Only the Truth (5 page)

"Is she a killer?"

"Yes."

The lawyer clapped his hands like he was applauding me. He smirked while he
did it.

"Very good!
The defendant's own lover admits
she is a liar, a whore, and a killer!"

I hung my head.

Mr. Green slapped me lightly twice on my left cheek with his right palm. I
looked up.

"We have no question of guilt," he said loudly staring past my
head as if there was a crowd behind me. "No one thinks Ms. Charlene is not
guilty of homicide. But is she guilty of homicide in the first degree?"
Mr. Green looked back at me.

"I don't know what first degree is."

"Premeditated murder, Billy Ray."

"Premeditated?"

"Planned, Billy
Ray,
planned and carried out
with full understanding of what she was doing.
Like planning
to get pregnant so as the jury will feel sorry for her and the baby."

"But Charlene
ain't
in her right mind, Mr.
Green. She wasn't since the day the old man moved in and she still doesn't have
a clue who she is or who I am."

Mr. Green smiled crookedly. "Is that what you think, Billy Ray? Do you
think that's what the jury's going to think when they find out Charlene also gave
sexual favors to the guard on duty in order to have the opportunity to sleep
with you?"

I felt a black cloud moving back in over my life at those words. Sexual
favors, sexual favors.

I could barely speak. "What sexual favors?"

"Blow jobs, Billy Ray, blow jobs. The kind of favors that helps guards
turn
their backs on goings on in the cell."

I felt the heat rising in the room. It came to me that I almost didn't mind
her giving a blow job to the officer because she wouldn't be kissing him at the
same time and he wouldn't be getting her pregnant. The baby was mine.

"No one would have ever known if she hadn't gotten pregnant,
Billy."

"I didn't ever think about her getting pregnant. She never got pregnant
the whole two years time we was together alone in the house."

"You all never used any birth control in those two years?"

"I never used
nothing
. I never saw Charlene
use nothing. We wanted to have a baby, so we could be a family."

Mr. Green looked pained. "This just gets worse and worse, Billy Ray. Charlene
had what is called an IUD, something inside her to keep her from getting
pregnant. She had the doctor take it out when she visited him a month after she
was arrested. So, why do you think she did that?" I couldn't follow what
he was talking about. I just shook my head.

Mr. Green grabbed my head between his hands.

"Look at me, Billy Ray. Not only did Charlene give blow jobs to the
jailer to get sex with you, she only had sex with you to get pregnant. If the
jailer hadn't been caught in the act and if the doctor hadn't given us the
report about the IUD removal, the jury might damn well have felt sorry for
her."

I wanted to block my ears with the flat of my hands and start singing so I
couldn't hear what he had to say.

"And that's not all, Billy Ray!" Mr. Green might as well have been
the prosecutor for all the bad things he was telling me about Charlene.
"Charlene told the jailer she would do anything to have the chance to hold
her Sweet Billy Ray in her arms again like it was in the old days with you,
her, and Big Dog all curled up together in your bed with the patchwork quilt
she made from old cloth you had found."

"Did you ever tell her about that, Billy Ray? Did you?"

I shook my head. "No," I said softly, "I never told her about
our life together once she asked who I was."

Mr. Green reached over and put his hand on my knee. "She remembers
everything, Billy Ray. Everything and she pretends to you that she can't
remember a thing. She slipped up, Billy Ray. She slipped up because she wanted
to get pregnant and get sympathy in court. She is totally sane and totally in
control. She's a psychopath, Billy Ray, and the jury is going to give her the
death penalty, baby or no baby.

He turned to me when he got to the door.

"She's a liar, Billy Ray.
A liar, a whore, a
killer…..and a liar."

