Kiss Them Goodbye

by Joseph Eastburn

  Her mouth drew him down from a great height. He remembered his body arched forward. His lips landed on hers. They were so soft he seemed to go right through them until his mouth was almost underground. He sprang back up to the surface. With each kiss, he fell deeper into her mouth. It seemed there were undiscovered regions, vast precipices. He kept falling, his lips roaming a vast terrain, tasting a perfect land, but his hands, he made sure, never fell below her white neck. He just let them rest there as his mouth traveled back and forth.

  An hour later Ballard walked Janine home. She lived on a dirt road that wound up the hill behind the town high school. They talked about their parents. Her mother worked part-time in town, she said. She didn’t mention her father.

  When he said goodbye to her, he kissed her sweetly and kept his hands on her neck. He didn’t want to take advantage of her. Besides, he was afraid. She appreciated him for that. Her kisses told him that again and again.

  18

  LATER THAT NIGHT, Marty Orloff dozed off in the front seat of his Oldsmobile parked down the dirt road just below Brookside Cottage. He didn’t see Ballard come in.

  When Cary was climbing the steep stairs to the second floor, he saw Harold Finkelstein standing at the top of the stairs, leering down at him. On one side of him, smiling from ear to ear, was Bill Chung, a Chinese exchange student; on the other side, Jordon Goodson, a fat Jewish boy from Brooklyn.

  The three of them stood at the top of the stairs in their underwear, swaying their torsos back and forth like hula girls, as they grasped their genitals and hoisted them up and down, rolling their eyes, and running their tongues around the edges of their mouths. The sound of their smacking lips stopped Ballard on the stairs. In one of Finkelstein’s sweaty hands, his Latin 2 book danced above him like a ghost. His ears recoiled as the three of them warbled in high-pitched voices.

  “Janine!” they crooned to the top of their registers. Ballard thought he was going to choke; the mere sight of them had killed all the available oxygen. “Ohh, Janine? Is that you, honey?”

  Ballard decided to play it cool. He walked quietly up the stairs, grabbed his Latin book from Finkelstein’s grimy hands, saying simply, “What are you guys, jealous?”

  The three boys stared at him, then exploded into Goodson’s room, landing in a heap on a single bed. As the springs squeaked furiously, Ballard walked into the bathroom and washed the front and back cover of his book. He pulled a paper towel and rubbed the stone visage of Caesar—camped in Gaul, no doubt—as he heard the boys howling.

  “Yeah, we’re real jealous,” Finkelstein yelled toward the bathroom. “We want to get crabs too!”

  Goodson burst out a laugh, his enormous stomach shifting up and down like the continents. Chung laughed silently, rolling over so that, with his back turned, his shoulders bounced to the four winds.

  Ballard stepped back into the doorway. “You better watch your mouth, Finkelstein.”

  “Yeah?” he said, his face lifting up. “You better wash yours!”

  “Shut up.”

  “How much does she charge?”

  Ballard felt his chest tighten. “She doesn’t do that. You have the wrong girl.”

  “That’s not what Gluckner said.” Finkelstein eased himself up to a sitting position. The other two boys went quiet.

  Ballard felt as if his shoes were nailed to the floor. “What did Gluckner say?”

  Finkelstein reached down and grabbed his crotch. “He said Janine fucked his brains out in the graveyard!” This set off another explosion. The three could hardly contain their laughter. They rolled against each other, kicking the air deliriously. They didn’t notice that Ballard’s face had gotten so red he almost passed out.

  “Gluckner was never in the graveyard,” he said. “It was somebody else.”

  Finkelstein sat up. “Yeah, somebody else letting her have it after he was finished!”

  Ballard walked into Finkelstein’s room, looking for something to break. He grabbed the plastic handles on the boy’s stereo. He hoisted it up, completely beside himself, thinking he would throw it out the window. Then he saw something through the glass that stopped him. He sat the stereo down, his hands trembling.

  Finkelstein walked in. “Hey, don’t worry about it, Ballard,” he said casually, leaning on the doorjamb. “Look at it this way, you got some ass, right?”

