I try and think of a way to get her to take one last unprovoked swing at me in front of witnesses. Then I could charge her with assault and maybe win this time and also get a quick divorce because of her physical cruelty and a legal writ preventing her from seeing and speaking to me again. But why bother, because the judge would probably say her hitting me again was caused by all the past times I’d provoked her. I’m also afraid that the next time she hits me she might batter my brains or eyes so much that I’d become blind or knocked into insensibility for good.
About six months after our courtroom battle and a few weeks after she stopped calling and sending letters, I get a phone call.
“It’s me, don’t hang up,” she says. “I want to give you a quick uncontested divorce.”
“What’s the trick now?”
“No trick, darling, it’s love. I met a beautiful man and we want to get married.”
“I hope he’s a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than you.”
“He happens to be even thinner and shorter than you, but don’t be mean.”
“I can see why you want to marry him. So you can beat him up even worse than you did me.”
“Not true.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“And don’t argue with me either. You want the divorce or not? Don’t grant me it and you’ll never see the end of me for a lifetime.”
“I want it.”
We agree to file for divorce on the grounds of mutual mental cruelty. We get the divorce in a month, and a week later she marries. I saw the man at the divorce court. He’s a little guy all right, older and weaker-looking than me too. I wanted to warn him about her but then told myself to stay out of it. It’s his business. And if I say anything he might not marry her and then she’ll be on my back for life. Besides, if she does beat him up and he presses charges, the court and most of my old friends will know I wasn’t crazy after all. Two men pressing assault charges against the same woman—that’s no coincidence.
A year later she and her husband are in the newspaper. He’s in a very bad coma. His sister, the article says, got a call from her brother saying Melanie was trying to break down their bedroom door to attack him. When the sister got to the apartment she found her brother on the floor and Melanie kicking him repeatedly in the head. The sister tore into her, knocked her out with a pan and then called the hospital and police.
Melanie’s arrested. Her husband’s still in a coma. A newsman calls me and says “Mrs. Delray’s your ex-wife. So what do you think of the charges against her now—husband battering, attempted murder? Where it might end up a homicide, as he’s got no more than a fifty-fifty chance to survive. Even if he does she’ll still be in serious trouble, as he hasn’t got any chance of being anything but totally brain-damaged for the rest of his life.”
“If you don’t mind I’ll save what I have to say for the jury trial. Because I might be prejudicing the case if I told you all that happened to me and then because of some legal technicality she got away free,” and I hang up.
A LACK OF SPACE
They never let me out in the sun anymore. I don’t know why. My lawyer and I have never gotten a clear ruling on that. But when night comes and it’s dark, I’m allowed a ten-minute rest period outside. There I see the other suns—the stars. I learned that from some library books here and the newspaper articles I’ve been reading regarding this country’s space effort. The other stars are supposed to be suns, like ours, though in varying degrees of intensity depending on how big they are and how long they’ve been around. And every one of the other suns is capable of having its own solar system and our sun is only one of about one hundred billion in our galaxy and there are about five thousand galaxies in our cluster of galaxies and we’re all revolving together because we’re all held together by the force of gravitational pull each galaxy in our cluster exerts on the other, despite the fact that the closest galaxy to ours is two million light-years away from us and each light-year is approximately six trillion miles in length, and actually all of us—Earth, solar system, galaxy and cluster of galaxies—may be part of an even larger system called a cluster of clusters of galaxies, though because of limitations in astronomical equipment scientists haven’t discovered it yet. Meaning: no matter how big we think the universe is, it’s probably even bigger than that. Meaning: no matter how many billions of trillions of light-years of space we know about or can imagine going in every which direction starting from Earth, there’s probably trillions of trillions of times more space than that. So why do these prison officials have to be so petty as to deny me a relatively small sun to look at and which they know is what I like to look at and do almost most, and particularly in its setting state? And why only the night for ten minutes to see those other suns? Because I’m a condemned man, they probably reason, and they got to deny me more than the usual prison freedoms they deny the other men on death row, since I once committed that most heinous crime of all of making hay with a girl who was a minor and when she was through with me and tying her hair in back with a ribbon she said “God, if you’re not the worst lay in all these creations, then I don’t know who is,” and kept on repeating that opinion in various ways till I said lay off and she wouldn’t so I insulted her a bit and she said “Goddamn you, fag, you can’t go insulting me like that,” and still nude she grabbed a branch and came at me as if she was going to cream me with it, so I slapped it out of her hand and shoved her with my palm just to protect myself from the rock she was picking up and she fell back over her own foot and banged her head against the top of a tree stump and rolled off it onto some stones just as I leaped forward to stop her from rolling and falling, and knocked herself out and died. I knew I was in trouble and there was nothing I could do for her now, so I beat it out of there and someone found her soon after and the police came and the doctors at the hospital said she had been viciously attacked and carnally assaulted and some people in town said she was last seen riding off with me on the back of my motorcycle and I was picked up and charged with rape, murder and running away from the scene of a crime. I was jailed and written up in newspapers as a young mad killer and charged with the rape-murders of three other girls in the area, though those charges didn’t stand up, and brought to trial for the rape-murder of one Jenny Lou House and convicted and sentenced to die by hanging. For three years now I’ve had a stay of execution, since the state I was tried in has a law saying the crime I was convicted of carries a mandatory death penalty, and my lawyer who’s against capital punishment on any grounds except treason and for someone who kills a federal employee who’s on duty, even a postman, contends that that state law is unconstitutional. It’s taken him the three years to get my case to the nation’s highest court and in all that time I’ve never once seen the sun. And when I am allowed out in the high-walled six-by-six-foot space for my ten-minute rest period, I’m always accompanied by two guards with guns—as if I could ever escape to any other place but my adjoining locked cell—and the space is always brightly lit as a main city square might be, making it impossible some nights to see the stars.
