Kiss Them Goodbye

by Joseph Eastburn

  HE PULLED INTO the tiny driveway of his mother’s white house on a back street that faced a river. Beyond the water was the mill, still running, though the smoke it generated was considerably less than it had been when he was a boy.

  He stepped out of the car and looked around. It was chilly. He had taken a turn off the highway, thinking he would look around his hometown.

  His mother came out of the porch, wiping her hands on her apron, looking apprehensively at him. The sun was in her eyes, and a wrinkled hand pulled a few wisps of white hair out of her blue-gray eyes, tucking them behind an ear. The other hand blocked out the sun.

  “That you, Nick?”

  “Hey, Mom.”

  She opened the screen door, came down the three steps, one stair at a time, her eyes searching his face as only a mother’s can.

  “Something the matter?”

  “I’ll tell you about it.”

  She slowly began to smile, wrapped her arms around him, then she tucked an arm under his and they edged together slowly up onto the porch and into the house.

  An hour later, Nick pushed the crust of Sarah Lee apple pie away and took the last sip of his coffee. His mother was looking down, her hands folded, shaking her head. He noticed how her face still seemed to be continually on the verge of some tropical storm. When he was a child, he had thought her face was really the sky, sunny one minute then turning gray in an instant. As he looked at her across the table, he saw the clouds moving in.

  “I wouldn’t let the job bother you, Nick. People never know what they’re doing when it’s happening to them.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They just do what they think they should—that’s what you did.”

  Fowler nodded but didn’t say anything.

  She rubbed her mouth, which was still puckish, still vaguely mischievous, though at this moment it was more serious than usual. “You did the best you could.”

  Nick Fowler stood up, took a few steps toward the window, glanced out for a moment at the wool mill, then sat down on the ledge with his arms crossed. He was looking down. “Now that I think about it,” he said, “I don’t know why I didn’t hand in those reports. It was stupid.”

  His mother’s eyes didn’t move from the spot on the tablecloth. “You were afraid.”

  Nick looked up at her, then back down again. “For the kid.”

  “And yourself,” she said almost inaudibly.

  “Myself?”

  His mother crossed her arms, then matted her lips together thoughtfully, raising her anxious eyes to meet his. “You didn’t want to incriminate yourself, Nicky, have you forgotten?”

  “What?”

  “Well, this boy Cary sounds exactly like you.”

  “Come on.”

  “You were suspended from school like he was.”

  “Well sure, but—”

  “For fighting, wasn’t it?”

  Fowler’s eyes moving as he thought back. “Yeah.”

  “You were accused of things you didn’t do, remember? Just because you wouldn’t hang around with that crowd down at the square—I mean, the way those boys would spill out of that bar on Saturday night—you didn’t feel safe in your own town. One of them started pushing you around, remember?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “They made fun of you because you had a crush on that girl, what was her name, the girl with . . . the hair?”

  “Margie.”

  “She was so prim they accused her of everything under the sun.”

  “Let’s not go over all this.”

  She paused, rolling the edge of her napkin. “I never told you what they said to me at the school, did I?”

  “What did they tell you?”

  His mother rubbed her brow, where clouds were amassing, her face moving now into an electrical storm that she tried to hold back. “They—they called me into that dingy office . . . this was just after your father had disappeared . . .”

  “It was then?”

  “They had the audacity to tell me you should be put in”—she swallowed to push down the emotion—“a reform school!”

  “You never told me that.”

  “They said you were dangerous.”

  Fowler stood up and turned, looking out the window. He smiled bitterly. “Only to myself.”

  “Yes.”

  He looked out over the roof of his car, beyond the side street to where the river water was gleaming in the afternoon light. He could see the shape of a mill raising its mottled walls in the water’s reflection. “Mom, tell me about the night Dad was shot.”

  “Now, don’t start on that again.” She waved her hand. “I don’t remember, dear.”

  He turned around to look at her. “Yes, you do.”

