How it all started was Charlie and I.

Start over.

How it all started was Charlie and me. Me and Charlie was.

Start over.

What happened was we were driving out across Wyoming.

We was. We were, we was. We was. We was drivin cross somewheres. What happened was we was drivin cross the country, somewheres in Wyomin. Start over.

Wrapping sausages in first one, then two and three napkins, absentmindedly half watching the blonde woman’s flat-screen jaw flop out the morning All the News You Need for Your Day War with China? Superhurricane Melania Tampa Evacuation Gas Shortage, she didn’t see the man walking toward her across the mostly empty restaurant until he was standing over her with his tray, Peterbilt hat, and goofy smile. He said something and she looked up, past the gravy and hash browns, taking him in, ready to ignore, bolt, or step-pull-jab as necessary. Here I am, she thought, hunched over my coffee in my ratty Cattle Decapitation shirt and clunky hipster frames, red eyed and greasy haired, I thought I had my fuck-off face on.

“Mind if I sit down?” he asked, maybe the second time, she wasn’t sure. He had on those black steel-toed sneakers security guards wore.

A glance at the extensive selection of empty tables, communicating what, indulgence? Or briefly, why? He had nice eyes, at least, and seemed friendly, despite the oddness of approaching a stranger at the Chuck Wagon Buffet at seven o’clock in the A.M., so she shrugged slightly more than not at all.

He sat down with his tray and took off his ball cap, revealing a smooth brown helmet of hat hair lengthening to a tidy mullet at the back. Five o’clock shadow and wry blue eyes. She didn’t say anything.

“Not from here, are you?” he said, grinning.

“Weak opening,” she said flatly, resuming wrapping sausages in total practiced nonchalance.

“Sorry, I don’t mean to hassle you. I just saw you over here on your own and thought a pretty girl like you might like company.”

“You do a lot of cruising at the Chuck Wagon? That what passes for Tinder out here?”

He laughed, the sound of dusty boots in open air, a laugh that seemed to need a knee slap to complete it. “I work the night shift at the prison,” he said, “so I come by here a lot for dinner. Or breakfast. I don’t usually pick up women, but I saw your Cattle Decapitation T-shirt and figured, hey, any lady who’s into eco-radical deathgrind must at least be interesting to talk to . . .”

“Don’t imagine they play out here much,” she said, sliding the wrapped sausages off the table and into her bag. He work at a prison? For real? Be careful not to seem any warmer than suspicious, or the fucker might get ideas. Frankly, the whole trip had been a freak show from the beginning, from the first Pennsylvania pit stop with one-eyed “Chiyanne” behind the counter all the way to last night’s Survivor: Extreme Weather film crew at the Best Western, and what kind of name is Chiyanne anyway, printed all caps on a white sticky label? Is it, like, phonetic? And why here, why Extreme Weather? Did they know something she didn’t? Not mentioning the StormWatch convoy that passed her outside Elkhart, a different kind of climate change: four up-armored Humvees with turret-mounted machine guns and Indiana Civil Defense tags, one with a #qanon bumper sticker.

“I saw ’em when they came through Fargo a few years back, for the Karma.Bloody.Karma tour,” he said. “There’s a lot of metal fans out here, you’d be surprised.” Still smiling, digging into his eggs and gravy now. He reminded her vaguely of this pimpled jock she’d macked on in high school who, when she pulled his dick out of his pants in the back of his car, had exclaimed: “Whoa, I thought you were a dyke.”

“Not so much.”

He shook his head. “Naw, really, there’s lots of metalheads out here. Fewer vegetarians, it’s true,” he said wistfully, picking up a forkful of gravy-coated eggs.

“That”—time to go—“I don’t doubt, but rather my surprise. Look, Mr.—?”

“Mike. Call me Mike.”

“Look, Mr. Mike, I got miles to go before I sleep. The Fergus Falls Chuck Wagon is peachy keen, but I must needs hit the road. Hope you don’t think I’m rude.”

“Well, uh, I don’t even know your name, ah, I mean, where you goin’ in such a hurry?”

She stood with her bag and leaned over the table—“Tell ’em Suzie sent ya”—then rapped a knuckle twice on the grease-flecked laminate and spun in her low-cut Cons, sweeping past the buffet and out the door, not looking behind, not looking anywhere but out to the car in the lot waiting against the low green of west Minnesota, the massed clouds looking suspiciously like tornado weather, and her Jack Russell Abelard standing against the driver’s side window with his snout dug into the crack and snapping ceaselessly, his pink tongue curling like a tentacle, just like he’d been when she left him. He was a dependable little shitface.

Leaving had not been a hard decision, as such decisions go. Ever since getting back in fact from that bullshit clusterfuck road movie and collecting Steve the Cat from Cathy, a niggling itch grew by night, plains invading her dreams, space and air calling Suzie, and day by day she struggled and failed to remember why the hell she loved New York, what she wanted, how it all worked. The UberATs will stop for you, that’s the way it is, it’s not something wrong with them when they edge and push and seem about to ever so slowly run you over simply by not stopping, no, they’ll stop, there are rules here, but what the fuck, why bother? It didn’t help that Remy had turned spastic, calling at weird hours, carrying some sort of guilt for what had happened. She told him take your baggage to JFK, honeylamb, ’cause there ain’t no room for it here.

It was Steve running away—she almost said “escaped”—that clinched it. Fine, she thought, now the one human being I can depend on in the world is gone and he was a cat, so fuck it, I’ll apply somewhere out there, some fucking Buckeye Podunk State College, Flyover U, anything away for a new start, a real new start, start over for real. With her New York grit and crabby glare she’d be unique, a character, instant personality, and it would give her time to adjust to whatever song she’d find playing when the record flipped.

So she applied to MFAs across the land, playing nice in class to get her recommendations, trying to work what happened with Jim and Remy into something worthwhile and failing, some road movie novel, then writing other stuff, some other things, the last one she’s working now in scraps and bits, The True Life Story of the Highway Killers, or Charlie and Me, or maybe Caril Ann’s Last Stand, driving it across the country in a stained green Mead notebook, working up the fake to take the edge off the real, trying not to remember so hard all the people she was leaving behind, trying to bundle and sink old memories of, for instance, Nate the sk8r boi, with the pale chin scar and orange-spotted brown eyes always wide open like he was gonna jump, such a sweet guy and when he showed up bleeding knees and elbows asking “You gotta Band-Aid?” she knew he’d be hard to unhook. Packing/throwing away her life to fit the remains into her new used car, she’d found boxes and boxes of gauze and tape and tubes of Neosporin, and it was all she wanted in the world to punch his number into her cell and hear his lopey fragments, Sup, yeah, hey bro, but no, she just smiled, and now, crossing Fargo in the butter-gold light of a Great Plains morning, America bang-flat before her sea to sea, driving into the coming storm, she let herself linger on his really quite enormous nose and crooked cock, his lean waist and huge feet, his shyness, tenderness, and sulky humors. She remembers he dumped her by text message.

How many fresh starts you get? Like a deck of inky-blue cards, little pictures, draw and play—she had a feeling she was getting near the bottom, though, like whatever’s next better stick.

“What you think, Abelard?” she asked the curled white tube on the passenger seat snoring softly. His ear twitched in post-sausage stupor.

At this point she could only imagine the blue Rockies in the distance, because from here it was still miles of miles, Fargo left behind and Valley City, Jamestown, and Bismarck yet to break, rolling and humming and thick air whistling in the window, oldies, classic rock, country, Today’s Urban Beats, All Polka All the Time, Live from Here. These northly, arid plains were different from the OK scrub she knew in her blood, yet gave the world the same sense of infinity, the far-curved horizon, endless sky, immensities of brown and blue and gray making you see yourself a spot dribbled onto eternity, a little nothing that happened once and was gone the next fall. The exact obverse of New York, where the world is a hum happening only for you. And not just the flat but the lack, the emptiness of it, the absence of human growth—not that there’s no formation, Costcos and Sinclairs, for example, the highway, but here the structure seemed temporary against eons of earth and wind, while in NYC the present is all there is, built up on a granite spar you don’t even think about.

It was the sense of inevitability she remembered from the plains that troubled her most, a sense that came from how easy it was to cast lives adrift on the flats, how shallow roots dug here. If it wasn’t flooding or tornadoes, then it was a freak storm smashing trees into houses or drought or a late frost choking the first shoots of spring or a hailstorm crippling the harvest, not that she ever lived on a farm but that was how it was in her imagination, fed on Laura Ingalls Wilder and Willa Cather and The Wizard of Oz, the texture of being out here, or maybe just her mind, a recurring melody that sang “vanitas, vanitas,” backed by the whipsaw rhythms of the Dust God’s steel pedal guitar. Tomorrow would come because the storm clouds would always build on the horizon and sweep the day down, tomorrow would come because killing winter would always freeze, tomorrow would come because the brutal son would always rise, tomorrow would come down onto the plains like death because that was what it did, but you might not be there to meet it. You were trash to be swept up in a crosswind, twisted into space, and tossed away, again and again, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

How it all started was like this.

