Who Named the Knife

by Linda Spalding

  For me, they were something else. The two people I spoke to most often on the phone that summer were an old woman and a prisoner, neither of whom I could save. When I wasn’t talking to my mother or Maryann, I was cutting young trees out of the huge chunk of Canadian Shield next to the house, grabbing and pulling and chopping as if I could free up the roots. It took me years to give up all the hodgepodge of growth on this great mound of stone – raspberry stalks and birch saplings and unrecognizable stuff with roots crawling underneath – years to care enough because at the top of this rock, a huge metal cable leads up to a hydro pole and a light that interferes with the stars.

  But a month or so before, when a group of our friends were here and a lot of wine and margaritas had been drunk, there was a contest with two ugly-looking slingshots to shoot out that light. Eventually someone succeeded and, for the first time in all these years, the night was really night.

  But the thing about that light we shot out is that it went cold, then flickered, then somehow relit. There was nothing left – no discernible filament – but we got out the slingshots again. Would one go back in time? Would one call back the mother who danced in the kitchen or the brother who taught us to swim? We cleaned up the broken glass and lay with our backs on the rock to take a good long look at the sky. Funny to think this piece of ground is the one I’ve known longest in my life and Maryann’s been in prison longer than I’ve been here.

  39

  That winter was going to be a tale of two cities: In Vancouver, my daughter was pregnant with twins and the pregnancy was so precarious that she was confined to bed for several months. In Topeka, my mother was dying, but not so that anyone noticed. “I’ve been lazy today,” she’d report. “But what could be nicer than lying here reading in bed?”

  I went to see her.

  I went to see my daughter. I came home and paced and wondered which one I should visit next. I was frightened. At such times we want to make everything right, hold back the fates, put all the pieces together again. I was frightened, and instead of going to see my child or my mother, I went to see Maryann. Getting off the plane, I was actually not sure what I was doing there. And the only motel room I could find had to be rented from a man who stood behind bulletproof glass. There were old Band-Aids in the shower; there was no phone. But I tried to compare my room with Maryann’s cell as I pulled back the unpleasant bedspread and crawled in under it.

  The next morning, the prison was exactly as I had left it, even to the stout woman at the desk at the visitors’ centre. Same woman. Same giant scissors. “Are you wearing an underwire bra?” Maryann had to be called away from work, but she was allowed to see me because I had come from so far away. The only other visitors were two women, elegant and well dressed. With them sat Leslie van Houten, one of the three Manson girls. “I didn’t know they were in prison with you. All this time and you never told me. Do you know them? What are they like? Do they stick together? How do the other women feel about them?” Leslie was very thin, with a long braid that was grey and a look of suffering stamped into her face.

  It was a warm, overcast day and the prison, surrounded by those same thousands of cows, was blanketed by the smell of their shit. The stench was so overwhelming that I almost gagged. The visiting room was hot and there were hundreds of big, buzzing flies. We pulled two plastic chairs up to a bench and sat facing each other, knee to knee, eye to eye. “Do you want to meet Leslie?”

  “Yes.” I’d parked my rental car next to a new Lincoln that one of the visitors must have been driving.

  “That’s her mother. And a friend who brings her out here.” Maryann was wearing the glasses I’d had an optometrist send down from Portland. I’d carried her prescription into a shop and picked out the frames. I’d had to explain the situation, that I could not send them myself; it was against the rules. I’d asked one of the clerks to try them on because she looked a little like Maryann, if Maryann could wear bubbly hair and bright red lipstick.

  When Leslie’s visitors got up to leave, she came past us on her way out. In a minute she would be strip-searched. Then she would go off to her job or back to her cell, but now Maryann introduced us and Leslie gripped my hand, gazing at me with huge eyes and looking nothing like the young woman who carved an X on her forehead during her murder trial. “I’ve heard about you,” she said.

  I said I’d heard about her as well.

  I was going to have two days with Maryann – days when I should have been someplace else – and I hoped there would be time to talk about things we had not talked about before. We’d talked about the progress of her writ; had she heard from Mike Brennan? We’d talked about Valere, whose parole hearing was coming up. “She might get out this time.”

  “That will be like a divorce,” I had told Maryann.

  “Death,” she had said.

  We’d talked about William, about her father and mother and … “Did you ever get mad at them?” I asked.

  “Just once,” she said, without stopping to think. “It was in Hawaii, during the trial. Dad had told me he had some money set aside. Money to help me if I really needed it. So one day this smooth lawyer named Winston Mirakitani finds me on a bench outside the courtroom. He’s really short but flashy in a white suit and he says he can get me off for $50,000. So I call Dad and he says he doesn’t have the money. That made me really mad. But that’s the only time.”

  I was sitting in a room buzzing with flies and heat and I told myself that my mother was simply old, simply fading, simply not feeling well as she had been old and fading and not feeling well for three years. I told myself that Esta would be all right and I crossed my fingers and leaned back in my chair. I said, “He still owned the house in Phoenix, didn’t he?”

  Maryann shut her eyes. “But he’d told the tenants they could have it for as long as they needed.”

  “You needed it more. He could have sold it to save you.”

