Captain Kiss
By Robert Kinerk
After my mother died, I wanted to kiss everyone and have everyone kiss me. I was only four, so I don’t have my own memories about this part of my life. What I know is what aunts and uncles have said. They’ve told me I was clingy, that I’d pucker up for a kiss and climb on someone’s lap. I surprised one uncle with a kiss when he was napping on a couch. He flinched at the touch of my lips, but when he sat up he called me the kissing bandit. I do remember that.
I don’t want to blame my mother for this kissing frenzy. Her death meant more than my aberration. I’m still dealing with what it meant, but by the time I started school—the time when memories begin—I had outgrown whatever fear or need had driven me to press my lips against the lips of relatives. That compulsion went away until I was twelve, in 1952. That year, I wanted to be Captain Kiss for Halloween.
I had a stepsister by then. She was only eight, but even she knew being Captain Kiss was not a good idea.
“People will laugh at you, Benny,” Bump said. Her real name was Monica but she answered to Bump, a nickname the family gave her because of how she hobbled on her crutches. Bump had had polio when she was just a baby. When we called her Bump and people saw her crutches, they’d say we were callous. But Bump wouldn’t answer to Monica. She saw Bump the way we saw it, as a sign of affection.
Twelve-year-olds know the danger of dressing up to look like a super-hero and calling themselves Captain Kiss. At twelve, hormones are coming to a boil. You’re not a little kid anymore. You can look at your body and see changes. All this had happened to me. I wasn’t goofy. I wasn’t nuts. I wanted to be Captain Kiss, and I understand that now—or I believe I understand my strange desire—as a throwback to being four and needing all the reassurance kisses can provide.
Bump watched me use my stepmother’s lipstick to make a big K on a white tee shirt. That was going to be part of my costume. I had rescued a checkered table cloth out of my stepmother’s basket of rags. That would be my cape. I had a store-bought eye mask, the black kind I’d seen burglars wear in Donald Duck comic books.
“I’m going to tell.” Bump’s warning was quiet and solemn.
I knew she meant she would tell her mom about the lipstick. “I’m not going to use it all,” I said. I certainly didn’t intend to use it all, but as it turned out the lipstick was almost entirely gone by the time I filling in the outlines of the K. Bump had stood a witness to the entire coloring-in. She hadn’t tattled when tattling would have saved a fraction of her mother’s lipstick. Now that it was gone she knew she was too much involved to hobble off and squeal on me.
She still had warnings, though. “Everyone will laugh, Benny.”
Despite foreknowledge of the laughter that might come, Bump went trick-or-treating with me. She went as Little Bo-Peep, with a billowing skirt and one of those bucket-shaped hats shepherdesses must have worn a million years ago. She didn’t have a shepherd’s crook. She had all she could do to handle her crutches and carry the pillowcase she hoped to fill with Halloween treats. Neighbors knew Bo-Peep was actually Bump, and in their kindness they were generous with their candy and their praise of her costume. No one bothered asking me who I was, so I didn’t have to tell them anything about my Captain Kiss disguise. It gave me pause to be so pointedly ignored. It made me know my Captain Kiss identity wasn’t universally appealing. It was appealing only in solitude. It had a nighttime appeal, the appeal of the bedroom mirror, private and personal.
By the time we finished rick-or-treating our immediate neighborhood, which meant visits to eight widely spaced homes, Bump’s limp was more pronounced. She did not complain, and for about a solid minute we stood looking across a picket fence at the home of a boy we called Eddie the Brat. He had a sandbox and a swing set and a lawn that was, by the standards of southeast Alaska, immense. He’d left his bicycle carelessly lying across his concrete walk. The bike and swing set glistened with the mist of the evening’s soft rain. I felt the rain on my hair. My cape no longer billowed behind me. It had become too soggy.
