CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

1976

I have learned that love goes away but the things you do during love can’t ever go. Like a baby you never wanted in the first place, like the one Leerae was going to have in Community A. Her guy ran off after she got pregnant, and drove her to the stealing. Just like Charlie drove me to all the things we did. He took me off for a steak in that beat-up Ford of his and I never got back. Year after year, I go through these pictures: The Chevrolet with the girl’s math book in back, left open on the seat like a great big promise. The fancy Packard. The lights on the lawmen’s cars flashing over all the faces. Mother’s dark blood, Betty Sue, the picture of that boy the lady had showed and cried over. I can still see it all, though not so clear. Even big things that change you get lost with time. How do you explain what happened in me? I was a girl. He started shooting.

*   *   *

Charlie got the chair, which wasn’t any surprise, but I got life when I should have got off. Maybe I was not the best of girls. Maybe I did not always follow the rules. Maybe I should never have let Charlie come in my window that night, but people don’t get locked up for that kind of thing. After the sheriff came, me and Charlie both got treated like part of the same thing. We passed the night in separate jails at Valentine, and I couldn’t sleep with thinking how sad it was to be stuck in a place with that name. I drew a heart on the cold jail wall and thought about Valentine’s Day not being so very far off and how no one had ever gave me a card. I never have gotten one either. People hated me so. They thought I drove Charlie to it. I said no, I did not, so many times I finally just quit.

When the sun came up, we got put in the separate cars again, which was A-OK by me. I never wanted to see Charlie again. There was no place, really, I wanted to look. The lawmen headed us back to Lincoln. Sheriff Meeks said the whole world was waiting for justice. I still didn’t believe he meant justice for me. They had taken off my cuffs and sat some old gray-headed baggage right there next to me in the backseat doing her knitting. After a while she had put it away and asked me if I would like to tell her what happened.

“I want to tell Mother what happened,” I said. I don’t know why, I guess I really thought there was half a chance I’d dreamed this up.

“I’m sorry, that can’t be,” the old lady said, nice enough.

“How come?” I said. “Doesn’t she know?”

The lady gave me a funny look and pushed her glasses up her nose. “Don’t you know your mother’s dead, Caril?” she said.

“What do you mean, dead?”

“She was killed.”

“She was killed?” I could feel my eyes were starting to cry. “Who killed her?”

“Well, you know who, Caril, don’t you know who? You were there, weren’t you?”

I shaked my head and put my hands in front of my face to hide my eyes and let out a great big sob. “Where’s Nig?”

“Who is Nig?”

“Nig.…” Yes, it was real. It was all real and there was no going back. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I got kidnapped.” I said it over and over so many times it was true.

The lady handed me a box of Kleenex. Later I got to making little dolls out of the paper to pass the time. After a while, the car holding Charlie had pulled alongside so the lawmen could talk, and there was Charlie in back staring me down. His hair was all messed up and something was smeared over his cheek. He tried to shout at me through the glass, and I had held up one of my little dolls and put it real close to the glass so he couldn’t miss it. I took my thumb and my long finger and waved the doll at Charlie. Then I wrang the doll’s neck so Charlie could see how I wasn’t going to have a problem giving him up.

But the sheriff’s old bag said in the court that what I did with the Kleenex “demonstrated a violent nature.” She said there wasn’t any way she could see I didn’t know about Mother getting killed. Either I was putting on an act or I was in shock. Yes, I was in shock. I was in shock the whole time.

Mr. Scheele had sat in the plastic chair with spectacles sliding off his nose, trying to capture just what went on. He wouldn’t let me forget, even though I told him I had nothing to do with it. “Are you sure that’s the way it happened, Miss Fugate?” In the beginning it had made me feel important, a grown man calling me by my second name, like someone was finally going to listen to my side. But after a while I could see he was not on my side. He hoped that if I repeated the story enough, I’d trip and say it was all my fault. I’d go ape and scream, Yes! I told you a million times how it happened! and he’d say, There! Just as I thought. A violent nature.