  “Oh, he’d never go back on his word.”

  My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord, do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of they mouth. Judges XI. “I got the box,” I said, to change the subject. “How many thousands of pages did you send?” I had wanted to compare the court testimony to the words I’d written in my yellow notebook, but when a box half the size of a bathtub arrived, I’d more or less given up. Had I actually listened to all those millions and millions of words? Both lawyers had asked William to go over the most trivial details countless times and every rehashing of events was more detailed. “He walked a little ways away from the car,” William had said, describing Larry’s murder. “And I told Maryann to watch him, but she indicated she could watch him from in the car. I instructed him to walk down to this little ravine. It wasn’t the same place where Joe was. And I know when he walked down he’s going to slip and fall. And before he gets back up the road, he won’t know which way we turned.” There were fifty versions of that paragraph. “I could see that he’s going to slip and fall. He’s not going to break his neck or nothing, but he’s going to probably get scratched up.”

  What I noticed was how much I’d missed. I hadn’t written a word about the forensics expert who testified that there were only two bullets and that Larry had been shot from behind. William had stated many times that Maryann shot Larry three times while she was looking him in the face.

  Where was the third bullet?

  Another thing I hadn’t mentioned in my notes was Bert Bray’s testimony. Maryann’s father had told us about talking to William in Yuma and convincing him to turn himself in. Was I listening? Did I wonder then, as I do now, why William went to Yuma instead of staying on the bus and trying to escape?

  “I didn’t have anywhere to keep it when Mike sent me the box,” Maryann was saying. Most of the pages were things that had been recently filed on her behalf, but there were old transcripts attached. “Did William ever drive your car?” I asked now. “In Phoenix?”

  “Yes. All the time. He’d come by to see me at wor
k and ask for money.”

  “And that was a VW, but he said in court that he couldn’t drive a stick shift.”

  “He could. He did. Definitely.”

  “Why would he bother with that little lie?” Mike Brennan, at USC, was trying to show that the State of Hawaii had depended on the testimony of a known informant, that they had allowed him to perjure himself when he said he was serving life without parole. But maybe William lies without even realizing it. Maybe he even believes what he says. In one of his letters, William had written to Maryann, “Don’t sweat it. You’ll go free as I will not be believed and you will. I know this, and when you’re out there, think of how I freed you. Think of the price you cost me.”

  I noticed that another prisoner had come in to meet a visitor. “He comes all the time,” Maryann said, when I asked about them. I asked because they sat together like elderly couples sometimes sit, bowed over with foreheads together, as if their moments together were measured and cherished.

  “How old is she?”

  “In her seventies, I guess. She killed an abuser. Not hers, though. Someone else’s.” The woman was small and delicately built. Her husband held her hand tenderly. That evening Maryann was supposed to make a speech in front of the warden at a meeting of the Life Termers’ Organization. She had recently been elected president and she took her duties seriously. Her speech would be about elderly prisoners, who cost the state an average of $66,000 a year. “There’s a woman here on dialysis,” she told me. “Has to go out to the hospital twice a week under guard. And do you have any idea what those guards get paid? A younger prisoner costs about $28,000 to keep. That’s a big difference. It’s stupid to keep old women locked up. What harm are they going to do anybody?” Then she recited the statistic for lifers, which she knows by heart. Less than 1 per cent come back once they’re released. “We just don’t come back. Our crimes are crimes of circumstance.”

  “Maryann,” I said suddenly. “Let’s find your birth mother.”

  “I told you she had me when she was sixteen?”

  “Yes, you did. Yes.”

  “And did I tell you it was my mother who left my father and me? He gave me up, but he did it out of love and wanting what was best for me. That’s why I decided I wanted to know who he was. I’d been asking my mom questions about him, but she wouldn’t tell me anything. Finally I told her that no one could ever take her and dad’s place in my heart or my life, and she sent me a copy of the adoption papers.”

  “In here?”

  “Yes. Containing my birth parents’ names. Hers was Anna Foster. His is Herbert Douglass. I was born Kerry Jean Douglass, which is kind of strange to think about.”

  “Why don’t we …”

  “I don’t really have anyone left.”

  “You have Penne.”

  “Not quite.”

  “Anna Foster could still be alive.”

  “I know, but I don’t care about her – especially after what my father told me. The last time he saw her was when he took her the divorce papers to sign. She was working in a bar. In Phoenix. Mother Anna.” She looked away.

  Included in the pages of testimony were all the things we had not been allowed to hear – the bench conferences between the judge and the attorneys and his instructions to them. Hioki kept trying to prevent things. That was his tactic, but he didn’t seem to know what he was up against.

  “Then what happened?”

  “She shot him, shot him.”

  “How many times?”

  “Three.”

  I told Maryann I would see her in the morning, and I went out slowly, with nothing to do for the rest of the night but read more pages of testimony. The parking lot was empty and when I climbed the three steps to the guesthouse to retrieve my car key, the keeper handed them over, she of the scissors. But when I put the key in the car lock, the car alarm went off and I glanced quickly up at the guard towers. There were guns trained on me.

