Cemetery Road

“Duncan’s got nothing to do with editorial content now,” Paul told them. “Don’t kid yourself. Marshall decides what goes in that newspaper.”

“Let’s buy him off then,” Holland suggested. “Justifiable PR expense.”

“Great idea,” Paul said. “How much you thinking? I know of a Russian oligarch who offered Marshall half a million bucks to kill a story.”

“He turned it down?” asked Buckman.

“Yes, sir. Then the oligarch threatened to kill him. Marshall went with the story anyway.”

“So he’s got balls,” Russo said. “That doesn’t sound good for us.”

“I’m thinking about the Watchman,” said Arthur Pine. “I’m surprised that rag hasn’t closed down yet. I think the father’s badly overextended. About eight years ago, he took out a big loan to buy out his brother’s stake in the newspaper.”

“Who’s carrying the paper on that?” asked Buckman.

“Marty Denis at First Farmers. He and Duncan McEwan go way back together.”

“Let’s look into that.”

“Duncan’s also carrying a business loan on a new press he bought about the same time,” Pine informed them. “Nearly two million, I think.”

Buckman’s eyes glinted. “Marty Denis have that loan, too?”

“I’m pretty sure he does.”

The old banker smiled with satisfaction. “Duncan McEwan never learned his way around a balance sheet. Typical English major. Let’s get into it, Arthur, just in case.”

“Right.”

These guys, Paul thought bitterly. If they want to destroy somebody, they find a way to do it without even un-assing their chairs. An honest man doesn’t stand a chance. And Duncan McEwan, for all his faults, is an honest man.

“Long as we’re in here,” Beau Holland said, “what’s your wife up to lately, Paul? She still trying to put any of us in jail? Because I heard she drove to Jackson today to take a deposition in a bid-rigging case.”

Paul gave Holland a dark look. Had they been alone, Beau would never have dared speak to him that way.

“I asked you a question,” Holland pressed.

“He gave you the answer you deserved,” Max said, his eyes glinting with an odd light that had moved many a man back a step. “We don’t discuss wives and children in this room.”

“Maybe not,” Holland said. “But your daughter-in-law makes herself impossible to ignore, Max. And a lot of people around this table agree with me.”

There was some awkward shifting in the chairs, but nobody spoke in support of Holland. Paul was grateful for his father’s defense.

“I hear she works with McEwan on stories,” Beau went on. “Feeds his reporters information. And some of that stuff splashes on us.”

“Then get yourself a fucking raincoat,” Max said. “Bid-rigging sounds like your area. You feeling the heat, Beau?”

Holland’s eyes smoldered, but Buckman spoke up before he could shoot back at Max. “Max is right,” the banker said with an air of finality. “Wives and children are off-limits. Paul, I wonder if you’d mind excusing yourself now. We have a little housekeeping business to take care of before we adjourn.”

There were no groans at this announcement, Paul noticed. Everyone in the room was watching him again, and the air felt brittle with expectation.

“Sure,” he said. “No problem.”

He slid his chair back and got up, then walked to the door, his eyes on a photograph of stooped black figures chopping cotton in a field. I know how you feel, he thought. As he took the elevator down to the first floor and moved through the lobby, he came to a certainty about one thing: Somebody in that room killed Buck Ferris.

The only thing he wasn’t sure of was whether they’d done it on orders from the club. He thought about waiting for his father to come down, but then the others would see that he’d waited. If Max wanted to tell him anything, he would call.

Three minutes later, Paul’s cell phone rang as he pulled his F-250 into his spot down at the wood treatment plant.

“Hey, Pop,” he said. “How about Beau Holland, huh?”

“I’m gonna hammer a punji stick up his ass one day.”

“Beau might just like that.”

Max laughed heartily. “You know he would.”

A flatbed truck pulled through the gate stacked with bundles of green pressure-treated fence posts.

“What do you think about the Buck Ferris thing?”

“I think Holland killed him. Unless it was Russo. He’s got the history for it.”

“Did the club order that hit?” Paul asked tentatively.

“No. But I don’t think anybody’s upset about it. Buck was a real threat to the mill. You know that.”

“Problem is, killing him didn’t remove the threat. It magnified it. You guys better walk on eggshells for a while.”

“You mean ‘we,’ don’t you?”

“Yeah, sure. But I’m not a real member. And I don’t stand to make half as much off the ancillary deals as those assholes do.”

“You’ll be making plenty. And I’ll be making more. You need to keep that in mind if your buddy Goose makes himself a problem.”

Paul said nothing.

“You also need to make sure he doesn’t get too tight with Jet. The two of them together make a bad combination.”

Paul felt his face color. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what I said. Just make sure your wife doesn’t insert herself where she doesn’t belong. And vice versa.”

