Lady Killer

Looking out the window, there are two cypress trees that separate the backyard from the front. They blow in a wind I cannot feel. I planted those trees five years ago near the two apple trees that have not bloomed once in seven years apart from the first year I planted them. I remember the day I planted the cypresses. It was early summer and warm, but it started to rain and the piles of dirt I dug out of the holes where I would put the root-balls were turning to mud. When I finally planted them, it began to pour and she watched me from the window with a smile on her face. I cannot forget that smile. I waved back at her with a muddy hand. My hair and clothes were soaked and the rain was cold. When I came inside we made love and the clothes that had clung to my skin lay by the basement door.

I hauled those trees in the floorboard of my Mini-Cooper when I bought them from the store. Now, they are over seven feet tall and spread like the hips of an old married woman. Their hips have given way to brothels of birds and life every spring since. They have endured several harsh winters. Hardly anyone gives them thought though, but me. Maybe the birds do. I can’t say. I doubt it, though, for I have never had much of an opinion of birds. I think of the trees incessantly. No one considers the life of two trees of any kind, other than the man that planted them. They were a metaphor for her and me, our life growing together, only the metaphor no longer holds true.
 
The kind corrections officer with the spread of a matured cypress asks me what I would like for dinner. There is a difference between someone asking you what you want, or what you would like. I look back at her and tell her vegetarian chili with onion, please. I ask if that wouldn’t be too much trouble, and she smiles and says no, of course not. No trouble at all. She assures me the cooks in the kitchen are prepared for anything legal. I ask what she means and she says that some others who have been on death-row have asked to eat humans, or exotic or extinct animals, as though their execution could somehow have been suspended by the lack of the ingredients of a final meal. It makes me smile, for some reason, though it should make me sick. I don’t eat animals at all, I tell her. She smiles like her kindness has suddenly expired. The hypocrite lady killer look, she gives me.

She goes away and I am looking at those swaying trees. And then the pastor walks in and he is wearing an ugly sweater and his skin is gray and he kind of blends in with the block wall. He is a dumpy older man, shoulders sloped, a hunched back, with kind blurry blue eyes and a bit of a Kentucky accent once in a while when he talks too fast. He asks me if I want to say a few prayers with him and he tells me he will be with me all night if I want him to. I tell him no, it is okay, but say I would like it if he can stay through supper. He smiles. I used the term "supper" because the Da Vinci painting The Last Supper depicting Christ and his disciples having their final meal sticks in my mind in a sort of panoramic thought.

We sit down to two bowls of chili, with bread and crackers, and cherry Kool-Aid, which was also at my request. I couldn’t help but to think of how kind it was for them to give me this, despite me being me and doing what I have done. That most immoral deed that cannot be erased by any good act. No one sees me for the person I was on any other night, but for that sleepless one. No one forgives, though they profess it as a grace. The pastor says its been a long time since he drank cherry Kool-Aid and I can tell as he is drinking it that he is remembering some lost time. As am I. A hot summer night with her when we made love in the backyard after coming home from the bar drunk. I drank cherry Kool-Aid afterwards.

I confess to him that as we eat and drink, sometimes I look across from him and see her at our dinner table. She gently raises the spoon to her mouth but doesn’t say anything at all to me. It was the way she treated me those last few weeks, I say bitterly before I trail off. And he asks who, as though he doesn’t know, and I say my girlfriend. And he acts as though it is okay, but his eyes tell me something else and he looks down into his bowl of chili at the onions and then back up and he asks me if I want to talk about her. I loved her, I say eagerly. I hope not to sound morbid, but I love her still. I don’t know if there is anything more than that to life.

The pastor tells me that it is good I feel that way and he shakes his head to affirm his words. I wonder if he has been here before with other death-row inmates, but I don’t ask him that. I never knew him until I was sentenced. I wonder what it is like for him to watch a condemned man in his last few hours squirm the way I must squirm and live up what is left of life the way a fish on a boat deck does in a small puddle of water. He tells me that he believes me and that God knows that I love her. He says God forgives us of all our sins and he goes on and on while I continue to eat my bowl of chili. Then we change the subject to the Cincinnati Reds and we talk about baseball and the 99 season before I tell him that he can go now, but that it would be nice if he was here tomorrow.

Of course, he says. I will be. God willing. We say a last prayer for the night and appropriately it is something from John about Jesus’ betrayal after The Last Supper. And he tells me how Judas Iscariot wasn’t so bad and how he was only doing what God made him do and for some reason that made me feel a little better about myself until my guilt absorbed all that he said and then I thought of myself as Judas Iscariot and felt worse. I can never believe a kind word about Judas, however logical and true it might have been, so I guess I am no different than those who hate me.

I lie in bed and try to sleep. The room is warm and I cannot lie still. She turned the heat up too high. She is lying next to me without any feelings for me, or none that I can feel or detect. She doesn’t love me anymore, she said. My betrayal of her love with meaningless others has ruined me in her eyes the way Judas was ruined in mine long ago in Sunday school and a thousand years of revisionism will not change anything. She knew not the grace of forgiveness and I was always too clumsy in my apologies.

