One day, while taking a look at some vistas in Dad’s stereopticon, it hit me that I was just this little girl, born in Texas, whose father was a sign painter, who only had just so many years to live. It sent a chill down my spine and I thought where would I be this very moment, if Kit had never met me? Or killed anybody… this very moment… if my mom had never met my dad… if she had never died. And what’s the man I’ll marry gonna look like? What’s he doing right this minute? Is he thinking about me now, by some coincidence, even though he doesn’t know me? Does it show on his face? For days afterwards I lived in dread. Sometimes I wished I could fall asleep and be taken off to some magical land, and this never happened.
At this moment, I didn’t feel shame or fear, but just kind of blah, like when you’re sitting there and all the water’s run out of the bathtub.
Kit and I were taken back to South Dakota. They kept him in solitary, so he didn’t have a chance to get acquainted with the other inmates, though he was sure they’d like him, especially the murderers. Myself, I got off with probation and a lot of nasty looks. Later I married the son of the lawyer who defended me. Kit went to sleep in the courtroom while his confession was being read, and he was sentenced to die in the electric chair. On a warm spring night, six months later, after donating his body to science, he did.
It was better to live a week with someone who loved me for what I was, then years of loneliness.
He needed me now more than ever, but something had come between us. I’d stopped even paying attention to him. Instead I sat in the car and read a map and spelled out entire sentences with my tongue on the roof of mouth where nobody could read them.
Little did I realise that what began in the alleys and back ways of this quiet town would end in the Badlands of Montana.
Then sure enough Dad found out I been running around behind his back. He was madder than I ever seen him. His punishment for deceiving him: he went and shot my dog. He made me take extra music lessons everyday after school, and wait there ’till he came to pick me up. He said that if the piano didn’t keep me off the streets, maybe the clarinet would.
Did you hear about the guy at the nuthouse that walked around naked except for hat and gloves? This nurse came up to him and said, “You can’t walk around that way.” And the guy says, “It’s okay, nobody comes around here anyway.” And the nurse says, “Well, what do you have on the hat and gloves for?” And the guy says, “Well, you never know…”
My Mother died of pneumonia when I was just a kid. My Father kept their wedding cake in the freezer for ten whole years. After the funeral he gave it to the yard man. He tried to act cheerful but he could never be consoled by the little stranger he found in his house. Then one day hoping to begin a new life away from the scene of all these memories he moved us from Texas to Port Dupree, South Dakota.
Of course I had to keep all of this a secret from my Dad. He would had a fit because Kit was ten years older than me and came from the wrong side of the tracks so called.
We hid out in the wilderness down by a river in the grove of Cotton Woods. Being the flood season we built our house in the trees.
Kit was glad to leave South Dakota behind, and cursed its name. He said that if the Communists ever dropped the atomic bomb, he wished they’d put it right in the middle of Rapid City.
At the very edge of the horizon we could make out the gas fires of the refineries at Missoula, while to the south we could see the lights of Cheyenne, a city bigger and grander than I’d ever seen.
They hadn’t found but one set of bones in the ashes of the house so we knew they’d be looking for us. Kit made sure we’d be prepared. He gave me lectures on how a gun works, how to take it apart, and put it back together again, in case I had to carry on without him. He said that if the devil came at me, I’d shoot him with a gun. One day I carried thirty pounds of wood a distance of five miles. Another day while hiding in the forest I covered my eyes with make up to see how they’d come out.
In the stench and slime of the feedlot he’d remember how I’d looked the night before. How I ran my hand through his hair and traced the outline of his lips with my fingertip. He wanted to die with me, and I dreamed of being lost forever in his arms.
I left Kit in the parlor and went for a stroll outside the house. The day was quiet and serene but I didn’t notice, for I was deep in thought and not even thinking about how to slip off. The world was like a faraway planet to which I could never return. I thought what a fine place it was full of things that people can look into and enjoy.
On Thursday, the governor of Oklahoma sent out the National Guard to stand watch at the Federal Reserve Bank in Tulsa when word got out that Kit meant to rob it. It was like the Russians had invaded.
We lived in utter loneliness, neither here nor there. Kit said that “solitude” was a better word, ’cause it meant more exactly what I wanted to say. Whatever the expression, I told him we couldn’t go on livin’ this way.
l made up my mind to never again tag around with the hell-bent type no matter how in love with him I was.
Kit took the bottle and spun it around leaving to fate which direction we should take.
He took and buried some of our things in a bucket. He said that nobody else would know where we put ’em and we’d come back someday, maybe, and they’d still be sittin’ here just the same, but we’d be different. And if we never got back, well somebody might dig ’em up 1,000 years from now and wouldn’t they wonder.