********************

Mr. Green was right about Charlene. She was a liar, but she was a liar who
wanted to be with me. She was a liar and a whore but she only gave the jailer a
blow job and she didn't let him screw her. She wanted to be able to make love
with me, have a baby with just me. Is it wrong to lie to do that? Is it wrong
to lie to forget your past? Is it wrong to kill to protect your future? Is it
wrong to lie to make someone happy? I wondered if I had gone to church I would
know more about what was right or what was wrong. It was getting all blurry to
me and if I didn't know, maybe Charlene didn't know. I trusted her heart and
her love for me. I went back to the jail but this time the new jailer set a
chair on the outside of the cell for me.

"Did you do that with the guard so you could see me, Charlene?"

Charlene bit her fingernail. "It wasn't
nothing
,
Billy Ray."

"Did you only let me make love to you to have a baby?"

Charlene shrugged.

"Did you know who I was this whole time you said you didn't?"

Charlene's gaze shifted to her thumbnail. She was more nervous than I had
ever seen her before. "I knew who you were," she whispered softly.

"Why, then, Charlene?
Why did you say you
didn't?"

I looked through the bars at her and for the first time in knowing Charlene,
I saw tears in her eyes. I realized she had never cried before. Not when I came
back from my time in jail and not when they took her away.

"I thought if I told you I didn't know you,
then
you would go away."

I felt like she had slapped me through the bars. "You wanted me to go
away?

"I knew I was going to go to prison for a long, long time. I wanted you
to forget me and go back to our little home up on the hill." She looked
dreamily over at the wall where there were only grainy grey bricks to see.
"I could see you in my mind, you with Big Dog running in the woods and you
making the biscuits I showed you how to make a dozen times and you still make
them flat."

She looked back at me. "I can do that in my mind, Billy Ray. I can make
our life right here in my mind." Her voiced changed and took on a harder
edge. "Then you came back to visit me, over and over again, and you ruined
my dream. You were happy in my dream and then you came to the jail, miserable
and desperate. You made me have to make you happy here instead and give you the
baby you wanted before they took me away from you forever."

Charlene turned away from me and I heard her say, "You've killed me,
Billy Ray. You've killed me."

********************

"Why do you think she is telling you that you killed her, Billy
Ray?" Mr. Green was asking me.

I was trying to understand. "Because if I had left her alone, she could
have her dream of me being happy all the time and now I have made her unhappy
because she knows I
ain't
happy…" I couldn't
make it sound like any kind of sense.

The lawyer grunted. "No, Billy Ray, you
are believing
her very inventive story. She pretended not to know you so she would look nuts
to a jury and get off with an insanity plea. She doesn't care about you or her
unborn baby."

"But she killed the old man for us."

"She killed the old man because she was tired of dealing with him and
didn't want the police to find out where she was hiding, Billy Ray."

"She loves me, Mr. Green. I know it. I can feel it. You can't live with
a woman a whole two years and not know if she loves you."

Mr. Green laughed at me. "Most people live all their lives with a woman
and never know her."

I felt my cheeks burning. "She's innocent, Mr. Green."

"Innocent? What the hell is she innocent of?" Mr. Green slammed
his fist down on the case file that he had brought to the house with him.
"I am her damned defense attorney and I, for the life of me, can't think
of one defense angle to go to court with. She's made a fool of you and she is
going to make a fool of me."

I watched him gather his case file and his coat and head for the door.

"Aren't you even going to try and save her, Mr. Green?"

Mr. Green turned at the door and pointed his finger at me.

"You, lover boy, come up with some reason for anyone on that jury to
feel sorry for that girl and I'll do my best."

********************

Mr. Green entered an insanity plea for Charlene and then the clock started
ticking toward the
new year
. I visited Charlene every
day but it wasn't the same as it was before. I couldn't make her smile anymore
and she looked weary. She was right. I should have gone away and let her
pretend we were the happy family on the hill. I was hurting her daily and I
watched her get paler and weaker each time I visited. I brought her candies and
old magazines and papers I found in people's trash, just to keep her mind off
of things. But, she didn't seem to show much interest in anything. Since I
wasn't allowed in her cell any more, I couldn't hold her in my arms or kiss her
real good. Besides, she had morning sickness all the time and barely could keep
any food down.

