What must those men feel as they watch the local elected officials—nine whites and four blacks—lift the gold shovels from the stand and spade them into the pre-softened earth? The aldermen and supervisors are mugging for the cameras now, trying to look like Leland Stanford at the golden spike ceremony in 1869. A paper mill is no transcontinental railroad, but any project that brings a new interstate to a county containing only thirty-six thousand people comes pretty close to salvation.
When the photographers stop snapping pictures, the ceremony is over. The crowd disperses quickly, and crews miraculously appear to break down the tents. As the governor’s motorcade roars up Port Road, Jet and Paul give each other a quick connubial hug, then separate to find their respective vehicles. Was that hug for show? I wonder. Max and Paul walk side by side to a couple of Ford F-250s, while a few yards to their right, Beau Holland climbs into a vintage Porsche 911.
I half expect Jet to text me, but she doesn’t. She and Josh Germany climb into her Volvo SUV—Jet behind the wheel—and pull onto Port Road, heading toward the bluff without even a glance in my direction. Suddenly Paul’s suspicion doesn’t seem so absurd. As I follow the Volvo with my eyes, I notice something I missed when I arrived: a small fleet of earthmoving equipment parked in the shadow of the bluff, under a line of cottonwood trees. As Jet’s XC60 vanishes at the top of the bluff, black smoke puffs from a couple of smokestacks, and then the low grinding of heavy Caterpillar engines rolls toward me. I had no idea they intended to start work so soon. In fact, I’m pretty sure they didn’t. Nobody made any mention of it today.
They’re going to wipe out all traces of Buck’s digging, I realize. And maybe of Buck himself. Suddenly I’m as sure as I’ve ever been of anything that Buck was murdered here last night.
A chill races over my skin as the big yellow monsters crawl out of the shadows. I’m not sure what I can do to stop them or even slow them down. As I ponder this question, I hear a much higher sound, rapidly increasing in amplitude. It’s the hornet buzz of a drone, the same buzz I heard this morning. Looking up, I see the familiar silhouette of a DJI quad-rotor flying what appears to be a precise grid pattern over the paper mill site.
I want to cheer out loud. Denny Allman didn’t wait for the appointed time to meet me here. He came straight to the site and got down to business as soon as the crowd broke up. For a few seconds I worry that the equipment operators will get suspicious and call someone about the drone, but in all likelihood they can’t even hear the damned thing above the roar of their big diesel motors. Even if they do, they’ll assume that Beau Holland or some other Poker Club member—or even the Chinese—is using the drone for a commercial purpose related to the site. As I glance over at the Flex, trying to decide what to do next, my iPhone pings.
Piloting from the woods, reads Denny’s message. Can you pick me up on top of bluff in 20 mins?
Will do, I reply.
Any place need special attention?
Look for disturbed earth. This is our only chance before those graders and dozers tear it up. I remember Buck telling me that he unearthed the largest Poverty Point fragment near one of the foundation piers of the old electroplating plant. Don’t fly too low, I advise Denny, but get good coverage of the footprint of the old plant. The foundation especially. Understand?
10-4, comes the reply.
C u in 20 mins, I type, walking rapidly to the Flex.
I don’t need to hang out here on the flats, drawing attention. Where to go? Beyond the twenty-foot-high levee that protects the industrial park from the Mississippi River should be a thirty-foot slope to the water. That would put me out of sight of the equipment drivers. They might know I’m there, but out of sight is usually out of mind.
From the moment I saw Buck’s shattered skull through Denny’s drone camera, I’ve had a sense of disparate threads coming together, of a hidden pattern revealing itself. A town like Bienville is like the river it was founded on, filled with deep and conflicting currents. Most times, the only way to detect such a current is by seeing something unexpected shoot to the surface. Buck’s corpse might be that surprise. There is another way, of course, but it’s usually fatal.
Fall in and get sucked under.
Chapter 11
You don’t grow up thinking you’ll sleep with someone else’s husband or wife. But life has a way of taking us places we never planned to go, and the moral restraints we absorb as children tend to fall away in the face of protracted frustration and desire. Many a man or woman has awakened from a months-long oxytocin high and realized that they’ve put their spouse, their children, or even their life at risk in a blind quest to regain a purity and intensity of experience allowed only to the young. Sometimes we’re chasing reflections of romantic ideals unconsciously implanted in us by our parents. Other times we stumble into someone who carries a key that could open or close a door on some formative trauma we might not even remember. Whatever the trigger of our passion, we cross a line that we once believed inviolate, and by so doing throw the world out of balance in such a way that it must eventually right itself, regardless of human casualties.
Ironically, our passion blinds us to our true motives in these cases. Often we perceive our personal world as out of balance and seize on the notion that another person will somehow right the ship, restoring the “happiness” we crave. The mind-altering ecstasy of sexual union further distorts our perception, making it infinitely harder to navigate the maze we have created for ourselves. This self-induced blindness pushes us to take insane risks. I’ve had to restrain Jet more than once during the past three months. The compulsion to be “free” from a perceived trap can be overwhelming, and many a human being has gnawed off more than an arm or leg in their desperation.
I began my affair with Jet with both eyes open. I wasn’t driven by sexual compulsion to possess her body, which I had come to know intimately as a boy. Nor did I crave the thrill of forbidden assignations, which can amplify sex into a druglike addiction. What I wanted from Jet was everything: her present and all that remains of her future. She wants the same. Our general plan is simple: After my father dies, I’ll return to Washington, with or without my widowed mother. A month or two later, Jet will tell Paul that she believes they need some time apart. This will lead to a trial separation, then to discussions of divorce, while I—the cause of this action—will have long been out of the picture. At some point during this phase they will deal with the issue of their son, Kevin, whom Jet wants to bring to Washington to live with us.
The plan is sound, as such things go. The problem is that, for Jet, that final matter is a deal-breaker. She will not leave Bienville without Kevin. Yet she insists that Paul and his father will break every law on the books to ensure that she never takes him away. Since the Poker Club exercises absolute control over the chancery judges in Bienville, Max Matheson can dictate the terms of Jet’s divorce. Yet somehow, we’ve allowed ourselves to ignore this fact. Since my father has not died, we’ve contented ourselves with stolen hours, pretending the risk is minimal. For three months, we’ve drifted along on a tide of bliss, believing our plan must eventually come to fruition of its own accord.
Paul’s suspicion under the Prime Shot tent showed me in one gut-wrenching minute how blind we have become. Our long-range divorce plan is meaningless now. Paul already suspects Jet of infidelity. If we keep taking these risks for even a week, he’ll discover the truth. But if we stop seeing each other, what then? My father could die tomorrow, or he could live another six months. Can we go six months under conditions of absolute separation? Can I live every day as an actor in a theater of the absurd? Can Jet?
Could we live six months without water?