“Good, I’m going to drive back to New Orleans and look at some clothes I saw in a window on Canal yesterday.”
That evening, Wesley was tired from working on the shelving at the junior college Industrial Arts Shop. His car wouldn’t start, and he realized the starter was out. He had to walk all the way back to Thomas Jefferson Avenue.
Despite the car trouble, he’d planned to get almost everything finished by the time he brought it to the house, a prefabricated job. He would simply screw the pieces into place in the room with Nate’s help. This was his goal. He was almost done with everything, and could do touch up work on the stain at the house if needed. Dr. Claiborne had ordered a fancy wooden ladder with a brass rail from an advertisement in The New Yorker, a magazine the old man bragged that he’d read since his undergraduate days at Ole Miss. Wesley took the ladder out of the cardboard packing and saw that it would be easy to attach once he got the slide installed. The shelves were adjustable with setting holes and wood pegs to raise the track that held individual shelving in place.
His mind was hardly on his work, however. Images of Charity’s naked body in the bedroom, her long hair invaded his mind like the aroma of a swamp after a storm. But as soon as his daydream and lust became particularly titillating, he’d remember the verse from the Bible: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” The memory disturbed him, and he tried to push it out of his head.
Wesley spent time planning the details of the installation so that he’d only need to make one trip with Mr. Kirby’s truck and the trailer from the shop to the house. Keep it simple, he thought. He’d grown so accustomed to Charity’s bed and the love-making that he hated to finish the job and move to Lafayette, and at times he even plotted ways to remain in town, maybe commute to the architecture program at LSU. He’d even slowed down finishing the work to make it last the whole summer. He knew better than to ask Charity if he could stay. Deep down, he understood his role in her life. The rejection would have been too much for him. Had she wanted him to stay during the fall, she’d be the first to tell him not to leave, and he knew it. The lack of invitation bothered him.
Charity bought a new pair of black go-go boots, a short skirt, and a red blouse at Reed’s on Canal in New Orleans. She had her nails done and her long hair styled in a feathered flip. She was going to model the new outfit for Wesley, she said before she left to shop, and take him to dinner at Clay’s Restaurant downtown. She liked controlling him, and she acted as though she had him on a tether like a little lapdog.
On Saturday evening, Wesley drove Charity to Clay’s in the Mercedes, and they ate filet mignon. She ordered an Old Fashioned with double shots of bourbon. She relished the stares from townspeople when the pair went out in public. The few who spoke to her gave her an opportunity to introduce him, which she did—as her personal assistant, an artist friend. After the dinner, they watched a pornographic movie at the Joy Drive Inn. Hers was the only Mercedes in the dark lot, and they put the top up after a while, fondling each other in the backseat like a pair of high school students during prom night.
Wesley sat at the table in the little pool house Sunday morning. He was finished with the work on the shelving project in the Claiborne study. One day during the upcoming week, he planned to ask Nate to help him start the installation, assuming he didn’t push it ahead yet another week to stall his departure from Charity’s bed. He was finished with his summer independent study at Baxter State, and with C.J. Kirby’s final “A” grade, Wesley’s associate’s degree coursework was complete, except for attending the December commencement ceremonies. Kirby had given Wesley an “A” for the course, and he said he would be posting the official grade at the Registrar’s Office in a few days.
Now that he was basically done working on the shelving, he could return to his art. Some months before, he’d started painting a scene from the Big Natalbany River, the green color almost black over the brown water full of silt, the depiction of a creek after a spring rain. At Baxter State, he’d won the second-year student art award in December, a juried show judged by an Alabama artist with only one name: Beeson. He had some paints and oils, a palette that fit his hand, and he wanted to offer the finished product to Charity as a parting gift when he left for architecture school in a couple of weeks. There was added excitement because she said her husband had called President Van Broussard at Lafayette, and they were committed to a Presidential Scholarship, though he didn’t know the amount. He was thankful for how well everything was going, especially after the hard rift with his father. Wesley believed he needed to make his own way in the world, and he now had a real peace about his decision to move into the Claiborne House.
