Kiss Them Goodbye

by Joseph Eastburn

  “There isn’t anything.”

  “So, what are you telling me?”

  “The only other thing I can think of is—the polygraph has trouble with people that—I sometimes refer to them as ‘psychologically dead.’”

  “I see.”

  “It’s difficult to get any kind of response from them. It just . . . doesn’t register.”

  Fowler requested that the test not be reported and filed the results in a brown accordion file folder in his office he was keeping on all participants, suspects, even police personnel involved in the case. He stood up from the makeshift file, looked down, and realized that, without thinking, he had put the information under F—the first initial of his own surname.

  MARTY WATCHED BALLARD shuffle down the back stairs of Ardsley. The boy walked over to the second floor of Madison Hall. Outside the faculty lounge he asked to see the assistant headmaster about a room change.

  A prefect stepped inside to tell the master Cary Ballard wanted to speak with him. As the oak door opened and closed almost immediately, Ballard caught a glimpse of a tense scene around the table, where a room full of grim-faced teachers were sitting.

  The door opened again and Mr. Allington stepped out. His somewhat imposing stature was leavened by an easy manner and a deep, calming voice. He smiled as he pushed the door closed. “Mr. Ballard,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

  Cary smiled. “Am I interrupting you, sir?”

  “Not at all. Another faculty meeting. What’s up?”

  “Well, I can’t really study in my room, after what happened, you know . . .”

  “I can imagine.”

  “And I was wondering if you would recommend me for a room change.”

  “Sure . . . why not?”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I don’t know what openings there are. Any particular hall you have your heart set on?”

  “No, but—as far away as possible.”

  Allington clamped his large warm hand down on Ballard’s shoulder. “Call me tomorrow. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Ballard’s face lit up. “Thank you, sir.”

  Marty ducked into an empty classroom as the boy ran past him down the hall.

  Inside the faculty lounge, Allington closed the door and resumed his seat at the large mahogany table.

  Dr. Hickey had taken off his glasses and was rubbing his face feverishly. Dr. Clarence was there, Mr. Toby, Messrs. Curamus and Carlson. Ms. Coates. All of the faces at the table were grimly set, some staring bleary-eyed up at the fluorescent lights, others gazing down at the sheen on the wood table.

  Toby leaned forward. “These columnists are breaking stories every five minutes. One story I read—”

  “Please. I hear it from parents all day long,” Dr. Hickey interrupted, “calling to withdraw their sons. I’m putting out fires from the minute I get up in the morning.”

  There was a pause in the room. No one wanted to say what they all feared.

  Toby cleared his throat. “What I was going to say was, one of the columnists speculated that, with this kind of assault, it could happen again.”

  Dr. Hickey’s head jerked up and down. “For God’s sake, don’t curse us with that.”

  Dr. Clarence lit his cigarette and placed the gold lighter neatly on the edge of the table. “It very well could. No one can foresee what may happen.”

  Dr. Hickey stood up, adjusted his shoulders stiffly, and glared out the window. After a silence, he turned around. “The trustees are up in arms. My board has become a lynch mob. The alumni association predicts fund-raising this spring will go dry. Enrollment is bound to plummet. I called you all here this afternoon—because we need answers. What are we going to do?”

  “Meet them head-on,” Mr. Allington said quietly. “Start fund-raising now. Let’s strategize, Brandon. If we start a fund for the boy’s family, even a scholarship in his name, we can contain the damage. Then elicit further support later.”

  The room fell silent. Dr. Hickey looked across the room with contempt at Allington. He knew it was a great idea. He shook his head stiffly. “It could backfire in our faces.”

  “We’re going to have rebuild our integrity one way or another. Why should we wait?”

  Several masters looked over at Allington, nodding in agreement.

  Dr. Hickey’s eyes ferreted the room. He could see the other masters saw some wisdom in this. He fixed his gaze on the tree outside the window and did not speak for the rest of the meeting.

