by Greg Iles
“Take it easy. We can’t fix it from this hill.”
“No . . . hell. You’re right.”
This may be the only time I’ve heard him speak that phrase to me.
“I can’t fix it at all,” he says, obviously exhausted. “It’s your turn. But you can’t do it from Mississippi.”
“I thought you wanted me to stay here and run the paper. That’s what you said at the hospital.”
“Ah, hell. We’re nothing but a backwater now. Back in the sixties, this was the front line. But the war moved on. There’s still plenty of injustice here, but look at the rest of the country. I should have packed you boys and your mother up around 1973 and moved you to the new trenches.”
“I was one year old in 1973.”
“That’s what I mean. Doesn’t matter now. The Moving Finger has writ.”
This Khayyam allusion is a flash of his old character. “Nor all thy Piety nor Wit, Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,” I continue.
“Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it,” he finishes.
In this moment, a blessed memory returns to me. I’m sitting on my bed with Adam, while Dad reads aloud poems from The Oxford Book of English Verse. I don’t know how old I am, but even Adam is still a boy. Each week we must choose a poem to memorize. I usually pick some brief Byron or Shelley, but Adam has phenomenal recall. I’ve watched him recite all 109 stanzas of Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol without a hitch. I do, however, remember choosing The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tennyson on one ambitious night.
How could I have forgotten poring over that text before I went to bed each night for a week? Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward . . . And then the evening I recited it, after Dad got home from work. I’d never been so nervous. I sweated, turned red, worried I’d pee in my pants. But somehow I started, working through the lines, word by rhythmic word. I remember Adam’s glowing face, encouraging me all the way, just as he did by walking along the side of the pool when I practiced swimming. The rhythm helped me find the words: Storm’d at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode and well, Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of hell, Rode the six hundred. Behind Dad I could see my mother watching anxiously, worried I would stumble. But the words poured out with ever more certainty as I neared the end, like a horse running the last quarter mile to the barn. After I finished, Dad stared at me with a new emotion in his eyes: pride. He spoke not a word of criticism. Then he reached out and tousled my hair while Adam and my mother applauded.
How could I have forgotten this?
“Oh,” Dad groans. “No, wait—”
As I turn, he twists in his seat. Then his arm flies up as though he’s trying to reach around himself and grab his own shoulder blade.
“What is it?” I cry, my heart quickening. “What’s the matter?”
“My back—oh, it’s bad.”
“We need to go.” I reach for the key, but he grunts in a way that tells me not to start the engine. He’s breathing hard and shaking his head. “It’ll pass,” he gasps. “Nothing to be done anyway.”
“You don’t know that. I want Jack Kirby to see you.”
“Let’s just sit here, son. I don’t think it’ll be long.”
A wave of panic hits me, sending adrenaline crashing through my veins. “I’m taking you back,” I tell him, cranking the motor.
“Damn it—”
“I’m taking you back and that’s an end to it!”
He settles back in his seat. “All right. Hit the gas, then.”
The Flex has a truck engine under the hood, giving it a surprising amount of power. Once we clear the cemetery gate, I switch on my hazard lights and use every cubic centimeter of horsepower as we roar down Cemetery Road, making for the intersection with Highway 61. I drive with my left hand only. My right rests on Dad’s left forearm, gently squeezing at brief intervals to let him know I’m with him.
“Won’t be long,” I say every few seconds.
“Okay,” he says once. A mile down the road he whispers, “Not bad . . . not as bad.”
As I screech onto Highway 61, the vehicle swaying on its shocks, I realize there’s something wrong with his breathing. The silences last too long, and when the breaths come, they’re like gasps. Something like a snore follows these gasps, but it’s not a snore. It’s almost like he’s trying to talk.
