“Well, one time when I was there visiting my grandma and I guess I was about six or seven, I asked you if you wanted to swing on my swing and then I asked you if you’d marry me. Do you remember that?”
“No.”
“You don’t remember that?”
“I’m sorry.”
He shook his head like he couldn’t believe I’d forget he wanted to marry me when I was four or five years old. Then he stacked up all his papers to go. He says, “Well, my grandmama was a bitch on wheels. And I bet the same can be said for your sweet Dr. Nina Rothmann.”
People think you can’t be nice and smart both but I don’t see why. Mawmaw used to tell me and my brother Tanner, “I’d rather have sweetness and niceness in a child than a report card full of As,” but why couldn’t she get both? Course the last A she ever saw was the one I got in algebra in tenth grade. But I blame that on going out almost every night with Kyle, who was a senior and the star of the basketball team. Rich as Tilden Snow was, even he wasn’t popular like Kyle. So my grades slipped. Meanwhile my brother Tanner would probably still be stuck in first grade if all his teachers hadn’t passed him along to get him out of their classrooms. I bet he’s the only boy ever flunked conduct in a elementary school.
Our grandma Mawmaw raised me and Tanner after Daddy and Mama got killed trying to beat a Food Lion truck through an intersection. She said they wasn’t cut out to be parents anyhow, due to drugs, drink and the NASCAR tracks. They dropped us off at Mawmaw’s almost every night even before they got killed. Mawmaw said my Mama was the only thing my Daddy ever met that was as fast as him. He loved speed and speed killed him in the long run. And he took my Mama along for the ride. Only twenty-four, both of them, which is how old I am now, so I guess twenty-four is just a real unlucky year for the Lubys in general, since that’s how old my brother Tanner was three years ago when he held up the ABC store while still on parole.
Poor Mawmaw, she used to tell me with my brother Tanner it was déjà vu right back to our daddy only worse. Daddy was Mawmaw’s only child and she said he was one too many. Plus she said she didn’t have her strength like she used to. But she never quit. Thirty-five years at the job and she’s still cleaning houses. Because of her I was never cold and I was never hungry and I was never made to feel no good. And I know my little boy Jarrad never will be either, if Mawmaw can just hold on to him against Kyle’s mama’s, Mrs Markell’s, lawsuit. Kyle’s mama getting her hands on jarrad scares me more than a lethal injection. I mean, look how Kyle turned out. So bad his own wife shot him.
Way back when Daddy was fourteen and he robbed Mawmaw’s purse, stole her car and drove it down to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, she asked her minister at Church of the Open Door if the devil could of got her pregnant while she was asleep at night, ’cause she’d started wondering if Daddy was the son of Satan. But the minister said the Devil don’t make personal acquaintanceships in the modern world. Well, that minister never met my husband Kyle Markell. And I wish I could say the same. When Mawmaw came down to the hospital after they pumped out my stomach, she told me the only way somebody wouldn’t have killed Kyle sooner or later was they never met him. But I sure don’t think Mawmaw figured it’d be me. I never was a violent person, never yelled, never cursed, and I never could stand blood. I couldn’t even cut up a frog in biology. And when that Clemson guard whammed his elbow into Kyle’s nose his freshman year and they couldn’t stop the bleeding, I fainted dead away in the stands. I fainted other times too, like when Kyle had juliaRoberts put to sleep just because of her seizures. That was my dog that had eyes like Julia Roberts. I’m convinced Kyle ran over her with the van and swore he didn’t. I never wanted to hurt anything in this world till the day I picked up that gun and told Kyle to put down that basketball and shut the fuck up.
Anyhow, the reason I wouldn’t go on the stand in my own defense was the samples Mr. Snow gave of what the District Attorney would likely ask me. I wouldn’t tell that sort of thing to Mawmaw on my deathbed, much less testify on a Bible about it to everybody in my hometown. Like the weird disgusting stuff Kyle heard on the Internet that he kept trying to make me do in bed. And Mr. Snow said how they’d twist things all around so lies would look true and the true things sound like lies. So I kept telling the lawyer the same thing I used to tell Kyle. No thank you. He got real upset. The lawyer, I mean. To be honest it was nothing much compared to the way Kyle used to freak out on me when he was alive, which I guess it’s my fault he’s not anymore. All my lawyer does is grumble how I’m tying his hands behind his back. One day early on in the trial he said I had a sympathetic personality and was young and petite and pretty—the way his eyes shifted around behind his glasses when he said that, I had the feeling he was coming on to me without even knowing it, which would be pretty strange considering, but he wouldn’t be the first man that got strange on me at the wrong time. His idea was if I took the stand and started crying I could maybe win over the jury to go easy on me even if Kyle had played in the Sweet Sixteen.