It seems to me there was plenty of opportunity to make a choice, Miss Fugate. You were at your home with Charles for an entire day before the police showed up, and you say that on more than one occasion he went to the grocery store to buy provisions—potato chips. Why did you not then inform the authorities of the situation, if you wanted so badly to get away?

I was too scared of what he’d do.

And when you forced your way into Mr. Lancaster’s kitchen just after midnight on the night of your capture, why did you not identify yourself then and direct him immediately to call the authorities?

I thought he would know me. I was telling him with my eyes.

How was that?

But there was no way I could show him on account of looking so hard at the floor. I did not tell him anything more. It is not the kind of thing you can explain, how you love and love till you are all wrapped up in the same skin and have to swallow the same bites and breathe the same cold air, because he chose you and you chose him. And then every one of his choices shrinks up your choices a little more, till you are gone before you realize there was any choice at all.

*   *   *

Warden Carmichael checked me in. She was big as this state.

New commitments are permitted to retain the following items:

One wedding band. I sure as hell didn’t have that.

One watch. No, no reason to tell the time.

One commercial religious medallion. I didn’t know what that was, but I was pretty sure I didn’t have it.

One Bible. No.

Letters. No one had ever so much as written me. Who would write?

Two photographs.

I had given up the shots of me and Charlie, and the picture the lady had showed me in her room of her son and the dog and her husband I kept in my mind. Everything had been so together, everyone in the picture smiling, and a moment later it was all smashed up and ruined, the lady killed, the dog’s neck broke, the husband shot dead at the door saying her name, and I had no idea what happened to the boy. She had said he was my age. And maybe the boy was not so different from me now, in having no one and nothing left, not even the dog.

For a year they stuck me in solitary. It was a little room with gray-painted walls other girls had wrote on. There was a heavy door with a diamond window big enough for a face, and a place for sliding my food through like someone had gone and stuck me in a mailbox. I did have my own window with bars to look out over the grass and the fence with the electric wires on top. They let me keep the window open, and I was thankful for this. I never knew the time, but I could tell by the light and by the bell that told the inmates that had some choices what to do. There was breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At night I would lay in bed and think about what it was like to be outside. But I never could recall the girl I was before Charlie. I would lay there at night and think about the different ways it could have been till it made me crazy. I heard the crickets in the prairie grass and watched the moon out the window, and it seemed to be lighting up all the footprints me and Charlie left behind. I saw futures that never were.

See that boy sliding into second? He would have been my son!

See my grandchild holding a potato chip and making her way across the kitchen floor? She’s taking a first step that will never be taken!

Betty Sue, nothing but trouble, hanging around punks at the Capital Race Track.

I was sketching the wedding dress in my notebook when I should have been paying attention, but what did geometry matter when I was going to marry Bob?

Do you think my husband knew I was already dead when he said my name? Did he have any hope?

And I wanted to say, Don’t ask me, lady. I didn’t kill him. I was trying to fix the dog’s neck so your boy would have something to come back to. But I couldn’t speak. My throat was red and swollen shut from trying to explain.

The only one left who could explain it right was Charlie, and he was about to get the chair. So he wouldn’t talk. I begged for someone to let me see him one last time, even though I thought I never-would want to see him again. I thought if he saw me, maybe he would feel bad and say how none of it was my fault. But Charlie wouldn’t see me and President Eisenhower didn’t care. Maybe he never even read the letter I wrote. Or maybe it never got sent. Or maybe it was spelled all wrong and he couldn’t make it out, and nobody bothered to tell me.

I waited all day for Charlie to get another stay. But it wasn’t just the talking. I thought of his hands touching me all over, his fingers, the face I always knew. I couldn’t even draw or eat my food or close my eyes, for everything hanging so much in the balance.

After lights out, I laid there in the dark waiting for someone to come tell me Charlie had spoke. I thought it might happen. There were people who said he loved God now, and there was a time he had swore he loved me too.