It started out Charlie and me fell in love.

Start over.

What happened was we were driving out across Wyoming.

We was drivin out acrost. Acrossed. Acrosst. Across’t? Cross. We was drivin cross Wyomin. What happened. Happind. What happind wuz we wuz drivin cross. Start over.

She lit a Parliament and cracked the window, somewhere out there, later, while tornado-storm rain turned the road to white water, her destination the other side of the veil. She’d applied to various programs, got into a few, and had eventually decided on Seattle. She had looked, looked, and looked, peering into photos on websites for answers to her questions: who were these people, what would it be like, what did the future hold. She was baffled by the notion that she recognized almost none of the names anywhere, yet all the bios claimed novels written, poetry published, awards won, articles and stories in the New Yorker and Tin House.

She said writing was the important thing, of course, that was the party line, but really? For fuck’s sake. Everyone talked like it was religion, like you were touched by the Holy Spirit because you liked to tell stories or thought words were cool. Artaud was closer to the truth when he said all writing is shit and all writers pigs. Inspiration? Craft? Try ego. Try delusion. Try pettiness and ressentiment. All these twisted perverts taking out bent passions on a blank page, making shit up, inventing lies, a bunch of fuckups spending their nights muttering to themselves over their laptops.

She stopped writing and looked up at Abelard and Abelard looked up at her. I stopped writing, she wrote, I wrote she stopped writing. Go back and read it again. She turned where she sat with her back to the window, the dog on the bed, the dark screen, she turned her head to face the uncurtained window pounded by the storm’s rain, the weird storm glow casting her in fuzzed-out silhouette, gray on gray, and she saw herself reflected in the screen and Abelard’s gaze, remembering someone writing about how the miraculous quality in Rembrandt was in the way he caught figures just as they turned toward the light.

It was the collection of Day-Glo silicon yard gnomes at the New Museum, standing Gulliverian among the rotund mini orgiasts bent in pink and yellow erotic convolutions, this one holding her breasts up around her beard, this one spreading its ass to the sky, this one sticking all its fingers from both hands in its mouth, boy-girls, girl-boys, bearded women and lady-men in pairs, triads, and garden-gnome daisy chains, neon blue and green and orange, fucking and sucking one another’s beards and cocks and cunts and tits and assholes, heigh-ho, heigh-ho, dig dig dig the utopian art-commodity dullness of it all, feeling as she flâneured through disgraced and bored and gazing out the gallery windows at the light descending through the sky over the city like the fall of heaven, smears of molten cloud and a plane crossing, a gently arcing black star, remembering when Bowie died and that P J Harvey song about a rooftop in Brooklyn and seeing Melt-Banana play the Williamsburg Music Hall and watching Lou Reed fall asleep at a Richard Foreman show at St. Marks and CBGB closing down and the Dunkin’ Donuts going in at the corner of Bedford and Seventh that had finally put the last piece in the deterritorialization puzzle that had for weeks been quietly assembling itself within her, the message now as obvious as Kara Walker at the Domino Sugar Factory. That was after Steve fled and before she got Abelard, around the same time her mother got cancer. Now, quiet in a hotel somewhere in America, she writes I am sitting in a room writing about thinking about remembering, my dog’s looking at me, the rain’s washing out the highway, we’re taking the Oregon Trail out West, what dusty life, dysentery and Indians, I was trapped in a Koons now I’m trapped in a Hopper, still the same soulless gape, alone in a room with a screen.

And a dog.

And Charlie.

Start over.

And how it all started was me and Charlie fell in love. How it all started was a movie. How it all started was Jim called and Charlie was.

Start over.

It started out Charlie and me—start over.

What happened was we was driving out across Wyomin.

She counts light poles by the roadside. She pounces on the page. There’s an emptiness across the land, across her mind, a blank scrawl, cataract sky, inhospitable fallowness, dead mammals, reflections in glass wiped flat by time. Extinction time, end time, first time. She crosses the country and lives happily ever after, gets her MFA, teaches creative writing. She writes a road movie, she writes the true story of Caril Ann Fugate, she writes a hundred books about dead and made-up people.

Return, tab, type.

Start over.

What happind wuz.

The emptiness should be the page and not the language. The emptiness should be breath. I never wanted any of this, she thinks, I never wanted to come here and I never wanted to go, I just wanted something different. But what’s that even mean? What’s different? How is anything different from anything else? I just wanted a new start, start over. I didn’t want the thing but wanted not the thing that was, the unthing, another thing, a future unformed by the past. I wanted nothing. Where do they sell nothing?

Return, tab, type.

Me and Charlie.

Disconnect, destroy, liberate, occupy, break free from this toil of endless days, summon the Wind Son, unleash the Anthropocene, a new glory, always fresh, but that’s not what happens, is it? In fact it’s scar tissue and bad reactions, sleepless nights, accumulation and wreckage.

Return, tab, type.

Start over.

I wanted nothing. Nothing. How fucking hard is it to get a little nothing?

The mountains show the next morning, a blue haze on the horizon that as she drives resolves into distant peaks, the world washed clean by rain. Curving into rise, not geology but geometry, the edge of the plane.

“I see them there,” she says to Abelard, who looks up at her, head cocked, “and it’s the same as it was before, going the other way. I mean, the sense of leaving, being free, it’s in the plains maybe, I don’t know. I never felt free in New York. I felt hemmed in, beleaguered, bothered, rattrapped, and wasted time, always something doing, and then after a certain point that seemed normal, like what we were. I don’t know. It was a good tour, Toto. I wish I could have said goodbye to Steve.”

She looked down at Abelard, who was munching on his crotch, and shook her head.

She lit another Parliament and cracked the window. The smoke in her lungs came down with savory pain. But if you start by saying no, then what do you have left? Former model, former wage-slave office drone, clockwatcher, paper shuffler, former New Yorker of SoHo, the LES, and Flatbush-a.k.a.-Ridgewood, messy, smoking, no doubt cancerous, flabby but still thin enough, needs more and more product to manage her face, snappy, hip, prickly, uncongenial, doesn’t like people, likes animals but not enough to be a vegetarian, a hater who takes ambivalent pleasure in the end of human civilization, the fall of America, should have been a nun, like Teresa de Ávila, should have found her ecstasy in God but instead smeared it across a decade of bad calls, questionable liaisons, and date-rapey sex. Can you retire at forty? Onward to the next lucky break, Abelard, some new thing to hate. They got whales out there, kid, sharks, too, even if they’re all suffering debilitating hormonal failure from the toxins leaching into the sea.

When I was growing up, I wanted to live in a Jane’s Addiction video. Now? Dad sitting there in his favorite chair, wearing his dress blues with his medals all over his chest, flattop haircut and ruddy cheeks, and Mom lying in a hospital bed with chrome rails, hooked to an IV, her life leaking out in slow breaths. Green-bean tater-tot casserole on the counter, cream of mushroom soup and ground beef. The TV’s playing Fox News with the sound off, the only other light the dimmed sun seeping through the closed blinds shutting out the sliding glass door at the back. The hi-fi’s playing Roger Miller, “Lock, Stock and Teardrops,” with that creepazoid electro-voice backing him and the slow boom-chicka-boom, meanwhile the EKG beeps, the IV drips, dad lifts his arm and sips his bourbon. He’s got those cheap black shiny air-force dress shoes on, he’s looking into space, and over his shoulder in the weak gleam float constellations of transient dust, universes of mote life swirling.

She saw the sign for the rest area and pulled off. She put Abelard’s leash on and got him up and out into the yellowing grass. The rest area was nearly empty, only one other car, towels hanging in the windows to keep the sun out, and nobody else around. Abelard pulled the extender out to the max, sniffing at something, then threw himself on his back in the fine brown dirt.

The mountains were bigger now, weighty in the distance, massive and gray. She was finally feeling the end of the prairie, the earth was rising into solemn humps, and the mountains lent the drive a sense of narrative, some chaptered sequence, repetition and change.

“Pee already,” she said, drinking water from her bottle. Then she noticed a round-eyed pale boy with a cowlick watching her from the window of the other car, maybe six or seven years old, staring with that blue intensity lonely children have, open and probing, making her feel as if she’d somehow exposed herself. Thankfully, Abelard was straining out a turd cluster, so she didn’t have to stand there being stared at long before they got back in the car and drove off.

