Surprises

The first thing that surprised me about killing someone was how much energy it took. It was damn exhausting, stabbing somebody over and over and over again. I felt like I’d been pitching in the World Series, my arm was sore for near about a week.

My grandma always said we should learn from every experience, and one thing I learned from this is what a bunch of candy-assed cowards the gun-toting criminals are. I mean, if you hate someone enough to kill them, you ought to do it right — up close and personal. Shooting somebody from a distance — don’t that take some of the satisfaction out of it? It seems cold to me. They ought to make a law that anybody who commits a murder has to use a weapon other than a gun. People ought to be creative about killing, and guns, in my mind, take some of the imagination out of the process.

The day I killed Wiley Duster, I hadn’t planned to do it. Sure, I’d had my moments when I thought, “I’m gonna kill that bastard,” but you know how people say they’re gonna kill someone, and they really don’t mean it. Like, you say, “I’m gonna kill that kid if he don’t quieten down,” or “I’m gonna kill that man if he comes home drunk again.” You wouldn’t really do it. It’s just a wild thought that darts across your mind, like when you’re camping out overnight and you think you see a coyote dashing across the hills. One minute it’s there, the next it’s not, and you just go on your journey, and things are like they were before. But that Saturday night, the Saturday I killed Wiley, I had the thought of killing him, and then I had a second thought I’d never had before: “I think I really will.”

Now everybody in Castroville, Texas, and points beyond knows that Wiley Duster was a Grade A, card-carrying asshole, and he deserved to die. To me, it was an absolute miracle nobody had bumped him off sooner. But the police didn’t see it that way. When Sheriff Pug came to arrest me, he said, “Janey, why the hell did you pull a stunt like this? Why did you kill off ol’ Wiley?” And I said, “I killed him because he was an asshole.” And Pug said, “Lord, Janey, you can’t go around killing everybody who’s an asshole. There wouldn’t be hardly no people left on the planet.” And I said, “Well, at least there’s one less idiot in the gene pool now.”

I got to say, I ain’t heard nobody claim they’re sad that Wiley’s gone. Oh, his mother shed a couple of tears over the casket, but that was pretty much for show, to make everybody in town think she was grieving. But I think even she was relieved she didn’t have to be responsible for him anymore, bailing him out of jail a couple of times a year, loaning him money to get his motorcycle repaired — things his wife and his girlfriend got tired of doing after a while, and can you blame them?

When the news people interview me about the murder, they always want to know the details, so here’s what I tell them. I tell them it was about 10:30 on Saturday night, just about a half-hour before quitting time at the Dairy Queen on State Highway 90. Wiley was working as the second shift manager, and I was in charge of the dairy orders. Meena was working the cash register, and Glenn was working the grill. When the urge came over me, I was fixing a Peanut Buster Parfait for Junior Davis and a Snickers Blizzard for his new girlfriend, Tina Dooley. Wiley came up behind me, and put his hot breath on my neck, and he said, “Go easy on the peanuts.” I slammed down the plastic cup, and I said, “All right, you no-good, slimy creep, that does it.” I told all the customers to get out, I told all the employees to get out, and then I took the knife that we used to slice the lemons for lemonade, and I stabbed Wiley 24 times. I might have stabbed him more, but my arm was getting a cramp.

After it was over, I washed my hands, sat down in the manager’s office and smoked a Camel. I turned on the little radio we keep back there, and they were playing “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.” I was thinking how I always hated that song because it was so whiny — he’s got somebody new, well get the hell out there and find somebody new yourself — and I was just about to change the station, when I heard the sirens. At first I thought, “Is there a fire close by?” and I went to the front window to look out. I didn’t see no smoke, so I decided to go back to the kitchen and fix myself a chocolate dip cone, when I hear on the radio that there’s a “police emergency” in Castroville. Well I think, “A police crisis? They must be down to the last dozen glazed at the Krispy Kreme.” A few minutes later I hear a banging at the door, and I go to answer it, and it’s Sheriff Pug. I say, “Come on in. It ain’t locked. You don’t need to beat it down.” He looks over at Wiley and says — like I don’t already know this — “Wiley’s dead.” And I think to myself, “Well, no wonder you’re the sheriff, big guy, ’cause you got an eye for details.” But I didn’t say that. Instead, I say, “Yeah, I know. It’s a mess, isn’t it? I guess I better get a mop.”

The reporters just love this story. They always tell me how colorful it is, and how I got a special way with words. I was on the nightly news at every channel for just about two months after it all happened, and I’ve done two interviews with “Hard Copy.” Even now that I’m in prison, I still get cards from Geraldo Rivera and Diane Sawyer begging me to come on their shows for “exclusive” one-hour interviews. I might one day, but I haven’t said yes yet. I like to toy with the big-time TV folks the way a cat likes to toy with a mouse. It’s just a lot of fun to play with ’em, making ’em wonder whether you’re gonna keep ’em or gonna let ’em go.

