Deadly Kiss

by Bob Bickford

  ‘Take your ghosts, and your feelings, your ego, and your fucking...tragedy and bother someone else with them.’

  I didn’t want to see the face in the mirror. I didn’t like it. I turned off the bathroom light. In bed, I lay still and listened to myself breathe.

  CHAPTER 29

  Eli and Roy Tull,

  Milton County, Georgia, Tuesday, July 2, 1946:

  “Roy?”

  “What, Eli?”

  The old wood cabin was dark. The two boys lay up in the loft. Their parents slept below, and they spoke quietly.

  “Are we going fishing tomorrow?”

  “No. I have things to do tomorrow. I can’t be fishing with you.”

  “What kind of things? Can I come?”

  “I can’t be dragging no little kid with me everywhere, Eli. I have grown-up business, you know.”

  “I ain’t a little kid. I’m near as big as you. Mama says we’re two peas in a pod. She cain’t hardly tell us apart anymore is what she says.”

  “Mama always says things like that. You’ll never be as big as me.”

  “Will, too. Bigger, maybe. I might be bigger’n Daddy. You’ll see.”

  There was noise from below, and they heard their father cross to the base of the ladder.

  “Hey, peas-in-a-pod, the both of you,” he whispered loudly from below. “ Go to sleep. Not another word.”

  They heard him return to his bed. The yellow dog stirred from the floor at their feet, and the bed shifted as his weight landed on their legs. Each boy, in turn, had a warm snuffle in his ear and then the bed settled as the animal lay down between them and sighed loudly.

  Their mother’s voice carried from below. “Jacob, that dog is on the bed again. I can hear it. I’ve told them not to let it up on the bed with them. I’m going to put that creature out of this house for good in the morning, I swear.”

  “Hush, Dottie. You say that every night. Leave it be.”

  The two boys giggled silently. They both turned inward and put an arm across the dog between them. The old cabin creaked and groaned and settled and finally slept.

  ***

  Present Day:

  The next afternoon, I got a cold drink from the refrigerator and headed outside to sit on the dock.

  “C’mon, boy,” I said to the dog.

  He looked up at me from his sprawl on the front porch and scrambled up. He walked by me and stood patiently at the door. I sighed and turned back to let him in. I had a couple of window air conditioners running inside against the heat, and I closed the door behind him. I could see the blue glare of the lake between the trees as I walked across the forest clearing in front of the cabin. As soon as I came out of the pines, the temperature hit me hard. The large granite pier that jutted from the island was blistering under my bare feet

  The day was brilliant. I sat and looked out at the water. The trees on the opposite shore wavered and shimmered. The islands to the west hovered above the lake’s surface, like flying saucers uncertain about landing. I took a drink of cold soda, held the bottle up to the light, and wished it was a beer.

  My cell phone vibrated.

  “Are we better than this?” Molly asked.

  Far off, a boat engine revved and I spotted it, red and white, beginning its approach from across the reach. Molly. My heart sped up. “I think we are,” I said.

  “Good.”

  I could hardly hear her over the wail of her boat’s motor when she hung up.

  The heat was forgotten, and I absently set the bottle down beside my chair. For the next couple of minutes, the bow grew larger until finally I could make her face out behind the windshield. When she was near, she cut the engine and drifted expertly to the dock. I caught the rope she flicked at me.

  She pushed her sunglasses back on her head and smiled. “Look what I brought us,” she said.

  It was hard to take my eyes from her face. I glanced at the figure that sat in the other cockpit chair, holding the metal grab handle in front of him.

  “Hello, Doctor,” I said. ‘You keep your promises. Nice to see you.”

  “That’s a fact,” he said. “I do. I can now cross Canada off my list of places I never got to. This is beautiful, Mike. I don’t know how you can ever leave it.”

  Roy wore deck shoes, plaid pants, and a high-billed fishing hat. He didn’t look like he had spent much of his life outside his office. I was glad to see him.