Abelard barked at nothing.

Later, sitting by the fire and feeding him a hot dog, she thought back through the pines and campground and was filled with an unexpected sense of loss. Not for anyone in particular, not for Jim or Steve or New York or Dad, but something vague and structural in the sense of parties meeting and slipping away, the contingency of it all, sudden clashes and moves in disparate space, like without Oklahoma there was nothing, which is ridiculous, she knows. She had people in New York, contacts, longtime friends, but then, there, honestly, it was one thing and then another and was there anyone she still knew from the old days? And did she ever really care? The city was so far behind now, all the way across the country, back through the mountain passes in the dark night, back through the trees, invisible, glowing, waiting there at the edge of the continent, a sprinkle of lights over a stab of black schist, seawalled sprawl at the edge of America, and what did it have to do with her, or she with it? Much as she’d left Oklahoma behind, turning her back on the width and breadth of Middle American plainness, she’d now turned her back on New York, on the starry-eyed hubris of the Empire State and the mad scramble up the maze, the dumb clutch at the brass ring, the money and greed and ambition and exception that powered the city in waves of mindless faddishness, but she couldn’t turn her back on America, could she, still here, still her, still making its way down the new century that already felt so terribly old. And west? What was west?

It’s where you start over.

Abelard looked up and she absentmindedly fed him another bit of hot dog, thinking about these last few days, years, this life, Jim and Remy and Jim’s fierce dream and crazy escape—rupture? evasion?—and how she’d never lost the sense she had of something mysterious coming to life when he’d stood there in the bar and opened his map across the table, giving them the nation at a glance, its secrets and truths plotted across the grid in blue rivers and lines of rising peaks, flyover junctions and suburbanized metropoles, nowheres and dreamlands, hints scrawled in crazed graffiti, and how at the same time the map meant it was there, there it was, given and pre-owned, already been chewed, and even for all that space, there was a way you couldn’t go anywhere anymore, somehow, where they weren’t already looking. It’d all been fenced off. And what this had to do with Caril Fugate and Charlie Starkweather, with guns and the Sinaloan War and Whitman and Trump and Oklahoma City, how somehow it all meant something she couldn’t quite grasp, couldn’t quite put her finger on, something big and important and dying, maybe already dead, and how her chest seemed to open at the pain of the past and the promise of tomorrow, the clear impossible anything rising in the sky, the great big lie she still wanted to believe in, her lover, America, the road.

That’s why, typing at the hotel the next night at the edge of the edge of the mountains, almost there now, that’s why this now, the screen, that’s why she exists, why she thinks and breathes and talks, why she’s heading across the country writing heading across the country, why there’s a second life, why another life, why you start with The Word, why the word was, why the word was in the beginning, why you start over, that’s why she types what happened was, but no, that’s not right. Start over.

What happened was.

How it all started was like this.

It started out with Charlie and I.

Start over.

Charlie and me. Start over.

What happened was that we were driving out across Wyoming.

We were, we was. We was drivin cross somewheres. What happened was we was drivin out across the country, somewheres in Wyoming. Start over.

What happind was, we was on a lonely stretch a road somewheres in Wyomin and it was the first time I’d ever seen the mountains ever, all dark and high against the edge of the prairie and I thought how we got to go over them, there ain’t no way, and I felt sad and angry cause we knowed they was after us, we heard all about us on the radio.

Start over. Do it again.

What happind was we was on a lonely stretch a road somewheres in Wyomin and it was the first time I’d seed the mountains ever, all dark and high against the edge of the prairie, and I thought how we gotta go over em, there ain’t no way I thought, and I’s sad and angry cause I knowed they’s after us, we heard all about us on the radio, and Charlie says they knowed what kinda car we had and he said they’s looking for us for sure now, so we stops at this car, I think it’s a Buick, just out on the road and Charlie gets out and walks up like a big sheriff and all that like he always done and I sees him talking to the man in the car but he won’t open the winder so Charlie comes back and he gets the twenty-two and takes it and shoots in the winder and shoots the man again must a been ten times. I reckon he just went crazy. I thought, he just gone crazy and got all scared cuz a last night he made me do it with him when I didn’t want to so I thought what if he tries somethin now and he’s all crazy? That’s why I got outta the car when that man come by. First there’s the one man who drove by and turned around and come back and I thought Charlie you better shoot him too and he gets outta the car and walks up and Charlie points a gun at him and the man grabs it and they start rasslin then that deputy come up in his car and I run up to him and says, “Take me to the police,” and he says, “Get in,” so I did, then I tole him how Charlie killed a man there and he asks me who that is and I just looked at him funny and said: “That there’s Charlie Starkweather.”

I member at the beginnin when he tole me he killed Bob Colvert, he said some others done it but I knowed right away he was the one cuz even if he was scared he couldn’t help but make a little grin like he done something bad, and he took me and we drove around town and I made him tell me all about it, how he said he walked right in with his shotgun and said you just put that money in that bag there then he made Bob drive him out by Bloody Mary’s where he said he was just gonna leave him tied up but Bob tried to hit him and grab the gun so he just shot him bang like that. He said it was awful cold and dark, it being December and all, and nighttime, and I asks him what’s it feel like killing a man and he says it feels good, real good, like its the first right thing I ever done. And I says the second right thing, you dog, and gives him a kiss him on the cheek. Then we parked and he kissed me up some and he asks me you want to touch the gun and I say yes, and he takes it out from under the seat and I look at it and thought, that’s how you kill a man right there, with some black metal, just a piece of the world like a tool or a hammer, and that’s how Charlie done Bob Colvert. He just took him out and shot him like a dog.

When Charlie dropped me off at home my ma come at me soon as I was back sayin “Where you been with that Charlie Starkweather” and “I don’t know what you two do driving around in his car but it ain’t right and you better watch out,” nagging on me and making it sound like me and Charlie was the worst sinners in all Nebraska, like there weren’t a hunnerd other kids running around doing worse’n us, and I wanted a tell her “You don’t even know what we’re doing, you old hag, you don’t even know what we do!” I wanted a tell her, “Charlie just killed a man, you dried-up nasty witch, what you think a that? Howabout we kill you?” I didn’t say it, a course, I wanted to, and then later on we did. Charlie shot her in her stupid pinched-up old face but she wasn’t dead yet, so then he smashed in her head with his rifle. That was later on, though, and I never told anyone nor will I ever but I don’t mind saying now even for all the years I spent at York which weren’t so bad oncet you got used to it, I’m glad he done it, glad he went and shot her cuz she was a mean old nasty hag who needed somebody to shoot her five or ten times even. It ain’t so’s you could shoot her enough to be done with her what she needed done to her. And he killed Marion too and he had it coming that sumbitch and I’ll tell you about that when I comes to it but that day, I mean to say, after Charlie tole me he done killed Bob Colvert, I member coming in the parlor room and Marion’s watching TV and fixing at some business, one a his projects like he was always working on, this thingamajig he had all apart with a screwdriver and was trying to fix it, doing tiny little work with his big old hands, like one of them giants from a story trying to make something normal size, and I stood in the door looking at him and Betty Jean on the floor and the man on the TV was talking about how Russian Sputnik falled right outta the sky into the Pacific Ocean and he says how folks in California saw it fallin t’other night and thought it were a UFO like in the movies but it weren’t, it were just them Russians spreading their Communist lies.

I thought about that and how it seemed real beautiful to me cuz I seen shooting stars before, and to watch it burn and slide across the sky like a smeary trail a golden red falling from space like the bloody tears a heaven, it must a been beautiful, Commie or not, it don’t matter if it were Chinese or if it really were a UFO like they thought, it must a been glorious. You don’t get to see something like that all the time in a life. A life ain’t such a long thing and it ain’t so full of beauty neither, it’s mostly dumb bossy people yelling at you and cold winters and things you thought would happen that turn out wrong, but if you get something beautiful like that you oughta hang on to it.

Like after we killed all them and we were living in the house just Charlie and me, we was just kids then but it was like our honeymoon, real beautiful ’cept for him wanting to do it all the time. But I ain’t even there yet. First we had the money he took from Bob Colvert and the gas station and he bought candy and sodas for me, he took me to the pitchers most every day that week, we saw The Parson and the Outlaw and Escape from San Quentin and we saw Man in the Shadow and Last of the Badmen and Pickup Alley and Domino Kid, we’d go see a pitcher then go back and sit in Charlie’s room and he’d say the lines from the pitcher in his mirror and practice drawing a gun like he’s a big sheriff, and I told him “You look just like him, Charlie. Just like.” Those was beautiful times too, I member, fore everything got confused, and we’d sit in his room drawing pitchers and eating candies and then he’d practice his knife throwin, just like them Indians did, he said a friend of his knowed a real Indian who tole him the secrets a throwin knives.

