Cemetery Road

Once again, I was shocked to see my older brother buy into this idea. On any other night, Adam would have laughed at the absurdity of the dare. But that night, he let himself be baited. As subtly as I could, I tried to stop him. I wasn’t scared of much back then, but heights I did not handle well. That tower was as tall as a fifty-five-story building. Even standing with both feet planted squarely on the ground, I felt the soles of my feet tingle as I looked up at the metal beams and struts silhouetted against a moonlit cloud.

By the time we’d driven over to the tower’s massive base, the Mathesons had imposed a penalty for chickening out. Anyone who didn’t make it to the top would have to streak stark naked down six blocks of Main Street at dawn. Great, I thought, picturing myself sprinting down Main with one hand over my cock and balls. Just getting up to the main ladder proved difficult. First we had to park a car beneath a tree that grew near one of the tower’s four legs. Climbing onto the roof, we managed to grab the lowest limb on the tree, and that ultimately took us to a point where we could stretch precariously over a twenty-foot drop and grab the metal pegs that served as the ladder for the first hundred feet of the climb. (The power company had undoubtedly designed this obstacle to prevent drunken fools such as ourselves from attempting the suicidal climb. Clearly, they underestimated our stupidity.)

While still in the tree, Joey Burrell decided he was too drunk to try crossing to the metal pegs, so he turned back, becoming the first to earn the penalty. But soon the rest of us were clinging to the tower leg, like newborn raccoons afraid to follow their mother up a tree. Trey Matheson was highest, followed by his brother Dooley. Then Paul, Adam, and, last of all, me. I went last because something told me I might have to make a strategic retreat. I didn’t want to, but I wasn’t so deluded as to think I might not get into trouble.

For most of the climb, I stared only at the ladder rungs, focusing on the few square inches where I would place my free hand, then release the other and reach up again, finding the next rung—again and again and again. I heard birds and bats flying around me, but I didn’t turn to see them. Mosquitoes bit me, sucking my blood without interruption as the wind whipped my shirt, tearing at my body. I sweated continuously, soaking my clothes. The boys above me chattered and laughed, and the Mathesons whooped like madmen every minute or two. All this I ignored to keep my Zen-like focus.

Two-thirds of the way up—at about four hundred feet—I made the mistake of looking out over the river. A paralyzing wave of vertigo hit me, and it was all I could do not to vomit. My vision blurred. I became vaguely aware of the lights of faraway towns and farms, and the great glittering serpent of the river running beneath us. From six hundred feet in the air you can see thirty miles. At only four hundred feet, I was incapacitated.

Adam soon realized I was in trouble. He stopped climbing and offered to come back and follow me down, discarding any thought of the climb as a test of manhood. But since we were already two-thirds of the way up, I decided to go on. I didn’t want to suffer the penalty and risk arrest for indecent exposure; nor did I want to suffer Paul and his preppy cousins ragging me for all eternity.

I made it fifty more feet. Then my nerve broke.

It was the signal failure of my life. While the Mathesons hooted with derision from above, yelling “Pussy!” at the top of their lungs, I clung to that ladder like an arthritic old lady asked to scale the Matterhorn. This time Adam insisted on escorting me down. Shivering in terror, I told him I would descend only if he pushed on to the top. Besides, I whimpered, we were on a ladder. How the hell could he help me get to the ground? Adam said he would tie one end of his belt to his ankle and the other to my left arm, so that if I slipped, I’d have an instant to catch myself before the belt broke and I went into free fall.

I wasn’t going to put my brother in that kind of danger. When Adam saw that I wouldn’t change my mind, he finally started up again. My subsequent descent was a triumph of courage over abject terror. I was still two hundred feet off the ground when I saw the others “summit” the tower. And once they were on the platform, six hundred feet in the sky, I learned just how crazy the Matheson cousins were. Dooley, the seventeen-year-old, climbed onto the top strut where the aircraft warning lights were mounted. There he stood up like a gymnast on a balance beam. There was nothing to hold him, not a safety rail, not a belt … nothing. A single gust of wind could have plucked him off that tower like a dandelion seed. Watching him dance along that strut like a drunken court jester nauseated me. Dooley Matheson was willing to throw away his life to try to get back at my brother for a basketball loss that could never be erased. That, I thought, is what makes McEwans superior to Mathesons on the evolutionary scale.

