Deadly Kiss

by Bob Bickford

  The little girl was condemned. The details of what had transpired behind the store were known only to Wanda Sutton’s family, and the absolute truth of it only to the white boy who had witnessed it, but the vague sense of it was enough to stain her in that society for the rest of her life. She had crossed a line that was never spoken of and stirred the fears of the uncontrollable change that was approaching.

  Oddly, the most scorn shown to her came from the blacks in her community. They continued to patronize her father’s store because they always had, and their open contempt for her was far more stinging than the whispers and averted glances that came from the whites.

  Floyd Sutton might have saved his daughter. He had served his country for two years in Europe, and it was his Colt pistol that Willard Davis had used. It had made the trip home with him from Italy and France to dispatch Eli, who was a different sort of enemy.

  Because of the war, Sutton had a larger sense of the world than most of his neighbors, and had he sold his store and taken his family north, things might have turned out differently than they did.

  If he ever considered it, he wasn’t given the time to act.

  The Negro child rested in his grave outside the small Baptist church, tranquil through all of the winter rains and summer suns that should have marked his lifetime. As decades passed, the church fell into disuse but was not torn down, for the land had little value. For the next sixty or so years Eli Tull remained there, waiting. It wasn’t time for him to go.

  On warm summer afternoons that buzzed with insects and heat, a passerby who was alert might spot him and not find it remarkable.

  He was only a small black boy, loitering in the high grass, amusing himself in the shade of the oaks that surrounded the property, wandering among the grave markers and passing the time.

  ***

  Present Day:

  I pulled the throttle back and cut the engine to idle. The boat came down off its plane and slowed, pushing a wash of water in front of it. I looked over at my father, who had one hand on his hat and was smiling, perhaps in spite of himself. We were stopped in the middle of the sound, opposite my island. The drizzle had stopped, the sun was out, and the lake was calm.

  Echo Island sat on the horizon, freshly washed by the rain, ready for company.

  “You good, Dad?”

  “I haven’t been on a boat in years.” He grinned. “When did you learn to drive one? It doesn’t seem like something you’d do.”

  “When I moved here, I had to learn fast.” I smiled back. “At first, I pretty much just slammed it into whatever dock was nearest when I needed to stop.”

  I looked around me, seeing the lake and its bordering forest as he must be seeing it, for the first time. It was all beautiful. “This part of the lake is unique,” I said. “The water’s about seventy-five feet deep, except right here beneath us. We’re sitting over a kind of underwater canyon. The bottom’s almost four hundred feet down. The people around here call this the ‘Hole.’ There’s all kinds of stuff down there--boats, even an airplane.”

  He peered over the side. “Why?”

  “Anything that sinks and ends up down there stays down there. It’s too deep to even try to bring it back up.”

  A bomber on a training mission from the old Muskoka air base crashed into the lake one night in 1943. It took its crew with it to the bottom of the Hole and was never recovered. There were also a couple of boats that I knew about down there, and other things as well. It was not a part of the lake that I liked.

  I pointed ahead of us. “That’s my island,” I said. “The small one.”

  “How can you live out here alone? What does Angela say about it?”

  “Angela hasn’t thought much about what I do in a long time, Dad. If she has an opinion about it, she doesn’t tell me.”

  “Lonely,” he said.

  “People can be lonely in the middle of a city,” I said, thinking about it. “Sometimes it’s lonely, I guess. I have friends, and I go into town to shop or work at the marina almost every day.”

  Another small boat passed by, headed west. It was moving fast, and the wind-whipped people on board waved, holding onto their hats.

  “If I want to see some lights, Huntsville’s a decent-sized city. It’s less than a half-hour away.”

  “Doesn’t seem like much of a life,” he said. “You never stop running away from things. You’re just living off your wife’s money.”

  “She isn’t my wife anymore,” I said. “That’s what divorce is. I took what she gave me. I was entitled to half and didn’t take it. I never asked for anything. She didn’t want the island any more, and that’s what I settled for.”

  “If you didn’t drink so much back then, you’d still be married to her.”

  I felt a flash of hatred for him. “I haven’t had a drink in years. Guess I came by it honestly, Dad.” I was stricken by the instant hurt on his face. As quickly as it had come, my anger fled. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean that.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes. The boat rocked gently. I heard a light plane overhead; I squinted but couldn’t pick it out in the glare.

  “You don’t even work, do you,” he finally said.

  “As much as I need to. I restore old mahogany boats now. I built this one,” I said with some pride. “It’s more than seventy years old.”

  “That’s a hobby. It isn’t work.” He crossed his arms and slumped in the pilot’s chair across from me, refusing to enjoy the day anymore.

  “I have something to tell you,” he finally said. “I can’t go home. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “You can stay with me, Dad,” I said. “You can always stay with me.”

  He waved his arm around him. “Here? In the middle of a lake in the middle of nowhere? You’ve found the end of the earth. I might be running, but I don’t have to run this far.”

  “Just tell me, Dad,” I said, as gently as I could. “Just tell me what’s going on.”

