Butterfly Sunday (20 page)

She caught her reflection in the pier mirror by the front door. She didn’t look like a murderer. Then she smiled. It was a lovely smile. It was the same as ever. Yet, looking at her full lips and abundant, even teeth, she began to descry something she had never before seen. It was a removed quality, a coolness. No. No, now she had it. It wasn’t merely cool. It was cold—the cold, all-knowing wisdom of the dead.

SUNDAY, APRIL 23, 2000

3:36 P.M.

Seeing Audena had upset him. The moment she and that dog she married walked into his church, he remembered why it had been so long since he’d seen her. His sister was a grabby mule. She resented his dental work, his two-year-old Cutlass, his watch, his clothes and Leona’s cooking.

Had she but known how much she truly had to resent!

She was his only living immediate family. Well, then, he didn’t want any living family. He wasn’t about to connect with his dim-eyed, reprobate cousins in Calhoun County for the sake of blood. It was a stupid impulse. He should never have invited her. It was just that he was trying to tie as many loose strings as he could. He and Helen agreed they would never look back. Averill
had acted on some leftover, half-wit notion he should see his sister one last time.

Helen didn’t want to look back. She had a bad memory here. Her daughter had been murdered on her wedding day last September. Helen didn’t have anyone else in town. All her people were dead now. She’d gotten the amicable divorce her husband had promised her—and every penny of their prearranged settlement. Like his marriage, Helen’s had been one of convenience. Of course, there was one difference. Helen’s ex-husband was a gay man looking for a shield. She was pregnant from a series of amorous escapades. It had never been a real marriage. They had long planned their divorce. Half the time when Averill and Helen were upstairs in bed, Ransom was downstairs entertaining some of his fairy friends.

People could make what they would of all that. It had worked out well for all the involved parties.

Averill had always regretted deceiving Leona. He had no other choice, then or now. There would have been no way to sit her down the night they decided to get together and explain it all to her. He had to have, then and there, a wife whose obvious pregnancy would validate the idea that he had been married for some time and was committed to building his family.

He couldn’t very well tell her he’d been fingered in a murder. Nor could he explain that there was compelling evidence against him—which he needed her and the pregnancy to counter.

People were all hypocrites. Everyone lived two lives. There was the person you acted in order to survive in the world. Preacher, teacher, lawyer, Boy Scout leader—you were always some spit-shined perfect version of yourself that the world demanded of you. Then there
was the flesh and blood, stepped-on and biting-back you, the one ruled by your inner needs. That was the real one.

Averill, like most poor fools, had been a secret from himself well into adulthood. He had set out to conquer his own flesh armed with the spiritual weapons of his biblical training. He had stumbled on that holy path and discovered his powerlessness over his mortal weaknesses.

He still walked the Christian road, but he held his virtuous postures because he knew that’s what the people who fed him expected him to do. He was supposed to believe certain Christian precepts—water into wine, the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus Christ—and he did. However, the abstemious nature of Christ, particularly in regard to the temptations of the flesh, was beyond his ability to embrace.

He was ashamed to say it, and he would never say it aloud to anyone, but Averill Sayres had serious doubts about the intimate proclivities of his Lord and Savior as reported. Something was off there; something was missing, something went over the top in the direction of the divine. A young man needed women. There was a wealth of unexplained desires hiding under those biblical robes. Didn’t he have charisma? Weren’t there flocks of women everywhere he pitched his tent? No. Some tiny little mind had crammed all that chastity in there, probably to keep people feeling bad about wanting to do what came naturally all the time.

When he and Helen were far away, he’d send word to Leona about the baby. No, he couldn’t fix everything by telling her the truth. However, she’d at least know the motives and circumstances behind it. He knew that a decent man, one who had the guts to look life in the
eye, would never deceive or swindle or seduce the way he had. A better person would never have compromised and slithered his way into this deep hole. He wouldn’t have found himself so crazed by terror of his own desperate outcome.

He was a weak man, not a slippery beast of prey—not by intent. He would have been a more respectable man. He had meant to. He had given that his best effort. His failure to repair himself and stand as a man among men would be his everlasting sorrow. Or if he was not just another weak man, if he was evil, if he was a snake, then he couldn’t help it. What were his alternatives? Surely she didn’t expect him to commit suicide? A man’s primary obligation was to live.

Seeing Audena had been a terrible jolt. The time apart had softened his memory of her. He was almost ready to forgive her for certain things. But she was really a mule, a horse-faced woman from hell, standing in the pit of all his past torment, tugging at his billowing, starched white sleeves.

