The party, to him, was like the inside of a nervous breakdown.
He almost stumbled over a pair of bodies entwined on the ground. Catching a glimpse of exposed breasts, he apologized and continued on as a boy cursed at him. Walking far away from the house, Wayne sat down on the shore near a couple of beached canoes and sucked on his ice. He was trembling inside, and wished he’d never stepped across that doorway.
“You all alone?” someone asked. A girl’s voice, with a thick backhills accent.
Wayne looked up. He couldn’t see her face, but she had thick waves of black hair and he thought she was the same girl Terry had been talking to. She was wearing a low-cut peasant blouse and bell-bottoms, rolled up as if she’d been wading in the water. “Want some company?”
“No, thank you.”
She swigged from a can of beer. “This party’s fucked up. I hear Dickerson put acid in the punch. That would really fuck everybody’s mind, huh?”
He winced at the first use of that awful four-letter sex word; the second gave him a funny feeling in the pit of his stomach. She was the kind of girl who did it, he realized.
“Pretend I’m blind,” the girl said, and crouched down in front of Wayne. She ran her hand all over Wayne’s face. He flinched because she smelled so strongly of beer. “See, I’m blind and I’ve got to feel what you look like. You go to Indian Hills?”
“I graduated.” Beneath the beer odor was another aroma: the rich, musky, forbidden scent of a woman. He told himself to get up and go back to the car. But he didn’t move.
“My name’s Lonnie. What’s yours?”
“Wayne.” He almost said Falconer, but the name hung on his lips. He shifted his position, hoping she wouldn’t notice his swelling penis. Tell her who you are, he told himself, so she’ll get up and leave you alone!
“You know Randy Leach? Well me and him broke up tonight. Sonofabitch is going to Samford University in Birmingham, says he’s got to date other girls. Shit!” She drank from the beer and offered it to him, but he shook his head. “I wasted a whole summer on that bastard!”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Well, that’s how it goes I guess.” She looked at him and laughed. “Hey, what’s wrong? You look like a whore in church, you’re so tense!”
Blasphemy and sacrilege! Wayne thought. He looked at her in the darkness, but could only make out the pale oval of her face. He couldn’t tell if she was pretty or not, but he knew she was a lost sinner. “Are you saved, girl?” he asked.
There was a moment of shocked silence. Then the girl laughed uproariously. “Oh, wow! I thought you really meant that! You sounded just like my damn momma, always after me to go to churchy-wurchy! Are you rich?”
“Rich?” Wayne echoed. “I…guess I am,” he said truthfully.
“I knew it. Know how I knew? ’Cause there’s somethin’ so squeaky-clean about you. And you don’t even drink beer, do you, ’cause it’s too low-class for you. Where you going to college?”
“Up in Tennessee.” Tell her it’s the Southeastern Bible College!
He could sense the girl staring at him. “You’re sweet,” she said softly. “Who’d you come here with?”
“Terry Dozier and Helen Betts.”
“Don’t know them.” She sat close to him and looked out toward the lake. Wayne could feel her body heat, and again he shifted uncomfortably. The images tumbling through his mind were nasty and sinful, and he knew he was walking close to the Pit. “I’ve went with a lot of boys,” Lonnie said after a while. “How come every boy I ever go with just wants to have sex?”
Jezebel! Wayne thought.
“I mean, I know I’ve got a good body and all. I was in the Miss Fayette Junior High contest last year, and I got the most points in the swimsuit competition. But seems like everybody tries to take advantage of me. Wonder why that is?”
“I don’t know,” Wayne said in a husky voice. From a black part of his mind a sibilant voice said, She wants to do it and she uses the four-letter sex word.
Then, before Wayne could shift away again, Lonnie leaned toward him and whispered in his ear, “Why don’t we go out in one of them canoes?”
“I can’t. I’ve… I’ve got my good clothes on.”
She giggled and tugged at his shirt. “Then take your good clothes off.”
“You’d better get back to the party. Somebody’ll miss you.”