Then, to my horror, I saw my celebrated brother prove he was just as crazy as Dooley Matheson. As Dooley climbed down into his brother’s arms, Adam mounted the strut and not only walked along it, but extended his arms like wings while his shirt parachuted around him in the wind. When I saw the wind whipping his shirt like a sail in a storm, I finally puked. After I recovered myself and looked back up, I saw Adam bend his knees, take Paul’s hand, and drop back onto the platform. Relief surged through me like an anesthetic.

Then, as Adam started down the ladder, I saw Trey Matheson leap from the platform and catch hold of a high-voltage line where it passed over a horizontal strut that protruded from the tower. My heart started slapping my chest wall. The madman was hanging from a wire carrying 50,000 volts of electricity across the Mississippi River! God only knew what he must have been feeling: every hair on his body had to be standing on end. What I couldn’t see was how he would get back onto the tower without killing himself. If he grounded his body to the metal, the electrical current would blow off his legs as it shorted out his brain and heart. I watched Trey the way I’d watched the trapeze artist from the Ringling Bros. Circus as a little boy, until the elder Matheson finally swung himself repeatedly to gain velocity, then let go of the wire and flew back to the tower ladder like Spider-Man.

The shame and abuse they heaped on me when they finally reached the foot of that tower was almost unbearable. I heard the word pussy a hundred times in five minutes. Dooley crowed about how I had “pussied out, like all faggots do when the going gets tough.” Trey stared at us with a trancelike glaze in his eyes, claiming he’d gotten a massive hard-on as soon as he grabbed the high-voltage line. Pretty soon they were bragging that there was nothing that required balls they couldn’t beat us at. The basketball championship had obviously been a fluke. Then Dooley started singing “The Ballad of Casey Jones,” substituting profanity at every available opportunity. “Marshall McEwan was a pussy from hell, born sucking dicks in Bee-en-VILLE, tried to climb a tower with some ree-ul men, then he pussied out all over again!”

I laughed, even as some part of me wondered why Dooley seemed so obsessed with homosexuality. Did he really hate queers that much? Or was he secretly gay himself? As he started another verse, I wondered whether Dooley’s IQ might be marginally higher than I’d initially guessed—but Adam wasn’t having any. He told Paul to shut his cousin up, or he’d shut his mouth for him. I hadn’t seen Adam make such a threat since he’d defended me from a bully when I was ten years old. Dooley started squaring up to fight Adam, and Adam’s eyes went strangely flat. Paul Matheson looked worried. Paul knew all too well what Adam could do to someone on the football field when he felt no particular animus toward them. What would happen if Adam McEwan decided to really mess somebody up? I could see Paul wondering. There was more tension in the air than there had been atop that electrical tower, but Paul’s cousins didn’t seem to realize the danger.

Then I heard myself say, “There’s something I can beat you assholes at. And I’ll bet any amount of money you want on it.”

This took their attention off Adam, and quick. What was I talking about? they demanded. Some kind of fag parlor game, like bridge?

“I can beat you across the river,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Trey demanded. “Like racing over the bridge? We already won the drag race.”

“Not in the cars,” I said, feeling eerily calm. “Swimming.”

That stopped them. I knew then that, whatever they might say, they couldn’t refuse my challenge. Refusal didn’t fit into their fantasy of themselves. I had them cornered.

“Bull-fuckin’-shit,” Dooley said finally. “You won’t swim that river. It’s a mile wide.”

“More like half a mile. Three-quarters maybe, with the high water. And I’ll beat you by a hundred yards, you stupid cow-fucker.”

They looked at me like I was delusional.

“You ever swum it before?” Trey asked cannily.

“No.”

“He lying?” Dooley asked Paul, over his shoulder.

“No. But he’s a hell of a swimmer.”

“Well, shit. I’m a hell of a swimmer, too!” Dooley crowed. “I’m a great swimmer! I won the hundred-meter freestyle when I was thirteen.”

“Blue ribbon,” I said with mock awe. “So you’re all ready.”

“Fuck you,” Dooley growled. “I was born ready.”

