Cemetery Road

Could we live six months without water?

YOU THINK YOU KNOW everyone in a small town, but you don’t. Besides, Bienville isn’t that small. Not like Soso or Stringer or Frogmore. When I was a boy, Bienville proper had twenty-four thousand people in it, and outside the city limits the county held another fourteen thousand. That meant a school system big enough to make a certain amount of anonymity possible. If you went to a private school, for example, there were always kids at the public school you didn’t know. I knew most of the boys in town, of course, from playing ball and riding bikes and swim team and a dozen other things. But the girls—especially the girls at the public school—were mostly a mystery to me.

Several boys in my neighborhood still went to public school, and one—John Hallberg—was a good friend, though he was a year older than I. One weekend John took me to the movies with him, to sneak into Highlander, which was rated R. When we arrived at the cinema, we found three public school girls he knew waiting in line for Pretty in Pink, which was the movie we were pretending to go see. Two were the ubiquitous archetypes of my childhood, freckled and blue-eyed, one with dirty-blond hair, the other with light brown curls. But with them was a girl unlike any I’d ever seen. Her skin was as dark as a summer tan, though it was only March, and her jet-black hair reached almost to her behind. She was tall for her age, but what captured me from the first moment was her eyes, which were huge and dark above angular cheeks that descended to the dramatic V of her chin. And they took in everything.

John introduced this exotic creature as “Jet,” which I assumed was a nickname, albeit an unusual one for a girl. I would learn later that her given name was Jordan Elat Talal. “Jet” was an acronym coined by her aunt, one that even her mother used. And though this “Jet” was the same age as her friends, she seemed at least a year older, probably because she didn’t giggle or blush or cut up the way they did. When one of her friends invited Hallberg to skip Highlander in favor of Pretty in Pink and John said no, it was the dark-haired Jet who suggested the girls try Highlander instead.

One of the blessings of my life was that I wound up with Jet Talal sitting on my left in that movie theater, my nerves singing with excitement. This only happened because both other girls wanted to sit beside John, which left Jet little choice but to sit beside me. We didn’t talk much during the movie, but we stole several glances at each other, some I remember to this day. They were searching glances of curiosity and, after an hour or so, longer looks of recognition.

After the movie we all went to the nearby Baskin-Robbins and ate ice cream, which sounds corny today, but which in fact was pretty damn great. While John talked about the swordfights in the movie and the girls gossiped about junior high, Jet told me she’d actually wanted to see Salvador, a film about journalists covering some Central American civil war. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I faked my way through, and by ten that night I’d squeezed out every drop of information my father possessed on the subject. The other girls made fun of Jet for her comment, but she endured their teasing with impressive equanimity. Hallberg later told me that the public school kids called Jet “the Brain” because of her freakish abilities in math and science. But that mildly pejorative epithet failed to marginalize her, because her beauty was undeniable, and at that age (as at most ages), beauty was the currency of popularity.

I spent ten days trying to get up the nerve to call her, and when I finally did, her father answered the telephone. The sound of his heavily accented voice paralyzed me. Joe Talal was “that Arab scientist from the plating plant,” but most of the fathers spoke of him with respect. I would learn later that Joe Talal laughed a lot, but back then, my heart stuttered when his brusque baritone asked who I was. When Jet finally came on the line, a different kind of panic gripped me, but somehow, through the painful pauses, she made it all right.

During the final month of school, we met a few times at the Baskin-Robbins, each riding our bikes there, and we grew closer with every meeting. Soon I was waiting outside old Mr. Weissberg’s house during Jet’s violin lessons, reading The Prince of Tides and trying to think of something interesting to say to her. I wasn’t sure I ever did, but when summer finally came, I learned that I had.

I know now that I was blessed in another way to be from Bienville, because my boyhood summers in the 1980s were more like the summers the rest of America lived during the 1960s and ’70s. When school let out in May, we hit the door barefooted and didn’t return home till dark. Not a house on our block was locked, and every one had a mom in it. Many of those mothers made sure we had food if we wanted it, and all were free to discipline any child who required it. Our playground was all the land we could cover on our bicycles and still get home before full dark (around nine P.M.). That was about forty square miles.

