The Speed Queen Read online

  And it’s a dumb question. How could I use the knife first? There were five of them and one of me, and back then I weighed like a pound.

  Not that it was self-defense at that point. Mr. Jefferies said it was going to be murder even though I didn’t do it. The question was, was it second degree or first, and how many counts of each? That’s not even including the Closes and all of that.

  But that should go later. First I think you’d want to talk about me growing up in the country. In the newspaper no one ever mentions I’m from the country, and I think it’s interesting.

  My family was my mom, my dad and me, and our dog, Jody-Jo. He was a basset hound the color of a Fudgsicle except where he d turned white. He was old and had bad dandruff and farted a lot. He didn’t like to play with you. He’d just lie under the glider, and when you wanted to rock, he’d get up and say something before he walked off. His back legs moved kind of sideways. He was my mom’s dog from before they got married, and my dad refused to clean up after him. My mom had a shovel around the side of the garage, and a trash bag.

  The house though. You ever see Bonnie and Clyde? It was just like that. The next house was a mile down the road on each side. This was right on Route 66, the old one. All day I’d sit on the glider and watch the cars come by; my dad taught me all the names—Chieftain and Starfire, Rocket 88. The nearest town was Depew. In back we had an old chicken house and back behind that a pond the dirt turned red. The house was yellow and had two floors. I don’t remember any of the furniture except a piano that was always broken. You’d hit a key and nothing happened.

  The wind was the big thing there. It really did come sweeping down the plain. I don’t know if you’ve ever been out here, but don’t forget to put that in the book. Make it windy like every other day. You could say it’s windy tonight, that all those protesters outside the gate are getting their signs and coffee cups blown around. Or say I can hear it whistling around the Death House like a ghost. Something like that, just get it in, you know how to do it.

  Out there the big worry was tornadoes. April and May was the season. If you saw one, you were supposed to call the police in Depew, then open your windows a crack and wait in the basement. We had an old mattress down there, and when the warning came on the radio, my mom would take me and Jody-Jo down and we’d sit on the mattress and eat Ritz crackers with peanut butter until the radio said it was okay. Depew had a siren; on a calm day you could barely hear it. But I never saw one. All I remember is every few days the wind would take one of my mom’s sheets off the line and dip it in the pond and she’d fish it out, cursing like you never heard.

  There weren’t any chickens left in the chicken house, just dust from the feathers that made you sneeze and a smell like ammonia. Behind the house was a little hill I’d ride my tricycle down. I’d pedal as fast as I could and then when the pedals were going too fast to catch up with I’d hold my feet out and let the pedals go crazy. I used to fall off a lot. When I went inside, my mother would slap the dirt off my dress. It was kind of like a spanking. “What have you been doing?” she’d say. “Haven’t I told you a million times not to do that? What’s wrong with you?”

  My tricycle had plastic tassels that came out of the handgrips. You could hang on to them like reins. You couldn’t steer so good with them, but that made it more exciting.

  When I was four I broke my wrist. I was riding down the hill when the front wheel hit this dip. The wheel turned and I went over the handlebars and the trike came down on top of me. I thought I was fine. I was used to that kind of thing. I got up and tried to pick the trike up, but my hand wouldn’t do what I was telling it. I went inside and told my mom.

  “What did I tell you?” she said. “I told you but you wouldn’t listen to me, would you? Now do you see what happens?”

  And I didn’t listen to her. They put a cast on my wrist that my fingers stuck out of, and when I came back I got right back on my tricycle. A few days later I had the exact same accident again, except this time the cast hit me in the side of the head and completely knocked me out. I woke up a little later and went inside. I didn’t tell anyone, but in bed that night I could hear like a radio in my head, just soft so you couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  I know what you’re thinking but it’s not true. I was better the next day. I’ve never heard any other voices. If you want to do something with that, then fine, but that’s not my story, that’s yours.