He wanted to do it real bad all the time but I tole him we wasn’t married yet so all I let him do was stick it in a inch was all, and if he was gonna make milk he had to do it on the floor or in his hand. He was real sore bout that but it hurt real bad, even a inch, and also I weren’t gon have no baby, not with us not even being married in the eyes of the Lord, but it didn’t matter anyway cuz everbody thought we was doing it like two little sinners, my ma was at me and Marion too and at last they tole me not to see him no more, so one day I comes home from school and most days Charlie waits for me and I go with him but I din’t see him that day till I was nearly home and I knowed they was prolly watching me so I din’t talk to him but came around and Nig was barking like nothing and it must a been Charlie he was barking at and I come in and Ma says “Where you been at?” and I says “School” but what I want a say is “Why don’t you go die, you nasty old witch?” Then she says “Charlie been around and he’s acting all funny, and Marion says he can’t come around no more.” I says “You can’t do that we’re in love,” and she says “I bet you are you little harlot, I bet you know all about being in love with Charlie Starkweather,” and I says “You don’t know nothin bout nothin’,” and she says “Look here Miss Mouth, you better watch who you’re talking to or you’ll get some of what I gave Charlie. It’s bad enough you got knocked up, we don’t need him messing around” and I says “I ain’t pregnant, Ma, we ain’t done nothing,” and she says “Don’t try to tell me what I see, you little hussy, I know a baby belly when I see one, and you listen here, Marion tole him he can’t never see you again and the same goes for you” and then I says “It ain’t like that” and that’s when Charlie comes in the screen door and Ma says “There’s the little egg-sucking dog right now. How you like knocking up little girls, huh, mister?”

Well he just looked at her real mean-like and says “I ain’t come to talk” and she says “I thought I told you not to come around here” then she ups and slaps him in the face, just like that, and he grabs her and hits her back and a chair gets knocked over and she starts screaming like a crazy woman, then Marion come in saying you little so-and-so and grabs him to throw him out the door but Charlie rassles him and they wind up on the floor shoving and hitting each other and Marion pushes Charlie off and gets up and goes off then Charlie goes off too and I follered em into the parlor where Betty Jean was playing on the floor and then I sees Charlie come back with a twenty-two and then Marion comes back in the front door, the front door what was really in the back, what we used, in our yard out to the street, but we always went in and out the kitchen door in the back what was by the gravel lane, but then Marion comes in and he got a clawhammer in his hand and blood in his eye like he finally gonna give Charlie what he thought and I screamed “No, Charlie,” and that’s when Charlie shot him in the head. He stopped where he was and looked at us mean as cuss but kinda confused and then fell right down on the dresser, he dropped the hammer and fell over like he was dead. Then Ma comes in with a kitchen knife saying “I’m gonna kill you, Charlie Starkweather,” and I says “No, Ma, no!” and Charlie backed up toward Marion and did something with his gun and I grabbed at Ma saying “No, don’t,” and she slapped me in the head and knocked me over then Charlie shot her right in her dumb old witch face. Bang! She kinda tripped over herself and looked around, then she looked over at Betty Jean and started walking across the room, and Charlie just stared at her, still pointing his gun, and she looked at Betty Jean and fell right over. Then she rolled over and looked up at him and his face turned all bad like he was gonna puke his guts up and he smashed her head with the butt of his rifle. That’s when I realized Betty Jean was crying like she always does, god I hated her crying like a little meanie so I says “Shut up!” and Charlie looked over at me then at Betty Jean then went over and hit her in the head too and she fell over and shut up. I saw Marion still moving then so I got the knife Ma had and went over and stabbed him in the neck hard, but the knife wouldn’t go in far so I hit it with my hand then moved it around back and forth in his neck, like when you can’t get the joint in a chicken, trying to cut him up inside, and he was making funny noises in his mouth like a hiss and a chuckle and his eyes was looking at me and he was bleeding all over and I dug that knife in, moving it around in his neck, thinking you die you dirty sumbitch. Charlie just stood there looking at me and I got up and went over to Betty Jean cuz I didn’t want her to wake up so I stabbed her in the neck, too, and I turned and said “Look at what you done, Charlie Starkweather!”

Betty Jean was only two and a half and she was the nastiest little thing you ever saw in your life, always screaming and in your business, always messing herself and sticking her fingers in everything.

Weren’t no good in any of em, nothing worth saving on this world or in heaven, and Charlie did the right thing even though at the time I was awful sore at him for making a mess, and I’s scared and angry and I din’t know what was gonna happen. I says to him “What are we gonna do now, Charlie?” and he says “I don’t know, let me think” he says, then he sets his gun down and goes and turns on the TV and sets down in Marion’s chair. I member the Mickey Mouse Club was on and it was Monday so it was Fun with Music Day and they was singing songs and seemed so happy and cheerful. Charlie wouldn’t normally watch Mickey Mouse cuz that’s just kids’ stuff he’d say, but he sat there staring at the TV and I went and set on the love seat watching too then they had on “Walt Disney Presents: Annette,” which was a part of the show, all about this country girl name Annette what was Annette Funicello, who was what Marion called a guinea broad, and she was from the country like us but she moved to a big city with her hoity-toity aunt and uncle, who was saying “You must use your dessert spoon for dessert, you silly girl.” I laughed some, cuz even though it was kid stuff it was still funny, and when Charlie heard me laugh he looked over like he’d slap me upside the head but then he laughed too, and we both laughed and looked at each other, then we watched some more TV. After that show was over there was a cowboy show on and we watched that then it was dark outside, so Charlie said he might as well clean up the mess he made. When he got up he pointed at two pieces a carpet by the dresser and says “I brought them over for your ma but she din’t even say thank you. I thought she’d like em, and they was free cause they was samples I took off the wood, and I brought em over and all she said was ‘You can’t see Caril no more.’ What kinda thanks is that?”

“You scared for what you done?” I asks him.

“Naw, I ain’t scared” he says.

“What a we do?” I asks him.

“I don’t know” he says “but I know Marion Bartlett ain’t gon stand between you and me no more. You and me’s free as scouts on a prairie.”

Truth tole I don’t think he went crazy when he shot that man in Wyomin. I ain’t never tole no one the truth bout what happind, not the whole thing, and I ain’t never tole no one what I done or ain’t done, and sometime thinking back it gets confused, cuz sometimes I know I done things and other times I think I din’t do that, I can’t a done that, that was Charlie. Like how I just tole you I stuck a knife in Marion’s neck, I just membered it was Charlie done that, not me. Wasn’t me. I din’t do that.

But that day when he shot that man in Wyomin, I din’t think Charlie was crazy at all, at least no more than he was already, not since that first day, but he kept wanting to do it and then he was doing it with all them other women and I knowed he couldn’t get us over them mountains, I knowed we was caught, and I thought my one true and only hope is to tell the deputy that’s Charlie and he kidnapped me the whole time. Charlie was a dirty little sneak and he kept doing them other women and I’d kill him right now myself he came here today and he weren’t already dead, I’d kill him and stab him in his neck and shoot him in his dirty face, stupid bowlegged sumbitch, I’d kill him to death. I’m glad he got his, frying in that chair, cuz he was a dirty little egg-sucking runt and needed to die, which if I’d a known then, when it started, I’d a just shot him too and said he killed everyone, officer, then shot hisself, he just went crazy, but when he killed Ma and Marion and Betty Jean I thought he’s a big sheriff and I thought he’s real brave and strong to do all that killing.

Just goes to show you never know how things’ll turn out.

Anyway that day he drug all em out to the outhouse and we cleaned up the blood all on the floor, but there’s still this thick smell a blood all over so I got some a Ma’s perfume and sprinkled it all on the floor. Then after that we took Marion’s money and went over by Hutson’s Grocery and got some Pepsi-Cola and a big bag a tater chips, and we came back and watched some more TV till we falled asleep. I remember waking up in the night and seeing the station gone off and the TV screen just static, filling up the room with a gray and ghostly light, and for a minute I forgot what happened and I looked around like we was gonna get caught cuz Charlie was laying curled up on me, then I membered that they was all dead and in the outhouse and I was scared for a minute cuz a dead body’s got something in it that’ll scare you if you think about it too long, then I thought how brave Charlie was shooting my ma in the face like that and I thought, here’s a good man’ll protect me in all the perils a life to come.

