Butterfly Sunday Read online

  11

  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.

  There were trains passing, freight trains close below and rattling the windows.

  A driving rain pounded the hotel room window around which giant peacock-blue Christmas lights had been strung. It was a white clapboard building in need of paint. There was a dark khaki U.S. Army bus parked in the alley beside the hotel. From the café and bar downstairs Elvis was singing “Love Me Tender.” A freight train was passing. He pressed his lips to the window and whispered to the lumbering iron-wheeled serpent rolling away down below.

  “Come and take me away, come and take me away.”

  Behind him at the foot of the bed the soldier with the dark hair was unfastening his pants. On the mattress another soldier was flopping with Mama, whose peroxide-yellow hair glowed blue from the twinkle lights on the little tree they had placed on top of the television set.

  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.

  12

  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.

  He was putty, soft taffy in her fingers. She had been absolutely right about him. He was living in a frenzy of excitation exacerbated by fundamentalist Christian denial. Denial had so overstrained his ability to suppress his human appetites that he had absolutely no control over them. He was also ignorant, greedy and ego-driven. The fool didn’t have a clue. He was hers. He had no chance against her persuasive manipulations. She had netted and bagged and twisted him.

  She had guessed from the first day he came to see Henri about the church that Averill was her man. He had that greasy weasel look about him, the shifting eyes and insidious sensuality of the abused. It took one to know one, didn’t it? Something familiar smoldered in him, something tightly wound and inevitable seeped through his toothy grins and enervated laughs.

  He was always aware of his flesh. He assumed the rest of the world was as well. His clothing was always a little tight here, a little loose there; there was always something shiny or flimsy or opaque about it. He was in a perpetual state of seduction—the way those whose innocence has been stolen always are. He was overwrought with sensing, trapped in his futile pursuit of those who had robbed him. Yet he was ignorant of all that, and worse, mortified by his physical impulses, ashamed and terrified—so distraught with his quivering need that he had turned in desperation to the constraints of hard-shell Puritanism.

  If Henri was the dull and sexless lover, thrashing about for a few insensate minutes with his ego, Averill would be that driven animal, that wildly dominant paramour, helpless once aroused to moderate his lust until he and his partner were numb, depleted and bruised.

  She was right. From their first time back in September, Averill had been that tender and terrible husband she dreaded and craved. He was insatiable. She was something less than human with him, she was depraved and monstrous and she horrified herself, but she was, from the moment he touched her until he withdrew—sometimes hours later—alive.

  Nor was she so devastated by it all to play her part. It was Averill’s mind she pleasured with sighs and promises. It was his abuse she molded with her whimpers, his sickness she nurtured with her cries of delight. He came to her against his will. She knew, if he never figured it out, that his lust was a mask for his darker need to violate his own morality, to shame himself with increasing frequency, to drive himself lower and lower into an abyss of self-loathing until he could no longer bear the pain of his disgusting nature, and kill himself.

  By now Averill Sayres was deep into the fog and shadows of the thrilling fur-lined trap she had set for him.

  “Henri’s not coming home for Thanksgiving,” she had told him a little over a week ago. They were riding around in the new Cutlass she had given him as an early Christmas present.

  “So we’ll spend it together.” Averill grinned.

  “I don’t need Henri’s money,” she lied. “I have my own.”

  “Money don’t matter to me,” he said flatly.

  “You’re a man of God,” she concurred, ripping the twenty-six-thousand-dollar price tag off the passenger-side window. Then she told him about her dream. She wanted to live on the Pacific Coast in a modern house set on a tall cliff with every room open toward the ocean. She wanted to spend her whole life with Averill, and—who knew?—maybe, God willing, their children too.

  She told him, knowing he was pretending to go along with it, knowing she had no such dream, not for him, though they would have a future, a long golden slide into the lake of fire after he had helped her do what had to be done.

  13

  SUNDAY, APRIL 23, 2000

  5:17 P.M.

  She heard a car.

  The afternoon had passed like the Dark Ages. She went half-crazy—running to the front porch every time a green persimmon plopped on the roof. She couldn’t stop herself. She was out the door at every thud or scrape or fluttering in the trees. Of course, it was guilt—that pernicious dread of getting caught. Though it didn’t make sense. Getting caught was the point. She had full intentions of facing justice. She had no plans to flee, attempt to cover her tracks or otherwise circumvent her inevitable trial and conviction.

  It was by those means, and only by those means, that Tess would exist—if only in the past tense.

  She had checked the kitchen clock at ten-minute intervals. At seventeen minutes past five she was standing in the kitchen and she heard a car engine whine as it climbed the hill. She had hardly heard a soul on the road since Averill had gotten up from the table and walked out the front door at fourteen minutes before two.

  He had inhaled two slices of the chocolate cake while she cleared the dining room table. She had set the rest of the poisoned cake on top of the clothes extractor. Yet it wasn’t there when he asked for his dessert. It wasn’t anywhere. She had to slice the harmless version that was sitting on the kitchen table. Earlier she had watched Winky open the car door for Audena because her hands were f
ull. Leona had given her a dish, a porcelain casserole that had belonged to Averill’s mother. It was a cheap glass baking dish and the rim was chipped. Audena had somehow managed to set it on the stove and abscond with the deadly torte instead.

  Not dreaming there was a remote chance that anyone but Averill would consume the heavy chocolate pastry, Leona had emptied the carton of Rat Zap into the filling, rendering her dessert lethal enough to wipe out a platoon.

  She had watched Averill cross the road and move another hundred yards uphill to his church. She had counted on that. It was his habit to spend Sunday afternoons in his study behind the sanctuary. It was a country church, way up an old clay logging road that wound through the woods another half a mile before it petered out. Odds were very strong that there wouldn’t be another soul on that road until Wednesday evening when the choir practiced. She had counted very heavily on all of that.

  As soon as Averill was out of earshot, she had ransacked her desk in an effort to locate Audena’s phone number. Failing that, she tried calling information. As it happened, she learned that there were two Winky Hodges listed in Calhoun County. Both had answering machines, so both were warned that her chocolate cake would be the last dessert either might ever eat. She didn’t waste money on long-distance explanations either.

  Now the situation swallowed her last bit of sense. She’d poisoned the stupid bastard. She’d murdered him. Why? She hated this. Now she had lost the point, the reason why it had been so necessary. Now she couldn’t quite grasp the triumph of her execution. She was dangerous. She deserved to die. It was all turning against her now. The sky and the woods were laughing at her. She thought of him gagging on his own blood, his flesh on fire, the hopeless torment.

  Maybe there was still time. Maybe. She was dizzy. She had to sit down. Maybe she had poisoned herself! Or Averill had caught on to her and switched the dishes. She could hear him laughing. Her flesh crawled. He was in the living room. She made herself go look. No. No, it wasn’t Averill. It was the television. Some jungle movie. She needed a drink. She found the bourbon under the back steps. She sat down on the wooden stairs and took several sips straight from the bottle. She sat there for ten minutes. Then she got up. She had to do something. Anything.