Forbidden Island an Island Called Sapelo

by Tom Poland

  “Tell me about Caroline,” I said.

  “Well, I can’t talk about Caroline without talking about Hines. I married him when Lorie was ten. He, like Garrett, was a damn game warden.”

  “A lovely bunch,” I said.

  “Two years later, we had Caroline. Hines just knew we’d have a boy. He was full of plans. Teaching the boy to hunt and that kind of thing, but we had Caroline … ” she said, her voice trailing off. She seemed to reach inside for new strength before carrying on.

  “From the day she was born, Hines had little to do with her. She died at the age of four. Leukemia. We buried her on a Saturday, the beginning of deer season. It was so hot that day. I almost fainted at the graveside.

  “Right after Caroline’s funeral, Hines drove home, lifted his rifle from its rack, and left to climb into a deer stand he’d spent weeks building. That afternoon, God sent one thunderstorm after another to wash Caroline’s footsteps from the earth. All that rain ruined his hunt,” she said, pausing, “and I was glad. I never forgave Hines. With Caroline gone, I held on to Lorie as if the world were about to end.”

  She began to cry. Caroline was in her grave, and Brit lay in a hospital bed. So, we had common denominators … terrible losses.

  “Let’s walk the beach,” I said and I took her by the hand.

  We walked a beach strewn with driftwood and shells and stopped to sit on the trunk of a huge tree between naked limbs spiraling to the heavens. It was like sitting on the skull of some prehistoric beast. The night sky was brilliant and the Milky Way ran through the sky like a luminous river, the river of Heaven. The sea blazed up in phosphorescence.

  “Tell me about Lorie. What do you think she looks like now?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Tyler, “you know how teenagers change, but I have a photograph of her taken right before she left, the one I made the flyer from.”

  She reached into her blouse and removed a school photo, about the size of a business card, wrapped in tissue. I held it up to the sky and could just make out a girl with blonde pigtails that looked blue from the starlight. She smiled a faraway smile, like she was not there. She was pretty like her mother.

  “Where do you think she’s been all this time?”

  “I think she lived for a while near Charleston, which isn’t too far from Wilmington, where her only letter came from. She loves the coast. After she ran away, I found some letters hidden beneath a liner in a drawer from kids I’d never heard of. Lorie must have been thinking of running away a long time before she, at long last, did. The kids sounded like runaways themselves.

  “I ended up in a, well, a situation, where I had little to do but read. I read the letters over and over looking for some clue. Something I might have missed. Some clue. I memorized them.

  “This letter is from a girl, Blaze. I too, am tired of this bullshit called the real world. Leave that hell of a home and live off the earth.

  “This one is from Jason.” Come be with me, if you want to find a happy place with people that don’t need lots of stuff to survive. Come love the Earth, share energy and true love.”

  The kids sounded like hippies of the 70s, full of naïve fantasies.

  “And one more, from Dune. A girl or a guy? You tell me.” I have found a place for you. No laws, no police, no government, no religion, nothing. Be yourself. Live and let live. Come to the island. Join me and be free.

  “An island,” I said. It’s tempting to think he or she is referring to Forbidden Island.

  “It’s another island near Charleston where some kids had set up a commune near a tea plantation but no one knew much about it.”

  “Yes, but laws exist there. Maybe she didn’t go to Charleston.”

  “I don’t know that she lived on the island for certain, but if she did, she, no doubt, felt safe and accepted there,” Tyler said, pushing a delicate white shell, blue with starlight, across the sand with her toe.

  “Why did she run away?”

  “She tried to kill her stepfather. I made the mistake of stopping her.”

  An awkward silence set in. I thought I should say, well, something, but then Tyler resumed, taking the conversation in an altogether new direction.

  “Have you ever driven up behind a truck carrying chickens, feathers flying everywhere?”

  “Once or twice,” I said. “It’s like driving into a pillow fight.”

  “Lorie and I were following a truck when a chicken escaped through a missing slat in one of the crates. A white puff of feathers came off the truck, and the next thing I know, a chicken glanced off the car antenna and landed in the grass along the shoulder.”

