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  “Can we help you?” says Wesley.

  “I need to duplicate some pages from this book.”

  A Yankee or something, he thinks, and she’s probably in college, maybe a freshman.

  “No problem. Which pages would you like done?”

  “I’ve got them marked there. The ones with a paper clip and a piece of paper.”

  “Okay, if you will just go over there and get that little black counter box, and bring it on back over here to me, I’ll fix you right up.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And ask them if they can help that girl over there with the oversized stuff.” Wesley steps toward the oversize machine and says to the girl waiting, “My buddy’s going to help you out. He’s the expert on repairs. I already had an appointment set up when you came in.” He moves back to his post behind the chest-high wall, looks at the new young woman over at the main desk. She sure is fat, he thinks, but maybe it’s just more big since her proportions are about right. Nothing is hanging anywhere. Everything looks pretty firm. Wesley imagines his hands on her bare skin, roaming all around all over the body of this great big old young woman, probably a virgin, his hands just sort of venturing around, finding a bunch of little bitty freckles like a bunch of stars up in the night sky there under one of her breasts where the skin is the whitest, following a little line of star-freckles right up to the sun—her nipple. Her nipples are probably bright pink, not dark brown or black, he thinks. He blinks, hard. Dear God, please forgive me. Help me free my mind of things that I’m not supposed to think about.

  It’s weird that I should feel this way about some girl who’s fat, thinks Wesley. He’s been trying not to think about women and sex. Maybe what’s going on is that he’ll just be thinking about kind of weird and different women, unusual women, like this one—for awhile. Then, after that, no women, no fantasies. Maybe God is slowly changing the way he thinks about women. Kind of slowly getting him out of the habit. Now, if he had a wife, he could think about her all he wanted to. That wouldn’t be a sin.

  This business of stopping thinking about women and stuff has been harder than stopping drinking and cursing. Wesley doesn’t like to hear cursing any more. It’s wrong. When he couldn’t get his roommate, Ben, to stop, he had to finally insist that Ben please at least start all his curse words with an n, or at least do it with the main ones. Wesley has had a hard time figuring out which are the main ones. He figures damn and hell are okay. They were okay with Mrs. Rigsbee, the old Christian lady he used to live with, the one that got him to become a Christian himself.

  The Christian life has not been an easy life, but Wesley knows it’s the right life.

  The big girl with red hair returns, hands Wesley the little black counter box and her book. “I just need a copy on the sides where the little piece of paper is clipped on,” she says.

  Wesley takes the book to a machine. He reads a little from each page before he copies it. It’s some kind of education thing, about teaching kindergarten. There are diagrams of a classroom, several lists. He finishes, removes the counter from the machine, puts the sheets inside the book, gives it all back to the fat girl.

  “You pay him over there,” he says. “And ah, come back to see us. I’m usually here on Monday mornings.”

  “Thank you.” She smiles at him.

  “I believe I’ve seen you over close to where I live.”

  “I’m at the Nutrition House.”

  “Yeah, I live close to there. I’m Wesley Benfield. Pleased to meet you.” Mrs. Rigsbee taught him to look the person in the eye, reach out with his hand, use a firm grip.

  “I’m Phoebe Trent,” the young woman says.

  She’s still smiling, thinks Wesley. A lazy kind of smile, full lips. Those eyes and those freckles and that thick red hair all together. Wow. He can’t believe how much he wants to see her all over. “Well,” he says, “I hope you’ll come back.”

  “I will.”

  “You a kindergarten teacher?”

  “I’m an aide at Mt. Gilead Kindergarten, but just for this year.”

  “You got to be kidding. I go to church there!”

  “Really? Well, I’ll be going there, too. I’ve been there for the last few Sundays.”

  “I haven’t seen you. Do you have a ca—?” He feels himself moving too fast. Car. He can find that out later, if all the other stuff works out.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing.” I bet she does have a car.

  A man in a suit and tie walks up and says to Wesley, “Do y’all sell paper clips?”

  “There’s some in a plastic cup over there on the counter.”

  “I need about a hundred.”

  “Check with them over there.” Get out of here, man.

