With Malice Aforethought

The rain just wouldn’t stop. It strafed the small slivers of glass through the brown metal frame and made everything blurry for a few seconds until it washed away and periodically relented. You couldn’t break the glass, but even if you could, you wouldn’t be able to get through the opening. The three panes were the size of a fat man’s forearms, atop each other, if he had three arms to stack. When it was morning and clear, the sun shined through the window and left three sunlit stripes on the floor which made Jack think of a flag. Three white-yellow stripes on gray concrete. It was his flag, for he was his own nation. He was all alone in the world.

Through the window, and the deluge of rain upon it, he watched the cows in the prison’s farm field. Sometimes they stood there. Sometimes they laid down. Sometimes they weren’t there at all. These here, they were new cows. The old ones had been slaughtered. He didn’t see them slaughtered. But he saw them one day and then he didn’t see them again. You could tell by the markings. And it made him feel hopeless that everything goes away like those cows. Everything is slaughtered for someone else’s appetite or convenience. 

He stared at his tray in the cafeteria. Sitting on the sterile silver stool and table. Hamburger gravy over instant potatoes, peaches that didn’t taste like peaches, and a hot roll. A square of butter lay in it like a stillborn child. He scraped out the wax-like butter and ate the roll and the tasteless peaches, but he gave the rest to Bugs. Bugs earned his name by being constantly infested by some kind of insect. Bedbugs. Roaches. Flies. Maggots once grew in the sole of his infected left foot. Bugs’ latest prize was a caterpillar he swallowed. The thin, wiry murderer of three promised everyone that one day he would open his mouth and he would fly out of himself in the body of a beautiful butterfly. He was harmless, unless you were a bug he might accidentally kill. Unless you were the three college kids he murdered on The Appalachian Trail in the summer of 89. But he was James then. A drug addict. He wasn’t yet Bugs. Bugs was Jack’s only friend in prison, if he could be described rightly as a friend.

Jack sat in the classroom in the front row because he liked the class and the instructor and because everyone else took up all the other rows. It was mandatory for all inmates convicted of a violent crime. ART, it was called. Most of the inmates went because they liked the instructor, Ms. Colleen Daugherty, who was a young clinical psychologist who simply wanted to help reform broken and hopeless lives. Her father did a stretch in Mansfield for three separate Felonious Assaults and missed out on a dozen years of her childhood, so she figured this was her way of helping some other little girl to not lose her dad. She didn’t keep track of how she was progressing for it wasn’t a great stat that would justify her program by any means. She had no delusions. She knew the men came because she was an attractive young woman who wore plenty of pencil skirts and summer dresses. Whatever it took to get them engaged, she said more than once.

“Whatever it takes?” a rough and aged Captain asked her as she came in that morning. It was a common conversation staff had with her whenever they saw what she was wearing that day. It was never anything too risque, but always something that caught the attention and held it there. Something the men would think about later in their lonely cell when the lights went out. But maybe with it, she thought, they would think of some discipline or lesson from her class.

“Yeah. Pretty much,” she said back to the Captain. “I will get through to one or two. And that will be a difference worth making.”
 
Jack liked Colleen, not because she was young and beautiful, but because she was kind and her good soul was as apparent as her small breasts, or the thin but distinct shapely lines of her hips. And Colleen liked Jack because he didn’t look at her like a wolf eyeing a porkchop. So they shared a mutual decency in a very indecent environment. Colleen was one of the few people Jack made an effort to speak to. One of the few he cared to see. And she shared personal stories with Jack in one-on-one sessions, which she didn’t do with anyone else. She told Jack about her father, who she never told anyone else about. She told him that her father had a cherry-red 68 Camaro with a black-vinyl top. Only he got drunk one night and totaled it. That was somewhere between those dozen years that he was locked up. 

“So when we doing some actual art, Colleen? Being that this is ART, isn’t it?” Jack proposed.

“Anger Replacement Therapy, Jack,” she smiled.  “The art of self-enlightenment is an art in itself.”

