Zion (15 page)

On Tuesday at five minutes after twelve, Wesley met his father at Tickfaw State Bank to get his college money. It was the first bank branch in Baxter Parish with a drive-through window. Wesley arrived early, and he stood waiting outside for his father.

The young man gritted his teeth when Tom pulled into the lot with his truck. Tension seemed to pass from one to another, their faces radiating heat through their bodies. They walked stiffly, not saying a word as they entered the little bank branch.

Once in the lobby, Tom said, “Son, I’ll do what you want. I’ll build the cabinets and shelves for the Claibornes, but I don’t want your help. And I surely don’t want you living over there. Move on back home today, and I’ll do the whole project by myself. Stay away from that woman and the house, and we’ll make our peace. How about that, son?” He was surprised by his own offer, his mouth open and his cheeks gray.

“No, I don’t want you to do that. I just want the money for college, and I’ll complete the project myself. It’s long past the time for me to move out on my own anyway,” Wesley said, perturbed by his father’s conciliatory gesture.

Tom grimaced.

Wesley could see the disappointment issuing from his father’s eyes when he turned to walk up to the teller’s window. Tom gave the woman his account number and asked for all the money in savings. He said he wanted everything that was available, which came to eight hundred and twenty-seven dollars. The savings account was drained empty, and the cash was counted out and placed into Tom’s palm. He handed it to his son.

“Thank you,” Wesley said, and he walked away from the bank and his father without saying anything more.

At the pool house in the Claiborne’s backyard, Wesley put all of the money he’d received inside an envelope and slipped it between the pages of Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged
, his favorite book, which he’d read the summer before. It was one of a dozen books he brought to the pool house. The envelope was marked with the date and dollar amount: “5-28-74 - $1012.” It was all of the money he had saved plus the money his family had been putting away for school, the eight hundred and twenty-seven dollars. He was going to ask for the first half of the money from Charity, minus his rent. She said the rent would cost him fifty dollars per month, phone and utilities included. He planned to stay a month or two at the most and then leave as quickly as he’d arrived.

Wesley was placing his clothes in the empty cedar chifforobe when he heard a metallic noise outside and went to the window shade and saw Charity squaring a chaise lounge with the edge of the swimming pool, her terrycloth robe placed across the waist-high wrought iron pool fence. Her back to him, she was dressed in a green bikini top and bottom with a towel over her arm. A magazine and a pack of Kools were in her hand along with a small brown bottle. Her breasts were large, skin almost golden. The word “perfect” flowed in and out of Wesley’s mind like a guilty dream.

He watched her sit down on the chaise lounge and untie her bikini top and gaze out at the blue water. Then she turned her face toward the pool house and winked at him, gesturing to him with her chin, opening the magazine to shield her bare chest from sight.

Wesley jumped away from the window, the blinds closing abruptly where he had bent them back to gaze out. He was rattled and embarrassed. He put the heel of his palm against his head. “Shit, I’m busted bad,” he said out loud.

Wesley composed himself for a few minutes, trying to forget about being caught while gazing out of the window shade. He sat on the bed to get his nerve up and then gathered his carpenter’s toolbox to go over to the house to begin prepping the room for the work. Rather than looking out the window before leaving, he opened the door wide like nothing had happened. He could see Charity now on her stomach sunning, her straps down, and back open. She turned her head toward him and grinned.

“You don’t have to worry. I’m not going to get up. What are you planning to do today? And what’s in the box?” she asked.

“Uh,” he answered sounding stupid, unsure what she’d just said. “Oh, I’m going to start work on the study, if you don’t mind. These are my tools.”

“Sure. But please do me a favor first.”

“Ah-ha.”

“Put some oil on my back, would you, Wesley? I’m trying to tan, not burn, and I can’t reach it all.” She picked up the brown bottle from the ground near her side and held it up, her head turned toward him.

He knew better, but he put down the wooden box and reached for the bottle of oil anyway. He poured some of it on her back and began to rub it in. After a second, he got down on his knees and kneeled beside her to reach across her long back, the smell of coconut filling his head. He wondered if perhaps this was the temptation of the Garden of Eden set in Pickleyville on Thomas Jefferson Avenue.

