Martin Krafft

Perfect Kids

You ever had the experience of being attracted to someone who wants you dead?  I ain’t talking about no come home late after a binge, and your wifey all mad at cha.  I mean this person wants you strapped to a gurney getting a needle full of death.  ‘Cause one of the jury, she a fine piece of ass.  I try to give her a sad look every once in a while but when I do those fine big lips get real thin, so I only look when she not looking.  Can’t even see her ass because they take me away ‘fore she ever stands up, but I can tell she got some curve to her.

“Darryl Williams is a monster,” Prosecutor Man says all big and tough.  It ain’t fair that he gets to look all sharp in his suit, and here’s me stuck in orange and chains.  And what do you know the juror’s nodding her head along?

How the hell I’m thinking about jury ass when I’m about to get sentenced, that’s beyond me.  But after the whole bunch of remorse and no hope, my mind, you know, I just start to wander.  As if it done take as much as it can take so it gotta take something different.

 Now I ain’t gonna deny I done a terrible thing.  If you told me about someone else who had done the thing that I did, I’d say, sure, go ahead and fry that son of a bitch.  I could make excuses about how my mama treated me.  You might just think I was trying to wiggle out of what I did.  But hell, tell me you would go along with it - being strapped down, saying your last words to the man about to stick a needle of God-knows-what in your arm.  Even if you did a real bad thing, you sure as shit wouldn’t go along with that.

The jury’s sitting there staring at me.  I know that look in their eye.  It’s the look that they already done made up their mind but trying to show like they ain’t.  And I can’t do nothing about it except sit here and give them the sad look.  I can’t tell them about how I stepped up to be a daddy for Janice’s three little girls all different daddies none of them me, or how Janice done teach me to cook a dish or two and I even cooked dinner for all of them sometimes.  They’d think I’m just trying to wiggle my way out.  I been trying to wiggle my way out of trouble ever since my mama held a shotgun to my head and said, “Tell me you love me.”  I been wiggling so long, I can’t even tell the difference anymore when I doing it or not.

It’s kinda funny how Prosecutor Man got this little mark of white hair on his mostly brown-haired head.  Like he’s trying real hard to be perfect, but it just don’t come out right.  Something ridiculous about a man arguing and going on about the need to kill another man who’s all chained up as if I’m a threat to anyone but myself.  Now he asking the guard to explain how I threw piss at her, and that don’t look good for me either.  Prosecutor Man trying to kill me so he can shoot big, maybe even Georgia attorney general but I hope he know better than to think he gonna make it any higher than that.  If I had to kill anybody I should have killed that son of a bitch but I didn’t see Prosecturo Man walking through the woods when I was high out of my mind.

Now I’m getting away from telling you what I did that got me here, but you’re going to have to bear with me a little longer.  I’ll tell you what I did but first I gotta tell you who I am and who I been.  I gotta tell you about fishing.  My pops, he used to take me out fishing every couple weeks.  We’d drive over to the Chattahoochee, a brown, brown river.  We sat on the bank not catching anything and he would stare into the water as bits of trash floated by.  I would ask him what he was thinking about and most of the time he would say nothing.  Even then I didn’t believe him but I was happy enough for it to be just the two of us that I didn’t ever make no more bother other than asking that question.  The one time I asked it, though, he said, “Your mama, she one crazy bitch.”  That was before things got really bad but they were already moving in that direction.  What made it all worse was that sometimes Mama would act like she really did love us.  Like she’d bring home Chick-Fil-A and say we were all real good kids.  Then that same night she’d get high and start acting crazy again. 

My pops he was a real silent type and some times, most of the time, it seemed like he was trapped inside his head, maybe not even trying to get out.  When we went fishing he bought me a bag of Cheetos and that’s why to this day they’re my favorite food.  If anyone comes to visit me here, not that anyone’s come to visit for the past six years, I’m going to ask, shit, I’ll beg for them to get me a bag of Cheetos from the vending machine.  That’s right, this trial happening six years after the incident, and that’s something I worked real hard for.  ‘Cause I know they just itching to stick that needle in my arm, so I say, hold up, I’m gonna hurt myself ‘fore I let you hurt me.  That’s why I knocked into the boiling cooking oil and got myself all scorched up.  One thing after another, me just fighting all the few ways I can.

What I still don’t understand is why my daddy put up with all that stuff from my moms and didn’t never do nothing about it.  I mean come on she put a knife in my hand and a hammer in the other and dragged me to where he was watching tv and said, “Go on, hammer that knife right through his head.”  My father just sat there watching the football even with the knife poised right above his head.  Maybe he knew I wasn’t going to do it but why didn’t he stop it?

