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.”
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.