  If you do, you might say it was the spirit of a Pawnee squaw. A few years ago some people from the university dug up a whole ditchful of bones near Depew. They think it was a massacre that got covered up. You might say it was the sole survivor’s ghost coming back to find her husband and babies. (You could do it in parentheses or italics so we’d know it was a voice in her head, like in Pet Sematary.)

  We lived on Route 66 until I was five, when my dad got a job at Remington Park and we moved closer to Oklahoma City. I was excited about moving, but sad too, leaving the pond and the chicken house, the little hill.

  I guess I should take this time to apologize to the Close family. Lamont and me are honestly sorry for causing them all such pain, and I wish I could undo what’s done. I can’t. I hope my death will be some comfort to their family. I’d like them to know that we had nothing against Marla and Terry Close, and that they were not involved with the drug business or anything illegal, like the newspapers say. They just happened to be living in that house at that time. As a Christian I pray they’ve found their reward just as I hope to find mine tonight.

  That was one thing I noticed when we were there that last time—the piano was gone. I thought something that heavy would never move, I don’t know why. It was a shock. I remember saying something to Lamont when we were tying them up.

  “What?” he said, because the kerosene was splashing.

  “The piano,” I said, “it’s gone.”

  And he stopped what he was doing and asked me where it used to be.

  “Right here,” I said, and made the shape of it with my hands.

  Lamont put his arm around me, and we stood there looking at where it should have been. There was a bookcase there with pictures of the Closes. They were on a beach somewhere with a sunset lighting up the sky, drinking those little drinks with umbrellas. Behind us, Mrs. Close was whimpering inside the trash bag. Mr. Close’s hand was still flipping like a fish.

  “What the heck,” I said, “the thing never worked anyway,” and we went back to work.

  We sat on the couch and watched them a little bit, then got on the road. When we passed Depew, the siren was going wild.

  3

  I’m not going to say anything about the number of times. You can get that from the newspapers. I’m sorry about that now, but after the fifth or sixth time they probably didn’t feel anything. That’s not what I will or won’t be forgiven for anyway. That was Natalie.

  I understand you need all these details to tell the story right, that people are interested in that kind of thing. I don’t know why we did it. Everyone asks me that. All I can tell you is that sometimes you just go off, you don’t know when to stop. Later you come back to yourself, but sometimes you just go off to this other place.

  I’m not explaining it right.

  I remember doing it. It’s not like I wasn’t there or that I wasn’t the one doing it. It’s like nothing else existed except me. Does that make sense? I was the only one that counted. They were there just to please me, to make me count more. The more I did it, the bigger I got. It’s a drug by itself, the size you get.

  I’ll try to answer that better later on. It’s a hard one.

  We moved from outside Depew to Kickingbird Circle in Edmond. It was a new development then, the houses were brand-new, with just dirt for yards, stakes with strings between them. The city was still building the streetlights; the gutters were filled with nuts and bolts. It was like a play where they’re still building the set.

  My dad was an assistant trainer at Remington Park, and my
mom worked at the local post office. That’s right, the one where the guy barricaded the doors and shot everyone. I figured you’d like that. Maybe you could make her the only survivor who has these bad dreams and tells me about hiding in a canvas cart. But she’d quit by then. By then she’d made her pension and stayed home all day reading mysteries and listening to the radio.

  She doesn’t read your books. She likes the ones where you get the same lady detective except they’re working on a different case. It’s like a TV series, you get the same characters over and over. Like “Cheers”—you know everybody. She goes through two or three a week. She gets them from the library.

  When she heard you were going to do the book, she said, “Anyone but him.”

  I said, “Mom, what do you want, he’s the biggest writer in America.”

  “He’ll do a job on you,” she says. “He’ll make you look bad.” So just for me, make me look okay, all right?

  Anyway, we lived on Kickingbird Circle and I went to school at Northern Hills elementary. My mom gave me a key so I could get in after school, and she’d always leave me cookies or grapes or a note that said there were Popsicles in the freezer and I could have one if I took it outside. I’d watch “Speed Racer” and maybe “Gilligan’s Island” or go over to Clara Davies’ house and play Barbies or Mystery Date or whatever. Then around five-thirty my mom would pull her Toronado into the drive and ten minutes later my dad would roll up in his Continental, and I’d help make dinner.

