CHAPTER THREE

1959

I was ten years old in Chicago when I first heard of the Starkweather killings. Upstairs in the study, I sat by the radio with a candy bar in my hand and listened. The reports reminded me of Gunsmoke or The Inner Sanctum. Authorities combed the state of Nebraska. Reckless lovers were on the run. Was the Fugate girl a victim or an accomplice? What had Starkweather been like as a child? “Can you remember who he was before this tragedy unfolded?” the radio asked. “He got picked on in kindergarten,” one of his brothers said. “They called him Little Red.” I had a certain affection for him because of that. For a while it was Charlie who had my sympathy in this story.

Then we moved to Lincoln. My mother became more agitated. Things started to change. And when I heard about the boy just a few blocks away who’d been orphaned because of Starkweather, I lost any feeling I had for Little Red. It was that boy left alone I couldn’t seem to get off my mind. I always imagined him wandering on his own. Don’t all children worry about finding themselves left alone? I always did, even before my mother got restless. I always knew somehow I would wind up without her.

*   *   *

It was late June of 1959, the day before Starkweather was to be electrocuted, when my mother went out and bought the Studebaker Golden Hawk. Teenagers gathered around the Nebraska State Penitentiary, waiting for the lights to dim and 2200 blue volts to go slamming through the murderer’s body. I’d been watching those kids strut up and down across the television screen from the safety of our parlor. They were defiantly hanging off the hoods of cars, slugging beer, their eyes fixed on the prison windows for some sign of Starkweather’s passing.

When Lucille, our housekeeper, cried my name, I catapulted off the love seat and charged through the foyer, worried that the execution had already happened. Lucille was standing at the window in the bright green kitchen, wiping her dark hands on her apron as she watched a gold car pull up the drive. My mother was behind the wheel, honking and waving, her scarf billowing out behind her. Lucille placed her warm palms on my shoulder. “Lord, what your momma got herself into this time? Daddy gonna have himself a fit.” I pictured my father with a red face, pounding the desk that had once been his father’s or yanking at his tie. It was the only sort of fit I could imagine him having, in the safety of his study, far from my mother’s gaze.

Mother charged into the kitchen through the garage door, swinging the car keys around the tip of her finger. Her nails were fire-engine red. I hadn’t ever seen them with polish. The kitchen was filled with the scent of mint brownies, her favorite, but she did not seem to notice. She was flying, and we were just a few things left adrift in her wake.

“Girls,” she said, “come on.” She tugged us through the kitchen and into the cool garage. The brand new car sat ticking in the empty spot beside the dusty Chevrolet we’d driven from Chicago to Lincoln the summer before, when my grandfather had died suddenly, leaving Capital Steel and the house to my father.

My mother opened the driver-side door. “Meet the Studebaker Limited-Production Nineteen Fifty-seven Golden Hawk Four Hundred,” she said. “Without even a scratch.” The car was solid gold with cream-colored tail fins and a white leather interior. My mother put her hand on the hot hood and stared at Lucille. “So what do you think?”

Lucille shook her head. “You don’t wanna know what I think, Mrs. Hurst.”

“I do so,” said my mother. “I always want to know what you think, Lucille. It’s very important to me.” My mother was always saying these sorts of things. I think she got them from plays. Whenever my mother bought new clothes from Miller and Paine on my father’s credit, she pulled Lucille up the pink-carpeted staircase. I’d watch as Mother held dresses with tags still attached up against Lucille, parading her proudly in front of the mirror. “Don’t you look lovely!” she would cry. Or “That color complements your dark complexion so well. I don’t want it, after all. You keep it!”

Lucille never seemed to object, but afterward she would sit in my room and brush my hair while I cracked bubble gum and listened to Gunsmoke and we would laugh. Nothing my mother did ever seemed quite real.

Now here we were, the three of us, standing around the gold car as if it were some sort of fiery comet dropped from the sky. “Folks gonna talk,” Lucille said cautiously, circling the Studebaker. “You don’t do anything halfway, do you?”

“Of course I don’t.” My mother clenched her fists. “I saw it in the sun off the Cornhusker Highway. I had to have it right then. I’ve never felt this crazy before about anything.”

“I love it, Mother,” I offered. “I think it’s beautiful.”

My mother turned to me but never really looked. “Well, get in then Puggy,” she said. “We’re going for a ride.”

Trotting around the front of the car, I opened the passenger door. My mother climbed slowly inside, watching me, and then suddenly stuck her palm out, freezing me where I stood, my hand wrapped around the chrome door handle.

“Take off your shoes, please,” she said. “God knows where you’ve been.”