She is fast asleep as though not next to a condemned man and she gives no thought to the chaos in my mind, or the aching of my heart knowing the next day is the day for me. Her heart, she said before, ached a long time ago the way mine does now. But it doesn’t ache anymore. She begins to snore and I lie there and play through memories, pictures, things past that will never be again and things that will be, but that will be without me. This bed will be someone else’s soon enough, and even the pillow I lie on will hold his head. Some person out there somewhere waiting for her. Biding his time to replace me. In my closet will hang his clothes, in my drawer will rest his underwear, and by the front door, there will be a row of his shoes.

I found myself in a state of paralyzed paranoia. There was no more talking to be done, this is what she wants as compensation for transgressions of my past before I knew my God. I foolishly replaced my want of faith and God with that of women, unsuccessfully, of course. I was raised as a lady killer, and I will soon die as one. I wake to a cold room and the cell door opens. The pastor, in another equally hideous sweater that looks like two rundown ducks in a crosswalk, ambles in and says hello in a somber way that makes me know it is morning, and it is time. It is time to pay for what I have done to her. I get dressed in the jumpsuit and brush my teeth, for whatever reason. I make a cup of coffee and look out the window and those cypresses are still. There is no wind. It is gray and looks cold out. They ask me if I would like breakfast and I say no, let’s get on with it. I can’t eat.

A group of four walk me down the hall and the pastor is behind me and he is saying prayers as we walk, which doesn’t matter to me. I don’t hear them. I can only hear her voice telling me she loves me and telling me that we will be together. I can hear her goofy voice when she was in a good mood and first called after work. I can feel the anticipation for her voice in my soul and I think of how I can make her happy, as though it is still possible, and how I can bury the past or scorch it well enough so that it is ashes rather than rotting bodies.

They strap me onto the table and I am relaxed. I look up to the white light in the room which is high on the ceiling. I think of my daughter and can hear her laughter in the room. I can see her belly and her brown wispy hair and her big slate-blue eyes. I can see her looking up at me asking what is going to happen now. I tell her, Daddy is going away. Why? she asks. I hurt mommy. She doesn’t understand, my girlfriend says bitterly. I don’t understand these things, either, I admit. I don’t know child psychology anymore than I know female psychology. And they ask me for final words as they prep my arm with a cotton ball soaked in cold alcohol and I say, “Love is not fleeting. I love you still.”

She glowers at me, thinking what to say. She has her keys in one hand and her coffee in the other and she is running late to work. There is no emotion. She says to leave the house key on the counter and don’t come around. I tell her alright. My heart breaks. She once told me her anger was a defensive mechanism for what is underneath, but I don’t know anymore. She was scarred when I met her by someone who betrayed their wedding vows. I think there was beauty in her scars and I loved her more because she was hurt and I wanted to make her whole again the way you mend trees, or flowers with broken limbs, or birds with broken wings. But I failed. I can’t do anything about it now. Then the pinch. It is her administering the needle with no life in her eyes. I suppose I am that fish on the boat deck then. 

My eyes open. I sit in the living room after she left for work. There is no sound. Not even a clock tick. The last of my things are collected in baskets and jammed into my Mini-Cooper to take to the new place. This house, that was a prison in my delusions, is suddenly a home again with pictures on the walls and subtle empty places where my things used to be. The pastor is here and he helps me move. He is the particles of dust in a stream of morning light through the living room window blinds. He tells me the apartment is a new opportunity to find a fresh start and the monogamous love that I seek. She was the love I sought, I complain to him. He says something about accepting that which you cannot change and all that bullshit.

And I protest that I don’t believe in love anymore because love shouldn’t quit or give itself up, despite a few transgressions of one that is ill in the mind and heart the way no one should be ill. I implore him to understand the way I implored her to. I say people fall in and out of love the way they shower or shave. The way they trade-in cars or cellphones for new ones. They come and they go the way they do to and from a department store to buy toilet paper and milk. They aren’t capable of being or feeling anything deeper than that which they feel for only themselves. He says that is a dour view of life and love, and I say I would never make it writing greeting cards.

I thank him for all his help and shake his hand. He asks if I will be in Church next Sunday and I say yes. I don’t tell him I will be hungover, though. I have lost my faith in people, and myself, but not my faith in God. He then becomes a fly that waits for an open door.

I pack the car full and pull out, just missing the cypress on the left that I always told her was her. I was the one on the right by the fence. I sit there at the end of the driveway for a long moment and look at the house and the yard. The apple trees still haven’t bloomed. Our wildflowers will be blooming soon, but I will not be here to watch them, or to mow, plant, and pull the weeds. To fight the mosquitoes. Or to drink wine on the porch after the kids are in bed with hopes to make love soon thereafter. It got away from us. It got away from me. Someone else will be here soon, until he tires of her, or she tires of him, and so on. I will be long gone.

I drive away to the apartment where I am supposed to feel my execution become my revival in time. The afterlife for cheaters is a barroom full of aging lady killers, with a bell on the door that turns all the heads when it rings. It is the bell of opportunity, after all. The possibility of another to replace the last. They should call the place Judas Iscariot’s, and they should have told them about the needle. My head doesn't turn to the bell anymore. And I stare into a bourbon that is the color of her eyes.