That first evening, Wesley and Charity went out to eat a late dinner at the Firefly Inn across town. Afterward, they had drinks in the informal den of the big house, and they listened to some of Charity’s rock albums on the hi-fi. After a few hours of drinking and dancing to the music, he and Charity went to bed in the upstairs room. A line was crossed while she was poolside, the moments when he was watching her from the window. He had been a virgin. Sex with her made him weak-minded and giddy about his new found pleasure and great luck. The night in her bed made him tired and excited, like a hound near the end of a hunt, and he could only hope for another chance.

Once a year, James Luke and his third wife, Heloise Tartt Cate, went to the black-tie fundraiser for the mayor of Natchez on the Fourth of July. James Luke owned a tuxedo with a big bowtie, which he only wore when he was forced to. He hated the annual event. The mayor was vying for his third four-year term. James Luke had plans to grow his business into a more respectable real estate venture on both sides of the Mississippi, investing in property acceptable to genteel Natchez elite rather than continuing his slumlording north of downtown in the black quarters. He would need the mayor’s office to acquire easy permits for his real estate investments, and the mayor needed his contribution to the campaign.

The party took place at the Rosalie Hotel ballroom, a great hall adorned with red, white, and blue. The couple spoke very little on the way over in part because neither of them wanted to go to the event. The Cates lived in a prominent part of town, a somewhat modest but adequate historic home that Heloise had inherited from her maternal grandparents. James Luke married her for the money, and the fine cottage was just one advantage to marrying up in the world. They both despised the pretense necessary for life in Natchez, but making appearances was the price of doing business, or at least a major part of success was buying a ticket and showing up. They wanted to escape, but there was no escape in gentrified Natchez.

The mayor said, “Hello there, Mr. Cate,” as he greeted folks at the front door to the ballroom where he stood in the receiving line. James Luke shook his hand, and Mayor Cecil Pearce kissed Heloise on the cheek. “Y’all been staying busy?” he asked.

“Real busy. Just to pay my city taxes, I’ve got to work three jobs,” James Luke said, partly joking, but trying hard to jab the mayor where it might hurt him.

“Well, y’all go enjoy some good music and food inside,” the mayor said. He didn’t bite on James Luke’s tax comment, and he shook hands with the next couple in line as quickly as possible.

James Luke and Heloise walked into the ballroom as the band played “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the song a well-loved local anthem of the Lost Cause. The musicians covered both traditional country and Southern Rock tunes. The drummer beat the cymbals, metallic noise clanging, and the sound was accentuated by the bass guitar and strong vocals. Amplified Rock and Roll rhythms pulsed through the room. It was obnoxiously loud like the sounds of a pounding hammermill. Political supporters and their teenage children were there for the fundraiser, and some young people danced on the open floor.

The Cates made pleasantries with everyone they encountered, etiquette befitting James Luke’s wife’s lifelong social connections. He took a mixed drink from a black waiter’s silver serving tray.

The band ended the set and left their instruments for drinks and cigarettes. The noise was grating on James Luke’s nerves, the amps turned several notches higher than necessary for enjoyment.

Someone tapped James Luke’s shoulder sheepishly from behind. He turned around and saw his father-in-law, Franklin Tartt, acting coy. They shook hands. James Luke’s wife and mother-in-law were already sitting at a table drinking cocktails, visiting and complaining about the deafening music now on a short break.

“You clean up pretty nice for the public,” Tartt said. He was a third generation money-handling banker, the kind of man that spends his entire day trying to beat a customer out of a dollar, and then patting him on the back and calling his prey his best friend.

“I try. I always want to look like I have a small portion of your holdings,” James Luke said, laughing.

“Come on now. You’ve got every bit of three times my money.”

“No, you’re white collar, and I’ve still get dirt on my boots every damned day of the week.”

“Hell, you own two-thirds of North Natchez. Folks say you’re going to run for mayor when this jack-legged clown finishes up his next term.”

“My word, I don’t even own a percent of the places in the quarters, and I’d have to be brain-dead to run for public office. Besides, the mayor’s post ain’t worth a bucket of dried horse dumplings. All he does is listen to people bitch about their water bills and the coloreds day and night, but I do hate to see that asshole Pearce get reelected year after year, even if I did give him three hundred dollars for this campaign fundraiser to do business around town. All the bullshit you’ve got to go through to work in Natchez. I’m already neck-deep in bureaucratic crap with the Corps of Engineers.”