The trial went pretty quick, but it attracted a lot of national attention. Lawyers came down from Harvard to argue my case. They told me not to worry about money because the publicity of the trial would be worth every penny they had to spend to defend me. Celebrities flew in from Hollywood and held a protest march outside the Medina County Courthouse, carrying signs that said I was being railroaded by a corrupt judicial system that treats the rich different from the poor. (Although how they know that about the poor, I don’t understand, since they all rode up in chauffeured Mercedes.) Feminists came down from the college in Austin and said on the TV that I was a victim of male oppression and that the only way I could truly be free was for women everywhere to dismantle the patriarchal system that dominates the world’s economic order. The people from the American Civil Liberties Union flew here like a flock of starlings and said I was being denied my Constitutional rights — they were never specific about which rights, but it sounded good to everybody who heard it. The people from the AFL-CIO came and organized a whole bunch of unions, including the “Janey Union” for restaurant workers. And when the conviction came down, Billy Graham and a gaggle of religious leaders held a prayer vigil in San Antonio to keep the community from rioting.

I guess this was the second thing that surprised me about killing someone: the amount of attention you get. All those years I spent going to church and raising my kids and ironing and keeping my nose to the grindstone at work, and I never got no kind of praise or acknowledgment for it. But I kill just one person — and a pretty sorry person at that — and I get my picture in the paper more times than the President. The world is a weird place, if you ask me.

I’ve been in prison for about three years, and we’re deep into the appeals process now. The lawyers come a couple of times a week with their briefcases and their stacks of papers and tell me not to worry, that we’re gonna take this thing all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if we have to. Great, I think, the same people who outlawed prayer in school. The same people whose fold includes a man who talks to women about pubic hair in Coke. These bozos are gonna decide my fate. I hope it gets settled before then.

I know prison is supposed to be my punishment for killing Wiley, but it really ain’t so bad in here. I don’t have to cook, I don’t have to worry about scraping the rent money together, and I don’t have to do any housework. In some ways, it’s like a vacation. Sure, I miss my kids, but their daddy’s got them, and he was always a better mother to them than me. I guess the best thing about being in prison is that I’ve got time to think, which I sure as hell didn’t have time to do before.

My psychiatrist says it’s good for me to do all this thinking. She says I need to analyze my actions so I can understand them. That I need to “own” this tragedy, so I can come to terms with it. She says it’s important that I look deep into my psyche, wherever that is, and “consider” why I killed Wiley so I can forgive myself. She has about 10 dozen reasons for why she thinks I did it, and her favorite one — or at least the one she repeats over and over — is that Wiley reminded me of my father, and that I wasn’t really stabbing Wiley but stabbing my “father figure.” I smile a lot when she says this, because she’s a nice lady, and she went to school for a long time, and she means well. She seems real proud of her theories, this one in particular, so I just let her go on. Besides, I want to keep some things private.

The truth is I might have killed my father, if he hadn’t drunk his sorry self to death, but I killed Wiley because I wanted to, not because I was thinking about how some other body was a pitiful excuse for a daddy 20 years ago. Wiley had it coming, and I was proud to be the one to give it to him.

Before the trial, the lawyers and the police were always pestering me, asking me what it was that Wiley said that set me off. What did he say or do that was so awful, I was moved to stab him 24 times? I never wanted to get specific because I didn’t want to embarrass the others, but it wasn’t one thing — it was years of things Wiley said and did. It was the way he made fun of Glenn, the retarded boy, who worked the grill. The way he said cruel things, like calling him “Armadillo” all the time because he was slow, or calling him “Brick” because he was one brick shy of a load. It was the way he made fun of Meena because she was fat. He’d pinch her on the bottom and say ugly things like “I’d like to get me some of that sweet stuff, Meena, if only I could find it under all that blubber.” It was the way I’d see him act in town. Moving the old blind beggar man’s cane so as he couldn’t find it. Or telling Lucy Finder her husband was running around on her, when her husband was really working a second job at the gas station, and making Lucy cry and say she was gonna kill herself if she had to be alone again.

And I guess, if the truth be told, I did it for some selfish reasons, too. I got tired of the little things, like him interrupting me when I was talking, like I weren’t even saying anything important. And him looking at me like I was some suit he wanted to try on and throw away. Mainly, I just got tired of feeling small just so Wiley could feel big about his self.

So, in all my thinking time, I been thinking about my crime and how everybody told me I’d be sorry.

But damned if I didn’t get another surprise.

I ain’t.