THIRTY FIVE
TIESHA’S HANDS BLED. The blisters from the damn double-oar were fierce, but she was paddling the damn kayak around the entire damn island this time. No more putting ashore and resting when she ran out of steam. They’d been on Cooper for almost a year and it was time she showed the island who was boss. It was one continuous go-around this time or she’d lean over the side and let the ‘cudas have her.
Cooper Island rose from the ocean like a giant’s shoulder to the right. The pregnant swell of Virgin Gorda floated off her left. Or should it be port? Was her little boat big enough to merit a port and starboard? Tie eased her stinging hands in the salt water then picked up her oar. Her back had gone a polished mahogany from sun. She gritted her teeth and dug into the cobalt surf, her muscles rolling like the small waves upon which she rode. Cooper was a tiny island, really just a hill sticking out of the ocean—one and a half miles long by half a mile wide—but big enough so that by the time Tie pulled the kayak onto shore she was spent.
She collapsed on the sand, not even bothering to fix the wedgie from her bikini bottoms. The sand gritted into the side of her face and smelled like sun and salt. The water lapped and shushed. If she wasn’t careful she’d fall asleep like this and get even worse sun burn than the last time. That, and if she stayed out past sundown, the skeeters would make Swiss cheese out of her black behind. A shadow fell across her back, cooling.
“Now this is a wonderful sight,” said the shadow thrower. “Prone, almost naked…perfect.”
She squinted one eye open at the shirtless beach bum. He’d changed a lot over a year. His hair had gone sandy and was too long but that one curl still got in his face. His skin had darkened and he needed a shave. He looked wonderful. He looked like himself. “Unnnh,” Tie answered, blowing a puff of sand.
“You get all the way around without stopping?” Calvin asked.
Tie closed her eye. “Cooper Island is my bitch.”
“Thought I was your bitch.”
“Emmm,” she stretched like a great cat on the warm sand. “Can’t have too many bitches.”
Calvin squatted down on his hams, stared over the domes of her bottom and out into the winking blue. “That a fact.”
“Not if you wanna’ be a playa.”
“You a playa then?” He scooped up a handful of sand and dumped it on her left butt cheek.
“What,” she said without moving or opening her eyes, “are you doing, white man?”
“Preserving your ass for future generations.” He dumped another handful on her other cheek. “It would be a travesty to let an ass like this go unappreciated.”
Light footsteps threaded through the sand and into Tie’s ear. She opened one eye and watched as a woman in her middle-sixties moved up the beach. She resembled an enormous mushroom, a spreading straw hat protecting her whip-thin frame. Even with that puddle of shadow to walk around in, she was still pink as a new strawberry. “Comes Miss Jean.”
Calvin continued burying Tie’s rump. He had it mostly covered and now drew a small smiley face on the left mound. He’d been aware of Cooper’s only other year-round resident for some time now. She lived on the other side of the island, near a seasonal beach club and restaurant; had bought one of their bungalows. Miss Jean walked the circumference of the island every day at the same time like the hand of a grand, organic clock. Calvin lifted a hand and called, “Afternoon, Miss Jean.”
Tie purred, “Hi, Miss Jean.”
“Hello, you two,” Miss Jean said, the ghost of Gloucester cornering off her words. “Make it all the way around this time, Tiesha?”
“Island’s my bitch.”
“Good girl,” Miss Jean said without breaking stride.
“Dinner at the club tonight?” Calvin called after her.
Miss Jean’s hand rose up next to her head and flapped. Calvin smiled. Yeah, that was the right way to do things down here. Flap, maybe, flap, maybe not. The biggest decision their life on the island presented was whether to order the jerk chicken or the mahi-mahi. Calvin and Tie were done. They’d earned a retirement for all they’d seen and those they’d saved.
Money wasn’t a problem. Holy Mama Church had taken good care of her last Templar Knights, transferring monies to an off-shore account in the name of Bishop Thomas Neary for years. Thom had made certain that if anything ever happened to him, Calvin would be granted power of attorney. He and Tie could live comfortably for the rest of their lives without worry. Calvin inhaled an endless breath of sea air and let it out forever. Nothing would ever darken his brow again.
Tie rolled over and looked up at him. “You ever think about Jeremy?”
