You think you know everyone in a small town, but you don’t. Besides, Bienville isn’t that small. Not like Soso or Stringer or Frogmore. When I was a boy, Bienville proper had twenty-four thousand people in it, and outside the city limits the county held another fourteen thousand. That meant a school system big enough to make a certain amount of anonymity possible. If you went to a private school, for example, there were always kids at the public school you didn’t know. I knew most of the boys in town, of course, from playing ball and riding bikes and swim team and a dozen other things. But the girls—especially the girls at the public school—were mostly a mystery to me.
Several boys in my neighborhood still went to public school, and one—John Hallberg—was a good friend, though he was a year older than I. One weekend John took me to the movies with him, to sneak into Highlander, which was rated R. When we arrived at the cinema, we found three public school girls he knew waiting in line for Pretty in Pink, which was the movie we were pretending to go see. Two were the ubiquitous archetypes of my childhood, freckled and blue-eyed, one with dirty-blond hair, the other with light brown curls. But with them was a girl unlike any I’d ever seen. Her skin was as dark as a summer tan, though it was only March, and her jet-black hair reached almost to her behind. She was tall for her age, but what captured me from the first moment was her eyes, which were huge and dark above angular cheeks that descended to the dramatic V of her chin. And they took in everything.
John introduced this exotic creature as “Jet,” which I assumed was a nickname, albeit an unusual one for a girl. I would learn later that her given name was Jordan Elat Talal. “Jet” was an acronym coined by her aunt, one that even her mother used. And though this “Jet” was the same age as her friends, she seemed at least a year older, probably because she didn’t giggle or blush or cut up the way they did. When one of her friends invited Hallberg to skip Highlander in favor of Pretty in Pink and John said no, it was the dark-haired Jet who suggested the girls try Highlander instead.
One of the blessings of my life was that I wound up with Jet Talal sitting on my left in that movie theater, my nerves singing with excitement. This only happened because both other girls wanted to sit beside John, which left Jet little choice but to sit beside me. We didn’t talk much during the movie, but we stole several glances at each other, some I remember to this day. They were searching glances of curiosity and, after an hour or so, longer looks of recognition.
After the movie we all went to the nearby Baskin-Robbins and ate ice cream, which sounds corny today, but which in fact was pretty damn great. While John talked about the swordfights in the movie and the girls gossiped about junior high, Jet told me she’d actually wanted to see Salvador, a film about journalists covering some Central American civil war. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I faked my way through, and by ten that night I’d squeezed out every drop of information my father possessed on the subject. The other girls made fun of Jet for her comment, but she endured their teasing with impressive equanimity. Hallberg later told me that the public school kids called Jet “the Brain” because of her freakish abilities in math and science. But that mildly pejorative epithet failed to marginalize her, because her beauty was undeniable, and at that age (as at most ages), beauty was the currency of popularity.
I spent ten days trying to get up the nerve to call her, and when I finally did, her father answered the telephone. The sound of his heavily accented voice paralyzed me. Joe Talal was “that Arab scientist from the plating plant,” but most of the fathers spoke of him with respect. I would learn later that Joe Talal laughed a lot, but back then, my heart stuttered when his brusque baritone asked who I was. When Jet finally came on the line, a different kind of panic gripped me, but somehow, through the painful pauses, she made it all right.
During the final month of school, we met a few times at the Baskin-Robbins, each riding our bikes there, and we grew closer with every meeting. Soon I was waiting outside old Mr. Weissberg’s house during Jet’s violin lessons, reading The Prince of Tides and trying to think of something interesting to say to her. I wasn’t sure I ever did, but when summer finally came, I learned that I had.
I know now that I was blessed in another way to be from Bienville, because my boyhood summers in the 1980s were more like the summers the rest of America lived during the 1960s and ’70s. When school let out in May, we hit the door barefooted and didn’t return home till dark. Not a house on our block was locked, and every one had a mom in it. Many of those mothers made sure we had food if we wanted it, and all were free to discipline any child who required it. Our playground was all the land we could cover on our bicycles and still get home before full dark (around nine p.m.). That was about forty square miles.
Jet and I made the most of that freedom.
We usually met in the mornings, riding our ten-speeds to LaSalle Park, then spent the entire day together, pedaling all over Bienville, even way out on Cemetery Road, into the eastern part of the county. We had little contact with other people during this time, but we didn’t want it, and nobody questioned our behavior. In retrospect, I believe we entered a sort of trance that May or June, one that would not be broken until the following September. Our trance had phases, each one a level deeper, as though we were descending into a warm pool, a shared fugue state where we existed as a single person, not distinct bodies or personalities.
The first descent occurred on the day we turned north off Cemetery Road and pedaled deep into the woods, following what appeared to be a deer path through what had once been the Luxor Plantation. Luxor’s “big house” had burned in the 1880s, and the Weldon family, who owned it, had moved into the slave quarters. As a younger boy, I and my friends had discovered an old cypress barn that stood on the property, partly collapsed and surrounded by a thick stand of trees. The disused barn made a wonderful fort and an ideal base from which to explore the woods. On the day Jet turned down the path that led to the Luxor barn, I hadn’t been there for a couple of years, but I was glad she’d done it.