  AT FOWLER’S MOTEL, personal calls from old friends in Buffalo flooded the switchboard. At the state police station, where all communications were checked, there was a stack of messages. Several people had called in confessions, admitting to the crime. All these annoyances, as Fowler called them, had to be checked out.

  Judy Bayard was not singled out as the person who had leaked the information to the Tribune. Captain Weathers warned her, along with the rest of the staff, he would not hesitate to fire anyone inflaming the situation further by talking to reporters, or anyone on the “outside.”

  That night Nick read Cary Ballard’s academic file. It did not contain the in-depth psychological profile, which was in the possession of Dr. Clarence. It comprised only his transcripts, the results of intelligence tests, correspondence between Cary’s mother and the school, as well as some typed observations by the admissions committee on the day of the boy’s interview.

  Several people on the committee used either the word “nervous” or “distracted.” The headmaster was, in his own words, “. . . nonplussed as to whether the boy was right for Ravenhill.”

  Mr. Allington’s notes, however, included the sentence “It’s time we explore the underprivileged, the afflicted students who could not, without our help, create new lives for themselves. I wholeheartedly recommend acceptance and scholarship money.”

  An admissions assistant wrote that he was “appalled” that Ballard had been expelled for fistfighting from his last boarding school, Fieldcrest Academy.

  There was, however, a notation in the margin in someone’s harshly slanted script: “Find out the details of father’s death.” Why was that pertinent to his admission? Had the boy told them about his father?

  He looked at the handwriting. It was nothing like the elongated scrawl from the purple letter, yet it occurred to him he should send it to the examiner anyway.

  17

  THERE WAS A wrenching account in the Tribune the next morning of Crawford’s grief-stricken parents’ journey from New York back to Evanston, Illinois, to bury their son. The article again was penned by Maureen McCauley.

  By midday, Cary Ballard’s request for a transfer from Ardsley Hall was granted and he moved his belongings to Brookside, a small house with eight boys on a country road just off campus, near a marsh.

  He also walked over to the gym and requested a chance to try out for the cross-country team. He had placed well in several races at Fieldcrest before he was kicked out. The coach said it was too late, but suggested he spend the remainder of the fall training on his own; if he got in shape, he could try out for winter track.

  Ballard jumped at the idea. As soon as he had thrown his suitcases on the bed in his new room, he put on his sneakers and sweats. He had to get out of his burning head. Away from the police.

  Other times he had gone running, he had kept to the manicured fairways of the school golf course. Sometimes he took to the back roads that wore tiny threads through a fabric of cornfields. Today, however, he wanted to run around the lake.

  He did some stretches and jogged out the back entrance to the school, set a brisk pace along the outside of the great fence as it snaked along the boundary of the school. He didn’t see the unmarked car creeping along behind him.

  The fence was ornate in the extreme: tall, wrought-iron shafts that rose out of the ground some eight feet into the air, girded at the bottom by two waists of scrollwork, encased at the top in horizontal steel struts.

  As Ballard picked up
the pace slightly, he counted the uprights as they whizzed by in the corners of his eyes. He shuddered when occasionally his eyes drifted up to the razor-sharp points that looked like medieval spears crowning each upright. From the apex of the point, the iron had been forged down on each of the four corners of the shaft, only to curl up again, causing each upright to look vaguely like a turret. A castle of knives, he thought. He tried not to imagine blood.

  Cary brooded over whether the steel shafts that seemed to puncture the blue sky were designed to keep the students in or the real world out. He wondered why the same fence encircled the abandoned graveyard. He picked up his pace as he started down the last hill into town. He remembered some school facts as he felt the first beads of sweat run down his brow. Ardsley Hall and Booth Hall—joined by the stone arch—were the original academy and so were also surrounded by the same gigantic fence as a kind of memorial to the past.

  He started down the main street, running at a good clip when he passed the barbershop. He noticed his reflection in the tall glass window. It didn’t make him happy to see his thin legs and arms pumping furiously when he had imagined himself much bigger, much stronger.

