by Howard Owen
The dream’s vividness will haunt her for the next 10 days. She can even remember the sounds of her mother’s and father’s voices as they talked, the smell of her mother’s perfume.
She does not believe dreams carry any kind of mystic power. At best, she sees them, like any good academic, as a manifestation of the subconscious.
Lately, though, she has been running across her late father in some unusual places, and it is hard not to lump this dream into the same category as her conscious sightings, filed under Nervous Breakdown.
She has gone back to Montclair once since she left, to take care of a few business matters regarding Phil Macomb’s estate and pick up all the things she didn’t think to pack for her original flight. She had lunch with Cathy Rayner, assuring her old friend that she would be coming back, sometime soon. She went to see Hubert Lefall and had a short, uneasy conversation with him about her sabbatical and the chances that she would be back, “fit as a fiddle,” next September.
She wonders, lying on the couch and wrapped in a blanket, replaying the odd little dream, whether she is moving forward or backward, fitness-wise.
She hears a noise outside and thinks Justin and Leeza might be returning. It’s Kenny, though, slamming the car door as he comes back from some errand or other. He seems to stay busy even in these dark days when the mere possibility of something growing from the cold, dead dirt seems out of the question.
She wants to see him, she realizes. She needs to talk to him.
He answers the doorbell on the second ring and ushers her in out of the rain. He still has his jacket on, over a work shirt and jeans. He’s in his stocking feet. She’s wet despite the umbrella, which turned inside-out on her in the brief run between their houses.
“I had this dream …” she begins.
He pulls her to him as she drops the sodden umbrella on his carpet.
“I’ve been having one myself,” he says, low and urgent. “It starts like this.”
For 20 minutes, they get no farther than the rug.
He kisses her long and deep, and she responds in kind, the two of them trying to devour each other. Georgia has always worried about things like her breath and her underwear in situations such as this, but nothing seems to matter now. They fall into a rhythm in which they are breathing only each other’s breaths, as if they are giving each other artificial respiration. He runs his tongue into her ear and then—luck? skill?—discovers the place on her neck that has always driven her wild.
She doesn’t even bother saying any of the obvious things she is thinking, has thought lately when she let her mind wander to this scenario. This is so wrong. We shouldn’t be doing this. What if someone sees us?
He begins removing her blouse, a button at a time, then unhooks her bra from behind with one hand while she fumbles with his shirt.
“We’d better go somewhere,” she gasps as her naked back slides across the floor, “before I get rug burns.”
“Yeah,” Kenny says, helping her with the shirt. “We ought to get a room. I think I know where one is.”
She knew, somehow, that he would be this good, if she let him. She wonders, as he slides slowly in and out, making it last, giving her three orgasms before he’s even had one, if it isn’t the forbidden fruit aspect that so turns her on. She knows that she will feel terrible about this, later, when she regains her sanity.
For now, though, she is along for the ride. It has occurred to her before that sex keeps getting better the older she gets. She wonders when that corner will be turned, too. The few men who have been open enough to talk about it indicate that it is the opposite with them. Another of God’s cruel little tricks, she thinks. When they would have chewed through a chain-link fence to fuck us, we weren’t really in the mood. Now, when we’re more than ready, they’d rather watch a ball game half the time.
She wonders if this is the worst thing she has ever done, of a carnal nature. She never cheated on Jeff Bowman except to make a point. She did have a one-nighter during her second marriage, but Mark was so cold and self-contained that she didn’t even think of it as being unfaithful, wondered if he would even have minded, except for the impropriety.
They lie there, after she has come as close to passing out as she ever has during sex. They’ve been in his bed for two hours, and he has spent almost all of that time stimulating her with his cock, his mouth and his fingers, usually a combination of the three. She has tried to reply in kind, and has made him come twice, which, although she has lost count, is at least a four-for-one bargain for her.
It is her experience that men, in this post-coital situation, do not stare back when you look deeply into their eyes. The remote control becomes a valued item.
Kenny, though, is different. Even as they exchange a very long, wet kiss, tasting themselves in each other, he keeps his eyes open, as if he is trying to memorize everything he sees.
“Do you know,” she says, when she comes up for air, “that I don’t believe I have ever come that many times in a week? What planet do you come from? How in the world did your wife tear herself away from you?”
She has his face in her hands, and she leans back a few inches.
“I’m sorry. I’m getting way too personal.”
“Nah. No, you’re not. I will tell you, though, it wasn’t this good. Nothing’s ever been this good.”
Georgia feels her face reddening, and laughs at the thought.
“What?”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” she says. “I’m just thinking, I’m lying here in bed, buck naked in the middle of the afternoon with a likely blood relative who has just screwed me unconscious, and I’m blushing over a compliment.”
“It’s true, though. Really.”
She resists the urge to tell him she bets he tells that to all the girls.
“Thank you. Thank you for—for all that—and thank you for telling me that.”
They talked, once before, about the likelihood of Kenny’s late father being the son of Littlejohn McCain and Rose Lockamy Locklear. It was an awkward conversation, one Georgia wished she hadn’t started.
