hide anything of value to try and keep it away from my drug-addicted younger half-brother, who was slowly stealing her blind. 

She had these stash places in drawers all over her house. Everything labeled important is hidden. That’s how it worked in Sandra Lynn’s mind, too.

The bottom right drawer had some of the same kind of stuff in it, more clothing than the other bottom drawer, and when I removed that clothing, I found a shoe box. 

It was large and heavy, so I pulled it out and placed it on the bed. When I opened it, an old white windbreaker was neatly folded on top. It was from the 70s because of all the bowling patches running up each sleeve; my mother, her sister, and grandmother had quite a bowling team back in the day. 

After I removed the windbreaker and inspected it a little bit, I discovered the holy grail of Cornbread: this was her stash box for her Cornbread correspondence over the years. I felt like I had hit the jackpot.

Cornbread in a shoebox.

Pictures, letters, and notes from Cornbread were in the box — not a lot, but enough to piece together the puzzle of my mother’s relationship with this twice-convicted drug-running felon who was one of the most interesting people I had ever met from Childress, Texas. 

Cornbread was a legend to me.

The first picture was an old 4×6 of Cornbread laying on a beach towel, wearing only a pair of short swimming shorts, propped up by leaning on one of his arms with a bottle of Coppertone and his Sony Walkman lying next to him. It was a nice set-up and staged photo of Cornbread with a wry smile, rough beard, and gangly body. 

If you didn’t know any better, seeing the photo of him laying topless on the towel in a nice green grassy spot, you would have thought he was at the beach. Or at least he was at a nice resort pool. 

On the back of the photo, I discovered the quote that made me wonder. The photo from the handwritten date in the top corner was from June 1990. What was the true nature of Sandra Lynn’s relationship with this beguiling, mischievous crop duster with a silly nickname like Cornbread?

Cornbread was well into his second sentence for drug-related crimes – a fact that I was able to piece together after finding this photo in the box I found in her room.

I had wrongly believed that he had only spent time in Federal Prison for being a tree-top flyer in the eighties. But it turns out he couldn’t leave that lifestyle behind and got busted trying to board a commercial aircraft with enough cocaine strapped to his body to garner a federal conviction for a second time. 

For this offense, he pled guilty and found himself in Southern California doing his allotted time. He was not bothered by his circumstances and laughed at his affairs in true Cornbread fashion with a broad, sly grin.

As I put the photo of Cornbread down and imagined him smiling and having a nice day, “100 yards from the ocean” – in prison, it made me smile, too.

Chapter Two: The Tao of Cornbread