  He felt his calf muscles bulge, though, as he ran the metal stairway that led up to the bridge over the waterfall. Down on the street Marty got out of a car and watched him.

  At the top of the stairs he turned out into the grass that ran up toward the graveyard. He felt the blood rush to his head as he sprinted up the hill, thinking he would work his way back down the other side of the lake.

  When he ran by the graveyard’s wrought-iron gate, he heard a voice. Behind a tombstone, he could see a blond girl bent over on her back, flailing her arms at a boy who seemed to be wrestling her down.

  He stopped running.

  Ballard caught his breath as he walked toward the wrought-iron door that was hanging by a single hinge. Through one of the iron scrolls, he saw the boy trying to get the girl’s dress over her head.

  Out of sheer wonder, Ballard opened the gate. The rusty hinge reported a low scraping sound that rose suddenly. The startled boy in the graveyard jumped up and ran backward, tucking in his shirt. The girl stood up, confused, her eyes staring at Ballard, committing his timid face to memory. The attacker, hiding his face, yanked her backward and Ballard noticed that she was still looking at him as she was pulled out of sight.

  WHEN HE GOT back to the gym, Cary saw Harold Finkelstein coming out of the showers. He wondered what Harold had been doing the other night chasing Ms. Coates by the power plant. Finkelstein was a tall, muscular boy whose bright red hair was trimmed so close to his head that it made his ears look like they were sticking out. He was one of the eight students living in Brookside Cottage.

  Ballard mentioned, offhandedly as they were both drying off, what he had just seen happen to the girl in the graveyard. Finkelstein sat listening on the rickety wooden bench between the lockers, rubbing the foreskin of his penis, inspecting it with great care.

  “Watch out, she wants your dick,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Yours and everybody else’s.”

  Ballard felt his face flush and couldn’t help himself saying, “I guess yours is already spoken for.”

  “What?”

  Ballard threw his sweats in his locker. “Only you like them older.”

  Finkelstein looked up in shock, then laughed derisively. “Like your mother.”

  “Fuck off.”

  Finkelstein looked at Ballard. “That girl’s the town whore, douche bag. Don’t you know anything?”

  “No, I don’t know anything,” Ballard said, still looking in his locker, his voice striking a note of sadness.

  “Well, I’ve heard the upperclassmen talk about some townie girl with bleached hair named Janine that”—he noticed that Ballard was still looking away—“never mind,” he said, “she probably doesn’t mess around with virgins anyway.”

  Ballard felt an indignation rise inside him. “I guess that counts you out,” he said resentfully. Finkelstein didn’t argue. He just smiled, keeping his eyes trained on the dial of the combination lock as he slammed the gray door.

  Ballard walked down the hall, weighed in, and took a whirlpool before he left the gym. Marty was outside, grimly counting the leaves on a branch of ivy by the front stoop. When Ballard slammed out the door, he almost missed him.

  THAT EVENING CARY had to walk out to the language arts building on the outskirts of the campus to take special help in Latin 2. His teacher, Mr. Curamus, in addition to being the assistant football coach, was a man whom Ballard felt was solely responsible for the Latin language being dead.

  Ballard would stare at the floor, his eyes occasionally darting to Mr. Curamus’s pointed beak as it lunged up and down while he was attempting to read Caesar. No one could murder a line of Latin like Mr. Curamus. Ballard’s eyes wandered from the gray floor tiles, trying to look outside at the trees—anything to assure himself that he was still alive.

  Tonight it was nearly dusk and night was pressing in around the edges of the leaves, making them seem indistinct. Ballard’s eyes fell back to the floor tiles, until something moved in the window that brought his head and shoulders up with a start.

  Staring through the glass was the blond girl. When he looked up, she smiled, then pressed her lips down over what looked like braces. She kept smiling.

  Cary’s heart jumped. Out of embarrassment, he pretended he was writing something and glanced in earnest at Mr. Curamus as the man gunned down another line of innocent syllables.