Like a good girl, I shed my saddle shoes and climbed in beside her. The white leather was warm with the late June sun and smooth as the inside of a shell. My mother fixed her scarf in the rearview mirror. When she turned the key in the ignition, the car rumbled to life, and my mother inched it out of the garage. A ray of sun caught the face of her watch and splashed over the dash. My mother was small and neat, with black hair and smooth tan skin. The turned-up nose so unfortunate on my own face lent hers a sprightly charm.

I hugged my arm around the flesh hanging over the waist of my skirt and tried to suck in as my mother jammed her foot on the accelerator and the car launched backward. I saw Lucille lift her hands to her face. I heard a honking horn. I turned around. My father was just then coming in the drive, but my mother failed to see him, and the back of the Golden Hawk Studebaker rammed right into the front fender of my father’s Packard.

My father got out, slamming the car door, silently inspecting his broken headlight. He approached my mother’s window slowly, as if he were trapping a wild beast, and then bent down and peered inside the car. “What’s this about, pet?” He was trying to seem calm and open-minded. His blue eyes were wide and his brow was raised. It made me want to giggle. Beads of moisture clung to his temples.

“What does it look like? I bought a car,” my mother said, staring straight ahead. “I needed one.”

My father shook his head in disbelief. He was leaning his elbows on the door. “Why would you do that?”

“I’m tired of being surrounded by your father’s things.” My mother sighed. “Dead this, dead that. I want my own things.”

My father’s face turned red. “I don’t understand why you would do this without talking it over.” He paused. “It’s like you’re sneaking around, Ann. Why would you do that?”

“This whole town’s ready to pop.” My mother shrugged her shoulders. “I got the itch.”

“I can’t believe it,” said my father, mopping his brow with his handkerchief. “This whole thing would be amusing if you weren’t my wife.” He smacked the side of the car. “Do you think money grows on trees, Ann? Is that what you think?” My father leaned his head through the window. “Tell me how much this boat cost.”

My mother was boiling up. Her knuckles were white and her eyes were hot and wicked.

“Tell me how much.” My father was exasperated. “It’s not even a family car, for Christ’s sake.” His tie had dropped over the edge of the window.

My mother grabbed the tie in her fist and tugged hard. My father’s head lurched forward. “You ruin everything,” she snapped. “You’re so ungrateful!”

A storm of shock passed over my father’s face. Then his features went blank. He pulled back his head, straightened his tie, and went inside to pour himself a drink.

*   *   *

Before dinner, I heard my father speaking on the telephone to someone about the execution: “And how is that poor boy who lost his parents?” I wanted to ask my father what he’d heard about the boy when he hung up the phone, but I could tell by the look on his face that he wasn’t in the mood to waste time with me.

My mother lay on the living room floor, her bare feet propped on the arm of the couch, a glass of wine in her hand, her hair spread out over the Oriental rug. Even at dinner, after Lucille had gone home, my parents didn’t really speak to each other. They just raced through the motions of sitting down, and before I’d even started eating they were back on the patio, getting drunk in the uncomfortable silence that all Lincoln shared that night. Each household held its breath and waited for the lights to dim—which would never actually happen, my father assured us, though everyone else said the electrocution would have this effect. I wanted to know what was happening, but my father wouldn’t let me turn on the newscasts.

“It’s nothing to get excited about,” he said, coming through the French doors from the darkened living room with another drink in his hand. “I want you to understand that, Puggy. It’s not some holiday.” My father patted me on the head. It was my favorite thing he did, though I hated their nickname for me. It made me feel like the fat aunt visiting the glamorous couple. I never quite understood how I had come to be their child.

He sat back down heavily in his chair. The candles were burning low on the slate table, and the fireflies winked at me in little sparks from the dark bed of the rhododendrons. “It’s a time to mourn the lives that were lost,” my father said, swirling the ice around in his glass. He peered into the bottom of his drink and took a long sip. “It’s time to applaud the efficiency of American justice.” I pictured blue electricity coursing through wires in the basement of the penitentiary, while the boy sat in his living room waiting for someone to come home.

My mother snorted and poured herself more wine. “You didn’t even know the dead people,” she said to my father. “Don’t pretend to be involved.” The bottle of wine was almost empty. Her eyes were wet and flashy, burning with life. Outside, the leaves rustled excitedly in the ancient trees along Van Dorn Street.

My father would not let it rest. “We’re all involved. These were people our friends knew, people my father knew,” he said. “It was a senseless killing.” He looked down at his hands, folded tightly around his glass. My mother’s hair was glistening over her shoulders. She shook it dangerously close to the flame and looked at my father. He pulled the candle to him, out of her reach. It left a splatter of wax that I started to pick at.