Jet and I made the most of that freedom.

We usually met in the mornings, riding our ten-speeds to LaSalle Park, then spent the entire day together, pedaling all over Bienville, even way out on Cemetery Road, into the eastern part of the county. We had little contact with other people during this time, but we didn’t want it, and nobody questioned our behavior. In retrospect, I believe we entered a sort of trance that May or June, one that would not be broken until the following September. Our trance had phases, each one a level deeper, as though we were descending into a warm pool, a shared fugue state where we existed as a single person, not distinct bodies or personalities.

The first descent occurred on the day we turned north off Cemetery Road and pedaled deep into the woods, following what appeared to be a deer path through what had once been the Luxor Plantation. Luxor’s “big house” had burned in the 1880s, and the Weldon family, who owned it, had moved into the slave quarters. As a younger boy, I and my friends had discovered an old cypress barn that stood on the property, partly collapsed and surrounded by a thick stand of trees. The disused barn made a wonderful fort and an ideal base from which to explore the woods. On the day Jet turned down the path that led to the Luxor barn, I hadn’t been there for a couple of years, but I was glad she’d done it.

Until that day, when we rode our bikes, we talked endlessly. But on the day we entered the Luxor barn, we stopped talking. The ground floor was heavily overgrown with ragweed and poison ivy, and it looked snaky. But a ladder led up to the spacious, tin-roofed second floor, which was open to the forest at both ends. As I followed her onto that high platform, I remembered standing along the edge with my friends, aiming golden arcs higher than our heads as we competed to see who could pee the farthest. I’d learned that day that a ten-year-old boy can piss fifteen feet laterally before his urine hits the ground—at least from a ten-foot elevation. But I quickly forgot that detail as Jet walked over and stood beside me, then took hold of my arms and turned me to face her.

My stomach flipped as she leaned toward me. The kiss that followed lasted close to an hour. There were breaks, of course. Brief ones, for air. But during that hour we passed out of whatever place we’d existed in before, into a country where words were superfluous. We went back to that barn the next day, and the next. By the third afternoon, our hands began moving over each other’s bodies, seeking what they would. I’ve never forgotten the succession of shocks that went through me when my hand slipped inside the waistband of her jeans. The hair down there was abundant, thick and coarse, which stopped me for a moment. The next shock came when my fingers went between her thighs. She was so slippery that I wasn’t sure what I was touching—a world apart from the classmate who’d let me finger her outside a traveling carnival one night. But even that shock dimmed when I felt Jet reach down and unsnap her jeans so that I could reach her without straining. My face suddenly felt sunburned, and I got light-headed for a couple of minutes. Then she put her mouth beside my ear and whispered, “That feels good.”

That feels good …

All my life I’d been conditioned to believe that sex was something girls didn’t want, but submitted to only after a long siege by a boy who felt and vowed unending love. To hear this sublimely feminine creature tell me that it felt good for me to do something that her father would have killed us both for doing was almost more than I could bear. But I didn’t stop. The next day, while rain beat endlessly on the rusted tin roof, Jet reached down, placed her hand over mine, and began guiding my movements. It was then that I discovered what pleasured her most wasn’t on the inside at all.

For weeks we rode our bikes to that barn. We spent whole days on that second story, living in our world apart. As the summer sun rode its long arc across the sky, the light would change until the barn became a cathedral. Golden shafts spilled through openings in the roof, and dust motes hovered and spun around us as though suspended in liquid. The things we did in our cathedral we did standing, for some reason. Perhaps we knew that if we lay down on those old dry barn boards, we would cross the only boundary that remained uncrossed, and we were too young to deal with the consequences of that. If we had, I’m not sure we would have ridden home as darkness settled over the woods.