At least my brother Jermaine tried to stop the crazyness.  He told the social worker at school and she said don’t worry you can trust me with anything.  So Jermaine told her that there were roaches on our floor.  Not just a few roaches but damn near a whole civilization, that mama wasn’t doing nothing about.  Well, they sent a fire man to check it out and he even said out loud this is disgusting.  We thought for sure he would take us with him, but no, he just wrote up a report and left.  Mama got so mad we thought she was going to kill one of us but at least she didn’t know who told.

Next day the damn social worker called Mama.  Mama asked who told.  We were all listening as hard as we could in the family room.  “Jermaine, huh?” Mama said real loud, turning to look at Jermaine and the rest of us so scared for him we about to piss our pants, let alone what he must have been feeling.  But Jermaine, he knew when enough was enough.  He stood up and walked to his room while Mama was still on the phone. 

Mama knew how to get out of trouble.  She talked and talked to the social worker about how work had been really hard and she was trying to keep everything together but first one thing slipped then another, but now this was the wake-up call she needed, she’d get everything straightened out.  Maybe it was just ‘cause I’d heard Mama telling those same lies before, but I wondered how the hell somebody’s gonna be a social worker and get fooled so easy.

We’re sitting in the living room waiting for Mama to get off the phone.  Even Jerald, who’s always goofing around, he ain’t moving a muscle.  Then we hear the door slam.  Footsteps on the concrete, then running down the road.  I can’t see him, but I know who it is.  It’s Jermaine saying enough of this shit.  Why he didn’t bring me with him, that’s another thing I still wonder about, but that was the last time I saw him for what twenty years.  I thought Jermaine done got away free to a good life so you can imagine my shock when my lawyer told me he’s going to testify on my case - from prison.  While he was waiting to testify they kept him in the same jail as me.  I saw him at mess and he laughed and rustled my head like he used to.

“Shit,” he said.  “I thought I messed up big.”

“I thought you got away,” I told him.

“You can’t never get away.”

And I was in no position to argue with him.  Turns out Jermaine’s serving a life sentence, which is the best I can hope for.

Now Jermaine sits back in the chair waiting for Prosecutor Man to come at him.  Prosecutor talks about all the bad things Jermaine did, and even to me they sound pretty bad, but Jermaine just sits there all calm and collected, like some ninja master waiting to strike back.  “All due respect,” Jermaine says, eyes making clear he don’t mean not a drop of respect, “ain’t my brother had enough hurt done to him?”

And he go on to tell how Mama stripped us naked and whipped our junks with electric cord.  How she get high and bring old Bertha out.  That’s right, she even got a name for her shotgun.  But the jury just looking at Jermaine like he’s about to jump out at them.

Excuse me if I still ain’t ready to tell you what I did, ‘cause I know you just waiting to jump on me like that jury already done jump on me and Jermaine too, even though that man surely can speak.  Let me tell you about the rest of my family.  Jamie, you could say she the only one who turned out any kind of normal.  And that might have to do with Mama less interested in bothering her than the rest of us.  She started dating older dude in high school and within about two months of that she done move in with him.  And they still married to this day with a cute little kid who Jamie told me she didn’t want me to have nothing to do with after I showed up to their house a little high.

Jerald, he messed up like the rest of us but instead of getting caught up in violence, he just use one woman after another then leave her.  Somehow he got a woman who always willing to take him back.  Shit, if I had that I wouldn’t be here in the first place.

I hadn’t seen none of them in the past nine years, and now it’s like a family reunion at the court house, ‘cept for Mama.  She ain’t coming, ‘cause when the social worker called her for an interview, she done threaten to kill the social worker.  Dear Mama.  Jerald, he don’t even look at me, and Jamika, she just look at me real sad.  I wish Jamika coulda seen me sometime ‘fore I got arrested because that was once I met Janice and let me tell you she helped me get my head on straight.  That woman loved me and I loved her.  I loved her three little daughters.  At least I thought I loved them all but then when I slept with Tabitha’s preschool teacher, I wonder how much my love really worth.  That the worst feeling, when you gotta doubt how good your love is, ‘cause you know it might be no good.

I imagine them sticking the needle in.  Last I heard, state of Georgia got caught buying their killing drugs from a pharmacy with no license, run out of back of a London driving school.  If that weren’t bad enough, they went and sold they extra drugs to other states so they could join the killing party. 

I’ve heard a lot of sons of bitches shit themselves when they get canned.  Good.  I’ll be sure to eat as much as I can and leave a big old shit for them to have to clean up if they’re going to strap a body down and pretend like we any kind of civilized society.

“That’s it for today,” the judge says, and they take me back to jail.  Jermaine’s hauled off back to a state prison somewhere out in the country.

