Deadly Kiss

by Bob Bickford

  “Car. Someone broke her car window. My dad covered it, and she couldn’t see out of it very well. It caused an accident. They thought it might have been a kid in her class, but they never proved it. Didn’t really matter anyway.”

  She had died before I graduated from high school. She came out to her small blue Volkswagen one morning to find the passenger window shattered. A rock lay on the front seat. My father taped a sheet of translucent plastic over the window opening, and she left for work. She crossed a highway on her route. That morning she pulled into the path of a semi-truck, which hit her before the driver could even touch the brakes. Pieces of her car were scraped into the asphalt for almost a quarter of a mile.

  The police confirmed the truck had been behind schedule and speeding. She had miscalculated the distance before she pulled out, likely due to her hazy view of things through the makeshift window. They said my father should never have improvised that way. For a long time, I sifted the events that led up to her accident and speculated on who had actually killed her. In the end, I decided that a lot of people had.”

  “She was a teacher too?” Molly asked.

  “Yeah, same school as my dad. We all acted like we didn’t know each other. She could have ridden with him that morning, but they never went together. She was only in her late thirties, maybe early forties.”

  “God--that must have been awful for him. For you both.”

  “I think he blamed himself,” I said. “I know I blamed him. What a stupid thing to do, taping the window that way. I think that’s when he started drinking more. He hardly noticed when I left home.”

  “There must be some good things that you remember,” she said. “There’s always some good.”

  “You always think there must be some good, Molly.” I smiled. “I guess he was a good teacher. They said he was, a lot of people seemed to think so. He cared about the world, and politics, and poor people. He loved animals more than people. He was always good with them.”

  “Like you?” she asked, eyebrows raised.

  “Maybe.” I thought for a minute. “He loved baseball. The Red Sox. I believe he always secretly dreamed that he could have played in Boston. He loved Angela, from the day he met her, even though he wasn’t at our wedding. Mostly, though--”

  Suddenly I was breathing shallowly, and my eyes stung. “He loved our daughter, I guess. I’ll give him that much.”

  Molly slid over closer to me and put an arm around my waist. “It’s good you’ll get a chance to see him.”

  I shook my head and slowly let my breath out. I dreaded the whole thing. She put her hand on the back of my neck.

  “I’ll be here. Call me if you need to. I’ll make you guys dinner when he’s here.”

  I walked her to her boat. When she had roared away across the water toward her own shore, I stood and looked at the cottages dotted here and there in the forest on the other side. They would soon begin to fill up and the area would get on with the summer season.

  Even in the brightest summer sunlight there was a curious dimness about Hollow Lake. She was dark, and she was haunted. She exhibited none of the party mood that was evident in many of the vacation communities in the lakes around her. There was something muted about her celebrations and her tragedies, something that suggested the present was seen through the frosted glass of the past. She accepted few visitors, and there had been no new construction on her shores in decades.

  On summer evenings, fathers of years past stood among the pine trees with the fathers of today as meat was turned over hot coals. Clusters of women on verandas sat and sipped drinks in warm twilight. Some of them were not easily visible and did not join conversations. Children, splashing in the shallow water alongside docks, were sometimes joined by playmates; small children from long ago who had left, grown up, gotten old, and then at last returned to play again. Mothers who had gathered broods in for the night leaned in lighted doorways, looked into the deep gloom under the trees around them, and wondered what it was that they sensed. They felt as though there was something they had forgotten, something just out of reach.

  The elderly were troubled by memories as they looked into her waters. Old loves and forgotten sins returned to them with a vividness that stole their breath. They were briefly gifted with the knowledge that we were all born with and learned to deny. As we looked forward, we also looked back.

  CHAPTER 5

  Eli Tull

  Milton County, Georgia, Wednesday, July 3, 1946

  It was too hot in the shed, and the smell of human sweat was overpowering. They dragged the boy to a rack that was used to spread and dry something or other and tied his wrists to it. He had squalled and fought the entire way from his house to this place in the back of the car, and Willard Davis was glad to be quit of him. His arms ached from restraining him.

  The building was long and low. It had been shut and disused for years, and, even this late at night, it retained the day’s heat. They had brought one oil lamp with them. It illuminated them, but outside of its yellow circle there was nothing but shadows. The far end of the building was completely black. The darkness at that end felt occupied, as though things were hidden, watching what transpired and whispering about it.

  Sutton showed the gun straightaway, holding it near the youngster’s nose and cuffing his chin with it. “You look at this, boy,” he said. “You look at what I have for you, if you don’t listen, and listen good.”

  He set the pistol down at his feet and slapped the child hard, forehand and backhand. The sound of flesh on flesh was horrible in the narrow space. The boy continued to wail and struggle against his bonds.

  The girl had been pushed into a corner when they entered, and she looked from the gloom into the lamplight, chewing on a knuckle.

  Davis stepped in and grabbed the boy by his throat. “You--stop--your--squalling,” he shouted. “Hush up!” With his other hand, he turned the small head toward the corner. “Do you see that girl? Do you want to know what we’re willing to do to any nigger who lays a finger on her? Apologize to her right now! Beg her for us to leave you be!”