  Ballard’s attention seemed to be drifting. He turned listlessly. “No.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t get any ass.”

  “You gotta be kidding.”

  “No . . .” he said, turning to Finkelstein with a shiver. “I only kissed her.”

  “You what?”

  “I said I kissed her.”

  Finkelstein shook his head and yelled out into the hallway. “Hey, Goodson, he said he only kissed her.”

  Goodson’s stomach preceded him into the hallway. “Wouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “He doesn’t know what to do with it.”

  Finkelstein smiled at Goodson. “Yeah, but Ballard has principles, you know?” He turned back to Ballard. “Of course what Cary here doesn’t realize, is that if he kissed Janine, he just kissed every cock in Ravenstown.”

  Goodson howled and disappeared back into his room. Ballard could hear him tell Chung what Finkelstein had just said. There was a pause after which Chung started to laugh and cough at the same time until he started to gag uncontrollably. Goodson could be heard slapping him on the back.

  Finkelstein shut the door to his room, sat down again, his hairy leg up on the bookcase. He stared up at Ballard, who was looking out the window. “Just make sure you use Listerine, bro. Get rid of those nasty germs.”

  “Right . . . germs.”

  Finkelstein smiled. “You don’t want to believe it, do you? I’m warning you, I know women. She’s bad news.” Finkelstein was admiring the red hairs on his calf.

  “Yeah, you know women, all right—old ones.”

  Finkelstein now looked up at Ballard, again shocked, but not willing to betray that, his gaze resolved into a threat. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “How’s Ms. Coates?”

  Finkelstein eyes drifted to the side, then looked back at Ballard. “Least she doesn’t train.”

  “What?”

  “You know, Ballard—several guys at once.”

  For a moment Ballard couldn’t get his breath. He thought he was going to faint. A hand appeared in the window. Ballard watched it through the glass as if from a great distance. A second hand joined the first, pulling the dark brim of a hat down onto a head. As the hat now tilted up, it revealed the face, partially draped in black.

  It was the stranger.

  Kneeling on the sill, dressed in the same dark cape, the same eyes shining. Ballard stared at it. The hands tried to lift the window, but it was locked. Ballard felt himself getting sleepy. He looked into Finkelstein’s eyes. They were narrowed under his angled eyebrows, glowing with hostility. “Little boy,” he said. “Ready for bed?”

  The figure outside the window nodded at Ballard very slightly. Ballard felt sick to his stomach. He wanted to break Finkelstein’s neck, but something was pulling him down. Some horror that drew all else in its wake was starting to engulf him. His fists began to unwind. Shrouds seemed to float before his eyes. He looked down at Finkelstein’s eyes; they burned far into the distance, like lamps across a river in some other world. A world where nothing was as it seemed.

  Ballard didn’t remember walking down the hall, closing his door, and falling asleep with all his clothes on.

  19

  THE URGE BURNING in me again. Rhythms out of the night. Terrifying beats, drums. Air escaping—my head a sieve.

  Down the drainpipe, soles, knees at the siding, hands picking the ivy. The honeysuckle behind the hedge reminds me of a man I killed in the flowers. Around the back of Brookside, under the split rail. My breath like an engine, idling. Across the lawn, terrible thoughts like sores, lesions, sounds torturing m
e, poisons in my head, down behind the squad car parked up the road, crawling slow.

  An open window. Rise up. Quick blow to the back of the head—stunned. Grab his baton. Hit him again. He slumps over, good. Need time. That cadence like a volcano inside me. Better put him out. Fumble inside the pockets, where is the fucking syringe? Okay, juice. Up with the jacket, honey, in the bicep. Sleep.

  Now I can move. Feel the night bloom. The man in the flowers sending me strength—body long decomposed—so I can right so many wrongs. The night like petroleum, igniting me.

  Screen door open, up the stairs. Down the hall by the bathroom. Inside, bare sink . . . see the mirror? Look at—eyes, oh no, lift the scarf. The mouth perfect, mother’s mouth, full of longing, rage.

  Out into a hallway cramped with snares and tambour—sounds rising and falling. Never going away. So many hallways. The vein thumping in my arm. Sweat running. Open the door!