  Cary made a notation on the page in his text, then glanced back out the window. It was empty. The trees had almost disappeared into blackness and he felt his chest sink. He regretted he hadn’t smiled back at the girl.

  A half hour later, when he had finished the interminable review exercise, Cary Ballard thanked Mr. Curamus and backed out into the night, ready to make the trek back to Brookside.

  A voice behind him called out.

  “Hey.”

  He turned around. The blond girl was standing waist high in the reeds up a small embankment, on the other side of the gravel. “Who are you?” Ballard said.

  “Janine.”

  “I’m Cary.” He managed a belated smile.

  “Thanks for distracting that guy in the graveyard,” she said as she nervously pulled her hair out of her collar.

  “What was he doing?”

  Janine turned her head to one side, frowning at Ballard as if he ought to know better. “He was taking advantage.” A kind of confusion darkened her features. “I don’t know why it always . . .”

  “Does that happen a lot?”

  She nodded helplessly. “My mother says I was cursed with hard looks.”

  “I don’t think you look hard. You’re . . . beautiful.”

  Janine almost trembled, looking at him, then up at the sky for a full minute. Then she stared down at him a little baffled. “Would you like to be my friend?”

  Ballard felt an emotion inside him that had no comparison to anything he’d ever experienced. “Yes.”

  She smiled. “If you hadn’t come along today, I’d have had it.”

  He nodded, thinking that Finkelstein might be wrong. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Yes, you did. You think I do that kind of thing every day?”

  Ballard stared off at the woods, then realized he might not be able to speak again if he didn’t say what was on his mind. “Some people say you do.”

  Janine’s upper body seemed to rise out of the reeds, revealing the tight creases in the thighs of her jeans. Through the small aperture between her legs, he caught a glimpse of the evening sky.

  “Did somebody tell you about me?”

  “Yes.”

  She stared down at him, and as her mouth dissolved before his eyes, she turned suddenly and disappeared.

  Ballard ran up the bank, dropping his Latin book somewhere in the reeds. When he got to the top of the rise, he could see a tousle of wheat-c
olored hair flying through the tall grass. He ran after her. What he couldn’t hear were the footsteps of someone behind him, who stopped, reached down and picked up his book, and kept walking along the gravel.

  Cary knew that to catch up with her, he’d have to run hard. He felt the blood pound up into his nostrils as his heels thudded down the hillside. Janine was running fast, her boots sending small stones back, one of which pelted him in the forehead. She ran with anger, he thought, so he let her wear down, keeping just about ten feet behind her, watching the steam in her legs start to give out.

  Once she yelled over her shoulder, “Get away!” He didn’t. Finally, when she had reached the soccer field on the other side of a pasture of tall grass, she collapsed and rolled in her jean jacket to a stop, her chest heaving in the darkness. Ballard stood over her, only slightly winded, but letting his breath sound more furious to match hers. They heaved together.

  “I dropped my Latin book.”

  “You can eat your Latin book, for all I care.”

  “I’m sorry about what I said.”

  Janine forced her elbows under her. She was still breathing hard. “Who told you about me?”

  “Finkelstein.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Some kid who lives out in my new residence, Brookside; he’s just a twerp.”

  “He’s a liar.”

  “Well, who was that guy in the graveyard?”

  “What difference does it make? I didn’t ask him to maul me.”

  “Why do you hang around with him then?”

  “I don’t. He keeps following me. What else is there to do in this town, anyway, watch the trees grow?”

  Ballard knelt down in the grass beside her. The grass was wet and he liked the feel of it. He leaned forward and put both hands in the grass beside her. He felt the soft flesh on her arm touching his knuckles as she breathed.

  In the half-light, he could see her chest fill with air, pressing her firm breasts up into her yellow satin blouse. Her lips were parted and she stared up at him, her eyes quietly burning.

  Ballard couldn’t remember how much time passed as he looked down at Janine. He remembered her breath slowing down. Then time came unraveled. He seemed to drift into a fantasy that was played out on the soft landscape of her face.