“Right,” he nodded, laughing a bit.

“You get out in only three months. Better pay attention down the stretch.”

“It’s not going to make any difference, you know.”

“Not if you don’t let it,” she argued. Still, when she argued, she smiled and her eyes lit up with the passion she possessed day-in and day-out. She didn’t know Jack’s story like she knew the others. She knew the charge and the victim, but he had never in any group in the past two years said why he did what he did. He only said that he did it and he wanted to do his time and leave. Never that he wanted to get better. He just wanted to do his time.  


The months passed slowly. Jack watched those cows out his window that came and went. More trays of hamburger gravy and rolls and stillborn butter that tasted like wax. He thought of his ex-wife more than he wanted to, and it seemed there was nothing that any class could ever do to stop him from hating her and obsessing over the events that occurred that led him to prison. An Attempted Murder charge that had been dropped to Felonious Assault. And under the circumstances, leniency was given with the hope that Jack could be reformed. That programs such as Colleen’s ART and Thinking for a Change would make an impact, and time would do its part, as they say it does. But time has a mind of its own. It doesn’t diffuse things in all people. It doesn’t always make things better and it sometimes makes things worse. 

It was on the last class of his last week that Colleen surprised everyone, Jack, in particular. When the violent men walked in like a flock of lambs they were greeted by two dozen easels and canvases and each a set of paints and brushes. “What in the hell is this?” someone laughed.

“Well, its ART,” Colleen grinned looking at Jack who was smiling for once. “I thought today we would paint a picture. About our pain. Why we are here, we can call it.”

The men took their seats near the easels and canvases they claimed for themselves. Bugs would predictably paint an insect of some sort. They were all eager because in prison any break from the ordinary is welcome.  Monotony is the hoarder of time, whereas, the unexpected is the great relief. It is that which hastens time like a spendthrift.

“So, well, begin. If you need any help, let me know. We will discuss them when we finish. Happy painting!”

Jack didn’t pick up his brushes immediately. He sat on the edge of the desk and stared at the blank canvas before him. Colleen tried to avoid him and give him space, but after several minutes of him staring, she approached him cautiously and tried to get his thoughts, or to encourage him to paint his mind. This is what he requested, after all. He couldn’t refuse.

“The way you talked about art, I thought you might like this idea,” she mentioned.

“I’m no Van Gogh, Colleen.”

“You needn’t be,” she replied.

He still stared, but nodded.

“Is it the subject?”

“I’ll paint it,” he said abruptly, “The reason I’m here. If you don’t look at it until I’m gone.”

She thought for a moment and sighed. Then she shook her head. She had hoped it was a clever way of breaking through to him. But she realized she had no choice, and if those were his demands, then, well, those were his demands. Her interest and curiosity in what he would paint far outweighed the therapeutic value of the subject material. All she knew of Jack was that he tried to kill his wife after she unexpectedly said she wanted a divorce. Although she could have looked at everything from the trial, she didn’t. She knew that Jack hadn’t said a word in his own defense, but his lawyers argued that he had a momentary lapse of prudent judgment. Uncharacteristic of himself. An unfortunate emotional reactionary response to a caustic and chaotic marriage to a heartless woman who had toyed with his emotions and left him for an unsavory mortgage banker who simultaneously left his wife and kids.

Where was the truth in that? she wondered. She knew that which lawyers say can only be taken with a grain of salt. That which the victim says, too. The victim’s advocate, as well, who has a job to garner sympathy for the victim and not to be truthful at all or empathetic to the accused. The prosecutor, whose job it is to paint a cold-blooded villain with no remorse or regret and no reason to have done something so vile other than it is simply in his nature and, as such, he poses an immense threat to society requiring the maximum punishment, consecutive, not concurrent, and nothing less. There’s as much dishonesty in the courtroom as there is bread in a bakery, or whores in a whorehouse. That much Colleen Daugherty knew full well, which was why she didn’t go to law school.