I wish I had another chance. If I did I would never shove another girl, or at least not till I first married her. I think a married man has less chance of being sentenced to death for killing his wife rather than a girl he recently met, even if he confesses to the charge, which I didn’t since the girl I supposedly raped and murdered was actually the one who seduced and nearly murdered me. I met her in this doughnut place she was countergirling at and it wasn’t a minute after I settled on the stool that she said “That your bike?” meaning my motorcycle in the lot, and I said yes and she said “When do you get off work?” and I told her I’m not working now, only riding, and she said “That was intended as a play on words, young man, as what I meant is when do you want to take me for a ride around this dinky town and maybe even out of it?” and I said I really don’t like putting girls on my back who aren’t at least twenty-one and who also know how to sway with the rider, meaning lea
ning right when I go right and so on, and she said “I’m twenty-one except I look older from working in this nut house and living in another, and I’ve been on the backs of more riders than we have doughnuts in this shop, and besides I once owned a bike myself and if I still had it I could outride you from here to the Coast by a day and a half.” “Bull,” I said. “Buy me a bike and I’ll prove it,” she said. “Ha,” I said. “Want a free cof and French jelly?” she said. “You’re something,” I said. “And you’re something for saying I’m something, and also for having such a big beautiful bike. Now what time did you say you got off work?” “Seven?” I said. “That’s about the time I lay off also,” and she told me to meet her at the corner across the street, not here in front. “This is a small town with big mouths and I don’t want my folks knowing I’m going with riders again. And here—no one’s looking,” and she slipped me a bag filled with French jellies and two containers of chocolate fizz.
That night I met her at the corner. She ran her hand over the chromium fenders and carb pipes and said “Wow, this is really one striking gorgeous creature you’re keeping,” and was all set to straddle the back when a man walked past. She turned on me winking and said “Excuse me, mister, but I don’t talk to strange customers no matter how big a tip they leave or promise next time—oh, hello, Mr. Denham.” “Hello, Jenny Lou,” the man said, “anything wrong?” “Nothing I can’t handle thanks very much, and give my best regards to Mrs. Denham and Beverly.” “I’ll convey them that,” he said, still eyeing me suspiciously as he walked away. He was a friend of her folks, according to the newspapers, and one of the last persons to see Miss House alive. He later identified me in court as “That’s right, the one with the snarl,” when at that moment of identification I was despondent near to tears, and gave evidence how he heard me annoying Jenny Lou on the street and tried to warn her about me but she said she knew perfectly well how to handle the situation. “Well apparently she didn’t,” Mr. Denham said, “or else this young man was crafty enough to handle the situation a lot more perfectly than she.” The judge told the clerk to strike Mr. Denham’s last remark from the record and for the jury to disregard it when they make a final decision. But I could see from their faces they wouldn’t. They all had me hung from the start.
“Are you going to exchange how-do-you-dos with distrusting townsmen,” I said, “or are you coming riding with me?” “I’m going to do better than that,” Jenny said. “I’m going to ride out with you some quiet place and hump you there till you’re black and blue all over and then I’m going to leave you for dead when all you’ll be is dead tired from my humping and steal your bike and ride it to the Coast and put it on a boat for the Orient and ride it across that continent and maybe even via China if she’ll have me and then across the Mideast and Africa and Europe and back on a boat and then ride it halfway across the country to home again. I expect that whole trip to take me a couple of years, wouldn’t you think?” “You scare me,” I said. “You got these wild nutty ideas which I even think you want to carry out some. I don’t believe you’re not jailbait anymore. Let me see your driver’s license.” “I don’t have one,” she said, “because I once got busted and put away for riding a bike into a crowd when I was seventeen and the police took away both my license and bike. Two people got killed, that’s why.” “Then some form of identification,” I said, but all she’d brought with her was a five-dollar bill, just in case I left her stranded and she had to get a ride home. “What year were you born—quickly now: what year?” and she gave the date for someone born twenty-one years ago. I knew too well about getting girls any younger on my back. Besides the possible trouble with police over curfews and such, these girls had tendencies to scream bloody murder if they suddenly got cross with you and sometimes for no better reason than your not wanting to go a hundred-fifty miles an hour in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. The younger they are beginning with the day after their sweet-sixteen party, the faster they want to ride. And I later learned from my lawyer that Jenny had only two months before I met her turned sixteen. She probably mastered my age test because she had failed the same test with some other rider who had put it to her. If I ever get out of here I would think of a totally new test which for all I knew only I had the answer to. And after I used it on the first girl I didn’t think was twenty-one, I’d think up another new test for the next girl I didn’t think was twenty-one—always a new test so it could never get circulated and known.