  It was normal. I had friends. I liked school, especially geography. I belonged to the Glee Club. In gym I was the best at the softball throw. You can check up on all of this and everyone will tell you it’s true. It wasn’t like Carrie at all. My shoes were new; no one laughed at my clothes.

  The only strange thing about my childhood is that we didn’t go to church. Not once. I don’t know why that was, maybe because Sunday was a big day at the track. My dad would get up like any other workday and back the Continental out and take off while the rest of Kickingbird Circle was still asleep. Later my mom would make pancakes and we’d read the paper together at the kitchen table. We read everything, even the stupid cartoons in Parade magazine. Our fingers turned gray.

  I can hear you thinking it was too normal, it was weird normal. Not true. No one said it was perfect. We wanted to believe that, I think—the kids—but we knew it wasn’t true. Mrs. Richardson had a stroke and they moved away. Darryl Marshall ran over Tallulah, the Underwoods’ Siamese. It was mysterious, I guess, because we all crowded around, but I wasn’t the one who picked it up with a stick, and that night I didn’t worry about it. Before bed I looked out my window at the far-off lights of the city and up at the stars and made the same wish I always did—that my life would always be like this.

  4

  This is better.

  I met Lamont Standiford for the first time on Friday, October 26th, 1984. I was working the swing shift at the Conoco on the Broadway Extension. I was drinking then. Every night I drank a fifth of vodka. As long as you smoked, they couldn’t smell it on you. It was a good job for an alcoholic. All I had to do was punch buttons and accept money. I’d been working there a month and I’d already gotten a dollar raise.

  He was driving a firemist-red 442 convertible with a black top. I’d seen the car cruising Broadway; there wasn’t much to do but look out the window. He pulled up to pump 7 and the light on my board came on. He waved at me to turn the pump on. I hit the button. It was like being a lab rat; the light comes on, you hit the button. Sometimes the customers get angry when you’re slow. Not him. He waved to say thank you, and I gave him a smile. He was smoking right next to the No Smoking sign. He was slim in black cigarette-leg jeans and his hair was all over the place, like he’d been riding with the top down. He bent over to fit the nozzle in. I was drunk and I’d just broken up with Rico and I thought it might be nice to have somebody again.

  I had a customer to take care of, so I put down my cigarette and made change for them, and then somebody else. When I was done I sat back on my stool and took a drag. I couldn’t see him. I thought he’d flipped down his license plate to fill up, but I couldn’t see him. I stood up for a better look and saw that he didn’t have a license plate, and right then he pulled out and across traffic and I lost him in the stream of taillights.

  For every drive-off you had to fill out a form. The more you had, the harder the manager looked at your receipts. Each one made you remember what a crummy job you had. I hit the reset for 7 and started filling it out. I hated seeing my handwriting going all over the place. By then I was tired of being a drunk but there wasn’t anything else I could do. I got down to Description of Vehicle and thought how easy it would be to find a car like that, and I started to put down the wrong car. I’d only seen him for a minute but I started to put down a Buick Skylark.

  And right when I’m finishing the description, the 442 pulls in again. It’s got the grabber hood with rally stripes, raised white letter tires, spinner hubs—nothing fancy, just very tasteful. It pulls right up in front of my window and out he gets. He swings his hair back out of his eyes and bends down to the hole in the Plexiglas, and his pupils are huge. He has these teeth that are almost fangs. I like his eyebrows, the way they bend down at the ends.

  “I forget what number I was on,” he says, and slides a twenty into the trough.

  “Lucky seven,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says, surprised I know, and looks at me.

  I can still bring back that look—his eyes like an eclipse, the way his hair blew around his face, how he hooked a piece out of his mouth with a pinky.