  “When did you get here?” I asked.

  “Last night,” he said. “Miss Molly was kind enough to drive down to Toronto to pick me up.”

  I glanced at her. I hadn’t known a thing about it.

  “Say ‘Toronno,’” I told him. “If you pronounce both the ‘T’s people will know you’re a foreign tourist.”

  Molly burst out laughing, despite herself. “Yes,” she said, “and never mind your southern drawl. It’s pronouncing all your ‘T’s that gives you away.”

  “Someone from Alanna, Georgia isn’t worried about it anyway,” I said, and helped him out of the boat. “How long can you stay?”

  “Just a few days this time,” he said. “I can already tell I’d like to come back, though. See it when it snows.”

  We walked up to the cabin, Roy trailing behind us.

  “He’s staying with you?” I asked quietly.

  “He’s seventy five, Mike. You don’t even have level ground to walk on here.”

  “You have room?”

  “All we need. Joseph was using the spare bedroom, but he’s gone back to the city. I’m by myself.”

  I was careful to keep any expression from my face. I was relieved, ecstatic in fact, but I knew that Joseph would be back, and that Molly would take him in again when it happened. I was still on the outside looking in.

  “I went a little further,” she said. “I invited some people to dinner, a get-acquainted thing for him.”

  “That’s a nice idea,” I said, wondering if I was invited.

  “Of course, you’re invited,” she said, reading my mind. “I’m having it here. Tonight.”

  I laughed. “Am I cooking?”

  “No, you’d have to open too many cans. You’d hurt your wrist. I have food in the boat. I need you to stay out of my way. You aren’t put out, are you? I’m not presuming?”

  “I’m just glad to see you,” I said honestly. “Attach any strings you want to.”

  “Kind of glad to see you too,” she said. “A little bit.”

  Her voice was casual, but there was a tiny distance in her manner that made me wonder if I were outside and had lost the keys to whatever parts of her she had let me have access to.

  We settled on the veranda. Molly and Roy decided to split one of my beers. On my way in to get it for them, I let the dog out. He pushed by me and greeted Molly as if she were his heart’s desire. When I came back out I handed each of them a glass.

  “So how was the trip up?” I asked Roy.

  He stretched his legs out, looking happy. “I enjoyed it,” he said. “It was exciting coming through Canadian Customs. They were a little too nice, though. I would have appreciated more drama, maybe a search of my luggage, to mark the event.”

  “You’ve just never wanted to travel?” Molly said.

  “Oh, I did. I never had the time. Never had the time for a lot of things, I guess.”

  He shook his head and smiled, remembering. “In the early years. I was the only black doctor in town. Taking a holiday would have weighed heavily on me. I would have worried the whole time and spoiled it. As I got older, staying close to my practice was habit.”

  “Well, we’ll try to make this a good holiday for you,” Molly said. “I’m going to get the dinner stuff from the boat.”

  She waved away my offer of help and headed to the dock. I noted that Blue followed, eagerly circling her whole way down. The dog’s laziness disappeared when she was around.

  “How old is this place of yours, Mike?”

  “The cabin was built in 1900 or thereabouts.
A group of doctors from New York used it as a retreat.”

  “Colleagues of mine.”

  “Probably a few years before your time, Roy. They were Spiritualists. I imagine they used the place for a séance or two. Molly’s aunt, Kate Bean, is going to be here tonight. She can tell you more about that part if you’re interested.”

  I filled him in on some of the events that had brought me to the island: the divorce settlement and my own need for isolation.

  “How has all the peace and quiet here worked out for you?”

  Molly raised her eyebrows and smiled on her way by with an armload.

  “It’s not as quiet here as you might think,” I said.

  “Do you still want to talk about your father?” Roy asked. “Are you ready for that?”

  I was uncomfortable. “I think I need to.”

  Someone across the lake was running a chain saw, and it snarled faintly across the water at us.