“Nobody’s getting into that river,” Adam said with sobering authority. He sounded exactly like our father. “We’re all wasted, and a sober man would be crazy to try to swim that river, especially at night. Not to mention at high water, which only a lunatic would try at noon. Plus, that water is runoff from the north. It’s iceberg cold. So forget it.”

“I can do it,” I said quietly.

“I said forget it,” Adam snapped. “We’re going home.”

“You go if you want. I’m swimming it.”

“Then put your money where your mouth is,” said Trey Matheson. “I don’t get wet for free.”

In the end, we bet four hundred dollars on the race. Four hundred dollars then was like forty thousand to me now. More. It was all I had in the world, every dollar saved from working minimum-wage jobs. But I risked it, because I believed in myself. But what happened afterward—

“Hey, Marshall!” calls a high-pitched voice. Not Adam’s …

I blink myself from my trance and see the river two hundred feet below the bluff, stretching north through clear sunlight, not cloaked in fog like that terrible night—

“Marshall!” Denny Allman calls, running along the fence on the bluff’s edge. “Come see! I found the truck! I found Dr. Buck’s truck!”

By the time Denny reaches me, panting like mad, I’ve come back to myself. He jams the shaded screen of his iPad Mini up to my face. A green sea of treetops glides past below the flying camera, as though shot by Stanley Kubrick.

“Is that a live shot?” I ask.

“No, the drone’s flying back on autopilot. My battery was low. This is recorded. There’s the truck! See it?”

Denny apparently put his drone into a hover over a local make-out and picnic spot north of town called Lafitte’s Den. The den is a geologic anomaly, a sandstone cave set low in the loess bluff, long said to have been the hideout of pirate Jean Lafitte while he evaded U.S. Navy ships pursuing him from New Orleans. No one has ever satisfactorily explained where Lafitte could have concealed his ships while he hid in the cave, and historians consider the story more legend than fact. As Denny’s drone descends toward the treetops on the screen, I see the rusted orange roof of Buck Ferris’s GMC pickup.

“That’s it,” I marvel. “You did it!”

Denny is beaming with pride. “Yep. I thought about flying down and looking into the windows, but the trees are pretty tight, and we’re at the limit of my range.”

“No, this is great. Don’t risk your drone.”

Staring at the abandoned truck parked in the dirt turnaround by Lafitte’s Den, I’m sure of only one thing: Buck wouldn’t have wasted five minutes digging at that natural homeless shelter. Thanks to the Lafitte legend, over the decades the earth in and around that sandstone cave has been ratholed like a block of cheese by an army of gomers with metal detectors, ten-year-olds with toy shovels, and housewives with garden spades. The most anyone has ever found there are arrow points and pottery shards, which can be picked up anywhere in or around Bienville after a heavy rain. No one in the past two hundred years has ever found a single gold piece of eight.

“Buck wouldn’t dig there,” Denny says, reading my mind. “There’s nothing at that cave except empty beer cans and used rubbers.”

This kid. “You’re right. Something’s wrong here.”

“But there is sandstone in the ground around the cave. Could falling on that have crushed Buck’s head like we saw?”

“I don’t think so. First, most of the ground is covered with dirt. Second, even the sandstone is so soft you can dig a hole in it with a car key. Third, the cave is deep but not high, so he couldn’t have fallen that far.”

“Unless he fell from the top of the bluff,” Denny points out.

“If that’s what happened, he’ll have multiple broken bones. Also, there should be traces of sandstone in Buck’s wound.”

“What are you gonna do?”

I look down into the boy’s expectant face. I always see his mother when I do that. Like a lot of guys, I slept with her a few times in high school. Dixie was a good person, but I knew even then that she would never get out of this town or even to college. “Do you want credit for finding Buck’s truck?”

Denny thinks about it for a few seconds. “That won’t make up for the sheriff finding out for sure it was me filming his morons on the river earlier.”

“Probably not. Somebody will find that truck in the next few hours, but the sooner the better, as far as making a murder case. How about an anonymous call?”

Denny nods.

“Okay, then. I’ll handle it.”

“How? There’s no pay phones anymore.”

With my burner phone, of course, I think. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay,” he says skeptically. “So what’s next?”

I start to ask him what he means, but I know. And I’m glad. Because though Denny’s only fourteen, he has a resource I can’t easily replace.