  The first young woman is raising her voice to the Copy-Op employee. “But I worked on that map for three weeks. It won’t do me any good in three pieces. It goes on display. It was his fault,” she says, pointing to Wesley.

  “I got to mail out this flyer,” says the man who wants paper clips, “and I decided to add this letter that explains what my business is all about.”

  “Over there.” Wesley points toward the counter without taking his eyes off Phoebe.

  Then Phoebe is walking away. As she opens the door to leave, she looks back at Wesley and smiles, holds up her hand and says, “Bye.”

  The Copy-Op boss is walking up. “That map is ruined. Did you tell her you worked here?” he asks.

  “I’ll be right back,” says Wesley. He walks around the counter, out the door into the hot air outside, calls to Phoebe. “Hey. You headed to the Nutrition House?”

  She stops, amazed. A man is calling out to her. But it’s daylight, a city street. She will be in daylight, walking home. It’s all probably okay. And he’s cute. This is a surprise. She can’t remember when she was last pursued in any way like this.

  “I’m heading home, too,” says Wesley, catching up. “I’m not far from where you live.” The hot sunlight glints off car fenders. Wesley feels like jumping into the air.

  Phoebe decides to make a little joke. “You’re not at the halfway house, are you?”

  “Actually, I am.” Wesley reaches up to his nose, pinches it, eyes her. “I’m a counselor there.” Wesley knows his residency at BOTA House is a kind of mistake. He was already a Christian when somebody left their keys in the ignition of a white Continental with a tan interior. And now he’s asked God for forgiveness. And he’s been forgiven. And he’s been in enough institutions—the orphanage, the rehabilitation center—to know how to be a counselor. He knows the ropes, more or less.

  “Oh. Well,” says Phoebe. “That must be an interesting job.”

  “Oh, yes. Very interesting.”

  Phoebe notices Wesley’s shoes. Sneakers, with the laces undone. They don’t seem to be a counselor’s shoes, she thinks. But you can’t always tell about counselors. “Do you know Celia Boles—one of the counselors at Nutrition House? The graduate student?”

  “Actually . . . actually I’m not actually a counselor.” Wesley tries to smile, but the smile doesn’t come onto his face just right. Half of his mouth stays down. “I just. . . I mean . . .” Honesty is the best policy. “I didn’t want to scare you off. I’m a resident at BOTA House.” Christians are honest, THE BEST CUNNING IS NO CUNNING, Mrs. White had up on her blackboard one time.

  Phoebe moves her hand up to the top button on her blouse. One of those! She knows about the halfway house—where it is and . . . and everything. At the Nutrition House people sit on the porch and joke about it.

  “But see,” says Wesley, “I got in some trouble a couple of years ago, but it was an accident. Honest. Like a honest accident. See, I been going to church for several years—still do, regular—and up until this trouble I was living with this woman, this old lady. And I was going to church then, too. This old lady, she took me in, see, and she got in trouble on account of it, and had to change churches and all just because she took me in, and so we both ende
d up at Mt. Gilead, and she was like my grandmother, and so anyway, I’m going to be getting out of BOTA House in three or four months. What happened was I went and took this Continental for a ride and had already been in trouble when I was a teenager about cars. I was a orphan. Still am. But see they won’t take you in at the halfway house unless you’re really okay. The other clients are just embezzlers and women and stuff, people that don’t pose no threat at all. My roommate might pose a little threat, but he’s the only one. No, I’m kidding. He don’t pose a threat. He plays guitar. It’s really a normal place, pretty lax, like a dormitory or something. We got a band and everything. Just a few people that had bad breaks.”

  “I see.” Phoebe has seen normal kinds of activities going on over there—people cutting grass, painting a shed out back. And anyway, he’s a musician. “What instrument do you play?”

  “I play bass. But I’m learning bottleneck guitar on my roommate’s six string. I’m going to get me a National Steel Dobro when I save enough money. It’s a—you know what they are?”

  “No.”