And then, just like an answer, someone was there. A key turned in the lock, and the door creaked open and hit cement with a heavy sound. My heart clenched up like a little fist. I sat up in bed and tried to make out who was there. There were keys on a waist and a big dark shape in the moonlight to say it was Warden Carmichael. Her breath came out heavy, and I knew if she got any closer I’d be able to smell it. She did not make to turn on the light. “It’s done with. About twenty minutes ago,” she said. “Charlie Starkweather’s dead.” She sounded like maybe this was a great thing, like maybe the world had gone to war, and her side was winning. A little heart that was left inside me drifted away on a gust of wind.

“They shaved off all that red hair and did the sponge,” she said. “Then they put on the electrodes—two on the head, one on the calf—and then they flicked the switch.”

I didn’t want to hear any more about that.

She said how the first shock knocked him senseless and the second fried his brain. Smoke came out of his ears and he soiled himself. The third shock stopped his heart.

“But did he tell them?”

“Oh, he told them, all right.”

“What did he say?”

“He wished you were there next to him.”

“You mean to talk to?” I said, on account of hoping so much.

Warden Carmichael blew air out through her fat cheeks and said, “He wished that chair was made for two, honey. And he’s not the only one that said it. Don’t expect any special favors around here.”

What special favors had I ever got? My whole life slammed shut. I thought of a flash of light breaking through Charlie’s brain and I wondered if he pictured the ways we had loved.

*   *   *

A long time later they let me out of solitary. Warden Carmichael left and Jackie came; she was thin with nice-enough hair and didn’t want us to call her Warden. There were small changes, but never ones that really mattered. It was true I had some privileges, but it was not like being free. On Wednesdays the van took me to the nursing home, which as far as I could see was not so different from a prison. After lights out sometimes they let me keep up at the drawing in the study room, even though I had run out of new things to draw a long time ago. Sometimes I would stay in the little hood of light an extra hour, pretending to be thinking about a picture, but I was really wondering what the whole world would be like if I ever got out. “Not if, Caril, when,” Jackie always said, since she believed in us inmates. Jackie believed a woman could change. She had started up the sewing program and reading and the dreaming about the future. In general, this place was a whole lot better. But I didn’t know where it would get a person to dream about the future, since all my dreaming with Charlie had only landed me here.

I watched the new girls that came and cried for being here and the crazy ones that went and cried for leaving. The dried-up grass turned green in the spring. There was snow in the winter and weather in the summer, but I never could feel it. When a tornado rolled in they made us walk in straight lines and squeeze in the basement, and we never so much as heard the wind howl. Only doors slamming, and keys locking, and the jokes about how if something happened and sweeped us away, maybe we’d end up someplace better, like that girl with the slippers who got carried out of Kansas. I never once laughed, though, on account of knowing I never would leave. I had come up for parole two times already for good behavior and was told two times I couldn’t leave. Soon there was going to be a third time, but I had gave up caring. I had gave up feeling till Leerae dived downstairs like someone swimming and broke her neck with trying so hard to break her baby.

*   *   *

The week before it happened was the first week Leerae showed up. It was stealing and drugs someone told me, bad ones you shot in your arm, and a baby still inside her with three months left to go. We always knew the new women’s stories, though I don’t know how we ever heard them. But Leerae was more of a girl than a woman, eighteen, just three years older than me when I had got my sentence.

They had let us out after lunch to walk in circles on the crunched-up grass. There was a frost and winter was coming, but Leerae didn’t look cold. She was marching up close alongside the fence with her stomach going up and down, like she was trying to stomp out the baby. I could see something fierce in the way she moved, but this did not bother me on account of never knowing anything that wasn’t fierce. She was so lean and, aside for the baby, like a fashion model.

And she dressed like one too, with a coat made out of sheepskin that was the same color as her hair, and dark red pants that went out at the bottom like fancy glasses turned upside down. They had let her keep her clothes, which meant she had not done so bad a thing. Before long she’d be out in the world again. Then she had left off the marching and stood on her tippytoes, trying to reach the wires of the fence. Fat chance. She was tall, but you’d have to be a giant. I wanted to help her. “Don’t,” I said, thinking someone had just forgot to tell her. “The top part’s electric.”