  40

  Saturdays at the prison are busy. This one had the usual young fathers holding babies, and grandmothers with older children or other relatives. A father gave his infant a bottle without looking at her, then held her up on his shoulder and slapped at her back, saying, “Good girl, good girl.” Another cycle, I thought.

  The scissor-lady in the guesthouse had smiled at me. The day before, she had helped me call the car rental place and they had told me to use the button on my keypad instead of the key. I had not been shot or arrested and I had found a nicer place to sleep. Today we can sit outside where the flies are less pestering and where there are more things to be seen. A mother and daughter whispering to each other in Spanish. And a prisoner named Anika, who is from Sweden. “She just wants to go home, but California won’t let her.”

  I also meet Pat, another Manson girl, who tells me she reads every book that I send Maryann. Pat’s mother is visiting in a wheelchair and they sit together for several hours, two heads bent.

  “How was the speech last night?”

  “It went great. I was nervous having the warden right there in front of me, but he seemed impressed with my research.”

  The usual moment of disinclination overwhelms me. My mother. My child. Why am I here instead of there? “Maryann, in court William mentioned other robberies. He told the arresting officer in L.A. that there were several in both California and Hawaii.”

  “In California, yes. But not in Hawaii.”

  “You’re sure? Why would he say that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why didn’t you disagree?”

  “They never asked me.”

  “True. Hioki dropped the ball a hundred times. But why didn’t they interview you in California?”

  “Because,” she lowers her gaze, “I wouldn’t talk to them without my lawyer and he wouldn’t give them anything without a deal.”

  “William said you did one robbery alone?” I’m looking through the new glasses and into her eyes, which are suddenly wet. “Tell me.”

  On June 25, while Larry Hasker’s body was being found and moved and identified in Hawaii, Maryann acted as lookout while William robbed a store in Downey, California. The next day, in Bellflower, she went into a U-Totem store, pulled a gun out of her purse, threatened the clerk, and took the money in the till while William waited in Cesario Arauza’s stolen car. “And that woman had a breakdown. She’d been robbed before two times and she ended up in a mental hospital.” A pause. “I did that to her. I took that piece of her life. I mean, she went home again, back to her kids, but I did that. The others were different, but that one was mine … and why didn’t I just tell her to call the cops, there was a lunatic in the car outside?”

  “Did you use the gun?”

  “I had it.”

  “Tell me about when you got picked up by Cesario Arauza. Because I have a theory. You can tell me if it makes sense.”

  “We started hitchhiking. To northern California,” she says quietly. “I think it was the same day we landed in L.A., but I’m not sure any more. Then we were coming back down.”

  “So Cesario picked you up and William was sitting in back.”

  “We had been riding with him for several hours when William pulled the gun on him and told him to pull off to the side. The man didn’t have that much money on him. I don’t know what William had in his mind.”

  “And he was nice to you.”

  “Who?”

  “Cesario. In his testimony, William said you stopped someplace and tried to leave without him, the two of you.” The words William had used were elaborate. Like my one-horned goat. He’d said, They wanted to throw me out and keep going, and there’s a lot of ramifications as to why it happened. You know, it went over and over and over and over and over. And it was a senseless thing, and it happened, you know. “He said Cesario made a pass at you. Or that’s what you told him.”

  “We never stopped until William told him to. Then they got out and walked down an embankment and I heard the gunshots.”

>   “Maybe he thought you were planning to go off together. The way you were going off with Larry Hasker after you dropped William at the apartment.”

  “But that was William’s idea. That’s what he told Larry when he asked him for a ride home.”

  “Because Larry was coming on to you. But Joe Leach was different. He was a lot older than William. Forty something. And he never really tried anything, did he? And those were the only three people you and William were ever alone with. Am I right? Larry Hasker and Cesario were your age. They were young. He thought they were coming on to you. Remember how William described Cesario? I just read it again in the testimony. ‘He was bigger. A lot bigger.’ ” Surely someone in the last twenty or so years must have suggested this. Someone must have thought of jealousy as a motive.

  “I never thought of that,” Maryann says, although she always describes her ex-husband as possessive, controlling. “He said that he got messages, that killing Arauza was part of a plan.”

  “So control was a huge part of his reality.”

  “It was always there. I was always being tested. He’d say, What did I tell you yesterday? And I’d have to recite it.”

  Stand up straight. What did I tell you? What did I just say?

  The night Maryann was arrested in Long Beach, William had asked her to go out and get him some cigarettes. He’d given her the car keys. He’d let her out of his sight for the first time since the Joe Leach robbery. It was her chance to escape. But minutes later she was pulled over by the police. Had he called them? When she took the police back to the motel, or when they took her, William wasn’t there, but he had left her glasses case in the room and in it there were four bullets, all hollow points.

  While she was taken off to jail and charged with robbery, William got himself down to Yuma. And how did Maryann’s father manage not to strangle this overgrown boy? Instead, they sat in the living room drinking ginger ale and fingering paper napkins until William got up and paced back and forth in front of his father-in-law. He was wired and volatile. Hungry. His knit shirt was torn. He had come for help and eventually he let Bert call the sheriff. “But can I have some breakfast first?”