“Miss me? Naw! Randy left with somebody else! Come on, sweet thing, let’s go out in a canoe. Okay? You’re so tense, what’s wrong? Little Lonnie make you nervous?” She took his hand and tugged at him until he stood up, and then she pulled him with her to the nearest canoe.
Wayne’s head was dizzy, throbbing from the echo of the rock music from way up on the patio. Lake water lapped softly at the shore. “I don’t see any paddles in there.”
She climbed in carefully and rummaged around, then held up a paddle. “Here you go. Just one, though, so you’ll have to drive the boat.” She sat down. “What’re you waitin’ for, sweet thing?”
“I…don’t think we should go out on the lake in the dark.”
She said softly and invitingly, “I trust you.”
Wayne looked over his shoulder at the house, where kids were dancing on the patio. He had a strange sense of isolation, a feeling that all wasn’t right and he should know what was wrong, but it evaded him. Wasn’t it right, he thought, that he should be a human being too?
“Let’s do it, sweet thing,” the girl whispered.
Wayne had to step through the water to shove the canoe off. He slipped into it, almost capsizing them and bringing a squeal of laughter from her; then they were gliding through the dark water, leaving the party noise behind.
“See?” Lonnie said. “Ain’t this nice?”
Wayne heard water rolling in the bottom of the canoe. His expensive loafers were getting ruined. The moon was rising, an amber scythe that looked so close and sharp you could cut your throat on it. Bullfrogs croaked from the shore, and the night closed around the drifting canoe.
Lonnie sighed deeply, a sexy, needful sigh, and Wayne thought his head might crack open like an eggshell. “There’s somethin’ awful familiar about you,” she said. “It’s your voice, I guess. Do I know you from somewhere?”
“No.”
The music faded to a low murmur. The Dickerson house was a distant glow on the shore.
A dark object lay ahead. Wayne said, “What’s that?” and then the canoe grazed a square wooden diving platform. He took the paddle out of the water and held it over his knees. His heart was beating harder, and when Lonnie’s voice came, it was like balm on a fever blister. “We could rest here for a little while.”
He almost laughed. Rest? Oh, she was a sinful Jezebel! She wanted him, he knew. She wanted to be naked for him, and to do it. “If you want to,” he heard himself say, as if from a stranger’s mouth.
Wayne found a rope trailing from the platform and tied up the canoe. Then he was helping Lonnie out onto the platform, and she was pressing herself against him and he could feel her breasts, her nipples jutting against his chest. His heart was pounding, his head was filled with heat and he couldn’t think.
“I’m cold,” she whispered. “Please hold me, I’m cold.”
He put his arms around her, and realized it was he who was trembling.
Lonnie pulled him down onto the platform, as lake water chuckled around them and the smell of moss drifted up. A dam of pent-up passions cracked inside Wayne—she wants to do it and there’s nobody to see, nobody to know!—and he fumbled at her clothes, his breathing harsh. His hands roamed over her body, as she held him close and whispered urgings in his ear. Her blouse came open. Wayne worked at her bra and then her breasts were free and warm against his hands. Her body pressed against his as his penis throbbed with heat. She rubbed at his crotch and then began pulling his belt loose, her teeth nipping at his neck. His pants started coming down. “Hurry,” she whispered. “Hurry hurry, please…”
>
His penis was exposed as his underwear came down, and the girl put her hand on it.
And Wayne heard in his head the crack of his father’s voice like a lash across his back: Sinner! Would you lie down with Jezebel?
He was excited and dizzy, his eyes squeezed shut, his mind tormented between what he wanted and what he knew he shouldn’t do. She gripped his penis, and he opened his eyes.
He was no longer in the embrace of a girl.
It was something that looked like a beast, a wild boar, red-eyed and grinning.
Wayne tried to pull away, but then the vision passed and it was Lonnie again, dark-haired Lonnie, faceless Lonnie.
Sinner! Would you lie with Jezebel?
“No!” Lonnie said. “Make it big again! Make it big!”
“I…can’t… I…” He was concentrating, trying as hard as he could. His father’s voice rang in his brain, a bass rumble of Doom: Sinner! He’d go to Hell for lying with a harlot, he’d been tricked by Satan into coming out here!