  Mrs. Fowler’s face hardly changed, but she flung her hair back as if it was a memory. “. . . He was on radio patrol. Stopped into the grocery store to buy coffee . . . you know the rest.” She turned away.

  “No, I’ve blocked the whole incident—I’m telling you. And you would never discuss it.”

  “Because it hurts.”

  “They shot him by his cruiser?”

  “No!” She turned back to face him. “He was away from the car, Nick. He just didn’t know he had stumbled on to a holdup. They shot him through the glass as he was walking toward the door—then stepped over him with sixty-seven dollars and change. They were never found.”

  Nick was shaking his head. “Goddamnit.”

  “It was raining when they found him.”

  “Where was I that night?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He reached over and grabbed her shoulders. “Stop protecting me. I want to know.”

  Her lip began to tremble. She looked in his eyes, sighed. “You and your brother had a big fight that night. Your father took Jim’s side as usual. You got very upset, yelled at your father, and stormed out of the house.”

  “What did I say?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You said—you hated him for loving Jim more than you! Why do you make me do this?”

  “And then he went off to work that night?”

  “It’s not your fault, for God’s sake. You didn’t put those hoodlums there.”

  “Why didn’t he shoot them? The report said he never drew his gun.”

  “I don’t know, dear.” She was backing away from him now.

  “You know.”

  “It’s not your fault, now come on!” Her eyes were scared now. She lurched around the table. Nick followed her, grabbed her forcefully by the wrist.

  “So the report was fudged, wasn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “He was preoccupied, is that it?”

  “Yes, yes, that’s all it was. Now stop this!”

  “Or . . . he didn’t have a gun . . .” There was dead silence in the room. “Maybe he got so upset that night he . . . forgot it?”

  Her eyes looked up at him and said it all. He let go of her wrist and looked away. A strange feeling swept through him, as if his father’s spirit had just brushed by him in the room. He felt a chill, looked down at her.

  “Do you still have that gun?”

  She studied him for a long moment. She finally nodded, walked over to the walnut hutch, and opened a drawer. She moved some dinner napkins and pulled out an old cobalt-blue long-nose .38 Colt revolver in a scarred rawhide shoulder holster. She handed it to him.

  “I should have thrown it away.”

  He slowly, carefully, as if trying on a silk garment, strapped the holster on his back, pulled the gun under his arm.

  His mother was staring at him. “It’s not your fault, Nick.”

  “Maybe not. But I owe him one.”

  She immediately pulled both of his hands sharply toward her. “You owe it to yourself.” Her eyes were filled with tears.

  His eyes were elsewhere. “I wonder.”

  “You’re a rebel just like he was, and by God, you’re twice a
s stubborn.”

  Fowler began to smile at her. “Think so?”

  Suddenly her face broke through the clouds. She smiled and cried at the same time. “You know you are.” She smacked him on his hard stomach, then hugged him around the waist. Nick touched her white hair and looked out the window, not knowing what had happened, only that he felt different.

  Nick was running, out of breath, staggering, the street in front of him distorted, rain coming down, rivulets of water, mud puddles, the cement pitched downward, his feet slapping through water, stopping, gasping, staring into the downpour. Ripples of neon on the puddles reflected a sign above—lights over the grocery store, neon tubes, in script, Nick’s Place—the tubes melting, oozing over the gutter, down onto the windows. Pulling the hair out of his eyes, he sees a man moving toward the glass doors. Inside two youths lurch away from the counter, black shapes in their hands, three shots, glass splintering, the man falls. Through the door, stepping over him, running away, laughing, footsteps receding in the dark. He walks up to the man, in slow motion, kneels down beside him. The man is trembling—a black cloak, hat, a scarf over his face. Nick’s fingers reach down, lift up the scarf . . . his father’s face.

  Nick sat up. He shook loose the dream. Slices of light were bleeding through the sides of the window shade. He thought it must be the floodlight outside the mill across the street. Here he was, the middle of the night, waking up in his old room, head throbbing. He stood up, reached for his clothes.

