The Art Of The Heart (3 page)

He
’d already been in bed when he heard the sound of the old McHenry flatbed clattering down the gravel road, and then onto the plowed field just beyond their fence. The motor died there. It did it in fits and starts. Most of the town’s teenagers parked there thinking no one could hear them approach, but Zac could. A line of trees hid the vehicles and their lights from the sight of the house, but the noise carried to his room like someone beating the inside of a metal drum. He recognized the McHenrys’ truck by the particular chug-chug-clunk sound of its motor. His heart did a song and dance knowing what the sound of that vehicle meant. Either Rory or Dale or both of them had come to cool themselves off in the pond. Even the thought of the teenager brought the now welcome stiffness to his pajama pants.

He listened for a few minutes.
The sound of only one truck door opening and slamming. He rose and knelt in front of his window to peer between the silo and the line of oaks that blocked the view of the road and field where the truck was parked. He could see the single darting beam of a flashlight making its way toward the pond. The figure was still too far away to tell who it was, and his heartbeat choked him in anticipation. Fireflies danced like miniature amber lanterns in the deep blue night. The singing insects of summer were alive with a new song, masking the crunch of footfalls on dry grass. Zac picked up the miniature binoculars and held them in front of his eyes, focusing until he found the dark figure moving toward the pond. At last he was beyond the trees moving toward the silo. He was tall. Long, light hair swayed at his shoulders beneath a cowboy hat. Rory. His breath caught.

Once he passed the silo Zac could see him clearly. He had the flashlight in one hand and a bottle of either beer or soda in the other. He paused at the edge of the pond and sat the two things he carried on the ground. He peeled himself out of his pullover T. He kicked off his shoes, removed his socks, rolled them in a ball and stuffed them inside one of the shoes
. Zac’s pulse was thick in his throat as he watched him unsnap and unzip his jeans and slip out of them. His naked body glowed like blue marble in the warm moonlight. Even deep in shadow his stature was like a work of art. It was because of the sublime perfection of men like this that songs were written, legends born, dreams fulfilled or hearts broken. Beauty, not blood made princes of this sort.

Zac was breathing so heavily it fogged the lenses of the small binoculars. He looked down the edge of bushes that separated the pond from the Weston backyard. Sheets were still strung on a clothesline waving in the light breeze. Down there was where he needed to be. He pushed his feet into his soft slippers. In a hollow house he had to make as little noise as possible. He knew every floorboard that squeaked and once past his bedroom door, he tiptoed a hopscotch pattern over them to get to the stairs. He walked down these close to the wall where the boards were less worn, stronger and
more quiet. At the bottom he listened. He was safe. His parents still slept soundly.

On the back porch the breeze caught his hair and billowed th
rough his loose pajamas. The night was cool and pleasant. The moon was just bright enough to illuminate a path between the wind-tossed sheets to the cover of the bushes at the edge of the yard. He made his way to these, and then carefully, pulling back branches, found a spot of bare earth where he could sit and observe the pond unseen by anyone.

Rory was naked, seated on his discarded jeans
, close enough to the pond to have his feet dangling in the water’s edge. Zac could see his toes wriggling upward, forming luminous ripples. He was leaning back sipping from the bottle. His silhouette was rimmed with pale light making his skin look like deep blue silk occasionally dotted with firefly glitter of perspiration. He was humming a tune that was familiar but unnamable. A hand skimmed down over his chest and abdomen and rested comfortably just below his navel in the nest of hair. Zac studied him like he was the sculpted work of a master on display in a museum. Every contour where light found a hollow was more beautiful than the previous.

He finished his drink, s
et the bottle down, rose and stretched wide and luxuriously, allowing the breeze to find its way over and around his naked flesh. His long hair whipped like a flag in one direction until he tucked it behind his ears and slowly waded into the pond. Then he dived in deep and the wave plumes showed that he aimed toward its center. A moment later he came up, wiping his wet hair backwards away from his face. It was in that precise moment, as he stood wet and gleaming in the light of the summer night, that Zac envisioned what he was to him. He was the embodiment of love. A real-life Cupid. A God of Desire. Not the fairy tale version of the chubby little boy with wings, but the slender, glorious young man. Clouds moved high behind him in the dark starlit sky giving him the appearance of having lustrous, ever-changing wings. The vision enthralled the younger boy.