"Charlene?" I asked her one evening. "How far back do you
remember?"

"I remember you coming up to me on the tracks. I remember you taking me
home."

"You don't remember what you did over in Bald Eagle?"

She shook her head. "I really don't remember that, Billy Ray. I know
you will probably think me a liar, but I just remember standing on the tracks
wanting to go home, well, to a place I could call home, when you came and took
me there."

"If you couldn't remember being in Bald Eagle, then
why would you kill the old man over what happened there?"

Charlene's face turned dark.
"Since when are you a
goddamned lawyer, Billy Ray?
Get the hell out!"

That is when I had my first flicker of doubt that Charlene was anything
liked I hoped she was. If she didn't remember the old man, why would she have
killed him for me? Why? And if she didn't kill him for me, why did she kill
him?

********************

Mr. Green spent the evening up on the hill with me.

"I told you, Billy Ray, she killed the man so he wouldn't turn her in
to the police."

I shook my head vehemently. "You might as well be the prosecutor, Mr.
Green. You seem to believe everything he says about Charlene.

"I do believe everything he says about Charlene. Sometimes defense
attorneys have guilty clients, Billy Ray, and there
ain't
nothing
we can do about it except lose the case as
gracefully as possible."

"I
ain't
giving up on Charlene that easy. I
know she's changed toward me since
I
knowed
she was lying, but, I still…." I couldn't even
finish talking because I knew I sounded stupid.

"Why don't you take Charlene's advice, Billy Ray?" the lawyer
asked gently, patting my hand like a child. "Why don't you just stay up
here with Big Dog and pretend Charlene was never here."

"What about my baby on the way?"

Mr. Green pursed his lips and then exhaled loudly through them.

"Do you really know it's your baby, Billy Ray? Do you really know she
didn't do something more than oral sex with that jailer? Hell, even if the baby
is yours, Billy Ray, the courts wouldn't see you fit to raise an infant alone.
I don't mean to insult you none, Billy Ray, but you don't make much money
sweeping streets and you won't even have a questionable woman like Charlene in
your life to be a mother to that baby. What the courts are bound to do is let
Charlene give birth to that baby and then find it a decent home."

I felt sick to my stomach. My baby was going to be raised by someone else
and it would still be just me and Big Dog.

********************

I came home the next evening after work and Big Dog was dead. Big Dog was
lying right in front of the door. He didn't bark. He didn't raise his head and
when I pounded on him, it just made a dull thud. I lay sideways on the floor
next to Big Dog's head and tried to pry his stiff jaw open with my hands. Then
I pressed my nose to his and laid there until I finally fell asleep. I near
froze to death on the cold floor that night.

Morning came and Big Dog was just as dead as he was the night before and I
had a bad cough. I opened the front door and grabbed Big Dog's back legs and
hauled him out on the porch. I had no idea what I was going to do with his body
with the ground frozen solid and a foot-high layer of snow over it. I dragged
Big Dog down the steps and then I decided to pull him across the road and onto
the site of the old burned down house. I piled snow over him and on the top of
the little
mound,
I made a cross with some pine tree
branches. I still didn't believe in God all that well, but I loved Big Dog and
thought he deserved some kind of grave.

I was feeling so sad I wondered why no tears were coming out of my eyes and
then I realized when I saw Big Dog dead, I didn't cry at all. I wondered if I
had so much bad luck that I was tired of crying about things. I wondered if
that's why Charlene never cried. Was she as coldhearted as everyone said or was
she all cried out?

I spent that night trying to figure out what had happened to me as well as
Charlene after everything went wrong. I remembered that I once lived alone on
that mountain with no Charlene and no Big Dog. Life was all right. I don't
remember being unhappy. Maybe, I kind of wished I had what other people had but
I didn't know no different, so I didn't think I had it so bad. But, then I got
Big Dog and then Charlene and now I missed what I never missed before. I
wondered whether having love was worth all the trouble of losing it.