  “Dead?”

  “No. It flopped all over the grass. Lorie was shouting ‘Go back, Mom. Go back,’ so I stopped and turned around. Well, we had to chase it down. It tried to fly, but couldn’t. It just beat circles in the grass. Lorie threw her sweater over it, and we picked it up. Its leg was broken and so was a wing. The chicken worked its head out of the sweater, and Lorie stroked its head until it settled down. We called a veterinarian who rehabilitates hawks and owls that fly into cars and power lines.

  “The vet splinted the leg and taped the wing down. ‘Keep the bird in a dark place,’ he said, ‘and keep water nearby. It’ll eat later  if it’s lucky.’ ”

  The chicken’s connection with a runaway mystified me but I knew it wasn’t idle talk, not on the heels of such an outpouring.

  “Lorie nursed that chicken back to health. She named it Lucky, and wherever she went Lucky shadowed her. Lorie was thirteen then and she and I both were going through a very hard time. Caroline was just getting sick. During her sickness, I realized I had made a huge mistake marrying Hines. I was a wreck. I didn’t give Lorie the attention she needed, and the chicken became her source of love and affection.”

  “I’ve heard of pet squirrels, turtles, and snakes, but never a pet chicken,” I said, still uncertain where Tyler was headed.

  “Two years dragged by. Lorie and Lucky were inseparable. She made a rhinestone necklace for Lucky. You should have seen it. A chicken wearing jewelry. That bird followed Lorie everywhere, the necklace all a glittering. It’d ride with us to the store, sitting on Lorie’s shoulder. At night, Lorie would put her in a cage and drape a beach towel over it. Lucky would go to sleep, you know, roost.

  “Caroline’s battle with leukemia was nearing the end about the time Lorie turned sixteen. I let Lorie double date, movies, that kind of thing to keep her mind off Caroline. At first, she went out with several boys. Then she met Keith. She said that no matter what they did, they laughed all the time. And I can tell you, looking back, if anybody needed to laugh, Lorie did.

  “It got where she saw Keith but no one else. He was a nice kid. When Hines learned she was just seeing one boy, he put his foot down. He tried to convince me I was opening the door to a teenage pregnancy.

  “He wouldn’t relent. He confronted Keith and told him he was spending too much time with Lorie. He told him not to see her again, that if he did, he’d take it up with his father. So, they stopped seeing each other.

  “Lorie cried for weeks. Being a teenager is such an awful time, and I hated seeing her have her heart broken.”

  “So, they stopped seeing each other?”

  “For a long time. But Lorie had done nothing wrong. I felt the right thing to do was to let Lorie see Keith. He was a nice boy, and it didn’t seem fair to him or Lorie. The bottom line was simple: she was my daughter, not Hines.’ ”

  “Ah, the perils of a blended family. What’d you do?”

  “I’d drop Lorie off at the mall where there’s a cinema at one end, a perfect meeting place. Lorie and Keith would bump into each other near the cinema. Sometimes they saw the movie, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they’d go with other couples and just hang out. This went on for months. I’d pick her up at the designated time. She was never late. That was the key. If we were late one time, Hines would raise hell.”

  “He had no clue,” I said. �
��That’s a bit deceptive, don’t you think.”

  “I didn’t give a damn. For a long time, he didn’t. Then Lorie told me she and Keith had bumped into a co-worker of his just before he went postal.”

  “Crazy?”

  “Yes. I dropped her off at the cinema Friday night to see a movie; at least that’s what I told Hines. In fact, she and Keith went to a dance. The next afternoon, Hines interrogated Lorie about the movie she’d seen the night before. He had the paper with all the movies listed. He asked which one she went to, what time it started, who was in it, what was it about, and when it ended. You’d a thought he was investigating a murderer. He crossed her up  caught her in a lie. That’s when she confessed she had seen Keith.

  “He went into a rage, cursing, throwing things, and threatening to kill Keith. He slapped Lorie three times.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “He is the law. I thought I could get through to him. I pleaded with him to remember what it’s like to be young, but he punched me.”