  “I’ve never seen her before! I don’t know who she is!” Eli screamed.

  Elijah Tull was ten years old. He was, at the heart of it, not a symbol. He was neither black nor white. He had not shed the innocence of childhood. He had never hated anything or anyone. Every morning was still a miracle to him. He wasn’t very big for his age. He liked almost any kind of pork and didn’t get it often enough. He had a cigar box with no lid on it under his bed. It had a red feather, four or five cicada shells, and the scratched lens from a magnifying glass. He thought that it came from a telescope and made up stories about its origin that he never told to anyone. He loved his mother and his father and his dog. He idolized his older brother Roy. Although he quarreled with him, he secretly wanted to be just like him.

  He had endured rough handling from these men, but the slaps were different. They evoked parental discipline. His mother slapped him when she was angry. For the first time in his ordeal, he felt like a child in the hands of adults.

  Like any ten year-old boy, he cried. His angry shrieks dissolved into tears, and that was his undoing. That was the end of him.

  “I never saw her before!”

  “Take that back!” Sutton screamed. “Take it back, you little bastard! Liar.”

  Eli stared up at him, his small chest heaving, his voice all gone. Tears streamed down his face. His nose ran, mixed with blood from his mouth. His silence broke the last of Sutton’s reserve, and he fell on the boy. The sound of his heavy fists on the little body sounded like meat being hit with a mallet.

  When Davis pulled his brother-in-law off two minutes later, Elijah was semi-conscious. His body was beyond repair. His jaw was shattered and turned at an impossible angle. One eyeball rested on his cheek. His left arm and four ribs were broken. Inside his skull, his brain was already beginning to swell.

  Davis was furious. “What’s wrong with you?” he hissed at S
utton. “We can’t never go back from this now.”

  He pulled a knife from his pocket and cut the ropes that held the child up against the drying rack. The boy collapsed onto the dirt floor of the shed. His right lung had been punctured by a rib, and his breathing bubbled, hitched, and sounded as if it would stop.

  “There ain’t but one thing I can do for this nigger now,” Davis said. He picked up the pistol from the floor.

  Elijah Tull lay there and looked up with his remaining eye. He thought he was in his own bed at home. It had been a good day, and tomorrow would be better. He was going fishing with Roy. The yellow dog jumped up and settled himself on the end of the bed, and Eli could feel its bulk with his feet. His father came into the room and stood over him. His hand was warm on the little boy’s forehead.

  Eli’s ruined mouth could not form words, nevertheless he heard his own voice. “Night, daddy. Love you.”

  His father bent to kiss him.

  Willard Davis pulled the trigger and Elijah Tull was gone.

  ***

  Present Day:

  I got to the restaurant in Huntsville early. Angela had no patience with people who were late. I backed my old jeep into a space near the entrance, sat, and looked at the rain running down my windshield. When I was tired of that, I watched the line of cars inch through the drive-through.

  Right on time, her white BMW turned into the entrance. She glanced over at me as she passed, but didn’t wave. I got a glimpse of my father sitting beside her, staring straight ahead. She pulled up to the building and let him out at the door then pulled ahead to park. I got out and walked across the puddled pavement to meet her. She stood and waited for me, impervious to the wet.

  Up close, she smelled expensive, even in the rain. Same Angela.

  “How was the drive?” I asked.

  “Fine,” she said, impatient. “He’s inside.”

  “Are you coming in? At least for a minute?”

  “Why? Are you scared of him?”

  “Scared?”

  I looked through the window and saw that he had found a booth. He sat, hunched and smaller than I remembered, staring into a cup of coffee. I was nervous. I felt as though I faced some sort of cosmic punishment. A vague feeling of guilt, the weight of unknown sins, pressed on me.

  I turned to go in, and Angela caught my arm. “There’s something you have to understand, Mike. He isn’t going back to Atlanta. He isn’t going back home.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’ve had him at my house for three days,” she said, “and I’m telling you there’s something wrong with him. He isn’t himself. I got him in to see my doctor, and you know what she told me?”

  I was shocked to see her tearing up.

  “Trauma. She suspects he’s had some kind of trauma. I thought he was showing Alzheimer’s. She said it’s one of the tragedies of old age that people are always suspected of and ignored. She thinks something bad has happened to him. Something recent.”

  “What kind of bad thing?” I asked. “He must have said something to you, for God’s sake.”

  “He’s terrified of something. He’s a closed book, just like you, but something’s wrong. Even taking him to the doctor--he normally fights me on that, and he didn’t. He was practically meek.”

  I looked in at him again. He sat, staring at a cup of coffee on the table. It seemed nearly impossible that he had gotten so old. It was unthinkable that in spite all of his stubbornness, he was being brought down. I thought of my mother and about her relatively young exit almost thirty years before. I wondered if this elderly man had missed her for all of these years.

  “I’m kind of surprised he even bought himself a coffee,” Angela said. “He doesn’t do much on his own. Listen. Visit with him a few days, and then I’ll pick him up, and we’ll decide what’s best. He isn’t going home, though. I’m definite on that.”

  “He’s my father, Angela.”

