Starkweather and Fugate – Liv Archer

January 24, 2025

The landscape is anemic and bored. The car smells like gasoline and cigarettes and not in the way that every car smells like gasoline and cigarettes. It smells like ten thousand people have driven this car before them. Even their fights are a reenactment of the way that people fight when they’re in love.

“We are theorizing,” Caril Ann Fugate thinks. “We are good and decent. All that matters is us, and our plan.”

Caril Ann Fugate tells Charles Starkweather that she feels hungry, and it is weird that she still feels hungry after all of this, but she is hungry anyways. He pulls over so they can stop and eat at a diner. He tells her to order something good, for the baby. They will pay for the meal using the cash they found in the man’s wallet.

After they eat, Charles Starkweather tells Caril Ann Fugate that he loves her. Caril Ann Fugate says it back, but there is reticence. She drinks more orange juice. She ties her hair up loosely and most of it falls back down onto her back and shoulders. She drinks some more orange juice. She looks out the window at the cars and the people and feels nothing. She wonders if Charles Starkweather also feels nothing, or if his way of feeling nothing is superior to hers. Maybe he is better at it. Maybe because he is older, so he’s had more practice.

While Caril Ann Fugate is in the shower, Charles Starkweather writes a note for the cops/paramedics to find after they have been discovered. It makes him feel better to write this note. It makes him feel cold and scared and then once he has finished his wrist aches and he is able to focus on that instead of the cold and scared feeling. His handwriting is poor. This makes Charles Starkweather feel embarrassed. He knows he has misspelled a few of the words but he wonders if this will make the court go easier on him. He wonders if he should have asked Caril Ann Fugate to write the note instead of him. He once saw her handwriting, on a note she had written to her mother and tacked on her bedroom wall. She wrote neatly and in cursive. He wonders if that would have made the court respect them more if the handwriting was done neatly and in cursive. He wonders if it matters. He decides it probably doesn’t. He thinks of wondering something else but Caril Ann Fugate comes out of the shower with her hair in a towel and smelling like hotel shampoo and roses.

Caril Ann Fugate is experiencing chest pains while they lie in bed together. When Charles Starkweather gets up to use the bathroom, the chest pains taper off, and then completely go away. Caril Anne Fugate assumes this must mean something, but she doesn’t care enough to investigate further. Caril Anne Fugate has chest pains when she is around Charles Starkweather, and she feels bored and cold when she is alone. She knows enough about life to know that boredom and coldness kills more things than chest pains. She is fourteen years old and sometimes she thinks she knows everything there is to possibly know. She wonders where she got this from. She wonders if her mother was a smart woman. She thinks about the way her mother cried before Charles Starkweather shot her. “No,” thinks Caril Ann Fugate. “She was probably really dumb.”

When the cops come, Caril Ann Fugate and Charles Starkweather do not look at each other. They do not look at the cops. They stare straight ahead, because that is the direction their eyes are most used to looking at from spending so much time on the road. That is the position that makes their necks feel the most comfortable. That is how they are used to reading each other’s minds.