“Let’s turn on all the lights in this spooky old house and just see what happens,” said my mother, suddenly transformed. She clapped her hands. “Let’s do something. I want to celebrate something.” Her voice was heavy and thick. She started toward the French doors, stumbling in the dark. My father, of course, was waiting. He caught her around the waist, picked her up, and carried her into the living room. I stood by the bookcase, watching in the dark.

“Turn on the lights!” said my mother. She swung her legs violently. Her heel caught one of the china frogs on the end table and knocked it to the ground. It smashed to pieces. My father held her tight until she stopped struggling. “I’m so sorry,” she said finally, starting to cry.

“I never liked that thing much,” my father whispered. He wasn’t angry anymore. He kissed her on the ear.

“Turn on the lights, please,” she sobbed.

“I can’t turn on the lights,” he said. “I might drop you. Then you’d run away and I’d be all alone.” My father cradled her head. Stepping over the china fragments, he carried her through the shadows and up the stairs to bed.

Nobody told me when to go to sleep that night. Everything was quiet. I stared out the windows at the streetlights on Van Dorn, sniffing the cork from my mother’s bottle of wine. I imagined that I had lost my parents. I imagined that I had lost everything. I walked around the house in the dark. On the television there was only static. I stumbled over furniture and thought of my grandfather’s ghost, of the way Lucille had found him in the living room armchair, dead from a heart attack, the newspaper folded neatly over his knee, the ice not yet melted in his drink. His cigarette smoke still lingered in our heavy curtains. I buried my face in the folds and inhaled, hoping for some secret knowledge, a whisper perhaps, from the world where Starkweather was going.

*   *   *

The next morning, I sat at the kitchen table counting out penny candy money that Lucille had given me for helping with housework. Arranging the coins in bright piles, I added up how much I would be able to buy. Lucille was cleaning the oven. My mother stood at the counter with the Lincoln Journal Star open in front of her, reading the details of the execution out loud. Her back was to me. Charles Starkweather had been electrocuted at 12:04 A.M. Two graves were being dug—one in the Wyuka Cemetery and another nearby—one for the murderer and one for the doctor who had declared him dead and then died from a heart attack right in the execution chamber. I wondered if Starkweather’s power reached beyond the grave. “Imagine!” my mother said. “Don’t you find the world tied together by such strange ironies, Lucille?”

“I don’t know about that.” Lucille stuck her arm into the back of the oven and scrubbed. “What I do know is the house looks like it got electrocuted last night.”

I giggled. I couldn’t help it.

My mother turned to me. She eyed the change on the table suspiciously, then reached over and brushed the nickels and dimes into her palm. The silver clinked against the back of her rings. “It’s summer,” she said to me. “Why don’t you do something, Puggy? Why don’t you get out of the house? You’re starting to look pasty. You could go for a swim at the country club. It’s an awful place, but at least you could get some exercise. You can’t just sit around the house all day eating candy.”

I thought of tanned limbs splashing in aqua water just down the street. Floral umbrellas blowing in the breeze, the sound of tennis balls crisply smacking rackets.

“I think we’ve got some mysterious blood in our veins,” my mother announced. “You can tell by my coloring. You take that into consideration the next time you go to that country club.” Then, returning to the newspaper, she buried herself in the pages and forgot all about me. I narrowed my eyes and stuck my tongue out at her, but of course she couldn’t see. Her face was hidden behind the front-page photo: the oak-plank electric chair against a blank wall, looking no more significant than a piece of patio furniture. It was the headline that caught my eye. I tried to read it backward: It said MASS MURDERER DECLARED DEAD; NEBRASKA HAS ITS WAY. I wondered if there was anything about the boy hidden somewhere inside that story. Maybe he had been interviewed about his feelings. Or maybe someone had kindly sent him away from all this.

When my mother took off in the Studebaker, I grabbed a mint brownie and the newspaper and went up to my room. A bee hit the screen. The morning light was still soft and new. I spread the pages out on the floor. Sometimes my mother just took up so much space. I took a bite of brownie and brushed crumbs off the pages. In section A10 there was a recap of the bloody trail Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate had left across the state of Nebraska, with pictures of all the people they had killed. They all stared out from the page like actors in the theater program I had found on the front table after one of my parents’ late nights back in Chicago: A Doll’s House. The people looked so happy, so certain about the future, it was hard to believe they were dead.

Charlie and Caril Ann were sitting on somebody’s couch looking happiest of all. He had his arm around her shoulder and his head cocked to one side. Her pretty brown hair was brushed over one shoulder, and her eyes twinkled like she’d just finished laughing. They looked all tangled up in each other. I wondered if I’d ever find someone to love. I was tangled up alone.