Our stop was, ostensibly, to ask ourselves if we should trick-or-treat at Eddie’s home. Actually, we’d stopped so Bump would have a chance to rest, but we didn’t speak about that. We debated, instead, the pros and cons of unlatching Eddie’s gate and approaching his front door. The pros of that decision included Eddie’s mom, who worked hard to woo friends for her only child. The con part was Eddie himself, who was selfish with his toys and bossy to those he let play in his yard. Not that I played with an eight-year-old, but I knew his reputation. The pluses and minuses of his character were what Bump ran through in the minute or so we spent staring at the lighted windows of his house. I think if we’d seen decorations out in front we might have ventured up the path, but his porch light wasn’t even on. We saw no hint of welcome, so it was almost as if Eddie had made the decision for us. Bump and I didn’t even have to voice what that decision was. We trudged back to our house, where Bump held my sleeve for a second and said she wished she could come with me more. Her pillow-case goodie-bag was only lightly filled. I told her I’d share what I got elsewhere, and as she struggled up the steps to our front door, I trotted off alone as Captain Kiss, uncertain about what I might do if the mockery Bump envisioned actually came, but wishing to be kissed, wishing, on some deep level, to plug into a secret affection that might be flowing through the night.
We lived near the top of a hill where the woods refused to retreat. Towering evergreens threatened everybody’s yard. Our road was still dirt because the city of Boon hadn’t incorporated our neighborhood yet. A volunteer association had contributed street lamps, though not a lot of them. They cast pools of light that showed like islands in the more general dark. Further down the hill, the houses were closer together, and the street lights brighter. The road there intersected with the island’s main road, and I made my way toward that intersection after I told Bump goodbye. I was still in the darker area, though, when, in the shadows ahead, I saw a girl standing so still she might have been waiting for company where the dark would protect her from being too clearly seen.
“Do I smell like I’ve been smoking?” She spoke as soon as I was close enough so to hear. I recognized her voice. Her real name was Hilda but she had changed it to Trixie in the eighth grade. She did it so the boys would like her better. That’s what my stepmother told me. My stepmother had spoken sarcastically to let me know she did not like the purpose behind Hilda’s change of name. I had to construct, in my own 12-year-old thoughts, what it meant for a girl to hope boys would like her better.
Trixie came close to breathe in my face. I caught a hint of cigarette smoke. “Not much,” I told her. She cupped her hands around her nose to try to smell her breath herself, then she asked me if I had some mints in my candy bag. I opened a box of Junior Mints I’d gotten and shook some of those chocolate-covered treats into her hand. After she had popped one in her mouth she studied my costume a second, then said, “What are you supposed to be?”
Trixie was my height, but I was tall for my age. I think she was fifteen. She looked older, though, and her blonde hair was cut and shaped in a grown-up style. To me it looked natural, but what did I know about the naturalness of a girl’s hair. It curled around her jawline and curled in at her neck. Something mechanical had made those curls perfect.
I told her I was an adventure hero. She asked, “What does the K stand for?”
I said, “What do you think it stands for?”
She laughed.
Even to this day I’m glad I had the sense to make the answer I did. If I had told her the K stood for Kiss, I don’t know what she would have said. As it turned out, she kissed me later, but I don’t think a kiss was on her mind when we stood in the dark sharing my Junior Mints.
“If you see Brent, don’t tell him you saw me.”
She said that just before she headed up the hill. I stood and watched the graceful way she strolled. She didn’t seem to be in any hurry. I wondered if she’d been invited to a Halloween party at some high-school kid’s house. The thought made me jealous. I felt shut out, which was a silly feeling because I didn’t even know if there would be a party, although in my imagination I could see a darkened living room with bigger boys and girls enjoying the freedoms darkness bestows.
The Brent she mentioned was my cousin. Trixie probably knew how we were related. Boon is such a small town everyone knows almost everybody else. That’s especially true when a person’s in school. You know all your classmates’ brothers and sisters, and often you know who their cousins are. Brent was a cousin on my father’s side, a son of my father’s sister, so his last name was different from mine.
I told myself I’d only go halfway down the hill, but my collection of candy was growing, and one more house always seemed like a good idea. Now I was among knots of younger kids—some of them cowboys, some princesses. I saw a family of ghosts in homemade costumes and a devil in a costume someone must have sent away for to an actual costume store. His tights were red. He had a red vest. He even had a tail.