Littlejohn’s belief in this unpaid debt to Rose’ family has made Kenny’s homestead possible. That one time, Kenny told Georgia that there had always been rumors in his family concerning his fair-skinned father’s provenance, the occasional slip of the tongue by some maiden aunt entrusted with all the secrets. The rumors only multiplied after John Kennedy Locklear inherited 160 acres from a deceased white farmer. He’d hear them second- and third-hand.
“Some things, though,” he told her, avoiding her eyes, “are best left alone. Littlejohn McCain was a good man, and he gave me what I had always wanted. Whether he’s blood or not, doesn’t make a bit of difference to me.”
“What now?” Kenny asks as they lie sideways facing each other on the big bed.
“Nobody, I mean nobody, can know about this. You’ve got to swear it, Kenny.”
He frowns and tells her she doesn’t have to worry.
Shit, she thinks.
“Kenny,” she says, trying to say it just right, “you know it’s just because we might be, you know, related, right? And how disgusting it must look for an old broad like me to be screwing around with a hunk like you. Nothing else. I swear to God. You don’t think there’s something else, do you?”
It can’t be that, Georgia thinks. Not race, the thing she was so proud to have blotted from her world view. She believes she is able to look at a person as a person, period. When she lies awake nights weighing her virtues against her many faults, she always gives herself a couple of points for that one. Surely she can’t be worried about the disapproval of a bunch of old ladies at a church she might never see again after the farm is sold. For all she knows, they might not care. Everyone, as Forsythia has surely taught her, has secrets.
Times change, although there is not one person of color at Geddie Presbyterian, there almost certainly never has been. When she and Forsythia were taking meals around on Thanksgiving, she as
ked who took food to the black shut-ins and needy, and Forsythia looked at her oddly and said she supposed the AME Zion church took care of them.
“It works well like that,” she said, a little defensively, Georgia thought. “If we thought someone wasn’t getting fed, we’d feed ’em, but I think they’d like to take care of their own.”
Maybe that’s so, Georgia thought. Maybe.
“You make everything too complicated,” Kenny tells her now. “You had a great time. I had a great time. Maybe we’ll have a great time again. Believe me, I don’t want everybody knowing my business, either.”
“Well,” Georgia says, “I surely don’t want it to stop. I mean, I can live with a little guilt for that many orgasms. A lot of guilt, actually.
“And, you know what they say about old ladies like me.”
Kenny starts to tell her not to call herself old.
“They don’t tell,” she says, “they don’t swell, and they’re grateful as hell.”
He is not a man to laugh long or loud, but he almost falls out of bed over this.
“I’ve got to remember that one.”
“Just don’t tell anyone who told you.”
“Or where.”
She is stroking him while they talk, and soon they are at it again. Georgia can’t imagine what the Almighty was thinking, making her love sex so much at an age when she surely shouldn’t be bouncing all over some younger man’s bed, pushing her diminished flexibility to the limit. Why wasn’t it this good when she was young and athletic?
When she makes him come a third time and looks up from where her head rests against his hard stomach, he looks as wasted, as drained and satisfied, as she feels.
“I don’t know,” she murmurs. “I don’t know if I can keep from telling somebody about this.”
“Give it your best shot,” he tells her, pulling her up to lie on his chest.
She does remember to tell him about the dream, finally.
“Well,” he says, lying there, still looking at her, not even glancing at his watch, although she has sneaked a couple of peeks at hers, “people do have dreams. I mean, you’ve been thinking about Jenny and that house and your daddy, too. It’s probably just the power of suggestion.”
“Maybe. OK, probably. But it seemed so real …”
“Georgia, I don’t have a real strong leg to stand on here, with that rock out there drawing folks looking for a sign from their ancestors. But you’re starting to worry me a little.”
Join the club, she thinks.
They are silent for a couple of minutes when she turns and looks up, resting her chin on his chest.
“Tell me something.”
“Tell you what?”
“If Pooh hadn’t gone back to his truck like a good boy that time after the yard sale, what would you have done?”
He stares up at the ceiling, saying nothing.
“You’d have had to kill him, wouldn’t you? Christ. I mean, could you have done that? Really?”
He makes eye contact again. He sighs.
“I probably shouldn’t do this. You know, when you asked me if I had ever shot anyone?”
And so he tells her the story he’d planned to take to his grave, the one he knew he really, really never should tell anyone.
His sister’s name was Rose, same as her grandmother. She was four years younger than Kenny. He had always tried to protect her when they were growing up, the two youngest kids in a big family.
The night he wasn’t there, he was 21 and she was 17. He was in Raleigh, a senior, four months from being the first in his family to graduate from college. She would have started in the fall. Rose was worrying her parents and older siblings, though. She had gotten wild, more so since Kenny left for college. Her grades didn’t really suffer that much, but she stayed out late, skipped school sometimes, and hung out with what was generally considered to be a bad crowd.
He got the call at the off-campus apartment he shared with three other men. Rose was missing, and had been since the night before. They found her car at the Quality Inn near the interstate. Kenny was back home in less than two hours.