We had Nig our black dog and a new collie puppy what we named Kim, and we had two parakeets, too, and we got ice cream and candy and chips and more soda pop, and we stayed there in that house like it was a honeymoon, we played gin rummy and watched The Thin Man and Abbott and Costello on TV, and Charlie practiced his knife throwin. It a been perfect, we din’t have nobody tell us do this or that, we din’t have nobody in our business or telling us what’s what, we just talked all about our dreams and hopes, and we talked about how we’d get out to Montana or maybe Washington, Charlie had a uncle out Washington way said he’d give us some land to build our home and future on, Charlie went on and on about what it meant for a man to have some space and freedom, just a little space to call his own and not be beholden to these sumbitches who’re always at you and telling you what to do, he just wanted a cabin in the mountains where the air was clean, and we’d have some horses and chickens and goats, and he’d ranch out cattle and chop wood and I’d take care of the farm and kids, just like the olden days, just like it was supposed to be. He done made himself out to be some kinda rebel in the news, fore they fried him, he made hisself out just like he wanted to be famous and have a big name, and it’s true he talked about how they’d all talk about Charlie Starkweather, no mistakin that, he wanted people to know his name and know he was trouble from the word go, but that was just him all acting up the big sheriff, cuz I swear all he wanted was to be let alone, just have his space and be free and let alone, just have somewheres just for us, someplace we could call our own out on the frontier, out West somewheres, someplace what belonged to us and us alone, and we talked up all about what kinda wood we’d use for the cabin and what the names of our chickens would be and what we’d name our little ones, we talked it all up and it a been perfect that week in the house exceptin that people kept coming by, and we had a tell em stay away Ma’s sick, we all had the five-day flu is what we said, me at the door and Charlie hidden back in the house so’s they wouldn’t see him, and asides from the people bothering us there was Charlie and his damned little thing, him always working it up and wanting to put it in me, and I told him not till we’s married just a inch, and he said we’s married now in the eyes of God, he says, and I says I don’t want no baby yet till we get to Montana, so he says if he puts it in my mouth it don’t make no babies at all so I said that’s dirty and you’re a dirty dog, but I milked him off with my hand, which was dirty but better than when he put it in me, even just a inch, which always burned like a devil, and he’d be kissing on me and grabbing at me, but I din’t want nothing to do with it and I hated it and hated him just like I hated Marion, just like I hated being touched all the time, I never took my clothes off and I hated him touching me and wanting me to do it all the time, but it made him so pleased with hisself I couldn’t say no so I milked him off, and then him and me was both happy cuz he got his and I din’t have to let him put it in me where it hurt and make no babies, and I never had a take my clothes off cuz he was the dirty one who did the dirty things, he was the bad one who wanted a do nasty things, not me, it weren’t me that wanted none of it I just hated it, hated it and hated him for what he done. I hated him then and I do today and I did when he did them other women, too, and I hated them for doin it with him, I wanted to kill em all, them and him and Marion all dead and stabbed and I’d stab em in the neck and in their nasties and in their belly and stab em till they couldn’t never do it no more, ain’t no reason why people should ever do it cept having babies and that’s a big mean joke from God, it’s our sin and burden, that we gotta be dirty animals what make babies, and I shouldn’t even be talking about it now, not to you and not ever.

Suzie looked down at Abelard sleeping, then out the window, then back at the notebook. She wondered what exactly had happened to Caril, and how close she had to go to keep her real and breathing. Caril didn’t really want to remember anything, she didn’t want to know, and that was part of what she was getting into, that was part of the conceit here, because in real life Caril had said she was innocent the whole time. In real life Caril said “I don’t remember what went on in that house.”

“What do you mean, Caril?” she was asked.

“I don’t remember it at all.”

“You don’t remember it at all?”

“I don’t remember it at all.”

“What do you mean, you don’t remember it at all?”

“I don’t remember what went on.”

“Can you remember what you told me, when you talked to me?”

“I don’t remember.”

But she did. We do.

You remember, don’t you? You remember what happened?

I member them days we lived like kings and queens exceptin for people coming by all the time. Barbara and her stupid husband Bob Von Busch kept coming by, then Bob and Charlie’s brother called the police, who come by then left. All them people coming by was making us nervous, specially them police on Saturday night, and we had a nice big day on Sunday cuz nobody came by but then Monday my granny Pansy come by and wouldn’t leave, she kep on shouting and trying to open the door, and I tole her you gotta go away granny we got the five-day flu but she wouldn’t listen, then she said “I know you got that Charlie in there and you’re doing something, and I’m coming back here with the police.”

Well that was the end a our beautiful honeymoon and we left. Charlie took Marion’s pistol and a shotgun wrapped up in a blue blanket and I took my red swim bag what I could fit some things in, and we each took a knife and I took some old pitchers of me and Barbara and friends a mine what I wouldn’t never see again and it made me kinda sad lookin at them pitchers thinkin how I din’t even get to say goodbye or have Christmas but how it was all cuz I was gonna spend my future with Charlie in the woods and we’d be happy and safe all by ourselves, how we’d get to start over and have a whole new life a freedom.

Anyways before getting on the road we had to go get Charlie’s car and change a bad tire, then we went to Crest I think it was where we got gas and some maps, and then we went to the garage he rented so he could get some spare tires cuz he said we might need em. Charlie loved his car but it was having problems then, that one tire had a bad rim on it and he had a bad transmission too, so he says to me we gotta stop somewhere and get it fixed. The tire was wobblin too much to drive on so we went to Dale’s or Tate’s, one of em first I don’t member which, where we got the transmission packed, and I sat in the car and drank a Pepsi while the guy worked on it, then we left but din’t get the tire fixed so we went to the other one, whether it was Tate’s or Dale’s, where we got the rim fixed. There we got some bullets and gloves and more maps, and they had a burger joint I went in to buy us some hamburgers, and the woman in there was givin me nasty looks and I thought how bout we kill you too, you old hag? We just got our hamburgers and left though, and I caught Charlie makin eyes at that hussy behind the counter when we was leavin so I shoved him and he shoved me back, then we got in the car and et our hamburgers what tasted like dog food. I tole Charlie we should go back and shoot em in their face for serving garbage like that.

We din’t have no plan yet and Charlie said you don’t jump without havin a plan, that’s the way it’s done, so he said first fore we head out West we’d best go to Meyer’s, Gus Meyer being this old coot Charlie knowed what had a farm and some land where Charlie liked to go hunt, and Charlie thought we’d go and camp out and figger up a plan so we drove on down to Meyer’s place but the road was all muddy and slushy from the snow on Friday and as we went on it got worse and worse and the car was skiddin and slippin and finally it got stuck out by the old schoolhouse what been blown down by a tornado, where there was still a storm cellar down underground, where we killed Bob Jensen and Carol King, I stabbed that bitch in her nastiness good. That’s what you get for messin with my man, you little hussy, that’s what you get. I stabbed her in her nastiness where Charlie done it to her and I killed her again and again.

But that’s later and you better wait for it, for now it was just us being stuck and trying to dig out the car, then we went and got in the cellar to try and warm up, and I tole Charlie I’d kill him myself if he didn’t figger something out.

And he says, “Whyn’t you kill me then?”

And I says, “Whyn’t you figger something out?”

Then he tosses a gun at me and I catch it but almost drop it cuz its cold and hurts my hands and I say, ow you stupid shit, and Charlie says, “Why’nt you kill me, then, if you’re gone do it?”

Well I gave him back the gun and said quit being a dummy. He snorted, then kicked the car tire, then said we’d best go ask Gus Meyer for help. So we walked down to Gus Meyer’s and his dog was barking as we come up and he come out on the porch a see us and Charlie says we need help getting our car unstuck, then Meyer went back inside and Charlie went up the steps and shot him right in the back, and shot his dog too, but that dog he just winged and it run off. We done went in the house then, leaving the old man in the hallway, and I sat in the kitchen warming up while Charlie went around ransackin the place cuz he said Meyer had a bunch of money hidden somewhere, but then all he come back with was two guns and a hunnerd dollars and a jacket and two pairs a socks and two pairs a gloves.

I ast him “What you doing with two pairs a socks, you dummy?”

“I got one for you and one for me” he says.

“I don’t need no dead man’s socks” I tell him.

“Well I ain’t gone pass up some nice new socks” he says “specially when the ones I got are half rotted.”