She whipped around and gave me a mean look to say I should leave her alone. Her face was pretty but covered in a spray of pimples. “Any other suggestions? Got a coat hanger?”

I had no idea why she would want a coat hanger since the whole of us didn’t have any coats here worth hanging. And hers close up was not so nice as I had thought, but used up and dirty, like some old goat tossed in the corner of a barn. “No one’s got coat hangers,” I said. “It’s the rules.”

“Well, I don’t follow rules.” Leerae kicked a stone against the fence, and it made a little ping. There was some strange way about her that reminded me of Charlie, and to think of him buried so many years gave me a chill. A white bird with big wings flew out toward the road, and we both stopped to watch it. I had never seen a bird like that.

“What’d you do?” I said, though I should have thought twice about asking since I never would want to tell her what wrong things they thought I’d done.

“I got caught in a mixed-up crowd and I couldn’t go home.” She told me Jim left her knocked up in Rapid City with no money for rent, and she had to steal. She turned a trick or two and then they busted her. The way she said this was flat and strange, like she had gave up caring. She was the kind of girl the chaplain was going to try to help find God. “And I guess if you were so good at rules you wouldn’t be here so long,” she said.

“How do you know how long I’ve been here?”

“Oh, I know. Everyone knows. You look just like the pictures, like no time passed, like you’re some kind of spook.”

I didn’t like her calling me a spook. Time had passed. There were wrinkles by my eyes to show it. I had felt every day go by.

“They still talk about it on the outside,” she said. “You’re the child girlfriend.” There were great blue circles under her pretty eyes and a hardness in her jaw.

I certainly wasn’t a child anymore. I’d spent a good half of my life at York. I wanted to ask her to take a hard look and think about the things we do as children and if they deserved to be forgiven and forgotten like Jackie had told me. After all, I was not so different from her in getting caught in a mixed-up crowd. And I had never so much as thought about turning a trick.

It made me sick to think about me and Charlie still being talked about at every supper table in every town, because maybe they were still saying the same old thing: that I was a part of killing the lady since I had stole from her. But not saving is not the same as killing, no matter how you look at it.

“Well, stories you hear aren’t always true,” I said.

“Right,” Leerae said, and kind of laughed. She watched a transfer van drive too fast down Recharge Road. There was nothing else moving anywhere I could make out, no mark to separate the plains from the sky. When she turned back around I could see a wetness in her eyes that looked to be tears.

There didn’t seem to be anything worth saying, so I started to walk away. “A lot of us should never have been born,” she said, and punched her fist on the baby like an exclamation point. I knew how she felt. I did not believe in reasons for everything.

“You don’t want to hurt your baby, though,” I said, on account of knowing how it felt to hurt Mother’s baby, even though I had not been the one to stick in the knife.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Leerae said of the baby. “It’s hurt enough already.”

She stood there a second still as salt and then a funny look crawled up over the edge of her face, and her skin went white behind the red spots. Blood was running out from her nose, and all the toughness in her was running out with it. It spilled in two red trails that went between her fingers down her wrist and inside the sleeve of her coat. Red was painting the grass, petals that had ripped off from a flower, and she went down on her knees and put her arms out like she was making to gather them. I wondered how it was blood kept following me. I kneeled on the cold ground beside her. I took my hands and tilted back her head like how the orderly did at the nursing home. “Don’t touch me,” she said, but I didn’t listen. We kneeled there for a time, and after a while the bleeding stopped.

*   *   *

Leerae was not going to let herself be saved. The girls who saw it happen said there was no way you could predict it. When Leerae had got to the landing, she put her arms at her sides and dived down the stairs with a sureness of being shot from a cannon, like someone was going to catch her. But no one was there to catch her. The guard had stumbled after her but couldn’t get a hold, and Leerae had landed at the foot of the stairs with her head against the wall and her neck all twisted and you could tell from her eyes right then she had died. I didn’t want to hear any more about it, but everyone was whispering. Eyes like blue skies all clouded up. Even a pretty girl like her wasn’t happy.

