Pay the Piper (19 page)

It was Saturday. I went to my deer camp to look for a place to erect a deer stand for the coming season. No one else was there since the hunting season had not opened. That night alone in my cabin, except for my dog, I drank most of a fifth of bourbon while reading and listening to the radio.

Next morning I began to build the stand in a low tree. I had seen a beautiful buck on this spot the previous day. It was hot, and around ten o'clock I drank a beer. During the morning as I worked I drank several more, and arrived back at Matagorda. We were to leave shortly for an afternoon party. I fixed a drink to take along in the car—“a traveling drink,” which is a common custom here where there are such great distances between places.

Sallie and I arrived feeling no pain; we were in a friendly mood. I had had neither breakfast nor lunch and at some point ate a hamburger one of the girls cooked, at Sallie's insistence. During the course of the afternoon, I blacked out. That is, I simply ceased to remember anything. This had happened before if I drank early enough and kept on long enough. Apparently, my behavior does not appreciably change when this happens. I have surprised friends sometimes by asking what happened at a certain time when they were not aware I was especially drunk. From what I can learn, at some point Sallie and I had a disagreement and ceased talking. I remember for a while taking a sunbath around the pool's edge. From that point on, all I know is what I've been told. When we arrived back home, the children had come in. Some of what happened I remember from a statement Sallie gave the District Attorney. Some of it I was told by lawyers. Sallie and I continued to argue. I went to the kitchen to fix food, remarking that I had to do it myself, that Sallie wouldn't. I told her son to leave and go to his father's, where he was supposed to be staying anyway. I suppose my wife was going at me all this time. I apparently got one of my rifles and loaded it. I have no idea why. I can only guess I wanted to scare her or impress her with how much I meant what I was trying to get across. I honestly don't know what I was trying to prove. I happened to pick out a rifle that was equipped with a telescope sight, making it useless outdoors at night, or indoors anytime. All this is in retrospect; I do not remember any of it.

As I understand it, I then started toward the door. The rooms are so arranged that I had to round a corner to do this. It seems that as I got to the door, it opened inward, and Greg and I almost ran into each other. I seem to have been carrying the rifle in both hands, with the muzzle pointed toward the front, the only way it could go through the door. It went right into Greg's stomach. There is some speculation as to whether he grabbed the barrel or not, trying to push or pull it out of the way, to one side. The weapon had a set, or hair, trigger. It takes almost no pressure to fire it.

At the sound of the explosion my memory returns somewhat. I recollect the noise, but it seems to have been particularly quiet for that particular gun. Sort of a pop, as though it was a long way away. I remember seeing Greg lying on the porch, screaming that it hurt and not to touch him. I went to him and fell on my knees and tried to hold him in my arms. When I put my arms around him, I felt his intestines all in my hands and I tried to put them back where they belonged, and I thought, This won't really help him, I've got to call a doctor. I don't remember this, or anything else, until later when I was trying to call the police, the hospital, and couldn't find either number in the book. All this had already been done, but I didn't know it. While I was sitting there, the deputy sheriff came in—the ambulance had already come and gone—and he and I walked around and went over everything. Some of it I remember and some of it I don't. He told me to wash my hands, they were bloody to the elbows. Then we went to my parents and told them what had happened.

Later I learned that after I left Greg on the porch, I went to Tina's room where the baby had been sent. She was in her bed, and I sat down and read her fairy stories, just as I did every night. When Sallie was ready to go to the hospital, she came and got her. I did nothing, just sat there and kept right on reading the story. I have no idea how long I did this. I don't remember going to the phone.

The lawyers had an architect reconstruct rooms of the house where things took place, to show that I could not have seen Greg in advance of what happened. This would have been used at the trial. The hardest thing to explain is why I loaded the rifle, why I got it out in the first place, what I was going to do with it. There is no satisfactory answer to this that anyone would understand. That I have done it before to frighten Sallie, to try to get through to her, is not explanation enough. But I have none better.