He watched him for more than
an hour doing nothing special, but making each second feel momentous to Zac. It was like his mind was preserving each movement as if it were a vital brushstroke on canvas. He had nothing to compare what he was feeling against. It was new and wild and filled him to the brim. He was possessed by it.

In high school as all the other boys dated, Zac remained conspicuously alone. His oddness was what made them think he was slow, but that oddness was born from the fact that he simply did not share the same desire for the opposite sex. He was rarely teased or tormented for his
difference,
Sweetwater was too nice a town. He knew most people felt sorry for him. He could hear what they said behind his back. The hair that obscured his face didn’t impair his hearing in the least. There was no denying it hurt him, but the truth was far more dangerous. Sweetwater was also a religious community. He was better off playing dumb.

Unlike a number of the frustrated teenagers in the small town, he was not disposed to dreams of escaping to the lights and glamor and noise of the big cities like Kansas City or Saint Louis. They held nothing more for him than Sweetwater offered. He felt inextricably tied to the rolling flat farmlands and endless lonely sunset vistas. He knew he would live out his days here alone, and eventually fade into one of those future sunsets himself, taking his secret with him.

Zac had been drawing since he was fourteen. When he was fourteen Zac began to draw. It’s been said that imagination is the comfortable companion of the lonely heart. There was no one more lonely in all of Sweetwater than Zac Weston. So with pencil and sketchbook, he could live inside his own wonderful world, populate it with people he loved and who loved him in return. With his own art he found a way to make his isolation more bearable.

The one curious thing he discovered about himself the moment he began to draw was the way his mind had recorded things in remarkable, intricate, almost photographic detail. If he saw it, he could draw it. No matter how long ago he
’d seen it. He could close his eyes and count the dandelions on the lawn around a fence post, the number of cakes on a red and white checkerboard tablecloth at a church bake sale, or the exact way the sun landed on a sixteen year old boy lying shirtless on a tractor in a pair of cut off jean shorts and a cowboy hat. The remembered lines in his mind guided the ones laid by his pencil on paper and magically he could bring a memory back to life in black and white. Many of those dark lead lines restored the images of one person who seemed to remain foremost in his thoughts. It was while he sketched a portrait of the blond god in the pond with the clouds drifting like amorphous wings behind him, that he had an epiphany. How he could bring love into his solitary life in the heartland in a town called Sweetwater. He could draw his own love story like a comic. Create his own version of a superhero in a Cupid-like figure he would name Eros, the Greek name for the same character. He would have large diaphanous wings and would only be attired in a see-through loincloth and sandals. He would carry his bow and arrows that were filled with uncontrollable love in a glittery, gem-covered quiver over his back. He’d be invisible to all until he finally found the one that he could love and would love him in return.

There was no doubt that a particular genius had hidden itself in the shy boy. And unless someone
were to glance in his sketchbook it would remain unknown. His parents were glad he found a quiet method to amuse himself, but they never intruded on him to even take a glance at what he was drawing. Like everyone else, they’d remain unaware of his unique talent. If his father would have looked, he would have clearly recognized every single member of the town of Sweetwater in a portrait of the square dance in their barn. You could pick each face out definitively. That same would be true of the Fourth of July picnic held along Main Street. Every detail of the event was laid out in black and white; down to the Sheriff licking his fingers clean of barbeque sauce.

The other item one would have noticed about each and every one of these sketches as crisp and clear as a photograph was the one figure that was repeatedly the sole object of focus. Rory McHenry
. No matter how many things were going on around Zac, being recorded with infinitely concise clarity in his mind, it all spun around the zenith that was the object of his affection. Rory was the Clark Kent of his story. A simple farm boy in the eyesight of everyone, but harboring a secret identity.