  She flushed, and the hurt was instant in her eyes. She was so cool, so impervious, that I was always shocked when something I said actually mattered to her. She had been a better daughter to my father than I had been a son, and I hated myself for the remark. I held the door for her and followed her in. We went to the booth. My dad glanced at me and then looked to Angela.

  “They gave me a black coffee,” he complained. “It isn’t what I asked for.”

  “You have to put your own cream and sugar in, Sam,” she said. “It’s on the counter.”

  “Want me to fix it for you, Dad?” I interjected.

  He didn’t immediately acknowledge me, but I looked into his eyes, and, after a very long moment, he nodded once. I looked over at Angela. Her lips compressed, she shook her head. I fixed his coffee for him. For some odd reason, I thought again about my mother.

  My parents met in Berlin. After a stint in the army, my father had a lifelong aversion to all things military and later said the posting that led him to my mother was the only good thing that had come of his enlisted time. Daughter of a wealthy southern family, she had lingered in Europe after her expected post-university cultural tour and stayed on a work visa to take over the ownership of a small cafe-bistro in the slowly rebuilding city. Her parents were aghast, and even more upset, when she married my father, whom they considered socially far beneath her. As a consequence, she had drifted permanently away from them.

  Ironically, the loss of financial support from home had doomed her business, and the couple returned to the States. They armed themselves with teaching degrees and settled outside Atlanta. They eventually took teaching positions in the same high school. They embraced the liberal activism of the 1960s with a sense of destiny and fervor. The recession of that tide had left them stranded, vaguely betrayed, and without purpose. I supposed both of them lived in the hope that a new decade would bring another movement, another anchor for their lives.

  From my earliest memory, my existence seemed to befuddle them, and they appeared perpetually surprised to return from classroom skirmishes to find a single soldier from the enemy forces living in their home. They were never unkind to me, but their drinking in the evenings occasionally caused minor issues with me to explode into furious rants and extravagant threats of punishments that never happened.

  Between themselves, they fought almost constantly, without passion, usually with wine. I moved as a child phantom through the dry smoke of their exchanges.

  My father was angry, literate, and aware of all the small nuances of the international stage. He was incensed by events in China and Granada and Cuba, scornful of those who missed all of the complexities, but was baffled by what went on in his own home. He bitterly approved of rebellions and uprisings across the world, but had no empathy for his own teenage son.

  He still lived in the same house in Marietta where I had grown up. It would not have surprised me to find that he still walked the rooms, glass in hand, and argued with the shadow of my mother. My move to Canada was perhaps the one event in my life that had caused him to feel paternal pride. He viewed me as a draft dodger who came late to the festivities. To disabuse him of this would have been unkind.

  After my mother’s death, we lived in mostly anxious silence. I remembered him as perpetually exhausted and bewildered, and a sort of general disapproval seemed to be the limit of fatherly interest and affection. When I left his house after my eighteenth birthday, he shook my hand at the front door. I didn’t remember if he asked where I was going.

  CHAPTER 6

  Elijah Tull,

  Cobb County, Georgia, Wednesday, July 10, 1946:

  Dead was dead, and done was done. The Negro boy never came home.

  A body was found six days later in a muddy field. The corpse was a featureless lump, red with Georgia clay. No attempt at concealment had been made. It had simply been put there. It was the awful smell that led to its discovery, and, when the sheriff rinsed the face, it was sent immediately to the colored funeral home.

  The clothes it wore matche
d the missing boy, but definite identification was impossible. A merciless beating had obliterated most of his features before a gunshot to the head caused enough cranial pressure to distort what was left into something only vaguely human. His mother was physically restrained from seeing him. Six days in the hot Georgia sun had actually performed a kindness, as his father allowed himself to believe that it was decomposition that had transformed his son into something that looked like the remains of a small monster.

  He was ten years old, and he would never kiss another girl, white or otherwise. His name was Elijah Tull. The yellow dog that he shared with his brother grieved him and had known the very moment that he died.

  His parents’ hearts broke, and broke was broke.

  Dorothy and Jacob Tull buried their son in the tiny cemetery beside the Negro Baptist church. More than two hundred people attended the funeral, packed onto wooden benches and spilling outside the open doors, stoically ignoring the stench that seeped from the closed wooden box.

  Jacob Tull identified the two men who had taken his son. The storekeeper, Floyd Sutton, and his brother in law, Willard Davis, were arrested. They were brought to trial eleven days later without having spent a single night in jail. The two men admitted to having driven away with Eli, but claimed that after a warning he had been dropped off in his dooryard, unharmed.

  The impossibility of the positive identification of what was left of the boy made the proceedings nothing more than empty ceremony. The gate of reasonable doubt yawned open wide enough that the defense attorney barely needed to stir from his table. The all-white jury did their duty and acquitted without much deliberation, which caused tears to flow on both sides of the courtroom.

  There was little celebration in the community. The atrocity was seen as unfortunate and distasteful, and the storekeeper’s family was marked and shunned to a greater degree than gossip about a children’s kiss would have caused. Most of the white families who had attended the general store quietly shifted their custom to one a little farther away.