Please understand I offer no excuse for what happened. Some things have never been explained, such as the fact that the rifle was not where I would have dropped it or put it down when the deputy found it. It was about ten feet behind where I stood, in the living room. There is the question of where Sallie was all this time; she said she was right behind me, I think, and did she do anything—push me, pull me, grab the gun? Greg and I did not have any fight before the shooting, this much I know. Maybe we had words; we probably did.

You must know what it does to me to write all this down. Please please let it be the last time. For weeks afterward I seemed to find flecks of blood on me when I looked at my hands. Under my nails, in the quick, in the winding stem of my Rolex, which I scrubbed and scrubbed in jail with my toothbrush. I will hear that screaming until I die and I suppose as long as there is breath in me I shall see those guts streaming all over the floor when I close my eyes, and remember how it felt, trying to put them back. They wouldn't stay.

I have gone over this a thousand times, usually at night. But not always. Sometimes at work in prison it comes to mind whether I want it to or not, and I lose touch with reality awhile, trying to figure out what happened and why. I have never found a satisfactory explanation.

Before you came here, I had long ago decided I owed something to somebody for what happened, and I was adjusted to the idea of pulling whatever amount of time society required of me. I had no particular desire to get out as soon as possible, once my fear of the place began to subside. It's a peculiar way to repay society for what took place, but if that's what it took to square things, then I was willing to do my part. But what no one will ever understand is that keeping me here is not the real punishment I suffer. I carry that with me, wherever I go, and I have no idea how long it will last, perhaps always. Someday I hope I can think of this without the hurt that wells up in me every time the thing comes to mind. Time has helped a lot. I had to tell the psychiatrist at the hospital under sodium pentathol what happened, but the nurses said I had so little recollection of the whole thing that my sense of guilt was unrealistic; there just wasn't any, except that I knew I was involved somehow.

Sallie said afterward that I had been jealous of Greg. I don't agree. I can see why I should be punished and why I should be made to suffer. But what I cannot see is why anyone else should be made to. Why should you?

I have no bitterness over all this. There is no resentment in my heart toward anyone, and I am looking for no one to blame. If I had been a little older and wiser, I don't believe any of it would have happened. But I did not know what to do to ward it off; I did not know how to stop it.

Laurel, I loved that boy.

10

When there were escapes, the sergeant was too busy to distribute mail. It lay in the hallway, stacking up in a frustrating way: worse than when the sergeant sat there censoring it slowly, his lips moving over each word. Finally Hal had so much mail from Laurel he laid it over his cot, forming what seemed a patchwork quilt.

The guys have begun to tease me. Once they hid my mail, but I was so morose they produced it quickly. It's hell to wrap your life around one moment of each day.

Another day guess what I found on my pillow! The tiniest pair of Dr. Denton's nighty-nights you've ever seen—complete with feet. I'd forgotten just how small babies really are. Everything collected for the victims of hurricane Camille and unused has been sent up to the prison. Yesterday a whole truckload of paper plates arrived. What a place. I hadn't known it would beat Matagorda for nuttiness.

With Laurel on his mind he had begun to fear what others did—Buddy; his new confidant, the chaplain; Pris—that he might run.
Are you crazy?
she responded. But he continued to write about escapes. After a runaway was caught, obnoxious rules were made which did no good. People kept running. The only convict he'd talked to who ran said that an hour after he left he'd have given a thousand dollars to sneak back into his cage, but could only run.

He nearly died of hunger and thurst and mosquito bites and got an added ten years. Last night, the turkey boy on shift at the poultry farm stole Grady's horse and swapped that for a pickup and abandoned that to hit the woods. But those hills and woods were unfamiliar to him and the hounds ran him all over, and he got tired. The sergeant had gone into his locker and found a note from his wife which read simply, “
Baby, I need you.
” He had six more months and now has three years. So much time for so little freedom. Once I would have thought such thinking was crazy, but now I understand.

Thirst
, Laurel corrected. How could convicts help imagining things their wives and girlfriends were doing? He got out the only picture of her he had, with an interview in an old
Mid-South Review
. There was a picture of him at a party in Delton in evening clothes.