  “Nice ride,” I said, and I think we knew. Sometimes love doesn’t take much. You just have to be there when it shows up.

  My dad wanted to be a jockey but he was too tall. He was just over five feet, and by the time I knew him he was heavy. He wore a different-colored windbreaker to work every day, all with his name over his heart—Phil. I never called him anything except Dad, but my friends would say, “How’s old Phil doing?” or “When’s Phil getting home?”

  He used to pick me up and swing me by the ankles. I’d ask him all the time. “Swing me,” I’d say, “swing me.” He stood in the middle of the living room, spinning to keep up with me. One time he must of gotten dizzy because my head went right into the side of the TV console. I went right out, and when I came to I was on the couch with a towel under my head. My dad had ice in a washcloth. There was blood on it, watered down. He didn’t seem worried. He’d probably done this a lot at work.

  He was saying my name but I could barely hear him. Something was humming. The ice came down like he was going to put it in my eye.

  “Margie,” he said. “Margie.”

  Every time I could hear it a little better, like the humming was melting away.

  My mom came in from the garden; she had dirty gloves on. “What happened?” she asked, and my father told her. He showed her the washcloth.

  She came over and looked down at me. I tried to smile.

  “She’ll be all right,” she said.

  At dinner, I fell asleep in my chair. My dad said I just fell right off it. At the hospital the doctor said I had a fractured skull.

  On the way home I sat between them in the front seat. My dad was too upset to drive, and my mom kept reaching over me to stroke the back of his neck.

  “It’s just a hairline,” she said. “Phil, she’ll be fine.”

  5

  My mom didn’t think anything about Lamont. When I met him, I was living with two of my girlfriends in a bungalow behind the library in Edmond—Garlyn and Joy. This was after Rico and me broke up. My mom wasn’t talking to me for a lot of reasons I’ll get into later.

  Garlyn and Joy made a place for me. We were all drinking and going through a lot of jobs. But the place was clean, that was one thing we were careful about. Most of our furniture was plants because Joy had a talent for it. We’d all get up around noon and zombie around the house, cleaning up in slow motion. Ga
rlyn had a crate of old blues records and we’d get stoned and eat cereal on the couch and listen to Lightnin’ Hopkins and Sonny and Brownie.

  It’s funny, half the songs were these guys in prison for murder. They’d be hooting and hollering stuff like I done killed my woman / don’t you know she done me wrong. They weren’t sorry exactly, more like they’d learned something from it, like they wouldn’t make the same mistake again. We’d make up our own verses. I done paid that electric bill / I done paid it yesterday. Joy would sing into a beer bottle like it was a microphone and do Janis Joplin or put on a pair of shades for John Belushi. She could do all these dead people. We respected people like that, who’d killed themselves having a big time. We were like them except we weren’t famous yet, or dead.

  That was the best part of the day then, before we had to get ready for work. We’d sit there drinking and singing until someone said, “It’s that time.” That might be a good place for some wind—when we leave the house in our uniforms. We all had to wear one. Joy worked the drive-in window at Taco Mayo; Garlyn had just moved to Crockett’s Smoke House. I’d been at the Conoco only a month or so, and I knew that wasn’t going to last because I’d already started stealing.

  I’d steal cartons of Marlboros and sixes of 3.2 beer. In the beginning it was mostly for myself. Later when I knew I was going to quit, I’d fill up a trash bag and toss it in the dumpster for Lamont to pick up. Another thing I took was gum. We always had lots of gum—Bubble Yum, Bubblicious, Wrigley’s, Care Free. I’d bring it home in my purse. It was good because I felt like I was doing my part for the house. We all needed it, especially on the job.

  That’s how Lamont got to know me; he’d take me home after my shift. The first time he offered I knew he was going to because he’d cruised through the lot twice. He came in around ten to eleven and parked by the air pump. By then I’d finished my bottle and I was feeling all right. At home I had another pint in the freezer, hidden in a box of frozen peas. It was a good time of the night.