  Out on the porch, he let the screen door close quietly. He saw the mill across the river and raised his collar. He found the bridge over the water in the dark. Staring up at the old structure, he walked through the grass leaving a trail of footprints in the dew. The mill was leaning slightly toward the woods; he observed it—his mood now crowded with memories—seeing himself playing football on the grass in front of that mill on a hundred afternoons, his father calling to him. A voice in the distance.

  He entered the woods in back of the building. The floodlight dappled the branches. When he had walked far enough in, he stood quietly, took from his pocket the last purple letter from the killer. He had never turned it into the police. He reread it, his face grim in the darkness. The lines about “his affinity for the dead” starting to disintegrate as the match struck and set the paper on fire, a harsh glow lighting up the trees, the blaze warming his face for a moment, igniting his conviction, the ash at the end of his fingers at low flame, released, falling down, his foot grinding it into the wet leaves.

  41

  CAPTAIN WEATHERS AND Sergeant Cole were determined to take Cary Ballard into custody that afternoon. They couldn’t arrest him because he was a minor, but they could hold him in lieu of bail. They had intended to bring him downtown, make him admit that he had killed Finkelstein in a fight and hidden his clothes. They expected to grill him for hours, firing questions, intimidating him. Then they would start threatening him. He would confess. At least that was the scenario Weathers had in mind. When they walked out of Ballard’s room at Brookside, Mr. Bendleby stood in the center of the boy’s room scratching his gray head.

  Ballard had disappeared.

  Downstairs Marty Orloff stood by the squad car. He just kept shaking his head. His official story was that Ballard had never come downstairs. At least he had never seen him.

  Weathers was walking toward him, glaring. “I should fire you too.”

  “Wouldn’t blame you, sir.”

  “Go on home, Orloff. Take a few days off.”

  “Sir, I—”

  “One more word and you’ll be on safety patrol at the grade school.”

  BALLARD HAD AWAKENED that day with a start, a nervous unease flooding him. When he had opened his eyes, he was sure his vision was impaired. Everything was out of focus. He looked out the window and was able to vaguely discover that it was afternoon by the angle of the shadows.

  He saw the kinky hair of the little cop sitting in the car just below the hedge that separated Brookside from the county road. Cary’s eyes seemed to focus now.

  He walked into the bathroom and threw cold water on his face. He dressed and climbed the stairs to the roof. He stood up on the mansard eave at the back of the house and, grabbing a hold of the drainpipe, inched his sneakers down each lip in the siding. About ten feet from the ground, he saw a torn piece of glove wedged into the corner of the gutter. He pulled it out, jumped free, and rolled. He knew with a sudden chilling awareness—as he sat in the leaves—that this belonged to the killer.

  He plodded around the back of the marsh, climbed the fence, and threaded his way behind a clump of cedar trees until he came out on the road a half mile from Brookside. In the distance he could see the afternoon light on the grille of the little cop’s car. He smiled.

  He walked about a mile, then trudged up the hill to where High Street crossed. He drifted aimlessly around a bend of poplars. There he saw the brilliant green lawn of Raven House—originally a girl’s dorm back when the school was coed—now preserved just behind a low stone wall. Looking at the fresh grass seemed to ease the pain behind his eyes. He slumped down on the smooth surface of the stone wall, his hand cradling his stomach, his chin propped up on the cornerstone. He squinted at the intersection of Academy Road and High Street in front of him, focusing his eyes on the stop sign.

  He thought he saw Ms. Coates pull her yellow Mazda up to the stop sign, look both ways, glancing right past him, then turn left and putter off down High Street. This brought him up to a standing position. He swung himself onto the branch of an oak above the wall, peering at the yellow car in the distance. When he was satisfied where it stopped, he climbed down again.

  He walked around the lawn, looking up at Raven House. It was a massive white structure, yawning through its black shutters, with a nineteenth-century widow’s walk crowning its slate roof. It stood on a bluff overlooking the lake. Ballard remembered there was a bench around the back where he could sit down and look at the lake and the waterfall.