Max’s syntax was too tortured to try to unravel, but Paul got the point. “I’m losing you, Pop. You going by the field tonight?”

“Yeah. I know we have that party, but Kevin’s pitching good. I’ll make it to the Aurora in plenty of time to see the Killer.”

Paul got out and walked into his office, the conflicting odors of creosote and chromated copper arsenate following him through the door. As he nodded to the receptionist, he remembered seeing Marshall talking to Jet in the refreshment line down at the industrial park. When she’d lowered her sunglasses to look at Marshall, Paul had seen one thing with painful clarity: she was glowing. Given the complicated history they shared, it would be naïve to expect Jet and Marshall to avoid each other under the present circumstances. But it had been a long time since Jet had glowed like that when she looked at Paul. Years …

He thought about the last time he’d slept with her. Nearly a month ago now. He’d felt good going into it, and he’d taken a 50 mg Viagra to be sure he could finish her properly. But while Jet hadn’t put him off, she’d submitted to the act as though it were any other habitual duty. Again he saw her face tilt up to Marshall’s. Thirty years had fallen away from her in that moment. Hell, she even walked different when Marshall was around. A stab of pain hit Paul in the back of his neck, near the base of his skull. He reached into his top drawer and twisted the cap off a prescription bottle, then ground an Oxy between his back teeth before swallowing the fragments. I should’ve asked Dr. Lacey for another ’scrip at that meeting, he thought, shaking the bottle.

“Goddamn IEDs,” he muttered. “Sometimes I wonder if you haji bastards got me after all.”

CHAPTER 14

THE EIGHTEEN-MILE STRIP of asphalt known as the Little Trace began as a deer path in pre-Columbian times, was widened by Indians hunting the deer, then centuries later was taken over by whites traveling from Fort Bienville to the Natchez Trace, where it crossed the eastern edge of Tenisaw County. In those days outlaws would lie in wait along the trail, ready to ambush travelers unprepared to defend themselves with powder and shot. What irony that Buck, who chose to live along that historic route, would be murdered by modern outlaws exploiting that same weakness.

As I turn onto the Little Trace east of town, I wonder who might have staked out Buck’s house, waiting for his grieving widow to depart so that they could ransack the place. But before I’ve covered two miles, my thoughts return to Jet and her father, and to Paul Matheson, who is quite capable of killing me if he finds out I’m sleeping with his wife. To be clear, Paul isn’t simply capable of killing me; he’s been trained to do it. And unlike a lot of men with that training, Paul has used what he knows—just like his father did in Vietnam. I’ve seen him do it.

By the time Jet and I began our senior year, Paul had graduated from St. Mark’s and left for Ole Miss, and this opened the possibility of a new life to me. Thanks to Buck Ferris—and my failed suicide attempt—I had rejoined the world of the living by then. My home life sucked, but at least Dad had settled into a well-worn groove of pretending I was part of the furniture. My struggle with Adam’s death was something I pressed down deep in order to survive. The loss of Jet still stung, even after three years, but Paul leaving town had taken a weight from my shoulders.

During the previous year, my athletic pursuits had forced me into constant contact with him. We’d played football and basketball and even run track together, which meant that we’d spent hundreds of hours in each other’s company. We shared locker rooms, showers, bus rides, fast-food joints, team suppers, and crazy stunts in the dead of night. Despite the fact that he’d essentially taken Jet away from me, all this activity allowed our childhood friendship to reassert itself. We parted on good terms when he left for Oxford, but there was no denying the sense of relief I felt as he drove away from my house in the Corvette that had been his graduation present from Max.

To my surprise, when school started I found that I had become something of a star in my own right at St. Mark’s. In many ways, “Goose” McEwan seemed a character apart from me, but because he was accepted by all, life was easier when I pretended to be him. My grades had always been the best on the sports teams, and after Paul’s class graduated, I suddenly emerged as a replacement for my dead brother—or at least a reasonable facsimile of what everyone’s expectations for Adam had been. (To everyone except my father, of course.)

With Paul no longer around, Jet and I found ourselves thrown together almost every day. We were awkward around each other at first, but before long the feelings we’d shared during our magical summer returned, and nervousness blossomed into mutual attraction. In physics class one day an analogy hit me: Paul had stood between us like a lead shield separating radioactive masses. The moment he was withdrawn, Jet and I surged toward criticality.

Paul hadn’t broken up with her when he left for Ole Miss, as so many college-bound guys did when dating juniors. He’d promised he would come home every weekend, even though Ole Miss was four hours away. As it turned out, Paul didn’t return to Bienville for seven weeks, and that left Jet and me sufficient time to find each other again. We began in secret. That was when she told me that her father had originally been resettled in America by the CIA, for whom he had worked against Gamal Nasser, in Egypt. She also confided that a year earlier, Joe Talal had written a letter asking her to come to Jordan and live with his other family. This request had stunned Jet, and her mother had descended into depression, fearing that her daughter, too, would abandon her. As Jet and I grew closer, she gently probed me about Adam’s death. Soon we were comforting each other in places far removed from our classmates.