Three weeks back, the night before my trial started, my lawyer goes, “I don’t want to scare you, Charmain”—(Sure!)—but he explains how unless I testify so he can bring up about the drug stuff and weird sex stuff and the 911 and the rest of it, I could get Death.
I’m like, “Well, okay, then, I’ll take Death. But I won’t take the stand.”
He’s like, “Great. You know who’s gonna love this? The District Attorney. You know why? Because you just lay down in the death chamber, Charmain, handed him the needle and said stick it in!” He shakes this bunch of papers in my face. “Look at this, look at this, look at this!”
I say, “Excuse me but I heard you the first time.”
“This is State’s evidence. These are exhibits the State’s gonna be showing to the jury and you don’t think they’re not going to have a seriously deleterious impact?”
Well, I didn’t know what “deleterious” means but from the twitch in his mouth I could tell it wasn’t good. I looked at the papers. Stuff like:
STATE EXHIBIT #7. One desert eagle mark VII .44-caliber Magnum pistol, black matte finish. Six-inch barrel. Fingerprints of defendant on grip.
STATE EXHIBIT #13. Eight-round clip of .44 Magnum shells. Two rounds fired.
STATE EXHIBIT #28. Emptied kerosene can. Fingerprints of defendant on handle.
STATE EXHIBIT #51. Two .44 Magnum slugs taken from cranium of the deceased.
STATE EXHIBIT #85. Five-page letter of confession to shooting on Marriott stationery signed by defendant.
STATE EXHIBIT #97. ACC tournament basketball with bullet hole.
STATE EXHIBIT #103. Photographs of partially burned corpse of the deceased.
I said it did look like they had plenty of exhibits. Tilden Snow just nodded like his head was on a spring. But he was right about them making the most of what they had. For two weeks mornings and afternoons that sour-faced District Attorney, Mr. Goodenough, kept shaking plastic Baggies with those exhibits in them in front of the jury’s faces. He made it all sound like I was the original black widow spider. The worst was the pictures of Kyle’s body. I didn’t look at them. But the foreman lady, Dr. Rothmann, turned gray as a old dishrag when Mr. Goodenough shoved them at her, and I’m not sure how much she even saw because she turned her head so fast.
I’d rather be dead anyhow probably. I mean, I already tried. And failed flat as I did Algebra II when I was going out with Kyle every night, which was a shame, I mean the algebra ’cause it was kind of interesting. But at the time, I’m sorry to say, not as interesting as Kyle, who was already such a big basketball star at Creekside High he was on the news just about every week, leaping and dribbling and dodging and tossing. He could have had any girl he wanted in Creekside High and I was such an idiot I was glad he picked me.
Anyhow, I tried to die after I killed Kyle but I didn’t. I woke up alive in the ICU and I could just hear Kyle laughing that snuffling way he had about how Charmain Luby never could do a single thing right. But I did try. I b
ought a shelf’s worth of every pill Wal-Mart’s had on display, then I went to the Marriott and got most of them down with a bottle of vodka which tasted terrible because I’m not much of a drinker. I propped my letter to Mawmaw against the ice bucket and took out my silver-framed picture of my baby Jarrad (that Mrs. Markell got named Kyle, Jr., on the certificate) and I lay down with the picture on the bed and cried myself to sleep. I felt like I was dying and they said I would of too if it hadn’t been for the highway patrol knocking the door down and rushing me to the emergency clinic.
It was my brother’s Mercury Cougar got the police there, which I didn’t know was a stolen vehicle at the time I parked it out in front of the Marriott on Old 89, not that anything Tanner did would surprise me anymore. They had a whatever-you-call-it out for his car and it was a easy color to spot, Light Sapphire Blue, plus had a Pirates of the Caribbean flag from Disney World hanging on the antenna, plus Florida plates. They weren’t even looking for me yet. So they saved my life anc. went for the death penalty.
