The Love of a Bad Man Read online

  But she was already sobbing and taking Rainelle into her arms, who of course was in a state by that point, with Ray so close and naked to boot. He had managed to replace his toupee and with his free hands was grabbing at Delphine — her wrists, her hair, the belt of her dressing gown. It was a hell of a scene, like something out of a potboiler. I even stopped eating my pancakes for a better view, just in time to see Ray getting an elbow to the face and mama and baby rushing to the door.

  ‘Bitch!’ He put his hand to his nose. For the first time, he noticed me watching. ‘Fat bitch! What are you playing at? Help me!’

  I remember he looked so puny standing there, his toupee on askew and his lovely long dick hiding inside itself. Not at all like the spell-caster who could turn broken hearts into gold.

  Even though I’d been ready to do in my Willa Dean and Anthony at one stage, dealing with Rainelle made me glad I’d never had to. You wouldn’t think it, but it was more of a struggle in some ways with the bawling and the frog-kicking and the little face turning blue. Then again, maybe working on the children’s ward prepared me somewhat for the last part. We were always having little ones coming in near-purple with the croup and so forth.

  Ray and I went to a matinee afterward. When My Baby Smiles At Me. Everyone likes going to the movies when they’re in need of cheering up and we were no different. It was nice, too, sitting there in the dark with a big bucket of popcorn between us. Ray had left his toupee at the house, figuring it was time for a change anyhow, and in the middle of the film he sweetly laid his bare head on my breast. By the time we got out, I think we’d both near forgotten the cleaning up that was waiting for us back at Delphine’s. The streetlights were so bright it was like coming from a blackout.

  There’s no death penalty in Michigan, which is why they extradited us to New York State. It was a cruel trick to pull, but I guess it was fool of us to trust a bunch of men with our lives, and lawmen at that. As we were boarding the metal bird, the marshals kept joking about what a risk it was flying with such heavy cargo. Which just proves my point about folks only caring about what they can measure.

  It was shaky up in the air, but we had a nice view of all the lakes and scudding clouds. Honestly, I wouldn’t have minded going down then. For one thing, it would’ve saved us the trouble of the trial. For another, I wouldn’t have had to worry about my body, what kind of spectacle it was going to make.

  Because that’s the one thing everyone wants to talk about: my body. How much it weighs, how Ray could’ve ever put his hands on it, how much voltage it will take to kill.

  I’ve been thinking about it, too — about what’s going to happen when they pull that switch. I like to believe there isn’t voltage enough in the world to put me out, that even if all the lights of New York City go into that surge, my heart will still be thud-thudding with love for Ray. Because some things in this world have to be beyond measuring.

  Caril

  Charlie waits for me outside the school gates, leaning against his Ford and smoking Camels. Charlie’s cooler than anyone I know. He wears a black windbreaker and has his hair done real high and slick. I run to him as soon as the bell rings and let him kiss me right there against the car for everyone to see. I don’t care what the girls in my class say. None of them have a boyfriend as cool as Charlie, who’s been out of school for years and doesn’t have to earn his wages on some dumb old farm.

  My momma says that Charlie is trash. No better than the garbage bags he hauls from sun-up till ten a.m. She doesn’t care that he scrubs himself up real good before meeting me, so I can barely smell the garbage. He pays for all our dates and buys me presents whenever he can afford to — gumballs, hair barrettes, even a plush white kitten.

  I’m failing math and I might be held back a year, if I’m not careful. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t get myself to concentrate on the fuzzy chalk numbers on the blackboard, the books full of boring words. When I bring home Ds to my momma and stepdaddy, they scream at me until baby Betty Jean starts screaming, too. ‘It’s that Starkweather kid, isn’t it? That boy’s trash. One of these days, he’s gonna knock you up, and you’ll be out on your ass!’

  Charlie never liked school either. The boys at Lincoln High used to call him names — Lil Red, Bandy Legs, Peckerhead — and make fun of the way he talked. In gym class, he’d get back at them by throwing balls at their heads, or tackling them to the ground when they weren’t looking. He’s always happy when he tells me how badly he hurt those boys, many of them bigger and stronger, and I’m happy for him. I tell him, ‘Good on you, Chuck. They deserved it.’