“Well, I still think you want to be the mayor.” Tartt acted as if he knew James Luke well. Yet he remained an enigma. The closer he got to James Luke, the farther away he was from the heart of the man. Most people in Natchez, Tartt had no idea how distant he was from true knowledge when it came to James Luke Cate.

Sometimes at night he sat awake plotting his plans like a moribund chess player trying to win a championship. But he did not play by any set rules other than the ones he made up to further his own intrigues. There was no guidebook to follow unless he created it himself
ex nihilo
, out of nothing. His only constraint was the will to power, his willingness to stick a fist in another man’s face if necessary. James Luke trusted his wrath and decisiveness, not empty talk, not book learning, and he believed direct action created more wealth and privilege than an entire university business department working overtime. He was the Friedrich Nietzsche of Natchez, and no one fully comprehended it.

“James Luke, you need another drink?” Tartt said.

“Yeah, whiskey sour.”

“Me, too.” Tartt was a lush, plastered most evenings after six o’clock, usually falling asleep in his living room chair with a glass of whiskey neat. He said to the waiter, “Boy, go get us a couple of whiskey sours.” He then turned to his son-in-law. “That old waiter looks almost as good as you in a tuxedo.” Franklin Tartt laughed as he lit a cigarette.

James Luke faked a smile and let the comment slide.

They endured several windbag political speeches, the rallying of the troops, faith unchecked in the upcoming administration, promises as empty as cotton candy to the crowd of paying constituents, the price of democracy. The money was a pittance compared to what James Luke would make in the drug trade alone, not to mention the slumlording, all of which was helped along by a clean reputation as a hardworking Natchez-area businessman. This was all part of his strategy to expand wealth and domination. He was fifty-three years old, and he wanted to score big. He always heard that any man who could count all of his money and assets did not have nearly enough to brag about or be content with. Real money was weighed like overdrawn metaphors, the conspicuous symbols of large estates, tens of thousands of shares of stock, percentages of corporate ownership, but not cash tender. Let others estimate your worth from a distance and envy it. He didn’t have the assets to afford such comfort, but he was determined to get filthy rich or die in the process.

At home on South Pearl Street, the housekeeper had taken a telephone message for James Luke while they were at the campaign event. It was a note written in pencil on a slip of yellow paper. “Mr. Cate, please call Mr. Marshall Brown Low at his home in Louisiana.”

When James Luke read the note, he chuckled.

“What’s funny?” Heloise asked.

“Oh, nothing, just Beulah’s spelling. The way she wrote something down.” He stuck the note in his pants pocket, and loosened his cummerbund.

“What’s it about?”

“There’s an old boy down in Louisiana that’s called about a dog. But hell, I ain’t raised hunting dogs since I moved to Baton Rouge. Something about owing him a puppy from a litter’s stud service. He’ll give me a hundred dollars’ worth of hell about not getting him his pick of the litter. And it’s been a decade at least. I guess something’s got in his craw,” James Luke said.

“After all of these years?” Her frown was slightly crooked, askance, and questioning.

“Yeah, stupid people always get obsessed with what’s too late to change. The man called me six months or so back, and I heard an earful about not giving him the pick of the litter on a redbone hound or some such that he claims I promised him years ago. Truth be told, I have little memory of it. I said I had a purebred black and tan litter coming along in a month’s time.” James Luke smiled and grabbed his wife and hugged her, squeezing her bottom until she giggled.

“But you don’t have any hunting dogs to give him a puppy. What can you do for him now?”

“Nothing.”

“So you’re lying to him?”

“No, I’m stalling. Eventually, he’ll say he’s coming up here, and I’ll go fetch him a puppy from the city pound over on Liberty Road, a hound-looking mutt maybe, and give it to him. Promise him the papers in a week, by mail, of course. Then he can kiss my freckled ass good-bye. The postal service ate them papers and shame on them for it. That was my only set. Blame Uncle Sam. You can’t lose in the South blaming the government.”

“You’re so bad,” she said.

He kissed her on the neck and whispered into her ear: “‘Bad is good,’ my daddy liked to say.”

The next morning, James Luke sat on the screen porch of his antebellum cottage and stared at the slip of yellow paper in his hand. “Please call Mr. Marshall Brown Low at his home in Louisiana.” He pondered it, went through his options.

