Junior Mint

For three years I’ve been driving my taxi and I do a damn fine job. My cab’s clean. Tuned up. I don’t mix in other people’s business. Just tell me where you’re going and I’ll get you there. If I wanted to, though, I could show off my instincts. I can tell a devil from an angel. I can tell a cheater from a queer and I can tell whether their wives know.

When opera man and his pudgy wife got out of my taxi without even a nod in my direction, tossing bills at me like I didn’t have eyes to look into, I couldn’t help myself but back into their kneecaps with my fender. I couldn’t help but do it again when I heard her scream, “My legs!”

I’d say it happened faster than I could stop myself but that wouldn’t be the truth. I knew what I was doing and I enjoyed it. It felt right. I liked hearing her scream, feeling people banging on the car like they could stop me.

There was a torn dress and some broken bones. I didn’t kill them. I was entitled to roll some Bull Durham after the fact. I can smoke and explain myself at the same time. Damned if that police officer didn’t whip the cigarette out of my hands, though, and cuff me before I had a moment to speak up.

Even an honest man gets pushed too far and it ain’t his fault or the fault of his mother. There’s always someone doing the pushing – they’re the ones to blame. I never should’ve looked around at the crowd when the cops pushed me into the black and white. Ladies holding their fat hands up to their mouths, Marshall Fields bags hitting their chests. Mothers shielding their kids’ eyes so they wouldn’t see my face. I wish I hadn’t looked because it makes me wonder if I am what everyone thinks I am.

I want to die where nobody can see me. In the woods with a bullet in my brain. Wouldn’t that be o-kay? Wouldn’t that be the goddamn truth? Ned “Junior Mint” Diamond, he’s a drop-kicked baby, an imbecile. Everybody laughs when they see me but nobody shakes my hand because they might catch a whiff of me and wouldn’t they regret that? Wouldn’t they regret to touch the palm of such an idiot like me?

Sweet Ada Fisher

The nineteenth of May was kind to Kansas, weather-wise. Sweet Ada Fisher went out walking, digging the heels of her boots into the moist earth, wandering but not alone, never alone, always accompanied by ghosts. Ada knew ghosts and she took orders from them. Glancing right, she’d smile, tuck her ear toward the open air atop her shoulder and listen to the unnamed, the unseen, until she had a reason to move or a reason to speak. Till then she was still as a post and just as quiet.

That same day turned unkind to Ada, who had never been a mother, despite always wanting to be. Upon seeing a baby alone on a clapboard porch while out walking, she was ordered by her ghosts to seize it for her own. Ada wrapped the baby in a blanket and held it in her arms. She believed with all her might that it was her very own womb that carried this baby into being.

Only hours after she had brought the baby home and fed it cow’s milk; after she had tied a ribbon around its big toe for the baby to reach down and play with; and after Ada had rocked the baby to sleep, the Treece, Kansas police, Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts came knocking on her door, searching for the missing baby.

Ada had nothing to hide. She opened the door for them with the baby straightaway in her arms. They asked her if this was her baby and she said yes. They asked her for the name of the baby and she said Eleanor. They asked if the father of the baby was at home. There is no father, she said. Gone and left, they asked. Never was here, she said. 

I won’t go calmly, I heard her say as the police took the baby away from her. She screamed, and the police put a potion onto a rag for her to sniff in order to get her into the buggy.

The legal punishment for Ada was lenient, but it’s true that whatever darkness had taken her over before she met the baby has only gripped a stronger hold on her since that day. She no longer walks the path by her house. She picks grasshoppers from her yard and saves them in postal envelopes. She doesn’t look in the direction of neighboring children. She keeps her head toward the ground most of the time. But even if she is a grown woman with an infantile mind, the neighbors call her Sweet Ada Fisher because she is first and foremost a kindhearted soul, meaning no harm. She only wants a baby of her own, and that kind of want can produce darkness in a woman.

Evelyn Leigh

Don’t let anybody thieve your memories, Billy used to say to me, back when I thought he was speaking from out of the blue. As if some robber could reach into my brain and steal away my Christmases or my wedding day or all the things that make me Evelyn Leigh and not somebody different. But when the law caught up with Billy, and the police told me his name’s not Billy at all, it’s Walter Leach, and Walter Leach is a wanted criminal, a prison escapee, I realized that what Billy was trying to do was protect twenty-one years of our memories together in case I ever found out the truth.

I hid Billy from the law for all those years without even knowing it. Waitressing at Ramsey’s while he washed dishes in the back. Even when I begged him to work the grill so we could afford a few more things at home, he refused, saying he didn’t like being out front, too many people casting eyeballs. Too many police coming in - that’s what he meant, but it’s not what he said.

Now the police are trying to hide Billy from me, taking him into their custody and revoking our visitation rights. Three times they’ve sat me down in a dirty room with packs of cigarettes, blowing smoke into my face, asking me questions about my life with Billy. They tell me that my marriage wasn’t a marriage at all, that I wasn’t a wife but an accomplice in harboring a fugitive. I want to tell them that I would have married Billy anyway, even if I’d known he’d escaped from prison. I’ve never cared for the law, not even in my kindest moments. Instead, I tell them very little. I won’t let them get at the memories of my own marriage. 

Were Billy and I married on September 7, 1946 at the Lexington County Courthouse? 

Yes.

Did Billy ask for your sister, Martha Kenney, to be the witness at your marriage ceremony?

Yes.

Had you ever seen identification for Billy prior to the day you were married?

Most certainly not. And I pity your own wives. They must be tired of being married to men who always follows the rules. 

 These police can cut me open. They can look into my heart, rip out the memories from my mind, and still I won’t give them the answers they want to hear. They threaten me with the death penalty, tell me they’re considering putting Billy to death. I wonder if someone deserves to die just for slipping through their grasp for all those years, for making them look foolish. I wonder if Billy knows what they have planned.

He’s in Virginia now. That’s where he was born, and from where he escaped. I wear his red handkerchief underneath my dress, tucked into my brassiere. I keep his photo in my pocketbook and glance at it when the police leave me all alone. I look at Billy’s face, his features, and I think of them not as betraying the truth, but as truth itself. He is the man I’ve made my life with, who took me every Sunday to the movies. No one - no police - will convince me he is a criminal.