  We sat in silence for a long time. I looked over the side of the boat. This early in the spring, the water was amber with tannins close to shore, but out here in the deep it was a cold dark green, opaque with sediment from the melted ice. When I was just about to start the boat, he finally spoke.

  “I have to tell you about the summer when I was ten years old,” he said. “The summer of 1946. None of it makes sense otherwise.”

  “I’m all ears, Dad.”

  He sighed, not looking at me. “There was an old general store about a mile up the road from our house. Old gray wood building, covered with soft drink signs, had a big veranda out front. It’s still there today, but it looks different. I used to walk up there about every day, to pick up things for my mother, buy some sweets for myself if I was lucky.”

  A cloud bank went across the sun, and the air was instantly cooler.

  “Out back of the place the black pickers and sharecroppers hung around. If you wanted to pick up day labor, you went back there, pick from the dozen or so guys hanging around, playing dice, cards, shooting the breeze.”

  “You getting cold?” I interrupted.

  He shook his head. “The day I’m talking about,” he said, “there was no one back there. We had the back of the store all to ourselves. I don’t know why.”

  He talked for the next twenty minutes and then trailed off. I didn’t see a connection with his childhood memories and whatever was bothering him today. He resisted my efforts to probe deeper and gazed at the shoreline across the sound, lost in thought. After a few more minutes, I shrugged, started the motor, and took us across the green water to my dock.

  After a late supper that he had only picked at, we sat in the cabin’s main room. I had a fire going in the wood stove. The old iron pinged and hissed and creaked. He had told me about himself and his little friends in fits and starts throughout the day. The little black child, Eli, grieved me.

  “Sad story,” I said.

  “Sad story,” he agreed. “See
ms funny you have to heat this place in May.”

  “Springtime in Canada, Dad. We get some warm days, but nights are cold.”

  The interior of the cabin was unfinished white pine that had aged to dark gold. Although I had electricity by underwater cable, the service was fragile and unpredictable. On nights like this, I liked to use the gas lanterns. In their warm flickering light, the wooden walls glowed, and shadows danced and gathered to whisper in the rafters. The room looked exactly as it had a hundred years before.

  “Get me a drink, would you?”

  “I was just going to put the kettle on for tea,” I said. “Something hot sound better?”

  “Drink’ll do.”

  When I came back and handed him his rum, he continued to tell me about his tenth summer. I had a hard time picturing the man sitting across from me as a small boy.

  I tried to remember if I had ever seen a photograph of him at that age, and couldn’t.

  “The girl, Wanda,” he said. “She always bothered me the most. I’ve crossed paths with her for the last fifty or sixty years. Every time I think I’ve seen the last of her, she turns up again.”

  “Why does she bother you?” I asked.

  He looked up at me. “She’s ruined my life. She’s after me, her and her son.”

  “She’s after you? What does that mean?”

  “Her life has been one long mess,” he said. “One unending, ugly story of misery. She lost any chance and a lot of it’s my fault. She has every reason to never forgive me.”

  “What did you do? You weren’t responsible for anything that happened to her.”

  “Her mother hung herself in the store. She couldn’t go on. Wanda found her, and that was the worst. No kid should find a parent dead. I think for a girl to find her mother like that--something got broken that no one could ever fix.”

  “That isn’t your problem, is it?”

  “The boy, Eli,” he went on. “I still see his brother Roy. He wasn’t there behind the store, but he saw them take his little brother away to kill him. He’s suffered too, all these years. He did okay for himself though, became a doctor. My doctor these last few years, matter of fact.”

  I thought back. “Clarke was always our family doctor,” I said.

  “Retired. He retired, and I looked up Roy. He’s as old as I am, but he still practices. Better shape for his age than I am, that’s for sure.” He set his glass down and stood up. “I’m going to bed,” he said. “We’ll finish this another time.”

  I gave him a hand up from the deep armchair, and he went off to the spare room. I sat up for a while and nursed the fire, enjoying my tea and the quiet night. I thought about Molly in her warm, lit house across the windy sweep of cold water. I considered calling her, but it meant walking down to the dock to get reception for my phone. She was probably asleep, anyway.

  A long time ago, this island had been a sanctuary. Algonquin Indians had hidden women, children, and old people here while the men battled enemies somewhere else. Tonight, I sensed those old spirits moving around in the dark forest outside.

  Sometimes, the island was a scary place, a doorway to somewhere else. I had been drawn to it, perhaps because I needed healing, or perhaps because I was so damaged that I belonged in a lost land.

  Tonight, it was refuge again, though. It was a haven that had accepted my father and sheltered and hidden him from whatever was chasing him. The black water that surrounded the island was more security than any locked doors could ever be.

  I drained my tea. I could see into the kitchen from where I sat. I looked at the red kettle on the stove and thought about boiling more water. I looked at the ranks of slightly dusty bookshelves on the far wall and thought about getting down a book. I listened to the stove pop and hiss, and my eyes closed. An hour later, I half-woke up, turned down the lamp, and went in to my bed.