Regardless of the assurance of a right decision, he missed his mother. Wesley often visited with her at the campus library. He decided to call her at home with the telephone in the little pool house. He planned to hang up if his father answered, because he didn’t want to deal with the man.
Sara answered the phone. She said she was by herself. “Oh, Wesley, you haven’t called me in over a week. I was worried.”
“I’ve been busy with the job at the Claibornes’ place. And the Maverick broke down yesterday. It’s parked at the shop on campus. It won’t crank. The starter’s out. I’m going to have it rebuilt over at the machine shop on Cherry Street. It’ll only cost twenty dollars to fix it, but the old guy says it’ll take a few days. I almost called you for a ride, but I didn’t want to deal with Pops, and—”
She interrupted him. “Why didn’t you tell me your car was broke? Are you able to fix it yourself?”
“Nate and I can do it. But Pops has gone crazy. I don’t want to talk to him. It’s not worth it.”
“Like I’ve said before, you had nothing to do with the dispute between him and Charity. And I’ve had about all I can take of him. He is completely rigid and won’t give a damned inch. We’re done talking. Tom is set in his ways, and I think I’m going to leave him.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Yes, I am serious. I don’t like how he’s treated you. It’s never going to get any better between us. It’s just not right. I’ve had enough of his self-righteousness. If there’s an innocent person in all of this, it’s you.” Her voice cracked, and he thought she might start crying.
His eyes began to well up with tears. “Mother, I don’t know what to think.”
“Let’s get some lunch tomorrow and talk. We can go to the Hard-Row Barbeque. He never eats there, and I’ll pack his lunch for a change. I haven’t fixed him lunch in almost two months.”
“Okay. What time should I get there?”
“Quarter after noon. How are you doing with the carpentry project?”
“I’m about done with it. Just the last details left.”
“Good. And I have some money I’m going to give you. I can pay to fix the starter. If you need a ride, call me.”
“Thanks, Mother.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too. Bye.”
Charity attended the morning service at Federated Presbyterian Church two blocks away from the house. She kept the normal routine while Dr. Claiborne currently absconded in Washington. The old man couldn’t abide the holy rollers, so she went with her husband or alone to the Federated Presbyterian Church on Sunday mornings and to Reverend Hussert’s congregation by herself on Sunday nights. Even when he was out of town, she followed the usual split service routine to keep up appearances. She hadn’t seen Wesley all day.
At Federated Presbyterian Church, she mouthed the traditional prayer of confession with the other Reformed congregants, but her mind was as blank as an empty tablet when she said the words. She took lunch at the country club, and she played a round of tennis with a young man she was trying to seduce, a love interest she’d cultivated as Wesley’s replacement to live at the pool house and to sleep in her bed once he left for Lafayette. After the country club, she went to the evening service at Reverend Thad Huss
ert’s Flaming Sword Church at five-thirty, where she had been baptized and born again for the seventh time a few months earlier. On stage, she fronted the band with a tambourine as she danced in a long dress covering her go-go boots, her good looks and flamboyance making her the center of attention of every man in the sanctuary.
The amplified band played hard driving gospel songs with drums and electric guitars with riffs like rock anthems sung by the Rolling Stones. Church members played instruments on stage behind and beside the pulpit. She’d seen the Stones in 1972 with Sloan Parnell in Houston, and she had not been as excited by any music until she started attending the Flaming Sword. The major difference between the church band and the Stones was the lyrics to the tunes that they played but not the sensual allure of the rhythms and beat. The raw sex in the music was exactly the same.