Then the rumors started finding their way back from Ole Miss. Since leaving Bienville, Paul had apparently been screwing every girl in Oxford willing to remove her sorority skirt, or even hike it up behind the frat house. At first Jet wrote these stories off as malicious gossip. Then she had a confrontation with a drunk girl who’d graduated from St. Mark’s three years earlier. The girl ended up yelling that she’d not only slept with Paul at Ole Miss, but had also had him the previous year, while Jet was going around on his arm like the queen of the city.

Two days later, Jet and I properly consummated our relationship. It was a bittersweet experience for me. I’d slept with three other girls by then, but Jet had learned a lot during her years with Paul. I couldn’t escape the feeling that he had explored and awakened parts of her that I had been meant to, and only because Jet’s father had abandoned her a month after our summer ended. Jet sensed a shadow between us, and eventually she asked me about it. This conversation finally exorcised Paul’s ghost for me—her assertion that I was not a substitute for Paul, but rather the reverse. He had been a replacement for me, during a time when she’d been too wounded to trust any emotion that made her feel vulnerable. She’d wrapped herself in a shiny new life with an extrovert jock, rather than a wounded, self-conscious introvert like me.

Paul finally came home in late October, and he expected Jet to pick right up with him. When she refused, he got angry for about five minutes. Then he found another girl and spent the night with her. Despite this public abdication of their role as the school’s golden couple, Jet and I kept our heads down. For a week we met out at the spring at Parnassus. With cars at our disposal, we could easily drive out there separately, then relive the afternoons of three years before, only with penetration added to the mix. But it was inevitable that someone would eventually see us behaving like lovers, and they did. When word reached Paul, he went crazy.

It turned out that Jet had shared many details of our first summer with him. Because he’d had far more sexual experience than Jet, she’d used her experiences with me to pay him back in kind for his too-vivid recounting of previous exploits. This left Paul feeling that no matter how many times he had sex with her, he would never elicit the purity or depth of response in her that I had.

I hoped he was right.

The night he heard about our new relationship, Paul demanded to meet me at the Bienville Country Club the next day. At four P.M. on a weekday—I still remember that. Through a mutual friend he had called me out, Old West style. The story spread like wildfire. The next day, he skipped class and drove four hours to kick my ass.

To my surprise, the country club was closed when I arrived, apparently for remodeling, but a line of cars was parked outside the entrance, a 1980s analog of the mob that watched the “chickie-run” in Rebel without a Cause. I hadn’t known the club was closed, because my family had never belonged to it. Dooley Matheson, Paul’s mean Jackson cousin, opened the locked gate for me, and I drove in to meet my destiny. The sky was overcast with steel-gray clouds. Paul stood out on the practice green, staring off toward the tree line, looking ten pounds heavier than when he’d left town.

We walked the first five holes in silence, not looking at each other except for sidelong glances, the way you look at other men in public restrooms. He stank of sweat and stale beer. I had an eerie feeling that he was measuring me for the first blow. In preparation for my senior football season, I’d put on a lot of muscle over the summer. Paul had been out of training for months, pounding bourbon and Cokes and chowing down with his frat buddies. I had never seen him show fear, and I didn’t that day. But he seemed to be wondering whether taking me on might prove more painful than he’d imagined after a few shots of whiskey at Ole Miss.

As dusk fell over the sixth fairway, he started talking. Not to me exactly, just venting. Strangely, he wasn’t talking about Jet. He was mumbling that college had turned out to be nothing like he’d imagined. It was basically an extension of high school, he said, and nobody he knew had any idea what they were going to do in the real world. A couple of St. Mark’s guys were on track to be doctors. Others claimed accounting was the quickest path to a Beemer and a Rolex and a McMansion in Dallas. None of that interested Paul. He’d been raised by a father who was larger than life—an athlete and war hero who could outrun, outplay, outshoot, outwork, outdrink, and outfuck (just ask him) any other man in whatever state he happened to be in at the time. In short, Max Matheson was a tough act to follow, and Paul didn’t seem to have any idea how to go about it.

At the ninth-hole tee, he stopped to piss out the beer he’d drunk during the drive down from Oxford. Then, as though taking out his dick had somehow broached the subject we were there to discuss, he said, “You love her, don’t you?”

When I didn’t answer, he said, “You’ve always loved her, man. Don’t try to deny it.”

“I didn’t deny anything,” I said, still tense with the expectation of violence.