Lifting my hand from his forearm, I lay it across his forehead. The skin is cold. Unnaturally so. As this realization sinks in, somewhere out of the deep reservoirs of trivia in my brain—accumulated during the writing of thousands of news stories—two words rise: agonal breaths. That’s what I’m hearing now. My father’s in cardiac arrest. The gasps are his body’s last-ditch effort to get oxygen to his starved organs. His brain has already winked out, like a guttering candle. Oh, God, I think, an image of my mother filling my mind. Why did I take him out there?
“Dad? Dad!”
Nothing.
He hasn’t inhaled for thirty seconds. Maybe forty. Just when I think he’s finally gone, he gasps again, a long inhalation like a breath—and yet not a breath. Then comes the long, rippling sound like a snore.
“I’m with you,” I tell him, wondering if he knows I’m here. Maybe he can feel my hand, at least. “I’m with you, Dad,” I tell him. “I’m with you . . .”
My hand is still on my father’s forehead when we reach the hospital, but his skin feels like the flesh of a mushroom. He didn’t breathe or gasp as I drove the final mile. He never will again. Dr. Kirby and my mother stand outside the ER entrance. Jack has his arm around Mom, comforting her as best he can.
When I stop, Jack leads her to the passenger window. I press the window button with my left hand. As the glass sinks into the doorframe, Mom sees my hand resting on Dad’s forehead. Thankfully, his eyes are closed.
“I shouldn’t have taken him,” I say helplessly.
“You did right,” Dr. Kirby says. “He wanted to go.”
“Did you talk about Adam?” Mom asks.
“We did. I learned a lot. I’m so stupid.”
“No. You did the right thing.” She looks up at me at last, and her eyes are clear. “I’m glad you were with him at the end.”
“Me, too,” I say, my voice breaking. “I talked to him all the way back, so he’d know he wasn’t alone.”
Dr. Kirby nods his approval. A single tear runs down my mother’s cheek. “I know he heard you,” she says softly. “It’s over now. He’s with Adam now.”
Chapter 49
Paul Matheson trudged up the fourth-floor hallway of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, watching his father’s half-open door. He hadn’t eaten in a while, so he’d gone down to the McDonald’s on the first floor of the hospital for a cheeseburger. Paul was no health-food nut, but he wondered if Mississippi’s medical center was the only one in the union shoveling Big Macs and fries into patients and their families during medical crises.
He was functioning on four hours’ sleep. After the ER docs had evaluated and admitted his father last night, Paul had rented a room at the Cabot Lodge, just across Woodrow Wilson Drive, to have a place for Kevin and Jet to crash if they decided to stay over. They had stayed about six hours, but his father had been sleeping a lot, and Kevin had baseball practice, so they’d headed back to Bienville in her Volvo. Paul hated to miss the practice, especially since his father would also be absent, but the other dads would just have to handle it.
From what the doctors said, Max was lucky to be alive. If Warren Lacey hadn’t managed to get him to a hospital when he did, his vital functions would have shut down on Parnassus Hill. Max had a depressed skull fracture, a subdural hematoma, and a bruised cerebral cortex. Surgeons had drilled a small hole in his skull to relieve the pressure on his brain, and now he was doing as well as could be expected. The neurosurgeon who’d informed Max about his close call during his post-op visit was surprised to hear his patient answer: “Doc, I walked out of an army hospital in Chu Lai and returne
d to my unit six hours after suffering worse than this.” That was Max all over. Had to show the doc he was the toughest SOB he’d ever operated on.
But maybe Max was. For when Paul turned into room 437, he was shocked to find his father sitting up in bed—or at least he’d raised the bed to where he appeared to be sitting up. Max had his cell phone in his hand, and he appeared to be texting with somebody.
“What’s going on, Pop?” Paul asked. “You trying to kill yourself already?”
Max looked up. “Duncan McEwan just died.”
Paul felt a momentary dislocation in time.
“Seems Marshall drove him out to the cemetery, to Adam’s statue. He had a heart attack out there.”
“Mr. McEwan never got over losing Adam,” Paul said. “Not even after, what, thirty years?”
