Cemetery Road

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.”