Later in the evening, Wesley heard a knock at the pool house door, a steady but feminine sounding knock-knock-knock. He figured Charity had come back home from the Flaming Sword. He quickly covered the painting on the easel with a cotton cloth. The young man walked over to the apartment door and opened it. Charity smiled. She wore a long dress with her hair pulled up like a Pentecostal church lady, but the top three buttons on her blouse were splayed open. “Hi babe. You’re looking mighty good,” she said, sounding upbeat. She walked over and kissed him, and they embraced. She was three inches taller than Wesley in her new boots.
“I’m fine.”
“Good.” She looked at the painting on the easel stand, his oil tubes spread out. “I didn’t know you were working on any art.”
“I’m trying to finish a piece. I worked on it a while back.”
“What are you painting?”
“A scene from the river near where I grew up, the Big Natalbany River.”
“Can I look at it?” Without waiting for an answer, she removed the cloth covering.
“Yes,” he said, a little perturbed.
She stood staring at the work. “The Big Natalbany sure is small, ain’t it? But it’s beautiful. The painting is almost done, right?”
“Nearly. Maybe in a week, maybe less. Now that I’ll be finished with the study soon, I can devote more time to the painting.”
“I want it, and we’ll buy it. It’s simply stunning.”
“Well, my plan was to give it to you.”
She squeezed his upper arm and held it. “I’ve got an idea. Have you ever drawn a nude before?” she stared into his face. He could feel her breath.
“Sure, for the art department last year. It had to be done on the QT at a gallery in New Orleans. My professor said it would have been a complete scandal at the junior college.”
“Did you do a good job on it?”
“I think it came out all right. Here, I have it in my portfolio.” He reached into his portfolio and pulled out a piece done in charcoal on canvas, and he took it out of a slip to cover. It was a nude woman with short hair, a bob cut, sitting in a straight back chair.
“You’ve got a great eye. My husband collects art, as you know, and I bet he’d pay well for some of your pictures if you have more. And the great thing is that his friends will get jealous, and they’ll want to buy some stuff, too. They’ll bid your price up out of pure jealousy. Greed and jealousy make the world go around.”
“Like I said, I was going to give you the river painting when I leave for Lafayette—as a present.”
“Please, you need the money, and Dr. C. has plenty of money, believe me. He inherited property and Wall Street stocks galore, and it’ll be just as special of a gift. He’ll pay at least two hundred dollars, and you should take nothing less from him,” she said.
Wesley thought about the money for a second. “That would go a long way. It would pay to fix my bum starter and loud muffler, and buy a new set of tires, too.”
“Would you draw me nude? That’s what I’d really like,” she asked.
He hesitated, his conscience gnawing at him. It was a risk. He would leave behind a record of sex. He wanted no evidence of their tryst, their ongoing sexual relationship. She always supplied him with a condom to wear, and she was on the pill. But the picture could get him busted for sure.
She gazed at him, touched his chest. “I’ll let you keep it for me as a little memento.”
“Okay, I’ll do it.”
Wesley set up his charcoal pencils and easel in the informal den of the big house. After they finished eating burgers and fried onion rings in the kitchen that she’d picked up from the diner a block away, he began to draw her as she sat unrobed in a chair in the den. Her legs were crossed, just like the model for the class in New Orleans. He sat with his easel and pencils. He began to square her from the rough edges, and he saw that she was even more beautiful nude inside the living room than in the darkened bedroom where they made love, even more striking than her body at poolside in the warm sun. Her legs crossed like scissors and cut into his heart. He couldn’t understand how he had wandered into such a magical place.
Wesley listened to her chatter, going on and on about her trip to Paris and Rome with Dr. C. last April. Her talk was constant. She said she was planning to attend school for art history, though she had not taken a single class since she graduated from high school.
