It didn't occur to me until I had driven up to the Ravens Roost Lookout on the Blue Ridge Parkway in response to that long ago request by Dabney Belcastle to be here at a precise time on this date that this was the same date, two years later, of my first meeting of Belcastle in this exact spot. I'd had the date circled in red on my calendar for several months; I gave no thought to not showing up. Belcastle had cut me a hefty check just to be here, although he'd made no secret of why he'd asked me to be here or how he hoped it would make up in some small part for taking Hank Hemings from me.
The irony there was that a heavy burden lifted off my shoulders the moment I was free of Hank. He was an indulgence that had become a ball and chain for me—a sex-driven habit and fetish that I could not break until Belcastle arranged the divestment.
The day was perfect, so I had come up early. I saw no reason why I shouldn't multipurpose this trip. I'd brought my easel and my canvases and paints and I, once again, was trying to capture the light just at the right time on the Torrey Ridge opposite the lookout ledge as I had done in the painting I had left by the front door at Castleton when I had discovered Hank fucking Dab on the floor in front of Dab's fireplace.
I was so engrossed in trying to capture the reeling ravens and hawks flying over the little valley created by the spur of the Torrey Ridge pushing out from the main Blue Ridge range that I didn't hear the car pull into the parking apron off the parkway.
"I think you've gotten it just right." The voice was melodic, a basso profundo. The sort of voice you'd hear narrating a PBS documentary. I turned and looked, and for the briefest moment my attention was drawn past the young man standing there to the white Bentley convertible parked beyond him. My heart leapt into my throat, and my gaze snapped back to the man, half way expecting to see Dabney Belcastle, but knowing that wasn't really possible.
"Are you Paul?" I asked.
The young man did a double take but quickly relaxed and smiled.
"He arranged this, didn't he? This is why he specified the day and time."
"Yes, I suppose he did," I answered. This Paul was quite a good looking young man. Belcastle had told me that he was an English professor, so I was expecting something academic and anemic. But he was strongly built, achingly handsome, and deeply tanned. Ah yes, I then thought. He's been off in Southeast Asia the last few months.
I felt my hand trembling at the sight of him. He was much more presentable and alluring than I had thought. I had wondered what Belcastle was up to in this, but now I could see where he might have been as manipulative as ever—but even more promisingly so in this than in some of his other controlling schemes. I turned back to the painting to play for time and to catch my breath from having taken in the beauty of him.
"You're not wearing the fur coat," I said.
"It doesn't seem to be me," he said, and then he gave a rich and rumbling chuckle. "It's in the car, though. Still in the backseat where he left it."
"Ah, yes, the car. I can see that you're 'wearing' that, though."
"Yes, I think that's me perfectly," he answered with another chuckle. Then he moved in close behind me and put a hand on my shoulder as he peered into the painting. "Yes, I think you've got it just right."
"The birds," I muttered, pleased that he liked the painting but not that pleased that he was so forgiving. I had expected the eye of an artist, but I was being unfair. He was an artist of an entirely different eye. I continued with the demur. "I don't have the birds right. I never can seem to do them justice."
"That's because they value their freedom too highly, I think," he countered. "They are free spirits up here; not static and showy like the mountainsides in their autumn mantel. They defy capture, and maybe that is as it should be."
Ah, a discerning artist after all, I thought. All of this time and it took an artist of words and concepts to free me of the need to control even the birds reeling on the updrafts of the mountain slopes. Be free and loose, go with the flow, they were telling me. Follow the moment. I suddenly felt more relaxed and free than I had for years.
"I would like to buy this painting when you are done, if you wish to sell it," Paul whispered over my shoulder. He had his other hand on my other shoulder now. I saw that he had placed a silver box on the ground beside my chair as he had moved closer to me.
"That's what he said—two years ago today, right here," I answered in a low voice.
"Ah," Paul said. "Do you think he planned all of this?"