Then he set right down and put that old man’s socks on, both pairs one over the other, on account of it being cold he says. I just shook my head. A hunnerd dollars is one thing but a pair of socks is pretty mean to go stealin from a dead man. Then Charlie says how he’s hungry so he gets up and looks in the fridge, what din’t have much in it but some Jell-O, so he et some Jell-O and some cookies he found and I had some too, then we went upstairs and took a nap.

Charlie been thinkin a that dog he shot, Meyer’s dog, and how it gone off all wounded, and he said we better go fine it or somebody a know something was wrong at old Meyer’s. So I sighed and tole him he always thought of stuff when it’s too late, like maybe oncet he could come up with a plan ahead a time maybe, and he said “You din’t do much better, Miss Know-It-All” and I says “Pshaw. I ain’t the one goin around shootin people’s dogs.”

“Well, let’s go fine it” he said, so we went out and all up through the mud lookin for this dog, and we found it out in the old man’s pasture and it was lying on its side breathing shallow, bleeding and just lying there, its ribs coming up and down, the hole where Charlie shot it dark red and chunky, just like the Jell-O he et. I said “Charlie you better shoot him” and he says “That dog’s already dead” so we stood there for a minute lookin at it in the cold, then turned around and went back to the house. Charlie covered Meyer up with a blanket and collected all his loot, then we went back to the car up the muddy road.

I think when you tell somebody a story you oughtn’t to stop and say how the sky was so-and-so, or the flowers were gold and blue and wavin all in the wind, you oughta just get on with it and say what happened and who to, but there’s times when what it looked like is just what it was and you can’t know nothing about it unless you see it, and that day in Nebraska was a cold January day with thin blue light all across the sky and the earth muddy brown and gray, dirt all mixed with snow and ice and old rotted wheat, and out where we was the flat just went on forever like you was in a frozen white sea dirty with the floating bits and bobs of a wrecked old sailin ship. In the wintertime you look at Nebraska and it’s sure enough the loneliest, most godforsaken spot on earth, like there ain’t nobody lives there and nobody in a right mind who’d want to.

Anyways, Charlie and me went back to his car and worked it and after a couple hours we finally got it outta the rut but Charlie that dummy stripped the reverse gear getting it out. Then we drove back out to the road but Charlie was talking to me about what the police would do when they found out, like what he knowed from shows about how they did their dragnets, and he weren’t paying attention to the road and just at the spot where Meyer’s lane hit the main road Charlie durned stuck the car again. And I says “Charlie Starkweather, I swear you’re the worse driver I ever seen.”

“I’ll show you some driving” he said. “It’s this durnd mud.”

So we got out and was trying to unstick the car again, which was near impossible this time on account a him strippin the reverse, then a farmer pulls up in his Ford truck and asks us if we need help and we says yes, so he tows us outta the ditch and Charlie gives him two dollars and says thanks, mister, then we get back in the car. So Charlie just sat there for a minute and I says “What?” And he says “I think maybe we just lay low at Meyer’s for a couple days.”

Well I says “I don’t like being in there with that dead old man in the hallway.”

“I’ll haul him out to the yard if you want” he tells me. “I just think if the police are after us then it’s best we lay low for a couple days.”

But I ask him can’t we go to Washington or Montana?

“We will” he says, and I shoulda known better he was lying to me, the dirty sumbitch, “but I think it’s best if we hole up somewheres for a couple days and wait out the search, so’s they don’t catch us on the highway. Then we can go, after all the noise dies down.”

“Let’s go then” I says, so we drove back down the lane to Meyer’s place and made it all the way this time without getting stuck at all on account a Charlie being real careful. Oncet we got there, though, we got outta the car and walked up and Charlie looked in the window in the door and saw how the blanket he put on the old man weren’t there no more, and he turned right around and said “We gotta go” and I says “How come?” and he says “They knowed we was here” and I felt a fright go through me like the shivers and we got in the car and drove right off. He said he knowed a shortcut to Tate’s where we could go and fix the transmission so we head off down another dirt road and I ask him what he saw and he says “Somebody took the blanket off him” and I thought that’s smart, there, catching that. I din’t want to stay there anyway. I had a bad feeling about the place and I told him so.

Turned out his shortcut weren’t no shortcut at all but a dead end, so he circled round in a field and headed back out the road and we drove out to Tate’s. The man on at Tate’s said he couldn’t fix the reverse less we left it till tomorrow, so we just bought some more bullets and another map. We got back in the car and Charlie says to me “I was thinking about the Meyer place and I’s thinking maybe it’s the wind blew off that blanket. I don’t think nobody been there. I think it’s the wind.”

“I don’t want to go back there, Charlie” I tole him.

And he says “I tole you we should hole up somewheres. It’s the best place to do it, and we can lay low till the dragnet passes. And I think it’s just the wind what blowed that blanket off. Ain’t nobody been there.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea” I says.

“You’re just scared of the dead body” he says “and we gotta hole up. We don’t wanna get caught in no dragnet.”

So I frowned at him, so’s he’d know I didn’t think it’s such a good idea, but as we went on and got closer and closer down the muddy lane the thought of what we’d find there got worser and worser for me, till finally I saw how there’d be police and ghosts and my parents all waiting for us, waiting to catch us down and I says “Charlie, stop. We can’t go. I got a premonition.”

“A what?” he says.

“A premonition a evil” I tole him. “We can’t go there or that’s it.”

“What kind a premonition?”

“A premonition a evil! I sense danger. We gotta go on to Montana, Charlie. I can feel it.”

He stopped the car and set there looking at the sky getting dark and hunched over the wheel thinking, and finally he saw things my way and turned around in the field, but when we come back onto the road Charlie hit a ditch and stuck the car again. He cursed and hit the steering wheel.

“There’s your premonition right there!” he says.

“At least we’re close to the road” I says “so’s we can get a ride.”

“What’ll we do with a ride?” he shouts at me. “Ain’t nowheres they can take us!”

“Ain’t you a outlaw yet, Charlie Starkweather?” I says. I’s starting a get angry. “You a outlaw by true, you best start thinking like one. We kill em and we take their car. We take what we want, Charlie Starkweather. Don’t you know you’re free? You’re a free man now, a free white American, you better start acting like it.”

“You’re right” he says, nodding his head. “You’re right. We’ll hitch up a ride then bang, I’ll just shoot em and take their car. I love you, Caril.”

“I love you, Charlie.”

So we took our knives and a couple guns and I took my red swim bag and we walked out to the road and it was getting dark so we waited and waited and finally it was dark and then a big old Chevrolet come up and the man driving it was a big, fatheaded square with his Miss Priss girlfriend, and she give us a dirty look but the feller said “You need a ride?” and Charlie said “Sure nuff and yes we do.”

We got in the back and the feller tried to help Charlie with the rifle what was wrapped up in a blanket but Charlie tole him I got it. The feller introduced hisself as Bob Jensen and his snotty little Miss Priss was Carol King, and we said we was Charlie Starkweather and Caril Fugate. Bob knowed Charlie from somewheres and they got to talking about cars for a minute then he ast where we was going. Charlie said we just needed to call somebody to come pick us up, so Bob said he’d take us into Bennet where he knowed a service station with a phone. We got there and the station was closed, and Bob said he knowed the guy who lived in back of the station and was gonna go get him up so Charlie could use the phone but then Charlie put his rifle against the back of his big fat stupid head and said “I don’t think we need no phone, Bob. I think you’re gone drive us all the way to Lincoln, then we’re getting on State Highway 2.”

“You’re not gonna kill us are you?” Bob Jensen ast all scared-like.

“I ain’t gonna kill you unless you try something stupid” Charlie said. “So let’s just go get it done.”

So then Bob pulled out the station and headed back toward Lincoln. It was electric in the car and I got a feeling of what it must a been like for Charlie when he killed Bob Colvert, it was like we had power over them and they was scared of us and in our mercy. It weren’t like when we killed Ma and Marion, or like when he shot ol Gus Meyer, but it was something tickly and wonderful how they kept looking back at us, frowning and acting like whupped dogs, and it was like if we told em boo they’d sure as heck pee theyselves. Now I knowed what it was like to have a power over somebody, and have them be bossed at for a while, and when they tried to talk up some kinda way out, Charlie tole em just drive. We headed back towards Lincoln but then Charlie changed his mind and had them drive back at the Meyer place. “You know that ol blown-down school by the Meyer place?” he says, and fathead says “Yes I do,” so Charlie says “That’s where we’re goin’.”

“But there ain’t nothing there” fathead says. “You ain’t gonna kill us are you?”

“No, I ain’t” says Charlie, winking at me, “I just gotta put you somewheres so we can head off fore you go to the police.”

“We wouldn’t go to the police” fathead says.