  In the Ford, Charlie guides my hand on the gearstick. I bump along with him through muddy paddocks, squealing as the windows are spattered with dirt and cow shit. ‘You’re doin’ good, baby,’ he says in my ear. ‘You’re drivin’.’ My hands are firm on the wheel. All around us, cows are lowing. Grey geese gather in the sky like clouds in tornado season.

  I’m fourteen now and gaining flesh. Hips that weren’t there before and fat, pale breasts I try to hide under my loosest shirts. I feel like a cow, but Charlie says I’ve never looked prettier. He takes me to the Runza Drive Inn for ground-beef rolls that leave my hands greasy and my clothes covered in pastry flakes. When I get home, I try hard to eat up Momma’s cooking, but it’s not easy with my stepdaddy grumbling across the table. ‘I’ll be damned if that girl isn’t knocked up. Look at all the pounds she’s packing.’

  Charlie says he wants to marry me. Around town, he’s been spreading the word about how we’re going to live together, all the babies he’s going to put inside me. I tell him he shouldn’t be saying such stupid things, but he says it’s a compliment and, besides, I shouldn’t be calling him stupid. So I let him run his mouth, figuring it’s easier than trying to shut him up.

  We’re still flushed from driving, looking out at the frozen cornfields, when Charlie says he’s got something to show me. I wonder if maybe he’s going to get his gun and shoot a goose from the sky, like he did one time. Instead, he jumps down from the hood of the Ford and fumbles in his windbreaker for a little gold ring.

  ‘Caril, baby, let’s do this. Let’s get h-hitched.’

  The wind is in his hair, picking up the bright red tufts. I’ve always found Charlie’s red hair pretty, like his green cat eyes, but right now I’m finding it hard to look at him.

  ‘I can’t, Chuck,’ I tell him. My tongue feels heavy and cold, like I’ve been sucking on icicles. ‘Not while I’m still in school. Momma would never let me.’

  ‘Damn your momma! Come on. D-don’t you want to wear it?’

  He starts trying to put the ring on my finger. It’s cold, and his hands are so rough they make me pull away. ‘No,’ I say, and my voice sounds meaner than I want, but sometimes it’s hard getting Charlie to understand any other way.

  Something flickers in Charlie’s eyes and he shoves the ring back in his pocket. Then, sooner than I can slip off the car’s hood, he’s kicking at the fender, cussing the whole world and me. ‘Goddammit! Damn you! If you only knew what I goed through to get this shitty ring …’

  Charlie hasn’t come to get me from school since our blowout so I’ve been taking the big yellow bus. It’s slow and full of stupid boys from my class, who aren’t anywhere near as nice as Charlie. It makes me think maybe I was too hard on him and should call him up when I get home. Only after I’ve done my homework though. Things have been better since I’ve been doing my homework, and my stepdaddy’s even saying I could make something of myself someday, like a nurse or a kindergarten teacher.

  The house is quiet and after I’ve opened the screen door, it flies shut behind me with a crash. And just like that, Charlie is standing in the doorway with his .22 rifle pointed at me, yelling, ‘Go in and sit down!’

  ‘Chuck?’ I look from the gun barrel to his freckled face, and think it must be some kind of joke, though my heart is racing like a rabbit’s. �
��Don’t be stupid. Put that down.’

  ‘I tolded you, sit!’ he yells again. Then: ‘Don’t you ever call me s-stupid.’

  So I go into the den and to Momma’s rocking chair, the one she likes to sit in with Betty Jean. I start asking Charlie where everyone is, but he won’t answer, just keeps pacing around with his rifle, tilting his head every now and again like he’s hearing something I can’t. After a while, I start crying, and he says, ‘They ain’t here, okay! I tolded them it’s just you and me from now on.’ Then he switches on the TV.

  We watch a lot of TV that night, so much my head hurts and my eyes get small and squinty. The only time Charlie lets me get up is to fix us some dinner and once to use the bathroom, and he follows me like a shadow.

  ‘I can’t go with you watching,’ I tell him, when he wants me to leave the door open. He just laughs and says I must think I’m pretty special, and do I really think he’s never seen water before. Since I don’t have much choice either way, I unbutton my jeans and settle over the bowl, tugging down my shirt so he can’t see between my legs. Even then, all I can manage is a trickle.