She left him to paint, and a short while later, Jack began. And as she eyed him from time to time, he seemed more and more passionate about what he painted and his brushstrokes were pressed so hard against the canvas she could hear them from her desk at the front of the room. He turned his easel so nobody could see, and when he finished, about an hour after everyone else had gone to the rec yard, he sighed empathically, put his brushes in the wood cup of water, and wept. Colleen was reading a book at her desk and didn’t say anything to him. She knew it would embarrass him, so she didn’t say anything or look his way. After he composed himself, he placed a canvas drop cloth over the painting and brought it to her.

“Remember,” he said holding up a finger. “Not until I’m released.”

“I know,” she smiled. “Thank you.”

He shook his head and started to leave, but she caught him with her words.

“You know, you don’t have to do this.”

“Do what?”

“What you are going to do to her.”

Jack smiled for lack of a better expression. Almost as though in gratitude for Colleen, or because of her naivety. Of course, she knew what he was bound to do, only she didn’t know why. Perhaps, that is what she wanted to know before he was released. Why he must kill his ex-wife. In a previous class, she had the inmates write stories. She said that their anger could be written out and purged onto the page so that they didn’t have to actually live and do it. The story would act as a substitute. So she encouraged them to write the angriest and most hateful story they could write. But Jack wrote a story about a child. A story that was the furthest thing from angry. It was hopeful and loving. In the story, the protagonist was released from prison after doing a stint for manslaughter and rescued his child from the child’s abusive mother. He kidnaped the child and they took a canoe down a river until they were several states away. And despite amber alerts, and people searching, the father and child made it to Mexico and lived a happy life on a beach working at a resort.

“I’ll see you soon,” Jack promised, leaving the room.

“Oh, I hope not, Jack.”

He nodded and left.

Colleen dug out the story he wrote and read it again. It was called “La Playa de Mis Sueños.” She knew enough Spanish to understand that it meant “The Beach of My Dreams.” She knew he hadn’t a child, so she wondered if he dreamt of having one. It was a good story and she had offered it back to him, but he refused to take it. His desire to kill his ex-wife had not been exorcized in any therapy session she offered, so she knew she had to make a report to the parole board so they could decide the terms of his parole. She knew she must do it to save him as much as to save his ex-wife. She put her face in her hands and took deep breaths that she hoped would help give her clarity. Then she opened her eyes and looked through her fingers and saw his painting under the drop-cloth. Would she look before he left, or would she honor her promise? Was there a clue there she could work with in the final few days. Or was Jack a lost cause. She stared at the covered painting.

Over the last two days, Jack worked out in his cell doing push-ups and sit-ups. Spring rains lessened and summer approached. He looked out his window and watched the cows. Different cows. Hamburgers on Monday. Cube steak on Tuesday. Hamburger gravy on Wednesday. Porkchops on Thursday. Fish on Friday. Spaghetti on Saturday. And chicken every Sunday. But no longer for him. He didn’t eat any of it. He became a vegetarian in prison after watching those cows come and go. The despicable way society treats the most vulnerable among us. We kill what we doesn’t see. That which can be killed for convenience behind a closed door, it shall kill. That which benefits it to do, or inconveniences it less. It is unholy and cannot be a principle of the same Bible he reads.  To kill innocent things the way that we do because it is practical or delectable? And while all judgment and scorn fell upon him for attempting to kill his whore of an ex-wife, and will fall upon him heavier when he is released and follows through and does kill her, they go about killing innocent animals and babies because they are fucked in the mind. But he immediately took back the profane thought, for profanity is poison and is not welcomed in the garden of his mind.

The day came and he waited for them to come get him. What he would do the day he was released was throughly planned and he was sure of it. But how he would do it, remained the only question in his mind. He rolled up his wool blankets and mat and sat on the white concrete with his eyes closed and his hands folded in prayer. “Forgive me father,” he began when the door buzzed opened.

“Time to go, Douglas,” the guard bellowed.