I wondered if the baby had died right when she died, or if it struggled for a little while, trying to make sense out of the quiet dark. I thought of all the people I had seen before they were killed and how they had tried to make sense of it too.

I didn’t want to leave my room anymore. I wouldn’t go to the nursing home. I laid down on the bed and painted pictures in my mind out of light that was making different shadows on the wall. All the ghosts were there, but they had no voices left to say what really happened, just lips that moved without a sound. Jeanette, he said, because he loved her. She had gave me a chance. She told me there was always a choice. But it hadn’t seemed to me there was ever a choice.

*   *   *

All those years later when the parole board let me off and Jackie told me I was free, I really didn’t care. She said, “Isn’t it wonderful, Caril?” But I didn’t feel one bit wonderful. I looked out at the flat ground on the other side of the fence. It went on forever, and in my case forever was a pretty bad thing. Forever I’d have to live with it: what I did or what I didn’t do, depending on how you looked at it.

“You know,” Jackie said, and put her arm around my shoulders, “it’s not my job to say whether you are guilty or not, but it’s my job to say when you are rehabilitated.”

“Am I?”

“There isn’t any question in my mind you are rehabilitated.”

But I did not feel the least bit rehabilitated.

“There are certain services we offer that will help you get on your feet again.”

“I don’t want any services, Jackie.”

“I wish you would, Caril. These services are meant to protect you.” But I didn’t feel like being protected.

Jackie took me to her office and gave me the box full of the things I came with. Before I opened the box, I looked down at my clothes and they were not so different from the ones I showed up in—I was a spook. I didn’t have any need for the old things in that box, but I opened it anyway because I was supposed to. But there were new clothes inside, my size, on account of Jackie knowing me better than anyone else. She had gone to Grand Island and bought me green pants with a flare and a coat that looked to be made of white leather with a trace of fur around the collar. “Jackie,” was all I could say on account of being so shocked by her kindness. “Leather?”

“It’s not really leather. It’s pleather.”

It looked enough like leather to me. I put it on and pulled it close around me. “Thank you,” I said.

She nodded her head and told me how great I looked, and I wondered if there would be anyone else to ever think so.

I turned around in a circle ’cause she wanted to see me happy.

“Your sister is coming to pick you up in York?”

I nodded my head at her.

“Why not here?” I did not tell her my sister wasn’t coming at all, that I hadn’t so much as called her. I hadn’t seen Barbara since I had got here, and I was pretty sure she wouldn’t want to see me now.

“I want a walk,” I said. “I haven’t really walked anywhere in a long time.”

Jackie took me down the hall and held open the door, and a rush of cold came in to meet me. I knew all the girls would be watching from the windows waiting to wave, and maybe it would give them a little hope to see me leave. Suddenly I couldn’t move. My feet felt stuck in one place.

“Go on. You’ve got a whole life left,” Jackie said. But I had already passed half my life in here.

“What are they going to say, Jackie?”

“Who cares what they say? You can change your name, and eventually they’ll forget.”

But I didn’t think anyone was ever going to forget.

“You know, Caril, the world forgives,” she told me, and touched my arm like the lady in Lincoln. I wasn’t so sure about that either. How could parents forgive for the children that got taken? And how could the boy forgive the way I let his mother and father get killed? She had told me his name. And I knew his age, on account of its being the same as mine. Sometimes I wondered where he was, but I never would want to know anything more than that. I was too afraid he didn’t come out right. Maybe he came out like me.

The sky was gray and the road was gray, no different really from the walls I had left. I walked along the side for a while, crunching snow with my boots, leaving my footprints. I wished I could brush them away. I wondered about all the different places I had seen on maps, and if there was anywhere someone wouldn’t know my story. The town of York was five miles. When I got there, I would take a bus west and make my way to a lake because I had never so much as been to one. I knew there was a lake made of salt in the state of Utah, where Salt Lake City got its name. I heard there was so much salt, it washed up on the shore and stayed, like something spat up from a great big ocean. I would head in that direction because it was something, and I had no more reason than a lake full of salt to head anywhere else.