by Bob Bickford
Molly walked past both of us and went directly to Arthur. My heart was in my throat. She took his hand.
“He’s just lost his mother, for God’s sake,” she called back to us. “Put the guns away.”
I joined them.
“What do you want?” she asked him gently.
“Gotta talk to you.”
“So talk to me,” she said. “You don’t need the gun to talk to us.”
Up close, I was aware of how unhealthy he seemed under the muscles and tattoos. His skin had a yellow cast that was mirrored in the whites of his eyes and his teeth. His henna-colored hair and light irises enhanced the effect. He smelled of dope and looked as though he hadn’t slept in days.
“I’m sorry about your mother, Arthur,” I said. “It’s a hell of a thing.”
My sympathy was genuine, and for a moment he was taken aback. He sagged, and looked lost for a moment before visibly struggling to recover his anger. “They told me you found her. Was it you put her there?”
“I found her,” I said gently. “No one put her there. She put herself there.”
“You might as well have,” he stormed. “Harassing her. Phoning her at all hours like you did.”
“I talked to her once, Arthur,” I said, “about my own father. I wanted to talk to her again, but I was too late. I never called her. What do you know about my father?”
“I don’t know nothing about your fucking father,” he said. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re driving a nice car, a new motorcycle, a boat. Lots of new toys. Where’d you get the money for all that?”
“I’m a businessman. Where I get my money’s not your business, bitch.”
“It is, if it belonged to my father,” I said. “Is that where you got it?”
“Only if he’s my customer.”
He turned to the man behind him. “Do you know his daddy, Leon? Is he our customer?”
The man didn’t answer. He stared at us impassively, arms crossed, gun dangling.
“Did you get money from your mother?” I asked.
“My mother had a check for six hundred and seventy-eight motherfucking dollars once a month, motherfucker. Anything else she got from me.”
“There’s nothing else to talk about, Arthur,” I said, and started to turn away. “Leave me alone. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“She didn’t kill herself, you know,” he said. “I know she didn’t.”
I turned back and stared at him.
“They found her with one slipper on her foot. I found the other one in the hall by the door. You think she went out to do a suicide wearing one shoe?”
“She wasn’t herself,” I said. “I’m sure she wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“Well, she wasn’t in her right mind to take my car,” he said. “She knew better’n that. She had no fucking license either. But you know why else she didn’t kill herself?”
I waited.
“She was too fucking mean, that’s why. She might’ve killed someone else, but not herself.”
I turned and started for the van. We were done.
“Which leaves you, turkey,” he called after me. “The midnight caller. Unless you scared her into it, saying you know what she done, over and over. You wait, fucker. We’ll be talking again.”
I stopped in my tracks. “What did you say, Arthur?”
He was already in the wagon, and the hot rod engine turned over and rumbled. The rear tires shrieked and then grabbed when he turned out onto the street.
“Did you hear that?” I asked Molly. “She was getting phone calls. Like my dad. The caller knows what she did.”
She shrugged, and got in the van. Sydney heard what we said and shook her head.
“Fuck it,” she said, and rolled her window down and lit a cigarette. “Who knows if someone was calling her. Sounds like bullshit, to cover up the fact that he was the one making phone calls.”
“Could that be true, though? That she was being called too? ‘I know what you did’?”
“He’s blowing smoke up your ass, Mike. He has guilty knowledge, and he’s playing you. He doesn’t know what you’re going to do, so he’s laying down a bunch of crap. He knew about the calls--so what? He probably made them on his mom’s behalf. He has kind of a high, husky voice.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Anyway, he’s out of your life. You’re done with this, off to a different country. This whole sorry mess is finished.” She threw her cigarette out of the window. “Let’s go get your plane.”
***
The departure board told me it was seventeen minutes until boarding. I rested, beyond dozing, beyond moving, at peace. Molly had her head on my shoulder. I needed to think about my father, but at some point in the future, not now. Wanda’s death had put him to rest.
I was startled when the phone in my hand vibrated.
“Hello?”
“I know what you did.”
I was stunned. The force of the caller was appalling, something old and sick and twisted. I felt sick to my stomach. It felt like Wanda on the other end, though that was impossible.
“I know what you did?” My voice seemed loud. “Is that your only line, fucker? I know what you did?”
I heard a tiny click as we were disconnected. “Fuck,” I breathed to myself.
“What is it, Mike?” Molly asked, alarmed. “Who was that?”
It was ridiculous to think that Wanda was calling me. Calling me from the store. It had to be her son. Maybe we needed to go back and get the police involved, after all.
I looked at the exit, over at the security gate. I heard our flight announced, and the airline person opened the door to the jet way. I shook it off. I had had enough. I stood up, shouldered my bag, and led Molly onto the plane.
“Are you okay?” Molly asked. She looked over at me from her window seat and touched my hand. We were at cruising altitude, and people were moving in the aisles.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m not sure that I’ll ever be relaxed on an airplane again.”
Her eyes were sympathetic. “I know. You never really told me. How do you feel about your dad killing those men?”
“I don’t know. The story fits him.”