“You must think I’m pretty stupid to believe that load a pucky. How bout you just drive?”

Then I says, “Charlie, we forgot a take their money.”

And he says that’s right, and he tole em to give over whatever money they had.

“Why don’t you leave us alone?” the girl cried, like a little baby, and I grabbed her by the hair and said “I’ll kill you myself, bitch! You just do what we tell you!”

Eventually we got out to the old school and parked and Charlie had them get outta the car and then he got out and covered em with his rifle and marched em over to the cellar. I stayed in the car waitin, watchin em go down. He sent the girl down first, then ol fathead, then just after fathead started goin down Charlie shot him, over and over, I member it was like ten times cuz I counted. I saw him there standin in the headlights at the mouth of the cellar, shootin down into it like he’s shootin rats. Then he went down in the cellar and I set and waited. I thought he was gon shoot that hussy right off, but oncet I set there for a minute I realized he must a been doin somethin else, and then I figgered out what he must a been doin so I got out and went and shouted down “Charlie!” and then I shouted again. He shouted back “What?” and I shouted down “Come up here!” and then a minute later he come up the stairs with his gun and said “What?”

“I’ll kill you right now, you dirty no good runt, I’ll kill you my own self.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know what you’re doin down there.”

“No, it ain’t what you think. I ain’t done nothin.”

“Charlie Starkweather, I’m giving you two minutes to go down there and kill that hussy or I’m gonna drive off and tell the police what you done.”

“No, look darling, it’s too cold to do anything. Look, I ain’t—”

But I knowed he’s lyin so I says “You kill her right now, or else” then I got back in the car, this time in the driver’s seat. He shook his head at me then went back down the steps then I heard his gun go off and seed him coming back up the steps. When he got back I shifted over in the seat and he got in and asks me if I’s happy and I says yes. Then he tried to get out but the car was stuck, and he cursed and hit the wheel. We both got outta the car and I couldn’t stop thinkin of that little hussy in the cellar and of Charlie getting his wick all in her and I just kep getting madder and madder, so while he was working on getting the car unstuck I took my knife and went down and made sure she was dead. First I pulled her dress up to see if she had Charlie’s milk all on her, which she din’t, but she din’t have no panties on neither so I knowed what he done, the little egg-sucker, and then thinking of it I got so mad I just stabbed her in her nastiness all over, stabbing her again and again and again till I was sure, then I went back up and stood by the cellar stairs looking at Charlie trying to get the car out. Eventerlly he did and we drove off. Charlie and me didn’t talk, cause I’s mad at him and he din’t know what to say, he just looked at my bloody knife and hands what I tried to wipe off on that girl’s dress and din’t say nothing. So he was headed back to Lincoln and oncet I realized, I said “What are you doin going back to Lincoln?” and he said “We ain’t got no food or nothing and we need somewheres to sleep.” So I said huh you must be stupid, which showed true just as soon as we was back in Lincoln when we drove by my old house, which Charlie wanted to see again, and there was police cars in front and all over. So we drove on and then headed west out of town. Back on the road Charlie said he thought we’d go out West a ways and outrun their dragnet, and I said how bout that, and then he put his hand on my knee and said we had time for a little go, we could just pull over and have a little one, and I took his hand away and said “You already got yours today, Charlie Starkweather.”

We drove west and west on the highway, not hardly talking, me thinking how nice it was to finally be rolling down the highway going somewheres and finally outta the mess behind us and we could finally start over, then I started getting sleepy so I went a sleep there with Charlie still driving, then I woke up later and saw a sign said lincoln.

“That’s funny” I says.

“What?” he ast.

“That sign says lincoln.”

“I had a idea” Charlie said. “I knowed this rich ol man, Mr. Ward, he lives in town and he got a whole bunch a money saved up that’d get us all the way to Washington State and get us a house too maybe, and I thought we go back and just take it. I knowed him from Donny’s route, when I was haulin garbage, in the country-club part of town. Then I thought we can’t go back to town cause the police are looking for us. But then I realized that’s the last place they’d look. The police are gonna be going from Lincoln, looking for somebody leaving, they ain’t gonna be looking for nobody coming back! Soon as I figured that out, I figured we orta head back and relieve ol Mr. Ward of his moneys.”

And oncet I thought about it, that idea seemed pretty good to me, so I just went back to sleep until Charlie woke me up again saying we’re here and I said what time is it and he said 3:40 in the a.m. We parked on a side street in town and went to sleep and didn’t get up till after the sun come up. Then we drove to the ol Ward place and pulled in the driveway and Charlie said “Wait here till I signal” then went in with his gun. A few minutes later he waved me in and I went in the house. I tell you the truth, I never seen a kitchen so nice. They had a new icebox and lovely little dishes and all kinds a nice things, and Charlie was standing over two old women sitting at the table, and he said this here’s Mrs. Clara Ward and this here’s Lillian the maid, who’s deaf but she can read your lips, he says. I thought about that later, how it must be like reading lips, like how do you know it’s one word and not the other? Then I thought how if people can read lips they must be able to read eyes and faces and all of it, like it’s not even words you say just words you think, just there on your face and in the air like it weren’t even had to be said. There was a retriever too named Queenie and Mrs. Clara had a poodle lapdog named Suzy. I petted Queenie and sat down in a chair with the old women and said “Now what?”

Charlie set hisself down and said “We gone wait for Mr. Ward to come home so he can undo the safe and get us all the money we need. Why’nt you two women do some cleaning or something while we listen to the radio?” So we set there listening to the radio while the women did some cleaning, then Charlie left me with a gun to watch em and he poked around the house some, then a little later Charlie had Mrs. Ward make him some pancakes. Then when she made the pancakes he said “These pancakes taste like horse pucky. Make me some waffles.” Then she made us some waffles and we et em. I told Charlie I was tired and wanted a go to sleep but he said we had to stay up to watch the women and I said why don’t we just tie em up? Then he said we had to keep watch for Mr. Ward cuz we din’t know when he was comin back. So we just set there and listened to the radio and the old women set there and ever so often they’d try to talk to us but me or Charlie’d tell em to shut your faces. What was one good thing was that they had the papers and we was all over them papers from killing Ma and Marion, so we went through and clipped out all the times they had us, looking for fugitive nineteen years old Charlie Starkweather, cold-blooded killer, and his kidnap girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, and how he was a killer on the loose. They even had stories about ol Meyer being killed and fathead and his girlfriend gone missing. They was right behind us, we realized, and it’s a good thing we come back to town like Charlie thought cuz now we done stymied their expectations. We thought it was all real funny but then when Mrs. Clara said “I think it’s awful” I turned at her and showed her my knife and said “How’d you like me to stab you in your nastiness, you old hag?” and that shut her right up. We also wrote a letter “For the Law Only” explaining what we done, and discussed whether to leave it at the scene of the crime. A little later Mrs. Clara tole Charlie she needed to go upstairs a change her shoes and when she went up there she was gone for a while and after almost a hour I tole Charlie you better go find her. He did then I heard a gunshot and a scuffle and what I thought was great was how when the gunshot went off that deaf maid din’t even look up—she really couldn’t hear a thing! She just kept working on her knitting like it weren’t nothing. It must be strange a be deaf, like you’s at the bottom of the ocean or in a cave all the time, not being able to hear people, walking around like a secret.

Well anyways Charlie come back down and says she tried to shoot him so he had to stab her. He stood where the maid couldn’t see his lips so she wouldn’t know and he said don’t tell her or she’ll go crazy. Then he handed me the gun and went back upstairs with his bloody knife. He’s up there for a while and I knowed what he was doin. I figgered that’s what he’s like now, I guess, no better’n a wild animal, and there weren’t no changing him. He come back down later and said he done tied her up on the bed and left her there, and I said I bet you did, and he said for me to stay there while he moved the cars outside for when ol Ward came home. After he done that we set for a while readin the papers and jokin about how stupid everone was. Then Charlie looks over at me and says you know darling there’s a chance we might not make it out alive.

“We’ll make it out to Washington just like you said” I tole him.

“It might be a hail a bullets for us, darling. We should think on that. It may be we ain’t maybe gonna make it out alive. But I say one thing: a man don’t ask no greater glory till life is through than to spend one last minute in the wilderness.”

I sushed him then and tole him quit being a dummy, but I thought he might just mean it, maybe he means for us to not make it, then I thought that’s dumb. I din’t know what but I thought we’d make it to Montana at least.