  “It’s made out of aluminum or steel or something like that and has a chrome finish—looks like a guitar but it’s really a Dobro. And they made these National Steels back in the old days, the thirties and stuff, and since. Same people that made those big old cash registers. Anyway, they were built to be loud, before there were microphones and stuff. Had these little speaker things built in the front of them. What you do is put a bottleneck on your finger, see. Then you slide it up and down the neck and you fret kind of light and it’s a great sound.” Wesley slows his walking, reaches in his pocket and pulls out a bottleneck. She seems interested, he thinks, and she’s slowing down. “You get them made out of glass or metal. Some of the the guys that play that way are Bukka White, Son House. And Bonnie Raitt. It’s a great sound. And Johnny Winter. And there’s a guy that plays in Raleigh, Clifton Dowell. I already got some books that teach you.”

  “Oh, I see.” He is definitely sincere, Phoebe thinks, and polite. She wonders if he’ll want to see her again. She wonders why he is so nice to her. As big as she is. It’s unusual, she thinks.

  By the time they get to the halfway house, Phoebe has learned that Wesley, besides being a musician, is a part-time brickmason over at the university. Clearly he is not someone she would ever think about marrying, or even getting overly serious about, but on the other hand, she has been hoping for some kind of adventure here in North Carolina while she solves her weight problem. This may be the start of it. A Short, Gentle Adventure with an Interesting Young Man.

  “You from around here?” asks Wesley.

  “I’m from Michigan. I’m majoring in elementary education up there, but I’m taking a year off, you know, to be down here.”

  “Oh, yeah. Okay. I thought you sort of sounded like you were from somewhere up North. How do you like it down here?”

  “Fine. Just fine so far.”

  It’s time for Wesley to cross the street. “I’ll see you later,” he says. “Nice to meet you.”

  Phoebe lifts her hand and wiggles her fingers. “Nice to meet you.”

  Crossing the street, Wesley wishes he’d told her he could cook. Maybe he could have arranged to cook her a little something in the BOTA House kitchen—get her over there. He’s about to call out to her about cooking her some cornbread and stuff but as he opens his mouth, he remembers she’s in town to lose weight. He crosses the curb, walks along the sidewalk. Maybe she’s rich, he thinks. He’s heard that a lot of the clients at the Nutrition House are. Maybe if it all works out, she’ll see how much he needs a Dobro, and buy him one for Christmas.

  As she walks away, Phoebe worries about Wesley looking at her rear end. In the past, before she really faced up to her weight problem, she was learning to look in the mirror and convince herself that she was rather large, but not fat, really. She would turn and look at herself at different angles in the mirror. But all the Nutrition House literature, sent to her home back in Michigan, emphasized—and helped convince her —that she had a real weight problem and had to take control of her life and solve it with the help of Jesus—changing in the process her whole style of life.

  Her own personalized chart now hangs on her wall. It shows projected weekly weights and blank spaces for actual weights. All tailored to her personal situation. And she has little sayings taped on her wall, to say aloud and silently over and over. “A closed mouth gathers no food.” “Count, count, count and the calories won’t mount.”

  And now, there’s a new dimension to her life down South. An Interesting Young Man.

  Wesley runs his song through his mind:

  What do I do, Lord Jesus,

  with the women in my dreams?

  Some are dressed, some are not,

  and they come at me, it seems.

  They come at me through soft satin doors.

  Lord, what did you do with yours?

  Lord, what did you do with yours?

  Chapter 2

  Larry Ledford is sitting behind his drum set in the basement of BOTA House. He touches a cymbal with the tip of his drumstick—ching, ching, ching. He’s getting his distance from the cymbal just right. He moves his stool back a few inches, touches the cymbal again. Now forward a couple of inches.

  Larry has been out of BOTA House for several months and drives a bread truck. His girlfriend, Shanita, is sitting beside him. She is hardly ever more than two feet away from him —when the band is practicing or performing.

  Shanita does not like the bass player, Wesley Benfield, or the lead singer, Sherri Gold. Because they are white.

  Wesley comes down the outside basement stairs and in the door carrying his guitar in a battered case covered with bumper stickers. Wesley plays bass guitar but he doesn’t own a bass guitar. Instead he owns an old six-string electric hollow-body. He has taken all the strings off and put on four bass strings, creating a sort of homemade bass guitar, for the time being.

