“Rich one, too,” Mrs. Cash said.
WHITE TRASH NOIR by Michael Malone
All of a sudden Dr. Rothmann, the foreman of my jury, says she wants to talk to the judge. She gives me a look when she walks by the defendant’s table, straight in my eyes, and I nod back at her but I can’t tell what she’s thinking because there’s so many different feelings in her face. But behind me my Mawmaw stands up and bows her head to her. The judge and the jury get up too and they crowd each other out of the courtroom and just leave us sitting here. My lawyer leans over and says, “Charmain, you have got to change your mind and take the stand.” And I tell him, “No thank you.”
Mr. Snow goes, “This is Murder One, Charmain. You just cannot kill your husband in the state of North Carolina if he played ACC basketball.”
I go, “Well, this is Charmain Luby Markell and I’m not talking about my personal private life to a bunch of strangers in a court of law and have them turn it all into lies against me and mine.”
I got this lawyer? He’s young, just two years more than me, and halfway through our first talk in the jail I can tell he hasn’t had a lot of Life Experience, which, between you and I, I’ve already had way too much. Tilden Snow’s his name, Tilden Snow III, and I think it’s lazy for a family to use a name three times in a row when there’re so many nice new names out there you can choose from. They even got little Names for Your Baby books at the checkout counters, which is where I got my Jarrad’s name. That’s what I call my little boy, jarrad Todd Markell, even though his birth certificate says Kyle Lewis Markell, Jr., totally because my husband’s mother worships the ground her son Kyle walks on. Well, did walk on before I shot him.
So Mr. Snow wanted me to get up on the witness stand and tell why I shot my husband in the head and set him on fire in our backyard.
Mr. Snow chews at a cuticle; his nails are a mess. He sighs a long deep sigh and shakes his head at me. “Please won’t you help me here, Charmain?”
Please won’t I help him? Who’re they trying to give a lethal injection to, me or Tilden Snow III? I go, “Mr. Snow-”
He holds up his hand like a safety patrol. “Tilden. I keep asking you, please call me Tilden. Mr. Snow’s my Daddy’s name.” I think he was trying to make a joke so I smiled and said I’d try to call him Tilden but I wouldn’t take the stand and tell why I shot Kyle.
“Oh, Jesus,” he says. “Well, you better hope your friend Dr. Rothmann’s telling the judge she’s going to hang that jury.”
I say, “What does that mean, she’s going to hang the jury?” But he just pulls on his ears like he wishes they were longer and he runs off with the other lawyers after Dr. Rothmann and the judge and leaves me to sit and wait, which is what I’ve mostly been doing since Kyle died. Which I admit he did do when I shot him.
I’m used to it now but the first time they hauled me into this courtroom, I was crying and grabbing onto my grandma Mawmaw so hard they had to prize my fingers from around her neck. I saw the way it was upsetting her how they had my hands and feet both hooked up to a chain. But Mawmaw whispered at me, “Don’t you cry, baby doll, don’t you let those folks see you cry,” and I tried hard to stop and I did. The only other time I ever went to pieces was when Mawmaw brought Jarrad into the back of the courtroom and held him up for me to look at (he’s two and a half now and he was nineteen months last time I seen him). He had a little toy basketball in his hands and I swear he looked like his daddy, maybe because he started to cry and his face turned purple the way Kyle’s did when he got mad.
The first day I was in court the whole jury kept staring at me like somebody was going to test them in the morning. Right off I noticed this one lady on the front row, a soft pretty lady, small, with a sharp smart face. From day one, she looked right at me with her head cocked over to the side like a little hawk, sort of puzzling about me. They said her name was Mrs. Nina Gold Rothmann, except they called her Doctor. She got to be the foreman of the jury even though she wasn’t a man. And for two whole weeks of the State’s making its case against me, she’s about never took her eyes off me.
Now the State’s done and it’s time for our side to “shred them to pieces,” according to Mr. Snow, except I’m not going to take the stand so there won’t be much shredding likely to get done. Maybe that’s why Dr. Rothmann’s made them all go off to talk to the judge now. Maybe she’s in there telling the judge just give Charmain Markell the death penalty so the jury can go on home. They must be about as sick of hearing about that gun and kerosene and Kyle’s eleven points against Wake Forest as I am.
The first day of my trial I didn’t like Dr. Rothmann. It’s rude to stare the way she does. But after a while I kind of felt like we was almost talking to each other. I heard all about her life at what they call the vow deer, I believe. She had to tell about herself to get on the jury, or get off it, which a lot of them tried to because of their jobs or kids or whatever. They said she was a big doctor at the Research Center. She told how she was working on what we’re all made up of, genomes, something like that. When you know their genomes, you can tell people what they’re going to die of someday. Well, but I guess I don’t need a research center to tell me that. Lethal injection. Least if the District Attorney, Mr. Goodenough, gets his way. Anyhow, this foreman lady’s job of sorting out our genomes sounded hard but interesting and I could tell she cared a lot about it from the way she talked. At first I smiled at her just to be polite, but later on it was sort of personal because she was divorced and had a boy in college. And I thought that was kind of like me-I mean, I’ve got one little boy and no husband anymore too. So a lot of days went by in court with me and Dr. Rothmann looking at each other. I started figuring out some beauty tips I could of given her if she’d come in Pretty Woman. She had three suits that didn’t do much for her; the sleeves were too long so she just had them rolled up. Her hands were nice though; somebody did a good job on her nails, but not us-I never saw her in Pretty Woman and I do all their hands.
After a while I decided her eyes weren’t mean, she was just thinking hard all the time, not like some folks on my jury that were taking naps with their eyes open. Not that I blame them. All that State’s evidence was boring me, and it was my life. But Dr. Rothmann, she hung in there even with that old fat Mr. Goodenough mumbling about ballistics this and ballistics that for four solid hours. Isn’t it something? I could not make myself listen.
After a week or so Dr. Rothmann got to be somebody I could kind of talk to in my mind in my cell at night, like maybe explain things to her that were all balled up inside me like string in a junk drawer, like she’d be smart enough to see how they’d look if they got untangled. When I looked at her over there in the jury box, I felt like she could see what was true. I tried to explain it to my lawyer, Tilden Snow, but he said, “I don’t trust Rothmann.” He figured the D.A. must know something or he wouldn’t have let her on my jury because he said usually the State avoids these Ph.D.’s like the plague on account of they are soft on crime.
Yesterday I told Mr. Snow in the visiting room how, deep down, I thought the foreman lady was kind of sweet and he snorts at me, “She’s about as sweet as a jar of pickled okra.” I said I was surprised somebody rich as him even ate pickled okra but he tells me, “Charmain, I’ve got a grandmama same as you and she loved pickled okra.”
I say, “I know you do because my grandma used to clean her house and your mama’s house.”
He says, “I know. Your grandmama was the White Tornado.”
“Yes, she was and still is. She quit your mama,” I say.