They never found her body, never found any evidence of anything resembling foul play. The police hinted strongly that she might have run away.
But he knew Rose would not have done that. None of her friends confessed to any inkling that Rose Locklear might have been contemplating such a thing.
She was dating Cam Jacobs. Rose was a risk-taker, and Cam was a risk, everyone agreed, a rough-talking mill foreman with orange-hued skin and a scar across his cheek. He was 10 years older than Rose. He was, the rumor had it, rough with the ladies.
How many times has Kenny blamed himself for not telling her just how big a mistake he thought she was making? But she was not of an age to have listened even to him, probably, might have just run that much faster into Cam Jacobs’ arms. Everyone knew Rose was a little wild.
Cam had a good alibi that night. He and Rose had met at the Quality Inn, had spent a couple of hours there, but then he had to go and help two friends move. He had said goodbye to her in the parking lot by 9:30. He thought she was going out to one of the fast-food places on the boulevard to meet some friends, but he said she told him more than once that she was thinking about running away, maybe going out to California.
His two friends told the same story, over and over: Cam Jacobs and they worked putting furniture into a U-Haul until after midnight, and then they had a couple of beers before closing time. Lots of people saw Cam at the Rendez-vous.
Kenny could hardly look at his parents as they were told about the room at the Quality Inn. The clerk had recognized them both as they checked in, but didn’t recall seeing them leave.
There was no physical evidence. They found samples of Rose’s hair in Cam’s car, but as he said, they had spent a lot of time in his car.
Cam Jacobs was never indicted. Kenny would see him around town occasionally, before Cam moved to Lumberton. They never spoke about Rose.
His parents didn’t want to believe that their daughter wasn’t coming back. His father put up posters until the day he died of a heart attack, five years later.
Kenny was more pragmatic. He did his grieving, and then he put his plan in place. He knew it wouldn’t happen quickly, knew he’d have to be patient if there was to be any chance of it happening at all.
Kenny was 28, a teacher for six years, when the first leak finally sprang.
He was in a bar one night, and he struck up a conversation with a Jacobs who, it turned out, was Cam Jacobs’ second cousin. Kenny mentioned what a tough guy he’d heard Cam was, and the cousin started telling stories.
After relating a couple of bar brawls that ended with hospitalization, the cousin leaned a little closer.
“They say he killed a girl,” the man said, his voice barely audible.
“I’d heard something about that, but didn’t they clear him?”
“He’s got some good friends,” the cousin said. “Good friends will cover your ass when it needs coverin’.
“One of ’em, though, old Pete Oxendine, he had too much to drink one night, just me and him, I don’t even know if he knew me and Cam was related, and he told me.”
“Told you what?” Kenny’s hand was shaking. He tried keep the shake out of his voice.
The cousin was quiet for 30 seconds, but Kenny knew he was just milking the drama.
“Told me Cam didn’t come by ’til almost midnight. That they were real pissed with him, leaving them with most of the work. And he was all messed up. Him and that girl had got into some meth, and I don’t know what all happened, but he burned his clothes in a trash can outside the house, got some new clothes, and he made ’em swear that he’d been there since 10.
“At least, that’s what Pete Oxendine told me.”
He’d lied for them before, and they lied for him, and didn’t ask any more questions about it. By the time they had kept quiet for half a year, Cam made it clear that, whatever he had or
hadn’t done, anybody that waited that long to tell the police about it after lying for six months was in for some jail time.
“But Pete, he drinks a bit, as the song goes, and I suppose he said something he shouldn’t of.”
“Why did he kill the girl?”
The cousin said he never heard.
Kenny never found out all the details. He didn’t care to know any more, didn’t even want to find out where the body might have been dumped or buried or God knows what.
All he wanted to do was slip away from Cam Jacobs’ cousin as seamlessly as he could, leaving such a mild impression that the cousin would barely remember him in the morning and might never recall telling him that story.
None of it would ever hold up in court, if it ever got to court. There was even that scintilla of a chance that Cam Jacobs had nothing to with Rose’s disappearance. Kenny considered this, but he knew. He’d always known.
Maybe she wanted to leave him and he got crazy. Maybe it had something to do with drugs, taken or sold. Maybe she was pregnant and he didn’t want to deal with that. It had occurred to Kenny, as he sifted through all the possibilities over the years, that she probably had been with Cam Jacobs since she was 15 and could send him to jail if she wanted to. Maybe she threatened to do that, or turn him in for dealing. There were a million possibilities. There always was the chance some fisherman would hook her remains in some remote stretch of the Campbell River some day.
Kenny Locklear thought it to death, trying to find some other answer to the mystery of Rose. All any sensible person could come up with, he concluded one last time, was Cam Jacobs.
It wasn’t that hard to find Cam. He was still in Lumberton and lived in a trailer park. He’d led an exemplary enough life the last six years that he had never been arrested.
Kenny made the 70-mile round trip to Lumberton three times before he figured out how he would do it.
Cam worked the 3–11 shift at a textile mill. His habit seemed to be to come home to change, then go out again for a quick beer or two. He was living with a woman; they didn’t seem to have any kids.