  Shanita watches Wesley open his guitar case. Honky-dude-cracker. Larry told me he wouldn’t never play music with no white-assed-cracker. Pale man. I tell you.

  To Shanita’s dismay, Ben, the lead guitar player and Larry’s good friend, turned to blues over a year ago, when she and all of her friends were getting into rap. And then Ben had to come across this white boy, his roommate Wesley, who liked blues, and this white girl, Sherri Gold, who had this thing for blues. Shanita doesn’t understand it. Then her honey, Larry, he got into blues. Blues is just not where it’s at. It all sounds the same, for one thing. It’s got soul, but it’s just not where it’s at in this day and time. It’s from a different age.

  Ben comes in, speaks, sets his guitar case on the floor and starts opening it.

  Wesley gets out his guitar, straps it on, watches Larry tighten his cymbal. “New cymbal?”

  “Naw. Just shined it.”

  “Hey, Shanita.”

  “Fine.”

  Sherri Gold, the lead singer, hasn’t come yet. She’s late. She’s been out of BOTA House for a while now too, like Larry, and is working at Winn Dixie. She has a gold front tooth and a good, scratchy blues voice. Her goal in life is to sing like Joe Cocker up high.

  Wesley and Ben hang the blankets. Four over their heads flat out, and four around them, to soak up noise.

  The BOTA House band is a gospel band, the Noble Defenders of the Word, waiting to become a blues band. They’ve got the loan of an old sound system from Ballard University for as long as they play gospel. The band’s plans are to—in a few months, oh, maybe six, when Wesley and Ben are out and get full-time jobs and the band can afford their own sound system —expand to blues, maybe some rhythm and blues, change the band’s name from the Noble Defenders of the Word to the Fat City Blues Band and head to Myrtle Beach or Key West—or somewhere like that—and a future that includes long nights of playing the blues to hot, dancing crowds, playing till they drop, sleeping late, making albums and videos, and getting rich. Wesley figures he can work all this
in together with being a Christian.

  The band practices very quietly when they’re playing blues —loudly on the gospel music.

  Larry touches the cymbal again, adjusts it, moves his seat forward, touches the cymbal, moves his seat back, touches another cymbal, moves a cymbal stand toward him a few inches. Larry has a small chin, a long nose, and wears three gold chains around his neck. He stands and leans over, adjusts the height of a cymbal stand. The chains hang loose.

  Shanita thinks: I love to see his chains dangle.

  The band is planning to work up a blues song, “If It Looks Like Jelly, Shakes Like Jelly.” Ben’s cassette player, dark gray, long and low, with a speaker at each end, holds the tape—a Charlie Hicks recording. Ben has just pressed the start button when Larry, positioned so he can see Provost Sears or Mrs. White, the housemother, coming down the outside stairs, says, “Red alert, red alert, red alert.”

  Shanita looks through the glass in the basement door and sees Ned Sears’s pasty-white face. Oh, God, she thinks. Another honky.

  Ben punches the cassette player off button with his foot and starts singing. Wesley and Larry join in.

  Just a closer walk with Thee. Precious Savior—

  Sears walks in. Shanita watches the smile play on his face. Fooling this dude. The provost, the university president’s twin brother—except they don’t look alike. This one’s almost bald. Shiny white head. He snoops sometimes. They’re that kind of twins that ain’t identical.

  The band sings while Sears stands, listening. When the song is over, he says, “Gets better every time.”

  Larry adjusts a cymbal. Ben gets a rag from his guitar case and wipes down his strings.

  “Good work, good work,” says Sears, glowing, but uncomfortable. It’s difficult to glow here in the basement—now —because neither of the three blacks present will look at him. This whole BOTA House band idea started out as a white gospel quartet, and Mrs. White got him to get Philby in the Music Department to find them some sheet music and a sound system. A wonderful idea, he thought. But then two blacks joined, and they started singing Negro spirituals, never checking with Mrs. White. Well, of course black gospel music—the spirituals—is all right, as long as they don’t move on over into rock and roll or any of that bong-bong black stuff.