  “I told you a little, but not about that day. My mother had taken me with her to my auntie’s house to visit. We were there when the police came and took my daddy away.”

  He pronounced it On-tay.

  “I wasn’t allowed out of my parents’ sight in those days, right after my brother--anyway, we didn’t know my father had been taken until we got home and the neighbors told us. We went to the jail every day until he died, but we were never allowed to see him. I only saw him once, being taken from a police car into the courthouse. He was in a crowd of police, and even though I hollered for him, he didn’t see me.”

  “Awful,” I said.

  “It was,” he said heavily. “I still dream about it all these years later. It was the last time I was ever going to see my father. There was a huge crowd outside the courthouse, trying to get a look at him. The state police were there to keep it under control. Six or seven police were all around him and ran him from the car to the door.”

  “Were they worried about lynching?”

  He shook his head and leaned back in the chair, arms crossed. “No. I’ve seen ugly crowds of whites with that evil on their minds, and as a black person, you make yourself scarce. I wasn’t worried that day, and plenty of people knew who I was. There wasn’t a bad feeling toward my daddy for killing that trash. Those people had white skin, but there were parents in that crowd too, lots of them, and they didn’t condone torturing a small child to death, nigger or not.” He took a tiny sip of his beer. “What I dream about is that I was never going to see my daddy again, and I yell for him but no sounds come out. I’m mute. I feel like everything will turn out different if I can just get his attention, but I never do.”

  He turned slightly in his chair to look at me beside him. His eyes searched my face. His voice, normally cultured and without idiom, was lapsing into his childhood’s dialect as he remembered. “Course I forgave Sam. How could I not, after all these years? He was thinking about Eli when he did it. It also wasn’t a good thing that they got away with it and were going to get a pile of money from a magazine to shit on my brother’s death in public. Your father set all that right. I admire the hell out of him, and I know when he got to Heaven, my daddy shook his hand.”

  “He was sitting where you are now, looking at the water when he died,” I said, feeling the sting of sudden tears. “I think he worried about Heaven, at the end.”

  “No need. God knows our hearts better than we do ourselves. Your daddy was no killer.”

  He reached down to stroke the dog. Blue got up and wandered away.

  “It’s a funny thing about that kiss,” Roy said. “My brother didn’t kiss that girl, she kissed him, and that’s what made it so bad. If my brother had kissed her, I think he would of gotten hisself a beating and that would have been the end of it.” He turned in his seat and grasped my forearm. “She kissed him. Her daddy saw it. He saw his daughter kiss a nigger on the lips. Whether he knew it or not when he came and took my brother, he couldn’t let him live. Not when he knew what his daughter was. Elijah was doomed.”

  It was important. I could see it.

  “After that,” he said, “the evil and lies kept piling up. And you know what else? All the parents of all the kids who were there died that day, even if they kept walking around for a while. All the parents had lives that were over.”

  “How so?” I asked. “I see some of it, I think, but--”

  “Listen,” he said. “Wanda’s father was shot dead, along with her uncle, by your daddy. Her mother hung herself that winter. Sam’s parents, your grandparents were the absolute picture of white middle class stability, but your granddaddy ran off and died badly on the West Coast somewhere. The mother dived into a bottle of booze and never got back out, died destitute and crazy on a ward. Eli’s parents, mine too--well, we know my daddy was executed, but my mama was gone to me too. I brought her to live with me when she was old, and that was a good thing, but she had no part of me for many, many years. I reminded her of my dead brother.” He was getting visibly upset. “Every family that was involved lost everything. The kiss just got started with my brother, and it’s still going on. It’s going generation by generation. It’s evil. It’s just evil, and it still goes on.”

  I thought about the calls I was still getting. “It’s going to end now, Roy.”

  He nodded, and his face relaxed.

  I took his glass and went inside. Molly was standing at the counter cutting vegetables, and I stood beside her to rinse it out. She turned her head and carefully kissed me on the mouth. It was brief, and then she returned to what she was doing. Neither of us said anything.

