by Bob Bickford
“What happened?” she asked, her voice stretched thin.
“Don’t talk, Sydney! Get us off the property, right now!”
She put the van in gear, and I heard whining as the tires spun on the wet blacktop. We left the parking lot and slewed onto the highway.
“Pull over and stop!” I shouted.
From the shoulder of the road, I looked back at the store. There was no movement except for the shimmer of the rain.
“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to yell. We had to get off the property. This is safe enough.”
I sat forward and pulled out my cell phone. I was worried about the wet, but it seemed to be working. I called the police.
Six hours later, Molly and I stood on Lemon Street in front of the police station. The dispatcher had called us a taxi. The rain had stopped, but the street was wet, and absolutely empty. There was a traffic light at each end of the short block. Unsynchronized, they ignored each other, changing color from red to green to yellow with complete disregard for what the other was doing. The place had gone to bed without me, and even with a mostly silent Molly beside me, the loneliness was crushing.
“I’ve never felt so rotten about anything in my life,” I said.
“Hush, Mike.”
“I feel like I caused this.”
“Hush.”
Sydney was long since gone home, and I didn’t remember the city well enough to try walking back to the doctor’s house. Even though I had grown up in the area, the place felt alien to me, like something I had once dreamed. I saw the cab’s headlights turn into the street, and I stepped out and waved.
Wanda’s death was apparently a suicide, but it was still under cursory investigation. Sydney, Molly and I had watched from the backs of separate police cruisers as emergency crews attended the general store. The circumstances of my finding the body were confused and uncomfortable. Sydney had quietly advised me to stick with the truth and refer any questions I was unsure of to Crider the lawyer. The police officers who had spoken with me had progressed during the evening from vague excitement and suspicion to bored disinterest. They finally let us go.
The old doctor met us at his front door, wearing a plaid bathrobe. “I would have picked you up,” he said. “Hungry? Coffee? Tea?”
I thought about it, and Molly answered for both of us. “Tea would be all right, thanks.”
We sat at his kitchen table and watched him boil water and make toast. When it was ready, he sat with us.
“I’ll be glad to get home, Roy,” I sighed.
“I bet. You’re okay to go? They didn’t tell you not to leave town or anything?”
“No. At first they were a little bit pushy with me. I think Wanda and her son are known to them, though. I hate to say it, but they’re--”
“Trailer trash,” he finished drily. “No tears shed for her loss. I’m familiar with the phenomenon. Did young Arthur show up?”
“I never saw him, no. They kept us at the store for about an hour before they drove us to the station to talk to us. They still hadn’t taken her out at that point, and I never saw Arthur.”
He stood up, walked to the counter, and dropped more bread into the toaster. He spoke with his back to me. “So you think that’s it? You think she was your blackmailer?”
“I think so, yes. Her son probably was involved to some degree, but I don’t care. It’s over.”
“Do you feel like you slew your dad’s dragon, so to speak?”
“I would never have wished this on anyone,” I said sharply. “I didn’t want her to get away with torturing my father, but I didn’t want anyone dead either.”
He came back to the table and set a plate of toast in front of me. “Not what I meant. I’m asking if you feel more at peace about things.”
“I’m not sure, Roy.” I sighed. “It’s been a hell of a day. I’d like to say that I righted a wrong, but I didn’t. To be honest, I don’t know why my dad gave her any money, or gave in to blackmail. She couldn’t have seemed like much of a threat.”
“That may be where her son came in,” he said. “There may have been physical intimidation. Arthur’s kind of a pathetic creep, but he’s no stranger to physical threats on folks who are weaker than him. I can tell you from experience, age is a humbling process.” He sipped at his tea, lost in his own thoughts for a moment.
I sat quietly.
“For a strong man like your father, realizing that he was no match any more for a cowardly punk like Arthur could have been devastating. If he was drinking, and already prone to depression, who knows what kind of obsessive thinking could have developed. If he was feeding them money to leave him alone, and it finally ran out, that might have been the end of him.”
“It all fits,” I said. “I guess the question is whether I leave Arthur alone, knowing what I do.”
“Yes,” Molly said. “Enough. Your dad never wanted this. It’s time for us to get home.”
“I can tell you, he’s going to be lost without his mama, more than you think. Without her around, he’s going to dry up and blow away. I can bet you he’ll be dead of one thing or another inside a year. I guess you’ll have to follow your heart.”
“Right now I’m too tired to feel anything, Roy. I’m grateful for your kindness. It’s nice seeing you, but right now I wish I was home.”
“Molly tells me you have a big reason to get yourself home,” he smiled. “Nice surprise.”
“What is it? She won’t tell me.”
“And you think I will? You think I got this old by being foolish?”
Molly laughed. She wagged a finger at Roy. “Hush, you,” she warned. “Not a word.”
“Not a word,” he repeated, smiling broadly. “Sorry, Mike. I think too much of this girl to get on her bad side.”
I felt good about that. A bit of the day’s dread eased itself off of me.
“Do you want to take care of your parent’s ashes before you go? We can do it in the morning.”