“Make it big!” Lonnie was saying, a note of anger and frustration in her voice. She handled his penis like a small twig. “Come on, can’t you get it up?” After another minute or two, she released him and sat over on the platform’s edge, putting her bra and blouse back on.
“I’m sorry,” he said, hurriedly getting his pants on. He felt slimed by the Jezebel’s touch, but wicked needs and desires still coursed through him. “Next time,” he said. “It’s just… I don’t feel right about this. Okay?”
“Forget it. I need a man, not a little boy who can’t even get it up! Come on, take me back to shore!”
Her voice was ugly. The sound of it scared Wayne. “I just…you won’t tell anybody about this, will you?”
“What’s wrong with you? Are you queer?”
“No! Please…you won’t tell anybody, will you?”
Lonnie buttoned her blouse. He saw her head tilted to one side, as if in concentration. Then, slowly, she turned toward him. “Why not? It’d be somethin’ for a laugh, wouldn’t it?”
“Satan’s in you,” he whispered. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
“What?” He thought she smiled in the darkness.
“You’re a Jezebel, a dirty sinner and oh God I shouldn’t have come out here!”
“Now I know where I’ve heard your voice!” the girl said and Wayne cringed. “My momma made me listen to that Crusade crap on the radio! You’re—oh, wow! You’re the little healer himself, ain’t you?” She whooped with laughter. “Yeah! You’re Little Wayne Falconer! Oh, wow, everybody’s gonna laugh their—”
“No,” he said forcefully, and she was silent. “You’re not going to tell anybody.”
“Who says? Take me back or I’ll start screamin’!”
He had to make her understand! He had to make her see he was a righteous boy! He took a step toward her.
And then Lonnie abruptly turned toward shore and yelled, “HELP!”
“Shut up!” he hissed, and pushed her. She staggered across the platform.
“HELP!” she shouted again, her voice echoing across the water.
Wayne exploded. He pushed her as hard as he could, and suddenly Lonnie’s feet slipped out from under her on the moss-slick boards. She fell backward, her arms windmilling. There was a violent, sickening crunch! as the side of her head hit a corner of the platform.
She fell into the lake, and the black water covered her.
At once Wayne reached down to grasp her, but she was gone. Bubbles burst upward, smelling of lake mud. He leaned down, whining with panic, and thrust his arms underwater to find her. He got up, ran across the platform to the canoe to retrieve the paddle, and used that to probe the depths. He looked up toward the house, and started to scream for help. No! he thought. She’s not hurt, she’s all right! She only bumped her head a little bit, she’ll come up in just a few seconds!
“Lonnie!” he whispered. “Come on up, now! Come on!”
Black water sighed around the platform. He reached underwater again—and felt her hair. He gripped it and wrenched upward. It was a rotten tree limb with a green mane of algae.
He started to ease himself into the water to look for her, but realized that if he got wet everyone would know at the party. She was probably swimming to shore.
“Lonnie?” he called out, a little louder. Only crickets and bullfrogs answered.
After a while he began to cry, and he prayed as he’d never prayed before. The dark voice in his mind whispered, She was a Jezebel a dirty sinner and she deserved what she got! He sat on the platform for a long time, shaking, his head bowed.
Wayne was sitting in the Camaro’s backseat when Terry and Helen found him about an hour later. His face was very pale. The gin got to him, Terry thought.
“Where’ve you been, Wayne?” Terry asked as he slipped behind the wheel. “We were lookin’ for you.”
Wayne’s smile made his face look like a skull. “Just around. I went for a long walk. The music was too loud.”
“You meet any of those pretty girls?” Helen asked.
“No. Not a one.”
“Great party, huh?” Terry started the engine. “Listen, Wayne. Since I’m on a scholarship, you…uh…won’t tell your dad about this, will you? I mean, I didn’t smoke or drink.”
“No, I won’t tell.”
“Good.” Terry winked at Helen. “It’ll be our secret, right?”
“Right,” Wayne said. “Our secret.”