“Hop on, Miss Twenty-one,” I said, and she got on behind me, squeezed into me tighter than she had to to hold on. Nipped my ear with her teeth after we took a sharp corner and hugged my chest as we rode till I could hardly take in air. “I saw him force her on his motorcycle,” her boss, Mr. Hill, said at my trial. “He was having rape and murder on his mind even then,” Mrs. Hill told the jury. “Strike that out, clerk,” the judge said. “Jury will disregard witness’s last remark. Witness will be encouraged not to offer opinions of what went on in the defendant’s mind, but to restrict her answers only to what she observed the last time she saw defendant and the deceased.” “But that is what I observed,” Mrs. Hill said. “I remember telling my husband Mr. Hill as I looked at those two from my shop—’Paul,’ I said, ‘that young man has rape and murder on his mind if I ever saw one.’” My lawyer objected. The jury was instructed and the witness reproached. “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Hill said, “I wasn’t thinking just now. But I suppose you can’t help me for having bad feelings toward that man, since Jenny Lou was such a nice pretty girl and the most dependable worker we ever had. Murderer,” she yelled, and the judge banged his gravel till I thought it would split. “Rapist. Riffraff. Beggar. Scum.”
I asked Jenny if she could take me to the most beautiful spot in the area and she said “There’s a nice site by the river only twelve miles from here, but that’s too close.” “That’s distance enough for me,” I said. “I’ve ridden four hundred miles today and I’m nearly done in.” “Well I want to ride more than that,” she said, “and there’s another site sixty miles up along the same river that’s just as pretty. Let’s drive there,” and “Please?” and “Oh come on, just this once,” so I gave in and we got on the bike again and it was during this ride I really began thinking she was under twenty-one because all she wanted to do was go faster, faster. When I was doing sixty she wanted eighty and when I was doing eighty she said get it up to a hundred and when I reached a hundred she said one-ten, that’s all, just one-ten and she won’t ask for no more, but I pretended not to hear and even slowed down to ninety. I was getting worried she would fall off in all her excitement with the ride, and also of the police. You never knew for sure when they’d be hiding behind a board.
“I only got a chance to see them because they had to slow down for an ell-turn,” Conrad Jenkins, insurance broker, told the court, “and let me tell you I’ve never seen a girl looked so frightened in her life. It seemed she wanted desperately to get off the motorcycle while he at the same time I was seeing them from my picnic table was doing everything that sort knew to keep her on.” The judge cautioned Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Jenkins apologized and said he should have known better. “Having been an adjuster for hundreds of accident cases I know that witnesses are up here not to give their opinions or condemnations, but to confine their answers to the objective facts alone. But that was how I felt. I never saw a girl look so frightened, and in my work experience I’ve seen a lot.”
“What do you think of my site?” Jenny said when we reached the river, and I told her it’s beautiful and it was. No houses to be seen, no bridges, factories or boats. Just a quiet broad river with trees bordering both sides of it and beyond the trees were hills, mountains, clouds and a setting sun lighting up the edges of the clouds like what? Like a painting. Up till then I hadn’t been sure a place like that existed. It was what I started out traveling for, what I had even learned how to ride a bike for. To get off to the more primitive remote places people hardly go to anymore because they either don’t want to o
r these places are too tough to get to except by bike or Land rover. I took off my boots and walked in a ways and asked Jenny if she’d mind my going in for a dip in only my underpants as I didn’t want to wet my blue jeans, and she said “Take everything off if you want to, I as sure don’t care. In fact, I’m going to take everything off also and then scrub us down with soap if you have any in your bag.” I said I don’t need a washing: the water in the river will make me clean enough. “As a matter of fact the water’s going to make me pure, that’s what it’s going to do, because this is the purest river I’ve ever seen. Oh, I love your place, Jenny Lou,” and I stripped to my underpants and jumped in the river and coming up from around a minute’s swimming underwater I got what was the most beautiful view I ever saw: the setting sun reflecting off the water all around me, making it look like a river of pure golden honey I was in. Jenny came up from the water right beside me, nothing on her, looking great too. I said “Know how man first thought there was something like a Supreme Being around him?” and she said “Oh, you’re one of those.” “One of what?” I said, very cheerful, “it’s just something I discovered now myself for whatever it’s worth—want to hear?” She said, both of us treading water, “Okay—how?” and I said “Very long ago a man drove sixty miles by cart or went six miles by foot but did something to get here but got here and dove underwater and came up after a minute at this exact same time of the day on this exact same day and month of that year to the exact same weather and site we’re seeing right now and said ‘God.’” She said “That’s nice, I like that,” and kissed me on the nose, which I liked her doing. “Now let’s swim around some and then get out before we get chilled,” and I said “Good idea, Jenny, my friend,” and dived down and pulled on her legs till she was underwater with me and kissed her on the forehead. Then we swam around till the sun set and then swam back to land.
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