I did. It was time to send them on their way.
“Yes, please,” I said. “We’ll do it in the morning.”
CHAPTER 25
Roy Tull,
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Tuesday, June 5, 1956
The hand-painted sign over the front door read Domus Corvi in Solem, which was someone’s attempt at Latin. Crows in the Sun House was neither a fraternity nor a sorority. It was a large, comfortable off-campus dwelling for Negro students at the university. In a student body of just over seven thousand souls, seventeen were black, and eleven of those lived at Crows in the Sun. The neighborhood had been wealthy before the century’s turn, and the house was enormous. It was white with red shutters and needed paint.
Four young women occupied the ground floor, while the second and third stories belonged to the men. A fifty-year-old widow owned the place and ruled the students under her roof with an iron hand. They accepted her laws and edicts with mostly good humor. As student housing went, it was remarkably clean and quiet.
Roy was at the back of the third floor. It was warm, but an electric fan sat by the window blowing air across the room. It rattled at the end of each sweep before it started back the other way. There was a pitcher of ice water on the dresser. The curtains were green plaid and moved gently. The room was drowsy and pleasant. Roy stretched on the bed and considered a nap.
Far below him, he heard the screen door slam and then the sound of voices in the front hall. Steps, more than one person, climbed the carpeted stairs to the second floor, and then continued up the wooden ones to the third. Voices murmured their way down the hall to him.
“Here you are, ma’am. You have a visitor, Roy.”
“Thank you,” the woman said.
He rolled his legs off of the bed and sat up. It was the dark-haired woman, Ava, who had been in the car that went off the bridge a decade before. For a white woman to enter the bedroom of a Negro man in the Chapel Hill of the day was outside of any possible propriety, but this one was a sort of royalty, and
beyond such things. She swept in by herself.
“Should I leave the door open?” she asked.
“Open is fine, ma’am,” he answered.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t call me ‘ma’am.’ We’ve discussed that, Roy. I’m thirty-four, not old enough to be your mother or even your Sunday school teacher.” She pulled the straight chair out from the small desk. “May I?”
Roy was embarrassed that he hadn’t offered. He didn’t know how to act around her. It wasn’t that she was white, or even that she was beautiful. He could have adjusted to those things. She was ethereal, not quite real. She always seemed to be intensely present, absorbed and interested in him and in the moment, with a completeness that was unique. At the same time she had an air of indifference, a disregard for whatever was outside of her focus. The risk that she took visiting him didn’t merit her passing consideration.
She came to see him once a year. Her bond to him was permanent. He had possibly saved her sister from drowning when she was trapped in the rear seat of the big sedan, but Roy felt it was more than that. There had been recognition, a connection, the moment that they saw each other. It was familial. She had asked him what he wanted most, and he had said he wanted to be a doctor. She had stayed the course to get him there, opening doors and providing money for tuition and his living expenses. A local lawyer was liaison, but she came to him every summer.
Today she wore a pale green sleeveless dress that had a full skirt. When she sat down, he caught the scent of gardenias and the tiniest trace of her musk from the day’s heat. Her nose was straight and her eyes were still and dark.
She sat and looked at him, perhaps to note if he had changed since last summer. “You did well this year,” she said.
“I work hard. Held down a job nights, too. I can give you some money to help pay my way.”
“You already paid your way, Roy. I don’t need your money, and I don’t want you jeopardizing your marks clearing tables.”
“I won’t,” he said. “The job hasn’t gotten in the way of my books.”
“You’re working six nights a week. That’s nearly as many hours as a grown man not in school. I want you to stop.”
He was surprised. “How do you know? Are you checking on me?”
“Roy, this isn’t just about you. You’ve brought me into your dream now. And quite honestly, there are enough busboys in the South, and not even a fraction of the colored doctors that are needed. At least promise me that you’ll cut your work hours in half.”
He thought about it. “I believe I could cut back a couple of shifts a week,” he said.
She smiled at him full force. “In half,” she said. “And no girls! No kissing when you should be studying!”
He felt the blood drain from his face.
“There will be time for girls and kisses later.” She laughed. “But not now.”
He paused a beat, stared at her, and then stood up and headed for the door. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he stammered. “Don’t feel so good. I need to splash some cold water on my face.”
He bolted up the hall. Her voice followed him.
“I’ll know if you do,” she called, teasing. “I’ll see it on your face! I’ll always know what you did, Roy Tull. One look at your face, and I’ll always know what you did!”
***
Present Day:
“I guess I go on alone from here,” I said. “Both of them gone. It didn’t really hit me ’til now. I guess you enjoy the connections while you have them, because in the end you’re alone.”
We were in the old graveyard. The sun was hot. We had dressed with respect to the occasion, but when Roy and I began to take turns digging the shallow hole, our jackets and ties had come off. Molly had wanted to take a turn, worried about his age. Roy declined her offer, feigning outrage. It was just the three of us, in among the headstones, along with whatever ethereal company we had drawn.