“Fits how?” she asked. “He was a school teacher. He never showed you anything violent, did he?”
“No, not at all. He seemed...impervious? He didn’t care about violence, somehow. I’m not sure how brave he was. He just wasn’t impressed by violence or threats.”
The drinks cart reached us. The cabin attendants chocked the wheels and began to lean across seats in bright inquiry, anxious to pour. I waved them off.
“I’m going to have a beer,” Molly said. “I hate beer, but I’m in the mood. What’s a good beer, Mike?”
“They’re all good. No reason to be picky about beer.” When she had been served and taken a sip, she settled into her seat and I went on. “I think that was part of his strange popularity as a teacher,” I said. “Strange because Mr. Tibbs he definitely wasn’t. He didn’t take any shit from any of his students, but he wasn’t trying to be tough either. Tough kids didn’t impress him, and I think he actually got through to a few of them because of it. They respected it. It was genuine in the sense that he wasn’t capable of being intimidated.”
The cabin was jarred as we passed through turbulence, and the seat belt light illuminated. I gripped my armrests tightly. Molly peeled the fingers on the hand nearest her loose and held them in her lap.
“Oh, boy,” I said, and let my breath out. “One time when I lived in California, he took it into his head to visit me. It was weird. I have no idea why. He took the bus instead of flying because it was cheaper. Three days and nights of sitting in the same seat to save a buck. Imagine. His bus got into downtown LA just after midnight. I didn’t even live in LA but that didn’t matter to him. He knew I lived in Southern California, so Los Angeles was where he was getting off.”
The plane lurched, and the plastic pa
nels in the cabin rattled. It didn’t seem so bad with my hand captured on Molly’s lap.
“So there I am in the very worst part of downtown, and in the ’80s the downtown bus terminal wasn’t a place you wanted to be even in the daytime. They had security guards prowling around who looked like they belonged on death row, and at night the sidewalks out front looked like a war zone with all of the homeless people sleeping on the ground.”
“I thought you guys were completely out of touch after you left home,” she said.
“Mostly we were. There was just that one visit. He spent three days on a bus, stayed with me for two, got bored, and got back on for the three day ride home.”
“He must have cared a lot about you to do that, Mike. I don’t imagine you were entirely pleasant at that point in your life.”
I thought about it and shook my head. “He wanted to eat at this twenty-four-hour cafeteria that was a downtown LA landmark. It had been there for about seventy years or so, and I remember the food on the menu was like stuff you would have seen in the 1930s. Tapioca pudding for dessert, like that. Bizarre. He absolutely had to go there to eat. It was the only thing he showed the slightest interest in the whole time he was there.”
“So you took him?”
“I did. The place was close enough to the terminal that we decided to walk. At one o’clock in the morning, there we were, walking down the meanest streets in California. There were scary people staring at us everywhere I looked. I was twenty or twenty-one, and I’ll tell you a secret. Most twenty-year-old guys have the delusion that they’re tough. I did too, but I was scared to death. Scared to death.”
I paused, remembering, and trying to think of the words for what I was trying to say. “I looked over at him. He was probably close to fifty years old, and not very big. A school teacher. He was getting the evil eye from all these potential muggers, and he didn’t care. He refused to even notice them. He wasn’t afraid because he just didn’t care, and it made him one of the scariest guys on the street that night.”
“Maybe it was an act for your benefit,” she said. “Or maybe he really was brave. Or some of both.”
“I don’t think it was an act, Molly. It’s really the way he was. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he saw something so awful when he was a kid that it scarred him. He wasn’t tough. He just wasn’t able to really care what happened to him anymore.”
“Maybe it’s something else, Mike. Maybe he never cared much what happened to him, because he cared so much about what happened to everyone else. Maybe when you kill a dragon when you’re only ten years old, you never get to be the same as other people again.”
PART III
ECHO ISLAND
ONTARIO, CANADA
CHAPTER 26
Eli Tull,
Milton County, Georgia, Saturday, August 12, 1967:
Eli sat in the choir loft and watched dust motes float in the colored light. He was bored in the way of young children, which is vastly different than the boredom of adults. Grown-up ennui was a defeat, selfishness, a deadening of the senses to wonder. A child’s boredom was an explosive charge of curiosity and interest that was restless. It simply hadn’t yet locked onto a target.
He understood that he was dead, but he didn’t know yet quite what it meant, or what he was supposed to do about it. He did know that he had to wait. He had somewhere to go, but not yet. There was something not revealed, and, as a child, he accepted the reality of that, however impatiently. He had a feeling that it had something to do with his older brother, who he loved with the usual adoration that was the way of younger brothers.
He had already waited twenty-one years in this place, and there were decades of waiting still to come, but time meant nothing to him. A year and a minute were the same.
The church had been built for a white congregation, but a Roman Catholic one that was in retreat in the state, and so it had been abandoned to the black Baptist worshipers who used it now. Consequently, it had a choir loft stretching across the back wall, although the current choir sang on Sundays at the front of the church. There was a piano up there that was kept in tune and used by the locals for lessons and practice.