Despite the sly assurances he’d given his wife, he did not know exactly what this man wanted, but he figured his years of criminal activity in Baxter Parish were finally catching up to him. There was no need to guess what it was about, he reasoned. If the marshal wanted to arrest him, he would get his lawyer to fight it. A good lawyer fashioned the law for his client like a pimp setting up a prostitute with a john. That’s what he’d learned since moving to the state of Mississippi. It was just a transaction based on need. The more money he made, the more he used his lawyer to take care of everyday problems as they arose.

It had been almost a decade since he’d lived in Louisiana, and he figured the statute of limitations ought to soon take care of nearly everything. He had not killed anyone, so he wasn’t worried about a capital crime without a limitation of years. He’d call the marshal to see what was going on. No use in running away from it. His wife was now off his trail, and she wouldn’t ask any more questions. She was highly predictable, and he knew he had her stiff-armed on this one—at least for now.

James Luke remembered the fires. He didn’t care anything about the hardwoods or the hogs in the woods. But he hated the Parnells, hated P.T. and Sloan who beat him out of a tract of land in Kilgore that he was going to buy and pay for by selling the trees. The two hundred acres of land was owned by a black family in Biloxi, and they didn’t know the value of the trees. When he tried to contract with a local timber man to clear cut the property, Sloan got wind of the deal and his father bought the land out from under James Luke. It was a grudge that ate at James Luke like a cancer.

He started to systematically burn Parnell and Fitz-Blackwell property. Much of it was done in his truck, riding through the country roads with his coon dogs chained in the bed. He had several packs of cigarettes loaded with matches below the tobacco. He’d light a cigarette, take two drags and toss it out of the truck window. The matches would catch when the fire hit the sulfur tips. The cigarettes started roadside fires, and the arson was impossible to trace back to James Luke, a simple hunter in the woods.

But he also rode Diablo, his black horse, slipping through swaths of timber company land at night, young plantation pine trees laid out in rows like corn. A cotton rope trailed behind the horse. The rope was tied to a special D-Ring on the back of his saddle, a tool he often used to drag hogs. James Luke fastened a collection of greasy rags doused in lard and kerosene to the end of the rope, which he lit. He rode Diablo between the pines. With a slow breeze blowing, the fire spread through the pine needles. The wind urged the fire to grow as the horse pushed deeper into the woods, walking his natural gait. The young pines began to burn behind him. Finally, the fire consumed the cotton rope itself near the back hooves of the horse. When James Luke saw the fire closing in, he’d dismount and stomp out the little fire from the remaining rope with his boot. Then he’d gather the rope, wrap it into a circle, and place it in a croaker sack taken from his saddlebag.

Once he made a wide circle through the woods, he’d ride up to a friend’s house and visit a while, drink a few beers.

After eating the breakfast Beulah had cooked, he opened the pages of the
Natchez-Democrat
. Though the fundraiser was mentioned, it would be the next day before it was covered and his picture published. The editorial policy required that everyone put down their drinks before the social page photographs were snapped. At least he knew he’d look proper in the paper.

James Luke had important business to take care of today. The telephone message was a nuisance, a distraction. He started to call his Louisiana lawyer, Salvatore Arnone, a bottom feeder with an office in Vidalia and a clientele of mobsters working in the rackets. He was a ham-fisted meat-eater who was never without words or petitions when James Luke needed them, pleadings produced like rounds from a machinegun. Salvatore was a criminal defense attorney with connections to the Cosa Nostra in New Orleans. His reach went as high as Carlos Marcello, the Mafioso, and he was kept on retainer by James Luke and many others. Salvatore was licensed in Louisiana, as well as Mississippi, and he was just a phone call away.

Nothing I do will matter, James Luke thought, unless I say too much. But I won’t paint myself into a corner. If I get the attorney involved too early, it’ll show I’m scared. Trying to hide something. I’ll be okay alone unless the marshal gets out of hand. Okay for now. At least the marshal ain’t too bright no way.

He swallowed the last of his orange juice and went to the bedroom to retrieve his .45 pistol, which was kept in a dresser drawer when he wasn’t carrying it. For safety, every morning he placed the pistol in his aluminum lunch box for his travels and workday activities. He checked the clip and the magazine, and wrapped the Colt in a red and black handkerchief and put it in his lunch box before he left the house.