“Thirty-one.” Max was looking at his phone. “I remember it like yesterday. I put my boat in the river and spent two days searching for that boy. Damn shame. Adam was the best natural athlete to ever come out of this town. Best white one, anyway.”
Paul nodded. “Them trying to swim the river that morning was the stupidest thing I ever saw.”
“And it was Marshall’s idea, you said. At least you were smart enough not to try it. Shows your sense. It’s a miracle Trey and Dooley didn’t drown, too. Idiots.”
Paul went silent at the mention of his cousins. There was something about that morning he’d never shared with a soul.
“What’s the matter?” asked his father. “You look like you saw a ghost.”
“I’m just tired.”
“Bullshit. Spill it, boy.”
Paul wished he hadn’t said anything about the river. “Two weeks after Adam drowned, I was over in Jackson with Dooley and Trey, staying at Uncle Richard’s house. I heard them talking about that morning. They were high as hell, really out of it. Apparently while Marshall and Adam were separated out there, Dooley and Trey swam around and messed with Adam in the fog. Pulled him underwater eight or ten times. He eventually got away, but Trey was pretty sure they wore him out doing that.”
Max stared at his son as though he’d rather not hear the rest, but Paul couldn’t stop himself. “Marshall said it was Adam cramping up that killed him. But Trey felt like him and Dooley had murdered him, pretty much.”
Max’s gaze drifted off Paul to the window blinds letting in shafts of late-afternoon light.
“Pop?”
“Things happen,” Max said. “High school boys do stupid things. Best keep quiet about that from now on. Adam McEwan is still remembered as a saint in Bienville.”
“I’m not stupid,” Paul said angrily. “I was just telling you. And at least Duncan can never know about it now.”
“That’s right.”
“How’s your head feeling?” Paul asked, wanting to change the subject.
“Miniature jackhammer going off in my skull. Kevin gonna make it to practice in time?”
“Yeah. And I talked to Jack Bates. He’ll practice the pitchers today.”
“What Jack Bates knows about pitching would fit in my mother’s thimble.”
Paul gave his father an obligatory laugh.
“Sit down a minute, son. We need to talk about something.”
“I can’t hear standing up?”
Max sighed heavily. “You’ll want to sit down for this.”
Paul sat on the arm of a vinyl chair that folded out into a twin bed.
“I don’t know if you know this,” his father began, “but you’re having marital problems.”
“Yeah? I don’t know a married couple that’s not.”
“This is different. This is a crisis.”
Paul was too tired to get excited about his father butting into his marriage. “What are you talking about, Pop?”
Max lifted his left arm and pointed to the bandage on his head. “Your friend Marshall didn’t do this.”
Paul sat up straight. “Who did?”
“Your wife.”
He blinked in disbelief. “What are you talking about?”
“I need to tell you a quick story. Wait till the end before you start asking questions.”
Paul shifted on the arm of the chair, but he forced himself to remain silent.
“You know how I’ve been missing baseball practice lately?”
“Yeah. I thought you were working.”
Max nodded. “It started that way. About six days ago I missed practice to ride out to the Zurhellen acreage and meet one of the heirs. You remember that?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I was going pretty fast, and I came up on Jet’s Volvo out on Highway 36. From a couple hundred yards back I saw her turn on Blackbird Road, near Marshall’s place, the old Mendenhall farm. For some reason I followed her. He’s got a security gate out there on his private drive. Well, I saw Jet open that gate without fully stopping, like with a remote switch. I pulled up afterward to make sure the gate doesn’t have some kind of automatic opener on it. It doesn’t. That means she had a remote in her car.”
Something fluttered in Paul’s chest, like a skipped heartbeat.
“I left that day,” his father went on. “But it bugged me. So the next day, before practice, I parked out near that gate. Sure enough, there came Jet, headed in the same direction and right back through the gate. Well, I locked my truck and walked through the woods to Marshall’s house. I saw them together on his patio and filmed them with my phone.”