The original tenants had left behind the glorious windows, rich with images of blood and martyrdom. In very late afternoon, just before sunset, the western-exposed glass made the air heavy with glowing blues and reds. It was then that Eli liked to come and play in the choir loft. He thought that the colored atmosphere gave him substance. Today, however, the soft warm light didn’t hold its usual fascination for him. He fidgeted.
He sat up, interested, as the church door banged open beneath him. Footsteps scuffed the boards below and then noisily mounted the stairs to where he sat. He watched as first the head and then the shoulders of a boy about his own age came into view. The youngster was carrying a thin book of sheet music. It was borrowed, old and delicate, and the boy had been cautioned again and again to treat it with reverence. He set it on the piano and wandered over to the rail. He stood looking down at the pews for several minutes, but nothing happened. He eventually sighed and turned to the piano, settled on the bench, and began to play.
There was an old hymnal in the rack on the seat back in front of Eli. He stared at it and steadied his breathing. He closed his eyes and concentrated and then launched his shoe at the book, a mighty kick. It shifted a fraction of an inch. When it rocked back, it made a tiny click, the barest tapping sound.
The boy at the piano stopped playing and looked over his shoulder at the noise. Seeing nothing behind him, he resumed his playing.
Eli shifted his hips for more leverage and closed his eyes again. He felt the energy inside him as it built. When it climaxed, his foot shot out and connected with the pew in front of him. This time there was a satisfying knock from the varnished wood. He sat up and looked at the other boy. He had turned himself around on the bench and sat, wide-eyed, piano forgotten. Eli sat facing him, smothering giggles, until the boy turned back around and began to play, much softer than he had been. His shoulders were hunched, as if he expected a blow from behind.
It was time to change tactics. Eli stood up and walked carefully around to the other side of the piano, where there was a grouping of items that had been placed upstairs for storage. There were several stands made of filigreed metal for holding flowers, and assorted other items that were seldom used. He spotted what he was looking for. It was a tall candle holder, a relic of the Roman ritual, with a circular base made of polished wood. It still held the half of a desiccated candles. The smell of ancient beeswax from it was faint and pleasant.
The slender holder was as tall as his chest. He braced his legs, grasped the carved wood, and pushed. It didn’t budge. He looked at the other boy, who was concentrating again on the sheet music in front of him. Eli swung his arms back and forth in a wide arc, limbering them until he felt ready. On his toes, he leaned himself against the candle holder and began to push. There was no movement. He closed his eyes and concentrated all of his essence, all of his will. There was an imperceptible shift under his hands and then, in a rush, he felt his balance change as gravity took the job away from him.
The candle holder toppled and hit the floor with a clatter. The boy at the piano sat bolt upright, eyes wide and rolling. In dreadful slow motion, he stood up and turned toward the stairs, trapped in a frozen, sluggish body that hardly moved. Then all at once the spell broke. He yelled out loud and pelted down the steps in a tangle of arms and legs, with Eli trailing behind. He crashed into the door. It flew open with a bang and he was flying across the packed dirt of the dooryard, windmilling out to the road, running until he disappeared up the dirt lane.
Eli came behind him, laughing with the sheer happiness of the moment. He jumped and whooped. It would be impossible to watch the small boy, dancing alone in the churchyard, leaping and spinning with the purest joy, and not to smile along with him.
Shadows were lengthening across the churchyard as Eli, still giddy and reeling with the hilarity of
it all, skipped back toward the tiny cemetery behind the church. He bent and scooped a handful of tiny pebbles, then reared back and threw them as far as he could, a final burst of gladness.
It had been a good day after all.
***
Present Day:
I was glad to get back to the lake and my island, back to the melody of pine and rock and water that had become essential to me. I wanted to feel the sun and wind and cold spray that had become home, get back to the beaches and barbeques of a Canadian summer, back to the place where past and present, light and dark, seemed to overlap like no other place that I knew.
On the marina docks, Molly stood and waited for me to finish fueling my boat. The breeze off of the water blew away the gasoline fumes and brought me the odor of warming water, trees, and wood fires. Over all of it, the subtle coconut-oil fragrance of summer lingered.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Molly fish in her shoulder bag and then put her cell phone to her ear. “It’s the doctor,” she said, handing it to me.
“I’ve been thinking about that visit,” he said. “Do you think I still can do it? Impose on you as a guest?”
“We’d love it.”
“I’ve never been to Canada, and always wanted to. At my age, you start to think as much about what you haven’t done as what you have, and it starts to seem like the first list is a lot longer than the second.” He laughed. “If I flew up there, just say for an afternoon, you’d be able to get me to a hotel? I could fly out the next day. Kill two birds with one stone; talk to you and cross Canada off my list. Am I being rude? Inviting myself?”
“You aren’t being rude. Hang on a sec.”
I conferred briefly with Molly. She took the phone.
“You’re staying with me,” she said. “There are no hotels nearby. There’s a small town near us, but no hotel for about thirty miles. I live on shore and my house is a bit less rustic than Mike’s cabin. I have lots of room.”