I wish you could have heard the comments about the picture here. “Don't he look dig-nee-fied,” and “Where do you keep your wall safe?” After I showed your picture and explained something about you, Gus said, “I knew you'd end up taking one of these little split-tails with you, but I figured it'd be some of this local talent.” I wonder if he's ever seen any of the local talent. I love the way most cons put women on pedestals. Split-tail, yet! It makes you sound like a tropical fish.

Laurel, when I first saw that picture I was sitting on my porch at Matagorda and remember thinking your hair made you seem like an angel. I thought how lovely you were and I thought, I bet I could love that girl—but she'd be too intelligent for me. The voice that spoke to you in Connecticut sent you to me, and you did appear like an angel—a gift from heaven. I will always wonder at it.

Images rose to his head. What about her agent, her editor, book reviewers: were they all trying to get into her pants? What about William, even—he was in the house!
Hal
, she wrote him,

I don't need that pressure when I'm contemplating a divorce alone, worrying about what finances will be, and thinking about leaving my child for you if Rick won't come with me. Three fourths of my married life has been totally without sex. And one fourth has consisted of quite brief affairs and a few attempts with William. It is unbelievable to look back on when I realize what it will be like to be married to you. My sap has only begun to flow again, it seems, since the time when I was a teenager.

I feel strongly that what you should be saying to me is, “Why in hell didn't you leave him or have more affairs?” My life consisted of thinking day by day, I can't exist like this. Only I kept at it year by year. Really, I look at all these long marriages around me and think, I did achieve one. It is an all-right marriage. I went on believing I was doomed to a life of loneliness, though by the time I was forty I was despairing, and then all that ended the afternoon I walked into that crazy prison.

There was a period, though, of about seven years when I had no sex at all, either with William or anyone else. My seven lean years, I call them. To tell you the truth, I resent surprise and criticism from you concerning anything I've done. I feel that with William as a husband, I should have been looking around constantly in hopes of an affair. I wasn't, and I turned down chances because I didn't picture myself running around when I was a mother. I wasn't anybody's wife. I was William's housekeeper and knew every Sunday night for years he was shacked up and I sat there alone those Saturdays and Sundays, and other times too. As a woman who knew herself not to be bad-looking, to feel time passing, to feel in ways I'd never been married, is it a wonder I despaired? I told you about my affair with Edward. The first time he touched me I cried because a male creature had touched me. Because I had some physical contact with another human being, a grown-up. Well, to hell with it all. I'm sick of thinking about the past.

But she returned to his past.

You poor suffering man, you beat the walls of the jail with your hands till they bled? If only I'd known that day in the library, I'd have kissed your fingertips and your palms. You say jealousy helped destroy your marriage with Sallie, that you are your “own worst enemy,” and so I hope to hear no more; you know I'm never going to behave as she did. But why, if you never strayed, was she so jealous about you? Was it her own insecurity or because you had left Carla and might then leave her? You are right that when you put your head between my breasts and heave a huge sigh of relief, you will be safe. And I'll be safe when I'm next to you. Today is such a nuzzable day, I wish you were here. If ever with separation, time, and distance, you think that we've been swept away by our emotional natures, you don't have to feel committed. We can resume again when I come back south. Meanwhile I will not desert you, I promise. But whenever we are finally together, won't we drown in one another?

Apologizing about his jealous nature, Hal recalled to her he was mighty innocent about affairs. Remember, he had told her that was the way he was, strictly monogamous.
What's an all-right marriage? baby
, he asked.

Laurel set a triumphant foot on the stairs of a small office building in Soundport. For years she had frequented a dress shop on the ground floor without realizing law offices were above it. Soundport was becoming a different town to her. She thought of Hal looking at her picture in the magazine several years ago, evidently in loneliness, or he'd not have thought of loving her then. It was strange she had gotten the name of a lawyer through her mother. She had a friend whose daughter was also divorcing. She had her husband followed and found out he was seeing ten women. “That's better than one woman, Mother,” Laurel said.