That phase of our trance ended on the day I heard a noise from the floor below us. It wasn’t a footstep or a voice, but it was a distinctly human sound. A cough maybe, or a wheeze. As quietly as I could, I climbed down the ladder and made my way through the fallen boards that lay tangled in vines and thorns. As I neared an old, broken-wheeled wagon parked under the second-floor joists, I heard weight shift on wood. I froze, my heart pounding, then took three quick steps forward and froze again. I was looking into the eyes of an old black man with a grizzled salt-and-pepper beard. He was lying in the wagon on a pile of big green leaves, a dead cigar stub in his mouth.

Instinct told me to bolt back the way I came, but something stopped me. Maybe it was that he lay supine in the wagon and showed no inclination to rise. Perhaps it was the look of amusement in his features or the weariness in his eyes. As we stared at each other, he lifted a small paper bag and took a swig from the dark bottleneck protruding from it. Then he wiped his mouth with his sleeve and gave me an avuncular grin.

“You been up there two hours and I ain’t heard that girl holler yet,” he said. “What you doin’ up there? Readin’ the Bible together?”

“What?” I asked dully.

“I said, what you doin’ up there? I shoulda heard that girl holler two, three times by now. She old enough.”

“Whuh—who are you?” I stammered.

“I ain’t nobody. Who you?”

“Marshall McEwan.”

“You ain’t a Weldon?”

“No, sir. I’m friends with Pete Weldon, though.” The Weldons still owned the land the barn sat on. “Who are you?”

“Name’s Willis. I work for Mr. Weldon.”

I weighed this answer. “Mr. Weldon pays you to sleep in his barn?”

The man scowled. “Don’t get smart now, Marshall. I wouldn’t want to have to get up and teach you a lesson.”

By this time I had studied “Willis” a bit. He was a lot heavier than I, and he looked pretty strong, but I was sure I could outrun him. Of course, Jet was upstairs. She could probably outrun him, too. But she would have to get safely to the ground before she could.

“I’m guessing you don’t want me to tell Mr. Weldon you were here,” I said.

Willis scowled again. “I’m guessing you don’t want him knowing you out here, either, smart boy.”

I shrugged and tried to look nonchalant.

“Why don’t we make a little deal?” Willis suggested. “We’ll both just keep our business to ourselves.”

I waited a decent interval, then said, “That sounds cool.”

“Okay, then. You’d best get back up there and tend to business. That girl prob’ly gettin’ nervous by now.”

I took a tentative step back. “Are you gonna be here anymore? I mean, after today?”

“I been here other times, too, if that’s what you wonderin’. My old lady kicked me out the house, and I ain’t got no place to stay.”

“You sleep out here?”

Willis nodded. “Right now, anyways.”

I thought about this. “Okay, then.”

“Hey,” he called as I turned to go. “Don’t be afraid of it.”

“What?”

“Girls ain’t made of glass, boy. They want it, same as you. Don’t be afraid to work it. And lick it, too. You lick it?”

My face was turning purple. The old man laughed.

“Whatever you been doin’, try it ’bout twice as hard. Start gentle, but take it up steady, you understand? That girl’ll holler in three, fo’ minutes, I guarantee.”

“Um … I gotta go,” I croaked, backing away fast, then turning to run.

His cackling laughter followed me back up the ladder.

I found Jet waiting at the top, looking frightened, but once I explained what had happened, she calmed down. I didn’t think we should return to the barn anymore, but Jet thought it was fine.

Two days later, we discovered I’d been right.

On that day, some dopeheads from the public high school showed up at the barn and sat outside in the clearing, getting high. Jet and I hid in silence on the second floor, waiting for them to leave. But when they started building a campfire, we knew we had to go. We tried to slip away unnoticed, but they heard us trying to sneak out the far side of the barn. In seconds they surrounded us and started the usual bullying that older guys love to deal out to young guys as tall as me. It was during this hazing that they noticed how beautiful Jet was.