“I’ve got a feeling I know where Buck was really digging last night. And it wasn’t that cave.”

Denny’s eyes light up. “Where?”

“The new paper mill site, in the industrial park. I think we could use a little aerial surveillance out there. Check for signs of recent digging.”

“But you said they have the groundbreaking ceremony there today.”

I glance at my watch. “In an hour and a half. The time for an overflight is this afternoon. Can you meet me out there later if I call your mother and make sure it’s okay?”

“You bet your ass! I mean—no problem.”

“Thanks, Denny. You need a ride home?”

“Nah. I’m good. Going over to the depot for some food.”

“Okay.” I pat him on the shoulder and start back in the direction of the Flex, but he stops me by calling my name.

“What is it?” I ask, turning back.

“Are you okay?” he asks, looking genuinely worried.

“Yeah, yeah. I was just thinking about something that happened a long time ago.”

Denny Allman doesn’t look puzzled or even curious. He works his mouth around for a few seconds, then says, “Your brother?”

So he does know. “Yeah. Who told you about that?”

“My mom.”

Of course. “I figured.”

“She said it was the worst thing that ever happened in this town.”

That doesn’t surprise me. “That’s what it felt like, at the time. Actually, some pretty bad things have happened in this town since it was founded.”

Denny bites his bottom lip and looks at the ground. “Maybe one happened last night, huh?”

“That’s what I’m thinking. You get home and do your schoolwork. I’ll call your mom later on.”

Before I turn to go, the hornet humming of the drone sounds above us, and Denny’s DJI quad-rotor descends rapidly on autopilot, hovers for a few seconds, then slowly lands thirty yards away from us.

He grins proudly. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“Pretty cool.”

CHAPTER 7

AFTER LEAVING DENNY Allman near the old railroad depot, I walk back to the Flex and start the engine but leave it in Park. My anonymous call made, the rush of discovering Buck’s pickup has already faded. Seeing my surrogate father dragged from the river has left a deep shadow over me, one I sense will not pass for a long time.

I have an hour and fifteen minutes to wait before the groundbreaking ceremony for the new paper mill, but I have no desire to go back to the office. I’m craving coffee, but I’m in no condition to go to Nadine’s, which is where I usually spend my morning coffee break. Nadine Sullivan is about ten times more perceptive than Denny Allman, and I don’t want her picking at my soul until I get my defenses back up. The thing about kicking open a door to the past is that sometimes what’s behind it comes out under its own power. You can try to run, but no matter how fast you do, you’re dragging your demons behind you. At a certain point, you might as well stop, turn, and let them roll over you, enfold you. If you’re lucky, maybe they’ll die in the light of day.

Quinn Ferris’s accusations about the Bienville Poker Club still ring in my ears, but I don’t care to think about that right now. I’ll see those guys at the groundbreaking, where there’ll be plenty of time to study them in their native environment. Putting the Flex in gear, I drive slowly north along the bluff, skirting the edge of town, moving toward the Garden District, where six blocks of lovingly preserved Victorians stand between the commercial district and the high ground of the city cemetery. As I drive, I realize that despite being back in Bienville for five months, I’ve yet to go out to the cemetery once.

Soon after losing sight of the bluff, I turn left onto Hallam Avenue, which will carry me through the Garden District to Cemetery Road, which runs west-to-east from the graveyard to the eastern forests of Tenisaw County. Two- and three-story gingerbread houses drift past on both sides of my SUV, set back behind wrought-iron fences, but I don’t really see them. In my mind I’m standing on the bank of the river with my brother, peering through the fog at the Louisiana shore, which has never seemed so far away.

On that night, we drove down the levee in the Camaro and the Nissan until we came to a place where the river lay only twenty yards away. As soon as we arrived, Adam—speaking in my father’s voice again—declared that no one was getting into the water before the sun came up. That meant an hour’s wait at least. Hoping to talk me out of the swim, Adam asked me to sit in the car with him for a minute. Instead, I walked up and down the levee fifty yards at a time, breathing deeply, limbering my muscles, and trying to burn off as much alcohol as possible. After my failure to climb the electrical tower, I felt exultant at the prospect of redeeming myself and teaching Paul’s cousins a much-needed lesson.