  The Day-Glo playroom again. Paint thrown across the walls and windows. Colors crazed. Fury everywhere. Make it go away. Doesn’t stop. Colors scream at me. Voices chanting, odes. Hymns. I’m home.

  Open the door wider.

  A blade of light across a sleeping face.

  Close on knees. Up to the altar. Voices rising up, a crescendo. Look at your lips. Wipe her kisses off NOW.

  White Jockey briefs glowing against dark skin. No moonlight. No sounds, but slow breathing. Eyes inside at rem speed. Final dreams. Just let me brush your hair. Your radiant black hair. A wisp behind the ear, off the forehead, like they did to me. Let me brush.

  Your hair.

  20

  FOR THE NEXT several days, Finkelstein came up missing. First, the housemaster, Mr. Bendleby, noticed that he hadn’t come down for breakfast.

  Bendleby was the retired director of athletics for the school, an overweight man with white hair and an oval face that made him look oddly like an oversized cherub. He oversaw Brookside Cottage and coached winter track. The stories were legion about the day, a season before, he had spoken at the grandstand to all those who had come out for the sport. With an informal panel of judges, it was determined that he said “uh” four hundred and thirty-two times in his fifty-five-minute speech.

  In one run-on sentence, or “collage” as Goodson liked to refer to them, Bendleby managed to squeeze in thirty-seven “uh”s and still hold the audience in the grip of his art. The fact that people were laughing didn’t seem to penetrate his studied gaze. He just planted his cleats on the wooden track and kept on talking. It was later decided Bendleby secretly thought he was funny.

  He wasn’t laughing on the evening of Finkelstein’s disappearance. The red-haired boy had not attended a single class, made an appearance in the dining hall, or even the gym. Bendleby reasoned that he had run away.

  While his parents were informed, rumors spread throughout the student body that Finkelstein had eloped with Janine. It was said Finkelstein, who was a math whiz, easily first in Ms. Coates’s class, had stolen away to Wall Street and become a runner on the floor of the Stock Exchange. It was said Finkelstein had disguised himself in woman’s clothing with the intention of reapplying as the first female student at Ravenhill since 1903. Only Finkelstein could inspire this kind of gossip.

  Ballard realized he couldn’t remember very much about the last time he had seen Finkelstein. He remembered looking out the window. The rest of what he saw tore at the insides of his head, scratching to escape into words, but he never discussed it. He never discussed that he had woken up that night, sweating and covered with dirt on the roof of Brookside, or that his hands were smeared with mud. Or that the knees of his trousers were encrusted with dried dirt.

  In fact, most of those next two days Ballard felt uneasy, disoriented. He noticed that Goodson and Chung kept away from him, sitting quietly in their rooms with their doors shut. This only fed the fire that already burned out of control in Ballard’s brain. He could only sink beneath the covers, moving his body into a fetal position, moaning slightly, at times aware that people were climbing the stairs, but oblivious as to who.

  At one point, he began to shiver so much he got out of bed. On his way to the closet to get his robe he noticed a police car parked down the road, its red floods revolving in the afternoon light.

  In his closet, Ballard found his overcoat, which was warmer, and buried himself inside it. He was about to close the door when two white gloves fell down from the top shelf. He picked them up. They were damp. He couldn’t figure out why.

  Ballard stood quite motionless, trying to remember where he had gotten them. He knew that he had worn them the first day of school when he was selected at random to hold the chapel doors for the on-rushing students and faculty. He had been outfitted in a blue school blazer with a gold crest on the pocket, under which in Latin was displayed the words Sine Macula (“Without Stain”). He had also been given two pairs of white gloves, one for the morning, one for the afternoon. He looked for the other pair. They were missing.

  There was a knock at the door of his room. Goodson cracked the door and pointed his stomach at Ballard, who quietly thrust the gloves into the coat pocket. Goodson’s eyes dropped down to the pockets.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” Ballard said.

  Goodson stood for a moment, puzzled, then slouched over to Ballard, pulling the gloves out of the coat pocket. He stared down at them.

  “What the hell . . .”

  “From opening day.”