He sniffed, then looked off in the direction of the river, which flowed a half mile to the west. “I know she’s pissed at me. I’ve banged a lot of chicks up there, you know that. But Jet’s nothing like them. Not even the hottest ones at Ole Miss. Or the smart ones. She’s … freaking perfect.”

“Perfect’s a pretty high bar,” I said, but I secretly believed the same thing.

“I used to think so,” he said. “But Jet clears it.”

He finally looked over at me, and when our eyes met, I saw a guy who was hurting at least as much as I had been for a long time. Why? I wondered. Surely not because of Jet. Maybe it’s something to do with his old man—

“The thing about Jet,” Paul said softly, “is that no matter what you do to her, or with her, she stays pure. You know? She’s above all that, somehow—even though she’s doing it, and into it. Right?”

I knew what he meant. He was trying to describe something rare back then, the utter absence of shame in Jet’s carnality. But I didn’t say so. My mind was running rampant. What did Jet think of him in bed, really? Had she been honest with me? Or had she, out of a desire not to hurt me, pretended that sex with Paul was nothing special? How far had she gone with him? What boundaries had they crossed together?

“If you think she’s so perfect,” I said evenly, “why do you sleep with half the girls at Ole Miss? Why waste your time?”

“Why do you think?” he asked, looking out toward the river again. “I’m stuck there with nothing else to do. You think I’m going to lie around the dorm studying? You know me better than that.”

In truth, I didn’t know why Paul had even bothered going to college. It was a foregone conclusion that he’d end up working for his father in the lumber business. I guess he’d expected Jet to put up with a few flings, then be waiting for him when he came home with a report card full of “incompletes,” ready to settle into the rut that had always been waiting for him. One thing I knew—Jet had no intention of marrying into that life.

“You’re boning her, aren’t you?” Paul said, and this time his voice had an edge to it.

I said nothing, but my nerves sang, and the muscles in my arms quivered in expectation of a fight.

“You know,” he went on, “I could tell you something that would hurt you. Hurt you bad.”

My eyes burned and watered, but I held my silence. I wasn’t going to take the bait. I feared what he might say too much.

Paul looked off to the west again. Against the clouds I saw the great electrical tower we had climbed two and a half years earlier, just before Adam drowned. The sight half made me want to fight Paul. Fight somebody, anyway. He saw the tower, too, and maybe the flash of rage in my eyes, because his next words were not what I’d expected.

“Everybody’s gonna ask what happened out here,” he said. “If I kicked your ass or what.”

I was surprised to discover that I didn’t care one way or the other. My fear had seeped out of me during the walk, or else the sight of the tower had driven it from me. “If you want to try,” I said, “let’s get it over with.”

“How about we don’t and say we did?” Paul suggested. “I need a fucking drink.”

The implications of his words washed over me like water in a heat wave. “What do we say out there?”

He shrugged. “Fought to a draw. Got tired of beating up on each other. No girl’s worth killing each other over. Not even Jet.”

I wasn’t sure of this. “No black eyes?”

Paul chuckled. “You want to pop each other once apiece? To sell the story?”

I thought about this. “Not really.”

“Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s get back to the cars. I’ve got an ice chest in my backseat.”

This bloodless accommodation couldn’t have been what he had in mind when he drove down from Oxford with his hands clenched on the wheel of his Corvette. But whatever rage he’d felt over Jet’s cleaving to me had subsided. Night was falling, and a cold wind blew off the river, making the long walk back to the clubhouse an unpleasant prospect. I asked Paul if he wanted to run it, but he just laughed. Three days later, he dropped out of college and joined the army. Everyone we knew was flabbergasted. When George H. W. Bush gave the go order for Desert Storm, Paul was sitting in Saudi Arabia, waiting for the balloon to go up.

The honk of a horn startles me out of my reverie.

I speed up and wave to the impatient driver behind me, surprised to find myself on the Little Trace and nearly to the turn for Buck’s house, which sits well back in the hardwood forest in rural Tenisaw County. I’ve driven out here so many times that I can do it on autopilot, even after an almost thirty-year gap.

The narrow gravel road arrows away from the black asphalt and runs through tall trees wearing the fresh pale green of spring. Back in those trees, Quinn Ferris sits in a house with a bed that will never again hold the weight of the man who built it. Handcrafted guitars hang on its walls—and a mandolin and a mandocello and two dulcimers—that will never have another note pulled from them by Buck’s gifted fingers. All because he threatened to slow down the gravy train of the bastards who run Bienville like their personal fiefdom. I dread facing Quinn in her grief and anger, but what choice do I have? If the Poker Club killed her husband, it’s because nobody ever planted themselves in their path and said, “This far, but no farther.” Am I that guy? My father never set himself against them. But if my brother had lived, he would have. If only for that reason, I realize, I must do it.

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