  The next morning, I’m waking up sore in my momma’s bed. Outside, the world is dull and frozen: frost-covered chicken coop, frost-covered yard, frost-covered scrap metal. In the kitchen, Charlie’s frying eggs and crooning like Elvis on an off day, his red hair slick with my stepdaddy’s pomade. I hug my body and ask if he’s going to drive me to school. ‘Course not, baby. You don’t ever have to go back to that dump.’

  Come afternoon, the neighbours are knocking to be let in. Charlie turns down the TV and tells me to get rid of them. So I button my housecoat real tight and tiptoe to the front door, scowling through the screen. ‘You can’t come in. Betty Jean’s got a real bad flu. It’s con-tay-jus.’

  Afterward, Charlie gives me a pen and paper and tells me to make like I’m writing a note from my mother. Stay a way Every body is sick with the Flue, I copy out in my neatest handwriting. Charlie says it looks swell and tapes it to the door. Then he goes around and makes sure all the doors and windows are locked and all the curtains drawn shut.

  For a whole week, I don’t change out of my housecoat. The TV is on all day, so we see all the programs, from the baby shows in the morning to the talk shows late at night. Charlie drives into town for groceries and comes back with bags of potato chips, a tub of ice-cream, and three big bottles of Pepsi, which we drink with every meal. ‘Ain’t this romantic? Like a honeymoon,’ he says again and again. We neck sometimes, but it isn’t much fun with no one around to tell us off, and Charlie always wants to take things further.

  Once a day, Charlie goes into the backyard to feed the chickens and look inside the outhouse. He doesn’t tell me why, but near the end of the week, he says, ‘Boy, it stinks in there.’

  I believe Charlie when he says it’s time to split, though I don’t know whether I’ll ever see my momma, stepdaddy, or baby Betty Jean again. I tie one of Momma’s scarves up under my chin and pocket her lipstick, telling myself that it’s only to borrow; that I’ll be back as soon as the ice has melted and Charlie has stopped acting so crazy.

  Charlie drives us over to Old Man Meyer’s farm. Old Man Meyer has lots of guns. He has known Charlie since he was a little boy. It was Old Man Meyer who taught Charlie to shoot and skin jackrabbits. ‘I’m the best shot that old man’s ever seen,’ Charlie brags to me. ‘And he’s seen a lotta shooting.’

  When Charlie pulls up on the muddy track outside Old Man Meyer’s farmhouse, the dog is barking. The old man is hobbling out in his overalls, waving a .410 shotgun. ‘Hey, M-mister Meyer!’ Charlie calls out. ‘It’s just me and Caril. Can you lend us some ammo?’

  I wave at the old man and he stops squinting to smile at me. ‘Pretty Caril Ann! What are you doing going around with this jackass …?’

  Old Man Meyer’s bedroom smells of wool and tobacco. I’m wiping my eyes with his nubby blanket as Charlie tries on hats, doffing and swaggering in the looking glass. ‘That was a rotten thing to do, Chuck! Why’d you have to go and pull your gun on Mister Meyer?’ Charlie tosses his hat on the bed and grumbles, ‘I didn’t like the way he was l-looking at you, not one bit.’

  Charlie fills his pockets with bullets and spare cash. He gives me the .410 to keep, telling me I’ll need something to protect myself. In the kitchen, we make a meal of the rabbit stew bubbling on Old Man Meyer’s stovetop. ‘We’ll stay here, just for tonight,’ Charlie says.

  The wind is pounding and the dog is crying in my dreams. Charlie’s stumbling out naked into the cold, unloading his rifle at the whining, wagging darkness. ‘Now we can get us some sleep,’ he says. He cuddles up behind me, cold-skinned. His hardness is like a gun muzzle against my spine.

  The shotgun is heavy against my shoulder, trudging through the mud in my white boots. ‘Why’d you have to go get the car stuck, Chuck?’ I ask him again.

  ‘Aw, baby, you know I didn’t mean to.’

  The sky turns dark early at this time of year and the bare trees are scary, bent and blackened like witches on a stake. I think of how scary the old man’s body looked and feel like I’m about to cry, but Charlie’s watching me closely. Then a car winds into sight, and Charlie nudges me. ‘Look here, Caril. Stick out your thumb.’

  We’re rugged up, riding back into town with two preppy kids, who laugh when they see our rifles and ask if we’ve been out hunting. ‘Yeah, something like that,’ Charlie says. The prep boy has glasses and talks like he’s thirty years old, not seventeen. His girl is pretty. She has dark hair like mine and her name is like mine: Carol, spelled the proper way. I see the girl looking at Charlie and get a funny feeling, like a cold skin of ice over my stomach.