The conversation that followed that realization scared me in a way I’d never experienced before. These guys didn’t look like the potheads I knew, gentle dudes who’d rather lie on their backs staring at the moon than exert a single muscle. These guys looked like what my father called “dopers,” needle freaks. As they talked, I saw all the blood leave Jet’s face. They were sixteen or seventeen, pale and dirty looking. And they meant to have her. The tallest one told Jet to take off her clothes before it got too dark to see her. If she refused, he said, they would take them off for her. When she didn’t move to obey, one guy said he wanted to see what A-rab pussy tasted like. I wanted to protect her, but I couldn’t see any option other than getting honorably beaten within an inch of my life. I didn’t want Jet to know how scared I was, but when I stole a glance at her, I saw tears on her cheeks. That was when I heard a low, dangerous voice speak from the darkness under the barn.

“You boys ’bout to buy yourselves a boxcar full of trouble.”

The leader’s head snapped left. Like me, he saw Willis coming through the dark barn door, looking pretty goddamn intimidating. I suppose the three older teenagers could have taken that old man, but they didn’t look too sure they wanted to find out what it would cost them to do it.

“What you gonna do, nigger?” asked the leader, sounding more petulant than threatening.

Willis regarded him in silence for about ten seconds. Then he said, “What I’m gon’ do? That’s what you axed? Well …” Willis scratched his bearded chin. “I’ll prob’ly start by bendin’ you over that log there and fuckin’ you up da ass. That’s how we broke in fresh stuff like you in Parchman. You’ll feel just like a girl to me, boy. Tighter, prob’ly.”

My blood ran cold when Willis said that, but the threat had its intended effect. The three freaks shared a long look. Then the smallest skittered into the darkness under the trees. The other two followed, though the leader vowed revenge from the shadows. It was hard to believe the situation had changed so fast. It was as though a grizzly bear had scattered a pack of dogs.

“Were you really in Parchman?” I asked, after Jet had gotten control of herself.

“Nah,” Willis said. “My cousin was, though. I been in the county lockup a couple times, but not the Farm. I knew that’d scare them dopers, though.”

“Man … thank you so much.”

Jet began crying and shivering—delayed shock, I guess—but she thanked Willis profusely. When I rolled her bike out to her, she said, “What if they’re waiting for us on the path somewhere?”

“I’ll walk out with y’all,” Willis said. “I can’t come back here no more anyways. Them boys’ll go home and tell their daddies a mean nigger threatened to whup ’em on the Weldon place, and the sheriff’ll be out here to run me in. I need to find somethin’ to eat anyway.”

“I’ve got twelve dollars in my pocket,” Jet told him, digging in her jeans. “You’re welcome to it.”

Willis smiled. “Twelve dollars’ll keep me fed for most of a week, missy. I’ll take it.”

That was the last day we went to the barn.

We soon found another sanctuary—one equally as isolated and even more beautiful—but it was never quite the refuge that the barn was. It was a spring-fed pool that lay about six miles out Cemetery Road, on the old Parnassus Plantation. Generations of kids had spent summers partying out there, even skinny-dipping, until an accidental drowning and subsequent suicide forced the owner to fence off the hill where the spring bubbled out of the earth. I never saw anything quite like that place again, but I know it remains unspoiled, because Jet and I met there several times before I bought my house outside town.

Thirty-two years ago, she and I spent the last half of July and part of August at that pool, which had gone by many names since Indian times. Our trance slipped a level deeper in its cold, clear water and as we lay on the warm banks in the afternoon sun, like the turtles that were our company. But our time was growing shorter each day. I was scheduled to start summer football practice, and Jet had some sort of mathematics camp to go to. Like many fools before me, I assumed that time was infinite, that we would spend the rest of our school years together, then marry and strike out into the world to do great things—things the people of little Bienville had never dreamed about. To this end, Jet had already persuaded her parents to let her transfer to St. Mark’s, despite the extra expense. I couldn’t know that within a month, Jet’s father would vanish, severing the fragile filament that had bound us like a common blood vessel until then.