She couldn’t even let him alone about his teeth.

“They can chisel down your fangs and smooth your scaly cheeks, but you’re the same egg-sucking chicken snake.”

She could have helped him. She could have cared. Something rattled. Something quivered deep within. Now a voice like his own spoke from the hissing cedars outside his study window. It reminded him that Audena had been a fat and ugly girl. It painted the lonely image of an upstairs hotel window, a dull lamp flickering with the demon vibrato of an endless freight train. All Audena had to do was be away when things were going on. He was seven. One night a salesman told Mama that aside from his slightly bucked teeth, he was as
pretty as a girl. The man had played his fingers in Averill’s long, dark curly hair.

What did Audena know? Was she a bastard? Was she conceived in a whorehouse? Was she given to men when she was a child? Had she been forced to endure a decade of the hideous things that men had done to him? Averill slammed his mind shut. That was then, this was here and now. His study had been closed up since yesterday afternoon. The room needed air. He pressed the center section of the double window and opened it like a pair of doors. The cemetery was blurred by mist from the surrounding woods. The old stones were smears of terracotta and gray between patches of yellow-green. He breathed slowly, drawing in the Sunday afternoon.

Now he sensed a distant fluttering. At first he assumed it was a flock of starlings taking shelter in the wild grove of pecan trees about a mile above him in the woods. The notion hadn’t taken shape before he understood that it was that memory wrenching itself into his consciousness once again.

He told Audena about the soldiers and their scratchy cheeks and beer and cigarette breath. He told her about their smells and choking on their things and how when they had him on his tummy on the roll-away by the windows it hurt and he was scared they were going to crack him in two. He told Audena. She was twelve. He was seven. She said to shut up or the cops would arrest Mama, and Daddy would break his neck when he came out of Parchman Prison. He told her and told her to tell someone big. She just slapped him and said he’d been turned queer and was a woman and he’d suck the devil in hell through eternity.

He didn’t tell her that sometimes if a train was passing while a railroad man was sticking him, sometimes just to hold on to something he repeated to the train in the man’s pounding rhythm,
“Come and take me away, come and take me away.”

It was an old country church. It sat in a damp hollow by a graveyard surrounded by dense woods. It was brick. The interior walls sweated the minute you lit the space heaters. Even the best grade of oil-base paint curled off the sand plasters the winter after you applied it. No matter how immaculate he left this room, he always returned to a handful of paint chips lying like the first autumn leaves on the glistening cypress floor. The whole church wanted insulation, and the plaster and lathe would have to be replaced by wallboard. It was hell to keep this way. Though he kept the janitor patching up and painting it every week.

That was all over. That was done. He was going to lay down his robe and his Bible very soon now. He was
up to here with trying to figure out God. He was done with it. He didn’t need it. He had Helen now. And she had her freedom at last. Maybe it was like her queer ex-husband had observed. Maybe Helen and Averill were attracted by their mutual depravity. Maybe they were a pair of slithering and twining snakes.

All he knew was that when he and she were wrapped up in each other, he didn’t hurt. When they were bucking and moaning in the dark he didn’t know where he ended and she began. He had Helen and they were going away. What they couldn’t give each other between the sheets, her money would buy them.

When they were gone, he could write it all down for Leona about the baby. He could apologize and explain and get that torment off his soul. Once he and Helen were safe and happy in their distant paradise, where Leona would never be able to find or prosecute him.

There was a chill in the air he hadn’t noticed at first. He closed and locked the window and sat in the cracked leather chair behind his desk.

Loneliness began to creep throughout his body. He wanted Helen. His need for her was as unstoppable as the late-night Illinois Central grinding past his window. Sitting here without her made him feel as loathsome sad as the diesel wail. It screamed the way his insides had screamed once when two soldiers had him between them. They took turns, switching off between his mouth and his bottom. They were too big, too thick. He screamed because he thought he was going to break in half. But he didn’t feel it.

All he felt was the train on the tracks below the window and his heart crying,
“Come and take me away.”
He forgot about that for a while as he grew too big to let anyone make him submit to all that anymore. Until
Helen, until they had found themselves irresistibly drawn into her bed, into each other, sharing their excessive stimulation, following pleasure to ecstatic madness. Then he knew that she was his fondest wish come true and that she had come at last to take him away.

Then he heard the door open slowly behind him. It was the last thing he ever heard.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 1997

Looking back over the months, Soames had to admit that even evil had its pleasant side. She had done a fantastic job on Averill. She’d seduced him with everything from a leather jacket to a new Oldsmobile to an orgy of drug-enhanced pleasures.