  I wait in the car as Charlie leads the prep kids down the abandoned tornado shelter. The windows are rolled up and the winds are whirring enough for me to convince myself I don’t hear the shots. Charlie’s gone awful long and is wiping off his hunting knife when he climbs out of the shelter, jeans unbuckled. His red hair is snow-specked and tossed from the wind. ‘It’s too damn cold,’ he mutters. ‘Too damn cold.’

  We’re curled up together inside the locked car, on the rich side of town. Charlie is watching the sunrise, squinting at the mansions from behind the glasses he swiped from that prep boy. ‘I used to haul trash here,’ his words edge into my sleep. ‘You wouldn’t believe the stuff these rich folks throwed out.’ A man in a long wool coat and fedora leaves one of the mansions, suitcase in hand, and gets into a shiny black Packard. I yawn as I watch the man drive off and Charlie load his rifle. ‘Let’s get us some breakfast, baby,’ he says.

  The maid is wailing as she tries to cook us pancakes, slopping mixture and dropping a whisk on the kitchen floor. Opposite me, the rich man’s wife sits with her hands tied to the chair back. She wears something long, white, and floaty like a swan’s feathers. She smells of everything we don’t: soft beds, clean towels, hot showers. ‘We want coffee, too,’ Charlie is telling the maid, mouthing the words since she’s deaf or foreign or something. I look at the rich man’s wife and try to make conversation.

  ‘Gee, your dress is real pretty. I wish I could wear something like that to sleep.’

  I’m hunched up on the divan in the rich man’s library, watching the grandfather clock that hasn’t chimed yet, the statue on the mantle of some dead guy with eyes like a catfish. When I hear Charlie’s footsteps on the staircase, I look over and see he’s shedding his bloody shirt. He’s blacked his hair with shoe polish and has an armload of clean clothes.

  ‘Put this on,’ he tells me, holding out a light suede jacket.

  I look at it. Clean as it is, I shake my head.

  ‘Go on, wear it.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Goddammit, Caril!’ Charlie takes a step toward me.

  I look at the ceiling, then the statue of the dead guy. I swap my dirty blue coat for the clean suede one. When
my hands are curled inside the pockets, I ask, ‘Can we go now, Chuck?’

  ‘Naw, baby. Not yet.’ Charlie throws the pile of clothes on the divan. ‘We still gotta get that big shiny car.’

  We’re skipping town in the rich man’s Packard. I watch the black road fly ahead of us, the snow and stars falling onto the windshield. Charlie’s talking, but listening to him feels like being in school, the way he says the same things over and over. ‘People are no good. You’re the b-best thing in my life, baby. Don’t you wish we were the only two people on earth?’

  We’re crossing the border and I can see the lights of Cheyenne, but Charlie doesn’t want to go anywhere near them. He’s talking about driving to Washington State, the two of us living in a cabin in the woods. He keeps talking and I close my eyes, feel my head growing dark and heavy with everything I don’t understand.

  I wake up to pink skies, slowing. Charlie’s pulling up behind a parked Buick on a roadside outside Douglas, Wyoming. Gun over shoulder, he’s stepping out of the Packard. I see him knocking on the window of the Buick. I see him jerking his thumb. There’s a newspaper on our dashboard with a picture of me and Charlie on the front, a list of all the things we’re supposed to have done. I see Charlie pointing his rifle at the Buick and plug my ears, screw shut my eyes. I can hear baby Betty Jean wailing, the dog in the night. A siren starts to whine.

  The papers say that Charlie’s been sentenced to death. They say that Charlie wants me sitting on his lap when he goes to the chair, frying with him. They print photographs of me looking grownup and snooty, with my new clothes and spit curls. The papers call me a femme fatale, and Charlie tries out the words on the witness stand. ‘Caril, she’s a real f-f-fem fatal. She made me kill those people. I never met a girl so trigger-happy.’

  On the night of Charlie’s frying, I watch the clock. I watch the minutes click by as they strap his arms to the chair and fix the metal bowl over his head. I look out at the darkened prison yard, my forehead cold against the window grating. The minute hand ticks one after midnight. I close my eyes and smell the smoke of him on the night air.