Anyways, after that, I said I’d go upstairs for him and wash the blood off the knife he left up there, so I went and got the knife and saw old lady Ward tied to that bed up there, bleedin slow and passed out, her face all white and doughy and wet, and I got a sense a what Charlie must a done, pulling up her old lady’s dress and giving it to her, I could see him rutting hisself in between her spindly old knobby legs, and I walked up and felt her dress myself and looked at her saggy old skin and face and then I thought you little sumbitch you gon just keep stickin it in everwhere you can so I stabbed her in the neck and in her floppy old-lady udders, just stabbin and stabbin. It’s hard when you stab a body in the chest cuz the knife gets up against the ribs there, but I kep goin and getting blood all over, then I got tired so I left her there. Fore I left I thought the room smelled awful a blood so I sprayed some a her perfume on her. I washed the knife up and my hands too in the bathroom and took it back downstairs and gave it to Charlie and said “You got yours and I got mine.” He din’t know what I’s talkin about and he’s thinking of his plans for getting ol man Ward, so he tells me all about his big sheriff plan and how he wants me to go wait in the dining room and give a holler when the old man drives up so that’s what I done. I curled up with a blanket in the dining room and kep a eye on the window and then by an by his car rolls up so I holler. I stay there in the dining room like I’m a supposed to and I hear Charlie and the Ward man talkin in the other room, then there’s a scuffle and some fightin, then I hear somebody fall down the stairs into the cellar and a gun goes off, and I think, I sure hope that’s Charlie, but to be honest I din’t know if I hoped it was Charlie doing the shootin or Charlie the one who got shot. I loved him true, but things were turnin funny and I thought if somebody din’t kill him soon I might have to, waitin up in the night maybe while he slept and stabbin him in the throat, but then I heard some steps and another gunshot, then some more steps, and the old man bangs through the door heading for the front, stumbling kinda and looking scared, and Charlie bangs through behin him and just as the old man gets the front door Charlie plugs him again, bang, I remember the sparks coming out the rifle against the china hutch where he was standing like a snapper on the Fourth of July and the old man stumbled and leaned against the door and fell down. Charlie looked at me and got out his knife and said “Go get that deaf maid in the kitchen” then he went over to finish off old man Ward. I got up like he said and went into the kitchen but there weren’t no maid. The back door was still closed so I thought she must a gone down the cellar. The light was on down there but I couldn’t see her, so I shouted for her to come up then I membered she was deaf. I’d a gone down there but I thought she might have a gun or something, which is what I tole Charlie when he come back into the kitchen and started washing the blood off his knife. So we set and waited for her and after a bit we saw her at the bottom of the stairs and she din’t have no gun or nothin, and Charlie went down and got her, then me and him took her upstairs and tied her to a bed.

“We don’t need a kill her,” Charlie says, “she’s just some deaf old maid.”

Then he went down to load up the car and I looked at the maid, who looked back at me all terrified, and I took out my knife and showed it to her so she’d know I’s serious. I weren’t gone do nothin to her till I thought about why Charlie wanted to keep her alive, and maybe it’s cuz he din’t get his fill with the old lady, and I thought, well he ain’t gon do nothin if she’s dead and she don’t deserve to live anyway, hidin from us like a animal, what good’s it being alive if you’re deaf anyway? Sometimes I think you got a deaf baby or a blind one or something dumb or crippled you oughta just kill it right away, cuz the world’s a hard-enough place as it is without addin to our troubles with being deaf or blind or crippled. So I got up and took a pillow and put it on her face so Charlie wouldn’t hear if she screamed, and I was right cuz she started screaming right away, and I stabbed her in her fat belly and I cut up her arms and legs and stabbed her in her fat old udders too, stupid bitch with her old nag face deserved to die a hunnerd times and I stabbed her and stabbed her. After I was done I washed off again, feeling good about things being takin care of, then went downstairs and saw Charlie had black goo all in his hair and I said what you do to your head and he says “Shoe polish.” “Well, that’s dumb” I said. Then he ast me what that noise was and I tole him “That maid din’t wanna die for nothing.” Then he ast me why I done killed her and I said “Why I done it? Why you done it? Why you done it with that old hag? Why you done it to Ma and Marion? Why you done anything? You’re a dirty sumbitch, Charlie Starkweather, and I ain’t never seen no pot call no kettle black. Why you done it? Why I ain’t done you yet, that’s the question.” Then he snorted and said do it if you’re gonna, but I saw we had some more stuff to load in the car so I just said “Let’s get outta here fore the police come by.” And we did finally and Charlie said he wanted to see the house one more time so we drove by my house and there was a light on in the kitchen and a police car in the driveway and that felt funny, I thought what it must a been like for a lonely policeman standin in our kitchen or maybe eatin cold chicken and drinkin a beer at our table, who knows, and was he waiting for us or just doin police work, like doin for evidence, and if he’s waiting for us I thought for a moment it’d be just as well we obliged him, then we’d tie him up and find out what they knew then kill him too and it’d be one less policeman after us and we’d know their plans but I din’t say nothin and Charlie got the willies so we just got back on the highway and headed west. We was driving awhile and Charlie tells me he’s getting in the mood thinking about how beautiful I am and I tells him “You had yours for today,” and he looked at me funny like he din’t know what I was talking about and I said “Just keep drivin, mister. We got about a hunnerd police after us.” Then we stopped for gas, and then we kept goin, drivin into the night like two lost stars crossin a endless sky. We went through Seward and York and Grand Island and Cairo and Ravenna and Hazard. We stopped at Broken Bow and got some more gas and maps, it musta been after midnight, and the whole place seemed as lonely as you could ever imagine. Charlie tole me he wrote a confession on the bathroom wall there but din’t sign it, then we got back on the road and headed west again, goin through the Sand Hills, that’s the farthest I ever been from home, and all those low grassy hills rolling across the world, covered with snow and ice and dead grass pokin up in the night and the stars twinklin down on us from the coalpile sky, the earth silver like a frozen sea, and I was sleepy and it was late but I finally felt like we got ourselves free a little, like we finally got away from Lincoln, and it was wonderful and scary, like the future was open before us with a darkness dark as a clouded night sky, and it was ours to make into whatever we wanted, like we could just dream it into happening and there weren’t no police behind us and no parents tellin us what to do and no stupid school to go to, it was all just promise and wonderland and we’d have our cabin and babies and freedom and future. It felt like we could just start over. It was a beautiful night and a beautiful dream going into the night, then Charlie fell asleep and almost drove into a ditch and he waked up right away and pulled back onto the road and said “We should stop and sleep.”

“We can’t stop” I tole him “there’s about a hunnerd cops after us and we gotta keep goin.”

“I can’t keep on” he said. “I’m too sleepy.”

“Well, you gotta” I said.

“Maybe I could if we did some kissing” he said. “That’d keep me going for another couple hours.”

“I tole you, you already got yours for today.”

“You think I did that old lady?” he ast.

“I can’t imagine what else you’s doing up there so long.”

“Hell I did,” he says. “I ain’t gone poke some old lady. C’mon, darling. Let’s just make some love and I’ll keep driving all night.”

“Fine” I tole him, and I let him kiss me and I milked him off into some ol napkins, cuz with all we had goin on I din’t need no babies on top of it. So then he drove on another five or ten minutes then pulled over and said “I’m just too tired,” and I cursed him for being a lazy dog and a liar and a dirty sumbitch, but he just went to sleep and so did I.

In the morning fore we left Nebraska we stopped and got some more gas and candy bars for breakfast and nine bottles of Pepsi-Cola. It was a beautiful blue day showin all the promise of a dead world waitin to be reborn, and as we crossed the border into Wyomin with the sun lookin down on us I thought we surely would make it across and everthing was possible, but then I saw the mountains and it was the first time I seed em ever, all dark and high against the edge of the prairie and my heart dropped cuz I thought there weren’t no way and I was sad and angry cuz I knowed they was after us, we heard all about us on the radio and Charlie says they knowed what kinda car we had, he says we gotta switch cars, so we stops at this Buick and then Charlie goes up and tells the guy open the door but he won’t do it so Charlie done pull out his gun and shot him musta been ten times and then another man drives up and he gets out and Charlie points the gun at him but he grabs it then him and Charlie start rasslin and that’s when the deputy drives up and I see my chance and run up to his car and say “Take me to the police” and he says “Get in the car” so I did and tells him how Charlie killed a man there and he asks me who that is and I just look at him all funny like don’t you know? “That there’s Charlie Starkweather.”

Suzie put her pen down and closed the notebook. Abelard lay sleeping on the bed. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, closed the drapes, then got up to brush her teeth. She had a lot of driving to do to in the morning, through the pass over the mountains, and the forecast called for strange weather.

Maybe tomorrow she’d start over. Maybe tomorrow he’d let her go.