Murder at the Foul Line (24 page)

After a while I decided her eyes weren’t mean, she was just thinking hard all the time, not like some folks on my jury that
were taking naps with their eyes open. Not that I blame them.
All that State’s evidence was boring
me
, and it was
my
life. But Dr. Rothmann, she hung in there even with that old fat Mr. Goodenough mumbling about ballistics this and ballistics
that for four solid hours. Isn’t it something? I could not make myself listen.

After a week or so Dr. Rothmann got to be somebody I could kind of talk to in my mind in my cell at night, like maybe explain
things to her that were all balled up inside me like string in a junk drawer, like she’d be smart enough to see how they’d
look if they got untangled. When I looked at her over there in the jury box, I felt like she could see what was true. I tried
to explain it to my lawyer, Tilden Snow, but he said, “I don’t trust Rothmann.” He figured the D.A. must know something or
he wouldn’t have let her on my jury because he said usually the State avoids these Ph.D.’s like the plague on account of they
are soft on crime.

Yesterday I told Mr. Snow in the visiting room how, deep down, I thought the foreman lady was kind of sweet and he snorts
at me, “She’s about as sweet as a jar of pickled okra.” I said I was surprised somebody rich as him even ate pickled okra
but he tells me, “Charmain, I’ve got a grandmama same as you and she loved pickled okra.”

I say, “I know you do because my grandma used to clean her house and your mama’s house.”

He says, “I know. Your grandmama was the White Tornado.”

“Yes, she was and still is. She quit your mama,” I say.

He wants to know why but he’s not surprised.

I tell him. “Your mama called her a servant and said how she had to iron your daddy’s boxer shorts. And Mawmaw’s like, ‘No
thank you, Mrs. Snow, I am not your servant and I am not about to put my hands in a strange man’s underpants.’”

Mr. Snow—I’m sorry, I don’t want to call him Tilden—laughed. He says, “I didn’t know that. And here’s something I bet you
don’t know. I remember you. Your grandmama brought you to the house with her one time while she was cleaning—”

I nod. “She brought me with her to a lot of houses because I helped her clean till I started at Pretty Woman.”

“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 bought 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.