“I think the opposite is true,” Roy said. “We’re all alone when we step through that door, but only briefly. You can’t take anything along, and no one can go with you. You’re alone for that split second you step over that big gulf, and I think you decide in that moment what’s going to be on the other side. You’re not alone, you’re never going to be again, and you understand that you never were.”
“My dad always said life was a long series of goodbyes.”
“No goodbyes where they’ve gone,” Molly said. “No more ever.”
She turned me to her and enfolded me. She was citrusy and floral and soft in my arms. I knew that however strange the place, she was my home. I looked over her shoulder.
There was a tree twenty or thirty yards away. A young boy sat on the lowest branch, swinging his legs. His dog was lying on the ground beneath him, head on paws. The boy saw me looking at him. His face split in a smile that was brilliant even at a distance, and he waved enthusiastically at me. I winked back at him.
“I’ll arrange for a marker for them later, if you leave me their particulars.”
“Nice. Thank you.”
I looked at the boy in the tree. His head had swollen to the size of a pumpkin. One eye was gone, and his flesh hung in tatters. I smiled at him, ever so slightly.
“I know who you are, Eli,” I murmured.
As if satisfied that he had identified himself, he reverted to his normal appearance. His sunny smile was back. Between us, the old man leaned on the shovel, resting, and looked at the road.
“I hate good-byes,” Molly said.
An elderly red pickup slowed a little as it came abreast and then accelerated noisily past. It disappeared around the bend a half-mile away, leaving behind heat shimmer that made the road look wet.
“It never really ends, you know,” Roy answered. “We mark the ends of things, but it all goes on and on. You’re a part of something that never stops, not even after you’re gone, and you live better when you remember that. They’re on their way, and I guess now you’re on your way too.”
“We’re on our way home,” I agreed. “Let’s go.”
We walked out of the cemetery. As I passed through the gate, I turned back to wave to Eli, but the tree was empty.
I found myself once again in Robert Crider’s office. The lawyer’s secretary wasn’t at her desk, so I sat down to wait for someone to appear. The inner door was ajar, and after only a few seconds the man peered out. I re-introduced myself, and he looked confused. Just as quickly, his brow cleared as he placed me. He waved me in.
“I won’t keep you,” I said. “I have a plane out of here this afternoon. We won’t be recovering any of my father’s missing money.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “The market isn’t going to yield much equity in the house. There’s certainly going to be a shortfall, and that likely makes your position as heir untenable. We’ll proceed as best we can without you.”
“No,” I said, smiling. “Settle the estate. I’m his son. If he owes money, I’ll take care of it. He didn’t raise me to do anything different. He doesn’t deserve to leave here in debt to anybody at all, and he won’t.”
He looked across his desk at me, surprised. He stood up and shook my hand, and I left him. I felt like I was losing a heavy burden, little by little, scattering my father’s ashes in the wind.
We said an emotional farewell to Roy Tull on the front steps of his lovely, crooked house. Sydney Cotton’s green van waited for us at the curb.
Roy promised a visit. I promised to take care of Molly.
“All right,” Molly said. “I’ve said it before. I hate good-byes. I’m going. Come see us. Her eyes suddenly brimmed, and she hugged him. “This has been a lot, hasn’t it, Roy? It’s been a lot. Come see us where it’s happier.”
“I will. Love you, young lady,” the old man said. “See you soon.”
I picked up our bags and went to the street. I got in, put my seatbelt on, and waved. The old man waved back, turned, and went into his sinking, doomed home.
Behind the wheel
, Sydney looked tense.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Arthur Sutton’s car was parked here when I drove up. He moved when he saw me. I’m pretty sure he’s sitting around the corner. He has another man with him.”
“Well, let’s just go,” I said. “He can play whatever game he’s playing. He’s only interested in me, and I’m leaving.”
“Ever heard of drive-by shootings?” she asked. “Who knows what frame of mind this man is in.”
I saw that she had her pistol wedged on the seat beside her.
“Don’t you worry about shooting yourself in the leg if you go over a bump?”
“Screw you. I don’t like this a bit.”
“C’mon Sydney, he’s been following us around for days.”
“Let’s go, Mike,” Molly urged. “I don’t like this.”
We turned the corner and saw that the old Pontiac wagon was parked at the side of the road. I leaned forward to look in the rear view mirror on my side. The car pulled out to follow us.
“Wait until we’re away from the houses,” I said. “I don’t need someone calling the cops. At the top of the street there’s a place you can stop. There’s a small parking lot you can pull into.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I’m going to see what he wants. I have a plane to catch. I don’t want to be screwing around with him at the airport.”
“You’re not paying me to do this, you know.”
“I have news for you,” I smiled. “I paid your bill yesterday, remember? This is all out of the goodness of your heart.”
The parking area at the end of the road was empty. Sydney pulled in and stopped, leaving the engine running. As I got out, I saw that she held the gun in her lap. I walked to the rear of the van. The old wagon was parked twenty or thirty yards away. The front doors opened, and Arthur and the dreadlocked man I had seen him with before got out. He was carrying a pistol down by his side.
“Put the fucking gun away, asshole!” Sydney called.