  I came awake in the middle of the night. The wind had picked up, and the old cabin creaked on its foundations. I blinked in the dark. There was a figure standing in the doorway of my bedroom. I lay still, my breath stopped. It didn’t move.

  “Dad?”

  “They’re going to get me,” he said. “I have nowhere left to run.”

  “No one’s going to get you, Dad. I’ll keep you safe. I promise. Go back to bed.”

  He stood quietly. “Could I get a glass of water?” he finally asked.

  “Sure, I can get you some water.”

  The floor was cold on my bare feet. I padded out the kitchen and handed him a plastic glass on my way back. I slipped back under my blanket. “Go back to sleep, Dad. I won’t let anyone or anything come to get you. You’re safe here.”

  He didn’t say anything else, and, after a moment, the dark doorway was empty. I was flooded with a vague sadness, a feeling of forever loss. “I promise,” I mumbled. “Cross my heart.”

  I slid back into sleep.

  CHAPTER 7

  Sam Latta,

  Marietta, Georgia, Saturday, August 3, 1946:

  The boy pulled open the door and walked into the store. The man and the girl were behind the counter. She sat on a high stool, a book open in front of her, looking bored and defiant. Her expression brightened when she saw the boy. She sensed diversion. The man stared at him.

  “I know what you did,” the boy said. He addressed both of them. His voice seemed very small, and he tried again. “I know what you did.”

  The woman emerged from the aisles on his right. Her voice was shrill and angry. “You get out of here, boy! You got no business coming in here. You got no business at all!”

  The girl smiled, her eyes shining. The man stood still. His hands rested unmoving on the counter in front of him. His face was expressionless, eyes dark holes in his ruddy face. Although he looked the same, some part of him was gone, and he was less than he had been. His suspenders were slack over his beefy shoulders, as if the portion of his spirit that had left forever had taken some of his physical presence with it. He was becoming a void, and a void was dangerous, because it rushed to be filled by those things that lived in the darkness and waited for human despair and the abandonment of light.

  “I know what you did,” the boy said for a third time, “and I’m telling.”

  The sound of the slap filled his head. He felt the skin on the side of his face sting and flood with red. Tears betrayed his vision, but he didn’t take his eyes away from the man, even as the woman moved close. She pushed him violently. He lost his feet and went to the floor. His knees and elbows knocked on the bare gray boards.

  Slowly, he got to his feet, went back to the screen door, and stood for a moment with his hand on it.

  He was ten years old and slightly small for his age. In that moment, he was more than a boy, and far more than the man he would become. He stood for a moment, looking at them, and the three of them looked at him. Finally, he turned his back and went out into the hot, bright day.

  ***

  Present Day:

  I parked on the street and crossed to the passenger door to help my dad from the jeep. Traffic crawled along the main street. The town was packed, and I was lucky to have found a spot. The pizza parlors and ice cream outlets that lined the street were coming out of their winter hibernation.

  Tiny Ansett was a summer town. It was almost deserted during the winter months. Most of the five hundred permanent residents did their regular business in the small city of Huntsville, twenty miles to the west. The locals looked on their own downtown area as a transient carnival, too crowded in summer and too deserted in winter to bother much with.

  The main drag was dominated by Robertson’s Market, a rambling log structure that was a supermarket, hardware store, garden center, and souvenir stand under one roof. Robertson’s shared a parking lot with the liquor store.

  The Echo Island Pie Company was only coincidentally named after my island. Kate knew the place and was drawn to it long before she met me. Crammed into a tall, narrow old building, it was hard to get one of the six or seven tables in
side.

  Though the summer crowds passed it by, Kate Bean’s coffee shop stayed moderately busy all year, perhaps because it also housed the post office. People came in to pick up their mail and stayed for pastry and conversation. Her tables were usually full of gossipers, eating pie and drinking coffee.

  There was no attempt to discourage summer trade, but the cottagers who came to town were looking for summer fare--beer and paper plates, watermelon and suntan oil. They saw the boats under the main street drawbridge and long-legged girls in tank tops. They heard the exhausts of fast cars and motorcycles, and the summer’s hottest hits blasting from speakers that seemed to be everywhere. They didn’t see a quaint, dim storefront, and they weren’t there for pie and coffee.

  I pulled open the door for my dad. We went in, and I breathed the dim perfumes of nutmeg, cinnamon, fresh coffee, and old wood. The space always made me feel as if I had stepped backward a century, to a time when the essence of life in the area was grim survival rather than summer holiday, and people clung to basic pleasures and simple treats.

  The bell over the door rang, and Kate looked up from behind the counter. Well past her sixtieth birthday, she was beautiful. While Molly had clear, creamy skin and dark hair, Kate was auburn, with blue eyes and faint freckles. She didn’t look like her niece, but they shared a directness and honesty of manner, a basic integrity that marked them more deeply as family than hair color ever could. She came around the counter and gave me a stiff hug.

  I introduced her to my father, and she took his arm and led him to a table. When he was seated, she turned to me and spoke in a low aside. “Has he met Molly?”

  I shook my head. “Not yet.”