32
IT WAS AFTER ELEVEN o’clock, and Wayne was way late getting home. Jimmy Jed Falconer, in his robe and slippers, stood on the front porch in the cool night air and looked out toward the highway.
He’d slipped out of bed without waking Cammy, because he didn’t want her to be worried. His belly bulged the knot at the front of his robe, but still his stomach growled for food. Where could the boy be at this time of night? he wondered. He stood on the porch for a few minutes longer, then went back through the large, rambling house to the kitchen.
He switched on the lights, opened the refrigerator, and brought out a piece of blueberry pie Esther the cook had baked just that afternoon. Pouring himself a cold glass of milk, he sat down for a late-night snack.
The summer was almost over. And what a glorious summer it had been, too! The Crusade had held tent revivals throughout Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—hitting the larger towns and the cities—and next year would be ready for expansion into Texas and Arkansas. An ailing Fayette radio station had been purchased, as well as a South Carolina publishing company, and the first issue of Forward, the Crusade’s magazine, would be out in October. Wayne had touched and healed a few thousand people over the course of the summer the boy was a masterful orator, and could hold that stage like he’d been born on it. When Wayne had finished the healing segment of the program, the offering plates came back filled to the brim. Wayne was a good boy, and he was as smart as a whip; but he had a stubborn streak in him, too, and he persisted in going out in the airfield where his Beechcraft Bonanza was hangared and flying without a co-pilot, getting up in the sky and doing all kinds of crazy loops and rolls. That sort of thing scared Falconer to death: what if the plane should crash? Wayne was a good pilot, but he took a lot of risks, and he seemed to enjoy the danger.
Falconer gulped down the milk and chewed on a bite of pie. Yessir! It had been a glorious summer!
Suddenly he realized his left arm was tingling. He shook the hand, thinking it had somehow fallen asleep. It was very hot here in the kitchen, he noticed; he’d begun sweating.
Do you know what you’re doing, son?
Falconer stopped with another piece of pie right at his mouth. He’d thought about the night in May many times, and the question the Hawthorne witch-woman had posed to Wayne. That question had surfaced in his mind as he’d watched the pale and hopeful faces of the sick and infirm passing by in the Healing Line, reaching up with trembling hands toward Wayne. Suddenly, the blueberry pie tasted like ashes. He put the fork do
wn on his plate, and touched his chest where a quick needle-jab of pain had pierced. Now it had passed. The pain was gone. Good.
But his mind was wandering in dangerous territory. What if—what if—the witch-woman was right? And he’d known it all along, that Wayne’s internal battery was getting weaker and weaker, and that was why he never dared ask Wayne to heal his diseased heart. And what if Wayne knew it, too, and was continuing to play the part because…because it was all he’d ever been taught to do.
No! Falconer thought. Wayne healed Toby, didn’t he? And thousands of letters came in from people who said they were healed by Wayne’s touch and presence!
He recalled a letter from long ago, sent to the Crusade office a week or so after the tent revival in Hawthorne. It had been from a woman named Posey, and Falconer had thrown it away as soon as he’d read it:
Dear Rev. Falconer, we just want to tell you that our son Jimmie has been took by Jesus. Your boy healed him at the revival in Hawthorne, but Jesus must have a purpose for our Jimmie in Heaven. I have paid my sin for selling my baby to Mr. Tillman. May the Lord be with you, and all of your teachings.
Sincerely, Laura Posey.
Falconer had made sure Wayne would never see that letter, nor the few dozen letters similar to it that the Crusade had gotten. No, it was better that the boy never, never doubt himself.
Rising unsteadily from the kitchen table, Falconer went to the den and sat down in his easy chair. The framed Falconer Crusade poster, with him looking much younger and braver and stronger, was spotlit by a ceiling light.
Pain speared his chest. He wanted to get up now, and go upstairs to bed, but he couldn’t make his body respond. Maybe he needed to take some Tums, that was all. His mind was tormented with the thought of Ramona Creekmore looking at his son and knowing it was all a lie; she had the eyes of Satan, and that boy of hers was walking Death, and it wasn’t until he’d met them that his heart had begun to get worse.