Sometimes he thought she was lying out of habit. She didn’t mean anything by it, just routine deception as a means to keep the conversation lively. He tried to stay focused on his work, trying not to be aroused by her naked sex. Her breasts were unblemished and firm, round, and her thighs full of lust, her proportions almost perfect, unlike the nude model in New Orleans who was plain and slim with an average face, a kind of gangly woman. Charity looked like Miss America plus ten pounds at thirty-one years old, the sunlight’s effects on her cheeks and near her eyes. She’d won the Milltown Strawberry Queen title and had kept the tiara and sash, she said. He didn’t want to think about the love they’d make after the painting, after he was done, because he’d fail to concentrate on the depiction.
Twice, unsolicited, she assured him that Dr. Claiborne wouldn’t return for another week, and she would personally go pick him up at the airport in New Orleans. Dr. C.’s schedule never included any surprises, she promised. But for some reason, she looked a little nervous to Wesley.
Wesley was good at doing portraits. He had been drawing and painting them for years, sketching horses and animals, drawing members of the family and his classmates. He’d even tried his hand at drawing dead birds like John James Audubon when the naturalist was marooned at the Oakley Plantation House in St. Francisville during in the summer of 1821. The Hardin home was full of portraits and drawings that Wesley had completed over the years.
As he concentrated on his pencil and tried to keep his mind from wandering, he acknowledged her with nods and whispers of “hum,” “huh,” and “that’s so funny,” as she kept talking endlessly. He drew her curves and tried to stay focused on the shapes. There had been little sexual interest with the model at the gallery, but Charity was different, and the eroticism poured into his eyes with a sharp light.
He had watched The Graduate, and sometimes Charity reminded him of Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson. Charity was as cynical deep down, he knew, just as jaded as Mrs. Robinson. But he loved her and wanted to stay in her bed forever despite the danger and the obvious finitude of their relationship. He lusted over her, and he tried to draw her perfectly with every stroke from his charcoal pencil. And like many men his age and many far older, he had mistaken good sex for love. This was the great weakness of men the world over.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Other than two quick trips out of the motel, one for a phone call and the other to look around Thomas Jefferson Avenue and to call the Claiborne House, James Luke never strayed from his room. He ate the food he’d carried with him, heating and cooking some of it on his Coleman stove inside the room. He went to the payphone in the motel lobby on Saturday morning and called the Honey Tree Lounge in Trebor Heights, and he arranged for a prostitute to come to his r
oom later, a little entertainment he looked forward to during the whole ride down from Mississippi. And the Honey Tree Lounge did not disappoint in the least.
At dark on Sunday night, he drove back to the Heller-Reid neighborhood and parked on the street beside the red brick Presbyterian sanctuary. It was three minutes before eight o’clock. He sat with an open Bible on the seat beside him. Dressed in church clothes, a long sleeve white shirt, black trousers, but no tie, he looked like he had been next door to the service. His matching suit coat was hanging in the backseat window.
The Presbyterians met at seven o’clock. If the police or anyone else stopped him, he’d say he was going to or from the worship service, depending on who was doing the asking, and what time it was. The reason he hadn’t left his vehicle was because he fell ill, too sick to drive.
He looked in his open Bible at an underlined verse in Isaiah 53. He read it aloud, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” It was the book Tom had given him fifteen years earlier when he’d voiced some fleeting interest in God and religion. Tom had read the verse aloud to him and flagged it with a pencil mark and a red ribbon in the spine. James Luke sat in the truck sweating. Beneath the seat was his .45 pistol with the pearl handles. The high-powered rifle was secure and waiting in a long steel storage box behind the backseat.
Now the man watched a couple of dozen souls leave the front doors of the church. He was thankful that it was cooling a little as the sun fell. James Luke witnessed the last car leave the empty parking area and drive away. The area was poorly lit. Nearby was the alley behind the big houses, a strip of pavement that allowed the residents access to their homes from the rear. He got out of the Suburban, put on his dress coat, the Bible in one hand, his pistol in his waistband, and two bullet clips like blocks in his pocket. He crossed the sidewalk and into the alleyway. The night was now the hue of coal, no sun at all, the back alley as opaque as a tomb.
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