  Her lips were warm, and I could still feel them when I went back outside. The sunlight looked different.

  Later in the afternoon, I took Molly aside. I keyed up my messages and handed her my cell phone. “Listen to this,” I said.

  She pressed the phone to her ear. I could see her body stiffen as she listened. “How do you play it over?” she asked.

  I showed her on the phone, and she played it several more times.

  “Can you find out where this came from?” she asked.

  “The number’s blocked.”

  “Definitely the same voice as on your dad’s answering machine,” she said.

  I agreed.

  “Wanda Sutton is dead, Mike. Who the hell is doing this? Why?”

  ***

  Bill and Diane came for dinner, bringing Molly’s Aunt Kate with them. When they landed, Kate had immediately taken me aside. “Have you seen the boy in the kitchen again?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “All right then.” She dimpled, reminding me of Molly. “I don’t see myself putting anything in your kitchen garbage, just the same.”

  The six of us sat in my kitchen. The door was open, and a warm night breeze brought in soft sounds from the lake. Far away lightning flashed without rain. After dark, the room smelled like mystery--of old wood and apples and dried spices. A metal chandelier hung by a chain from the rafters. Molly had filled it with lit candles, and in their glow, our faces were gold. Summers gone by flickered quietly in the corners.

  The evening went well. Molly cooked in an unstudied, casual way, but her results were reliably wonderful. We passed roast beef, corn, and potatoes around the table, and for a while conversation stopped.

  “If this is how Canadians eat, I’ve been missing out,” Roy said.

  “This isn’t really a summer meal,” Molly apologized. “If we’re going to eat on the water, I suppose it should be barbeque. I just couldn’t see it tonight, though. I needed comfort food.”

  “Me, too,” Bill said, looking at me meaningfully.

  I tried not to smile. Diane was enthusiastic and hopeless in the kitchen, and Bill and I had suffered through many of her well-intentioned culinary experiments together.

  “Sometimes nothing else will do,” Roy said. “Years and years ago, my mama always made us stew and biscuits. I cook for myself these days, and that’s what I make now when my heart needs someplace to go.”

&nbs
p; “Exactly,” Molly said, putting the gravy boat in front of him. “When your heart needs somewhere to go. I like that.” She paused for a moment, lost in thought. “For me,” she went on, “it was always that someone cared enough about me to take care of something I needed, something basic, and that they loved me enough to make it good.” She smiled at her aunt. “It was always Kate’s roast beef on the weekend for me. I remember coming home from whatever I was doing, as a little girl or a teenager--even later coming from college and smelling it when I walked in. It was always home. It always said that I was safe.”

  “Even now, from time to time,” Kate said. “No age limit on it.”

  “Even now,” Molly agreed. “And you never ever forget the smell of it, or how it falls apart in your mouth. It’s all about safety, and it’s all about home.”

  “And you made it for us tonight,” Bill said, pouring wine into Diane’s glass. “We’re honored.”

  “Of course, I did,” Molly said simply. “You people are my home.”

  Over drinks and coffee, the evening slipped into night. I looked across the table at Molly. She leaned forward, her elbows on the table, her tea untouched in front of her. She slowly wound a lock of hair with her finger, her compete attention on the doctor. Her amber eyes were almost black in the candle light. I felt like I could sit quietly and look at her for hours.

  Diane brought the coffee pot to the table and topped off her husband. The doctor waved her off, indicating the half-inch of whiskey still in his glass. He looked around the table at us. “I’m so grateful to be here,” he said.

  It was an odd thing to say, and I was touched. The man had a profound humility, a decency that made me want to be around him. I could see why Molly wanted him as a guest.

  Outside in the dark, the loons started calling. It was a night noise that I hated. It sounded like the voices of lost girls. The warbling cries out on the cold water told me that hot tea, candle light, and the faces of my friends were transient. They all might vanish, with me sitting alone in the shadows.