I always wanted to stay in that Marriott. Or any Marriott. Even on our honeymoon Kyle took me to a Motel 6 at the beach. “I’m not paying good money for a bed in the dark.” He wouldn’t eat in nice restaurants either. “I’m not paying good money for something that’s going to turn to shit in three hours.” Kyle always called it good money and I guess what was good about it was he never spent it on me. He spent it on drugs and what he called Antique Vehicles. He collected old junk motorbikes, cars and trucks, and anything else crappy that used to move and now couldn’t anymore. He claimed their “value” was “going through the roof” someday and then he’d fix them and sell them for a fortune on the Internet. But he never did, surprise surprise. All he did was leave them there turning to red rust and weeds I couldn’t get at to pull. Between his antique vehicles and his basketball court, he used up all the space in my yard so I couldn’t grow a vegetable garden. He squashed my peonies under a 1952 Ford truck and he shot free throws standing on top of my tulip bulbs. Mostly up Kyle’s nose is where the good money went. And I got Motel 6.
Where I really always wanted to stay at was the Polynesian Resort at Disney World. But considering what’s happened, it don’t take the Psychic Hotline to tell me Disney World’s not in my future, because even if I don’t get Death, I’ll get Life.
My brother Tanner went to Disney World. Drove down to Orlando right after he got out on the ABC store thing. I wish he’d taken me with him. At least I would have seen the Magic Kingdom. Or I wish he’d never come back with that Mercury Cougar that stopped me from dying at the Marriott. Or I wish he hadn’t come back at all, so I wouldn’t have gone over to his trailer and seen his Desert Eagle Mark VII .44-caliber Magnum pistol I shot Kyle with. (Mr. Goodenough has been talking for weeks about that gun, like it was the most important thing in my life, so that’s how I know so much about it now, because believe me at the time I borrowed it from Tanner, all I knew was it was black and heavy and if you pulled the trigger a bullet came out.) Most of all I wish I’d never eloped with Kyle.
I picked the Marriott because I figured as far as me and a nice motel goes it was sort of now or never, since I planned on meeting my Maker after those medications took hold—if there’s even Anybody up there to meet, though I’d hate for Mawmaw to hear me wondering something like that. And you know what’s funny—not really funny but freaky—is at first I was thinking, Ha ha, wait’ll Kyle gets this Visa bill, he’ll turn totally purple, because on top of $129 at the Marriott, I had tore through Wal-Mart, looking like Kyle used to on the basketball court before they found out he was using cocaine. After I loaded up on medications, I bought Mawmaw a Hoover Deluxe because she brings her own equipment to the job, plus $326.59 worth of toys for her to put out under the tree next Christmas for Jarrad. It took me a long time to choose the toys and it was like I forgot I didn’t have a long time. That’s what was funny. I had completely forgot I’d killed Kyle, shot him in the head and drug him out in the yard and set fire to him right under his basketball hoop with a big pile of brush and a gallon can of kerosene.
Then when I was lying on the king-sized bed in the Marriott swallowing those pills, it hit me how there was no way Kyle was ever going to pitch another fit over the Visa bill or the other million things he blamed me for, like his whole entire life, which I used to be dumb enough to think was my fault. And then it hit me how it was Mawmaw that was gonna get stuck with that huge Visa bill. And how it was Jarrad that was gonna get stuck with his friends saying his mama had murdered his daddy, which is worse than what I had to put up with in school because of my name and that was bad enough, calling me Toilet Paper and “Please don’t touch the Charmain.” Plus jokes about my parents being trash and roadkill. Trying to write a letter for Jarrad to read when he was old enough was the last thing I remember.
My lawyer said a suicide attempt didn’t look good for me in some ways, and did look good in others. The way it did look good was it showed I wasn’t in my right mind and was full of remorse and confusion and maybe had acted “on impulse” and wasn’t trying to get away with something. The way it didn’t look good was I’d left a note for Mawmaw asking her to apologize to Mr. and Mrs. Markell for me and say I hoped they could forgive me for killing their son but not saying anything about how shooting Kyle was a accident, or self-defense, or spur-of-the-moment, or too much to drink, or some other reason why it wouldn’t be Murder One. Plus setting fire to Kyle with kerosene—my lawyer said that had the look of a cover-up.