He was taken to the courthouse and met with his parole officer. The anxious young man sat behind a cluttered desk and read from brochures and a file, mostly. He made little eye contact. Jack stared at a picture of the PO, his wife, and baby. “You are expected to live up to the rules and regulations set forth in the following six pages and, of course, abide by all local, state and federal laws. Any deviance or violation of any kind will result in you violating your parole and will lead you back to court and, possibly, back to prison. Your ex-wife has a CPO against you and you are not permitted to be 500 feet of her. If she comes into a restaurant where you are eating, you must leave immediately. Same for the grocery store, or the library. If you’re driving down the same road as her, you must take an alternative route immediately. You must not contact her in any way, via text, email, call, or through a friend. You got that?”

“I got that.” 

The PO shook his buzz-cut head and looked up at Jack suspiciously. “You get one chance at this, Douglas. That is it. I’m giving you brochures to jobs and to community resources. We’ve arranged for you to stay at the halfway house until you find permanent residence. There are low-rent apartments available, but you must be employed to get one and apply. The wait is at several months so you got to do it ASAP. There is a yellow piece of paper that lists all the local employers that hire felons. You can’t vote and you can’t own a fuckin’ gun. You got that, Douglas?”

“I got that. I don’t want a gun.”

“Good. How much money do you have?”

“About 300 dollars, I think.”

“Good. Use it on food and clothes and go to JFS on Tuesday morning and see about getting yourself an Obama phone to use for jobs apply to. No one will hire you if they can’t call you. I’ll need you to give me that number when you do, and again, do not contact your ex-wife for any fuckin’ reason. You got that?”

Jack nodded. 

“Alright, well, get over to the halfway house and get situated. I’ll check in with you later in the week. Don’t fuck this up, Douglas. If you fuck up, I fuck up. That’s how it works around here. You do good, I do good. Got it?”

Jack nodded.

He went to the halfway house and it was grimy. The lumpy mattress was dirty and stained, but the linens were clean. It sunk into the metal bottom and every time he moved that night, it squeaked. He opened his eyes and there was a white mouse on the concrete floor beside him. It appeared to look at him as he looked at it. He realized it had been a lot of years since he had seen a mouse. Then he went back to sleep and dreamed of Bugs. Bugs opened his mouth and that butterfly flew out of his throat and he fell to the ground, dead. The butterfly flew to the high ceiling and to the fluorescent lights. It managed to skim along the ceiling, and through the door, and out into the hall, and down the hall, and out through the guard entrance to the lobby, and out through the lobby into the foyer, and out through the foyer into the bright blue sky. And the dream made Jack happy for a moment, though it was just a dream. He was happy for Bugs.


The next morning he walked to JFS and got his Obama phone. He pulled out a piece of paper and texted his PO. His PO gave him the blue thumbs up emoji. What a fucking asshole, Jack thought. Then he apologized to God for the impurity of the curse word. He walked to a hardware store and looked around. Then he found a large hunting knife and a hatchet. Can’t own a gun, but there are no laws against buying knives or hatchets. Then at the counter, the red glimmer of a toy caught his eye. A model car. A cherry-red 68 Camaro. He picked it up and held it for a moment and smiled thinking of Colleen. Beside it, on another rack, there were little plastic cows and he held them, too. 

“I’ll take these, too,” he told the old man at the register. “And do you sell ski masks?”

“Ski masks? In July?”

“Is that a no?”

“No. We don’t, son.” The old man rang up the large hunting knife and the hatchet a little more warily. He placed them in a paper bag. But the car and the cow seemed to set his mind at ease a little.


He walked to his ex-wife’s house and her car was gone. He used a latter and broke in through the back kitchen window where no one could see him very well besides for some neighbors, who would have an obstructed view at best. It was a Monday and it was hard to say where she was, but inevitably she would return. He didn’t bother to go through her things, as he had one purpose in being here. To finish what he had started five years before. He sat in the closet in her bedroom and waited. Hours passed. His Obama phone buzzed several times, so he set it to silent. His prick parole officer, checking in. Where are you? At a job interview, he lied in reply. He imagined what his reaction would have been if he knew he was in his ex-wife’s closet with a hunting knife and a hatchet. Waiting.

