Cemetery Road. Greg Iles

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      “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.

       Ping, ping, ping …

      The text tone of my iPhone breaks through my dark reverie like a persistent alarm clock. I’m not sure how many times it went off before it finally registered in my brain, but now I look down at the screen. The text message is from Denny. It reads:

       Finished twenty minutes ago! U gonna leave me up here all day or what?

      On my way, I type, cranking the Flex and backing it around toward the riprap that lines the last drop to the river. Then I drive over the levee.

      The industrial park is enveloped in a vast cloud of dust. The crest of the bluff is barely visible through the thinner dust at the top of the cloud. I point the Flex toward it, but I know that somewhere out there, heavy equipment is scraping and pushing dirt without any regard for me. As I inch along the gravel road that crosses the mill site between the levee and Port Road, another text arrives: One of the bulldozers blocked the bluff road for ten minutes. I was scared, but it’s clear now. U better haul butt.

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