The disappearance of Joe Talal shocked all of Bienville. It wasn’t one of the garden-variety abandonments that were becoming more common as the ’80s progressed. Jet’s father was a chemical engineer, seemingly the most stable of men, and his work ethic was legendary. He’d invented a new chemical process at the electroplating plant, something that would have made him rich, had he not done it on company time. But the company patented it and took the money. This would have embittered most men, but Joe Talal took it well, and management rewarded him with what he most wanted, which was acceptance. Joe’s brilliance and can-do attitude earned him the respect of the whites at the plant, and their acceptance was naturally extended to his daughter. After all, Jet’s mother was white, and a Methodist in good standing. Joe might not have gone to church himself, but any time the congregation needed volunteers to build booths or mow grass, they knew Joe Talal would show up, ready and eager to work.

The cataclysm came the September after our magical summer. Joe had flown up to Connecticut for a continuing education class in electrochemistry. He did that kind of thing every couple of years. Only this time, he didn’t come back. Janet Turner Talal initially covered for her husband with a story about a sick relative, so it took a couple of weeks for people to figure out something was wrong. But before a month had passed, plant management was informed that Joe had resigned his position. Two days later, it leaked out that Jet’s father had returned to the Middle East, from which he’d emigrated in 1965. Jet had been putting a good face on things at school, but once this news got out, she stayed absent for three days. When she did come back, she was a different person. She had withdrawn into herself, and for the first time, I saw shame in her.

One month later, an explosive revelation swept through Bienville: Joe Talal had another family back in Jordan—a wife and a son. No one was sure about the details. Some folks said Joe had been mixed up in political trouble, Arab craziness, and that his family had been mistakenly declared dead years before. Others claimed he’d been a bigamist all along. In any case, Joe had abandoned his American family to be with his Arab wife and son, and he had no intention of returning to America.

It took me twenty years and a FOIA request to learn the true details of Joe’s departure from our lives. As a journalist, I now understand that the tragedy of the Talal family was but a tiny footnote to the Cold War politics of the United States in the Middle East during that era. All that mattered to me at the time was that Jet’s father had broken that trance in which she and I existed as one being. Worse, within a month Jet took up with Paul Matheson, who was a year older than we were and one of the least introspective guys I knew. I couldn’t understand it, except to reason that after being abandoned by her foreign father, she’d decided to grab the most quintessentially American boy she could find, one whose father’s fortune would guarantee security for life—if she could hold on to him. Jet did hold on to Paul, at least until he left Bienville for Ole Miss. They were the golden couple of our high school. Yet by the time Paul left college to join the army and fight in Iraq, things had changed again. But that’s another story.

Paternal abandonment is the central fact of Jet’s life: it shaped every decision she made afterward. Eight months after Joe Talal abandoned his daughter, I lived through a different version of the same experience—emotional abandonment by a father physically present—and there’s no question that it dictated every major decision of my youth. You’d think that shared trauma would have brought Jet and me even closer together. But human relationships aren’t symmetrical. The ultimate result of her father’s departure was that, after my brother drowned and my father began to blame and isolate me, I faced that situation utterly alone.

Perhaps if I’d still had Jet, I could have weathered the glacial coldness without permanent damage. But I didn’t. As the next year wore on, I quit every athletic team, stopped hanging out with former friends, and holed up in my room with the Cure and U2’s Joshua Tree album. My dad was drinking heavily at this time, so I found it easy to pilfer whatever I wanted from his stock. My mother had been prescribed several drugs in the wake of Adam’s death, and I ate those, too. While Jet worked tirelessly to distract herself from her pain, I sank ever deeper into mine, until almost no light from the world above penetrated down to where I existed.

One year to the day after Adam drowned, I drove my mother’s car out to the Mississippi River at dawn, stripped off all my clothes, and began swimming toward Louisiana. I was drunk on bourbon, stoned on pills. When I pushed away from the shore, I fully intended to drown myself. As pathetic as it sounds now, I thought about Jet as I stroked toward the middle of the mighty river. I thought about my father, too, how he lived as if I didn’t exist. I figured I would do him the favor of making reality conform to his desire. But when I reached the middle of the current, it was my mother who filled my mind and heart. How could I force her to suffer the loss of her only other son? Who would do that to her? A coward, answered a voice from deep within. A gutless coward. In that moment, an anger unlike anything I’d ever experienced was born within me. And that anger had but one object: the man who had failed me as a father.