  Goodson stared at Ballard, handling the gloves in silence. Then he noticed the slime on his hands.

  “Ugh,” he said, rubbing the film on Ballard’s sleeve. “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know. They need cleaning, I guess.”

  “You guess? Better come down. They found Finkelstein.”

  “Where?”

  “In the marsh,” Goodson said, touching his hands again as he looked at Ballard.

  A FISHERMAN HAD discovered the body in the lower reaches of the marsh, a short walk below Brookside Cottage. He was an older man, the caretaker of several campus houses during the summer months, who had developed a taste for trout.

  As it turned out, he had come down that particular morning with a jar full of fresh worms, only to become distracted by a piece of white material, cotton perhaps, billowing out of a natural pool that had been created during a recent storm when an oak had fallen across the stream.

  The fisherman put on his waders and sloshed out toward the white thing. As he got closer, it looked to him like an undershirt. His old arthritic hands reached down, yanked the cloth, but found it wouldn’t come. He cursed his father from whom he’d inherited his affliction and, this time grabbing hold of the cloth with both hands, heaved it straight up.

  Something heavy emerged from the silt. It was Finkelstein’s head. Rising up on either side of the head were the boy’s hands—in white gloves—nailed to a two-by-four that stretched under the shoulder blades.

  Around his neck his undershirt was knotted so tight that the boy’s face had turned battleship gray; the tongue, covered with sand, protruding to the edge of the chin. His eyes had rolled back so far into his head that the blood vessels looked like they might have leapt down the paths that tears once had taken.

  The old man took such a fright he started backward, falling into the stream, only to stand up again. With his eyes riveted on the gray face, he fell backward several times before he reached the bank, shivering, and as he later told the police, “plumb scared to death.”

  When Nick Fowler, Bill Rodney, Marty Orloff, and three policemen fished Finkelstein out, they saw he had been strangled by his own undershirt. Again, when the undershirt was peeled away, a knife wound gaped in the neck. The thing that shocked them, though, were the white gloves fastened down to the board with bolts. Once-red stains washed across the gloves. The men all stared at the Christ-like corpse. A chill passed through them. As the victim’s lower body rose out of the water, the knee-high garters holding up a pair of black dres
s socks were dripping water over a pair of black patent leather shoes, recently shined.

  Fowler was depressed. He knew that the body of this second boy was sure to have been washed clean of most prints or body fluids. He watched the body being covered, then loaded on a stretcher. He recalled Arthur Murray’s letter and wondered “whose enemy”? He didn’t have to wonder about the reference to Jesus dancing; Finkelstein had been crucified in evening clothes.

  He turned around when he heard the siren and watched the ambulance roll along the county road that bordered the marsh, taking the body down to the coroner’s office.

  Fowler realized that, with one look, a part of his psyche had coalesced with this dead boy. A part of him was now lying in the back of the ambulance—rolling out of sight. He felt alone. When he looked up, his men were staring at him. He felt disconnected from them but struggled to look into their eyes. There he saw pain and shock. It brought him back.

  He quickly gave assignments to his team. He wanted the foot size of the victim determined, and every store that sold dress clothes within a hundred miles checked to see if that size shoe had been recently purchased. He wanted tests run on the accessories themselves to see where they might have been purchased. He wanted the wood analyzed, and if possible where the bolts had been purchased. He wanted every student who was willing to talk interviewed. He wanted the entire faculty interviewed again if possible. He asked Bill Rodney to begin preparing the offense report. He told him he would prepare his own. The truth was, he couldn’t deal with it. He had to think.

  A police sketch artist snapped loose a tape measure from a tree on the far bank. He noted the distance to the body and, choosing a highway sign in the distance, directed Marty off toward a signpost by the road that he chose as his second coordinate.

  Fowler pulled on a pair of police-issue waders and eddied out to a stake that marked the spot where the body had been found. He rolled up his sleeves, braced the camera and sample kit hanging from his neck behind each elbow, and dropped his hands through the clear water. He reached down to where Finkelstein’s head had been partially buried in the silt at the bottom of the pool. He felt around for a few minutes and found nothing. The sketch artist was wading toward him with the tape drawn from the signpost.