Three different women, coming to their doors with treats in bowls, asked who I was supposed to be. Two times I was with clamoring trick-or-treaters, and the candy-givers’ questions got lost in the children’s shrill ‘Thank you’s.’ In answer to the third woman, I only smiled. She instantly supplemented her question with another. “Are you supposed to be a bandit?” To that, I laughed, which was answer enough. If she had asked about the K, now somewhat smeared across my chest, I don’t think I would have said it stood for Kiss. The night, despite the generosity of homeowners and the giddiness of the candy-mad children, had not lifted my spirits. My spirits were a twelve year old’s. They didn’t soar like a five-year-old’s would. If a really, really close friend had asked me, I would have said I was a kissing bandit. A close friend would have understood, but not a woman wearing what I thought must be her husband’s cardigan sweater and handing miniature Tootsie Rolls out to trick-or-treaters. The sleeves of the sweater kept slipping over her hands. That’s what made me think it must be her husband’s. If it had been he who came to the door, I would have had further reason not to mention Kiss in my explanation of who I was supposed to be. It would be hard enough to say that to a woman. It would be disaster to say to a man, “I am the superhero, Captain Kiss.”
My discovery of this danger rose out of uneasy feelings I didn’t have names for. My uneasiness had grown since I had lost the always solemn and sometimes grouchy company of Bump. So I was glad when the nervous laugh I released served to answer the Tootsie Roll woman.
I had by then reached the main road. My pillow-case goodie bag must have weighed two pounds. I had made up my mind to make the house across the street my last trick-or-treat destination and was unlatching its gate when my cousin Brent passed me in a Plymouth driven by one of his high-school friends. Two other friends were with them, and they had all been drinking. I found that out after the driver slammed on the brakes and threw the Plymouth into reverse. The car came weaving back up the road until Brent could lean out of his passenger window and yell, “Benny, my man,” in an exhilarated and demanding way.
Why, ‘My man?’ His greeting was condescending.
Brent would have been a junior in high school if he hadn’t been kicked out. He never admitted, at least to me, he’d been kicked out. To me, he claimed he’d dropped out because he wanted to join the army. He had to wait to do that until he turned eighteen. Maybe he did plan to go in the army, but I knew the reason he wasn’t in school had something to do with a girl.
My cousin immediately asked me why I was dressed the way I was. I had anticipated his question and had prepared an answer. “It’s just a joke.”
“The K doesn’t stand for Killer, does it, Ben? You’re not the killer type.”
“Lady killer,” someone in the car blurted. He got a big laugh from his friends, and I was glad of that. It made it okay for me to grin and not answer in words.
“It doesn’t stand for king, does it, cousin? You haven’t got a crown.”
“Does it stand for kisses? Free kisses?” one of the boys in the back seat bellowed.
Another boy boomed, “Tell him he can kiss my ass.”
This was the mocking I’d feared. My response was a buffoonish, hopeless grin, which was cowardice, but what would have courage accomplished? Could a skinny boy in a homemade costume intended to represent a fictional Captain Kiss make the world safer for affection?
Brent, still leaning on the window frame, waited till his friends stopped laughing, then he asked if I’d seen Trixie.
I didn’t answer.
He asked if I knew who Trixie was.
I nodded yes.
“Well, have you seen her, Ben? Say yes or no.”
I said, “No.”
“If you see her, tell her we’re looking for her. Tell her we’ve got beer.”
The news about the beer did not surprise me. I could smell it through the Plymouth’s open windows.
The driver steered back out onto the road. I watched the Plymouth speed away, and when I turned I saw Trixie sashaying toward me in her unhurried fashion down the hill. “Was that Brent?” she shouted when she was near enough to make her words clear.
I yelled yes.
She continued to saunter till she stood in front of me. “Did he ask about me?”
My nod told her yes.
“Did you tell him you’d seen me?”
“You told me not to.”