  “Where,” I asked.

  “Here.” She brought her hand up, with some hesitation, to her left breast. “He knocked me to the floor and went outside. I looked out the kitchen window and saw him take Lucky from the cage.

  “He cursed us. ‘Get out here right now, you lying bitches.’

  “I begged him. ‘Please don’t hurt Lucky, please. Lorie pleaded with him. ‘I’m sorry, please don’t hurt Lucky. I’ll do anything you want. I promise.’

  “Hines stood beneath the Formosa tree, holding the chicken spread-eagled by the legs and said he was going to rip the bird in half. Lorie ran inside.”

  “To call the police?”

  “No. She came back out with her shotgun, a single-shot .410. The summer before, she had taken a skeet class. She pointed it at Hines.

  “ ‘Put her down or I swear to God I’ll kill you,’ she said. He ripped away the necklace and held Lucky to his chest.

  “Hines puffed up like a snake. ‘Put that gun down now or I’ll wring its neck.’

  “Something in Lorie’s eyes changed. It was like fire burning. I lunged at the barrel just as she pulled the trigger. The shot went into the air just above Hines’ head cutting a branch from the Formosa.

  “Well, that did it. Hines slung Lucky by the neck in great looping circles until her head pulled loose. Blood gushed everywhere. He threw the head at Lorie, telling her ‘Give this head to Keith.’ ”

  “You should have let her shoot him,” I said. “The circumstances seemed justifiable.”

  “Yes, more than I realized even. Lorie would have killed him if she’d had a double barrel. Knowing what I know now, she would not have gone to jail because the system, I am certain, would have spared her. I’d still have her.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Lucky flapped around the yard in circles, blood gushing from her, and Lorie shoved me away and ran into the house. I tried to go upstairs to her, but Hines pulled me by my hair into the downstairs bathroom and locked me there. He had installed padlocks on both baths and our bedrooms. He always locked us up when he was mad with us.”

  “A real son-of-a-bitch I see.”

  “After a while, I could smell chicken grilling. It sickened me. Still does. I saw him take two plates, silverware, and some barbecue sauce to the picnic table.

  “He dragged Lorie from her room. He said any bitch who tried to shoot him would pay a price. He shoved a drumstick into her mouth and forced her to chew on it. Lorie threw up onto him. The last time I saw her, he was dragging her into the house. Hines came back, ate some more, and left the bones on his plate.”

  The venison at the Last Chance Café made sense now. She had endured a murdered husband, a daughter who died before life even started, abuse, and the nightmare of seeing a pet killed and force fed to her daughter. And the remaining daughter was gone, missing, maybe dead. I didn’t see how things could be worse.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You have been to Hell and back.”

  “That was Lorie’s last night at home. I slept downstairs in the bathroom listening to her cry. Some time after midnight, the house grew silent. The next morning, my door was unlocked. I went upstairs, and she was gone. She had left through her window and climbed onto the roof sometime during the night. That was seven years ago.”

  “You never heard from her?”

  “A month later, I received the letter I mentioned, postmarked Wilmington, North Carolina. Lorie said if I had let her kill Hines, Lucky would still be alive. She said she loved me but that sometimes love wasn’t enough. She said she would never come back until she knew Hines was dead. Then she dropped a bomb.”

  “What?”

  “Hines had been forcing her to give him oral sex. That’s what the thing with Keith was. Jealousy.”

  “Where is Hines now?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Good, what happened?”

  “I killed him.”

  ***

  My campmate was a killer. Good for her. Killing a bad man for a good reason was just. It settled some of the score for what life had dealt her. As Cameron said, the old eye for an eye thing. It felt right, not righteous, but right, and I envied her. I had always wondered if I had what it took to kill a man. Yes, to know you can kill is good. Others will sense it and not bother you. It was something everyone needed to know. So, I was camping with a murderess on an island where people practiced voodoo and doctors allegedly robbed people of their organs. What would happen next?

  Tyler hung her cup on a limb. She was through drinking.

  “After I received Lorie’s letter, I thought a lot. I wondered if she had made it all up, because Hines had killed Lucky. In the end, I couldn’t go on not knowing. I had to know the truth.