I guess it was a cover-up, just not enough of one. But it’s true, I couldn’t stand the idea of Mawmaw and Jarrad (when he was old enough) thinking I killed anybody, much less my husband, and I guess that’s why I tried to get rid of his body. I figured if Kyle was just gone and everybody thought he’d run off to Hawaii or something, then Mawmaw wouldn’t get her life ruined and Jarrad would have, I don’t know, a chance, I guess. When I tried to explain my reason to Mawmaw in the hospital, she said my Mama and Daddy hadn’t had half a brain between them but she had used to think I did have some brains. But I’d handed them over to Kyle to wipe his feet on. She said there wasn’t no reason for acting the way I had, and I had to accept I’d acted crazy and move on from there.
But I will swear this on a Bible. I never thought Mr. and Mrs. Markell would drop by our house that afternoon (which is something they never did, and Kyle sure never told me he’d asked them to supper) and find Kyle only half burnt up. I figured that brush pile would burn on through the weekend—nobody lives near us and besides Kyle liked to keep trash burning out back so you couldn’t smell his marijuana. I’d figured by the time anybody showed up, I’d be gone to Heaven or probably Hell, considering, and Jarrad would be at Mawmaw’s safe anc sound, and when Kyle wasn’t at Creekside Ford on Tuesday, because he had Monday off, somebody would call the house, and then one of his coworkers would come over and think he was gone. I never figured Mr. and Mrs. Markell would be wandering through my kitchen by four o’clock on Sunday, and they’d see the smoke and walk out to that brush pile. Because that is something parents should never have to see. Their son burning up in his backyard. And I do apologize for that.
Another thing that didn’t look good for me was my brother Tanner and the fact that I’d borrowed Tanner’s gun three whole days before I used it to shoot Kyle with. My lawyer called it “our elephant in the kitchen.” Before Tilden Snow got to be my lawyer, I admitted in my statement that I took the gun out of Tanner’s refrigerator and brought it home with me. “That gun implies premeditation, Charmain, which is why Goodenough’s going for first-degree homicide.” He (I mean Tilden Snow) couldn’t stop trying to get me to say something that wasn’t true about that gun. “Charmain, go back to that time frame. I want you to let me know when I say something that correlates to your motivation.” I swear that’s the way he talks; sometimes even the judge looks at him like he’s nuts.
But when Mr. Snow says, “Okay, go back,” I say I’m not going anywhere. He doesn’t listen any mo
re than Kyle did. “Maybe you took the gun because you didn’t want your brother Tanner to get in trouble with it.”
I say, “No, I didn’t.”
“Maybe you took the gun because there’d been crime in the isolated rural area you lived in and you felt afraid to be in the house with Kyle gone.”
I say, “All I wanted was to be in the house with Kyle gone.”
He jumps on this. “So maybe you felt afraid to be in the house with Kyle and wanted that gun for self-defense.”
I shake my head.
He sighs. “Maybe you weren’t even aware you took the gun.”
I say, “Now, Mr. Snow—”
“Tilden.”
“How could I not know I took it? That thing weighs a ton.”
He never did ask me to tell him why I did take the gun out of Tanner’s refrigerator. But he made that a rule from the very start. The day we met, he said, “Charmain, don’t answer any questions I don’t ask you. Don’t tell me anything I don’t tell you I want to know. Do you understand?”
I shrug. “Sure.” And that was the end of honest communication. That’s what the marriage counselor I got for me and Kyle two years ago said good relationships was based on. Honest communication. But that marriage counselor was a moron, plus started hitting on me every time Kyle went to the toilet (which was pretty often and the reason why good money got sniffed straight up his nose). All I hope is, that moron’s marriage-counseling business has already gone bust. It can’t be real good for business when one of your patients shoots her husband in the head and sets fire to him. I told Mawmaw back when I quit the marriage counselor, “That man didn’t respect me any more than Kyle did.”
That’s when she said the thing that was haunting me from right then till a year later when I pulled the trigger on Kyle. She took my hands in hers that were like tree bark they were so rough, and none of the paraffin wax dips I give her could do a thing for them. She said, “Charmain, you listen to me. Since I was eleven years old I been cleaning out other people’s toilets and the only way I can stand it is, I get the respect of the folks I work for and if I don’t, I don’t work for them no more. Listen to me, you got to earn respect. But when you do earn it, you make sure they give it to you. They can’t make you turn any which way they want to. You got to learn that, honey. You’re my only hope that thirty-five years on my knees with a scrub brush wasn’t just a gob of spit in a week of rain. You got to learn that.”
Murder at the Foul Line Page 17