Trixie took time to think about my answer. I suppose, in a way, it put her in my debt. I had told a lie on her behalf. She must have been grateful. Or some other feeling, maybe sympathy, prompted her to say what she said next.
“Kiss me.”
As she said it, she touched her face to mine, and our lips met.
“That’s not a real kiss,” she said when she pulled back. I guessed that meant she wanted me to kiss her better, but I didn’t have the nerve to attempt kissing better, whatever kissing better might have meant to me when I was twelve. Trixie, for a few seconds, gazed with her eyes searching mine, then she gave a little sigh and stepped around me. I watched her saunter down the road in the same direction the Plymouth had taken. When a car came by she turned and put her thumb out. The driver didn’t stop. I hated seeing Trixie hitchhike. It was a risky thing for a girl to do. I turned my back. The dark road beckoned. I climbed the hill.
Bump was waiting up for me. She had her mom’s permission, but Martha, my stepmother, had made Bump change into her pajamas. We sat on Bump’s bed and divided up my candy. We took turns making choices, and the only candy she refused were the miniature Tootsie Rolls. She pinched them and said they felt stale.
After the dividing up, with both of us still sitting on the bed, she asked if anyone had made fun of my costume.
It was a legitimate question. She asked it soberly. I told her no in the same unemotional voice she always used when she spoke. My answer only slightly fudged the truth. Strictly speaking, the boys with Brent who’d snickered at my lipstick K might be said to have mocked me. But I hadn’t told them I was Captain Kiss. I had kept that part of me secret.
“I’ll bet you’re lying.” Bump spoke with her gaze on her half of my candy haul—the M&Ms and Milk Duds and packs of Wrigley gum, plus sour balls in their cellophane wrappers—all spilled out on her bed. We both felt, I think, a post-trick-or-treat letdown. There’s despair in an excess of sweetness. I knew that half the candy in my pillowcase bag would get dumped in the garbage before Thanksgiving.
But Bump was only eight. She didn’t have my trick-or-treat sophistication. And she was clearly sad.
She had propped her crutches against her headboard. When she made her accusation about lying, she let her eyes rest on those braces of shaped wood and rubber armpit rests. Something immediately shot through her mind. Before I could move a hand, she swept her candy off her bed and to the floor. Sour balls rolled under her dresser. A box of Milk Duds popped open.
“There!” she shouted at the candy. “There!” As if the treats had betrayed her and deserved her contempt. She threw treats at me and started to sob. I left. I’d endured her storms before. In my own room, I listened to the sounds from Bump’s—her shouts and thumps. I didn’t know what Bump did to make the thumping sounds, but all her noises began at last to fade away. By then, I was reading my Atlas of World History. It was what I always read when I hoped to lose myself. It told of wars and epidemics and of mass migrations—a canvas vast enough to shrink me to a fraction of myself.
The house grew quiet finally. I put on my pajamas. I brushed my teeth. Each time I passed Bump’s open door, I registered how silence ruled in her room, and before I climbed in bed, I tiptoed back to check on her again.
Bump lay abandoned in a child’s pose—what looks to older people like drugged sleep. Her limbs were helter-skelter, and even her hair was a wraith-like thing, as if it had a will to crawl like tendrils and creep across her bed.
From outside came the sounds of wind and rain. The rumble drew me to Bump’s window. Dark prevented me from seeing very much, though I didn’t need to see to know that banks of clouds marched toward the mountains, and the mountains changed them into sheets of rain. Down the rain poured, and as each cloud exhausted itself, recruits appeared out of the caldron of the ocean to replace them. More clouds invading. More rain like weapons crashing down. In Boon, we know that history. We suffer it from month to month till spring.
I was thinking that gloomy thought when Bump said softly, “Ben?” She was sitting up in bed. I turned. She lifted her arms and held them open. It was her signal for a kiss, which I crossed her messy room to give. With it, I gave the hug her kiss required. I watched her, once she’d let me go, snuggle back beneath her covers. I stayed awhile to listen while the storm raged on outside, and when I was sure she’d drifted off again, I left my unofficial sentry post and, like someone stealing in retreat, returned to where I sleep.
THE END