“Are you the one who sent me that picture of them hugging?”
Max sighed with irritation. “I am. But let me finish. I went back the next day because I couldn’t really believe what was going on. I had to be sure.”
“Why didn’t you just show me that damn picture? Why email it anonymously?”
“I wanted to warn you without making you too mad. Wake you up to what was going on, make you pay attention.”
“Dad, you’re stirring up shit over nothing. Jet and Marshall have been working on stories and cases ever since he got back. She recruited him into her crusading bullshit.”
Max’s face hardened. “Do you want to hear what I’ve got to say or not?”
“All right,” Paul said, filled with irrational anger.
“I staked out that gate for three days. She’s been going out there every day. Usually during Kevin’s baseball practices, when you and I are a hundred percent distracted. Out of the way. Remember how many practices she came to last year? Most of them. This year?”
“Almost none.”
“Busy working, right?”
Paul thought about it. Before he could get very far, his father said, “Open the email I just sent you.”
“What?”
“Check your Gmail account.”
Paul took out his phone and opened his email. A lot of messages had accumulated in his inbox, but the most recent was from his father, and it had a file attached. Paul clicked on the file and waited.
An image much like the one he’d received yesterday appeared, a long shot of Marshall’s back patio, probably filmed from the tree line—only this image was video. At first Paul saw no one, but the whole image jiggled due to the shooter’s unsteady hand. Then the frame zoomed a little, and he discerned a figure lying in a chaise on the patio. Just as Paul decided the figure must be Marshall, his wife walked into the frame naked. He recognized a once-familiar rocking of her hips, something he’d seen less and less over the years: the sexual arrogance and confidence Jet displayed when she was eagerly anticipating sex.
Paul felt like his father had handed him a venomous snake that he knew must bite him, but which possessed some hypnotic power that prevented him from dropping it. He was doomed to watch the writhing of the oily scales in his hands until the fangs sank home.
On the tiny screen Jet paused in front of the chaise, apparently talking to the man lying on it. Then she turned her back to him and reached around her hips, taking the cheeks of her behind in her hands. The camera zoomed to the limit of its power, and the image went
grainy. Paul felt the fangs dig into his flesh as Jet pulled her cheeks apart. From his angle, he could see only her breasts and the dark tangle at her pubis, but he knew exactly what Marshall was seeing. Something moved at the level of the chaise. An article of clothing flew away.
Jet placed a foot on either side of the chaise and lowered herself onto Marshall’s midsection. She went down smoothly, almost without hesitation, then began rising and falling above him, working with a powerful rhythm that Paul had once known like the rhythm of his own heart.
“What’s it look like she’s working on there?” Max asked. “A newspaper story?”
Paul barely registered the words. He was thinking that for Jet to go down so smoothly—without even a hint of foreplay—she must have already been wet. Purely from anticipation. Not just moist . . . but wet. He couldn’t count how many years it had been since the prospect of sex with him had produced that response in her. In fact, the last woman he’d caused to get that way was a young waitress from the Twelve Bar, about three years back.
“You see how it is,” Max said. “Can I talk, or do you need some time?”
It took Paul a few seconds to find his voice. “At least I have something concrete to take action on now. Evidence.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Max said. “This situation’s far more complicated than you realize.”
“How’s that?”
“Because of custody. Who gives a shit about the marriage? Wives come and go. It’s your son that matters. Kevin.”
“What are you saying, Pop? Surely you have enough power to get me a clean divorce and guaranteed custody.”
“There’s a wrinkle in this situation.”
Paul’s bowels were churning down low. He tried not to let his father see how upset he’d become. “I’m listening.”
“You know I like Jet,” Max said. “I’ve protected her from the club’s retaliation for years. When she got Dave Cowart sent to jail, then went after Dr. Lacey’s license, I kept the club from hitting back at her. And they didn’t appreciate that, I can tell you.”