Zac lost himself in the story. Life inside his sketchbook was more real to him than the dull existence he led outside of it. He became so consumed with his own story that he no longer begged his dad to buy him the latest comics on their trips into town. His dad merely thought he had outgrown them. He had no idea that he was drawing and living in the imaginings of his own comic book.

One blistering hot Saturday afternoon when Zac was sixteen, he was seated in the back of the air conditioned Beverly Arts Bijou Theater. It was a small theater that barely sat one hundred people. It’s lobby was no bigger than Zac’s bedroom and half of that was taken up with the refreshment stand where you could buy your Slow Pokes, M&Ms, popcorn and Pepsis for a nickel each. Zac had his favorite seat in the last row on the left side near the exit. From here he could people watch. Which actually meant Rory McHenry watch. The nineteen year old always brought his latest girlfriend to the picture show because it was cool and dark, the seats were cushioned and deep and it was a good place to make out.
He’d pick the end of the row on the left side midway down the theater. Zac was far enough to the left that he could see the occupants of those seats perfectly. The movie was incidental to him. He was there to study the one who had unwittingly become the model of his comic book hero.

There wasn
’t any doubt that Rory was a countrified Casanova. When he’d kissed his way through all the girls and women of Sweetwater, he started on those from the next county of Clarksville. He never ran short of female company. That fact never deflated Zac’s infatuation as it would have someone else’s. He simply created an explanation for it in his story. Eros, the dispenser of love with his almighty arrows, was continually seeking love of his own and never finding it. He would go from one girl to the next never finding what he looked for. So his search was continual and he remained unsatisfied. The quest for his own love was endless for the tragic hero who delivered it to so many others.

The girl Rory had with him that Saturday was unknown to Zac, so she had to be from Clarksville.
She was dark haired, had a ponytail, was big breasted, wore a lot of make-up and too much perfume. The scent was still too strong for him six rows back. She liked to cup Rory’s face with her hands as she kissed him, and she turned her head this way and that as she did so, making loud smacking noises like someone eating a sorghum popcorn ball. Rory would move her hands away every now and then as if she was blocking proper access to the kiss, but in the next second they’d be right back in the same place.

By the fourth time, Zac was ready to laugh. He could psychically feel his hero
’s annoyance by watching his body language. The only way to stop this girl’s hands would be to tie them behind her back. But Rory persevered. The mating ritual could be humorous at times. Watching it afforded Zac insight into his character’s passion. The older boy’s kisses were tender and earnest, begging for the same in return. His long, strong fingers were extraordinarily delicate on someone who worked so hard. He didn’t grab, or push or squeeze. They were tactile, like he was exploring some fragile treasure. He whispered things in her ear and then found a spot on her neck with his lips to punctuate his words. The tremor that ran through her when he did this was visible. His mixture of words and kisses worked magic on her senses. They slid deeper into their seats. Zac could see nothing but the crown of Rory’s head and an elbow of an arm that was pumping back and forth against the light of the movie screen. The girls muffled moans were drowned by the soundtrack.

He would sketch all of this later in impassioned, graphic detail.
Poor Eros in his quest for love. Zac’s favorite thing to draw was his hero when he was in costume. He loved drawing Eros half naked. Broad shoulders, lean muscles and tapered waist. The shimmering see-through loincloth affording just the barest glimpses of his glorious manhood. The dark sprout of pubes pushing against the dazzling fabric, the thick length of dick and dangle of balls barely concealed. His skin was like satin with a sheen the light adored playing on. The translucent wings that allowed him to fly anywhere to continue his search. His beauty in this form would have been breathtaking to look upon, though no one would see it. As Eros performed his duty, he was invisible. His presence would only be known by the strike of his arrow as he brought love to the hearts and minds of others. Like all superheroes, his was a thankless job with no rewards. No one would ever know what wonderful things he’d done to further his mission. He would return to his everyday life as an ordinary farm boy, still alone, still barren of the wonderful joy he brought to others.