  When he found the bench, the afternoon sun was still beating down on it. It was October but it felt like late August—the kind of Indian summer day he remembered from when he was a child. He looked down at the sheet of cool water in the distance. He saw the reflection of the trees on the far bank. He watched the water like this for a half hour, his sanity returning slowly as the sound of the water just out of sight roared over the spillway on the far side of the bluff.

  Something caught his eye and immediately brought him up on his feet. He rubbed his eyes, sure that he was hallucinating. On the far bank of the lake, a girl in an ice-blue bathing suit was running. A tousled shock of blond hair was close enough to the shore that its reflection seemed like a fire moving over the surface of the water.

  Ballard watched Janine as if she were a character in a dream. A layer of gauze seemed to prevent him from really seeing her. He reached out, as if toward a painting, thinking he could touch the small figure on the other side of the lake. He stared impassively, wondering where she was going, but decided to sit back down. Then his eyes were drawn away. A few hundred feet behind her, but gaining steadily, he caught sight of a hulking shape running after her.

  Suddenly his eyes began to clear up again. It was as if a sheet of gauze had been ripped away. He saw the heavy arms pumping up and down in the distance, the ponderous legs striking the bank. He heard labored breaths echoing across the water and he knew.

  Ballard didn’t know what was forcing his legs down the hill through the high grass, or how his own breaths had replaced the ones that had driven him to his feet. His shoes were at an angle to the steep mound, throwing dirt into the air until he was down on a path near the water, where he broke into a sprint.

  In the distance the pumping arms were getting closer to the girl. As Ballard panned the bank, he saw that Janine’s face was flushed. Her unruly hair had fallen down in her eyes. Her limbs now flailed to the sides from exhaustion in her headlong pitch toward the bridge that extended over the spillway. Then she saw
him, and something more than recognition came into her eyes.

  Ballard felt his toes hit the wooden planks as he lurched forward across the bridge. He could see that Gluckner was only a few yards behind her. They were both winded, their lungs heaving as they bolted through the grass. He heard her yell his name.

  “Cary! Help!”

  Ballard grabbed the wrought-iron railing as he propelled himself in a run off the other end of the bridge onto the soft grass. He thought he saw desperation, fear, and love all exploding in her features as she ran by him, touching his outstretched hand, then she fell in exhaustion, rolled behind him onto the grass, her rib cage throbbing.

  He turned back to see Gluckner bearing down on him, his shoulders seeming to swell with each stride. Ballard felt as though he were standing in the path of a locomotive. He knew he would be helpless to stop this mammoth hunk of flesh. He stood quite still, his eyes blinded now like an animal on a highway at night. At the last instant, something made him duck his head and throw himself under the churning legs.

  A blast of pain against his skull. His shoulders struck Gluckner’s shins, flipping him over, the momentum carrying the husky student completely over Ballard’s back, where he hit the ground forcefully, skidding down the bank on his chest, over the embankment and into the water.

  Ballard looked up and saw Gluckner come to the surface of the lake, furiously splashing, cursing him.

  “Son of a bitch!” he yelled.

  He was pulled slightly toward the cement wall that dropped precipitously where the rivulets of water disappeared over the spillway. He managed to grasp some reeds from the bank to keep himself from going over. The reeds broke and he drifted with the current, paddling furiously, until he caught a hold of the underside of the bridging.

  Ballard stood up, grabbed Janine’s hand, and hoisted her up. They ran up the hill as they heard Gluckner’s voice cursing them in the distance. Janine was still winded and Ballard had to pull part of her weight as they ran through the old wrought-iron gate of the graveyard.

  Gluckner was still clinging to the bridge but had brought a leg up over the side, trying to heave himself out of danger, when they disappeared over the crest of a knoll. They rushed around a circle of worn headstones, behind a small mausoleum. Janine flopped down on the marble, catching her breath for a moment, while Ballard looked down at her. The skin inside the elastic of her bathing suit was expanding and contracting so rapidly, it made him dizzy. He tried to look into her eyes.