For Michael S. Harper
PART ONE
1
The police came and found arsenic in the glass, but I was gone by then. The landlady in the hotel found him. She went in bringing him the Sunday’s paper, and wanting the bill paid. They say she screamed and screamed and woke up the whole house. It’s got a bad name now, especially that room. They tell me a lot of people like to go and look at it, and see where the crime happened. They even wrote an article about it in one of these police magazines. That’s the way they do, though. I never did see the article. It bothered me at first when I found out they’d used his picture in there, one showing what I did. It didn’t bother me so much having mine in there. Elvira said they had my picture in there and my hair was all uncombed and they had me looking like a wild woman.
Elvira’s the woman in the same cell with me down at the psychiatric prison. They let her go out more than they do me because they say she’s got more control than I have. It ain’t nothing I’ve done since I’ve been in here. It’s what I did before I came, the nature of my crime that makes them keep me in here. The way they look at me. They don’t let me out with the other women. When Elvira goes out, she reads the papers and comes back and tells me what’s in them. She wanted to bring me that article but they wouldn’t let her bring it to me. I wanted to see it at first, but then when she sneaked it in with her down in her underwear, I wouldn’t look at it. I made her tear it up and flush it down the toilet.
“You know, they thought you was going to give that hotel a bad name,” she said. “I mean, a bad name where wouldn’t nobody wont to come and stay in it. But now it turns out that they’s some queer people in this world.”
“What do you mean?” I was frowning.
“I mean, they’s people that go there just so they can sleep in the same place where it happened, bring their whores up there and all. Sleep in the same bed where you killed him at. Some peoples think that’s what you was. A whore.”
I kept frowning.
“It ain’t me saying it.”
I lay on my cot and stared up at the ceiling. There were also people saying I did it because I found out about his wife. That’s what they tried to say at the trial because that was the easiest answer they could get. I’ve seen his wife, though. I didn’t want to see her because I didn’t know how I was going to feel. She came in to see me only one time during the trial. She was a skinny, run-down-looking woman in a black hat. For some reason, I had expected her to be a big, handsome-looking woman. She didn’t say anything. She just stood there outside the cell and stared at me, and I stared back. The only thing I kept wondering is how did he treat her. Because it looked like he made her worse than he made me. I mean, if she was as bad-off on the inside as she looked on the outside. She must’ve stood there for close to fifteen minutes, and then left. She didn’t have anything at all in her eyes—not hate not nothing. Or whatever she did have, I couldn’t see it. When she left, I wondered what she saw in mine.
Even now people come in here and ask me how it happened. They want me to tell it over and over again. I don’t mean just the psychiatrists, but people from newspapers and things. They read about it or hear about it someplace and just want to keep it living. At first I wouldn’t talk to anybody. All during the trial I wouldn’t talk to anybody. But then, after I came in here, I started talking. I tell them so much I don’t even get it straight any more. I tell them things that don’t even have to do with what I did, but they say they want to hear that too. They want to hear about what happened between my mother and father as well as what happened between me and that man. One of them came in here and even wanted to know about my grandmother and grandfather. I know when I’m not getting things straight, and I tell them I’m not getting this straight, but they say that’s all right, to go ahead talking. Sometimes they think I’m lying to them, though. I tell them it ain’t me lying, it’s memory lying. I don’t believe that, because the past is still as hard on me as the present, but I tell them that anyway. They say they’re helping me. I’m forty-three years old, and I ain’t seen none of their help yet.
I was thirty-eight when it happened. It don’t seem like five years ago, but it was. It don’t even seem like five months ago. I can still taste that cabbage I was eating. I was sitting in this place eating cabbage and sausage, drinking beer and listening to this woman onstage singing blues. I was in Upstate new York then. I’ve lived in Kentucky. I’ve lived in new York City. I been in West Virginia, new Orleans. I just came from out in new Mexico. I just up and went down to new Mexico after I got laid off in Wheeling. They’ve got tobacco farms in Connecticut. I been there too. I didn’t travel so much until after I was married, and that went wrong, and then
