“You need to call Jet Matheson,” she says. “She’s the only one with the guts to take on the Poker Club. Not that you haven’t done some things. I mean, you’ve printed stories and all. But Jet’s own father-in-law is a member, and she’s still gone after a couple of them like a pit bull. She took Dr. Warren Lacey to court and damn near stripped him of his license.”
Quinn got to know Jet during our senior year in high school, and better during the years I was away. “Jet’s out of town this morning,” I tell her, “taking a deposition in a lawsuit. I’ll speak to her when she gets back.”
“Good.”
Quinn goes silent, but I can almost hear her mind spinning, frantically searching for anything to distract her from the immediate, awful reality. I wait, but the new widow says nothing more, probably realizing that no matter what I do, or what Jet Matheson or anyone else does, her husband will still be dead.
“Quinn, I need to get back to work. I’ll check in with you soon, I promise. You call me if you have any trouble with anyone or anything today.”
“I can handle it, Marshall. I’m a tough old girl. Come out later if you get a chance. This house is going to seem pretty empty. You’ll remind me of better times. All my old Eagle Scouts around the dinner table. Well, Buck’s, really.”
Quinn and Buck married in their early forties, and she was never able to have children of her own. Buck’s Boy Scouts always got an extra dose of maternal affection from her, one much needed by some.
“Yours too, Quinn.”
“They were. And all the music. Lord, you and Buck played through till dawn so many nights. I’d get so mad knowing we had to be up the next day, but I never said anything. It was so pure. I knew how lucky we were, even then.”
And with that, my first tears come. “I remember you complaining a time or two,” I tell her.
“Well, somebody had to be responsible.” She laughs softly, then her voice drops to a confiding whisper. “I know you know what I’m going through, Marshall. Because of Adam.”
I close my eyes, and tears roll down my cheeks. “I’ve gotta go, Quinn.”
“I didn’t mean to— Oh, hell. Death sucks.”
“I’ll call you this afternoon.”
I hang up and strike off down the bluff, away from Denny Allman, who doesn’t need to see me crying right now. Denny’s father abandoned him a long time ago, and while it might be good for him to see how grown men react to death, I don’t want to explain that the loss robbing me of my composure now didn’t happen last night, but thirty-one years ago.
A fourteen-year-old boy doesn’t need to know grief can last that long.
Chapter 6
While Denny Allman flies his drone up the bluff face to change batteries and begin searching for Buck Ferris’s truck, I walk north along the fence and try to get myself under control. It’s tough with the Mississippi River dominating my field of view. Seeing Buck pulled dead from that water kicked open a door between the man I am now and the boy I was at fourteen, the year fate ripped my life inside out. That door has been wedged shut for more years than I want to think about. Now, rather than face the dark opening, my mind casts about for something to distract itself from peering into the past.
My finger itches to make that call I cannot make, but the person I want to talk to can’t take a call from me right now. I’ve slept with married women twice in my life. The first time was in my twenties, and she was French—my professor at Georgetown. I didn’t even know she was married when I started sleeping with her; her husband lived most of the year in France. The risks during that affair never rose above the possibility of an awkward meeting at a restaurant, which might have resulted in a sharp word later, for her not me. The woman I’m sleeping with now has a husband quite capable of killing me, were he to learn of our affair. If I called her now, she could try to play it off as business, but even people of marginal intelligence can detect intimacy in the human voice. I don’t intend to have my life upended—or even ended—because of an unguarded syllable decoded by a nosy paralegal. I could send a text, of course, but SMS messages leave a digital trail.
For now I must suffer in silence.
A group of women power walking along the bluff approaches from a distance. An asphalt trail follows the bluff for two miles—the Mark Twain Riverwalk—and in the early mornings and evenings it’s quite busy. Thankfully, by nine thirty most of the serious walkers have retreated to coffee shops or to their SUVs for morning errands. For the first hundred yards, I keep my eyes rightward, on the buildings that line Battery Row. I pass the old clock tower, the Planters’ Hotel, two antebellum mansions. Behind them stands the tallest building in the city, the Aurora Hotel. Next comes the memorial fountain enshrining 173 Confederate dead. It’s a stone’s throw from the emplacements where thirty-two-pounder Seacoast guns covered the Mississippi River during the Civil War. Across from the fountain stand a couple of bars and restaurants, another antebellum home, and then the new amphitheater, paid for by casino money.
The old railroad depot functions as the hub of the bluff, with its small café, convenience shop, tourist information office, and herd of blue bicycles for rent. Past the depot stands the only modern building on the bluff, the Holland Development Company, headquarters of our local real estate king. Just down the street from that crouches the Twelve Bar, a ratty blues club owned by a native son who’s turned down stunning sums to hold on to his pride and joy. Across from the Twelve Bar is a graded site awaiting the granite slab of a promised civil rights memorial, but somehow the final money never seems to get appropriated. I’ve walked this route too many times over the past months to be distracted for long. Eventually the gravity of the river draws my gaze to the west.
From the midpoint of the Bienville bluff, you can see seventeen miles of river. Thanks to the misguided Corps of Engineers, the Mississippi upstream from Bienville looks like a canal. It’s a nine-mile run to the first meander, and two meanders above that stands the siege city of Vicksburg. Besieged by Yankees during the Civil War and by economic woes today, the city fights hard to survive. It’s a grim reality, but the river towns are dying in Mississippi, by a slow exsanguination of people and talent that functions like a wasting disease. Most have changed so little over time that if you resurrected a citizen who lived in the 1890s, they would still recognize the streets they once walked. In Natchez and Bienville, you could do that with someone from the 1850s.
Of all the famous Mississippi cotton towns—from Clarksdale in the Delta to Natchez on its bluff—only Bienville is holding its own against the tides of time, race, and terminal nostalgia. The reason is complex, largely illegal, and has occupied much of my thoughts and work since I moved back here five months ago. My gut tells me that Buck Ferris’s death will ultimately be added to the list of smaller crimes committed in the quest for Bienville’s economic survival, but right now my mind refuses to track on that.