The door alarm switched off and the key turned in the lock. It echoed in the silent house. In the old bones. She was talking on her cellphone to a new boyfriend when she came in. Her last relationship with the mortgage banker didn’t pan out. He went back to his wife and kids. She laughed at something and told him to come over later if he wanted some. Jack waited, gripping the hatchet in one hand and the knife in the other. It was another hour before she came upstairs to get changed. And when the dresser drawer opened, he bust out of the closet and hit her hard on the top of the skull with the blunt side of the hatchet. She fell to the floor and blood gushed from her skull onto the carpet. She was still conscious, but barely. He picked her up and put her in the bed and put her feet up on the bed posts and tied her ankles to them. She moaned, but offered little more. He would wait for her to regain consciousness before he would continue.

“Did they put your feet in stirrups like this?” he asked her calmly as her eyes opened.

“God, Jack. No!”

“Did you think I was going to sit in prison and forgive you?”

She sobbed and bit her lip. He seethed in anger and punched her hard in the ribs, crushing two. Then he jabbed her with the hunting knife, which hit a rib and cracked it, pushing the broken fragments of the rib into her lung along with the hot steel blade of the knife. She couldn’t scream then, no one could hear her, just as the child couldn’t scream. No one could hear him either for he would be burned and dismembered before he was even born. Her eyes were full of panic and tears and she bit through her lip and blood trickled down her chin and neck then onto the bed. Her phone dinged and there was a knock on the door. He tied her arms to the top of the bed and hurried to answer it. When he opened the door, her boyfriend stood there and Jack buried the hatchet in his skull without saying a word. He dropped on the porch and Jack dragged him inside by his feet and set him up on the couch in front of the TV. He tossed the remote on his lap and said to make yourself at home, amigo.

His ex-wife was struggling to get out of the bindings when he got back upstairs. She saw the blood on his hatchet and whined like a dog. “I wonder how long it took for them to kill him. Was it quick and easy? In and out? Or did it go on for a while? Did you feel it? Or did they numb you? Did you feel him flushed out and ripped apart? Did it give you a sense of relief? Of finality, as this will give me?”

She cried pathetically. That was all that she could do. The adrenaline she experienced was not enough to kill the pain. Jack’s phone rang and it was his PO. He answered it. “Where are you?” his PO demanded in his prick voice.

“I’m killing my ex-wife. Ill call you back,” Jack said nonchalantly, hanging up.

He only regretted he didn’t wear his Indian costume. He didn’t know where it was. All his stuff went to his friend’s garage when he went to prison and he hadn’t talked to the friend since he was released. Since a few years before he was released. Friends don’t always stick. Especially, when you tried to kill you ex-wife. They were just pictures and clothes in boxes. He didn’t want any of it.

“Well, we better get started. I have another appointment in a half-hour, so...”

Jack cut off her right arm first. It took seven hard wacks of the hatchet to do so. Then he took the left. Then her right leg, which took thirteen. Then her left, which only took nine because he knew where to hit it. Before he could chop her legs off, she was in shock. She didn’t feel a thing, he assured a picture of her dad, which sat on the nightstand.

“I am skilled at the procedure and your daughter isn’t my first patient, sir. It’s a medical procedure, no reason to get all emotional. She is a clump of cells in her 444 month of gestation. She’s not a person,” he explained, wacking away. “You can’t have her remains. They’ll be disposed of according to policy and procedure of this clinic. In a dumster.”

He was covered in blood and carrying out her legs and arms like someone would carry firewood when the police arrived. He had already carried out her head and torso, which he dumped in her empty garbage can.

“Very poor response time, boys!” he said grinning.

“Put your hands up!”
  