Trey and Dooley Matheson sat in their IROC-Z, steadily taking hits from a Cheech-and-Chong-size joint. While the moon set and the sky grew blacker, two strings of barges moved downriver, and one moved up. As the last barge passed, its big diesels vibrating the ground beneath our feet, I noticed fog building over the surface of the river. That wouldn’t interfere with our swim, but it made me wonder about the temperature of the water.

When the eastern horizon began to lighten, four of us walked down the levee to the water’s edge: Trey, Dooley, Adam, and me. A thousand yards of river lay in front of us, a sheet of fog six feet thick hovering over the surface. It looked like the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Joey Burrell stood on the levee behind us, telling us we were crazy to even consider trying to swim it. Paul stood silent beside him, watching intently. Joey was simply afraid, which showed he had good sense. But I’d never seen Paul display fear, and he knew his cousins would give him hell for skipping this. His refusal told me that either Paul knew I was the best swimmer and didn’t need his help to beat his cousins, or he’d assessed the situation and, despite his considerable athletic ability, decided the risk of death was too great to chance the river.

That should have given me pause.

It didn’t. I wanted to show those rich bastards that they weren’t invincible, or blessed, or any more than just plain average. I wasn’t sure Adam was going to come with me, but when the Mathesons and I pulled off our Levi’s, Adam followed suit. At that point I told him he didn’t need to go, but he quietly replied that he couldn’t let me try the swim alone. If I drowned, Adam said, he’d never be able to face our parents and tell them what had happened. For a moment I thought of arguing with him, but in truth I was glad he would be with me out there.

The coldness of the river shocked me when we waded in, and the Mathesons howled. Adam and I made no sound, other than a quick sucking in of breath, then grunts of acceptance as we pushed off the flooded levee grass with our toes and joined the main current of the river.

“Nothing to it,” I told him. “Just do what I do.”

“Lead on,” he said. “I’m right behind you.”

It was strange, being the leader for once. But Adam didn’t hesitate to yield authority to me in the water. The fog was thicker than it looked from the levee, but I knew we could make the swim. In a pool I could cover the distance in twenty minutes. In a flooded river moving at eight or ten miles per hour—and with the added responsibility of shepherding Adam across—I’d need to drift as much as swim. If I guessed right, and we made steady progress, we would end up maybe four miles downstream on the Louisiana shore. The whole thing ought to take half an hour. Forty minutes, tops.

I looked back and relayed all this to Adam in a loud whisper. He nodded and said we should stay as far as we could from Trey and Dooley. I agreed, but before we were thirty yards into the current, Dooley swam over and tried to push me under the water. I easily avoided him, but he threw an arm backward and got hold of Adam before Adam saw the danger. They struggled for half a minute, Dooley managing to duck him until I went deep, grabbed Dooley’s leg, and dragged his head under. He fought hard, but I held him down until I heard him screaming. When I surfaced, I saw that Adam had bloodied Trey’s nose in a skirmish I’d missed. As soon as Adam saw that I was okay, we started kicking toward Louisiana, half swimming, half floating, staying high in the water like cottonmouth moccasins.

That worked well for fifteen minutes. Then we got separated. I’m still not sure how it happened. Maybe one of us got into an eddy, a boil, a whirlpool, something—but we lost sight of each other, and in the fog voices proved hard to track. The treachery of the Mississippi lies in its currents, which flow at different speeds and depths. This process creates dangerous surface effects. I’d thought I could handle them, but I was growing less sure as time passed. For the first ten minutes of the swim, I’d heard the Mathesons yelling and cursing, hooting insults. But for the last five minutes I’d heard nothing. Even stoned, they must have figured out that wasting energy in the river would kill them.

Tiring more quickly than I’d expected to, I started to worry about Adam. Certain he was behind me, I swam back and started a zigzag search, calling his name every ten seconds. The effort cost me two minutes, but I felt better after I collided with him in the fog. Then I saw that he looked pale, and he was panting in a way I’d never heard before. When I asked if he was okay, Adam told me somebody had been pulling at his legs, dragging him under. I was pretty sure the Mathesons were ahead of us, not behind, so I had no idea what might have been bothering him. An alligator gar? A big catfish? Both were unlikely.