  “I called Keith’s father and asked if we could meet. I asked him point-blank if Lorie had ever talked to Keith about any sexual abuse from Hines.

  “He said, ‘I don’t know how to put this, Mrs. Hill. He was coercing your daughter to give him oral sex. He said he would kill her pet if she refused or told anyone what he was doing. Keith said she cried about it all the time. Keith told me he and your daughter never did anything. I believe him. I had a hard time keeping him from going to the police. My son wanted that man locked up, but I told him to stay out of it. That sooner or later, it would all come out, and it looks like it has. I’m sorry, I’m sorry for you and Lorie.’ ”

  “You knew he was telling the truth, didn’t you,” I said.

  “Oh yes, I started putting two and two together and I could see why Lorie had withdrawn, why she had become so attached to Lucky, and why Hines forbid her to see Keith. It all made sense. All the pieces fit. I dwelled on this, obsessed on it. My mind moved in a new direction, a vengeful journey. And then it came to me. I knew exactly what to do. For a long time, Hines and I had had nothing to do with each other … you know … as a man and woman go, but that was fine with me. The honeymoon, so to speak, was long over, I hated being with him … having sex. Sex has never been that good for me anyway but I know its power.”

  “So, this new direction … where did it lead?”

  “I went shopping and bought some new lingerie … to … I suppose you could say, seduce him. I let a month go by to see if I really wanted to do this. I did. My mind was set, and then I put the plan into motion.

  “One Sunday morning, after coffee, with no warning—so it looked like an impulse—I asked Hines if I could “treat” him right there in the kitchen. It was my way of saying … you know, ‘go down’ on him. He was puzzled because we had long quit being intimate, but I told him it was just something I wanted to do.

  “I had him going good. He was … you know …”

  “Hard.”

  “Yes, thank you. It’s not easy talking about this. The words on his … you know … his …”

  “How about a street word, his cock?”

  “Yes, thank you. You’re making this much easier.”

  “Just talk
to me like you’ve known me forever. What do you mean the words on his cock?”

  “When he was young the egotistical bastard got drunk after he graduated from the Criminal Justice Academy. He had ‘The Big Enforcer” tattooed along his shaft. When we were first married, he’d grab me into the bedroom and tell me he had a warrant for my arrest, that ‘The Big Enforcer’ had a stiff penalty for me. God, I hated that.”

  “He had a wonderful bedside manner I see.”

  “I teased him. I’d do him a while then stop. I told him to go into the bedroom upstairs, strip, and wait, that I would put on something special for him. I came back in my new lingerie. He didn’t even realize it was new, of course. He lay nude, spread-eagled on the bed. I started again and got him close, real close, then stopped. I had him where I wanted him. I talked dirty to him. I told him to slide down to the end of the bed. ‘I’m going to get on all fours and lick you like the bitch I am.’

  “He liked that. He’d call me a bitch in heat sometimes, though that was nowhere near the truth. Beneath the bed was a handgun I’d bought in Fuquay-Varina, a gun made for women. Small, easy to hide, and powerful—a Model 85 UltraLite Titanium .38. Mr. All-mighty law officer, The Big Enforcer, had no idea I had a gun. I’d also placed a small tape recorder behind the headboard, a voice-activated recorder. I wanted a record of all this.”

  Tyler started laughing.

  “Oh this part is easy. He said, ‘Baby, you’re driving me crazy. Finish me please.’ I told him, ‘Don’t you worry, Hines-baby, I’ll finish you but good.’

  “I got down on all fours and started licking him. As I did, I felt beneath the bed. The gun was right where I had put it, beneath a towel.

  “I got my hand around the grip, my finger on the trigger, the safety off already, so the click wouldn’t warn him. He was close to … ”

  “Coming.”

  “Yes. That’s when I asked him a question. ‘Is this as good as Lorie’s blowjobs?’

  “He sat up like lightning had hit him. I rose and aimed the gun between his legs. He shrunk away in fear and said he didn’t know what I was talking about.