There’s Janice up on the stand.  That woman always knew how to dress.  First I too ashamed to even meet her eyes.  Too scared that she gonna look at me with no more love.  Then again, she the bitch that turned me in.  And she ain’t even gonna let her daughters testify for me.  After all I done for them.  Janice done forgot about how I took care of Tamira?  How when I found out one of her daddy’s friends done took advantage of her - and her only five years old - it was me, not nobody else, who told her it was ok to come out and say it.  Love and hate walk a fine line, and seeing Janice up there, it’s like I’m jumping back and forth across that line.  But for her, she ain’t nowhere near the line.  We make a little bit of eye contact, and I can tell, what we had we ain’t got no more.

I heard about some prisoners who get themselves a lady friend even in prison from writing letters or something.  For a while I did one better, I had me a online dating profile.  They shut that down real quick.  Damn newspapers should have better stuff to report on than somebody trying to date.  But all that was before I had to look at the mamas of Dell and Sierra and see the hurt and the hatred on they faces when they looked at me.  That’s why I just went ahead and plead guilty.  I knew there wasn’t no getting out of it and I thought that would spare them some of the pain of having to relive the terrible things that I did, but turns out even after you guilty they have a whole ‘nother trial to figure out if they gonna kill you or not.  My defense lawyer told me that they don’t have as many death penalty cases as they used to ‘cause it costs so damn much to go to trial.  Most of the time, you can take a plea deal and they take death penalty off the table.  But the victim’s still gotta feel like you get something pretty bad so they go through the whole show of running a trial to see if it’s life with or without parole.  “Isn’t that nice?” I said.  Defense Man, he just cough.

I don’t know much about law but I know that when I saw that Prosecutor Man stand up and start calling me a monster, I know that man got something to gain by seeing them stick a needle in my arm.  He calls up a woman to show the jury photos of Sierra and Dell and tells how much force I would have had to use to drive the screwdriver through their necks.  She says the semen in Sierra’s body was an exact match with mine.  The lawyer paints a picture of Sierra and Dell as two perfect kids.  Cousins who had just gone to the store for snacks to watch a movie.  Hard to get more wholesome than that.  Hearing all that stuff makes me wonder if maybe I should be put to death.  Prosecutor Man plays the tapes of the 911 call from Dell’s mother after she first saw the bodies.  She doesn’t know they’re dead yet, but she sees naked bodies and in her heart must know that something terrible has happened.

“Oh, God.  Oh, God.  Oh, God.”

I’d been kicked out by Janice and living on the street for a week.  Dealer spotted me some coke ‘cause back in the day I used to always be good for it.  High made my problems not worth a damn, but then high gone.  I was in the woods wandering around wondering what the hell to do with myself when I hear laughter coming down the trail.  Just kids.  It’s gonna be easy enough to do a little hold up and send them on their way.  They gave me their money sure enough then tried to run away.  That was when everything went wrong.  I lunged for the boy and tackled him to the ground.  He was strong, but I was stronger.  He was gonna recognize me and tell the police and then it’d be back to jail and there weren’t no way in hell I’d ever get back with Janice.  Next thing I knew, the screwdriver that I found rooting for food in the dumpster was in his neck.  And at that point there was no going back.  He was bleeding out.  Kindest thing to do was finish him off, but that weren’t as easy as I thought it’d be either.  His cousin was standing there screaming.  Big woods but I bet someone was going to hear her.  I threw my hand over her mouth.

The jury comes back in.  I don’t know who I hate more, myself or the prosecutor.  At this point I know they already decided.  Ain’t got nothing to lose, so I wink at the juror as I’m brought back in and seated.

Thinking about violence, and I know this is true from the look of hatred on Del and Sierra mamas’ faces, is that violence like a stream.  It flows and flows from one person to the next, ’til we all splashing around in the bloody waters.  It flow from my mama to me and Jermaine and Jerald and it flow from me to drown Dell and Sierra and keep on flowing over their mamas, their whole family who stand up and cheer when the jury announce I’m getting death penalty, and it’s gonna keep on flowing to the people who lock me up and the man who sticks the needle in my arm.  How you even gonna call it a penalty?  Penalty sound like it just a time out, but there ain’t no coming back from that time out.  Violence just keep on flowing until somebody stand up and put a stop to it.  Put a dam up and say, “No more violence.  Enough is enough.”  But me, I didn’t do that.  I too worried about how no one love me enough.  I want to put a dam up but it’s too late.  Flood done already swept over me.  I knew what the jury gonna say ‘fore the words come out of their mouth.

Don’t bother me no more.  All I’m doing is thinking about that juror, wanting to bend her over, pull her pants down, and lick all up in her tight, little asshole.

Martin Krafft is currently a graduate student in photography, video, and imaging at the University of Arizona. He received his undergraduate degree in Creative Writing and Economics at Emory University. He hails from the sweet-tea-drinking part of rural Southern Maryland. His jobs have been many and mostly financially unrewarding: ranch hand, volunteer firefighter, handy man, community organizer, preschool teacher, and video editor for an artist with dementia. His art and writing practice revolves around people’s search for meaning.