“I’m afraid if I do, I’ll drop her arms and legs on the lawn. Seems kind of rude. I’ll carry them the rest of the way to the trash and you can have your way with me then. In the meantime, go see if anything good is playing on the television. Her boyfriend is watching something, but I don’t think he’ll mind so much if you change the channel.”

The officer’s gun shook in his hand at the sight of Jack carrying the extremities of his once better half. Or worse half, rather. The second officer puked in the grass when he made out a foot in the bloody mess of what Jack was carrying.

“I love you to pieces, baby. Forever and always.” He looked down at her in the trash can and wished he had painted her like that in Colleen’s class. In a brief moment of regret, he thought that maybe had he painted the picture as he saw her now, his ex-wife in her own fucking garbage can, he might have better processed his anger and maybe he would have not killed her. But then he smiled and laughed as the officers regrouped and tackled him on the back lawn. 


That morning, Colleen walked into the ART classroom and pulled the canvas off Jack’s painting. She put her hand over her mouth and gasped. The painting was that of a baby in the womb in the early stages of a dismemberment abortion. Dilation and evacuation, they call it at the million-dollar clinic. Later that morning, she called Jack’s public defender who remembered his case quite well. Her voice was nasally and indifferent. “They all bleed together,” she laughed as she tried to recollect Jack at first. “He didn’t try to kill her because she decided to leave him for another guy. He tried to kill her because she aborted their child. He was nuts. The judge felt sorry for him, so he got the lesser charge. If he had a woman judge, he would have done fifteen.”

“Thanks, Pam.” Colleen hung up. She felt sorry for him. People commit heinous acts when they are pushed to a point and snap. But the jury process doesn’t forgive or excuse clear acts of violence because of a legally protected right to kill a child, sanctioned by the state. One of those behind-closed-door-things society tolerates for the sake of convenience and bullshit enlightenment that justifies the barbarism of murdering babies to express a right, or to defy a paranoia that someone else is restricting your rights to control you. Or out of convenience because the child complicates your shitty life. Colleen had long opposed abortion and was confident that had she been in Jack’s position, she would have done the same. Only she would have killed the bitch.

A few days later, Colleen received an unmarked package. Nothing uncommon. But against her better judgment, she opened it. She smiled when she saw the little red toy Camaro, impressed that Jack had remembered that it was one of her only fond memories of her father. He had painted the top black, she wouldn’t know, so that it matched the details of her father’s car to a T. Also enclosed was a letter, a story, really. The fictitious story of Jack murdering his ex-wife and throwing her in her garbage can in parts, as she had done to their child at the clinic. The gruesome aforementioned account that Jack had wrote himself. Jack enclosed the following letter:

“I am violating my parole and taking a bus to Texas and crossing the border to Mexico. From there, I will work with an old friend who lives in and runs a nice bed and breakfast in Puerto Vallarta. I expect that when you come, you will look me up. I also expect that you will not turn me in and that authorities will not extradite me back to the US on a PV. Thank you for giving me the power to purge in writing. I guess that ART stuff really works. I hope the story wasn’t too graphic, or too much for you, but that is the beautiful part in writing. You can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking and it relieves the desire in us to do that which we must not do. To spread more evil upon the Earth than what already exists.

“If you care to, or don’t believe me, you’ll find my ex-wife alive and relatively well, in body, certainly, but never in heart. As much as I wanted to do what I wrote, I cannot let her ruin me or the memory of our unborn child, who I am hopeful will come to me again in some way.

“Maybe, one day Colleen, you will understand that a person is not one action, or crime, or a desire to avenge a wrong done to them. Maybe you already know that. Maybe you will find your way here. And maybe, by then, I will be a rich and successful writer on the beaches of my dreams, my only dream, which is to be happy and to be in love with someone like you. Thank you for saving me.”

She smiled and put the letter away and rolled the toy Camaro slowly across her desk where it would stay until she saved up enough money and courage to travel alone, south to Mexico, where Jack waited, laying on the beach, twirling a little plastic cow in his hand with no malice aforethought.