Almost nothing.
“I try not to,” he said, scooping up a pile of sand and dumping it on her belly button. “I love your outie.”
Tie folded her arms behind her head. “We never really talked about it.” She locked eyes with him. “Even right after.”
“Never wanted to.” He dumped more sand on her stomach and drew the circle for another face, poked a couple of eyes, but left the mouth out. “You want to talk about it now?”
She was quiet for a second. “Yes.”
“What do you—I mean, is there something…?”
“You’d trapped it, right? With the Voodoo stuff—so it couldn’t get out of the kid, or like use its telepathy?”
“Telekinesis.”
“That, yeah, whatever. You made it so it couldn’t jump around, then at the right time you let it go.”
“Pretty much. I hadn’t really planned that. Just sort of felt like it was the last thing I could do. The only thing left to do.” He drew a frown on the sand face on Tie’s tummy. “It was either that or Thom was going to waste all of us.”
“How’d you know it would work?”
“I didn’t know,” Calvin said. “To be honest, I’m surprised any of it worked at all. And, in fact…” He trailed off, looking at the ocean. The shadow of the island stretched out over the little bay, inking the crystal water.
Tie searched his face. “In fact, what?”
He looked down at her. “I don’t think it ever worked at all.”
Tie propped up on her elbows. “Whachoo’ talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?”
“I mean, I think that Voodoo stuff didn’t work at all. I think it could have jumped out of the kid whenever it wanted.” Calvin’s voice was beginning to shake. The fishhooks of these suspicions had yanked at him from the start, and now that he had worried one free, it all wanted to come out in a rush. His eyes brightened and for a second, Tie remember what it was like to be a little afraid of John Calvin, of the things he’d seen and the marks they’d left on him. “I think,” he said, “that the demon, whatever it was, engineered everything that happened from the very first.”
“You mean it picked Jeremy for a reason?”
“Yes, but even more than that. When I say ‘from the first’, I mean it knew what it wanted when it found me all those years ago. It was the reason I ended up with Thom Neary.”
The sand was warm, but now Tie’s skin pricked with cold. “What’d it want?”
“I think it wanted to do a job, like a hitter. Like I used to be.”
“Mason,” Tie said.
“Mason, yeah,” Calvin nodded. “But Neary, too, I think. It couldn’t just take them for some reason, so it set events in motion almost two decades in the making.”
Tie blinked. “Jesus.”
“Like a chess move on a geological scale.”
They were silent. The sun moved. A gull cried. Something splashed by a rock, the late afternoon light calling out streamlined hunters. The temperature dipped a degree and a light breeze dried the sweat on Tie’s forehead.
“You think it’s finished?” she asked.
Calvin stood and pulled Tie up by her hands. “We are,” he said. “I know that much.”
“Yeah?”
she said, and seeing his face, she answered for him. “Yeah.” Tie leaned in and gave Calvin’s stubbled cheek a loud smooch. Her energy had returned, the warmth of the sand finding its way back into her muscles. “I feel like running,” she said.
“See you at home.” Calvin winked. “Lose the bikini.”
Tie threw a leer over her shoulder and sprinted down the beach in a burst of clean speed, all legs and floating grace. Her vitality and power filled Calvin with an ease he never believed he would feel. The world wasn’t just a place of darkness and pain. They were there, like anchors, reminders of life and struggle, but they weren’t all there was. There was warmth and running and sun. There was hot skin and cool water. Calvin watched Tie pound over the sand.
“Get thee behind me,” John Calvin whispered and turned his back on the deep blue sea.
The End
Washington, DC
December 25th, 2006
A Washington, D.C. native, John Richmond wrote his first piece of horror fiction at the tender age of eight and has been hooked ever since. After winning awards for fiction in high school and a scholarship for creative writing to Beloit College, Richmond cut his professional teeth as a copy writer for a Toledo, Ohio advertising agency. He traveled the back roads of southern Michigan in a beat-up Ford Escort purchased for a dollar, interviewing locals and harvesting real-life stories for a multi-media advertising campaign that earned two awards. At present, Richmond divides his time between work as a novelist and a full time job in advertising at the Washington Post newspaper. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife Leila.
Sins of the Fathers Page 66