The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [48]
He went for Janet, the snooty one, first. She was a student at TWU, and Art sensed that much of her attraction toward him was based on the fact that he was precisely the sort of man that her parents had sent her to a women’s college to avoid. Although she let him kiss her at the party, he pursued her for weeks before she let him go further—not that she was an obstacle to maintaining periodic visits to the car yard with Lucy. “I couldn’t help it. Lucy was just . . . I loved her in bed. She wasn’t one of those girls who would just lay there. She was too much fun and she lived too close to me.”
School was just getting out at the time Art met the girls, and that first summer in Texas became the most idyllic season of his life. On weekends he and the four girls would meet up at the north end of Ray Roberts Lake, a sprawling man-made reservoir created by the Army Corps of Engineers that includes two state parks. They’d park in a remote public lot, then hike down to the water and set up camp. “I had this place, my spot that I found that I used to love,” Art reminisces. “No one would ever come there. It had this real big cliff that you could dive off into the water. We’d go out there with rafts, throw them out into the water, and the girls would be laying on the rocks with their bikinis on. We’d have the grill out there, we’d have grass to smoke, and all that water. And I’d be the only dude with four girls, just fucking loving life!”
After six months, Art had had encounters with all of the girls, as they passed him off to each other not unlike a beloved puppy who, though fun to play with, proves too hard to housebreak. “At one point I tried to talk three of them into it at once, but they didn’t go for it,” he says with a laugh. He kept things casual through a combination of charm, well-selected lies, and somber reminders that he had a family back in Chicago, although he was in no hurry to return.
“He’d call once a week,” says Karen. “He sent me five hundred dollars one time. I know that Art loved our son, but he wasn’t around much. He was hurt.” Art’s failings as a father would almost rival that of his own dad, but his early days in Texas had all the appearances of a man who was getting off the criminal path. Pot smoking aside, he went nearly a year without committing so much as a misdemeanor. More importantly, he was content with his new life. “I thought about getting a ranch, maybe buying a few horses, setting up my own construction firm,” he says.
It’s a nice vision to entertain. Current quantum theory supports the idea that every choice we make or don’t make generates an infinite number of parallel “multiverses,” meaning there could indeed be one in which Art Williams is sitting contentedly on a corral fence this very moment, chewing the hay and watching the sunset under the wide Texan sky. The choice was always his. Farther off in the bushy ramparts of space-time, there may even be a universe in which he’s a district attorney or a successful businessman. One of Art’s most endearing traits is that he has never lacked for imagination when it comes to envisioning the majestic peaks of a straight-and-narrow future. He just has serious deficiencies when it comes to the dirty act of scaling them.
ABOUT NINE MONTHS after he’d moved to Texas, a magical date rang out in Art’s memory: June 4, 1994. Nearly a year earlier, Morty had informed him that his daughter Risa was getting married that day, and Art had filed the date away in his mind—not that he planned to attend the wedding. For him, it was significant because he knew that on that day Morty Bello and everyone in his household would be gone.
Working construction in Texas